The Magic of Focus in Business with Tyler Jensen

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0:35Founders Forum is a radio show and podcast where entrepreneurs share their journeys, reveal the stories behind their successes, and the lessons they've learned. Join Mark and his guests for a mix of inspiration, valuable insights, and a bit of fun. Now, let's dive in. Good morning, America. How are you? My co-host for the show, Steve Berardi, president and founder of Omni Building Group, LLC, who's in the business of new residential construction and residential and commercial renovations. And our guest today is Tyler, who I will introduce formally in a minute. But in the meantime, good morning, Tyler.

1:14Good morning, Steve. Good morning. Tyler, I have a topic for you. and the name of the topic is about things being revealed. So in a minute it will be revealed why this is the topic, but the topic is magic. And I was just thinking about magic both as a show business kind of thing and magic as something that happens, in my opinion, every day in real life if you look for it. So tell us about magic and how it's influenced your life. Yeah, absolutely, Mark. Now, for those of you listening, I am a magician, and that's why Mark brings this up, is I love to perform magic. So there's the first reveal there.

2:02Keynotes and speaking in my teachings. Now, one thing that I love about magic, I actually, my background into magic, it was actually ironic. My wife and I were watching America's Got Talent, and it was when Matt Franco won the first year, and then the next year they had John Dorenbos, who was Philadelphia Eagles. He was a Philly guy, yeah. And he was on the show, made it to the finals, and I looked at the magic, and I was like, I bet you I could learn that. By the way, I just have to tell you. Can I tell you something? You may know this, but John Dorenbos, so I've had events with him, and I've seen him do his magic, but he tells this story.

2:42He had a very crazy childhood where, if I have it right, I believe his father killed his mother. He comes home one day and finds his parents are dead. And very, very painful. And magic was what saved his life. And magic was also what got him in the NFL, if you read his whole story, which is really interesting. So anyway, go ahead. Yeah. And so I loved that. And I was like, okay, I bet I can learn this. And so I started practicing magic. I started performing and I started learning these. I actually met John as well at a conference and told him that story of why I got into magic was because I watched him.

3:22And we actually spent almost two hours together after the show. And he taught me some of his tricks and some of those things. And it was a great conversation. So he was a magic mentor. Yes, for two hours before his plane had to get to the airport. Wow, cool. it was it was fun and what the reason why i love magic so much is it draws people's attention people become so focused and wanting to see the magic experience the magic catch the magician figure out what it is and not wanting to be tricked right but we all love to be tricked but right and that's why it makes it fun but we also want to discover it right we want to figure things out.

4:08And people put a lot of focus and attention into that. And I love that concept because we live in a distracted world. We're connected, more connected than any time in history. All right. I'm connecting with you over in Philadelphia and I'm in Utah. Yep. Right. 20 years ago, it'd be like, how is that even possible? Right. But we're so connected and yet human connection is fading because we're so distracted. and i actually have a trick for you here cool to show you that cool so here we have these three cards and i if you're listening on audio we'll describe what happens okay gotcha so we have these three cards yep and the thing is i'll actually show these to you we have the jack two and seven and the thing about it is oftentimes people will never even notice when these change it just changed to queen king and jack i don't know how that happened but it happened magic just like that with those three cards that distraction we lose the focus and it's easy to lose focus and the thing about that in in life is when we lose focus on things that matter most when we're distracted we miss the little things we miss the little moments that can be magical and provide experience of our day.

5:30Every day we're meant to gain experience. And that's the magic behind it. I was literally, my wife and I do something fun with our kids every day at dinner. We do what's called Silly Sour Sweet. And we have three kids and they share what was sour or silly about their day. Something that's funny that made them laugh, made them smile. something that's sour so we can learn that yes every day we have things that suck and are awful and those trials but that's part of life and then what's sweet and how we can learn from those and the good things about the day and it's just those little things that can make a big difference when we just focus did you guys create that or did you hear that somewhere my wife created that i'll give Really good for her.

