Grow Your Business by Building Leaders
Hello! I’m Coach Jimmy and I am coming to you live from Dallas Texas. My name is Jimmy Hayes Nelson, people know me and call me Coach Jimmy because over the past nine years I have built a seven figure online business primarily by coaching and teaching other people. I always get, “Jimmy, what do you coach? Are you a fitness trainer? Are you a business trainer?” Man, I really think of myself I am a lifestyle trainer and I think the word “Life Coach” gets overused because like what are your credentials to be a life coach? I don’t know what my credentials are. I just know what my story is.
In my mid twenties, I found myself as a three time college dropout, a failed actor, living back at home with my parents, and I was 100 pounds overweight. I had failed on so many levels…oh, and I had about $60,000 of credit card debt staring me in the face and not to mention student loans from a degree I didn’t have. So that’s where I started! So to go from there to lose a 100 pounds, to keep it off for well over ten years now, to build a seven figure business, to get completely out of debt, to bring my wife home from her job, those are my credentials. So there is your “Why should I listen to this dude?” and hopefully you know, and I haven’t got it all right, and I am still not getting it right, but I have stuck around long enough that I am very proud of the things that we’ve accomplished as a business as a team as a family.
Your Follower Count Doesn’t Matter
Today we are talking about leadership and teaching and like I said for 2016, this is the year for me to teach. In this world of social media we get really caught up on followers.
How many followers do I have on Periscope?
How many people are watching me on Facebook live?
How many followers do I have on my Instagram account?
What are my follower number on Twitter or on Snapchat?
There is something about that because we think that it’s noble, that we’re like, “I need more followers because if I have more followers then I am impacting more lives. I am touching more people.”
But at the root of followers sometimes guys, and I am just as guilty as you are, it’s ego driven, right? It’s a little bit of, “Well look at how many followers I have!” And so I am really specifically talking…you know I am really talking to both my friends and cohorts and the network marketing / MLM world. Which is the world that I really have gotten my entrepreneurial feet wet. I always find it interesting that some people don’t consider that real entrepreneurship because it’s not your own products, but I wouldn’t be moving into this entrepreneurial space if it wasn’t for getting involved in a network marketing company and allowing me to learn how to leverage somebody else’s products.
Building Leaders Validates Your Business
I am also talking to people that it maybe you are wanting to be an online coach. You’re wanting to be a social media coach. You are wanting to teach other people. You’re wanting to mentor others in any way shape or form whatever that may be.
And I remember early on in my business, for whatever reason even when I wasn’t making money and I was extremely in debt, I have always been willing to invest in teachers and mentors. Sometimes it’s long distance mentors, right? You can with the magic of social media and just online presence, you can have a mentor that you have never ever met. Maybe you and I have that relationship right now where you plug in here and you are like, “You know what, I plug in to what Jimmy talks about,” because you resonate with me one way shape or form but we have never even met but you consider me a valuable teacher in your life.
I have done that with people online before whether it’s somebody like you know a Gary Vaynerchuk or a Brendon Burchard or people that I have ended up meeting, but initially…a James Wedmore, who is a good friend now, started as an online mentor and he didn’t know it because I popped on and I was looking for ways to improve my YouTube presence. Chalene Johnson was that and went from long distance mentor to ending up being a just a dear friend.
It’s Not About You
But I found not all mentors and not all teachers are the same. So really listen to me. I am going to jump right into the meat of this and really listen to me those of you building teams…so if you are in the network marketing space you are building teams of people, right? You’re building teams and those of you that are mentoring people in any way shape or form.
I have found that a trap that a lot of mentors, teachers, MLM people building businesses, anybody that labels themselves the leader of a team or the leader of a tribe, is that all is well and good as long as your ego is getting fed. This what I mean by this and I am just going to be really honest and go straight at this today.
