Addressing Leadership Vacuum: Helping Other People Succeed With Mark Johnson

Are you looking to skyrocket your business? In this episode, Mark Johnson, Managing Partner at Rimcrest Consulting LLC, joins Yolanda Martinez and Mark Yuzuik as they discuss life transformation and how Mark helps other people succeed. Mark explores the idea of leadership and spotting leadership vacuum that will make a huge difference in your career. Get to know how you can address this leadership vacuum in your own space as Mark shares some of the strategies he uses with his clients. Tune in and learn how you can grow your business by tackling what’s holding you back and expand to proportions you’ve only dreamed of before.

—

Listen to the podcast here:

Addressing Leadership Vacuum: Helping Other People Succeed With Mark Johnson

Welcome to Conversations with Mark & Yolanda. Mark is always either late or waiting for a big intro, his self-intro that is, because nobody gives him an intro but himself. We had an interview with the Favorite Sister’s from London. They interviewed us for their show. That was awesome.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Studio 53. You got Yolanda Martinez Yuzuik right on the main chair. She is in the big screen, the girl with the big smile. You can look at her and go, “You brighten my day.”

I don’t need all this, but okay.

I thought it would be nice. You got to do it for me.

You always do your own intro. You know you’ve had an intro from me. You have to do your own.

Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to welcome the world’s greatest hypnotist. If you haven’t seen his show, you’re only 1 of 12 in the United States that haven’t seen his show. Robin, you saw my show, “Mark is beautiful.” Thank you, Robin. She’s jealous because Robin won’t introduce her. That’s the way it is. What were you talking about?

I said we did an interview with the Sister’s from London.

I did ten minutes and then I had to leave for another call. We turned it over and turned it upside down and it’s me. She did it. Isn’t that weird if you turn, we’re upside down and it becomes me? If you turn, we’re upside down and it will be me.

Why do you have to make a song about it?

I thought I wanted to sing. Start a watch party. We have over three listeners. This is a record. It’s going to go viral. It’s crazy.

We’ll have more than that. Once they start listening to our conversation and your craziness, more people will come on.

You’re wondering about craziness. Can you imagine taking a business that, for years, only makes $500,000 and you come in and you redo the business and you go to $4 million or $5 million? Who would do that?

I don’t know. Who would?

Funny you should ask. This gentleman is amazing. He has been a big influence on my life. I talk to him once a week and it’s going to go on for a long time. It’s supposed to be like, “We’ll talk in three months and see what ends up.” “We’re talking in three months? That’s not happening.” The reason why is because he has been such an influence, “Mark, you got to come on.” You called him, “You got whole new things. You’re getting ready to get out there. Get ready to share a bunch of stuff. Let’s get out there. Let’s do this StreamYard where we’re getting a lot of people. It’s a podcast, Facebook Live.” He goes, “Let me think about it.” I said, “Perfect. I got your book.” He goes, “What?” “Your book.” We don’t give a lot of options.

You made him more nervous than he needed to be. He’ll realize once we get started that this is going to be a casual conversation where we share information, have fun and laugh. You kept calling him. You kept making him nervous about what this whole thing was about.

Aggression is making things happen. Share on X

I mentioned it’s easier when you’re done. If you overbuild, it’s like half the time the chute doesn’t open up and you’ll be lucky to make it to the ground. The chute opened up. That was easy. I’m thinking about this. I read his book. I was going to start reading that again and my call went a little longer than I wanted to. He is phenomenal. He’s an influence. He’s the man of the hour.

He’s done a lot of stuff for a lot of businesses. We are going to get to talk to him and pick his brain.

He’s 26 years old. I’m going to tell you, when you meet a man who’s 26 years old, he looks a little older than that. When you get him, he will talk for your business. We’ve been married a lot longer and he’s old. This is my buddy and becoming a dear friend of mine. Please welcome, Mark Johnson.

It’s great to be on here with you. I’m excited about this.

We are too. Sometimes we’ll have comedians and entertainers. A business guy, this is a real deal. Having somebody be able to take their business that is exciting. I read your book. I told you, “Mark, I know you wrote it, but it’s good. You got to read it again. You’ll be impressed with yourself.”

I did. I read it over again. I found a typo word too. I won’t change those yet in case anybody will pick up the book and will stop it. I’m excited about your interest in life transformation and that’s a big part of what I’ve always been interested in. Having a career with something to keep food on the table, the family fed and happy and housing, my career has been good to me and we may talk a little bit about that. The best thing about it has been to help other people succeed and sometimes you can only do that by trying things out yourself. I’m looking forward to sharing some of these ideas.

We talk about transformation. I do a mental transformation for people. I get them to realize that the only thing stopping you from moving forward is your body and somebody else’s limitations and to their story or you’ve convinced yourself that you’re not able to move forward because by moving forward, what does it mean to you? They think, “I don’t want to be separated. I don’t want to think about all these things.” You’re coming from a grateful place and yet at the same time you’re holding yourself back from being the person that can contribute that out to the world out there.