6:15That's really cool. I'm hoping to have grandchildren soon and I'm going to use that. Yeah, that is the cutest thing. We look for stuff now, right? We look for silly things. And that's the magic of life. The other day, my three-year-old, we were having breakfast, and she stood up on her chair and stood on one foot and held her toes and said, Dad, look, I'm standing on one foot and holding my bread. She was so proud of herself. That's right. That just made me laugh. That is so cool. Right? And it's the magic that a three-year-old can bring to your life when we just focus. Hey, listen, our 28 minutes on the show goes really quickly.

7:00So that was so great. We could talk just about that for the whole show. But I now want to introduce Tyler Jensen, who's a nationally recognized business strategist and speaker who helps individuals and teams achieve top performance through systems, focus, and optimism. He was named KSL 5's Business Coach of the Year in 2025. he combines real world experience with practical frameworks to help people grow their business and lead with confidence. And let's get into it. Your family all were in education. And it makes sense because you have a passion, I know, for teaching and sharing knowledge and helping others improve their lives.

7:42However, despite that background, you went for entrepreneurship. Despite your passion for teaching, sharing knowledge, and helping others improve their lives, you gravitated towards a riskier way of life, which was entrepreneurship. How did that happen? And you describe yourself as the black sheep of the family for that too. Yes, yes, absolutely. And that happens, a lot of just my drive to, I would say help others and serve others. I'm an individual where when I learn something and something's helped me or something's blessed me, I want to share that. I want to be able to make somebody's life better.

8:23I want to be able to improve in that way. And entrepreneurship was just a way that I could see myself doing that. Not necessarily in a search for money, but with more money, the more people can help, right? The more time freedom you have, the more you can serve. And so there's a lot of benefits that come from owning a business that related to those values of wanting to be able to serve and help more people and to be able to influence others. I think that was kind of one of those main drives since a young age. I was always looking for ways I could do that. Interesting. So, and I know you had little businesses like we did.

9:06I did as well. Long care, you know, cutting grass, right? You had that. Yeah. 14 year old. Yep. That's about, that's about the age. Yep. Got it. So, uh, you, uh, but then you got out and you worked as actually a corporate IT trainer at a university for a while, right? So that I did. Yeah. Weber state. And how did, how did, how did you like that? Because that's not necessarily entrepreneurial. It is not, it's not entrepreneurial, but I love the aspect because I had a lot of, a lot of freedom with training and we did outsource training we did in-source training at the university and it allowed me to use a lot of my creative skills as well as design skills i'm also an artist and so i love that aspect so i was actually a more of a software trainer for that university so adobe microsoft how to use these to either better your classroom or better of the business that we'd outsource those truck classes to.

10:06So after that, you then did get into your first entrepreneurial deal in the insurance business, right? I did, yeah. For some reason, I opened a scratch insurance agency. Don't ask me how it happened. That's how a lot of us find ourselves in that industry. Right, right, right. Exactly. It just happened. Probably recruited, I guess. Yeah, I was. So you then, it happened to me too. So you then spent six to seven years as a corporate trainer after that, after having a successful agency, correct? Correct. So I ran the agency for about two years, after which time the RVP approached me and saying, hey, our corporate trainer is going to be moving to a new position.

10:49That position is opening up. I know you have background in corporate training and you've done well in this agency. Would you want to take that position? And that was a tough decision, right? Because here I am, I'm an entrepreneur. I own a business. And here I'd have to go back into corporate. But I looked at training in two facets. And this is why even today when people say, why don't you continue to open an agency? Why don't you continue to do this? When I took that position, I said, okay. As an insurance agent, at most, I'll be able to help. 1 ,000 to 2 ,000 people. Those are good agencies. If I become a trainer, I could help 200 agents, help 2 ,000 to 1 ,000 people.

