The Entrepreneurial Wealth Manager Podcast

In this episode:

• Glenn discusses how he got into consulting for wealth management
• What is the Success Triangle?
• Why tracking your goals is so important at each stage of your career
• Common types of head trash and getting out of campgrounds
• Glenn discusses the difference between winners and “at-leasters”
• How to find what motivates you
• Glenn goes over three key building blocks for success

Transcript

(click here to download the transcript)

Andrew: Hello, everyone, and welcome to The Entrepreneurial Wealth Manager Podcast. This is the podcast where we interview successful wealth managers and coaches to learn about their journey, the obstacles they've overcome, and how you can model their approach to build your wealth management business. My name is Andrew Alix, and I'm joined, of course, by my friend and confidant Scott Sillari.

Scott: God, I love that introduction, Andrew.

Andrew: Every time, it's new.

Scott: It gets better every time.

Andrew: I'm glad you think so.

Scott: I do.

Andrew: In today's episode, Scott, we have an exciting guest.

Scott: We do.

Andrew: So I've been told.

Scott: He's a great guest. A lot of fun. The interview is a lot of fun.

Andrew: I'm glad you had a good time. You spoke with Glenn Mattson, President of Mattson Enterprise Incorporated, a Sandler Training Consulting Firm specializing in sales and management productivity and effectiveness. Glenn is a former top associate in the world for all of Sandler training. Glenn's firm conducts public and private workshops, corporate programs, and one on one strategic sessions for corporate executives, business owners, and individuals who find themselves in a sales management role. Clients include American Express, Merrill Lynch, Mass Mutual, and Guardian. Scott, Glenn sounds like he knows what he's talking about.

Scott: Glenn does know what he's talking about, Andrew.

Andrew: What are we going to learn from your interview today?

Scott: Glenn's really good at specializing in people breaking through ceilings. He calls them "camps." You start camping when you get to a certain level. He goes through, and what we're going to learn today is specifically about the success triangle, and how you can make changes within that triangle. What I'm talking about, Andrew, is attitude, behavior, and tactics, and how you can make changes. He goes through how you make changes in that triangle in order to break through those ceilings. That's what you're going to learn today on the podcast.

Andrew: Excellent. Well, let's not waste any time and jump right in.

Scott: I'm excited to have special guest Glenn Mattson. Glenn, thank you so much for being here. Before we jump into the meat of this interview, I wanted to ask you first a little bit about your business background. Tell me, how did you get into this consulting position for wealth managers and financial advisors out there?

Glenn: Sure. First of all, thanks so much, Scott, for having me part of the program. If some of you are from the New England area and New York area, it's a Hair Club for Men trick. I was a client of Sandler for many years when I was younger and had my own business, and what I found, Scott, was that the tools and systems that I was being taught in that process helped me become really the best I could be within that world. When I decided to sell the business, I actually got into the training and development business as ... First, of course, I was a client, and then I got in as an advisor. Of course, when I first got in as an advisor, I had a lot of the same trials and tribulations that most people had in terms of head trash, and doing my behaviors, and avoidance techniques and those type of things. Thank goodness I used our own tools to help me have the largest individual practice within the Sandler network as a producer. It took me about nine years to do that in the United States, and about another four years I had the largest in the world, again, as an associate.

Roughly about eight years ago I decided to go out on my own and buy my own piece of the business, and we've been solely really working just with wealth managers and people in the financial field. That's only really the clientele that we work with. Knock on wood, because the results that we get, we've been battling really number one or two in the world since then. It's been nice.

Scott: That's amazing. I love that, because I know that there's so much training that goes involved with this type of job. You mentioned when we were talking earlier about one of the tools, or the idea, the theory of the success triangle. Why don't you tell me a little bit about that, and how that is part of what you're doing to help these wealth managers be successful?

Glenn: Sure. It's interesting, when you start talking about training to anyone, and it's going to be a really bizarre statement coming from a training company that I will tell you, most training doesn't work. When we do training, it tells you what to do and how to do it, and that's fine. When we look at change, and it's the difference between training and change, our viewpoint is unless you elicit some type of change in the individual to consistently apply what they're being taught, you're not going to have a great rate of return. When you brought up the term "success triangle," it's one of the filters that we use within our metrics that really is a three-legged stool, i.e. a triangle. When we look at it, success is in the middle of the triangle, but it has three components that have to work, in congruence with each other, and not having one stronger than the other, because it will fall over.

