Tired of traditional talk? People pontificating about this or that? The left or the right? Sometimes the truth is just off lost in the noise. Having learned life lessons the hard way, Chuck Gallagher, international speaker and author, cuts through the noise to share truth through transparency!
Here’s a link the the show with Joe Calloway!
Nationally known guests talk about what’s important to you – your life, your concerns and your success. So tune in, turn on to Straight Talk with Chuck Gallagher.
Now, here’s your host, Chuck Gallagher.
CHUCK: Oh, my goodness! It’s great to be with you today. Welcome to Straight Talk Radio. Hi, this is Chuck Gallagher and we’re here to discuss issues and ideas that can transform your life.
Today, we’ve got a great show lined up for you. I am so excited. Some years back I recall emerging from a circumstance where I had made some incredibly bad choices. And when I say incredibly bad choices, I mean some incredibly bad choices – choices that changed my life. And the one thing I knew was that in order to change my life, I had to change my choices. Now, those are very powerful words. They are also very true. And I knew that if I were to find a second chance, so to speak, I knew that I had to be the best at what matters the most, which, by the way, is the title of a new book by international speaker and author and my guest today, Joe Calloway.
Joe has the kind of career that most people aspire to. He is the author of some outstanding books, like Becoming a Category of One, Never By Chance, 1ndispensible, and I love this title, Work Like You’re Showing Off! I think that’s great, Joe. Joe helps organizations focus on what is truly important, inspires constant improvement and most importantly to me, motivates people to immediate action.
So to help us answer that question about how we can be the best is my guest today, a man who knows a lot about being the best – Joe Calloway. Joe, welcome to the show!
JOE: Chuck, it is great to be here. I wouldn’t be anywhere else right now. This is where I want to be.
CHUCK: Well, you’re the man that I appreciate that kindness. I’m really excited to have you on the show. I’d really like to start the conversation about your book, Be The Best At What Matters Most. You state in the book, “Be the best at what matters most and you will succeed.” And then it says, “Part of me says that I should now just write the end.” You didn’t stop there, so tell me about your motivation to write this book.
JOE: Well, I’ll tell you where the motivation came from, Chuck. It’s interesting; a lot of times when I write a book, I have to think up kind of a premise for it, but this one really came to me, and this is what it was. Potentially during the recession, companies and individuals, I mean, just people that had their own business or people in their jobs, it seems like people got caught up with looking for extras and wow factors and how can I come up with something really unique and special and different to advance my own career or to advance my own business. It has finally given me a thought, I think a lot of us are going off on a wild goose chase. But what we ought to do is look at the absolute basics of what we do, those handful of things, those core things in our work – and the same thing can apply to our life for that matter – those things that matter the most and if we really, really excel on those things would be fine. Would be better than fine, we truly will be successful.
So the book was really kind of a reaction to people saying, “Oh, don’t worry about the basics, you need to do something special,” and my response is, “Listen, if you get the basics right, that is special. If you want to be different, be better. That’s the ultimate different.” So that, in a nutshell, that’s the concept for the book.
CHUCK: You know, I have to say, I really do agree with that and you’re right, when the recession hit, of course, at the time I didn’t know there was going to be a recession, and the next thing you know it’s like, “What just changed in our world?”
JOE: Yeah.
CHUCK: But you’re right, people are looking for the wow factor, that thing that sets them apart, and the fact of the matter is it seems like the organizations, the businesses that succeeded, the individuals that succeeded, succeeded not because they were so unique or different, they succeeded because they were really, really very good at doing what they do.
JOE: It’s interesting, Chuck. I think, if you look at the list of the best-selling anything… There actually is such a list, interbrand.com has the list of the world’s top 100 brands. And if you look at the top brands in the world and if you look at the best-selling things that we [05:54]the world, there’s nothing incredibly unique about them except for the fact they are unique in it they are really, really good and they are really, really consistent. I mean, the classic example would be Coca Cola, which is the no.1 brand in the world. You open a can of Coke, you know exactly what’s going to be in there every single time.