I want people to realize, let’s start with the mental game and understand that everybody has value. Some people have more value than what’s credit for. It’s my job to make sure there’s a credit. You come in and you do the same thing in your business. You do a break up with the business where you find, you call it a vacuum, the little nicks in there that says, “If we flood this up, your business skyrockets.” It wasn’t a theory. It’s reality. You’ve done it several times. There are many companies that are like, “You’ve done it over and over again.” I’m like, “You got to help me. Where’s my vacuum? Where’s my hole?” It’s like blowing up a balloon. Sometimes you can’t see the holes that release the air. If you want that balloon to be bigger, before you continue to blow, you got to fix the holes.

That’s exactly it.

Every time I hear the word vacuum, I used to think, “I don’t want a vacuum.” Now it’s like, “I like the word vacuum.” It’s all about vacuum for me.

Vacuums made a big difference in my life, in my career. We’ll talk about what leadership is, what’s a leadership vacuum and then how do you address those so that you don’t disrupt the organization on duly or make people angry with you. It may not be what your boss wants. We’ll talk a little bit about all those things. To say upfront, if I can help, we’ll have some of my contact information out there. If you’re thinking, “I may have a vacuum at my work that I would like to jump in and address. I wonder what Mark would say about that.” I’d be happy to talk to you by phone about it or by email.

Thank you for offering that. Especially with what’s going on in the world, people will have vacuums that never existed before. What you do is you fix them.

It’s a new level.

You’re creating, in your own life, a whole brand-new life coming up where you’re getting this message out because there’s such a need for it. You’re going to be able to help many more people out there and this time on a global situation because of the way we’re doing the work. There are many opportunities out there where you can reach many more people. When Yolanda and I do a show where we’re speaking, the audience is the audience. That is 300 or 500 people. That’s the most we can reach at that time. When we do things like this, we did a Facebook Live with Larry Wilcox with over 5,000 viewers. We could have got 5,000 people at a venue to talk about it. It keeps growing, the same thing with this. For those that are reading, your message can grow exponentially because of the situation that we’re in that before we wouldn’t have looked at this. There’s more room to grow.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to share a few tips on how to spot these and how to address them. You helped me with this, Mark and Yolanda. I was writing a book of things that I’ve learned in my life. A lot of people do this for my daughters and my grandchildren. As I was writing the book, I saw more and more items that had to do with a business career like how to write a good cover letter, what’s your resume ought to contain, how to get a job and how to advance.

GYMS Mark | Helping Other People Succeed

Helping Other People Succeed: When helping other people succeed, sometimes, you can only do that by trying things out yourself.

As I thought about that, we had a local politician here in San Diego who jumped several levels to make something happen. It was something good. It was about opening up the beaches here in San Diego during the pandemic. I wrote her a note saying, “You did a great job on spotting a leadership vacuum and resolving it.” As I thought about that, I thought, “She probably is wondering what that is, a leadership vacuum.” That led to me talking with you and then the book. This is a principle that has helped me time and time again as I take a look back at it. They’re out there. They’re all over the place. They can help all the readers to have a better career and make advances, even during a pandemic shutdown.

It’s time to pay attention. When you think about Blockbuster, they went out of business not because they didn’t have something to offer. Who came in business? Redbox.

They didn’t recognize it.

The market is always there. It changed a little bit. People still wanted it. They had to change. When you talk about a vacuum, for our readers, how would you describe it in layman’s terms? How would I know that I have a vacuum in my life, a vacuum in leadership and all that? What is a vacuum? We could break it down other than the balloon situation.

Let’s take a look at the definition of leadership first. Leadership is a lot of things and you think, “It’s leading people. It’s managing people.” It’s not managing people. Leadership is a little bit different. One area of leadership is being aggressive and that’s a word that I think about a lot. I don’t mean making yourself unseemly or unwanted by others or being too pushy. It’s not that kind of aggression. Aggression is making things happen.

There are two ways you go into a new organization. One is no one tells you what to do. You’ve got your own job description and you figured it out. That seems to be the way my career has gone in a lot of positions. You get in there with a job description and you figure things out. The other way is you have someone telling you what to do when it’s wrote. How would we want you to perform at what we need you to do? Both are fine, but you will see in an organization that there are problems in the organization that no one has ever addressed. Why aren’t we making more money? Why don’t we have more customers? What does a money area perform?

I switched industries. I went from the hospital industry into the insurance industry. One company in our area had a long-running trend of not fitting its metrics for many years. Using some of the principles we’ll talk about, a friend of mine, and still a good friend, we sat down and we thought, “We could build some ratios to track this better.” Once we did that, things jumped out that were wrong and prohibiting or keeping us from hitting those metrics. We fixed those. We had the only two areas that were running well in that area in that organization for years. It helped my career skyrocket with that group.