Sometimes I have a story for you, but I am just going to get straight to the meat of this today. I find that sometimes mentors are…they’re great or team leaders are great until somebody that they’re mentoring, all of a sudden starts branching out to do their own thing or outgrows them or outproduces them or maybe takes something they learn from that mentor, puts their twist on it, and starts teaching that. Instead of being happy for that individual, instead of taking private pride in the fact that that pupil, that team mate, that team member, is branching out to create their own identity, their own brand or whatever, they are more concerned that they are no longer in the home tent.
Their Growth is What Matters
I said that because I have done this in my past. So I have a group of entrepreneurs that I coach and train and teach and we call ourselves The Crew. If you’ve followed me for a while, you probably see that really cool (I should have worn that t-shirt today) our cool emblem and early on in my business, it was really important for me no matter who I thought that everything lived inside The Crew bubble. Why?
Well, I didn’t know at the time, but I look back at it know was because well that was my bubble.
It was the bubble that I created.
I brought people in and I would teach them and I would train them and I would give them my all so I thought that they should honor me by staying in the bubble, by giving all the credit to The Crew. Which just was another way of giving Jimmy credit because I was that brand. I created that.
I’ve had mentors that have thought me online training that has nothing to do with network marketing that they’re really giving and they’re really forthright with their information, until they don’t get credit anymore. I really try very hard to give credit where credit it due, to mention my mentors like I did at the beginning of this, to let you know where I learn from people, but at the end of the day, once it’s knowledge and once it’s knowledge that it’s given to me and I have made it my own, I am not obligated to like give credit. You know a list of credits every time I come on here and talk.
Sometimes people don’t vibe well with that, but think about this. The person that thought you to allow you to create your team, to allow you to create your course to be a mentor, you learned it from somebody. I don’t care how smart and savvy of a business person you are. You didn’t create jack. So who is it for you, or me, to all of a sudden get butt hurt or get ego hurt when somebody doesn’t stay in our bubble? Then somebody doesn’t stroke our ego, somebody doesn’t give credit where credit is due every single time.
God forbid they want to go out and branch out and create their own branding or want to create their own team.
Be a Good Mentor
What we need to learn is our job is to build up leaders. If you are truly a teacher, if you are truly a mentor, if your truly in the business of building up people, then part of that is that you know part of the process is kicking the bird out of the nest, letting them fly, because think of this…if I am building up this amazing team but I never let them go do things on their own…and I get it because my initial fear the people want to branch out like make their own teams or brand their own things or do their own things is that I didn’t think they were ready. “It’s too soon they are not ready. They are not ready.” You know I was like the concerned parent so really, initially, I really felt like it was coming from a place of…like a solid good place because I was like maybe they are not ready.
You are not their parent. You are not their boss. It’s not up to you to leash them and keep them in the cage.
And there is probably somebody you are mentoring right now or is on your team that already you know they don’t have a lot of skins on the wall, they don’t have a lot of skins on the wall or a big resume and they already working on a logo and branding themselves and trying to do their own things and you are like, “Don’t worry about that part yet,” and you may be right!
That person may not be ready, but it’s not up to you to like leash them and keep them in the cage.
You’re not their parent.
You’re not their boss.
I’ve had people that have decided to branch out from my team to create their own identity or create their own branding that I knew they weren’t ready. I knew they were more concerned about cute brandings and a logo than to really getting their root system down to lead a team. But it’s not my point to say, “You need to stay in or you need to make sure all your people hear from me or you need to…” and that goes back to ego.
You have to trust that you did a good enough job teaching them. It’s just like with the child. You may have the kid that decides to move out at sixteen or seventeen like super early, and some of you may have the kids that like won’t leave at all, right? They are like, “Hey, it’s 25. You are 25 years old. Get out the house!”
But don’t hold back those people that want to get out and do it on their own.
Now, this is what I tell them. “Hey, go do your thing. I am still going to be here to check in. Go bloody your nose and come back.”
I don’t shut the door on them.
