Speaker: 0:01

Welcome to The Heart-Led Business Show, where compassion meets commerce and leaders lead with love. Join your host, Tom Jackobs, as he delves into the insightful conversations with visionary business leaders who defy the status quo, putting humanity first and profit second. From heartfelt strategies to inspiring stories, this podcast is your compass in the world of conscious capitalism. So buckle up and let your heart guide your business journey.

Tom Jackobs: 0:36

Well, welcome to The Heart-Led Business Show. Today we are thrilled to have Sam Lee joining us. As a visionary founder and CEO of IndeCollective. Sam has been a guiding star for over 750 mid-career professionals transforming their expertise into flourishing consulting and coaching empires. With a treasure trove of experience from the likes of Goldman Sachs and WeWork. He's here to share his journey of heart-led leadership and the magic of unlocking income, impact, and independence. So get ready to be inspired by Sam Lee, everybody. And Sam, welcome to the show.

Sam Lee: 1:15

Thank you so much for having me, Tom.

Tom Jackobs: 1:17

I'm so excited to kinda dive into your story and really I think it's gonna inspire a lot of the listeners to really dive into their passion, especially coming from someone who's transitioned themselves out of corporate and into their own heart-led business as well, and, and come out surviving and thriving the on the other side. Right.

Sam Lee: 1:38

A hundred percent.

Tom Jackobs: 1:39

But first, I always like to ask, what's your definition of a heart-led business?

Sam Lee: 1:43

Absolutely. Well, you know, from my own lived experience and as you said, having now served more than 750 amazing mid-career professionals and launching their own heart-led businesses, I like to think of a heart-led business as one that helps that experience professional to maximize three things, their impact on clients, their community, and the world. Also their income and flexibility.'cause we deserve more of those things given all the, been there, done that experience that we have in the middle and late stages of our career. So a heart-led business very simply is one that allows an experienced professional to maximize their impact, their income, and their flexibility.

Tom Jackobs: 2:27

Love it. Yeah, exactly. You may want to change flexibility to independence that way. They all start with I

Sam Lee: 2:33

Yes.

Tom Jackobs: 2:34

three I process.

Sam Lee: 2:35

Yeah, you're right. You're totally right.

Tom Jackobs: 2:38

No, that's awesome. What a, what a great definition and more and more people are looking for that these days. Clearly. I mean, having served 750, that, that's a huge number of people that you've been able to help create that's created such an impact. What inspired you to kind of get, go out of Goldman Sachs and WeWork and, and go out on your own?

Sam Lee: 2:59

Yeah, well, what I've now, you know, seen in my own experience of, of building a consultancy for more than 10 years and in those 750 grads of IndeCollective is that building, you know, a heart-led business. I like to call them better businesses. Those businesses that maximize those three things. It's not that complicated. It does of course, require work. Anything a value requires or effort, but it's not that complicated. And what I've found in my own experience and in seeing others do it, is that there's four key ingredients that help people to get on a fast and reliable path to superlative outcomes in those three things. And the four key ingredients simply are, one, you and your expertise, and that is actually the most important ingredient. I like to think of it as even 80% of the recipe, and that's the stuff that you've spent a career developing. And that is inherently you. In addition to that first ingredient, there are three other ingredients, and these are accelerator ingredients because when you combine them. You and your expertise, they get you on a fast, reliable path to the superlative outcomes. Not to replacing income or trading time for money to get to okay outcomes, but to doubling income and freeing up half your time and finding the space to pursue people and passion projects that matter to you. Those three accelerator ingredients are playbooks that work, that allow you to translate expertise into a heart-led business. I've been there, done that. Mentors, people who have walked the path, who can coach you because who in the middle of their career wants to trial and error and hope for the best.

Tom Jackobs: 4:37

Correct.

