1541 – Selfless Service is Embedded in Us with Live Not Loathe’s Jevon Wooden

0:28Hey there, thoughtful listener. million in revenue. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high ticket sales appointments. You can even chat with me live and I'll see and reply to your messages. Also, don't forget the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for guests. Go to upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. We'd love to have you.

0:59with us right now javon wood and javon you are a business growth strategist and you are found on the web at live not loathe.com of which you're the founder uh and you're also the author of the book own your kingdom javon thank you so much for joining us hey thanks for having me josh i'm excited to be here and excited to add some value absolutely so you work with service-based a lot of service-based businesses, but share with me, share with us kind of like your impact in the world and like how you engage in what you do. Yeah. So what I do is I take the overarching business model that the entrepreneur is using.

1:34And I typically just look at efficiencies, you know, how they can improve their processes, their marketing campaign strategy. So they get a lower cost per click. If they run an ad, they get lower cost per acquisition. If they're looking for more clients, right. Depending on what their campaign strategy is, if it's for more traffic, you know, looking at what their bounce rates were for the websites, just looking at some key metrics to make sure that they're generating that more revenue with less effort. Yeah. So are there areas of the kind of the customer journey that you commonly see, like even if say someone is, let's say they're an agency and they're working with someone that's running their ads for them.

2:10Do you, are you saying you commonly find gaps where they're like, yeah, there's some areas for improvement that that you can fix absolutely the messaging i mean a lot of people go to these marketing agencies and stuff and the marketing agencies you know they may have the best interest at heart but they're using these cookie cutter things that don't really jive with the business owner so i'll make it so that it's authentic marketing right you look at their content how are they saying have they done market data analysis because a lot of people are just jumping in and they're focused more on the branding than the messaging.

2:43Right. And that's really hurting them, especially in uncertain times, like we're seeing right now. Yeah. And what, like, what would be some good schools of thought if we're thinking about like how to create content in a way that's going to kind of, it's going to connect, right. It's going to come across as authentic. Like, I feel like I know, and I like this people as opposed to just some generic how to steps in a blog post. Right. So the first thing you want to think about is who are you serving? Right. We know that. Right. Who are we serving? But a lot of people look at that first layer of service.

3:16Right. For instance, if I'm a coach, I may think that I'm serving the business owner. Right. But if I'm looking at teams, I'm serving their people. So you have different components and different customer bases. So you got to really identify which one you're speaking to. And then once you identify which customer base you're speaking to, now you can talk about their language. What language are they using to describe their problems? Right. So not what I want to say, but what are they're saying? So if someone stuffed their toe, they may say, ouch, I stubbed my toe. But I may be saying, oh, you had a foot injury.

3:49Right. So that specificity is very, very important because when they go to search, how do I fix a stubbed toe? You want to rank for that one. And then you also want them to say, OK, this person gets it. Right. This company is exactly what I'm talking about. They know how I feel. And then when you talk about the solution, we hear it all the time, features versus benefits. The benefits have to be meaningful to them, not just useless stuff that sounds good. We see a lot of coaches, for instance, they say, oh, get an empowering life or live to your fullest potential. That doesn't tell me anything about what's happening there.

4:24So you want to be very specific. You want to use actual language, not fuller words. If you're going to describe the fullest potential, what does that look like? You know, are they having more time? Are they generating more profit? You know, are they less stressed? Right. What does the less stress lead to? Are they more confident so they can get what they want out of life? You know, so you really want to talk more in depth and niche down on your language. Yeah. When you are engaging and when you're working with clients, like what is that process? Like where do you begin and like how do you determine where you go together?

4:56Yeah. So I have a proprietary framework. It's called the five why framework. So I talk is foundational. Right. So the first why we're going to look at the yardstick. What goals are you going for and how are we measuring success there? You know, then you want to look at the yield. What levers can we pull? You know, people, processes, technology. We hear, you know, how can we associate that? Do we need to get more resources? Are there some resources you have in place already that you're just not utilizing to the fullest extent? Are you wasting money? Right. So you want to look at those levers we can pull.

5:26Then we want to use a voting term. It's called YAR, you know, making it easy, making it flow easily. You know, what can I delegate? What can I get rid of? What can I delay? You know, a lot of us, I know, as entrepreneurs, we want to do everything at once. Sometimes you got to push those back. Maybe instead of Q1, you do it in Q4. Or maybe you delete it altogether because it's not serving you or it doesn't align with your brand image. Right. So those are some things you want to think about. And a business needs to be flexible, scalable and strong. Right. So it needs to have some resiliency. So the next why would be yoga.

5:57How can we make it so it can sustain these tough times? How can we make it so that you have more than just one revenue generation model? Right. You want to have multiple strategies to generate that. That way, when one is going down, you have another one supporting it and you have more. You can you can really know what your revenue looks like month in and month out. And then you want that yearn. You want those people being brand ambassadors. You want your clients screaming from the mountaintops how great you are. You want your employees saying how great you are, because those two subsets of people are what's going to help you become a sustainable and scalable business.

6:36Yeah. And what are some maybe some high level like ideas around like if we want to empower our clients or our audience or our employees to be better advocates? I know that I'm guilty of that. Like, I don't ask and I shouldn't be asking. You got to ask. That's the first step, Josh. Asking would probably be step one, Josh. Yeah, that's step one. But more so, you know, you create feedback loops. You know, we have to be able to, on the customer side and employee side, we have to do surveys. You know, how are they feeling? How can we improve the product to make it better serve who they are and what they're looking to do as far as solutions?