The three parts is the tactics, and that's the bottom right. That's technique. That's, Scott, when we look at what strategies and tactics do you need to have ownership of to really dominate or achieve your objectives? That could be different tactics and strategies for someone who is newer in the business, because they have to go out and find more. They may be someone who is a veteran, who's been doing it for a while, maybe different where they have to manage staff, they have to manage relationships, they have to manage their center of influences, but they also have to go out and bring in new business. As time goes on, those tactics and strategies may change a little bit.

The bottom left that we look at is the behavior. That's where some of the wheels start to get a little wobbly. Behavior really is a subset of their goals, long term and short term. You just can't have long term goals. It's a part of your belly button. If you only have long term goals, you'll start to lose the passion for it. You have to have short term and even daily goals. With goals, you need to have planning. You need to have the ability to track it, and edit it, and fine-tune it. Most people don't want to track what they've been doing, because they'd rather just wing it. Most have, when they first got started in their career, Scott, they used or use the tracking, the lack of it, against them, by their management teams. When they're at a certain level of their own production, they don't necessarily like to track too much, which is unfortunate because there's a lot of money that's being lost, and you can identify where to spend your time and the results of the spending your time by tracking what you do.

The third piece ... Go ahead, I'm sorry.

Scott: Before you move on to the third piece, let me jump in. Let's talk about this tracking, because I think that's one of the most important things, and something that I struggle with in my own personal work, is "What should I or should I not be tracking? How do I actually become aware of what I'm tracking, and then make changes for the better with those numbers, or make adjustments?" What are some of the things that people need to be paying attention to?

Glenn: When we take a look at your goals, we have a rule called, "You have to convert all your goals down to daily behaviors." You can't necessarily control the outcome, but you can control your daily behaviors, Scott. What we like them to do is when they break down, for instance, "I want to bring in X amount of dollars on a monthly basis." Let's suppose they want to bring in $2 or $3 million of new assets on a monthly basis, and their average is a million, so they need to bring in three new clients. This is just simple math for the sake of discussion, but they need to bring in three new clients, yet they have a closing ratio of 50%. That means they need to have six closing meetings per month. If you look at their sales process, if they say "hello" to one person, how many of those hellos do you have to have to get to one closing meeting?

If we have a wealth manager that may need to have, literally, say six open meetings, but it's really the first time you're having a dialogue with someone, or it's a current client about moving some money over, so it's kind of, we'll call it a first appointment. If every six first appointments they have, they only get one of those people to a closing meeting, again, using some generic terms, they need six firsts to get to one closing, but they need two closing meetings to get one client. In the world of realities, they need 12 opens to get to two closes, to get to one sale, but in this ratio we're talking about, they need to multiply all that by three. They need three pieces of business per month.

Scott: They need 36.

Glenn: Right.

Scott: 36 opens, right?

Glenn: Exactly. They need 36 opens. Then, what happens is we take a look at it. We say, "Where do you get your openings from? What's your sourcing? Is it referrals, is it networking? Is it from attorneys? Is it from accountants? Is it from groups that you're part of? Is it because you're doing guest events?" We look at your sourcing wheel, and then the wealth manager should say, "Every month I expect X amount of first appointments per source." Now, that's only getting you to second base. The real work, which is where most people, their heads explode, is, "What's the behavior you have to do in that source to get one face to face?" Then they have to multiply that behavior by the number of face to faces they're allocating by that source. That's the piece that we talk about, tracking. It is so easy to track and actually put a plan together to be successful.

The hard part of the behavioral piece of the triangle is the action leg. The action is doing it consistently. We have a rule that we have is, "Don't do a lot some of the time. You should do a little bit all the time." It's consistently doing what we call pay time activities, versus the avoidance technique of doing all the no-pay time activities, finding out what's going on in the world, what's happening with the economy, what are some patterns that we have to be aware of? Those are important, but if you're not doing the behaviors and the activities that you're supposed to to fill in those first appointments, the rest of it's a moot point.

Scott: I love it. That's really good, because I feel like a lot of times when you don't have the system, or someone to kind of lead you through what you just did, that you can get overwhelmed, and you're like, "Ah," then you just want to continue to do what you're normally doing, stay in that pattern, but you have to get out of that repetition, you know, and make those changes in your behavior. That's really interesting.