Sam Lee: 4:37

And third, surrounding yourself by a supportive community. Because at that stage of our career, why are you gonna be in isolation? That's not how you do your most effective work, and it's also not the fun or fulfilling path to building a business that will achieve those outcomes. So the reason that I started IndeCollective and the reason that I pursued this path myself is because it's possible, and because more people need access to those accelerator ingredients. They have been there, done that expertise from, you know, years if not decades of career, and they should be able to access the playbooks, the mentors in the community to get them to great outcomes, in business and life.

Tom Jackobs: 5:17

Yeah, absolutely. And I wanna kind of unpack a little bit the first ingredient, the you ingredient.

Sam Lee: 5:23

Mm-hmm.

Tom Jackobs: 5:23

And using all that expertise. Have you found working with all these folks that a lot of people kind of put down their own experience to a point where like, ah, you know, I did this for 20 years and I was really good at it. But nobody's gonna want that kinda, they just like minimize what they've done.

Sam Lee: 5:41

Yeah, a hundred percent. I think what everybody knows, everybody that I've had the opportunity to work with and you know, 750 people is just scratching. You know the tip of the needle, because just in the US alone, there are 60 million adults that are currently launching and growing their own coaching, consulting, and service-based businesses. And half of those people, 30 million adults, are in the middle and late stage of their career. So 700 people is just the tiny little, you know, scratch on the surface. But of those 750 people I've had the chance to work with, I'd say all of them know in their bones that they've got great experience. Probably 75% of them don't believe they're experts. They've got experience, but they don't believe they're experts and not all of them are wrong. Why is that? And, and, and it's not that they don't have the experience, but expertise is marrying experience with focus. Because if you're unfocused in the business you're building, you just have a lot of experiences that you're offering, not expertise. Expertise is experience rubber, meeting the road with focus on the right client, solving the right painkiller problems, and doing it in a way that scales the impact, income and flexibility you deserve. And anybody with experience can get to expertise. They just need to move the experience through a process that gets them focused, and that's what we help people to do.

Tom Jackobs: 7:15

Yeah, no, that, that, and I love that. That's such a key point to make, and people need to kinda hear that again, that the experience alone isn't going to get you to where you want to be, especially if you're not focused, which if I think of any entrepreneur, that's pretty much everybody needs to really work on that focus. And that's what gets you to the expertise level.

Sam Lee: 7:40

Yup.

Tom Jackobs: 7:40

And that's, I mean, that's where the paycheck becomes happening and that's where you make the biggest impact for people as well, is when you're able to really laser focus and guide them to they want to be.

Sam Lee: 7:51

Totally.

Tom Jackobs: 7:51

So what kind of, well, let's talk about your journey out of corporate and into having your own business. What was that like for you?

