314 Mastermind at Sea: Sales and Success Secrets from Four Business Builders Who Sold Big

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Art of Sales with Art Sobczak
Episode: 314 Mastermind at Sea: Sales and Success Secrets from Four Business Builders Who Sold Big
Release Date: May 29, 2025

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Introduction: Setting Sail for Success

In a special departure from his usual solo episodes, Art Sobczak hosts episode 314 of The Art of Sales aboard the luxurious Azamara Quest cruise ship. Joined by a select group of eight couples from the Fire Rock Country Club in Fountain Hills, Arizona, Art delves into the sales and success strategies of four remarkable business leaders: Tim Murphy, Tim Barone, Louis Vassil, and Darren Wellborn. This episode, titled "Mastermind at Sea," explores authentic, relationship-driven sales methodologies that transcend traditional techniques.

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Tim Murphy: Mastering the Pool Sales Process
Timestamp: [00:03] – [09:44]

Tim Murphy, founder of Presidential Pools, shares his journey from building the first pool in 1984 to selling over 35,000 pools in the Phoenix area. His company became the largest pool builder in the U.S., renowned for its innovative sales approach.

• Sales Process and Training:
  "We built a process," Tim emphasizes ([03:58]). Presidential Pools focused on hiring friendly, outgoing people, regardless of prior experience, and trained them extensively in product knowledge and relationship-building skills.

• Customer-Centric Approach:
  Tim highlights the importance of listening to customers, particularly women who often make the final purchasing decisions. "We were not really a hard sales type company. We were more of a relationship type business," he explains ([05:33]).

• Innovative Showroom Experience:
  The company’s "pool park" allowed homeowners to visualize and interact with pool designs, enhancing the buying experience. Tim adds, "We would put a picture of their family dog in the pool design... it was very cool" ([07:56]).

• Referral-Based Growth:
  While repeat business was limited due to the nature of pool installations, Presidential Pools thrived on referrals. Tim states, "Our most important was the referral business" ([08:04]).

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Tim Barone: Scaling a B2B Engineering Powerhouse
Timestamp: [09:44] – [17:28]

Tim Barone recounts his ascent from CFO roles in major corporations to founding his own engineering firm, which grew from $5 million to $350 million in revenue.

• Relationship-Driven Sales:
  "People buy from business people," Tim asserts ([12:08]). His strategy hinged on building strong, personal relationships with mobility equipment dealers, fostering trust and loyalty.

• Exceptional Support and Warranty:
  Offering a comprehensive 3-year warranty, Tim ensured customer satisfaction and reliability, stating, "There's got to be a way to say yes" ([13:09]).

• Culture and Leadership:
  Tim’s emphasis on employee and dealer relationships was pivotal. "I put the needs and the well-being of your employees... ahead of your own" ([16:54]).

• Handling Business Crisis:
  Tim shares his experience of returning to the company during downturns to restore culture and relationships, highlighting the critical role of leadership in business resilience ([15:02]).

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Louis Vassil: Creating Compelling Guest Experiences in the Restaurant Industry
Timestamp: [17:28] – [32:20]

Louis Vassil discusses his journey from the family restaurant business to founding Wildflower Bread Company, which expanded to 16 locations before being sold in 2024.

• Guest-Centric Philosophy:
  "Sales actually starts with this incredibly compelling experience that you offer to a guest," Louis explains ([20:28]). Transitioning from "customers" to "guests" underscored their commitment to a welcoming environment.

• Turning Fans into Followers:
  Louis emphasizes the power of transforming satisfied guests into loyal followers who advocate for the brand: "The goal... is to have their fans turn into followers" ([22:20]).

• Employee Culture – Breadheads:
  Wildflower’s employees, affectionately called "Breadheads," were integral to the brand's success. "We called our employees Breadheads... to let them know that they're a part of" ([23:10]).

• Training and Retention:
  Implementing a "passport" training program, Louis ensured employees embodied the company’s purpose and values, resulting in significantly lower turnover rates ([24:26]).

• Handling Customer Mistakes:
  Louis highlights the importance of empowering employees to rectify mistakes: "If you don't like something, we're going to offer to replace that meal... do whatever it takes and we trusted our Breadheads to do whatever it takes" ([27:54]).

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Darren Wellborn: Revolutionizing Sales in the Engineering Sector
Timestamp: [32:20] – [40:35]

Darren Wellborn shares his experience in transforming a traditional engineering firm into a dynamic, client-focused enterprise, culminating in his exit at age 44 after expanding to over 500 employees across six states.

• Employee-First Approach:
  "I'm putting my employees first, that they felt a kinship to the customer," Darren states ([34:46]). This philosophy ensured a motivated workforce dedicated to exceptional client service.

• Efficiency and Innovation:
  Darren discusses streamlining processes by adopting technologies like AutoCAD early on, enabling faster project completions and shifting from hourly billing to lump-sum pricing ([34:47]).

• Culture and Consistency:
  Drawing inspiration from Jim Collins, Darren established core values and a unified company culture across all offices: "Every office... looked the same, colors were the same, people acted the same" ([38:18]).

• Client Relationships:
  Emphasizing strong client relationships, Darren shared, "We treat it like we care about the end product... making you money" ([40:13]).

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Common Themes and Insights

Across their diverse industries, the four business leaders converge on several key principles that drive their sales and business success:

1. Relationship Over Transaction:
   Building and nurturing personal relationships with customers and clients is paramount. Whether selling pools, engineering services, or restaurant experiences, trust and rapport lead to loyalty and referrals.