And by the way, I love a wow factor, I love to put the cherry on top of the cake, but my whole thing is be sure you make the best cake first, then put a cherry on top of it. And to beat the ultimate wow factor, the ultimate wow factor is when people say, “Wow! These guys get it right every single time.” To me, that’s a wow factor, that consistency, absolute dependability and performance. Knowing that to do that, you’ve got to always keep improving, you’ve got to always keep innovating, you’ve got to always introduce new ideas. Certainly you have to innovate always, but I really do think that if we keep our eye on the ball and do those things that matter most would be absolutely fine.
CHUCK: Well, that’s right and it’s kind of funny you’re talking about putting the cherry on the cake. You’re right; you put the cherry on the cake and people say, “Oh, my goodness, what a beautiful cake,” and then they bite into it and it’s dry and been in the freezer too long or whatever the circumstance. Well, you’re going to go buy another cake for the folks just because it happens to look pretty on the outside.
JOE: Exactly.
CHUCK: You know, you certainly use a lot of business examples in the book and I get the clear impression that there are principles that apply to work and in business and you’re really good about listing those and talking about them, but I also assume they apply to what we call “work in your personal life”. So, did you intend this book to work on both fronts?
JOE: No, it’s funny and I absolutely agree with that and the thing is, I mean, I can brag about these principles, but they’re not mine. I didn’t come up with these ideas. I’m pretty much just a reporter here. [laughs] I’m writing about what I observe that works in the world, and, yeah, it’s a book written for people that have a business or in a business or whether it’s their job or whether they own the business. I mean, there’s all sorts of people that buy the book and like the book, but it is interesting, and it’s just as interesting to me as it is to anybody else, that they have the same principles of getting clarity on what’s truly important.
You talked about making bad choices in your life. I think everybody’s gone through that. I’ve made some humdingers in my life and I look at maybe most of those bad choices and I think they could have been avoided if I had had clarity and focus on what truly mattered the most in my life. I’ve got some mileage on me now, it took me a while to get here, but I think I’ve gotten pretty good clarity on what’s most important in my life and what I found then is it what makes the decision-making so much easier. It’s almost like you’re kind of making decisions in advance because you’ve gotten this clarity on what matters most. So, yeah, I think it does apply to life, maybe every bit as much as it does to business.
CHUCK: You know, Joe, you said something a second ago that raises a kind of an odd question. Maybe it’s off on a bit of attention, but you said you had hell of a mileage under your belt and therefore have learned more life lessons, and I certainly have the same, and I sit back and the question that popped in my mind was, “I wonder if there is a generational difference? I wonder if you have to have that life, if you have to have the years in order to find that clarity?” Or do you think the younger generation, that group that’s below us or two, can find it easier? Where do you see that?
JOE: You know, it’s interesting. I immediately default to when you were talking about that, Chuck, I go straight to my role as… If ever there was an older dad, that’s me. I’m 61 and I had a 12-year old daughter and an 8-year old daughter, which is a glorious and wonderful thing, and what’s interesting particularly with the 12-year old is we’re starting to talk about these sorts of things, like what our [11:04] and what’s important. She’s a really good kid and really smart, way smarter than I was, and by smart I don’t mean just book-smart, I mean life-smart, but we talk about things like, “Make decisions that you’ll be proud of. Make decisions that will make you feel good about who you are.”
And it’s funny, Chuck, that thing I was talking about a few minutes ago, this deciding in advance, my daughter and I were having a conversation just the other day about, you know, as she goes into her teen years, she knows she’s going to be facing some tricky situations, and I said, “Well, think about them in advance. Think about what your response is going to be in advance so that you know what you’re going to do when you’re faced with this or that though choice because you’ve already thought it through.” See, I didn’t do very much of that when I was growing up so I was shooting from the hip for a lot of things and I wish I had gotten better guidance and I think the same holds true for business.
CHUCK: Well, Joe, I agree with you and look, we have had the opportunity in this first segment to talk with Joe Calloway about his book Be The Best At What Matters Most, and we’re going to take a short break here on Straight Talk Radio and we’ll be back in a few minutes so stay with us, we’ve got more to come with Joe Calloway.