A leadership vacuum is either finding something in your own area that affects the company in total that’s holding that company back. If it’s in your area, I would say it’s a problem and you need to address it. They may have brought you in to address it. If it’s in the company and people seem to ignore it or it has a bunch of different people, try and help that project and then don’t move it far. It may be something where everybody has accepted that that’s the status quo. It’s never going to get better. That’s another opportunity.

There are a bunch of different situations. If you’re in it, it’s hard to see it sometimes. You’ve done it so long with one way that it’s like, “Why change now? We had the success.” That’s where people went out of business. Look at the malls. The biggest mall is Amazon. They are focused on service. She shops on Amazon. We’ll get some products we return. They’ll be like, “Keep the product and don’t worry about it.” Their customer service is outstanding versus when you call somebody and you sit at home for 30, 40 minutes. What happened to when we were younger where customer service would answer and you were taken care off right there? That seemed to have gone by the wayside.

I even remembered sitting on Southwest Airlines on hold for an hour and the lady finally got onto it, “We’re busy. We’re running a special.” I was like, “Okay.” In my mind, I’m thinking, “If you know you’re running a special, gear up for it to service people and have more people working.” It’s happening quite a bit and then they’ll say, “It’s the COVID.” It’s not the COVID because if a lot of people had no work and there are plenty of people to hire, you could fix the situation. They know it’s the mindset. That’s why we need to send you in there to fix this problem so we can get through. If we can get through them, if they answer the phone and get through to send you in there, maybe we could fix the problem. They don’t even answer the phone to get you in there to get this problem fixed. There are many different things out there. You’ve done this several times.

Yes.

Give me an example. I don’t want to give away the story because I’m excited about it.

You love this stuff.

I eat this stuff up. I want to buy and bring you many problems. I’ll say, “Mark, come here and let’s fix these things. We bought a boat.” You’ll be like, “Look at all the holes.” I’ll go, “You can fix all these holes.”

There are a few examples and maybe we go back to the one about the metrics. Here’s an example. Here’s another one from the same company. I won’t mention the company. This was a time when I was overall at the operations. I had finished my Law degree, but I hadn’t started the practice of law. I was working in a business area with a Law degree and it was great. I got the Law degree originally because I was afraid of being in middle management and maybe being laid off at some point. I thought, “I want to get that edge. I can always hang up a shingle and do something else.” It turns out that the law helped me think in different ways, which led to this.

Sometimes you have to work against the current. Share on X

I took over an area that had not performed well with this company. As I took a look at all the different components, by this time I understood insurance. These are high volume health claims. I understood how they worked. For some reason, we had backlogs. We had all kinds of problems, a rudimentary claim processing system. This was quite a few years ago. As I looked at that, I brought a team together of about twenty other leaders and I said, “Let’s get into this and find out what the problems are.” Over days and days of meeting on this, we had a list of issues and they all boiled down to one thing to me and that was the first pass rate. You input the information, it goes into the system and it would be great if it came back 98% correct then you could deal with that 2%. We had about a 17% or 18% first pass rate which means after all that, it would come back a few days later to be reworked. That held up everything and made people angry, “My healthcare claim is not being paid.” We would get calls that lead to all kinds of problems. The backlog, it became more work that way.

I have a relative who worked for Oracle. It’s okay to call them out. He was good at what he did. I said, “Do you have any ideas for this? If there was some way to automate this, this is all manual work, how would we do that?” We talked over some ideas and he said, “I could come in and fix this for you in two weeks.” It was early in the morning after we finished this conversation and I called my head of IT, a guy who was a friend to this day, and I said, “Can you go in there and figure this out?” I had an idea that we needed a system that would take the 50 most common questions that are answered that we get wrong and make those binary and have a system that would automatically check those before it went in for the first pass rate. He said, “This could take 3 or 4 months though.” I said, “I’ve got another company that will do this in two weeks. If I do that, what do I need you guys for?” He said, “We’ll call you later.”

He pulled his team together. This is in the middle of the night, 5:00 AM. He got his team in and by 7:30, I was at work already because this was a big problem for us. We had a contract with the government to get this done on time. He had a plan. Over the next couple of weeks, we implemented that. This guy became famous. You got to have him on the show. He became famous in this organization, it was nationwide, for figuring this out. He went on the road and showed other units of that same company how to do it. They got a niche for himself by figuring this out. All we did was we figured out how to ask the question, “Is this provider in the network? Yes or no.” Get that right and then it could go into the central system. We came back with about 70% first pass rate as soon as we implemented this. We had a team of servers that did all this work because these were hundreds of thousands of claims a month.

These are major companies.