2. Employee-Centric Culture:
   Treating employees with respect, providing them with comprehensive training, and fostering a sense of ownership contribute to lower turnover rates and better customer service.

3. Compelling Customer Experiences:
   Creating memorable and personalized experiences encourages customers to become brand advocates, driving organic growth through word-of-mouth.

4. Adaptability and Innovation:
   Embracing new technologies and innovative processes enhances efficiency and keeps businesses ahead of the competition.

5. Leadership and Culture:
   Strong, empathetic leadership that prioritizes company culture ensures resilience during challenging times and sustains long-term success.

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Conclusion: The Power of Mindset

As the episode wraps up, Art Sobczak teases the continuation of this insightful discussion in the next episode, where the focus will shift to the mindset and thinking patterns that distinguish the top 2% of achievers. Listeners can expect to gain valuable perspectives on personal and professional identity traits, beliefs, and habits that fuel extraordinary success.

Notable Quotes:

• Tim Murphy: "We built a process." ([03:58])
• Tim Barone: "People buy from business people." ([12:08])
• Louis Vassil: "Sales actually starts with this incredibly compelling experience that you offer to a guest." ([20:28])
• Darren Wellborn: "I'm putting my employees first, that they felt a kinship to the customer." ([34:46])

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Stay Tuned:
Don't miss the next episode of The Art of Sales as Art Sobczak and his guest speakers delve deeper into the mindset strategies that propel businesses and individuals to the pinnacle of success.

Transcript

[Art Subcheck]

You are listening to the Art of Sales. Everyone sells every day and this is your source for conversational real world sales and prospecting methods that you are comfortable using and that get results you'll help people buy instead of pushing them into being sold. Here's your host, Art Subcheck. Jim Rohn said that you're the sum of the five people you hang around with the most. I agree with that for most people, but I feel like I'm outlier since I think very abundantly and I'm blessed to have way more than five in my life who are not only extraordinarily successful in what they do or have done, but who are also incredible humans. It's so amazing to be with people who inspire you, you can learn from and overall make you a better person. On today's show, I'm doing something I've never done in my over 310 episodes over 5 years. As you probably know, I rarely have guests, but today I have amazing ones. So let me give you the backstory of the how and why. We are recording today on the Azamara Quest cruise ship somewhere between France and Spain as part of Perry Golf Tours. And both those companies are not paying me to mention their names, but I'm open to it. We put together a group of eight couples from our country club Fire Rock in Fountain Hills, Arizona. All the people, including our wives, fall into amazing, human and fun category and we all usually hang out because of golf and other social activities. Well, it occurred to me what an incredible mastermind group I was with and the schedule worked out where we have a lot of captive time here at sea today on the ship. And I want you to take advantage of the tremendous opportunity to tap into the enviable success that my friends have achieved so others can benefit. And they very graciously agreed with some bribes for drinks for the duration of the cruise. Oh wait a minute, those are included, aren't they? So with me today we have these guys, all of whom have either started companies or took an existing smaller one and built them into huge, extraordinarily successful leaders in their field, as you will hear, and in several cases they were able to sell and exit. We have a wide variety of both business to business and business to consumer and they have agreed to share with us knowledge, wisdom, experiences, mistakes to avoid and advice that can help you in your business and your life. So here's a format. First, since this is a sales show, you'll hear from each guy individually. We're going to focus on sales. Not like we normally do, or we focus on the technique and process. But we'll probably be talking more bigger picture. Then we'll get into what is really most important to business and life success. And that is our thinking. So first, Tim Murphy started cleaning pools right out of high school. In 1984, one of his family friends who was building a new house asked him if Tim could build him a pool. And Tim said yes, despite not ever having built a pool or knowing how he figured it out. And that was the first of over 35,000 pools that his company, presidential pools in the Phoenix area built over the next 35 years. They were the largest pool builder in the US at one point, after selling presidential pools the first time in 2006, he was able to buy it back after the economy had tanked. Many of you remember that he turned it around to again being wildly successful. And he again sold the company in 2020. Timoth, tell me, what does it take to sell 35,000 pools from a sales perspective?

[Tim Murphy]

Well, at one time, we had. We had 40 salespeople, and we were doing about over 2,000 pools per year. And just having really good sales staff knowledgeable in the business. And that's a process. We built a process.

[Art Subcheck]

What does it take to be a good pool salesperson? What is the pool sales process? I know because I went through it myself, but for people never built a pool. Explain that to us.

[Tim Murphy]

Yeah. So basically, we would sell pools about 80% of our business to residential clientele. And about 20% of our pools were sold to commercial pools, such as schools and hotel industry. So our core business was we basically had homeowners that would come in, and we had a showroom with seven display pools actually in the ground. We call it our pool park. And so I built this pool park because I wanted to mimic backyard vignettes. And it was almost like a little Disneyland area where homeowners could walk in and see and touch and feel the product and pools what they look like and visualize what they could have in their backyard. And it was very important for our salespeople to be really educated in the business. And we always hired and taught. We never, like, really brought people in from other companies. We trained them ourselves.

[Art Subcheck]

What were some of the core principles and philosophies of presidential pools that set you apart from your competitors?

[Tim Murphy]

I feel that what we did, a key thing we did was we brought our salespeople in.

[Art Subcheck]

We brought.

