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

Welcome back to the Heart-Led Business Show where passion meets Purpose. Today we've got the one and only Jim Padilla in the virtual studio. You can think of him as the Godfather of sales. And Jim has lived more lives than most TV dramas from surviving the streets and jail before 20 to mastering high stakes leadership, he turned chaos into his own classroom. Now he helps entrepreneurs do the same, transforming stress into strategy and setbacks into serious success. And now on the Heart-Led business show, Jim brings raw truth, resilience, and the kind of wisdom you can only earn the hard way. Jim, welcome to the show.

Jim Padilla: 1:17

Thanks for having me, Tom. So good to see you.

Tom Jackobs: 1:19

You too. And we've been working together for a couple months with a mutual client and I'm really excited to dive into your story and your Heart-Led business story as well.'Cause on my side, I've been watching what you guys are doing and I'm loving it. And I'm really curious about your backstory as well living on the streets and going to jail. So we're gonna have to dive into that a little bit also. But before we start, what's your definition of a Heart-Led business?

Jim Padilla: 1:46

Well, to me Heart-Led business is one that has to run through people. I mean, heart is the organ that drives a human. It's what's essential when that stops moving, the human stops moving. So when the heart stops moving and my opinion, the business stops moving. It's gotta be all about the people.

Tom Jackobs: 2:02

Yeah. And so the people is like the blood, right? And then it's moving. The heart is moving it all around.

Jim Padilla: 2:08

Yeah. That's what makes it feel, it's what makes it go. It's you know, the red and the white blood cells, right? You know, one is fighting you know, illness. The other one is carrying the diseases away. The other one's moving traffic around. It's like everything relies on what happens inside the heart and that that funnels the blood.'Cause once that stops, then all traffic stops and your business is gonna be the same.

Tom Jackobs: 2:28

Yeah, it's like a heart attack and you have a blackish on one of their, your arteries. That's a great analogy. I've not heard that, but I love it. It totally makes sense. A business can be a living, breathing entity of sort.

Jim Padilla: 2:39

Yeah, we're big on humanizing. You know, we work with pretty big enterprises and actually that's our new podcast that we're in The process of launching is the Entrepreneur to Enterprise Evolution. But we work with some pretty big scale companies, and our specialty is being able to scale those companies while maintaining the human side. It's like the bigger you get, you must focus on humanizing the brand.

Tom Jackobs: 3:00

That's an interesting take and I like that. How do you do that, in terms of keeping the heart wind, scaling? Because I can imagine a lot of entrepreneurs that have those big visions. They're like, I'm just looking at the numbers. And they're not really looking at the people and the process and humanizing it. Tell us about of how you advise them.

Jim Padilla: 3:20

Yeah, you know, it's interesting because the things that I learned. While growing up and, you know, being in an abusive environment and being in prison and on the streets and gangs my biggest weapon was learning how to read the room and reading the room was constantly assessing who's there, who's friend or foe, who's your biggest threat, who's potential ally and mostly how do you get them To work together. How do they serve each other, which makes me valuable to all of them, which kept me safe. And so that's all I did as a kid. I didn't know that this was gonna become a decoded business model. You know, 40 years later in life that would generate hundreds of millions of dollars. But it just become baked into the DNA. And so I could not at any point in time worry about me because I had to be so focused on them. And so I've learned that business works the same way. It's not the only way to do business, but it's the only way I've learned to win at business. And so I have to stay focused on you because then if I'm, if I'm not focused on me, then I don't have any fears or concerns. If I'm focused on you, then everything is how do you win what's coming? What might be coming, what just happened, and how do we assess it, right? So it's consistently putting all of the effort and the energy and the tension on you, which then makes it a lot easier for us to move and navigate. And then even if, you know, it doesn't mean things go great all the time, but when they don't, we know it helps us communicate it because it's always coming through the lens of how does this affect and impact what you're doing, how you're doing it, why you should be doing it et cetera. So it tends to bring a component to the business that most people aren't thinking of. I did a video on it not too long ago, but we have a tracking component. We switch the KPIs so that all the KPIs are focused on you. So most of the time, if we say our revenue targets are how many leads, how many clicks, how many likes, you know, CPMs everything is centered on how many things are coming to us. And which is great, but that is not necessarily a predictor of what's happening. Well, for your customer base. And so we switch them all around so that all the KPIs are centered around what's happening with the customers. So if our focus is lead acquisition for the customers, revenue for the customers projects completed for the customers, show up rates for the customers, all of those things, then all of those equate to. Us getting more leads, more likes, more follows, more shares, more revenue, more profit. But if you do it the other way around, it doesn't, you can get more, more leads and more profit without guaranteeing that the clients win. But if you focus on the clients first, then you guarantee that you win.