[Commercial break]CHUCK: Well, welcome back to Straight Talk Radio. Hi, this is Chuck Gallagher and I have a wonderful guest, Joe Calloway, who is the author of this incredible book, Be The Best At What Matters Most and Joe and I had the opportunity now to talk a bit about that and how this applies not only to business but to our personal lives.
Joe, I’ll start off by saying this, I referenced in our first segment that I’d made some pretty significant mistakes and I remember trying to recover from those and getting the very first job. And the first job that I had, following what I’ll call my recovery or a [13:31] that I had in federal prison, not something I’m particularly proud of, but part of life experience that I had was selling cemetery property door to door.
JOE: Um-hm.
CHUCK: And as you can imagine, that’s probably not the most exciting thing in the world, butif you knock on enough doors, somebody is going to say they’d been thinking about it. At least you know that if the person is alive, they’re a potential prospect. But I knew that I needed to be the best at what I did. I was highly motivated to be the best at what I did. And the end result was, within nine months I became their top sales person and that’s not something certainly to brag about, that’s not the point of this, but because I was the best, the people asked me, “Can you teach other people to do this?”
JOE: Um-hm.
CHUCK: And I say, “You know, I believe I can,” and the location where I was assigned became one of the top performing locations. And within less than a year, they said, “Well, can you teach other locations to do this?” Soon enough I was responsible for the states of South Carolina and Georgia, then North Carolina, Tennessee, South Carolina and Georgia, and within six years or so, I’d become a Senior Vice President in Sales & Marketing in a publically traded company. And people would ask me, “How do you do that? I mean, you’re a convicted felon on one hand and you’re a Senior VP of Sales & Marketing on the other.” And the answer was, “I started off with a concept that I needed to be the best at what mattered the most.” I needed to change my life by changing my choices.
JOE: Um-hm.
CHUCK: Now, you talk about defining the problem. In fact, you state, “Einstein said if we had one hour to save the world, I would spend 55 minutes defining the problem and 5 minutes finding a solution,” which is kind of incredible to hear, so how do you that playing out in business and in people’s personal lives?
JOE: I think that, and I can speak about this with greater [15:42]because I’m so guilty of it, Chuck, which is I love to immediately jump into action. One of the things that I really like, that I did with the book Be The Best At What Matters Most, is that I’ve got questions at the end of each chapter that are meant for if you’re working on your own by yourself, you can ask the questions to yourself, but if you’ve got a group of people that you work with – I’m getting feedback from folks that these questions are really helpful – to help them think through instead of jumping straight to, “Okay, here’s what we need to do,” to step back one step and go, “Wait a minute, wait a minute. What business are we in here?!” Because we could do this, we could do that, we could do this other thing, but do we want to do all three of those? Maybe we just want to do one of those? Anyway, the whole point is to get some real thought to, “Wait a minute, where am I going? What is it that I am trying to accomplish? What makes the most [16:53] for me before I define the problem or define the opportunity, before I jump immediately into action.” I’m a big fan of action, but I think too often we confuse activity with productivity. One of the things I say in the book is, “Winners are not the people that do the most. Winners are the people that do the most important.” I think that’s the distinction I’m trying to make.
CHUCK: You know, that makes so much sense and I think, from the feedback that I’ve had when you listen to people and they listen to shows like this or hear people speak, that’s the one thing that seems like there’s just a lot of clutter. Cluttering people, clamoring for attention, then you need to be involved in social media, you need to do this, you need to do that, and you get so involved in the stuff that you forget the focus of what you’re doing. You’re absolutely right! Being focused gets you the kind of result you really are seeking.
JOE: It’s interesting, Chuck, since I wrote the book, my awareness of all the ideas in the book has become heightened and more on the lookout. It’s funny, I was doing an interview just a few days ago and they said, “If you had to point to one, just one common factor among people and businesses that are consistently successful, what would it be?” and I said, “I honestly think it would be that they have tremendous focus and great clarity on what are the most important things need to be done in order to, fill in the blank, make our customers happy, make the best product, whatever it is.” But I really think Steve Jobs of Apple is the classic example of that. He had just almost otherworldly focused on what needed to be done. The current CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, speaking about Steve Jobs, said, and I love the way he put this, I think it could have applied to any of us or that we would want it to apply to us. He said, “Steve had an ability to cut through the noise better than anybody I’ve seen in my life,” and that’s a pretty powerful thing to be able to do.