[Tim Murphy]

We trained them on how we wanted them to sell. Important thing for our sales staff was really to sit back and listen mainly it was the women's decision on a pool. And so it was very important to listen to what they wanted, what their needs were. Everybody has different needs on a pool. So we really trained them to sit back and listen. And we were not really a hard sales type company. We were more of a relationship type business. We wanted the sales staff, that people ourselves people to really listen and learn about their needs, what they wanted and then come up with a design and very creative designing.

[Art Subcheck]

So it's interesting that. And you started pre Internet or when the Internet was just starting, right?

[Tim Murphy]

Yeah, actually I started. We started building in 1991, started presidential pools. And it was actually during the era of did it on paper. We didn't have computer systems like we have today. So yeah, we've morphed into all different. From the beginning of when we started selling pools, it was all really hand sketch and colored drawings, rendering drawings that we call them postcards. We would color them and do it all. But now today everything's done fully CAD and we do actually 3D renderings. We've even gone to the Google glasses where they can do flyovers and see the pool from daylight to nighttime lighting. And it's pretty intense of what's. How it's changed.

[Art Subcheck]

So you were actually ahead of the game. One thing that we teach in our training, of course, and all good sales training does is put people in the picture of already owning and using the product or service. And you guys were actually doing that with the Disneyland of pools that you had there. And it's interesting you mentioned that you said that women were normally making decisions. And there's so many stories where sales people will ignore the female or the wife or the other spouse and lose the deal because they're the true decision maker.

[Tim Murphy]

Yeah, we. Something else too is interesting is our tell our salespeople that when they're doing the CAD drawings and we would tell them to make sure they know take a picture of their family dog. And we would put their family dog in the picture and the individual of the pool design. So we'd know how many kids they had. We'd put that we could put people in the pool with their style of dog. It was very cool.

[Art Subcheck]

So being around as long as you did and doing as many pools as you did, I would assume that you have or had a lot of repeat business.

[Tim Murphy]

We did. But in general, pools are one deal, one hit. So people live in their homes average of about seven years in Phoenix. And so a lot of times they'll go buy another house with another pool. Or existing pool. So we really. The repeat business was not huge, but what was the most important was the referral business. And so we would hit a neighborhood, do a pool in a neighborhood, and we wanted every neighbor next door. So we wanted to be the fastest, we wanted to build the pool the absolute quickest, fastest and most. We want to build a really nice pool. So our competitors were companies that were tied in with the home builders, which we were not. So we dealt with advertising, marketing, and we brought the homeowner to us. And so we didn't have to pay a lot of referral fees or kickbacks to the home builders. And so we really focused on the media and referrals and we used to give, we gave referral money back to the homeowner for referring another customer. And it was that that account became a pretty significant amount of money that we were giving out annually as an expense. But yeah, it was, that's what we did. You refer somebody and when you brought.

[Art Subcheck]

On a new salesperson, what was one thing that was non negotiable that you wanted to make sure that they knew and that they had to practice all the time.

[Tim Murphy]

We honestly, it was not their experience. We've hired so many of our best salespeople or had zero experience in pools in general, but we just wanted really friendly people, outgoing people that were just really interested in learning and just their social skills. That's what we are focused on.

[Art Subcheck]

You've got a great story to tell. We're going to hear more from Tim when we get to the section on thinking and mindset. We have another. Tim Barone started out in corporate life out of grad school as a CFO for the largest veal. That's V E A L as in what you eat slaughterhouses in the country. From there he took a position at Mobil Oil where he got promoted and moved 11 times. He then was recruited to the Dial Corporation in Phoenix as a division CFO. After 20 years of making money for other people, Tim got the entrepreneurial itch and took an opportunity with a small Italian coffee coffee manufacturer where he was led to believe he would receive equity in the company, which didn't happen. Still having the itch to make a difference, he answered a small ad in the Arizona Republic newspaper for a CFO of a company manufacturing handicapped vans. He bid on himself and agreed to work for 75% less than what he was earning with the promise that within a year he would become a partner in the company. They did and he was promoted to COO. And over a period of 25 years, he took the company from 5 million in revenue to over 350 million when he retired in 2024. Tim, welcome.

[Tim Barone]

Thanks Hart. Appreciate it. How are you doing today?

[Art Subcheck]

Oh, doing fantastic. We've been for again a little backstory here. We've been on this cruise, what, 10 days now and there's just been a lot of reading. We've all been in the library quite a bit. No, actually we've been golfing and parting our eyes out. But back to business here. So Tim worked with obviously. Obviously. Actually it was a B2B company that was selling to consumers. When I say B2B, your sales staff were primarily the dealers that you were selling to. Explain, explain that process.

[Tim Barone]

So we had nine regional sales managers and each one of them was responsible for one of our 225 dealers. We sold through mobility equipment dealers throughout the United States, Canada and Western Europe. And so those, the company sales managers were responsible for those mobility equipment dealers. So we sold directly to the mobility equipment dealer, as you said, business to business and then supported the sale through the end consumer.

[Art Subcheck]

Now were you exclusive with those dealers?

[Tim Barone]

We weren't there essentially three manufacturers who represent about 95% of our industry sales. And so invariably we produced a slightly different products than our competitor did. We would take brand new Dodge, Chrysler, Honda, Toyota minivans and then convert them to be wheelchair accessible. So when we first started we did Ford and Chrysler, our competitors did Chrysler and Toyota. So we had a differentiated product. So we were really selling on the product attributes. Again most of the sales were made based on the end consumers desire to own a type of vehicle. So it was I want a Honda. And VMI was the only company that produced Hondas. So that mobility equipment dealer would carry our product to support that customer who wanted that vehicle. They would also carry a competitor's product who then would like prefer a Toyota minivan for sure. And so we would make those wheelchair access.