It turned everything around. All I did was I saw an idea over here and put it together and said, “There’s got to be a way. We know these 50 questions or problems. We’ve got all the data. We know from this person’s record who their provider is. Why can’t we check that and see if this person is in network or out network? Why can’t we do that automatically?” That’s what we did. We had an upfront processing system that we put together in two weeks that did all this.

This is one example of these opportunities where most leaders, if they’re not careful, they can sit there and think, “That’s always been the problem. Everybody, work hard. I need more resources.” This was during a merger of this company with another company that was a part of the organization. People left that company because they were afraid of losing their jobs, “We got a federal contract. You’re not going to lose your job. Please, don’t go.” “I’m afraid that I’ll get laid off.” They would leave. We lost about 30 people out of 200, but we were able to automate their work and we didn’t have to rehire. We’re able to do more with less. I wish they hadn’t gone. People being afraid, they wanted to take that other opportunity.

They cut 20% right off the top of expenses. Number wise, you took a company that was doing how much to how much by going in there and fixing that vaccum?

Do you mean how much cost-wise?

Yeah. What were they doing before money-wise and what did you bring to match them?

A good example would be another organization that I took over. This was an entrepreneurial opportunity. It was a business that I became aware of. I stepped into that and it was failing. The founder passed away. He had run it the same way. He did a great job. Everybody loved him. Is this what you want me to talk about?

Yeah. I’m feeling this story because I’m talking about it. I get it.

This is the one in the park. I was offered the opportunity to purchase it. They were worried that I would make a bad deal about it and I would lose all my money. They said, “Why don’t you try and run it for a while first?” I said, “Okay, I’ll do that.” I went in and ran that. This was a technical medical company. They built something. An ancillary doctor was required as part of the process. We sold it and quality was key to turn around. People need the product quickly. I got in and I found that they had always been chasing bills. They’ve made about $300,000 a year tops gross revenue. There were a lot of issues around quality around making payments on time. People are coming in and they saw this rudimentary half-finished showroom because the money wasn’t there to upgrade that. We’re too busy buying materials to make this product.

I got in and that’s one thing that everybody needs to understand. You do need to get in and learn what your people do and how they do it. I couldn’t go into a lab to make this item, but I sure understood what the process was and how it was done and what the tools were like. I also understood what quality meant. Those are important, to school yourself in those areas. I learned that quickly. I had to apply myself because we needed to turn this around. The IRS also, there are some back taxes owed. You never mess with the IRS. I said, “How can I get a payment plan?” “We’re sorry that he died. We loved working with him. We need to get a payment plan.” We did all that and square things away and I thought, “All we need is more money.” Isn’t that the case usually with a company? “We need to have more money.” You can only cut costs so much. You can only lay off many people. We only had 5 or 6 people working there. We couldn’t lay anybody off.

I found that we had this bank of dusty cards with patient names on them that went back years ago. They had never thrown one away. I brought in, what we would call, a virtual assistant. I brought in someone to go in and load all that into a mailing list. We’ve sent each of those people a personalized letter that was from me offering them a discount if they would come back. I made the letter. The envelope was to the person’s name or current resident. That way, whoever received the letter would have that opportunity to come in.

I was floored by that one simple thing. We had people coming in almost certainly beyond our capacity to make the product. That started and the cash was coming in. We counted discounts. It was a right to have discounts. We also had a cut-rate level of product. We advanced that to the higher end level as well as the cut-rate. In fact, we reduced the cut-rate but added the higher end stuff. We finished the showroom. Because it was Dr. Sensitive, we built in another lane for this doctor or another set of offices. We brought in another doctor to operate there. These were independent contractors. We had two doctors there and then we doubled our throughput that way. Those were simple things that we did but they almost tripled our revenues in the first year. We were up to about $700,000 to $750,000 after nine months in gross revenue.

Helping Other People Succeed: If you get the right people, that tide will lift all the boats, including yours.

Not even a year later, you tripled them.

I kept those records. By that time, I had people that were in that family interested in coming back into the organization. After a couple of years, I moved out and moved on with a corporate career. I went to law school at night and let that business go back to them. It was good to get in there and fix those things and help them with that because that was a legacy to them and not much to me.

What’s interesting is, many times people think it’s hard. Each time you go, “All I did was this,” all you did was what makes the difference between profit and failure. Recognize those little things, it’s huge. If you keep growing in the wrong way, you’ll have worse debt.

People will always come in and say, “Don’t do that. Don’t spend money there.” I had some criticism from our advisory board on spending money on things, like, “Why build a brand-new office? Why upgrade the showroom? It costs $4,000 to build that office.” At that time, that seemed like a lot of money. I was open with our advisory board. I had a lot of criticism for that. I said, “It’s going to double our money. The money that we have on Dr. Ray, we’re going to double that.” We did. We almost doubled that.