Sam Lee: 8:00

Mm-hmm. So I've been building E3 Ventures, my consultancy for more than a decade. Half of those years, I did it as a side hustle. I was doing it while in large companies, you know, venture backed companies, public companies, and you know, it allowed me to invest, advise, and do some lightweight consulting, which I found fun, engaging, and frankly, it just was an additional paycheck. And when we worked, didn't work, at least not to plan. It created an opening and I needed to step back from that business. There was no more a thousand person team for me to lead. And it created an opening to step into E3 Ventures full-time. And in doing it full-time in that first year, I was able to double the income I made as a full-time executive. And I was working, you know, 30 hour weeks, so about half as much as I had previously. And that honestly blew my mind. Because I had mentors and friends who had walked this path and talked about those types of outcomes, but until you've seen it for yourself, it's hard to believe it. And until you believe it, you can't become it. So in that year, I got to those outcomes, but the first quarter was none too easy. It really was none too easy. As I know you've experienced too, I'm sure in, in building your own businesses. But the first quarter I found myself. You know, almost out of fear, accepting whatever came my way. I had a great network that was sending me opportunities, but I was a yes man to everything. I was taking on too many projects, doing too many bespoke things for too many types of people with too many types of problems, which meant that I was trading time for money. I wasn't able to clearly articulate my value or charge for it. And I was burnt out and tired, right? Like I was, I was replacing my income immediately, but I was working more than I had as the full-time executive and I was running myself ragged. So that was the first quarter and in the second quarter I took a bit of a beat and I took a step back and said, let me turn to these mentors and friends that have talked about the great results and let me see what I can learn from them so I can find that focus and translate great experience from all sorts of interesting industries and companies and roles into expertise. And it was in that next chapter. And it didn't take me that long. I find that most of our members are able to do this process because we've now productized this process in the course of six to nine months. Definitely within a year of working with us. But in, in those next, you know, couple of months, I really focused on a couple of things. One, I wanted to get focused on the right clients, the right problems that I would solve for those clients so I could productize an offering. An offering that wouldn't have me serving everybody bespoke. But serving a subset of people in a scalable way, build once, sell again and again and again, or put differently, build once, and have impact again, again and again. So I got really focused and we now help people to niche on the right clients. The right painkiller problems, the problems that people will always be willing to pay and apply time and treasure to, even in tough economic environments. So that was the first thing. I just got focused on the right clients and problems and built a more scalable offering to help those early to mid stage startups with mission to, to grow.'cause I'm a commercial leader, so it was thing one. Thing two, with clarity of clients and problems, I got clear on my pricing.

Tom Jackobs: 11:29

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Sam Lee: 11:31

It wasn't about charging for time, which is where I started, and that's where a lot of people start. It's charging for your time. There's ceiling to that, right? You only have so many hours in the day and week. So if you're just charging for time, you're eventually gonna cap your potential impact and income. So I started to charge for value, and we can talk more about value-based pricing, but it required me to get really clear on the value that I was creating for those clients by solving their problems, I get confident on how to express that value so I could charge for it. And that was the second thing. And then third, it was about, you know, taking what I had learned as a commercial leader and making sure I was applying it to my own business so I could have a consistent pipeline of those ideal clients and confidently send those value based proposals. So those were the three things, the productization, the pricing, and the pipeline work that I focused on then that got me focused as an expert and building a business that allowed me, you know, within a year to get that great outcome of doubling the income, working 30 hour weeks, and uh, and seeing a path for myself and now for so many people that have followed.

Tom Jackobs: 12:32

Yeah, that's a, that's a quick turnaround. You're a quick learner. Obviously. Some people it takes. Me, myself included, several years to kind of figure that that out before you know it. But, you know, everybody has their own journey on it, but it's, it's really important to, to go through that, that process. A couple things I want to kind of dig into there that you mentioned that I've noticed heart-led business owners kinda have a, have a problem with, and that's the niching down. How do you, like how many of the people that you work with struggle at first with the concept of being laser focused on who they can help and who they cannot help? Yup.

Sam Lee: 13:10

So I will say I bet half of members, and, you know, I do different speaking engagements. I'd say half of any given audience gets it. It's the value of focus and actually scaling. And the other half just see it as counterintuitive. How can I maximize my reach, my impact, my income if I'm niching and focusing right? So it's, it's like intuitive for some and totally counterintuitive to the other half. I will say we have an amazing, so, so IndeCollective is led by a dozen, a dozen experts that teach our different playbooks, all of whom have built their own seven or eight figure business. You know, Josh Neckes, teaches two of our playbooks. As a marketer who's built a seven figure consultancy and a billion dollar tech company. He teaches productization and also value-based pricing. And he likes to say those two topics are actually two sides of the same coin. Productization is you as an expert, not as a generalist, but as an expert coming to your ideal client and saying, Hey, client, I've worked with countless people like you. Organizations decision makers, and in working with them, I've helped them to solve this type of painful problem. A problem that one solve creates a giant bag of value for you as a leader and your organization. And I know you're a reasonable person, you're gonna be willing to pay for the value that we create together. It's gonna be a smaller but commensurate bag of value that I'll take as my fair pricing. But you'll be willing to pay it'cause we're gonna create so much value for you. How does that feel? Right? So that's a fair value chain. That's value-based pricing in its essence. And when you think about your niched focus, the right client solving the right painkiller problems that create huge value, that's how you get, that's you then charge for that value in value-based pricing. So we kind of set up this personal business value chain through the program where we help people to understand that through focus, they're gonna create more value, they can accrue more value to themselves. And, and I think it clicks over time, but it's, it's a counterintuitive thing for a lot of people, um, who think, gosh, by focusing I'm gonna reach fewer people and therefore create less value, make less value, all the rest of it.