7:14You know, we want to make sure we have ambassador programs or referral programs or whatever you want to call it. Incentivize them to share. Right. Incentivize them to talk about how awesome you are. And it doesn't have to be anything grand. You know, maybe if I have a book. Right. Maybe I give them a free book if I found out that's what would serve them. You can find out whatever they want to use. Run that survey, use JotForm, TypeForm, something like that, or post on social media, a poll, and ask, hey, what would you like to see more of? Would it be a book? Would a$25 gift card be helpful? Whatever it is.

7:49And then incentivize them via a giveaway on that survey. And that's going to start generating where they feel like they're engaged, they feel like they're heard. Those are just some of the ways you can do it. As far as employees, right? You want ambassadors. You want them sharing on their social platforms how amazing you are. So it's not the filler stuff that really is speaking to people now. It's not those benefits that we hear about. It's really social causes that speak more to people these days. So if you're backing the social cause, you want to make sure you're really putting that out there and talk about how it aligns with your brand.

8:21Talk about how you're serving them, right? Really find charities that align with your values as a company. hmm this is good stuff i okay to our friend that's listening to our conversation right now if you didn't write down some of those things rewind about a minute and write that stuff down because that's probably going to be good for business free advice here um and javon how did you like what's your background like how did you get into this work yeah i have a very complex background right i started in the military um i did about 12 years in the military in the it field But I found that I really enjoyed business.

8:58I enjoyed getting people to see what their strengths are and then leveraging those strengths to make their lives and businesses better. So I got my MBA from Robert A. Smith School of Business, which is University of Maryland. And I've just been implying those terms. But, you know, we all know that degrees are theoretical. Right. And a lot of that theory, we don't really use it like we like we would think we do. So most of my training is OJT, right? That under job training, just helping others, you know, scale up their businesses, going in, finding the issues, hearing what's not being said, and just helping people scale up.

9:34You know, and I just discovered that you're a fellow military veteran business owner. So I was in the Navy for five years. You were in the Army for 12. What did you do in the Army again? So I was IT. So I did the kind of IT. They said, wow. So, and this was, this was back in the 2000s. And so, yeah, we had, it was kind of interesting. They put a lot of us, I would say unconventional, you know, smaller number of billets, you know, the small population of the specialty jobs. So I hung out, I ended up, actually my best friend from the Navy was in IT, but they kind of put us, so I was a journalist.

10:14so they'd have the journalists they'd have the corpsman they'd have like you know where there's there's not a whole lot of us but musicians i had it was like a maybe musician we were good friends we were like the oddballs yeah so but we became really good friends um hey but i wanted to ask you like you know your military background like and this is just maybe speaking generally now um are there any like when you hear someone kind of has been through that that that that school of hard knocks and AKA the, you know, they, their DD 214 graduate. Are there any things that maybe assumptions that you would make or like, are there any advantages you'd say to someone who's considering hiring a military veteran founders business?

11:01Yeah, I would say that the advantages really lie in the discipline, right? Most of us, we come out very disciplined. We come out very structured. We're very strategic about how we go about things. We're great problem solvers because we've had to solve problems that we never thought we'd see ever in life. A lot of us. Right. So there are very there's a lot of advantages. Right. The work ethic. You definitely really can't find that in a lot of people these days because people are like, man, soon as it's not instant gratification, they're out. Yeah. People tend to keep striving and keep wanting to do a great job for you because we know that we don't want to fail the people that we look to left and right.

11:38We have that selfless service embedded in us. yeah i see that a lot and one thing you'd mentioned too it's like kind of like this i did that work ethic you know i had say particularly on i would say standards right so in the military like one thing you can't get away with is good enough like if you try turning that into your sergeant or your chief or whatever yes good enough get your ass back down you don't finish that job. There's just no room for like failure. That whole concept is like failure is not an option kind of thing. And I, that, that, that sticks with you. Like, you know, you got that drilled into your head for, you know, for me, just even five years of that, like it still affects me today.

12:22Absolutely. Absolutely. It doesn't take long because they, they, every day, day in and day out, they're drilling it into you. So, so do your website live, not loathe for someone that's, you know, come across our conversation here and they're like, okay, I like Javon. I'd love to learn more. Like, what would you recommend kind of that next step in the journey? Is there, I see you've got some really good resources on your site. Right. Yeah. I would say go to live not low.com. That's L I V E N O T L O A T H E.com. And take a look around right now. I have a summit that's going on. It's called the million dollar marketing summit.

12:59And there's no fluff. We don't give all that filler stuff. We're really coming in with 25 plus experts. They're speaking on topics like how to leverage networking, referral basis, SEO, all the stuff we hear. Right. So it's free. So go ahead and hit that link at the top of my website. And then also schedule a free consultation. You know, I have free consultations for anyone that's potentially looking to grow and scale their business. So hit that scheduling link and yeah, and we'll be off to the racist. What kind of questions do you ask or how does that conversation usually go? Yeah. So I like to say I use the 80-20 rule, right?

13:34Chances are the person is going to talk about 80 % of the time I'm going to listen. And then 20 % of the time I'm getting pointed questions because I want people to be really clear about what they're asking. So that call is for clarity on the problems, on how the solution could look, right? What's the action plans? And we just answer some of the basic questions like what revenue are you generating per year? Where would you like to go? Now, what are some of the obstacles? Do you have the resources that are required for you to reach where you're looking to go or would you need something else, right?

14:03How can I best support them? Are they looking for marketing expertise? Are they looking for sales funnel strategies? Are they looking for new business opportunities? So we really get clear on all of that stuff. And then we look for an action plan, whether they work with me or not, they're going to get some type of action plan to move forward. Yeah. Your website, again, livenotloathe.com. Javon Wooden, your founder. And again, you've authored books. All of those are available on your website, Own Your Kingdom. Javon, thank you so much for joining us. I really enjoyed our conversation. Thanks for having me, Josh.

14:40I enjoyed it as well, man. Keep ascending.

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