Sometimes you have to work against the current but you got to be sure though. You got to be sure and trust your own instincts. You’re the one that would understand the best. Your leaders may be insecure. You’ll have bosses that don’t micromanage at all and let you run with the ball. Some that are secure enough, they’ll want to know what you’re doing. They’ll think, “That sounds great. Give it a try. We’ll see how it works. If it doesn’t work, I’ll back you up.” Probably a lot of bosses, I haven’t had many of these at all, they’re a bit insecure and they’re worried that they may eclipse in your light that you’ll get a lot of attention for turning things around and they won’t.

I’ve always respected those bosses that take you into a meeting with the board and say, “Mark figured this out. He saved us a lot of money. He saved us with this problem. I want to point out he’s doing a great job.” That’s nice because then you know you’ve got a good boss that’s going to let you take that ball and run with it. If you’re a boss, be that boss. If you get the right people, that tide will lift all the boats including yours.

How long does an average boss stick in their high positions? They’re changing them all the time aren’t they?

Yes. There are a lot of changes in corporate organizations. You could depend on having a corporation stay the same for a long time. I found early in my career, up to three years. We have a relatively stable group for three years. Now you see significant changes every six months at least, if not more quickly where key leaders will leave and that leaves a vacuum too. There’s always a reason.

Because the way the world is, things change instantly. There’s so much availability to other talents out there, either they move on or they move forward or whatever the deal is. People aren’t as hard-working. Not everybody, some people are more hardworking than they were before. That’s why a lot of companies are going to the Philippines and outsourcing things. They’re getting VA’s and things like that because of what it costs to do business in certain areas. It costs a lot of money the VA’s in New York and San Francisco versus in Oklahoma or places like that. Location is a big thing as well and how much you get back from the outsource.

My buddy, he owns a company. In 2.5 years, he brought it to over $1 million dollars a month. Since the COVID, he’s working at home. He goes, “I don’t think I ever want to go back to the office again.” I spent a week with him in Phoenix and we’ve talked about you so much. I said, “Jerry, You got to bring Mark on. That guy is amazing.” After reading your book and chatting with you, I asked Mark to hangout. I see the value more so than anything else. You get to apply your own advice to some of the things you’re creating as well. You’re creating a whole new program. I remember talking to you about all the band we can grow together.

That’s exactly right. There are other things that can help here, one of them is managing my checklist. I use that so much at my last company that they would all laugh whenever I would say checklist. If you think about how a lot of leaders worry about, “Am I going to be ready for the problem that comes?” If you manage by checklist, you’re ready for it and you know you’re ready for it. If you fill your job or your company down to a series of risks and how to look at those periodically, that’s a powerful tool right there.

There’s a story about asking a rancher, “Do you worry about a tornado?” “No. Every night I make sure that the barn doors are shut tight. That’s the last thing I do before I go in. I don’t worry about tornadoes because I’ve already done this.” It’s the same thing with checklists. Any management tool helps you stay on top of it. The worst position you want to be in is being afraid that somebody will find out something or something will happen that you’re not ready for. We have a tendency as humans to put that worry off and not think about it. Seek dopamine someplace else. Do not worry about it. Flood your mind with something that’s easy. Check Facebook or anything, except to worry about that.

Sometimes that universal power, whatever that is for you, can be giving you a little tip to look at that. I can’t tell you how many times that’s happened to me. I’ll wake up in the morning and I’ll think, “I wonder why I’m worried about this.” I’ll go in and take a look at it and then a couple of days later, a problem arises that has already been addressed. I’m looking at building some of this instructional material that will help with checklists, with new leaders, spotting these vacuums, and how do you investigate that? How do you know that you have a boss that will support you? If it’s somebody else’s area, how do you venture into that area to help? One of my big vacuums that I address in the book was not even my area. There was a problem that made all of us look bad in the company to serve regulators. It needed to be addressed.

We need you to come up with this product right away. I want to be honest. I want to make sure that I put the hypnosis in there so they listen to all this stuff that you’re teaching and they take advantage of that stuff so they make the right moves. We need this stuff out here before, Mark. What took you so long?

You’re right on target with that because it does take courage and inner strength to binge right into this. You will be alone many times in taking this step. As you do this, as you see success, you’ll have more and more confidence. I could go into other stories about that and maybe we will, but you’ve got to take that chance. You’ve got to step into it. Figure out what the vacuum is. Realize that leadership is making things happen. I’m going to be aggressive. I’m going to turn this around, whether it’s in my own area or someone else’s. Assess your boss.

You've got to take that chance in life. You've got to step into it. Share on X

I talked about this in the book. One of the big ways that people try and look wise nowadays is to be critical of new or old ideas. I’ve seen this over and over in meetings. First off, you don’t want to be the first one to come up with a resolution. That almost always gets shot down. You want to listen and let things pass by. When you do finally say something, which I guarantee will be the perfect solution, somebody will ask the critical question like, “That couldn’t possibly work. What makes you think that will happen?” It’ll be something that’s maybe not meant to be a put-down. People tend to think of others looking intelligent and smart because they’re asking those tough questions. Maybe sometimes the tough questions are necessary because you don’t want to go off and do something foolish. There’s a place for them. You’ve got to look past that.