Tom Jackobs: 15:25

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I've, I've shared this story before, but the, the, way that it really got into my head was when I was transitioning out of fitness and into sales coaching, and I would go to my BNI meetings every Wednesday morning at seven o'clock in the morning and I would do my general pitch'cause I was doing sales coaching and so I would do my little ten second. Hey, I'm Tom Jackobs. I do sales coaching for small businesses. If you're having a sales problem, I'm your guy. Come talk to me after. Something like that. And I was doing this for like four weeks and no referrals at all. And I was like, what am I doing wrong? So, finally I, I remember a coach saying, you need to niche down. I was like, okay, let me try this out. There's a lot of insurance agents that are in my my BNI group. So the next time I went there, I said I help insurance agents double their sales in the next six months by training their sales staff to

Sam Lee: 16:18

Hmm.

Tom Jackobs: 16:18

be really impactful in their sales. I got three referrals that day and none of them from insurance people. I was like

Sam Lee: 16:25

Interesting.

Tom Jackobs: 16:26

interesting.

Sam Lee: 16:27

Yeah.

Tom Jackobs: 16:27

And I, I asked one person, I was like, you know, I've been saying that I do sales coaching for four weeks now. Why now? He said, well, you seem like more of an expert now. I'm like, yeah. Interesting. Okay. Yeah, kept niching down.

Sam Lee: 16:41

We're in the middle of, of our spring cohort as we speak, and we're in the middle of a three week series on building your predictable revenue machine and, and just last week we heard from two of our expert coaches one who helps people to relationship build at scale to activate their current network and, and build an army of champions to send you referrals. The other of whom helps you to go beyond your current network, helps you to ideal, uh, uh, identify what she calls ideal connection avatars. Partners who already serve your audience, who can be making a trust transfer, introducing you to the right people that you wanna be meeting with, and both of those frameworks activating your current network to drive referrals and building partnerships that drive referrals require that you have focus.'cause how in the heck can you recalibrate your audience or build a new audience that is gonna get you in front of the right clients if you're a generalist?

Tom Jackobs: 17:37

Yeah.

Sam Lee: 17:37

Right? You need to know who you're gonna serve and how you're gonna serve them, and the great outcomes you're gonna achieve in order to activate people in service of building the business of your dream. So, so anyway, it, it really is the, the underlying thread of your whole business value chain. It's who do you really wanna serve? And it needs to be specific. And when you can get specific, frankly, you get to work with people you like.

Tom Jackobs: 17:57

Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Sam Lee: 17:59

It's just the fun part.

Tom Jackobs: 17:59

And it's, it's your tribe as as well, which is always nice to, to work with people like that. And, and you get paid more as a specialist. You know, you look at a, a cardiologist gets paid more than a, a family practitioner by far. You know, and same with, same with lawyers and like the generalist lawyer not doing as great as the one that focuses specifically on whatever, you know, some, some problem, criminal or whatever. And so, yeah, I think that's, that's a hard lesson for a lot of people to, to learn, but they have to do it, right?

Sam Lee: 18:32

Yep. And, and to, to borrow on, on the example of the, the doctor, the family practitioner versus the cardiologist. Why is it that the cardiologist is making 10 times probably as much as the family practitioner and probably working no more hours,

Tom Jackobs: 18:51

Yeah. Probably about the same.