11:41And now my impact is well over a million and how many lives I could bless in that way. And my service mindset kind of drove me to that position of how can I have this impact to share my knowledge, share what I've learned, to help and bless others as much as I could. It goes back to your interest in helping others improve their lives, going way back to your family instincts and everything. So while you were there, I'll just read this because you had – I know that retention in the insurance business, in the life insurance business, is somewhere between 11 % and 15 % after four years in the business.

12:17And you – your agent retention rates after training hundreds of agents was about 50 % to 60%. That's pretty amazing. Yeah. And how did you do that? I know there were some things you studied and learned during that time that helped you with that. Absolutely. And the number one thing that I saw within there was, first off, you have to make a human connection. And when it comes to insurance, you had to break the script. So I taught all of our agents how to sell based on education and not price. And so the agents that I trained and still train, they never focus on price. Even if their companies do, right, that's what everybody advertises.

13:08Oh, we'll save you on insurance, save money, save money, save money. The reason they want that is because the insurance company wants you to sell the cheapest policies. So they don't have to pay out on the back end. Right. Right. It's risk of variance on their part, right? Exactly. And so just teaching agents how to sell and how to educate through sales allowed them to actually make connections with clients that increase their retention, reduce their turnover. Our agents who stay have over a 90 % retention of their clients. And for an insurance agent, that's huge. Most of the time, it's 60 % to 70 % turnover of your clients every year.

13:45Because when they come to you on price, they leave you on price. Now that you say our agents, are you still connected with Foreign Bureau? I'm not connected with Farm Bureau anymore, but I call them my agents because I spent so much time with them as well. And even the agents that I help within the top performance group who have gone through our program and who I've consulted, I'll still call them my agents because they're creating this impact out on the world that I've had a part of. So we're going to stop there because it's break time for a minute. And then we're going to talk about two entrepreneurial activities that began right after that.

14:24So right after this. The Sattel Institute is the leading CEO member organization dedicated to corporate social responsibility. Under the vision and leadership of its founder, entrepreneur and philanthropist Ed Sattel, the Institute brings together CEOs in Philadelphia and other cities to support the nonprofit organizations organizations that do heroic work in our communities. The Sattel Institute believes that community is every leader's business. SI's members-only meetings and private CEO conferences give members the opportunity to hear from world-class thought leaders on crucial topics like AI, education, corporate philanthropy, and more.

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15:39As Ed Sattel says, think we, not just me. We are back on Founders Forum with our guest today, Tyler Jensen. And Steve Berardi is in the studio with me. And Steve, I know, has a question for you, Tyler. Tyler, it sounds like everybody you train, did you end up becoming friends with them? Do they, because of your influence, do they constantly ask you for your advice going forward? A lot of them do remain friends. I'm in contact with a lot of them. still to this day and a lot of my clients as well within the top performance group I stay in contact with. I recently actually just started a mastermind that's free to attend but it's invite only and so I still get to see a lot of those individuals on a by week every other week basis and that's one thing I'm a big proponent of is I don't believe in paid relationships.

16:37I'm going to be friends with you well after whether we do business or even don't do business and that's just one thing I love doing I love that I'm imagining that some of the agents at Farm Bureau might even be clients of Top Performance Group would that be right or not necessarily? Yes, there were several I did join That's why when you said our agents before I was thinking that you were still connected with them I figured that must be the case that's pretty cool So tell us about Top Performance Group. And believe it or not, we have less than 12 minutes left. So we're going to do that. And I also want to make sure we talk about Focusgate because that's really interesting.

17:14Perfect. I think the best way to describe Top Performance Group is really what we get to teach is the psychology and really the science of a top performer. And that's what makes it so unique when we help these business owners is over probably two or three years as I was working with agents, I always knew I wanted to do my thing and help in deep in that time period. But there's a moment when I actually owned an agency and I was sitting back and forth between a payroll check I was writing and my business bank account deciding, OK, I'm going to write this out of my personal checking account. thinking, okay, how does this even, how do I even continue?

