1957 – Unleashing the Power of Visionary Entrepreneurship with First Class Business’ Jackson Calame

0:05Hey there, thoughtful listener. Are you looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, influencers, influencers, and clients? Well, I've had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from. I've got a free video you can watch with no opt-in required where I'll share the exact steps necessary to be 100 % inbound in your industry over the next six to eight months with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for over 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high-ticket sales appointments.

0:51Also, don't forget, the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for great guests. Go to upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. I'd love to have you.

1:05With us right now, it's Jackson Callum. Jackson, you are the founder of First Class Business and the host of Vision Pros Live. Jackson, thank you so much for joining us. Josh, you're a champion. Happy to be here. Thank you so much. Your website is firstclassbusiness.io. And tell me a bit about what First Class Business is, what you do. Absolutely. So we help with holistic revenue growth for entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs, specifically visionary entrepreneurs. So the majority of the market is going to see that as kind of a fluffy reality. And I'm okay with that. I understand that. But we're basically the Alfred to Batman.

1:46We're that butler behind the scenes who runs a house, makes sure the company's running well. And when he's out there doing his thing, we're making sure he doesn't die and kill himself trying to help save the world. So that's all that infrastructure and process, vision, culture leadership management marketing fulfillment sales and support operations those pillars are incredibly valuable and too many entrepreneurs end up in a position where they can't sustain their business because they've tried to do it by themselves or with one unicorn for a long time and books like the e-myth talk about how you're never going to get out of it unless you shift that mindset yeah completely completely so if if you typically like working with the clients that you work with were to say, listen, I want you to keep doing what you're doing.

2:33But as the founder, as the CEO, as the visionary, if you were to say, if there were two to three activities that you would advocate for them in terms of them staying in their lane, what would you recommend they do? So the first thing I would do is I would get the source of the roadmap. How do I do this? How do I go about this? We have a two-hour webinar. That webinar took me 14 years of successes and failures to create, and it is fully in line with E-Myth, Rocket Fuel, The Effective Executive, One Minute Manager, Raving Fans, Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Tribal Leadership, all pulled into how do you practically implement this into a system?

3:12So that would be number one. I'd go read, I'd go look at something like that. Number two, I would learn how to implement this book, Effective Executive by Dr. Peter Drucker. I don't know very many entrepreneurs who've even read that book. Most of them haven't heard of it because it's not super well recommended. Why? Well, Rich Dad Poor Dad is a phenomenal book and it's a great foundation. It's easy to read. The Effective Executive is a very hard book to read. It is highly recommended by Warren Buffett. It's highly recommended by Bill Gates. I once heard LeBron James mention it. Those types of people, I tend to look for not just how many people recommend a book, but who recommends it.

3:50This has become one of my Bibles of business. If you can learn to be effective with your time, if you can learn to respect and appreciate executives, then you can move mountains for your business. So step three is not just being an effective executive yourself, but actually being able to teach others to become effective executives. I also don't know very many entrepreneurs in the world when they're teaching their teams who evaluate their teams properly. They base their evaluation based on what did you do today? They base on, okay, did we get the results this week or did we get the results this month?

4:23That's too fast for an executive evaluation. What Peter Drucker teaches is we should be evaluating executives based on quarters. I don't see small businesses doing that. They jump to conclusions too fast. They pressure their executives. They don't give them the two to three hours that they need. And if you start treating all of your team members like executives, it's amazing the shift that happens in the culture. It's amazing what happens with the relationships. It's amazing what happens with the results. Yeah. What would be maybe some examples, some real world examples of maybe other folks that you've worked with or, you know, just how this might look?

5:02I think in theory, someone may be listening to our conversation, hear what you just said and say, OK, cool. I'm going to start treating more of my team like executives. But what does that look like in more of a day-to-day role? Sounds like a leading question because I got a great story for that. So Jake Larson of Video Power Marketing. Jake Larson was put on stage by Ryan Dice and called the YouTube ad expert of the world at Traffic and Conversion Summit, right? He had been pre-selected to be one of the 10 YouTube ambassadors by the founder of YouTube. Founder of YouTube called him on the phone before they launched the ads platform, asked him to come out and he was one of 10 YouTube channels that came out to decide how do we make the ads platform better than TV.