[Art Subcheck]

So you took the company from 5 million to 350 million. Quite a jump. How did you do that?

[Tim Barone]

You know, I believe very strongly that it's a business to business, which is people buy from business people. Right. So it was clearly a relationship building enterprise. So as a creation of a relationship that I had from the CEO, from the CEO to the CFO position with those individual dealers, a lot of those guys and women became my friends. We had to take them on annual trips to get and reinforce that relationship. And then again also is making sure that when they hit a problem, which invariably we did, we are taking a Brand new vehicle, taking it completely apart and then rebuilding it. So we would, we would be doing a lot of damage to that vehicle, then rebuilding it. So invariably we'd have problems. And we were giving Those customers a 3 year, 36,000 mile warranty similar to what the car dealer is offering. So supporting those sales, making sure that when they had a customer issue, we were right there. And not only from the sales person perspective, we had customer representatives that were responsible for those specific dealers, again, supported them. Whatever their issue was, it was always, there's got to be a way to say yes. And so that's hard to do in business sometimes. And my one rule in business was there's only one person in the company who could fire one of our dealers and that was me. It's again, this relationship was so important.

[Art Subcheck]

So in previous conversations you had mentioned to me that there were a couple times where you had left and then the company didn't do as well and you had to come back in and fix some things, explain what went wrong and then what you did to do the turnarounds.

[Tim Barone]

I've always joked that I failed retirement three times. I think that the, it was a very, very unique position that I had. I think I told you before, I was a CFO for the first 22 of the 25 years that I was associated with the company. And people would always joke with me that you're the only CFO that I've ever met that had a personality. So again, I had really strong relationships with our dealers. If they came to town a lot of times they'd stay in my home when I went to their cities. I would always, our sales guys would always say, you need to come to my territory. Because every time you come to my territory, the sales increases because it was the relationship that I had with those dealers. So when I left there was a tremendous void created and that I had a partner who didn't have those same kind of relationships with our dealers. So again, sales would fall down and they asked me to come back on an interim basis to try to fill that void. And the last time I was chairman of the board, my ex partner had quit and they had asked me to come back. So it was my wife. I remember sitting at the breakfast table one morning at 5 o' clock in the morning when our partners called and said, we'd like you to come back as CEO. The answer was, I don't want to work anymore, I want to play golf, I want to hang out with my buddies. But it was important for us to go back we had 350 employees and that culture that we had developed within the organization was lacking. So again, coming back into the organization to create that culture, to support that dealer network, to support those end user customers was the thing that I did very well. And that was missing during those times when I wasn't there.

[Art Subcheck]

That's pretty amazing because you put the needs and the well being of your employees and in a sense also your dealers ahead of your own.

[Tim Barone]

Yeah, it's interesting, as you said, I had a pretty good large company experience and was treated well and made a lot of money, was promoted several times, wanted to be an entrepreneur like you said. And those employees made me the ability to be able to afford hanging with you derelicts as well as go on these kind of trips. And my wife said that these people have made us very successful financially and we owed it to them to again return that favor and go back and pick up the company and put it back to where it was before.

[Art Subcheck]

By the way, as an aside, when Tim said, you derelict, he wasn't referring to you in the audience, he was talking to the people here at the table. So what's one thing that you always tried to ingrain in your sales? I think you call them territory managers. Again, that was non negotiable in their dealings with prospects and customers.

[Tim Barone]

Our sales were very personal, for one thing, but also incredibly technical because again, we were taking an automobile and we were converted to be wheelchair accessible, which required a lot of augmentation to the vehicle. So again, technical knowledge was incredibly important and Tim Murphy had indicated one of the responsibilities. We made sure that when we hired people, we put them through vigorous training so that they could support the end user, answer the questions that the end user would have, as well as the dealer to make sure they knew exactly what the vehicle did, what it didn't do, and how it performed. And so that was again, the technical knowledge made against the the complete loop of the sale transparent to the end user.

[Art Subcheck]

So relationship was important, but we still had to have the product and the technical knowledge.

[Tim Barone]

Yes, sir.

[Art Subcheck]

Okay, thank you. Louis Vassil started working at his family's restaurant in East Orange, New Jersey at the age of five. Weren't there any child labor laws? Carrying wooden milk crates and sorting coins at the end of the night. He then worked there through high school as a dishwasher. He worked his way up in the restaurant business, performing pretty much every job, and later joined Auban Pon in a managerial role and rose to the level of VP in almost every department. But he Always wanted to run his own show, and he took an opportunity to become the CEO of the Coffee Plantation in Phoenix, Arizona. In his words. He said the courtship was great, but the marriage was horrible. So he decided to pursue his ultimate dream of applying everything he had learned by opening his own restaurant. He and his wife Tracy knew there was a need and a possible niche for exceptional bread and great food with white tablecloth service, yet with fast casual style, all at affordable pricing. So they started testing recipes in their home kitchen and ultimately opened their first wildflower bread company in Scottsdale, Arizona. Fast forward over 28 years. They built their concept into 16 locations and a bread manufacturing facility. Tracy and Louis sold Wildflower in September of 2024. And really, most people, I guess their thinking around sales and restaurants amounts to going through McDonald's drive thru and having the person say, would you like fries with that? Explain to us your philosophy of sales in the restaurant business.