If your boss is like that where you only get the tough questions to your own ideas, you may have an insecure boss. If it’s early enough in your career, you may want to take a look at making a move. Move into an organization that will give you more freedom to run with the ball. You will figure these problems out, anyone can. You’ve got to focus on it and figure out how it works. I would say that anybody with average intelligence or better can look at a problem and figure out what the components are and why it’s not working right.

Not everybody can recognize those. Sometimes we need somebody like you to come in there and go, “This isn’t right. You keep doing the same thing.” It’s like, “Why is it not growing? Why am I not getting the results? Why am I not making profit? I’m growing more but I’m not making more profit. I’m able to save some.” Liquidity is where your opportunity comes in. When you’re liquid, you have opportunity. You have sustainability. When you’re not, when you’re running that fine line and that checkbook that time all those zeros coming in, you better hope everything goes right every day. If you don’t, you’re subjected to some serious penalties which is going to cost you money, penalties in your business, employees, and work. You never want to come from a place of fear. You want to come from a place of strength. Strength is what gives you confidence. What you do is you give them the strength and the confidence so they are profitable.

I remember Keith Cunningham speaking at one of our events. He is a business guy. He was like you. He made $100 million and he lost it and he made twice as much again. The reason why is because he has a formula he sticks by. He’s all about the business. One thing is he pays attention to details. If you’re not going to measure it, how are you going to see where the holes are? If you don’t that, you can’t grow. He speaks for Tony Robbins all the time. He’s a brilliant businessman. I remember him saying, “I could take any business and make it profitable because I do my checklist.” He does his checklist. Some people don’t recognize and don’t see the checklist.

One thing he said is, “If you have businesses where you may make a lot of money, you don’t have any profits. You may have some where you don’t make a lot of money and you have a lot of cash in the bank.” You have to know what that is. I love what he’s saying because it’s right on. What’s the sense in making $10 million if you only have a $100,000 at the end of the year? Where if you make $2 million, you’ll have $500,000 in a year. Which position would you rather be? What you recognize is you recognize the power of that profit and the checkbook and the liquidity. Liquidity is where your opportunity is because from there, you can go buy these other companies that are failing and that’s how you grown your business. Instead of brick-and-mortar hard, you can grow it a lot faster by being more intelligent and smarter about it.

Having someone like you on the team and welcoming you into the factory of growth is the key to this thing. Many people want to know, “How much does it cost?” It costs everything you’re not making right now. All the profit you couldn’t make, that’s what it’s costing you. A consumer wants to know how much does it cost and the investor knows how much can we make. We got to get the right investor’s mind and not being threatened with that. The book you wrote, there are many stories in there. We could go on for hours.

Where can we find the book?

What’s the name of the book and where can we find it?

If you look on Amazon for W. M. Johnson Leadership, that’ll come up. There will be three books that will come up. My book is Leadership Vacuums Will Accelerate Your Career, which is a long title. It’ll have a picture of a space shuttle blasting off. That’s my book. It’s a quick read. It’s got two big examples, but hopefully that’s enough and it will be to get the wheels turning on how you can address your own world and make things happen. To that example that you gave, Mark. If you’re in a business and you’re not saving enough or you’re not getting ahead but you’re understanding, that is a time when it’s good to bring in someone else. Maybe even someone from a different industry to help you look at what you understand well and figure out what are the few things that will make all the difference. It’s the 80/20 rule.

He’s another consultant that came into my life, early in my career at the hospital. We had a bunch of doctors, physicians, and surgeons who were trying to figure out how to increase revenue in the hospital. He said, “Let’s list off all the doctors that are making your lives a little more difficult, asking for equipment and coming in all the time and asking for stuff.” We know that there’s a little bit of that. On the other end, who’s bringing in the most revenue? The ones bringing in the most revenue were the ones that we rarely heard from. He said, “That’s where you need to put your attention.” He said, “You’ve got to help anybody that complains. Any physician that comes in with issues, you’ve got to help them out with what they need. You’re not doing anything over here and these guys are that’ll build your revenue. If they’re doing this at your hospital surgery, they’re bound to be doing that at other hospitals. Get them all here. How do we do that?” It was a big a-ha moment that it’s not always the squeaky wheel. Sometimes it’s a wheel that you haven’t heard for years that is the problem that needs to be addressed.

I’m happy to come in and help people. I love doing this. To me, it’s exciting to see things from a system standpoint become better. In fact, even the affiliate marketing or multilevel, there’s a problem some people run into with putting all the revenues and it will grow fast many times. Put the revenues into buying inventory. You may not have anything to show for that, yet money is coming. Your lifestyle is getting better. There are simple things you can do to set up a retirement account. How do you diversify money out of that cashflow so you’ll have something left when you decide to leave?