Tom Jackobs: 5:50

Oh, I love that too. Yeah. It takes me back to kinda that Zig Ziglar quote. You can get everything in life that you want when you help enough you get what you want.

Jim Padilla: 5:57

Definitely, definitely. We've been living it out and like I said, I wish I could say I was designed on purpose that way. It just evolved.

Tom Jackobs: 6:04

And I love how you've taken what some people would say is quite a tragic childhood and growing up and you've taken the learnings that you had from that time and applied it then to how you are running a business as well. So I think that's absolutely brilliant how you've been able to kind of transition like that.

Jim Padilla: 6:22

Yeah. Well, you know, it's funny'cause when I roll with Jesus. I'm a Bible believer in Christian. I'm a Bible right here. One of my pastors in a men's group that I'm a part of, he said recently stuck with me, he said, you know, if you squeeze an orange and orange juice should come out and if you squeeze a lemon. Lemon juice should come out. So when you squeeze a Christian, only the Christ should come out. And if that's not the case, then you got work to do, right? And which I thought it's a very easy visual to remember as it is again, reciting it months later. And it's the same thing here. It's like the only thing that could come out of me was what was put in me. And so that's who I am. That's who I was. That's all I knew. So when it, when somebody says, Hey, let's, how are you gonna build a business? I'm like, well, this is all I know, so let's do that. You know? And then you just start. Then after over time, you know, and you start generating, hundreds of millions of dollars. You learn more things, you learn different things. But it all comes from those roots.

Tom Jackobs: 7:12

Tell us a little bit about your business and what you do.

Jim Padilla: 7:14

Well, we are very blessed to be a key player in scaling fast growth companies. We, people come to us when they're looking for, typically they're coming looking for sales team or they think they're looking for sales team. And we plug and play. We used to be a fractional sales division when this started 15 years ago. And we would come with. Senior VP, team leaders, project managers, as many sales team as you need. The shift that we've made in the recent few years because of so many government regulations. Instead of hiring salespeople that work for us, we now recruit them that work for you. But the rest of the business model is very still the same. We come in and we will oversee Your sales team will recruit'em, we'll develop'em, we'll train them, we'll run'em. But on the flip side of that is we will go in and to create your company so that it is a revenue producing machine, and that it will replicate the founder magic that you bring so that a sales person who doesn't have to be a unicorn closer. But just can be a unicorn human who can be on brand, on value, and on presence for you, a wrap them in a great offer and a great system, and they're gonna consistently and predictably overachieve.

Tom Jackobs: 8:17

How such a niche business. I'd love to learn how you started it.

Jim Padilla: 8:21

Well, I wish that was some amazing foresight. We just said yes to something that we had absolutely no idea what it was. The industry was needing it, quote unquote, in the coaching world that we were living, that we were in for a long time. You know, Bill Barron, who was an up and coming rockstar at the time in the coaching world, was about ready to do his first 7 figure launch. And he had a great company and a great team, but he didn't have a sales team. And we said, sure, we'll do it. And I, at the time didn't even know what a launch was. So literally went out that day bought Jeff Walker's book, launch book. It's on the shelf right back there. I've read it in a weekend. Recruited 12 of my friends and clients. And between that and a Google Doc, we jumped in and did led a$1.6 million wildly successful launch that we call the Bad News in the Bears in a Google Doc.'cause we had nothing else and didn't even know what we were doing. Two weeks later. A line at the door was born. And so for the next 2 years we generated, a hundred million dollars worth of revenue doing launches and live events. And then people started wanting us to stick around between live launches and live events. So we said yes to that, not realizing that that was actually a completely different business model and we had to learn all of that over again. I think every single thing that we have gained over time is because we learned it all by doing it wrong first

Tom Jackobs: 9:33

Yeah.

Jim Padilla: 9:33

which is the most expensive way to do, to grow a business. So try not to do that.

Tom Jackobs: 9:37

True. You wanna hire somebody that's made, we wanna hire you because you've made all the mistakes already.

Jim Padilla: 9:42

Exactly.

Tom Jackobs: 9:42

So we don't have to spend all the money making those mistakes. But what a great way to learn at the same time, it's some of the best learnings I've had were from some of the worst mistakes I've ever had.

Jim Padilla: 9:53

Yes.