Glenn: It is, and you know what's interesting, actually once people get the roadmap of success, and it always shocks me, we've heard the cliché a million times, that more people spend their time organizing a vacation than they do their financial career, right? They know when the airline is, what seats they're sitting in, when they land, where the car rental place is, what car they're taking, what they're doing on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. They've got it all mapped out. If you turn to them and say, "What do you have to do between now and tomorrow? Between now and the end of next week? What behaviors do you have to do to be successful this month?" Many of them stare at you. It's unfortunate, but they stare at you.

When we take a look at the behavior piece, Scott, the third piece of the triangle, that's attitude. Attitude is absolutely vital. Attitude is their desire, their commitment, excuse making, their self-esteem, concept of money, need for approval, fear of rejection, risk tolerance. There's a litany of things. When we look at it, if you start with the techniques, then go to behavior, then you go to attitude, but the reality is, Scott, if they don't have the right attitude, they don't do the behavior. If they don't do the behavior consistently, they won't use the techniques.

You know and I know with all the interviews you've done, knowing what to do is relatively not that difficult. Knowing how to do it, the behavior piece, is not that necessarily difficult either. It's doing it and doing it consistently, and having that passion and the desire, and not making excuses, and owning up to what you do or don't do, and not being afraid of taking a risk, or planting your feet, or asking tough questions. All those things are attitudinally based. A lot of people will come to us to learn how to, or for their goal setting, but the real world, the reality is that 90% of all issues that most wealth managers have with regards to transforming their practice to the next level is really attitudinally based.

Scott: I love that you brought this up, and I wasn't sure it was that exact word, "attitude," but I had a feeling that's what it was, and that's where we were going. I think this one's really interesting, because I hear out there some people just have certain characters, or certain motivation that you can't necessarily change, so how do you actually get them to make changes? I think this is the most difficult thing to make someone change, is their attitude, the way they're motivated, the values they have, their work ethic. Just all these things that have been ingrained in them throughout their life to this point. How do you help them make changes so that they can then focus on the behaviors, and the tactics, and the strategies?

Glenn: Absolutely great question. Unfortunately, not everyone is changeable. Not because they can't change. It's because they're willing not to change. When we talk about all the things you just mentioned, the DNA, how they think, the scripting in their head, their belief systems, for the most part, without going too deep into the psychology of it, which is my background, is that we have scripts in our head. If we have enough of a desire and a commitment to stay consistent with it, we can change an awful lot about how our head and how our noodle works. When we start looking at head trash, there are some very specific areas, or pods, or buckets if you want to call it, that are very common when it comes to head trash. One of them is what we call commitment.

I think everyone understands what commitment is, and that's, "Are you willing to do whatever it takes, legally and morally and ethically, to achieve your objectives?" I think most people, when they do their goal setting, Scott, will say, "Yeah, I do. Yeah, I am. Yes, I'm committed." That's intellectual. When it's time to actually do the activities, to fulfill it, we actually have what's called limited commitment. Limited commitment is when they start making excuses on why they're not doing their behavior. Excuse making, I believe, in farms, inside of private practices, inside of companies, is probably one of the biggest vampires that we have. When you make excuses and blame outside forces, "Listen, I can't sell because of DOL. I can't call new people because I don't have enough time over here. I can't do this because the product. I can't do this because the economy. I can't do this." If you keep blaming outside forces, you're never going to take responsibility for the outcomes. If you don't take responsibility for outcomes, you're never going to take ownership that you're the one that created it.

Excuse making is monstrous, and then you start going into some of the pieces you talked about with, "How come some people change and some people don't?" Well, I call it head trash, and inside there, we have what's called "campgrounds." A campground is really concept of money. Some wealth managers will work, and be very diligent, and have a lot of desire and commitment, and take big risks, and push the envelope until they make an income. That certain level of income, their desire and commitment to grow actually could get converted to a desire and commitment to protect what they built. They like their lifestyle, they got their two homes, they go on vacation quite a bit, they got the three European cars, they may or may not have an au pair, whatever it may be, wherever they're living. They're living a nice lifestyle. Their mindset is not, "How do I get bigger?" It's, "How do I make sure I keep making 100, 200, a million, 3 million, 5 million a year?" Their mindset more is, "How do I protect what I built?" Versus "keep growing."