If somebody wants to get ahold of you to talk to you, where could they email you? Is there a website they can email you from? What’s the best way to get ahold of you?

I’ll give you three ways to contact me. First, my consulting business is RimcrestConsulting@Gmail.com. My personal email is MJ92127@Gmail.com. My phone number is (317) 937-1056.

They got to get your book. The book is a phenomenal read. I love reading it. I’m reading it and we hardly got time to go to some of the stories. I liked the one where you said to people, “What do you have? How many months through this?” You said, “We’re doing it in so much time.” Do you remember that story?

Yeah.

Helping Other People Succeed: It’s not always the squeaky wheel, sometimes, it’s a wheel that you haven’t heard for years, but it’s a problem that needs to be addressed.

This is a great one. I love this one. You came in and everyone said, “We need all this time to get it fixed.” You said, “No.”

This is one that made me Mr. Unpopular for a while. This is what happened, we solved a huge problem that a company had for years. Everybody came in and said, “We had about over two months to finish this huge project before the holiday started.” I had everybody come together and I said, “Give me the project plan for how to get this done by December 15th.” If we don’t have these done by December 15th, there were 100 different projects. This was out of my area by the way. It was something that was important to the company. I said, “If we don’t have it done by December 15th, we’re not going to take any holiday breaks because the other parties that depend on this want to see that first of the year.” They all went, “I don’t know if we can do that.” I was thinking, “Yes, we can. Come back Wednesday. Let’s talk it over.” They came back.

These were all difficult and they said, “We can’t do it in two months. We’ve got day jobs. This is going to be impossible.” I said, “Don’t think about two months.” I said, “You’ve got eight hours in the day. You’ve got 24. That’s three sets of eight hours. You don’t have to take the weekends off. What I’m looking at is ten months of time. Is there anybody in here that can’t finish this in ten months?” They all go, “He’s going to be unreasonable.” Every person there became a hero in their own organization by addressing the issues and having them finished by that time.

It was a huge accomplishment that the regulators didn’t think the company would do, would become capable of. It had floated with some other leaders who had done their best. Sometimes you have to be unreasonable because you know what can be done and you know what isn’t. How long is a working day? Six hours. It’s like a day at school. You’ve got break, figuring vacations, go to the restroom, get lunch, and meetings, 5 or 6 hours. How do you make that into a true eight? It’s not eight. It’s 24. If you want to get something done, if it was your own thing, your own business and you’re going to make $1 million at the end of two months, you’d get it done.

You went, “That’s right.”

How do you make it that important for everybody?

That’s the thing with a lot of businesses, sometimes the employees don’t value a business for what it is. They value what is a job because it’s not their business. They don’t own it. They don’t put the same value into it. That’s why I always say. Treat the employees as they are part of the business and they’ll treat your business differently because then they’ll be like, “If this doesn’t get done, it’s going to affect me too because this is my job.”

That is wise. If you’re looking at the job as, “I’m going to move with the big boat here. I’m going to ride on the bus and maybe I’ll drive it as a manager someday.” I want you to take that bus and put a jet engine on it. That’s what your job is. Look at it like this is your career we’re talking about. Is it going to be a bunch of eight-hour days that are six-hour days at a nominal fee and you’ll be asking your boss for a raise or promotion? You’ve got to earn those. You’ve got to be someone that your peers go to for advice and that people look at you, your bosses, and say, “He’s someone that can get the job done. No matter what I give him, he’ll go in there and get it done.” That’s who you want to be. It’s not riding on the bus. You’ve got to think, “I can put a jet engine on this.” If it’s not the company that will let you do that, maybe you need to find another company.

Let’s take this world by storm, Mark. I’m excited. You’re going to come up with some products. You’re going to start with some podcasting. You’re starting to get all of what’s in that beautiful 26-year-old head of yours. You’re getting it out there.

I appreciate this opportunity. I appreciate the readers too. If there’s any way I can help you, I love figuring out a problem and putting that jet engine into it.

That’s what I love. What’s exciting about working with you is I get to work with you every week. To me, this is cool. Every conversation I tell you, “This is not going to end. You know that, Mark. We’re going to continue.”

Mark, you’ve been a great inspiration.

You are an inspiration to me and all of us. We’re going to get that message out there. We can help all those that’s beating and that don’t have a shot and give them a chance that they don’t see and fix their situations where they can grow their business. They can become an inspiration to somebody else and maybe pay it forward too. Continue down this path. Don’t you stop, Mark. We got too much work to do. Many people have been served. I know you don’t have to but when you’re in that position, we’re going to. I’m going to hypnotize you so I can be part of your program.

You’re going to make me do those 24-hour days. I’m ready.

Thank you for putting this time aside for us.

