Zero To A Hundred – Episode 5: How To Measure And Master Company Culture With Chris Hunsicker!

Hey Accelerators! 🚀 On this episode of “Zero to a Hundred,” we’re joined by Chris Hunsicker, the mastermind behind training some of the top managers in the world. If you’ve ever wondered how culture impacts your bottom line, this one’s for you.💡

🔹 What’s on the Menu:

• Unveiling the true cost of bad management and toxic culture
• How to calculate the ‘net usable talent’ of your team
• Real strategies to turn mediocre managers into top performers

🔥 Why Tune In?

• Chris shares his expert insights on how to measure and improve your company’s culture—because it’s not just about what’s on the balance sheet, but what’s not
• Learn how to make data-driven decisions that can save your business hundreds of thousands of dollars

💬 Gem from Chris: “If you don’t measure culture, you’re leaving money on the table. Period.”

📞 Get in Touch with Chris:

🌐 ChrisHunsicker.com

Don’t miss out—hit that subscribe button and let’s take your business from zero to a hundred! 💥

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How To Measure And Master Company Culture With Chris Hunsicker!

In this episode, we’re going to have a Master Management Coach and Trainer. He used to run the Ford Motor Cars Global Coaching Program. He’s a university professor and a number-one selling author on Amazon, and he has trained over 10,000 salespeople and managers in 40 countries. We’re going to go over some really exciting topics like how you measure the financial impact of culture as well as how to make good decisions based on good data. Let’s welcome Chris Hunsicker. Let’s accelerate together.

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We have Chris Hunsicker with us. It’s great to have you.

It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you.

Chris is a Master Trainer and management guru extraordinaire who has trained some of the top managers in the nation, the automotive industry, as well as other industries. We’re very excited to have you here.

Thank you. I’m excited to be here.

The Tangible Cost Of Bad Culture In Business

Let’s have a little bit of a conversation about one of the main things that you focus on within your training system. It’s really important for businesses because it equates to dollars on their bottom line, and that is culture. Can you talk a little bit about or at least define what the tangible cost of bad culture is to a company?

Yeah. I would call this defining the cost of mediocrity. In other words, most organizations spend 90% of their time trying to build a strategic plan or an approach to go through and pennies on what they’re going to spend on execution. At the end of the day, culture is what you do consistently day in and day out and how you behave. In other words, your ability to execute.

We look at our financial statements. There are so many things that are not on the financial statement, yet we know they cost money. For example, you have a sales manager who is emotionally volatile. We all know this guy. He is very talented in a lot of ways but goes off on people. We never define the cost of that. Everybody knows when he’s screaming and yelling at people, it spins you out and your head’s not in the game. You can’t go out and close a sale and get something done.

There’s no line item on the financial statement that says, “The manager can’t control temper. Minus $200,000.” It’s an expense but it doesn’t show up there. People all the time ask me, “As an executive coach, what do you do?” My short answer was, “I help managers not be idiots.” A vast majority of people know what to do. They know how to do it but they work for an idiot.

You use an example of that $200,000. It’s less than $200,000 to your bottom line. I don’t know if that’s a month or a year. It depends on the business. Is there a way for somebody who’s a business owner to say, “I’ve got a manager who seemingly is performing well but has a bad temper? People don’t like him. There always seems to be conflict.” Can they do a calculation to quantify what the loss is from that outlier who’s not within the culture of the team?

Yeah. Let’s do a calculation right here because when you see it, it makes so much more sense. I was in Southern California and was working with a fairly large car dealership. I’m going through an engagement survey where we did a survey to look at the level of engagement that employees have. It’s a great measure of culture. One of the questions was, “If I do something right, my manager will notice and say something.” This guy scored incredibly low. It was in the single digits. Another question said, “If I do something wrong, my manager will notice and say something,” which he scored 96.

As we started to go through the results, my general sales manager, who is a pretty good guy, in the middle of the room said, “This is a bunch of crap. I don’t do unicorns and rainbows. I don’t hug people. I sell cars and make money. I am clear and direct, and people don’t like it. That’s too bad.” I said, “Let me ask you then. Would you say you are a bottom line results-oriented person that doesn’t screw around and you can deal with the hard truth directly?” He said, “Absolutely.”