[Louis Vassil]

First, thanks, Art, for having me. So for me, really, sales actually starts with this incredibly compelling experience that you offer to a guest. At one point in the Wildflower journey, we called our guest customers. And in a rebranding session back in 2017, somebody pointed out to me, an outside consultant, that a customer was a very transactional word and a guest was a much more inviting word. And we changed all of our material from customer to guest. And really, from a sales perspective, the best form, and you heard it from Tim in the beginning, and really the. And Tim in the handicapped band business is your guests or your referrals. And at the Wildflower, we believe that people start out as fans, and fans can be fickle, right? If your team's winning, you're a passionate fan. But if the team loses all of a sudden, then maybe you're not as passionate about it. The goal, I think, for quite frankly, every business, is to have their fans turn into followers. Because when you think about the word follower, they're devoted, they follow you through thick and thin, and that follower then becomes your best form of advertising. So at the Wildflower, our sales technique was to ensure that every guest that came in was a follower and that they would go tell a friend or tell a family member about a great experience that they had. And ultimately that would lead to repeat business and new guest acquisition. Quite frankly, the least expensive way to advertise is by word of mouth. And that's what I think you heard from the first two people on this panel. And I still to this day attest that the best form of advertising in the restaurant business is that guest having this Compelling experience where they want to tell somebody, wow, I just had a great experience at the Wildflower or at any other restaurant that they visited. And then that promotes somebody else that may not have been, may have forgotten. Because the restaurant business, there's lots of choices. And unless you're really committed to eating a certain sort of style of food or a brand, you may stop at anything that's convenient for that day versus actually making the choice to go to your favorite brand because of a compelling experience.

[Art Subcheck]

What are some little things that your people would do? And by the way, I know your people were not called servers or associates. You had a name for them. Yep.

[Louis Vassil]

So we called our employees Breadheads. And again, that is just a more personalized way and endearing way, frankly, to let them know that they're a part of. They're an integral part of the brand's success. For, again, each of us here, nobody can do all the jobs in any one company. Maybe you can, but then you're not going to grow and you're not going to, in my mind, be successful. So you're really relying on a bunch of people that share in this comment. At the Wildflower, it was a purpose guided by some values. And we taught this communication tool set called Safe Space so that people would understand how to communicate, how to listen, and really how to be outstanding breadheads. And then ultimately for us, our goal was to really hopefully have these, because we were employing generally young people. Right. Starting out in their career. Some would make a career out of the hospitality business, but others might find their passion in something else. And from my perspective, it was just fine as long as we gave them some lifelong tools that they could use to really be successful and to be kind contributing members of society.

[Art Subcheck]

Explain some of the things in the training process or program that you had mentioned.

[Louis Vassil]

All right. For us, there's this. We call it a passport. So you talked about how we've been traveling, so we're abroad, and everybody needed a passport. And every time you go to a new country, you're going to get a stamp in that passport. But the Wildflower, there were three sections to really creating this motivated workforce. First was the Wildflower Purpose. All of this was created by the Breadheads a long time ago. And so at the Wildflower, our breadheads decided that the Wildflower believes that we change people's lives, create traditions, and build and feed the soul through the community with passion every time, every day. And then we're guided by these 11 values. Things like we treat each other like family, we're accountable for our choices, commitments and actions. We believe in continuous education to improve and those purpose 11 values. And then this communication tool set every redhead, whether you are the hired As a the CFO or your first job as a 16 year old, you had five weeks to complete that personal journey. And the things that really helped was that it was on your own pace and it got you to talk to other redheads or quite frankly other family members outside of the company about hey, what do you think about this and how do you feel about that? And then ultimately you got stamped in this passport as you completed each journey and at the end of five weeks, if you chose not to complete that, then, you know, we had a funny way of saying, hey, your vacation's over and we're going to send you home. But the reality is that you no longer were able to work at the Wildflower. And we've been doing that for about 15 years now. And there have been less than 10 extensions of that five week period in that time frame. And ultimately what's really interesting about that is that leads to less turnover. So the restaurant industry is notorious for turnover. Okay. Typically you might see in a restaurant company numbers over 100 or 200%. So staff's turning over once or twice a year. At the Wildflower last year on an hourly basis we were just below 70%. And this year the goal would be to be at 50% turnover, which still may sound high in a traditional sort of business, to business or white collar environment. But in a blue collar business those numbers are really outstanding.

[Art Subcheck]

Actually that's incredible when you think about, especially at the age level. So it sounds like you were hiring, right. But you were treating them well to keep them. And I would bet that a lot of your employees came as referrals from existing employees.

[Louis Vassil]

Yeah, 100%. So again, just like the whole, just like the guest referral, it's always great to have other breadheads that buy into the system, refer friends, because they're not going to refer somebody that they know won't fit in. The company culture doesn't have the work ethic, doesn't. It's generally not something that's going to happen because they don't want to bring somebody into a company that they care about that's not going to fit in or not going to be successful.

[Art Subcheck]

So as my listeners know, I'm fascinated by the food business and I always ask this question of anybody who owns or has owned a restaurant. What are some things that just make you crazy when you're at a restaurant and that it's actually killing their business.