Sam Lee: 18:52

Probably about the same, right? They've got probably specific hours and a way of working, but it's probably about the same. The reason they're making 10 times more is not because they've necessarily spent a heck of a lot more time studying. Right, the inputs, it's the outputs. It's the fact that people are paying for a life saving treatment, a painkiller problem intervention. There is a hierarchy of problems that your ideal clients face. At the top of that hierarchy are painful problems, and I say painful, not to elicit negative feelings, but to underscore that there are painful problems that no matter the economic environment. Your ideal clients will be willing to apply time and treasure to solve, period. Because they're so acute that when solved, they will create so much value. And then at the bottom of that hierarchy, there are what I call nice to solve.

Tom Jackobs: 19:44

Yes.

Sam Lee: 19:44

Or vitamin problems. Good luck in this economic environment. Getting the sales call, closing the contract, building a referral engine around, nice to solve problems. No one's thinking about them and they don't care right now. So you need to like the cardiologist, focus. On a painkiller problem for a type of client, because when you do that, you'll be able to get the sales calls. You'll be able to close the value-based contracts. You'll be able to activate the referral network, the current network, and the network you'll build in service of building that better business or that heart-led business of your own. And that's where the specialization really kicks into high gear. And we help people, as I said, to take the experience, which can be broad, right? I've worked in six different industries. I've worked with early stage startups and public companies in different executive capacities. So I could be, I could naturally fall into being a generalist, but I'm not. I'm very focused and it allows me to do double the income in half the time, right?'cause I'm charging for the value I create and doing it in scalable ways.

Tom Jackobs: 20:48

Yeah, exactly, and, and, just piggybacking on that nice to have to, the must have the, you know, do or die. And that's, that's the sales situation as well that I teach in heart-led and, and the heart selling method that I teach is you need to transform the nice-to-haves into needs-to-haves

Sam Lee: 21:06

Yes.

Tom Jackobs: 21:07

during that sales conversation. It's, you know, when you're dealing with, like, I, I work with health and wellness practitioners. A lot of times it's can be discretionary because it's not bad yet.

Sam Lee: 21:18

Right.

Tom Jackobs: 21:19

It's not bad enough yet,

Sam Lee: 21:21

Right.

Tom Jackobs: 21:21

but, so we need to elevate that to the must haves to get the value that you need.

Sam Lee: 21:27

Totally, totally, totally.

Tom Jackobs: 21:29

How do you work with people on the value-based, how important is that in terms of mindset and and mindset turnaround for people?

Sam Lee: 21:36

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So pricing is, is like probably 80% psychology. Um, and in order to get confident and in order to confidently express your pricing to a client, you need to do the behind the scenes work so that in that quick late stage of your sales process, you're able to very confidently express the value, package it in the value-based proposal, and send it once you've done the back work. Those last steps are actually quite easy and they become very routine. The back work, taking a step back starts with your productization. Who is the client that you wanna serve? If you're a generalist, good luck charging for value.'cause everything looks different. Everybody's got different, different problems and they create different amounts of value. So you really can't consistently express it in terms that will be understood by any client. They'll be general, right? So you gotta focus on the right client, you've gotta key into some problems. And then through the value-based pricing process, you need to unpack the value that you create quantitatively and qualitatively. What will this mean for your client? Both quantitatively and qualitatively. When you solve this problem with and for them, how much value is it creating? How do you express that value in terms that will be viscerally understood? It'll be felt in their bones. It will be a feeling, not just a thinking exercise for them. And we walk people through Josh Neckes, who I mentioned, who does productization and pricing two sides of the same coin. He walks people through a process of quantifying and qualitatively expressing that value. So that is understood by your ideal client. And we companion the thinking that we do, the hypothesizing around what we think we're creating in terms of value with user research interviews. So you're actually speaking to people that have these problems. You're listening to them as well as we've got, we've got custom GPTs custom, you know, AI that we've built into our program that helps people to kind of gather data points to, to, to kind of augment both their thinking, their research, and then package it in ways that can be expressed in a value-based proposal. So, so that's the process. It's about focusing on the right clients and problems and then going under the hood of those problems, understanding how to articulate those problems in, in ways that we viscerally understood. So you can express the value and then charge for it. And we find that our members can frequently raise their rates 25 to 50% in the course of the 10 week program because it's not that complicated. You just gotta do the back work, right? You can express it in ways that are viscerally understood. People will pay to solve their most painful problems. In fact, they'll be happy to pay those reasonable rates.