CHUCK: Yes, and I don’t know if you’ve read the book or books about Steve, he certainly was quite a character, at one level, but I have to admit, when you read the book and you just kind of absorb it, I cannot quite imagine what it was like to work for him—
JOE: Oh, my Gosh!
CHUCK: But I’m sure it was a bear, that’s probably a nice way of putting it—
JOE: Yeah, no kidding.
CHUCK: But at the same time how powerful would it be to be able to say, “I worked at Apple when Steve Jobs started the…” You know, I want a cell phone with one button. And everybody was like, “Remember the one button days when everybody was clamoring to have a Blackberry,” and now that’s not what you clamor for.
JOE: Well, you know, that’s the thing. I used Apple and Apple products as an example in my speeches that I give after being [20:13] positive power of making things simple. And as a matter of fact, while we’re on the subject, one of my favorite quotes is Steve Jobs said, he said, “My mantra has become simplicity.” He said, “It takes a lot of hard work to get your thinking clean enough to make things simple, but it’s work the work, because if you can make things simple, you can move mountains.” And that cuts right through what you were just referencing, which are even to Apple products, which are so simple, they don’t even come with an instruction manual. You just turn them on and it’s almost intuitive to know how to use them. So, yeah, I think simplicity is extremely powerful force. I think a lot of times we are all guilty of, and we’ve probably thought to ourselves, “You know, I’m making this way more complicated than it needs to be.”
CHUCK: Right, we do and, I don’t know about you, but I’m involved in several businesses and I get so frustrated at the complexity that seems to come out of various departments when the reality is there’s only two things we do: stay focused on those two things and be the best at them, and we won’t have a problem, but it sure is hard to get people to want to give up the complexity. I almost think complexity in some cases, especially in business, is justification for the job instead of thinking simplicity makes the job better.
JOE: I’ve said it when I talk to people whose businesses are struggling, I’ve noticed a tendency for them to sometimes say things along the line, “You’ve got to understand. This is a very, very complicated business.” And yet, when I talk to people whose businesses are absolutely thriving, it’s not at all unusual to hear them say something like, “Joe, you know, at the end of the day, this is really a pretty simple business.”
CHUCK: Right!
JOE: And I think you’re right. I think it’s a justification for not doing well. I think it’s a justification for you’ve got to [22:22] because this is all so complicated. Now I am the only one who can hold it together, but simplicity, I tell you, is just, I’ll go back to what I said, there’s a lot of power in making things simple.
CHUCK: Joe, let me switch gears here for a second. I want to go kind of personal. In your Chapter 5 you state there are four things that define Joe Calloway. Do you care to share your thoughts on those four things?
JOE: Chuck, yes. As a matter of fact, I’ve got a copy of the book in front of me. I want to be sure that I say the same four things that are in the book.
[Chuck laughs]JOE: Now I see exactly what you’re talking about. Those are pretty constant. The first one is, “Always put family first,” and I put this down that that’s a reference to my business as well because, I’ll give you a classic example, Chuck. Two weeks ago I was invited to give two speeches, one in New Zealand, one in Australia, nine days apart. The money was great and it would have been first-class airfare and accommodation. It would have been a really cushy trip with nice people in the audiences and I had, if we go back to the idea of, “If you’ve got clarity, you can make decisions in advance.” My answer was an immediate, “Thank you so much, I’m honored and grateful, but the answer is no,” because I don’t want to be away from home that long at one stretch. [23:57] I’ve got these two little girls growing up here and I’m okay with being out for a night or maybe two and then back for a while, but I’m not going to be gone for 10 or 11 days in a row. I’m just not! So that’s, “Always put family first,” that helps make my business decisions.
No.2 is, “Do quality work,” and that’s the absolute core as my approach to my business, it’s product quality and not products or ideas that go into books and speeches. And I work on that stuff all the time to try and make it better. I mean, all the time, every single day.