5:43They came up with the idea you should be able to skip ads after five seconds. Right. So fast forward a couple of years, he brings me into the company because I'm quote, one of the most critical people he's ever met. That was the worst compliment I've ever received in my life, Josh. And he was right. So I come out trying to be a little bit softer too, saying, Jake, I'm sorry about that, but yes, I'll help you. He had five clients at a time. Some of them, one of them, Entrepreneur on Fire, John Lee Dumas. Another one, NordicTrack, Yahoo.com, CorelDraw, all these really big entities that were crushing it, spending a minimum of$10 ,000 per month on YouTube ads.

6:22And he says, how do we do this? And I said, well, let's take a look at the Playscape. He had two interns, 70 ,000 people coming to the website per month and ultimately no other overhead. I said, well, here's what I think we do. You're going to be mom and I'm going to be dad. You need to nurture people, help people love you. I'm going to come in and I'm going to hold them accountable with love, of course, but when they come and complain to you that I'm changing how things go, you got to have my back too. If they aren't qualifying to become executives, if they aren't picking up the pieces, we implement procedures, resources, and templates.

6:57then you also have to be willing to let them go. If you can do that, we can work together. So over the next month, we trained them up. They were both very, very good interns. They both became executives, had executive behaviors within one to two months. We went from five clients to 20 clients. We tripled revenues. I took over strategy sessions from there. But Jake, when I talked, here's the other thing we did. So when I told Jake that we were going to do that and run the operation that way, this is the visionary integrator relationship also talked about in rocket fuel. I didn't know at the time, but I was being integrated.

7:29He's been visionary. I told those two interns, I said, there's two, there's three things Jake needs to be doing. One, he needs to be golfing with other executives. That's where he wins his deals. Say that again for the folks in the back. That's right. He needs to be golfing with other executives. That's where he wins his deals. Two, he needs to be speaking on podcasts and on stages. if he's on podcasts on stages he's attracting great audience members to us three he needs to be playing the jazz piano at conferences because everybody loves when jake plays the jazz piano if we can get jake doing those things and get him out if he's in operations we are not growing as a company if we can get him out of the day-to-day operations and into that position as a visionary we will crush it as a company so that became the focal point i said everybody else by the way we've got unlimited vacation days.

8:21So Cooper, when you go to Europe, you focus on your vacation. When you got things to get done, perfect. But if you don't have things to get done, don't even check in. Go be, go vacant. I'm watching Jake out of the corner of my eyes, seeing if he freaks out or reacts. No, man, Jake Larson's one of the best leaders I've ever met in my life. Great mentor to me. It's helped me get to where I am. I absolutely love that, man. You know, when I'm hearing you describe these ideal roles that a visionary CEO would do, I can't help but notice that these are very human-to-human, human connection type of behaviors.

8:56And that might be contrary to how we might sometimes see the role of a CEO is supposed to just be thinking about you know, you know, efficiencies and systems and, you know, and I got to tell you that, you know, as someone who really resonates with, you know, kind of the more of the visionary or the evangelist role or the human connection role, I like what you're saying. And I think it's, that's why I kind of chimed in there with like, say it again in the back for the folks in the back, because I like what you're saying. And I truly believe that one of the most important things that we can be doing as leaders is connecting with other leaders, because I think great things happen in an environment where you've got two leaders that come together, they discover that they like each other, and they look for opportunities to collaborate, because someone that's a high achiever, and they've got a lot of resources, a lot of things going on, and you're a high achiever, and you've got a lot of things going on, man, you get together in that, you know, that opportunity for collaboration, synergy, etc, is huge and can dwarf what, as a visionary or CEO, we might come up with some better mousetrap idea for our own systems.

10:07Someone else has already cobbled together so many other things. Is that coming together becomes this one plus one equals 11 dynamic? And if we could just kind of concentrate or stay committed to that, I love this. Can you tell me more about outcomes that might happen as a result of this focus on connection? And again, both connection with individuals and audiences. Yeah, absolutely. Thoughtfulness, intentionality, right? Those things go hand in hand. And so it's not an abandonment of strategy by any means, but it is a refocus. Josh, we got to get entrepreneurs and wantrepreneurs to take the rose petal glasses off and look at entrepreneurship for what it is.