That's usually one of the big stumbling blocks. You can look at their results of their income, Scott. If they've gone from, for instance, 250 is a big campground, 375 is another big campground. Right around 4 and a quarter, 500 is a big campground, 750 is a campground. Right below a million, believe it or not, is a huge campground. Heck, we help people go from a million, 7, 800,000 to 1.2 million, 1.6 million, relatively easily once they wrap their head around they're making a million bucks. It's that ability to start to climb again while they're camping. Some people won't climb. They get to a certain income level, and say, "Hey, this is pretty nice. I like this. This is good." They relax for a little bit, and they camp for two or three years. Some people will look around after they're camping for a while and say, "I can do better than this. I think I'm ready." It's not a conscious decision, but they say it subconsciously, and they get back to work.

If you look at, and those who are listening, if you look at your income level, if it's been the same for three or four years, you're camping. If you grow, and then you camp out for two or three years, just realize you're what we call a climbing camper. You climb, then you camp, then you climb. Psychologically, we all have the ability to grow. The reality is, are you ready to, and are you willing to?

Scott: I thought what you said was really interesting, because I think a lot of people, you have this feeling almost that you see. You have this extreme motivation to get to a certain place, these camping spots, right? Then, that one thing isn't motivating. For instance, I'll even use myself as an example. I have a very high economic motivator. I think it was only to a certain extent, to where I got to a certain comfortability of my income and lifestyle, then the money wasn't motivating me quite as much. Then it was like, "All right, I need to figure out what my next motivator is, so I can keep putting my head down and keep moving to that next level, that next level." How do you take someone that is stuck at one of these camping grounds and help them? Someone listening right now is at one of these spots, and they're like, "Oh, man. I've been camping for a couple of years." What do you do to help them identify what the next thing is to motivate them to keep progressing up, and keep moving to reach additional goals, or bigger goals, or bigger dreams?

Glenn: Absolutely. The crazy thing with that question is, it's different for everybody. When you're having a conversation, for some people, they hit whatever the number is. Let's just say $500,000, because it's an easy number in the middle. When they start making $500,000, it doesn't make a difference if they're independent, if they're working for a wealth management company. They'll have a conversation with me. They'll say, "Glenn, I never thought in a million years I'd make $500,000." Now, once I get them past the concept of making the money, and I start asking them questions about, "Do you believe in your heart of hearts that you're actually performing at your best? Do you believe that you're stretching yourself? Do you believe you still have the same motivation that you used to?" We call them "at leasters," and then "winners." "At leaster" is an individual, Scott, that their mindset is, "I know I can do better, but I'm okay being where I am." They actually use the words "at least." "Hey, I could bring in 4 million a month, but you know what? At least I'm doing 3." They could turn around, say, "Hey." Right?

Scott: I like that term. I've never heard that. "At leasters."

Glenn: At leasters. They know intellectually they can do better, but they justify mediocrity. I'm not saying someone making $500,000 is mediocre. Don't get me wrong. Those that are ready to climb, historically they don't ... Not all of them. They don't climb to make more money. They start to climb because they're asking themselves, "Can I be better?" For instance, I had a producer that I was coaching with yesterday. I've been coaching for a couple of years. He's doubled his business three times since we started with him. While we're going through this, he came to us and says, his name is Ken, he says, "I don't want to make more money next year, but what I want to do is ..." You have to realize what he's done. He's grown every year, Scott, and then two years ago, he goes, "You know what? I'm working too hard. I want to take all my Fridays off." I said, "That's fine. Piece of cake." We put into this behavioral plan every Friday off, but we also changed his behaviors to make sure he could do that.

Then, this year, he came back ...

Scott: He's still making the same money, but a little less time? A little more balance? [crosstalk 00:20:48].

Glenn: Exactly. That's exactly what he was looking for. He was looking for balance. Then, we took a look at, and he found out his wife had cancer, unfortunately. Knock on wood, she's better, but this was last year. He says, "Glenn, I'm taking off all of July and August, and we're going to go to the beach house, and we're going to do nothing." I said, "Absolutely. No problem, Ken." We figured behaviorally how he can make the same amount of money, plus a little bit more, instead of in 12 months, now he has to do it in 9 months. Remember, he's still taking all his Fridays off, plus July and August. Now, we've got to do it in 9 months, not 12.