No.3, “Do work that what makes us happy.” I’ve learned that there are certain types of jobs. If I take them on, I’m just going to see them on a calendar and they’ll put a knot in my stomach and life’s too short. I’m not going to do that anymore.
And then no.4 is, “Always be easy and a pleasure to work with.” I’ve tried to make that our big tiebreaker is that I want to be and the people that I work with on occasion, we want to be so easy to work with that people say, “All things being equal, this Joe Calloway is just easy to work with.” And I think that being easy to work with is a huge factor in today’s marketplace. If you want a competitive advantage, I mean, there are lots you could go towards, but a good one is to be the easiest to work with.
CHUCK: Joe, those are four great standards for your life and your business. This is Chuck Gallagher. We’re here with Straight Talk, transformational talk radio to live by and my guest is Joe Calloway and after we take this break we will be back to talk about the shortcuts or the fact that there aren’t any. Join me in just a few minutes.
[Commercial break]CHUCK: Well, we’re back from the break. This is Chuck Gallagher and this is Straight Talk Radio, and we’re here to discuss issues and ideas that can transform your life and, boy, I am jazzed. I have with me Joe Calloway. Joe Calloway is absolutely a great guest and we’ve been talking a bit about the new book that he’s got, Be The Best At What Matter Most. I think both of us are kind of kindred spirits in thinking about how that plays in life and what we can do not only in business but in our personal lives to be the best.
I recently wrote in my new book, entitled Message From The Mountain, that we get so caught up in stuff, I call it ‘mind sleep’, that we’re misfocusing on what’s important. Joe, as we come back in here from our break, you say there aren’t any shortcuts, and yet, I see so many folks that look for shortcuts in business and their personal life and it’s amazing how that fails. What are your thoughts about that?
JOE: Well, just to repeat what you just said, I just don’t think there are shortcuts. It’s funny, I was going to give a speech in Atlanta, Chuck, to about 700 franchisees of a company, so we’re all [27:30] into our businesses, and those were quite successful. One of them came up to me before a speech, he said, “Well, I hope you’ve got some secrets to success you are going to give us today,” and I said, “You know, I’ve been doing this for over 30 years and I’ve never heard a single one. I don’t know any secrets to success. There’s not any secrets, there’s not any shortcuts. There’s the things that we know we need to work on and whoever is best at that tends to do it extremely well.”
There’s a saying that I heard that I absolutely love. It says, “Don’t learn the tricks of the trade, learn the trade.” That’s where I come from and the thing is, it’s not just my opinion. Again, going back to when you look out there at the companies, whether it’s a big company or whether it’s a really successful restaurant in your neighborhood that’s been around for 20 years and people still line up outside the door. When you say, “Okay, what is it that they’re doing right?” They’re doing these handful of basics right and they’re not taking shortcuts because they don’t work. There aren’t any! There just aren’t any. If anybody knows a shortcut, tell me what it is, I’m all ears, but I’ve never seen one.
CHUCK: Well, obviously, you’ve been in this industry a long time and so if you haven’t seen any, I’ll assume it probably doesn’t exist, but I’ve got to ask you this question. I know that you have literally traveled the world, you’re an incredibly popular speaker in business circles, you have been inducted in the Speaker Hall of Fame. I’m just, again, thrilled to have you on the show, but how did you get started in this?
JOE: You know, it’s funny. It wasn’t on purpose! [laughs] I kind of bounced my way into it, I’ll make a long story really short. I was actually for just a couple or three years, I was in the real estate business and in a very small real estate company I quickly became the Sales Manager and then the General Manager. Every morning we had a meeting for one hour, me and all the real estate agents. I got paid based on how they did. My paycheck was based on the amount of business that they all did so it was totally in my interest to help them succeed and those meetings were designed to give them ideas, support, information that would help them be more successful. I’ve discovered that I really liked that, that bug just kind of bit me. So from there, I started a business doing customized training, workshop sessions for businesses and companies and during that I almost starved to death. I mean, I was just hanging on by my fingernails in the first few years, but little by little it got going and then I started being asked to do speeches as opposed to a workshop thing, and from there I started to do a little consulting, the book started. I have five books published now, and it was something that just kind of evolved over the years, but I I’ve been doing it for, golly, I guess it’s 30, 32 years this year.