[Louis Vassil]

Well, that we don't have enough time on that. No, I guess the, the really, I think the two or three things for me is a restaurant where simply you just can tell that the people don't care whether they're the servers or the staff. There's just a, either an aura or an attitude that's put off that you're bothering them today versus really the opposite of what hospitality is, which we're supposed to be welcoming. If you don't like to smile and you don't like to serve people and you don't like to say thank you and have a nice day, you're in the wrong business. And so that's probably my number one pet peeve. The second thing I guess would be when you know the food just isn't as advertised. Okay. It is incredibly challenging to be consistent in the restaurant business. You're depending on not only you're in the Wildflowers case, Breadhead, but you're depending on your outside vendors. People have to deliver quality food, right? The tomato has to be ripe or the lettuce has to be fresh in order to deliver a consistent food experience. And if it's not, you have to have control points in place. So too often a time go to a restaurant, have a great meal and the second time you go back, it's just not the same meal. And that can be really frustrating because of the consistency issue. And then of course, the last thing in my mind is that the general management of the restaurant misses opportunities to make a guest happy. At the Wildflower, you can just look at us and tell us that you don't like something and we're going to fall over you, right? We're going to offer to replace that meal, we're going to hopefully give you your money back and we might even give you a gift card to come back again. Okay. There are so many, particularly quite frankly in full service restaurants where, I don't know, you'll buy a premium piece of meat and it's just not cooked properly and they will offer you a pre dessert. And that piece of meat might have cost, I don't know, 180, 200, $250. And yet they're simply unable to move, as I like to say, out of their own way and just comp that especially for a guest that comes on a frequent basis. Now again, if you're a restaurant company and you're always comping your food, then you have an execution problem. That's not what we're talking about but when there are mistakes because they're going to happen, people are making this food okay and stuff goes wrong. But it's amazing to me how many restaurant companies do not either empower their managers or their employees to actually what I would say, do the right thing for the customer. Last thing I would say is that the Wildflower we just said do whatever it takes and we trusted our breadheads to do whatever it takes.

[Art Subcheck]

So if you're in the Phoenix area and you've eaten at Wildflower, you've experienced that. If you haven't, or coming to the Phenix area, make sure that you do. Actually, I just want to piggyback on that. Real early in my career I was speaking at a program and right before me was a guy from Domino's Pizza and he said one thing we train everybody who answers the phone is that they're just not calling to order a $9 pizza that's a 9 to $800 customer because over their lifetime they're likely going to buy $9,800 worth of worth of pizzas. So like you said, it's a huge mistake not to make it right because that's just not a one time customer.

[Louis Vassil]

Yeah. And an interesting statistic that was published years ago in what is considered the magazine of the restaurant industry called Nation's Restaurant News. Fascinating that you can take care of a guest and never make a mistake over your whole lifetime of that guest. And yet if you recover from a guest mistake, that guest is actually more loyal than the guest that you've never made a mistake on for their entire time of that brand's existence. So really, the opportunity to really recover and do whatever it takes and make it right for a guest is so powerful. And I think that your audience can relate to the fact that if they've had an experience, doesn't matter whether it's a restaurant brand or any other retail brand, if somebody does something and turns something around, especially if it seems over the top, they're going to tell that story time and time again. And that form of advertising is just incredible.

[Tim Barone]

All right, can I interject for a second something that piggyback on what the Louis said? And I said it in my program. It's culture. But you talk about a sales process and we talk about salespeople. Salesperson doesn't control the whole sales process even close. And we talked about it in my company. When I got there, we had 125% annual turnover. We reduced it to 2%.

[Art Subcheck]

How?

[Tim Barone]

By creating a culture where the employees felt like they had ownership, that they felt a kinship to the customer and did their job and did it with a smile on their face. And so that culture becomes incredibly important to the sales process. You could, in my opinion, you could have the best salesperson in the world. If they don't have people behind them that are taking care of the customer, they're going to fail.

[Art Subcheck]

So true. Part of the tagline of this show is that everybody sells every day. And even if people don't consider themselves a salesperson, everybody is a salesperson. Also, you have internal sales, what you're talking about. And that is building the culture, taking care of your people, selling people on doing what they're supposed to do and do it well. And selling, according to my definition, is helping people buy, helping people make a decision or do things that really is going to be in their best interest and something that you want them to do as well. So next up, Darren Wellborn comes from a family of civil engineers. He went to work for a large engineering firm right out of college at the age of 27, started his own engineering firm along with a partner doing private land development. Fast forward. He grew it to over 500 people in six states and sold it at the young age of 44. And a little bit more of a backstory here. Our entire group had the opportunity to tour the ship, which was fascinating, and we saw the bridge, and then we went down to the engineering room. And the engineer, the head engineer, was hilarious. He had tremendous personality. So I made the comment not to him, but to others in our group that now there are two engineers on our ship that we know of that have personality. Couldn't Igar is one of them. If you look at the stereotype of engineers, no insult to engineers out there. Typically, they're not like this guy. So, Darren, tell us. Show us about the sales process in an engineering firm. Where is their sales?

[Tim Murphy]

I will.

[Tim Barone]

I'll tell you.