This year, he came back and he's been divorced, and this is his second marriage, and he's a hell of a baseball player. He came back and said, "You know what? I want to coach my daughter's softball team." This year, in January, from the beginning of April, April, May, June, and July, the first week of July, he leaves every day at 2:00, because he has to go coach his daughter. Because of that, we just changed his mode of operation. He's still making the same amount, if not 10% or 12% more every year, but now he's literally working about 7 months a year. He has balance, and his desire was, "I don't want to be a workaholic." The desire was, "I want balance." The desire was this. Now, granted, he's making good money, but it's that ability to understand what pushes your button to get to the next level.

I have another person, he's doing fine. He changed careers. He's doing okay. He's doing six figures, but he's not making enough money where his ... Again, this doesn't mean it's everybody's goals, but this one individual, he's stuck the last four years the same income level. We started having a conversation, and I asked him, I said, "Does your wife work?" He goes, "Yes." I said, "Because she wants to, or has to?" He goes, "She has to." I said, "All right. Well, if she didn't have to, would she?" He got real quiet. His name is Scott, and I said, "Scott, from where you sit, do you believe you have the ability to earn the kind of income that you need to earn so she doesn't have to work, or it's her choice?" He got really quiet, and he almost started to cry on the telephone. He goes, "I never thought about it that way." I said, "Scott, this is life, man. When you have to look at the telephone, when you look at a prospect, when it's time to close for commitment, or close for money, or close for action, the reality is, you have to ask yourself is, are you wimping out, and because of that, your wife has to work? Are you going to plant your feet and hold true to your cause, so your wife has the ability to choose if she wants to work?"

For this individual, he's on fire now, because he has found a motivational factor that separates who he was to who he wants to be. For some people, we just need to have a conversation to figure out what that button is to push.

Scott: I love that, man. You're so right. It goes back to the whole, again, the money is a tool that only will take you and motivate you so far, and then there's got to be more underneath that you're motivated by to keep pushing you to that next level. I love that story about the guy that kept shortening his ... That you just told, about shortening his time, because he's working, if not harder than he ever has, but in a shorter amount of time. That was his goal. That leads me into my next question. Do you see, when you start getting past the money motivator, a lot of people really trying to identify where they want to ... It's more than just them? I'm having trouble trying to find the words, but giving back, or contributing, or it's someone else? The action they take will affect more people around them. Do you see a pattern, almost like the motivation has to be more than just what it is for them, but for other people?

Glenn: For some, it is. I'll take an extreme example on both sides. I have one client, and we'll just make up some names for the sake of discussion. Mickey, for instance, is very motivated by money. Don't get me wrong. Mickey makes substantial money. He's well into the seven figures every single year, and not on the low end of the seven figures. He's way up in the middle to the high end of the seven figures. Not double digits, but seven figures. When you ask Mickey, he will tell you, "No, it's about the money. At the end of the day, whoever has the most wins." That's his mindset. Mickey is 62 years old, and Mickey works hard, and he has a big team, and they all work hard.

Now, then I turn around and I'm going to go over to Brian. Brian is a different part of the world, and he has a partnership with his wife. Brian and Nancy, they were in the beginning very motivated by money. Where they live, they don't need a lot to live on to live the lifestyle they want. When he and I talked three or four years ago, as we started going through this, and he does an awful lot of retreats, he'll go to different countries, and he likes to build houses for the Habitat, and he's a religious individual. As the course of the conversation, I said to him, "Brian, let me ask you a quick question. Do you like spreading the word?" He goes, "Yes." That was part of his passions. I said, "By the way, how much is it to create a church in a different country?" He says, "What do you mean?"

I said, "Well, you go to other countries, and you help them with water, and you help them build homes, and you help them build communities and churches and et cetera. How much is it to build a church?" He told me the number. He says, "About this." I said, "All right. How much is it to sustain that church for a year?" He gave me another number. Now, his wife looks at him and goes, "Oh, wow." I said, "Brian, wouldn't it be amazing if you got committed to putting a church," or whatever, again, this is what motivated him, "a church in a different part of the country every year?" In the last five years, he's put one the first year, two the second year, three the third year, and now he's on task the last two years of putting five new establishments in these areas that he felt were, again, his passion.