I said, “Here’s the deal. I want to do a little ten-minute coaching session. I can help you make an extra $500,000 a year. Are you open to it?” He goes, “I don’t believe you can make $500,000 for me in 10 minutes but I got 10 minutes. Tell me what you got.” I said, “Have you ever done training on a Tuesday morning sales training and you go over exactly the steps to sell and what you want your people to do, and then that Tuesday afternoon, your salespeople are not doing the very thing you told them about?” He said, “All the time.” I said, “Give me an example.” He gives a very expletive, laden, intense explanation. I said, “That’s awesome. Give me another example.” He does the same thing.

I then said, “Now, let me ask you a question. Do you think those salespeople ever walked away from your desk after their coaching session with their heads spinning out, not in the game, went out to meet with a customer, and as a result, they didn’t  have a car sale?” He goes, “Yeah.” I said, “Did those customers come into your store and wanted to buy a car or were willing to buy a car but because your salesperson couldn’t show up, they went and bought a car somewhere else?” He goes, “Yeah.” I said, “Do you think that happens very often?” He goes, “Yeah.”

He said, “How many times a month do you think that happens?” He goes, “Five or ten.” I said, “Let’s be ultra-conservative. Let’s say that happens twice a month for each salesperson. How many sales guys are on your team?” He said, “Nine.” I said, “You got 9 salespeople twice a month 18 times. How much are you making on a car, front end and back end?” He goes, “It’s about $3,000 or $3,500.” I go, “Let’s go $3,000. It’s easier math.”

This key that I call denominating the cost of mediocrity is you’ve got to marry the behavior to the result to the cost. That’s the simplest thing. His behavior is going off on a salesperson. The result is the salesperson not closing a car sale. The cost is the profit you would’ve made on the car sale. Your expenses are fixed. The lights light. The heats heat. This is extra profit. I said to him, “Let’s take 18 times $3,000. How much is that?” He goes, “A whole bunch,” and a little more profanity-laden answer. I said, “This is great. It’s not an English class. It’s math. How much does that cost?”

$540,000.

Exactly. I said, “You and I both know that number’s way higher than $2,000, and you and I both know that number’s way higher than $500,000. It’s closer to $1 million.” He goes, “Yeah.” I said, “You said you’re a straight shooter, no excuses, and you want to deal with the data.” He goes, “Yeah.” I said, “No hugs and no being nice.” There’s the owner of the business. Turn to him. Explain to him why we as a business, in addition to paying you a salary, your commission, and your bonuses, should pay $1 million tax each year because you can’t control your temper. I’m all in.” He goes, “You are an SOB.” I said, “You have no idea.”

Did you say you called it the dumb tax? What did you call that scenario with the manager?

I said the cost of mediocrity, or you end up paying a stupid tax in this case because the business is giving up income from customers that came into the store and wanted to buy a car but they went somewhere else because this general sales manager spun them out. Yet, when I talked to that general sales manager later in this conversation, he had equated this tough, hard, nail-people attitude with him being successful. What I shared with him at the end was, “You are successful in spite of that behavior, not because of that behavior.”

I looked at him and said, “You give me one goal you’ve wanted to hit that you haven’t been able to hit.” He says, “We’ve been number 2 in our market for 4 years. We’ve never been number one.” I said, “If you picked up that extra $1 million and picked up those cars, could you hit number 1?” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “Here’s the deal. I’ll be your coach and I’ll work with you, but you got to work with me. You got to understand I’m a no excuses, straightforward kind of guy.” He slipped at me and said, “You’re an idiot.” I said, “I got to know. Do you want to talk about the goal or do you want to hit the goal?” He said, “I want to hit the goal.” I said, “Do you want to coach and get better or not?” He goes, “I do.” Eighteen months later, he was number one.

Quantifying The Financial Impact Of Poor Management

The cost that bad management can have to a business is massive. I want to recap this because it’s important for the audience to drive this in. Some people might recognize it in themselves. They might also recognize it in a member of their team. If you’ve got management that is constantly creating conflict within their sales team and their sales team is off their goal, you could be losing a massive amount of money.

Take the example of a car dealership. You’ve got nine salespeople. They walk out of the office of the manager with their heads spinning and they’re not focused. A customer comes in and at least two times a month, they miss a sale. Of those 9 people, that’s 18 missed sales a month. If they are netting $3,000 a sale over the course of a year, that is $540,000 that the business misses because the company culture is off and it’s all starting at the top. One thing that’s incredibly important is you have to have management that is working in tandem energetically with the salespeople on your sales team.