[Darren Wellborn]

I was in the service business, but the service business is different than these guys in that we sold our time by the hour in the engineering business, similar to a law firm or an accounting firm, but we sold hours. And I got into the business to try to change that. And most people think they're hiring a civil engineer. First of all, my grandmother thought I drove a train. I didn't drive a train. Civil engineers do everything. So roads, sewer systems, storm systems, grading plans. They build everything you see out there. So our tagline was everything but the building. The difference in our business. I told my clients, I'm not putting them first. I'M putting my employees first because I had highly educated, very well paid engineers that I wanted to keep forever. And the clients I would cycle through. So it was a little bit different in that I would say, my employees are more important than you are. Sorry, that's the way it is. And guys would come to me and they say, we're spending millions a year on you. Why are you not treating us with bold gloves? I go, because you treat my employees like shit. Sorry about that. You treat my employees poorly, and you're gone as a client if you cost me more than you make me, for sure. So I would fire clients based on how they treated my employees, and I grew based on that. So when I got into the business at about the same time Tim Murphy did, I started my firm in 1999. 90. And just two guys, one client. And when we started, we were selling by the hour. But we also started in the computer age, when the computer age just started in engineering, as he mentioned the AutoCAD world. I went from an engineer designing something would hand it to a designer, he'd finish the design, who would hand it to three draftsmen who would then draft it. Then he'd go back to the engineer to review it. That whole process took five, six people. I turned that into one person. So the engineer would design it on the screen and fulfill the obligation himself or herself. And so we consolidated that process so we became way more efficient. So I stopped selling by the hour and started selling by the lump sum, because I could do it faster than anybody else, and we were younger. When I did sell in 2006, 2007, I had 500 people. The average age was 31 years old. We were young people, and I was 44. I was the old guy. But we had great clients because we understood what they were trying to do, not how they were doing it. And what we did was simple. And engineers did it forever. They designed sewer systems and roads and bridges, and they've been doing it forever. And the designs don't change, but the way we approached it changed. We said we would tell our clients, we're not designing your sewer system. We're building places that you live, places that you play, places that you go to work, and that we want to make that whole experience something that makes a difference in the community, in your lives, in. In their worlds, and we want to make you money. And when I would tell a client, like a residential client, he'd come and he said, I build 100 homes a year. And I'd say, I build 10,000 homes a year. I know your business better than you do because I build it for all your competitors, too, and I take little tricks from them. And I'm going to help you out. So we would teach our guys to learn the business, not just how to design a sewer system. And that changed the way engineering was done in. At least in our company.

[Art Subcheck]

So for everybody listening, I'm not suggesting that you start out your prospecting by saying, hey, I'm putting my company before you. We're probably not going to be successful doing that. But I get what you're saying. As far as the culture of your people, how did you acquire clients?

[Darren Wellborn]

It was. We created a reputation of being fast. It did our job fast. We had a good relationship with clients. I would hire people, see students with personality, not a plus, students that couldn't speak to a client. So all my people could speak to clients, which is, as you said, is not normal in the engineering field. And I would hire engineers that could talk, engineers that had a sense of humor. And we. I was a big. Jim Collins, the author Jim Collins and I made my people read Built to Last, Good to Great, all of his book series. And part of that was culture, part of that was core values. So we developed what we call. My company's name was wrg. We called the WRG Core Value Man. We created this superman like image in every office, and it had all these core values, and those were how we operated and lived by. And part of it was enjoying life, and we enjoyed life together. We were a bunch of young people, and we enjoyed life together. We did a lot of things. Every Office was the McDonald's theory. Every office, no matter where you were, we were in Portland, Phoenix, Boise, Sacramento, Charlotte, North Carolina, and Las Vegas. And every office, when you walked through the front door, looked the same, colors were the same, people acted the same, people were. We treated you the same. Every system was the same. So it didn't matter where you were, if you were doing a Home Depot in Las Vegas or Charlotte, North Carolina, the client felt like they were in the same office, and they felt like they were getting the same service, which they did. And so we tried to change the way engineering is done. Engineers don't do that. They don't have a personality. They don't think about why they're doing it. They just do it and get the engineering job done and get out of the dashboard. So we didn't do that. We treated it like we cared about the end product, which was a place people shopped, place people taught their kids at Schools, we did schools, we did all kinds of things where people live their lives. And so we've changed that theory into that.

[Art Subcheck]

So you applied the human aspect both to the delivery of what you're doing, but then also, as everybody else has mentioned, the common theme there has been the relationships that you're forming with your customers as well as treating your people. So that's been true for everybody here. Thank you for that. And we're going to hear a lot more from Darren at the end here.

[Tim Barone]

And I would tell you that, and I mentioned about technical expertise and treating the customer right. It's your every employee should have a passion for what they do, or you shouldn't hire them. It's that passion that they cared about each other, they care about their customers, they care about their employees.

[Art Subcheck]

Yeah, I think that's true of everybody here and almost everybody who's been successful in anything. Because it's the person, it's the identity. That's why we're going to get into the thinking part, because that is. That is so big. But I always tell sales manager, I said, you can teach somebody off the street words to say in a certain situation, but unless they identify as the person who has the discipline and the habits and is other folk, others focus especially and cares about helping somebody as opposed to selling what they want to sell, they're not going to be successful.

[Louis Vassil]

I think also that often companies that don't fulfill their full potential, you see them generally blaming the people that work at the company. However, from my perspective, it's always about the leadership of the company and how are we as leaders making it as easy as possible for people to be successful within the company. And if you have a great employee, or in our case, breadhead, that actually believes there's another opportunity for them, I've never believed that. Clearly I'm disappointed. But you really got to ask yourself, what didn't I do as a leader to keep that person motivated and happy to want to stay at the Wildflower? And you can learn from that. And then you can actually hopefully try not to make that same mistake again or fix something in the system. Because too many times, especially in the restaurant business, I just hear about people don't want to work or they're not hard workers, they don't care. I don't believe any of that. I think people do care. They want to work hard, but they got to be in an environment where they feel supported, respected and successful. And that just doesn't happen that often. So if there's a company out there that's struggling. Sometimes it's really hard to look yourself in the mirror, but you might want to ask yourself what you're doing and how could you do it differently.