Some of us, we are motivated by money until we hit a certain plateau. I don't really know very many successful wealth managers, or people in the financial field that aren't motivated by money. When they get to a certain point, if money is the only thing that motivates them, they start to camp. They lose the passion of "why I'm doing it." They don't need the money anymore. I mean, how many nice cars am I going to buy? How many nice boats, nice houses, nice vacations? After a while, you've done and did it. For those individuals that aren't motivated by money, the next piece is, well, what can your money do for you? That starts having a passion for where you can go and what you can do.

I have another individual that's in Long Island. He will go schools, and he's passionate about teaching young children about saving, about debt, about credit cards. A passion. He's insanely passionate about it. He's going to elementary schools, not junior highs or high schools. He wants to teach people how to save early on. He says to me, "Hey, half my problem is, when I deal with the people when they're 30, or 40, or 50, or 60, most of them don't understand money at all." Because of that, he's really passionate about it.

Scott: Right? It's true. They should have classes in schools, teaching people about how to ... I remember growing up, and that wasn't ... The way money was talked about, it was like, you weren't supposed to talk about it.

Glenn: It's taboo, right? It's taboo to talk about money.

Scott: It was taboo. It's crazy. It's crazy, because then you don't know how to handle it when you start making it.

Glenn: Do you realize that most people are embarrassed by having questions about their finances, about, "How much money do I need to retire on? What's the best strategies to do? How do I accumulate money versus the distribution mode?" That's all technical stuff, but most people are very embarrassed. They're intimidated. They're uncomfortable having dialogue with some wealth managers, because they're very good at what they do, but if I'm embarrassed to say, "I don't know what I'm doing," it's hard for me to look for advice. Honestly, it's more taboo today, still, to talk about money.

Scott, if your son or daughter went to your new neighbor and they just pulled into their driveway, and it's the first time you met them, and they walk over and say, "Wow, that's a really nice car. How much did you spend on it? How much are you putting down per month? Did you buy it, or do you lease it? Did you throw the tax into it? Hey, by the way, how much do you pay in taxes on your house? How much do you earn?" All of a sudden, it's just numbers, but most of us on the way home would look at our son or daughter and say, "What are you doing? That's rude." All of a sudden, we've all kind of grown up in this society that it's rude and taboo to talk about money. Yet it kind of makes everything go around, doesn't it?

Scott: It does. It does. This has been fantastic, Glenn. Thank you so much for going through all this. I have one last question for you. It relates back to that, I love that we've talked about the success triangle this whole time. I think there's so much there. If someone's listening right now and they're like, "Oh, man, I've got to work on my behavior or my tactics and my attitude," what do you suggest they do, if they wanted to sit down and try to ... Obviously working with a consultant or a coach is a great thing, and really anyone that wants to take steps to the next level should have someone that's a mentor that they could be turning to and bouncing ideas off to, and helping them with their goals and their daily activity. If they're looking at their business themselves right now and they wanted to start focusing on some of these things, what would you suggest they do if they need to at least lay out what they're doing every day, and what they need to change? How would they go about trying to figure it out themselves?

Glenn: We call it the building blocks of success. Now, there's 16 of them, and due to time, we'll just hit a couple of them. The first one is that most people need to set up long and short term goals. Their goals have to be gussied. They have to have an understanding of what they're fighting for. The second thing they should put in place is really understand what's holding them back. We call that success barriers. What's the stuff, what's the ingredients, what's the procrastination, the head trash, lack of knowledge, lack of financial inventory to help you grow in certain areas, what's holding you back? I think the next piece, Scott, is really big. Once they get their goals in place, and they understand their behaviors, is most wealth managers and individuals have not learned how to fail. They look at failure as a negative. They look at failure means you're a loser. All failure is is an outcome that is different than what you were hoping for. Failure is universal, right? It's part of the human experience. It's really important to fail so you can learn how to win.

Really, I would tell people all the time, "Only by risking failure are you really likely to accomplish anything." If you look at the really successful wealth managers, some of the biggest, monumental growth spurts that they had is right after failure. Most of us have never learned how to take failure and make it into a lesson. If you look at the best of the best, no one likes failure. It stinks. I got it, but your "at leasters," your middle of the pack people, fear failure. Because of that, they don't take risks. Your successful people don't like it either, but they're not afraid of it. Because of that, they do take bigger risks. Because of that, they do get outside their comfort zone.