CHUCK: Thirty-two years? That’s actually incredible and, again, for those of us who are connected in a speaking business in different worlds everybody knows you, Joe. I do have to ask this question. I often speak about ethics in business and I’m kind of curios because you have not only diversity in the United States but certainly internationally, so what do you see on the landscape regarding ethical action and business today?
JOE: Well, I think the good news is that I think there is a much more heightened awareness of the importance of ethical behavior than has ever been in corporate America. Now, I know people see the headlines. It was the only thing that gets in the news, well, for the most part what gets in the news, is when a company does something wrong and somebody makes a mistake and does something dishonest or illegal, but that’s the nature of the news. In fact, I think most people in business want to do the right thing, they try to do the right thing, and in fact they do do the right thing. And I really think that because there were so many corporate scandals, Enron, I mean, golly, the list is endless, you could go on forever, that the company started saying, “Hey, this isn’t something just over on the side of the business of ethics. We can’t just give a nod every now and then. This has to be part of what we think about every day in every decision we make so I’m actually very encouraged by the state of ethical behavior in business today and I think it’s just going to continue to get better.
CHUCK: Yeah, you know, I have to agree with you. I think the unfortunate thing from a media perspective is, unfortunately, the media seems to feed on negativity.
JOE: Sure.
CHUCK: I guess that sells for some reason. Although, I tend to really like things which are more positive, quite honestly, but you’re right, the negative issue that gets focused on seems to catch media attention, but we don’t tend to focus on all of the right things that are taking place each and every day and those companies and organizations that truly care about their employees and their customers and create positive and valuable products that we’re able to enjoy the benefits from.
JOE: I’m doing a panel discussion in a couple of weeks here in Nashville and the guests on the panel are going to be [33:20], CEOs of companies, and all of these people are under 50 I would say, a couple of them under 40, maybe three of them under 40, and they’ve got young, successful, they’re all very successful companies, and what we’re going to talk about, Chuck, is culture.
CHUCK: Right.
JOE: In that the way you treat people, internally and externally, the way employees treat each other, the way that company treats employees, what it’s like to work here is something that I think, particularly the younger generation in business today, gives a lot more thought to than it used to be and I think that’s such a healthy thing. I’m really encouraged by young people in business today. I think they’re smart, they’re not afraid to try new things, they’re not locked into assumptions and I think most of them want to do the right thing and want to treat people well.
CHUCK: I agree. It’s neat to see the attitude of people today, especially the younger people coming into business because they really do have an attitude of caring and wanting to treat people as they want to be treated.
JOE: I think so.
CHUCK: You have a section of the new book, and before we go to a break, I want to end with this section and then we’ll come back, but it says in Be The Best At What Matters Most, that’s the book, but it’s called Ideas That Matter Most, so in the two or three minutes that we have left, perhaps share with our audience some of those ideas that you think not only work in business but work in life.
JOE: Well, you know, it’s funny. I’m actually in the business of ideas. That’s my job, to pass on ideas that can be helpful, and you’re right, at the end of the book I’ve got a whole list of ideas. My favorite is this quote by Peyton Manning and I absolutely love this. Peyton says, he’s a world-class feature of Hall of Fame quarterback, he said, “Pressure’s what you feel when you don’t know what the hell you’re doing.” I love this!
[Joe and Chuck laugh]CHUCK: That’s great.
JOE: If you think about it, there’s a lot of truth there. If you’re really grounded in knowing what you’re doing and feeling secure in it, I don’t think you feel nearly as much pressure. Another of my sacred ideas is people say, “Well, this being good at the basics, that’s okay, but I want to think a little edgier than that,” so I came up with the idea in the book, actually, it was in reference to a company called Zappos that some of your listeners are going to be familiar with.
CHUCK: Oh, yes!