Since it’s not a line item in the financial statement, it doesn’t get the urgency. Most managers would say, “I know my temper % is a little bit strong and I’m a little bit hard on people, but we get stuff done.” Let’s denominate that. He was a good manager and he worked hard, but he had that because he associated it. Once I did the math, he was on board. He went from not wanting to be in this meeting thinking my survey was stupid to within one hour, he was fully committed to me being his coach. We worked hard for a year and a half to get to number one. He was there and he didn’t understand how expensive that was. That’s why denominating the cost is so critical.

Measuring Culture And Managerial Behaviors

Let’s talk about what the steps would be when looking at your line items within your business and what you should be adding in there around culture. If you were to say, “I’ve got my balance sheet, my P&L, and my culture balance sheet,” for lack of a better term, what would you have on there that you should be measuring as an owner-manager of a sales team or a company?

If you’re looking at measuring culture, I always want to begin with data. In this case, remember I had the employee engagement survey. I would want to look at specific managerial behaviors that look at feedback, leadership behavior, consequences for bad behavior, accountability, and rewards. Those are the simple basic functions of leadership and management.

In this case, the data said that if he did something wrong, it was right on top of it, but if did something right, there was hardly any feedback about what was going on. One of the things that we worked on with him was his ratio of positive to negative communication was off. Think about it. This is John Gottman at the University of Washington. He can film you and your wife or your significant other and, for fifteen minutes, code the ratio of your language. He can predict with 94% accuracy whether you’ll still be married in 5 years from one fifteen-minute exchange. One of the major things in that was the ratio of your positive and negative communication.

It’s the same thing if you look at a business school. This is the University of Michigan. Of the businesses that went through downsizing, 85% never came back to where they were. Only 15% ever go on to succeed beyond that. We took a whole study of them, the 15% that went on, and looked at what made them different than the rest. Once you start downsizing, you’re done. What they found was that in these few companies that went up, the ratio of positive and negative communication between managers and their frontline people or managers and each other was 5 positive to 1 negative.

I want to come back to creating that culture for an existing business. Let’s talk about when you find that person who’s not willing to change but they still have talent and add value. When do you know when to cut the cord?

The Concept Of Net Usable Talent (NUT)

Let’s go back to data and math. I’m a big fan of results in math. I call this the Net Usable Talent or NUT. In every organization, people have a net usable talent. Your talent less your cost to the organization is your Net Usable Talent. It’s the same way with net profit. It doesn’t matter what your top-line revenue is. It matters what your net profit is because you can only spend net profit dollars. You cannot spend revenue dollars.

We see this in sports teams. If you go back to the late ‘90s with the Seattle Mariners, at one point, the Seattle Mariners lost Randy Johnson, Tino Martinez, and one other person. Those were great Hall of Famers that they lost. Yet, the following year was the year that they lost to the As. Remember they were 103 or 104 and lost to the As on that crazy play? The team got better when they lost some of the best all-stars. That’s a weird dynamic you see in sports a lot and in business.

Let’s say that I have two salespeople. I’ve got Javier and Maria. Javier is my top dog. Let’s use automotive retail. He’s selling 27 or 28 cars a month consistently. He has a 30 and a 25. He’s also that guy that sucks all the oxygen out of the room. He’s consistently late for meetings. He’s like, “ I’m the top dog. I don’t have to do that.” He’s loose on following rules. You guys know this prima donna person we’re talking about. Everybody knows Javier.

Javier, even though he individually sells a lot, dampens the whole team. Everybody knows that, but nobody knows, “Do I keep Javier? Do I not? What should I do? I don’t want to lose his production.” I would suggest you use what I call the Net Usable Talent calculation. Like the cost of mediocrity, we look at what this behavior costs. We’re going to do the same thing. We’ll be like, “Javier has terrible paperwork, so the office has to spend extra time to clean up his effort and clean up his mistakes. He has a negative impact on the team and what goes through.” We’re going to calculate that.

On the other hand, over here, I’ve got Maria. Maria only sells about eighteen cars a month. It’s a good 10 cars a month less, or we’re looking at about a 30% less production level, but Maria is the one who is always there to help everybody else. Maria is the one that when you’re on your day off and you can’t make it in, she’ll deliver the car for you and not make you split the deal.