Sometimes, you have to be unreasonable because you know what can be done. Share on X

He was excited. You called me and begged, “Please, let me come on.”

As soon as he got up the phone with you, he goes, “Mark wanted to think about it. I told him he was booked. He’s on the calendar. We’ll see him.”

I’m only doing the things that you taught me to do. I’m using your own stuff.

This has been a great experience. Have you ever been interviewed on TV with a problem? That could be interesting, even if you get the questions in advance. This was nothing like that. Those of you out there reading, as you have success then get on Mark and Yolanda’s show. It’s a great opportunity.

Thank you.

I had a good time.

We’re going to share this as many times as we can. We’re going to boost it. We’re going to share it. I know that there’s so much growth with us. I’m grateful that we had a chance to speak. You saw me speaking. If I didn’t do that simple lose weight seminar, we won’t be here. Isn’t it funny when you said when you wake up and something feels right? It felt right when I got your email.

Thank you.

Continue to create things, Mark. Continue with your podcast. What’s the name of your podcast? Have you come up with a name?

I’ve come up with a working name. There’s no content yet. It’s Wall2Wall Podcast. That way, we can talk about any subject.

You can have me as your guest on your first podcast. Mark, you’re a blessing in our lives and many other lives. Keep up the good work, the momentum. Keep on making a difference in other people’s lives.

Thank you, Mark. I’m telling you, that is a man that you have no idea. This is the tip of the iceberg to see what he has accomplished. No one’s done what he was offered. In all the podcasts and all the Facebook Lives we’ve done, this is the one where if you’re sitting there going, “My business.” Stop doing that. Pick up the phone. Send an email. Get his book. If you don’t do it, then you’re making excuses. Guess what’s going to happen? You’re going to get exactly what you think you’re going to get, nothing. Do you want results? This is it. This is a show that I want you to read over and over again. Contact Mark. He is the best of the best in the business.

You have no excuse because we’ve got all his contact information and how to get his book. You can call us and say, “How do I get in touch with him? How can you put me in touch with him if you didn’t take down this information?”

It’s great to have fun. It’s great to smile. Sometimes, in life, you need a little helping hand. “What’s going on with my business?” Let’s say your business is okay. What if you went from okay to phenomenal? What if you stepped it up? Get out the consumer mindset of how much the things cost and look at how much can you make. What did you not make? When you started your company, your business, did you think you’d be further along? If the answer is, “I thought it would be,” versus, “No,” then this the man you need to call.

Don’t use the pandemic as an excuse why your business is not growing. It’s the opportunity to figure out all those little holes that are in your business that you need to plug up and change or do something different.

Leadership Vacuums Will Accelerate Your Career!: How to identify leadership vacuums and use them to propel you to the next level

He’s the anti-venom for the pandemic. You want the right medicine. Make sure you get in touch with him. This is a rare opportunity that we get to do this. We had to bump Robin because we wanted Mark on. Robin, you don’t have to be on next time. Thank you very much. Share this, especially if you have business people. Share it with LinkedIn. Get it out there. Makes you get the opportunity to spend some time with Mark before he gets too busy and then you’re at the back of the line.

I remember Paul Simon the information at real estate. He goes, “When you see a deal, when you hesitate, you lose the deal. Let that be a lesson to you.” He goes, “You don’t steal in slow motion. When an opportunity comes, you jump on it.” This is called an opportunity, check it out. If you read his book, you’ll be in touch with the guy . You’ll read it within 10 to 15 minutes. It’s phenomenal. I’m going to read it again because I love his story and the way he writes is fantastic. We’re going to create more products. We’re going to get some more out there. Wall2Wall is going to be his podcast. He’s launching that.

He’s doing things. He’s getting active. He’s getting bigger. Take advantage of this opportunity. It’s the time to strike. If you’re hungry and you want success, this is the plate you want a go for. It’s all you can eat. Take it to the next level. You deserve it and other people do, your family, friends, loved ones, and all those people that are unable to be in a situation where you are. Move forward. This is your moral obligation to pay it forward. I truly believe that. Go to our Facebook. We’ll put another clip of video. Check it out. If you want to watch our videos, you can view them. Pick any year that you want.

We got more than a whole year. We got years of uploaded onto Vimeo. If you want a good laugh, if you’re feeling a little down or you need to laugh, go watch some videos.

We should make a song. “If you have a little feeling and you want to get ahead, go watch our videos.”

Mark should become a songwriter because he makes a song about everything. He made a song about the turtle, his garden. What else did you make a song about? He makes a song about everything. He should write a song.

Turtles are fast.

You should make some for commercials.

I’m trying to.

We’ll see you next episode.

We might be doing Tony Robbins.

We can interrupt Tony Robbins. Conversations with Mark & Yolanda are important to our people. We’ll keep you posted on who we are going to have here. It might be a surprise.