JOE: The thing they say about Zappos is that Zappos is still good at the basics that they’re cutting edge and if you really want to be cutting edge, get so good at the basics that are cutting edge. I actually heard this back when I was doing a lot of work with the army back in the eighties. I was working with army officers and this was something I’d hear some of them say, “We usually don’t get hurt by what we don’t know. We did hurt by what we know and don’t do.”
Another one of my favorite ideas that I put in the book is actually from a company called 37Signals, it’s an Internet company. I love this, they said, “Bells and whistles wear off, but usefulness never does.” I think, like all these ideas that we’re talking about right now, the best ideas are the ones that are just really simple. I mean, they’re almost kind of ‘dough!’ in their simplicity. But the best ideas, just like the best businesses or the best products, they’re not just the best solutions, they’re not complicated. They truly are simple.
CHUCK: We have been talking with Joe Calloway. Joe, it is honor to have you, we’re going to go for a quick break and we’re going to come back. We’ve been talking about Be The Best At What Matters Most, Joe’s newest book, but, Joe, when we come back, we’re going to talk about some of the other books that you’ve written, Becoming the Category of One, and the one that I love the title of, Work Like You’re Showing Off. So stick with me here on transformational talk radio. This is Straight Talk with Chuck Gallagher.
[Commercial break]CHUCK: This is Chuck Gallagher back with you and this is Straight Talk Radio where we discuss issues and ideas that can transform your life. Up to this point we have been talking with Joe Calloway about his new book, Be The Best At What Matters Most. Joe is an international speaker and author, the author of numerous books. He is a member of the Speakers Hall of Fame, been doing this for 30 years or so, as you say. Joe, it’s been a delight to have you on the program.
I want to switch gears and move away from your newest book, which I know people can purchase on Amazon or certainly you can go to joecalloway.com. Calloway is C-A-L-L-O-W-A-Y, joecalloway.com, but you wrote a book called Becoming a Category of One, and I think you talk about the thread of extraordinary success weaves its way from company to company. Perhaps we talked about this, but what are some of threads that weave themselves from company to company?
JOE: Yeah, that was my first book and that book really changed things for me because it did really well and still does. I actually updated it in 2010 and we came out with an updated edition, but the idea is what is it that extraordinary companies do to set them apart from everybody else in their category to the point where they become a category of one? Some of the things that we’ve already been talking about are also… You can sense bits of those ideas in that book, but there’s a lot of in Becoming a Category of One, for example, about what makes the most difference with customers and I think, and that book is 10 years old now, the most popular single chapter is about something called the three rules, which is about how you deal with customers and knowing the customer better than anybody else, emotionally connecting with the customer better than anybody else, those sorts of things, and I have always said that if I could have one competitive advantage, if I could just pick one, I think it would be, “Let me understand the customer better than anybody else does.” And I win way more often than I lose, and I tell you, in the business that I’m in, which is, you know, I spend a lot of time like you, I do a lot of speaking and it is vitally important for me to really understand the audience. One of the example in Becoming a Category of One is a guy that I bought clothes from for years and he knows me so well that it’s as easy as fallen off a log for him to sell to me because he knows me; he knows what I like to buy, he knows how I like to buy.
CHUCK: Right.
JOE: But the thing is, he’s that way with all of his customers and we’re all different. So that’s a fun book because it really gets into how do you create an advantage in business?
CHUCK: In there you talk about turning points and I know that you enjoy today a wonderful career, but I suspect, like all of us, like anybody that’s listening to this show, there have been turning points in your life. If you don’t mind sharing, what were some of those turning points for you and how have they made you the person you are today?
JOE: Let me give you the first one that comes to mind because it may have been one of the most impactful. This was back early in my career and I wasn’t doing speaking, and by speaking, for those in the audience that may not know what we’re even talking about, I do what a lot of us did. I do a lot of keynote speaking at conventions, where after a lunch or to open the convention or whatever, somebody gets up on stage and says, “Our keynote speaker today is Joe Calloway.” And I come on stage and I talk for an hour and then I go to the airport and I go home. But before I did that, all I did was workshops where I would go into a company and do training stuff.