I don’t exile them.
I am not mad because they are off doing their things because if I think about it, what if somebody had done that to me?
What if somebody had wanted to mute or slow me down or hold me back because they weren’t sure I was ready?
Which, honestly guys, I wasn’t. I told you my statistics. I had no resume for success jumping into this and my first mentor, the person that brought me into this business, I didn’t stick around underneath her wing for a very long time when I decided to take this seriously.
God bless her that she didn’t say, “Well, Jimmy. I need you to still put all your people in front of me or I need to make sure that you are in our community all the time.” She was just like, “Go. Do your thing.” and you know what? In a network marketing situation, that’s benefited her financially a ton. Had she held me back, had she got butt hurt that I off doing my own thing and that everything had to run through her or her team or her branding, I would have never reached my potential and it would have cost her a lot of money.
So let’s say you are not in the network marketing situation, let’s say you are mentoring people online and you are a teacher or something. If you hold somebody back and you don’t go let them do their thing, what if you let somebody go do their thing, do their own branding and stuff, and then you have the pride of saying, “You know that person that’s just rocking it with their online course or their membership site or their Ebook is a best seller? That was a student of mine!”
You can talk about that in your situation whether or not they give you credit or not. You can say, “Hey, some of my student or the people that I mentor include…” and all of a sudden you have this rock star list of people going, “Wow! That individual build leaders. They are not just trying to gain followers, they are not just trying to clone themselves, they build unique leaders.” and that’s rare! There are so few people doing that and it truly is. It is the fear of competition. It’s allowing…it’s celebrating if somebody out performs you.
Their Success is Your Success
When so many people are just, they get passive aggressive about it. They’re kind of like, “Good for yoooou!” and they get sassy about it and that’s just not helping anybody.
You know what? If my mentorees, my pupils, my students, my whatever you want to call them, start out producing me, great! That would be fuel for me to get my ass in gear!
That better be fuel for me to go “Wow!” Perfect example. I have a rock star on my team, Coach Tulin. If you follow her, go check her YouTube channel out. She is iamTulin on Instagram, she has a killer YouTube channel. She has become a better recruiter than I am. She has bypassed me in so many ways in certain aspects of our business.
Now I could get real ego hurt because I ask her, I am like, “Tulin, what?” I have gotten to the point where I would ask her, “What are you doing? How are you doing this?” And God bless her that she gives credit back and says, “Jimmy, I am just doing exactly what you thought me.”
Facilitate, Don’t Hinder
She executes what I teach better than I do in a lot of areas, but if it was important for me for her to stay in the house and stay in my branding and give me credit and put all her people through me, that slows down the process! She wouldn’t be the top recruiter if she has to go through that and like, “Okay, you’re going to put them in your group, but I want to make sure you put them in my Facebook group too and this other Facebook…”
It’s about their success, not your ego.
Dude, everything slows down to stroke my ego and tell me I am pretty. Don’t do that. Don’t do that to your people. Don’t need that. Take the private satisfaction that that person is kicking ass and you had something to do with it. But that person is gaining income that they are changing in their life and you have something to do with it, quit being passive aggressive about other people’s success.
If you have an issue with other people having success that are teammates of yours and you are passive aggressive and you are a little…you are just, I would check what are you listening to. It goes back…we talk mental game all the time here.
Don’t be Negative
What is it in your mind that you feel that you just can’t be completely truthfully happy for that person? When we talked about this before, and you could go back and see some of my other videos where I talked about mastering the mindset and the head game, because if you can’t be happy for a teammate or somebody else or, just think about it, when you see somebody have success…so go look on my Youtube page about my Scope about Abundance.
It goes back to the same thing. If you are passive aggressive or you get pissy because a teammate or a pupil or somebody else you are working with is outperforming you, then you feel like there is a limited amount of success to go around and by them having success they took some away from you. I am sorry. You and I are just going to disagree because that’s not how I look at things. There is enough to go around.