Tom Jackobs: 9:53

So how do you maintain then with this growth and the founders and a lot of the clients that you're having, it sounds like they're very like, money focused. How do you maintain the people part of that in the heart?

Jim Padilla: 10:05

Well, the big lesson I think in the side of this is that you have to remember The expertise that you bring, people are coming to you because you have value. Our first couple of years in this that didn't land on me I thought I was just privileged to work for them especially'cause we were working with a lot of who's who in the business game. I was like, oh, Zig Ziglar Foundation. Awesome. Kevin Harrington. So I was like, honored. I'm like, oh sure. And so I thought, well I had to be perfect and I couldn't screw anything up and I didn't wanna ask them for any help because then that would mean I'm screwing up and we actually have a resource we created years ago called, the lessons and blessings of scaling, your first million dollars. And it was everything we did wrong and that first year. And we thought that if you hired us, we had to do everything perfectly. And so if we came across a problem, I didn't want to come to you and go, well, how do you normally handle this with your clients?'cause I thought I was supposed to have the answer. Right. And then we were working with a very well known expert now, but at the time we killed a launch. I mean, we killed it. Not great, killed it bad like it died. And the goal was a$700,000 launch and we ended up doing like 125,000. By the time we really synced up with the client was like, at the end of the launch there was nothing we could do about adjusting. And she was like, why didn't you come to me for help? And I was like, it hit me in the face. I didn't know I could like the biggest. Light bulb in the world that went off because she would've preferred, she would've said, Hey, just, we asked me. We could, I assumed you're handling it. And so, I'm trying to ask you and you kept me at arm's length, right? So you have to recognize that you're only stepping in To work with somebody, your client's results are not your responsibility. Your client's guidance is your responsibility. Your client's service is your responsibility. The results is negotiated upfront and it's co-created in it's owned by both people. Right. You have to recognize that. And that was something that I didn't recognize until later in the game. And then we had another client who you know, similar. We did the opposite. We did everything she said. She was very hands-on and very control, and she was doing things that I knew we shouldn't be doing. But it was her company and it was her campaign. And so we said, okay. And then total opposite direction of the previous scenario. Same result. It's like you and that's where I learned a backbone in the business to say, look, you hired us. You brought us in because of our expertise. Now here's what my expertise is saying. Let us handle this. You handle that. If we do it the way you are saying it, I can't guarantee this outcome that you've hired me for. Right.

Tom Jackobs: 12:24

For people that are listening to this show, a lot of them are solopreneurs, solo practitioners and coaches and consultants. I wanna just really double down on what you just said as well, that when you go into a relationship with a client, it is a relationship. It is a two-way street, right? And I love what you said. The client results are not your responsibility, but the client relationship is your responsibility. I'm paraphrasing what you said. On the flip side, you have this laying down the road where you should be playing and the guardrails are too much oversight and then not enough questions to make sure that you're doing what you need to be doing to service the client. And I think. Myself included, and lots of other practitioner have made that same mistake of either not asking or not telling the client what they need to hear.

Jim Padilla: 13:11

Yeah, it's interesting'cause in that first scenario that was the first time I ever heard the word abdicate. I may have heard it before, but never in any context that I could recall. But what had we allowed her to do was abdicate her responsibility because we took it from her, essentially. Right? And so what I've learned from that is now we also look for clients who are trying to abdicate theirs. So when they go, Hey, you're on, this is yours. Go fix it. You go, make it happen. It's like, we're not the magic wand. We're not the fairy godmother. We're great at this. I can walk into your company, any company once I know the core story and the moving parts. We don't even need your input. Once we know what you're trying to do, we can build your entire infrastructure framework, be able to make this thing go. However, then it's my company and we're not doing that. So when you want that, that's wonderful. You're gonna be attached right here like that. In this particular offer that we are working with that, it's called the copilot program called the copilot. Because for a reason, because we sit in the seat next to you and we work together.

Tom Jackobs: 14:05

You're the first officer, not the pilot.

Jim Padilla: 14:07

And we are helping you run your company with wisdom and input from somebody who can think at your speed, who's been there before, who's helping to make these decisions, but we're not running it. And then checking in with you later.

Tom Jackobs: 14:19

Exactly. It's that would be awesome. It's Hey, here's my company. You do all the work, I'll take all the money.

Jim Padilla: 14:25

I would say, yeah, if we can do that. It'll cost you an awful lot more. We'll pay you a commission.