10:4696 % of businesses fail within 10 years. So why are we taking 96 % of advice? It doesn't make sense. And as a consultant of more than 10 years, I've seen that the 4%, when you actually get them to open up beyond the surface level answers, most of the 4 % who've won are surviving. They have debts. They have problems. They just disguise it a little bit better than the people who failed. So we've got to shift our focus, like you said, too. And for me, it's vision and then culture. and if you get the right vision and you get the right culture, then you attract awesome leaders to come and work with you.

11:26And now that you've attracted that, now you have something to market. So here's a real practical, the best example I've ever seen. There was a man that got on stage. He sold a car that would not exist for two to three years and 180 ,000 very smart affluent people spent a thousand dollar deposit on the Tesla Model 3. Unheard of. I go and I talk to the sales reps at the stores later. I say, how much do you make? Minimum wage. Why? Because the car sells itself. The vision, the culture, and the leadership made that happen. Now, you have to have fulfillment in place to not go to prison in those situations.

12:05You've got to be able to pull it off. And so there are other elements that are necessary, but let's rewind back to Jake. here comes Dr. Eric Berg and he had 106 ,000 subscribers on YouTube and it was my job to take this strategy session. He had paid$497 to meet with Jake Larson and here comes Just Jackson. I was terrified. I thought I was going to lose my job. I thought for sure because I had to tell him too, he's got one of the worst websites I've ever seen and I am not looking forward to that conversation. He's a doctor. He could be pretentious. He could get offended and I'm I'm pretty direct.

12:39So I'm like, how do I, how do I not lose my job here? He comes in. I say, Hey, Dr. Berg. He says, call me Eric. I go, okay, Dr. Eric Berg. Um, and he goes, call me Eric Jackson. I'm like, all right, Eric said, okay, let's start with your colors, the colors of your, your website. They're bright yellow and bright red. That's traffic stop signs and yield signs. Yeah. And he's like, okay, I can fix that. And he takes notes. You know how many entrepreneurs have argued me about the stupid color on their website like it's like i just called their baby ugly oh my gosh like no so okay so he takes notes and i'm like why is doctors taking notes i'm just jackson i was like 26 you know and then i said okay next thing you're gonna go to a bunch of restaurants this year how many newsletters do you want from restaurants he goes none dr bird how many people want your newsletter he goes what do i do i said what do i do about that I said, well, come up with an irresistible offer.

13:35It's got to be something that you've got to incentivize people for wanting to opt. It just said, sign up for our newsletter. How many times do we see that on people's websites still to this day? Because nobody wants that. It's boring. It doesn't drive conversions. So he said, okay, great. I can do that. I can come up with an offer. And he said, by the way, do you guys do all this stuff for us? No, we just did video. We're a video production company. We're a video advertising company. So I said, can I just be blunt with you? And he goes, yes. And I said, your website is so awful. I wouldn't touch it with a 10-foot pole.

14:04I'd never send a friend or family member to it. It looks like somebody stole your identity, is wanting to steal mine if I put my, I would never buy from this website. And he goes, okay, give me three days. I have no idea how he did it. This was back in 2014, 2015 time period. He overhauled his website within three days, put the right brand into place. If you look up Dr. Eric Berg today, he's at over 11 million subscribers. I don't know a naturopath who doesn't know who he is. So that practicality, intentionality of, yes, there's strategy to it. But what I'm really showing is Dr. Berg had the leadership skills and power to say, I'm going to listen to this guy.

14:46I'm going to trust that Jake hired the right person. I'm going to assess what this is and then make strategic moves. He never argued with me. I'm not saying he listened to everything I said. He knew to intuitively take what was necessary out of that and implement it. And he always respected us, was grateful for what we did. And then he went on and did the rest. I never talked to Eric Berg again, besides sending him an email a couple years ago and saying, hey, I hope you're doing well. Congratulations on everything. Yeah. Jackson, we have just a few minutes left. Can you share just a bit about how you work with leaders?