Well, back in, when was this again, back in the mid eighties, maybe around ’85, ’86, I had two clients that were 90% of my business. One was a bank and one was the United States Army, interestingly enough. So, that was 90% of my business, Chuck, and within 30 days both of them informed me that they, didn’t have to do anything with my work, it had to do things that what were going on internally with them, they would no longer be needing my services.
CHUCK: Oh, my!
JOE: Ninety percent of my business – gone! And I was like, “What on Earth do I do now?” And what that did was it forced me to look at what are my talents? What are my, one term is, core competencies? What are the things that I’m best at and how can I use those to maybe pursue a slightly different avenue? And that’s what got me into the speaking is I changed gears. Well, it turns out that speaking was a lot more lucrative than what I’d been doing before, but it took bad news [44:09] like that is, to create a good outcome.
Another turning point was the book I mentioned earlier, Becoming a Category of One, and I think the key to that, Chuck, was I wasn’t trying to get a book out. I was trying to get a really good book out, so I worked really hard to make that the best book that I could and it just did wonders for [44:41]. I mean, I had already been in business for, good golly, 15, 18 years when that came out, but it just completely rejuvenated my career and repositioned me. But it’s interesting; it’s an old cliché that we learn from our failures and we learn from our mistakes. I’ve tried a lot of things that didn’t work, but I always got information. I always learn something that I could use. I think the key is to keep trying, to keep moving forward. And I’ve been able to do a pretty good job at that.
CHUCK: Well, Joe, you said from the negative experience of your two major clients going away, you found a better opportunity, and a good friend of mine says, “When a window closes, another opens, but sometimes it’s a hell in the hallway.”
JOE: Oh, dear. Wow.
CHUCK: I can understand that and I think people listening to this show will understand that if they’re listening to transformational talk radio, we’re talking about transformation. And as we wind down, Joe, I’ve got to tell you, I love the book Work Like You’re Showing Off and Larry Winget’s quote is so cool. He says, “Calloway teaches you to let go of your excuses, break out of your chains, crawl out of your rut, drop your baggage at the door and kick the door down and grab life by the throat so you can actually become the person you admire most.” It’s a great comment by Winget on a wonderful book that you wrote. I’m just so happy that you’ve taken the time today to join us here.
So, before you sign off, Joe, what final thoughts you have you feel would benefit our listeners here on Straight Talk?
JOE: Well, I think because this current book is so on my mind that I do think a lot these days and a work a lot with my clients these days on this idea, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, take a deep breath. You’re making this too complicated.” And believe me, if anybody needs that advice, it’s me. [laughs] You know, there’s an old saying, Chuck, that we teach best what we most need to learn.
CHUCK: Oh, yes!
JOE: Maybe that’s why I’m getting to teach that right idea because I need to hear it, and I do think it’s easy to fall into the trap of overthinking things, making it too complicated, and if we just step back and say, “Wait a minute, wait a minute! What are the handful of things, the two or three, or maybe at most the four things, that if I do really well in my business with my customers that I’ll be fine if I just do these handful of things well.” And I think also, correspondingly, with our personal lives, if we kind of do the same thing and say, “Wait a minute. What’s really important here?” I know for me, I have just been blessed beyond reason with a wonderful wife and these two daughters that are just a [48:08] for me. So, what’s that done is given me perspective, I don’t need a whole lot more than what I’ve already got. I’ve got it pretty good, because I’ve got some great people in my life, I get to meet great people like you, so things are pretty good.
CHUCK: Well, Joe, let me first thank you for taking the time to join us here on Straight Talk Radio and let me encourage everyone to pick up a copy of all of Joe’s books. Now, you can find them if you visit joecalloway.com, Calloway is C-A-L-L-O-W-A-Y, joecalloway.com, or you can visit amazon.com, or you can pick them up in a bookstore near you. And let me say this heartfelt, if your organization is planning a powerful meeting that seeks a truly inspirational presenter, one that earned standing ovations time after time, visit Joe Calloway’s website. I’m sure he would welcome the opportunity to talk with you.
Joe, again, thank you so much for joining me and to all our listeners, join us next week for more of Straight Talk, transformational talk radio to live by.
This is Chuck Gallagher till next week.
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