Tom Jackobs: 14:30

Have you ever run into a situation? I know the answer to this is probably yes, but I always like to ask this question, when you wanna service and with your heart and that's all going great and but Then there's this money issue. We need to make payroll. We need to make rent, or whatever happens. And now there's this decision. Do I still lead with my heart or am I gonna go get that quick buck so I can pay off or do what I need to do with my business? How do you approach tough decisions like that?

Jim Padilla: 14:58

Well, I made a decision a long time ago, and I call it the Las Vegas mentality. I've never won huge at Las Vegas because I've never bet huge. We can be in Vegas for an entire week and we have been for basketball tournaments and different things for our kids and I'll have a budget. Okay. I'm gonna spend$500 gambling, what I would call, like lose$500 gambling this week. I would usually wait till like the end of the week. I would spend the most of the time just watching people and doing stuff. And then I would get, okay, I'm gonna do it on this table. And then I would bet, and if I lost the 500 it was gone. If I won, I would take the first 500 and put it in my pocket, and then I would let the rest of it write. So that way I didn't lose anything. But what happened is like one time I got it up to like that 500 became like$5,600. And I was losing my mind because I was like, this is 10 x of my bet you know and I said, I gotta take this off the table and go. I said, let's, because most people leave it on the table and they let it ride. That's a Las Vegas mentality. They leave, you leave it on the table.'cause you wanna squeeze every drop you can out of it. I don't wanna do that. I wanna take some off the table so that my humanity can be in restored and in place. It was fun, it was entertaining, and I made a few grand and I'm good. I don't need to let it ride so I can lose it all. And I think that's what happens in business. We try to squeeze every ounce of every inch and every ounce of energy and dollars out of something to the detriment of the company'cause if you try to do that, you're going to lose. Cause clients are gonna lose team. You're gonna lose opportunity, I don't want to say say publicly, but we do have an unwritten policy around here that if somebody is typically if an employee needs to, argue or negotiate or fight for that extra a hundred dollars, it's always gonna mean way more to them than it's gonna mean to us. So we're gonna give it to'em. I don't need you to prove it to me. If they say, Hey, I had this and I swear this deal came in and blah, blah, blah, and this was set, we could spend an hour or a day fighting over that a hundred dollars, or we can just give it to you. Keep the humanity in this. This person's fighting for this'cause they need it. Not that I don't need it, but what it means is I'm never gonna hit the big, big, big, big, big, big deal because we're gonna pull it off the table and say, okay, let's keep the humanity in this. We still win plenty big. We just don't win the super, super duper big.

Tom Jackobs: 17:08

Yeah. And when you shoot for the super, super big wins. You have to have a lot of losses along the way to learn and to get to that point. That totally makes sense. And what a great analogy as well. You should be the godfather of analogies, all the ones that you have. And taking the profit or. Keeping that humanity because again the dollar amounts, if you're negotiating with a potential prospect or an employee or what have you, the time and energy spent for that extra incremental, It's not always worth it. and. I think it sours the relationship sometimes when you get to some really intense negotiations and I think I think it's a advantage to go, Hey, I'm the bigger guy here. but I'll let you have that. You can have that. then it's oh my gosh, this is amazing. And everybody wins at that point.

Jim Padilla: 17:57

Yeah. And an important thing to remember too, just from a tactical perspective is, I do a lot of psychology studying. I'm sure you do as well in the sales game. And I study a lot, it's very common right now to study CIA and FBI tactics and, Navy seals, et cetera. And one thing that I was reading in a study is that the two most important peaks of time that your customers or people remember of any experience is the peak of the experience and the last moment of the experience. And if you don't handle it right, that a hundred dollars could be the last moment. It Not only could it burn your bridge, it could cost, it will flavor and taint the relationship and how they remember it. It could have been 3 years of wonderful, amazing awesomeness, but it ended because of a hundred dollars. And that's all I remember.

Tom Jackobs: 18:41

I've seen that, I've seen that before. I'm sure it's happened in my business as well at times. But yeah, that's absolutely right. People remember that very last experience in the peak experience. And hopefully they're both good.

Jim Padilla: 18:52

Yes,

Tom Jackobs: 18:54

because we've won five star reviews. So Jim, tell us a little bit about your business and how people can get ahold of you and learn more about the great work that you guys are doing.