[Art Subcheck]

Great management tip.

[Tim Murphy]

Hey Art. So, hey Tim again. So one thing about family, talking about family and business that I learned, my most biggest takeaway that I learned in my life was so I, my parents, my dad and my dad's brother back in the late 50s started an insurance company and we're from Minnesota. We migrated to Phoenix when I was five years old. And so I grew up listening to my dad and his brother talk all the time about insurance, about settling the claim. Our family was up and down through my whole entire life depending on which hurricane was coming through the US or what was happening here with fires or whatever it happened to be. And they kept saying to me, settle the claim with John, go settle the claim. Jimmy, get Jimmy, go settle the claim. Settle the claim. It's all I heard. So I never thought about this in my life until I owned my own business. The word settle the claim. So I literally took that settle the claim and put Jay Murphy up in our conference room in a stencil in our where we had our sales meetings. And that was our company philosophy that I lived by. And it was we're dealing with swimming pools. We've got a tractor going out of side yard and we're going to tear out the satellite dish, the walls, the backyard, flowers and everything they can imagine to get to the backyard and destroy the entire backyard and put a beautiful brand new pool. And so everything in the world can happen when you're dealing with nine different phases of construction in a backyard over a period of six weeks. When you run a 10,000 pound machine down a side yard. And so we all live by sell the claim because the sales staff would turn the job over. We had then project managers that ran the job and it was just a matter of just dealing with literally chaos. At several points we'd build the best process we could, but there something will always go wrong when it's going to go wrong. And so we just had to settle the claims. So we did whatever it took to make the customer happy. I was like super, super worried about the roc. It's called the Register of Contractors in Arizona. I wanted to have an absolute perfect record. I never wanted a blemish and we never had a blemish on our contractor license. And we dealt with 50 pools a week. We were digging and finishing 50 pools a week. And so it was a matter of just controlling it but they weren't settled. A claim for my family at an early age resonates to me big time. That's. That was our philosophy.

[Art Subcheck]

It's a great story. So what timid mission? Find a way to say yes. Do whatever it takes. Create the experience.

[Tim Barone]

Prime example. We're here on this beautiful voyage. Right. We've all paid a lot of money to be here. And it was. It's a golf trip.

[Art Subcheck]

Right.

[Tim Barone]

And we wanted to all play together. So I go up to the guy who's running and I asked, what if you made a schedule that we're not all playing together? And his first response is, we can't do that. Seriously. It was so easy to change the process to make us happy. And it's, nope, can't do it. And if that was the end of the story, and that's in any of our businesses, what's it?

[Art Subcheck]

You just lost a customer for life over something tiny.

[Tim Barone]

Yeah. That will cost a penny to them.

[Louis Vassil]

Yeah. And I think you heard Tim talk about it there. The restaurant business in particular has quite a bit of social presence. Right. Lots of reviews. Okay. You're getting constantly barraged. Right. Whether it's through Yelp, TripAdvisor, X, Twitter, Google Reviews. And again, there are definitely people out there that embellish what's written on those things. But for the most part, there's some truth. There's definitely truth in most of those comments. And you have to look at those comments as a gift. That's a free feedback. You didn't pay for that. Okay. Now, you may not like what they're saying, and surely I like to say the customer is always right in their own mind. But the reality is that oftentimes there's two sides to every story. The reality is you still need to figure out how to change those situations into positive ones for that guest so that they become that follower again for the brand. Whether that's in the. In Darren's business and Tim's business and Tim's business. Because ultimately, if we don't have satisfied guest customers, we don't have business, period.

[Art Subcheck]

I've heard different version. The customer is not always right, but the customer is always the customer.

[Louis Vassil]

Same idea.

[Tim Barone]

And it's a. We had. My company always had a saying. Similarly, it's a lot less expensive to keep the customer that you have than go find a new one.

[Louis Vassil]

Yes.

[Art Subcheck]

There are all kinds of studies and numbers that. Like 10 times more expensive to acquire a new customer.

[Louis Vassil]

Yeah.

[Tim Barone]

And it's the same thing with employees. It's so expensive for turnover. It's incredibly turned. And the customer who likes Mary, who calls up and want to talk Mary, Mary's not here anymore. She's gone. They got to be thinking, why did Mary leave? I had a lot of respect for Mary. Mary always took care of me. She always gave me that. She may not have had the answer, but she could find the answer to me. So you lose a lot of credibility when you have that turnover from a customer standpoint and an employee standpoint.

[Art Subcheck]

Hey, Art here, back on land, back in Arizona in my office studio, hoping that you enjoyed all those valuable tips and insights and stories that my extraordinarily successful buddies shared so far. Because these guys discussed so much pure gold in this episode and in the next part that we recorded on that trip, I decided to split it into two episodes. So we're going to end this episode here. And coming up, I get into it with the guys about what really separates the top 2% of the population who achieve at the highest level from everyone else. And that is our thinking. So they're going to share the mindset shifts that help them go from startups or very small operations to multi million, multi location industry leading businesses and ultimately being able to personally exit their businesses for multi millions. They'll also share the personal and professional identity traits and characteristics and beliefs and habits that drove them to their level and that you can adopt as well. So for now, thank you so much for investing your valuable sales time with us today. Until next time and the next episode, go out and make it your best sales day ever. I'm Art Sobchak.