Tom Jackobs: 24:18

Yeah. Absolutely. And it's, it's doing that work that I feel like a lot of health and wellness and heart-led business owners don't do enough of to show the value of what they're providing.'cause it is so valuable what, what a lot of these folks are doing. And it's just they talk about the features. Well, we're gonna do diet and exercise and we're going do hormone replacement. Nobody cares about that. They've, they care about the outcome and the value that it's gonna bring to their life.

Sam Lee: 24:48

Yep. Yep.

Tom Jackobs: 24:50

It's crazy.

Sam Lee: 24:51

And, and there's a, there was a great study that Google did a number of years ago. It's, it's now probably five, six years old. But I think the data holds true that two thirds of the buying decision, um, that your clients are making is actually emotional. It's not logical. It's not about losing this much, you know, weight or, you know, seeing your BMI change to this level. It, it's about how it's gonna make you feel. So being able to articulate that value in ways that are understood emotionally as well as logically the two sides of the equation is so important. And, and that's what the value-based pricing framework is all about.

Tom Jackobs: 25:29

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. People buy on emotion and they justify with logic.

Sam Lee: 25:33

Bingo.

Tom Jackobs: 25:33

You know, a hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah.

Sam Lee: 25:35

Yup.

Tom Jackobs: 25:35

That's great. That's great advice and, and great advice all through. I can't believe that we're just about at that time as well. So, Sam, how can people learn more about, IndeCollective and getting involved in getting better at their, their business.

Sam Lee: 25:49

Absolutely. Well, anybody is welcome to check us out online. We've got a lot of great resources that you can find on our website, indecollective. co. That's I-N-D-E-C-O-L-L-E-C-T-I-V-E dot C-O. We've got a podcast that you can find there. A newsletter and we'll include in the show notes a free module on value-based pricing. In case anybody that's listening wants to tune into that, it's an hour long. You'll learn the value-based pricing framework for yourself. It comes with an action sheet and a custom GPT so you can shift into action and hopefully raise your rates like our members do. So yeah, a lot of great resources on our website as well.

Tom Jackobs: 26:28

Oh, that's awesome. Well, that, that, that alone, the value-based pricing resource is so valuable for so many people. Yeah. We'll make sure we link that up into the show notes so they can take, take that and get some great value out of it as well.

Sam Lee: 26:42

Amazing. Amazing.

Tom Jackobs: 26:43

Yeah. Sam, thank you so much for spending time out of your day and helping tons and thousands of people taking the time from helping them to talk to us and help more heart-led business owners. So I really do appreciate you and your time.

Sam Lee: 26:56

Thank you, Tom for having me. I appreciate it.

Tom Jackobs: 26:58

Absolutely. And thank you listeners and those watching the show on YouTube. We do really appreciate you tuning in today and make sure that you're checking out everything that Sam Lee is doing and we'll again, we'll provide that all in the show notes down below. Just click on the show notes and you can see all the links down there as well. if you could do me a favor, and that is to share the show with somebody that you know, that might be wanting to start a heart-led business, but kinda struggling with it. Or somebody that has one and is struggling with it and needs some advice from our lovely guests that we've had, especially Sam today. And until next time, lead with your heart.

Speaker 2: 27:35

You've been listening to The Heart-Led Business Show, hosted by Tom Jackobs. Join us next time for another inspiring journey into the heart of business.