Now, once you've learned how to take your risks and overcome your failure, the last piece is kind of pretty important. That's really you've got to make a full commitment to your plan. Once you put the plan in place and you overcome some of your failure issues, you've got to make a full commitment to it. You've got to put both feet in the fire, here. You can't have one foot in the icebox, and one in the oven. It ain't going to work. When you're fully committed to your plan, here's the last piece I would leave with you, is really do not allow a mediocrity standard of performance for yourself, or for anyone around you. When you start to change, and you start to get better, the people who want to get better but don't have the fortitude to get better, they're going to bring you down.

That's why I don't know if you've ever been to, for instance, in Maryland they have the blue claw crabs. You can go into some of these areas, and they have 50 gallon wooden drums. All the crabs are in there, and you pick them out and put them out, and they can have your blue claws. There's no top to those barrels. The reason is, is when one crab literally, when one crab is trying to get out of the barrel, two or three or four other ones will literally grab them and pull them back in. Right? Mediocrity loves company. When you're with people, and you're in a wealth management office and you have four or five of your peers, and you start to change, your buddies don't say, "Hey, congratulations. You're doing awesome." Your buddies are taking a subconscious evaluation of who they are and what they're not doing, and what you're doing, and subconsciously they try to bring you back. Just like if you're on a diet, and you're out with one of your buddies, and he's not dieting. He may turn to you and say, "Look. Let's split a cheesecake. A little piece ain't going to hurt you."

You've got to have absolute, a high standard or higher standard for yourself, and you can't accept mediocrity. Misery loves company, man, but we all have what it takes to be great. We just have to choose to be fully participative of it.

Scott: I love it. Glenn, thank you so much for your time today. This has been a fantastic interview. If someone wants to get in touch with you that's listening today, what's the best place for them to go? Mattson.Sandler.com?

Glenn: If they go to the website, the seventh tab in, the very top is White Papers. The White Papers will help people understand some of the goal setting we talked about today for sure. It's going to be a lot on the head trash area. Same thing if you guys go into LinkedIn. I've done a lot of White Papers. My background's psychology, so I love the stuff in between your ears, your heart, and your gut. There's some great White Papers we've done there also, and when they do go on the website they'll see that we do have some boot camps if that's something they want to participate in. Obviously, they can call us if they want. It's a relatively easy number to remember. Our prefix is 631, and then it's just Sandler, which is S-A-N-D-L-E-R, which numerically is 631-726-3537.

Andrew: Thank you, and welcome back. Scott, thank you very much for that interview. Very enlightening. Of course, thank you to Glenn Mattson for his time, and sharing all of that knowledge with us. I've got to say, one of those things that resonated with me when I was listening to this was his explanation about having a road map, having a plan. Most people have a plan, plan their vacations more than they do for their business and financial success. What you have to do is buckle down and figure out, "What are those activities on a daily, weekly, monthly, annual basis?" You have to stick with that, and rather than just kind of envision how you want your business to be a couple of years down the line, when you're more successful or whatever, what are the actions you can take now that's going to get you there?

Scott: Absolutely. What I love, when he was talking about the term "at leasters." They say, "At least I did this." He talks about, those are the people that are, it's mediocre. They're okay with mediocracy. He says that ends up being part of your culture, and if you're surrounded by people that are okay with mediocracy, that's where you're going to stay, and you start camping at those levels when you say, "Oh, I at least got to this level. I at least made $500,000," or, "$250,000," or, "$750,000 in profits or billing." I thought that was really interesting, and his tactics for getting people out of that mindset and changing their behavior to break through those different camping stages, and identifying, "Hey, have you been camping at this level for two years, or three years?" Or, "Do you camp for a little bit and then realize you need to build your business more?" I think that it's pretty phenomenal. You can tell that he's just a really smart guy, knows his stuff. He's been doing it for a long time. He knows how to get people out of their own way to bust through those camping ceilings.

Andrew: Well, thank you very much again. Of course, thank you to our guest Glenn Mattson, and thank you most of all to our wonderful listeners, out there listening to this podcast. I have been Andrew Alix.

Scott: I am Scott Sillari.

Andrew: You have been listening to The Entrepreneurial Wealth Manager Podcast. Take care.