17:57Right. How do I grow this? And that happened due to the fact that I had a policy. It was my first policy that ever canceled on me and they only stayed with me for a few weeks. So I got paid on the account,$12 ,000 check on that account and then it canceled. So an insurance, you have to back pay it. And so here it was, I went and back paid a check to the company for$12 ,000. Now thinking, great what do i do to buy my payroll check this month right and that was kind of a catalyst to decide okay how do these agents make it right what do top performers do and that's what started me on this study of top performance and looking at that and researching and trying to decide is there a pattern is there frameworks is there something that can be modeled for individuals have top performance.

18:46And I discovered that in my research, there's actually things that keep people from it. That was the first thing I discovered first before I discovered our four pillars was the thing keeping people from top performance is complacency. And we get into our own way. We're distracted. We decide to be busy. And I form this topic of distraction. Distraction has come up a lot today and it's going to come up again. It has. Yeah. So interesting. It has. And yes, we developed the three complacency models. And to describe those, we described the first pillar of top performance, which is optimism. And optimism doesn't mean what a lot of people think it means, Mark and Steve.

19:29It means best. The Latin word for optimism meant best. And it's later translations that got translated into positive or happy or outgoing, but in its original context, it was simply best. Are we providing the best experience? Are we doing what's best for the customers? Are we providing the best experience for our employees? Are we becoming the best version of ourselves? Right? If you just think of, oh, optimism is just positive and you just have to be positive. Well, if you're positive all the time, you miss empathy. Sometimes people doesn't need positive. They need empathy. They need connection.

20:03They need your best version to help them. Right. And so we teach that first off. And then from there, when we're taking these good actions, we actually get busy. And that's the first thing that business owners face in life and businesses. They just become busy. And we call that complacently busy because you're just going from one thing without structure. And then our second pillar pulls you out of that, and that's systems. And so how do we create systems for employees, for sales, for marketing research, ourselves? And that pulls us out of business. But then we get in our own way again. And we become our natural complacent state where our brain says, oh, that didn't work.

20:49That failed. that was a failure you got yelled at don't do it again and then we're stuck in our own way and people become distracted and they spend two hours just I'll just scroll I'll just do the things that are easy and then our last two pillars get you to top performance power and focus and from there that's your own uniqueness and that's focusing on things that matter most and then you experience top performance and you're like this day was awesome i did this and then you fall into the third which is the self-made where you say oh i'm good i don't need to change anything now i made it to the top and then really the the pattern is daily discipline that's like the ultimate complacency every single day yeah that self-made is the ultimate self-complacency is a form of complacency right i mean it is yep so interesting oh i'm going to move on from that because i want to make sure we cover focus gate which there is a theme here so let's tell tell us about what focus gate is yeah and by the way you were found i just want to point out founder of top performance group which is still going on with a team of consultants and then there's focus gate yeah so focus gate actually derived from a early challenge of the top performance group right because there's going to be challenges in business right out of the gate focus gate was not as successful as anticipated There was other foreseen factors that we weren't expecting that came up, which then caused my wife to go back to work.

22:22She was a stay-at-home mom for years, and she went back to work. She was a teacher. She was a teacher before, a physics teacher, and she went back to work. And that's where this problem really discovered is the issue of these cell phones. She saw it before. She was a private tutor as a stay-at-home mom the whole time as well. But she saw this issue of cell phones. From there, we decided, okay, well, what can we do about this? This is a major issue plaguing America and teachers all over the place. And so then we decided to say, okay, well, what if we just like signal jam these cell phones? And it was like our business partner that we brought in said, well, that doesn't work.