She’s one of these glue people. In the meeting, she’s the one that’s the early adopter of the new stuff. She’s always bringing a positive attitude. When she walks into the room on a tough day, everybody’s like, “Maria’s here. It’s going to be okay,” whereas when it’s a tough day and Javier walks in, people go, “We’re screwed.” You know that difference, but we don’t calculate the value.

With Net Usable Talent, what I’m going to do is say, “If you look at the actual revenue or profit, the office wasting time to clean up Javier’s deals costs us two deals a month easily. If you look at the fact that he screws with other people’s heads and he’s the kind of guy that likes to mess with the new guys and other people and generally be a twit, that probably costs the whole team another five car deals a month. He’s the kind of person that won’t support the leadership team. He’s always going back and forth. There’s an insubordination about him that if you look at other people following that, it costs us another couple of car deals. By the time I add in what it really costs us, his sales are 28 a month but his net is 18.

On the other hand, I got Maria. She’s 18, but because she’s an early adopter going through, we get a couple of 2 car sales a month that we wouldn’t have gotten because of her energy and presence. The glue factor that she brings in, getting everybody together, keeping the floor running smooth, and everything is worth another three or four card deals a month because she’s helping everybody get better, not worse. Her Net Usable Talent is closer to 25 and his Net Usable Talent is closer to 18. Who’s the better salesperson?”

This is something that is really important for businesses to measure, which is what you call the Net Usable Talent. That Net Usable Talent is taking the talent less the expense to the business that’s giving you your net profit. In the case of Javier and Maria, Javier produces $100,000 a month at gross, but because he’s late, he doesn’t follow policy, he’s bad with paperwork, and he creates a negative culture, it’s costing the business an additional $40,000 a month. He’s netting $60,000 a month.

In the case of Maria, she’s a team player. She might sell less and only be selling $60,000 a month in net profit, but the added value to helping others, filling in, following the rules, and having great paperwork is an additional $20,000 to the business. On net, Maria is producing $80,000 a month, and Javier is producing $60,000 a month. Javier, ultimately, it sounds like to me, is not someone you even want in the organization. When you figure that out, what do you advise a business owner to do?

The Importance Of Cultural Fit In Employee Performance

You move on. The essence of leadership and management is to make really good decisions based on good data. Once the data tells you that Javier’s not the guy, you have to move on. Javier is going to be a top dog in somebody else’s thing. Once you know someone doesn’t fit your culture, you have to move on. Otherwise, you don’t have a culture.

I’d never really thought about it even from a sales perspective. If I look back at the beginning of my career and being in the real estate sales side of it, we had some people like that who were in the office who were a pain in the neck. I’ve seen companies protect people who were abusive, cheated on deals, etc. They were heads of the companies, and I could name them but I’m not going to, who were terrible people, but because they sold so many properties, they kept them around. It created such a negative culture.

This idea of making really good decisions with good data replaces that mindset of it being a difficult decision. It’s not a difficult decision if you are backing up the cultural decisions you’re making and the talent decisions you’re making based on data and using things like the Net Usable Talent scale when measuring your team.

Interestingly, the fear of these senior people you’re talking about is that we’re going to lose their production. In nearly every case, if you take a Javier out, almost everybody else in the organization sells a couple 2 or 3 more cars a month and the net of the organization is significantly better. You don’t miss them. I go through a specific example in the book. The store gets better 30 days later. 30 days later, the store is breaking records because, in the way you describe those offices, it’s the negative effect on the other twenty people in the office that kills everybody, not the 1 person that the bosses are protecting.

Isn’t that contrary to what they typically say that 20% of your sales team does 80% of the business and the other 80% does 20% of the business? Isn’t that contrary if you have people who are part of that 20% selling the 80% contrary to popular belief?

Let’s go deeper into the data and take a look at that. The general rule of thumb that 20% of your people do 80% of your business is accurate. That’s true, and that goes through. The first assumption is that in order to be in the 20%, you have to be one of these selfish idiots or you have to be a Javier. That’s not true. As a matter of fact, two things happen. If in your 20% is a Javier, it depresses the 80% even more. Remember. If I get a 10% increase in the 20%, that’s not as much as if I get a 10% increase in the 80%. This is much higher.

Number two, when you take the Javiers out of the 20%, you tend to get another 20%er in there, but that 20%er is more like Maria and not like Javier. You’re looking for people who have the cultural fit. It goes through, but if the 20% depresses the 80%, then every point of market share and every point of depression goes through and it’s multiplied by 8, not by 2.