Jim Padilla: 19:02

Well, we focus on companies that are scaling to exit. We build legendary enterprises for visionary leaders and for us, it's not that we can't support people or don't love people who are not seeking exponential growth. It's just we're built for big. We're built for speed, and we move fast and we challenge limits. If you're just trying to take some baby steps and maybe just make a few more sales, that's wonderful. We just don't have a lot for you. I got a podcast. I've got a YouTube channel with 5,500 videos on it, and there's plenty of world-class content in there, but if you know that you want the mountaintop and you just need help getting there, that's where we run. And that's system structure, strategy. Everything from how do you get yourself found to, how do you onboard team to, how do you recruit the right people to, how do you show up as the right leader for those people? And then how do you run? Fast and not hurt yourself. We have again, our YouTube channel where you should always be checking out. We have a few podcasts in there as well, including our new one coming up, the Entrepreneur to Enterprise Evolution, and which can be some world-class case studies, which I already have. Kevin Harrington and Michael Burnoff and several other work. Pretty high end leaders around that. And most, a lot of people who've exited companies and built big, big enterprises. But what I really wanna do is on the way to generating over a half a billion dollars worth of results, which is a term I hate saying'cause I don't like that in business we're identified by that number. It's like a brand we wear.

Tom Jackobs: 20:25

Yeah.

Jim Padilla: 20:26

But it helps that people understand that we we're not guessing at this. We've figured some things out. And what I wanna do is, I've done this for the last year now, I'm gonna give you a resource I'll share with you in a second, but I also wanna just give you our number. Write down this phone number, and it's my Google Voice line, it's my business text line transparency. My team can access it and stuff largely because I'm the bottleneck. If not just reach out and text us, and if you have any question about anything going on, growing your business. We'll help you or steer you to the right person who can or send you a resource that will help. I don't ever wanna lose the touch, the connection to the marketplace and to humans. Plus I, selfishly, I wanna know everything that's going on in the marketplace, so I know I'm always on top of all the right strategies. So if I know what you're doing, I can speak into it and I can keep it in my knowledge base. So my cell phone number is(916) 587 1946. Now, I promise you I will see it. I don't promise you they'll be the first one to see it. So if it's private to me, don't send it to me. If it's private to me, you probably have my other cell phone number, but just know that I will see it and we'll respond, and we'll make sure that you get your question answered.

Tom Jackobs: 21:26

Awesome. We'll, I copied that down, and we're gonna put that into the show notes, as well, so that people have that available to them.

Jim Padilla: 21:32

Yeah. Also I wanted to offer something to you guys as a resource. We have everything we've created, every tool or resource we've created has been to help us or help our teams to perform for our clients. And we have something that we call the 3 Step Sales Advantage and our twist on a two-step sales process, which is a lot of people set an appointment, close an appointment, right? It's fairly common, but there is a missing piece in the middle and it's the third step. And what most people don't do, I don't see it almost anywhere. And it's the magic that we call controlling the journey. So if you have an appointment. And then you have a show up and that that show up could be a book deployment, it could be an event, it could be a number of things. It's the next step could be the webinar. If we don't control the journey in the middle, that means we're leaving it up to the customer to determine the journey in the middle. And once you come into my world, you're not qualified to navigate that journey without me. So I have to ensure that I lay down the breadcrumbs, the steps, and the things that must be necessary so that you can win at each step in the process. In our world, and this 3 step sales advantage is a 30 minute training really love how it laid out. And so we've cut out the fat on the beginning and at the end, so you got 30 minutes worth of training. Fantastic resource. And that'll be in the show notes for you and I would love to see how it works for you.

Tom Jackobs: 22:47

Awesome. And that's that 3 step sales masterclass link you gave us as well. We'll put that all in there as well.

Jim Padilla: 22:54

Fantastic.

Tom Jackobs: 22:54

Jim, thank you so much for coming onto the show today and sharing your wisdom, sharing your stories quite fascinating, life and career that you've had as well. So thank you so much for sharing that with us.

Jim Padilla: 23:05

Absolutely my pleasure. Just love to see people doing great things and keep up all the work that you're doing because I get all your podcasts in my inbox and love seeing how active and busy you're staying helping a lot of people.

Tom Jackobs: 23:16

Yeah. Awesome. And thank you listeners for watching the show today. We really do appreciate it and make sure you're checking out everything that Jim's doing and we're gonna provide all of that into the show notes. So make sure you Get down in there into the show notes, check that out. And while you're there, You might see a review button, and I would really appreciate if you would give the show a rating review. It really just helps spread the word about the show. And for those folks that are looking for advice on how to start and lead and have a really good Heart-Led business, this is a show for them. So send it on over to'em. And until next time, lead with your heart.

Speaker 2: 23:52

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.