23:01And so then we actually developed a mobile app that solves the issue of cell phones in the classroom. It gives teachers full governance. So students download it day one and it integrates with the software. So when they enter class, the phone enters a focus mode, eliminating all distractions. But then it keeps emergency contacts such as parents or medical apps needed for the student. And then the teacher can decide what they want for the class period. So with one click, they can open up an app or a website or a resource on the student's devices. They can use class period and another click and it goes back into focus mode.

23:36And that's focus gate. It's an educational thing. So I think it's ingenious. I see a couple of challenges. I know Steve wants to ask you about. Yeah. Will parents give you pushback about this? Oh, that's a great question, Steve. From a lot of the conversations we've had with parents is, first off, they think that they love the fact that student cell phones are going to be, the distractions are gone, right? Because a lot of students are concerned of two things. They're concerned about safety with their kids and being able to communicate. But they're also concerned of the fact that we know that the presence of cell phones is decreasing test scores.

24:16It decreases cognitive performance by 20 percent. And parents are aware of that. And so with our solution, they actually have a parent portal. So if the parents designate as the emergency contact, they can still get through to their child. In an emergency, we have emergency protocols. So not only do all phones instantly unlock, but notifications are sent to parents and students on the exact next steps that the school wants them to take in that emergency. So again, I'm sorry. I said it's misorganized, right? It allows everybody to be on the same page and parents have loved that aspect. And you have it operating in pilot programs now or in actual working programs now in schools?

25:01So we're starting our pilot schools come January of this year. We're going to start in the private sector. And then from there, we'll move into the public sectors after that. Interesting. Any other challenges that you see with it? Yeah, this is a good question. My wife and I were traveling up to Yellowstone and I shared this thought with her this weekend, honestly. And I said, I feel like the biggest competitor on our app that will block out all these distractions for students is our big social media companies. When you think about it, this was a research done by one of our board members, Stanford Kind, they're in 10 ,000 schools, and they surveyed students and they asked them, how often do you spend time on your cell phone?

25:51And 95 % of students said they spend 90 minutes or more on their cell phone every day. And when you look at that, and we're stealing 90 minutes per student away from these social media companies where our IT team is going to have to, I feel, is going to have to block the social media's workarounds on trying to get notifications through to these students. So it's going to be a technology battle for the hearts and minds of our school children, unfortunately. You're battling the big guys. Hey, real quick, because believe it or not, we're out of time. But real quick, I know you're a voracious reader.

26:26What are your favorite books? We've got about 20 seconds to answer that. Oh, favorite books. One of them is from a mentor of mine, Rory Vaden. He actually mentored me through keynote speaking. Everything is called Take the Stairs. Love this book. It's all about success and doing the hard things that normal people don't want to do. What's Roy's last name? Rory Vaden. Rory. Yeah. V-A-D-E-N. Yeah. Got it. D-A-D-E-N. Just want to make sure people got that. I never heard that one. Great book. Okay, good. Yeah. Take the stairs. Don't take the elevator escalator. Take the stairs. Do those things that people, normal people don't want to do.

27:08All right. Take the stairs. On that note, thank you for being here, Tyler. It's a great show. It always flies by. Steve, thanks again for being here. Thank you all for listening. And we'll see you next week on Founders Forum. Founders Forum was brought to you in part by March Forward, LLC. We partner with entrepreneurs like you to assist in accomplishing your future vision, your life, your business, your legacy. Comprehensive wealth planning that starts with you, not a product. We hope you enjoyed your time with Founders Forum and that you found something of value to take with you throughout your day.

27:41Join us again next week for another episode of Founders Forum on WWDB 860 AM Philadelphia or on your favorite podcast streaming service. Securities offered through DFPG Investments, LLC, DFPG. Investment advisory services offered through Diversify Advisory Services, LLC, Diversify. DAS and DFPG are affiliated entities. March is unaffiliated with DAS and DFPG. Members FINRA slash SIPC. The information provided in this podcast is for informational and educational purposes only and should not be interpreted as investment advice. The views expressed are those of the host and guests and do not necessarily reflect the views of Diversify or DFPG.