God forbid you asked somebody that you trained, “Hey, you seem to have leverage here in something I am struggling with…” the same way I did with Tulin. “Tulin, you are recruiting like a mad woman. What are you doing? How are you saying things? What are the little details that I am missing?” and, nine times out of ten guys, that’s it.
They latched on to a detail you told them that you’ve forgotten. It’s happened to me again and again. “Oh, Jimmy, you remember when you said XYZ well the Z part seems to like…” I was like, “Oh! The Z part. I forgot that.” It’s the reason I asked you to put in the comment section some of your favorite quotes of mine because I will get to rolling and I don’t realize what I said, but you listened and activate that and that one little detail was the magic sauce. That one little thing, that one little phrasing helped you take off.
I take just as many notes from my team as I do my mentors because there are places they’re executing in places that I don’t execute well.
So are you also going to have people that try to branch out on their own and just fail miserably? Absolutely. That’s why you never close the door. That’s why you don’t bitter at your team mates or your pupils. You don’t get frustrated with them, you just check in. “Hey, how is that going? How is the team page going? How is your mentorship going? How is your mentorship site going? Is there anything I can help with? I see it’s going really well, what you feel like is…why do you feel like you have some momentum right now?”
I just feel like the minute, I just think that it should be a symbiotic relationship because if I learn from other people and that’s what made me an authority to be a mentor or to be a coach, well who’s to say that somebody I bring in isn’t somebody else that I get an opportunity to learn from? I do it all the time. My top leaders, we have a call a couple times a month and we really call it a mastermind. Yes, these are people that have come in to my business after me that are in my organization, but I take just as many notes from them because there is places that they are executing that I don’t execute as well.
But if all had to go through me and if it all had to be in my branding and my team and it all had to be Coach Jimmy clones, they would never be doing the amazing things that they are doing. In my business model, that would cost me money. That would cost money, maybe it wouldn’t cost you money in your business model, but that’s how it would go in this so why not?
Iron Sharpens Iron
Some of the top people I know in the network marketing space were people who didn’t have…so it’s kind of funny, there is a double edged sword in having a mentor or not. Some of the best people I know in this industry went off and kicked ass because their mentor or their sponsoring person or the person that brought them into business didn’t help them at all. So it was all on them and they went and did amazing things.
So you are like on one side good, for them because other people would use that as an excuse, “Oh, my mentor didn’t teach me anything. I signed up for that mastermind and…” I hear this all the time, I have seen people that I sign up for a mastermind with James Wedmore, if I sign up a mastermind with Bo Eason, and I have signed up with and I have done masterminds with Roger Lever, Chalene Johnson. People are always like, “Was it worth it? Did you get your money’s worth?”
There is nothing worse and more disrespectful than taking up a mentor’s time and then not activating what you learned.
That’s my job. I tell people from the beginning, that’s my job to get the most out of it. It’s like squeeze that rock and to get the most out of it. If I feel like I am not getting exactly what I need to from that mentor, you better believe I am going to be a squeaky wheel because I pay a lot of money and so I facilitate that relationship with that mentor.
I make sure…and how do you earn that time from a mentor? It’s not just about being a squeaky wheel. It’s not just about complaining. I gained the trust and more attention from my mentors because I activate immediately what they say.
They give me an assignment, I do it.
They give me advice, I put it into action.
There is nothing worse than if you are working with a mentor and you ask them some advice or you ask them what to do or they take time out of their day to train you to give you some advice or some knowledge or some how to and you don’t activate it. You just leave it as knowledge and you don’t activate it.
That is the biggest disrespect of the time to somebody who is willing to give their time up. If you had a millionaire sitting and willing to share with you what they have done and then you don’t activate it out of fear or out of laziness or just because “Oh, I am just going to learn one more thing…”
Push Them to Take Action
You better take off and you better go activate that shit immediately because that shows respect and you know what happens as a mentor and with my mentors? That I get that extra phone call, that I get text access, that I get extra parts of their time because they are like, “Oh, what I am sharing is not falling on deaf ears. This person is actually activating that.”