15:21Again, your website, firstclassbusiness.io. You share maybe just about your services or programs? Absolutely, Josh. So for those who are business owners, we have a free program. It's called the Power Launch, and that webinar is two hours long. To reveal behind the curtains, you're going to see at the end, it's a$5 ,000 a month implementation or a$44 ,000 a month upfront. That's designed to get people to go away who don't listen. Then it jump cuts and says, by the way, if you want to do this by yourself with your own teams, you can get access to this for$49 a month. that is also to get people to go away i am not in the business of helping people who want to cut corners and want to get rich quick on the flip side when i come on a show like this that's principally driven then i give what i call free parking free parking is 100 free access to that entire infrastructure there's 55 hours worth of work in there that an entrepreneur has to do it may sound like a lot of work but i know quiet quitters can get that done within two weeks What that will do is put you on a path to earn$20 ,000 a month in new revenues within 45 to 180 days.

16:31Why is such a weird timeline? If you don't have any of the assets in place and you're starting from scratch, you have more to build than somebody who's already got some assets. If you've already built a bunch of assets and your assets are absolutely trash, we may have to tear down that bridge first in order to build a new bridge. You might even take longer than those who are starting before you. I do not believe in upfront scope of works. I think they are also crushing companies because there's, if somebody has an upfront scope of work defined quickly or a do-it-yourself, done-with-you, done-for-you process that they're selling without getting to know your brand and your vision and who you are, you are buying a cookie cutter template.

17:10There's no way to personalize that. So we want you to have open access. We want freedom of options. We want freedom of choice for entrepreneurs. and if people go through that and they love what we're doing, awesome. If they go through that and they're like, you know what? This is hard. I don't feel like I need to do all this. That's okay. You're the visionary for your brand. J.K. Rowling needed a napkin. She became a billionaire writing a book. I'm not the know-it-all for what you need. I do have a show called Vision Pros to help people come on and the point is I learned the hard way. I am not the Grant Cardone of the world.

17:42I do not need a sheeple, everybody into success. I want to work with visionaries who know they are the visionary for their life. And I can trust that they are going to follow their own intuition and take full responsibility for their actions. That's what we're looking for. Yeah. Jackson, also, I just want to point this out to our friend that's listening. You can do a search right now on your podcast app and you can find the podcast Vision Pros. Can you share just a bit about that? And then again, to our friend that if you've resonated with Jackson, with what you've been sharing. Sounds like a great next step in addition to going to firstclassbusiness.io.

18:20Josh, we look forward to hosting you on the show as well. That's going to be awesome. Vision pros is for leaders, leaders with visions, people who want to share their visions. What qualifies a leader? Somebody who cares about those that they serve. So if you appreciate our stage and you're in the beginning incubation stages and you come in with honesty and vulnerability and saying what you want to do, I want you on my stage. If you come in with sunglasses and airplanes and trying to impress me and saying, I've already been on all these podcasts, you are walking yourself out of our, we will gently walk you towards the improvements you can make.

18:57And if you come back later, we will then help you. But most people won't go make the improvements, so they never come back. So we're looking for the authentic people, no pretenders, all contenders. And your qualifications have nothing to do with your previous successes. It has to do with your authenticity of your vision. I love it. So much I'm hearing, Jax. I wish if we had more time, I could get into you. I would love to talk with you someday about your use of negative and positive filters, which I just absolutely adore. Jax and Callum, again, your website, firstclassbusiness.io, the podcast, Vision Pros Live.

19:30If you are a friend or fan of the work I do, we will absolutely send that episode when that airs sometime in the future. Jackson, thank you so much for being a guest. It's been a true joy and delight. My pleasure, Josh.

19:48Thanks for listening to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show. If you are a thoughtful business owner or professional who would like to be on this daily program, please visit upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. We believe that every person has a message that can positively impact the world. We love our community who listens and shares our program every day. Together, we are empowering one another as thoughtful leaders. And as I mentioned at the beginning of this program, if you're looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, and clients, I have had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from.

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