I don’t mind volunteering my time because I give up my time as long as people will activate.
For me, I will work with that person all day long. That I see that it’s activated and that it’s going out and doing the things and activating things. If I find somebody, if I am having a second and third and fourth conversation with somebody, and they still haven’t taken my advice, I have got people like that on my team. “Jimmy, should I really do this?”
Yeah, you mean what I have told you to do five times?! The yes is going to cost you a little extra money but it’s going to get your business there. I don’t have time for that and so I don’t mind giving up my time. I don’t mind volunteering my time because I will even volunteer my time as long as people will activate.
I Will ALWAYS Work With Doers
For instance, those of you in my business, people that are Beachbody Coaches, this Saturday morning I am doing a three hour training. I am giving up three hours of my time. Any team! I am not getting paid for this. I just feel like it is that important for me to empower entrepreneurs and maybe you are not a Beachbody Coach and you just want to sit and listen to three hours of somebody who has built a seven figure business online.
We are doing a live class. You can go to PlaybookLive.com, PlaybookLive.com and register. Spaces are going really fast. I think the last time I did one of these, we had a thousand people register and I am going to give up my morning because it’s important for me to pay it forward. So many people have given me extra time that I appreciate that. It’s a way for me to give back as well. So you can go to PlaybookLive.com and sign up, we can spend Saturday morning together, it’s going to be done just like a live class, don’t ask me if it’s going to be recorded because it’s not.
It’s going to be live and we are going to treat it like a classroom style and you are going to be there and it’s going to be a Q & A and I am going to share with you the exact things that I had done over the past nine years that help me build a six and then a seven figure business that got us out of $60,000 in debt. I am just going to share. I’ll be a open book because it’s important for me to say, “Hey, if I am going to label myself a trainer, a mentor, a teacher, then I am not going to talk in generalities. I am going to show you exactly what I did.”
Special Leadership Master Class
And I really truly believe even if you are not in my business, that you could sit and learn from this and apply it to whatever you are trying to build online right now. If you are trying to sell that ebook, build a course, if you are an artist trying to like write that play or screen play or that song or you’re in network marketing, these things apply regardless, because I have learned from people outside of my business space and I have found ways to apply them as well.
So really take a long hard look and ask yourself, “Am I just trying to gain followers or am I truly building leaders? In building leaders, am I okay for the time I don’t get credit? And am I okay for times that they are not going to tag me…if I see them quote something and I am like ‘I thought them that!’ and they don’t tag me or they don’t give me credit, am I okay with that?”
Because obviously something I did stuck. I am watching them build an empire. I am watching them change their lives. I am watching something awesome happen. Don’t slow down those people, those go getters. There is not a bunch of them. There is going to be a lot of people that stay inside your bubble and stay inside your team and in your branding and everything else and that’s fine. Just don’t slow down those that all of a sudden you are like, “Wow, I have got a rock star on my hands.”
You don’t need, “Oh, I need a rock star to put a star on my badge.” It’s like a General where you have stats here. Let them go. Let them go and do their thing and it’s going to come back and reward you a whole lot as well.
So thank you guys for hanging out with me. I am so excited that, these mornings, we get to hang out and chit chat.
For my friends on Facebook, if this is something that has been valuable, do me a favor and share this. You can share this video, share it to your team, page tag people on it, make sure it gets around today because I really feel like this is an important message.
My friends on Periscope I am going to hang out with you for just a little bit longer so I am TheCoachJimmy on Periscope, Facebook, People or vice versa blah blah blah. So thank you guys for hanging out. Go build leaders today. Stop just trying to gain followers and amazing things will happen. I am Coach Jimmy and we will talk real soon.