Assessing Business Stagnation

Let’s talk about this because this topic is very important for business owners. Let’s say we’ve got a business that’s been running for 5 to 10 years. They’re doing quite well but they’re hitting a wall and are not selling more products. How should they be assessing their business? Their business is a sales business with salespersons. How should they be assessing their business to figure out where the gaps are, who on their team is succeeding, and who on their team is failing, and creating a path forward to start to grow the business even more?

That’s a million-dollar question that we could spend hours answering. It’s multi-factor. Let me give you one simple insight, which is a great way to begin that conversation. Let’s say this was a business that had been successful in the past but they hit a plateau and have plateaued out and gone through. I will promise you that when they were at their best, there were certain things that they were doing that they have stopped doing. When they were at their best, there were certain things they weren’t doing that they’d started doing. There’s an element of fat, dumb, and happy in here that goes on.

One of the first things that I’ll do when I have a business owner, a general manager, or a leadership team and they’re in that place and are stuck in that plateau, I’ll say, “I want you to go back to a time when you were ripping it and when you were awesome. Not a week, not a weekend, or not a month, but a window of time. Think back. When were you on your groove or on top of your game?” Everybody can tell me, especially in sales. Everybody knows when they were on.

What happens is you have a car sales guy who for a while was selling 30 cars a month for several years, and then he’s selling 18 cars a month and has been doing that for several years. I ask him and say, “Jared, how many cars a month do you sell?” You’re going to say, “30.” He is a 30-car guy because he used to sell 30 cars.

You haven’t sold 30 cars in a couple of years but you still tell people you’re a 30-car month car guy. This happens in sales all the time. We remember when we were great and we assume that’s who we are, even though we stop behaving that way. The only reason you’re not getting the results is that you’re not behaving in the way that you did when you got the results.

I would sit down with this manager, this owner, or this leadership team and say, “Tell me about this time when you guys were great,” and they will. I’ll say, “Now, I want you to think back to your days, your weeks, or your month coming in. Walk through a day in your mind with me. The first thing in the morning, what would you do? What would you do every day before you left for lunch? What is the last thing you do before you leave? What were the things that you knew were driving sales and making stuff happen? What was non-negotiable behavior for you?” You start charting all this stuff down.

I say, “Now, what are some things you would not do no matter how much you wanted to? You’re like, “That is not me. I will not do that.” I start charting them down. I’ll say, “Now, let me ask you this. How much of this stuff are you  doing, and how much of this stuff did you stop doing?” Every time, there’s a collective, “Crap,” in the room. It’s not complicated.

One of the things that’s really difficult for salespeople to quantify is what they do that makes them very successful in sales. I’ve run into this in my career at times when things would seem to be at a lull in one of my businesses. One of the ways I’ve built a lot of business and gained traction in any and everything that I’ve done is leaning on my network and the relationships that I have, building from there, and learning to make the ask, get exposure, and ask for new connections which then helped me build my book of business, whether it was in a FinTech play, a real estate play, or a capital raise play.

5 Key Things Business Owners Should Look At To Drive More Business

I have been guilty of also forgetting that I have to get back to the basics. That’s how I’ve built my career. Some people cold call. Some people send emails. Some people will set up meetings with different types of trade groups and do presentations. If you were to talk to a salesperson or a business owner who has hit that wall, what are the five key things they should be looking at? You already gave us a very quick and brief overview of how to sit down and analyze what happened in the past when you were being successful. What are the five key things that the business owner should be looking at to get back in the groove and start driving more business?

Number one is a mindset thing. Phil Stutz talks about this in his book, The Tools. He says, “Pain, hard work, and uncertainty are fundamental to life. You’ll never be exonerated from that. All of us believe, “If I find the right partner, marriage won’t be hard, uncertain, and painful,” or, “If I find the right job, it won’t be hard, uncertain. and painful,” or, “Someday, I’m going to arrive at a spot in my business where it’s no longer going to be hard, uncertain, and painful.” He says, “You are never exonerated from hard work, pain, and uncertainty.”

The Navy SEALs talk about embracing the suck. For the people who were once great and aren’t or who have plateaued and can’t go forward or salespeople who are stuck, the first thing you have to do is to shift your mindset to, “I am not working to escape pain, uncertainty, and hard work. I am stepping into it.” That’s the beginning. That without any other four that we’re going to talk about will fundamentally change what’s going on.

When your whole approach is, “I’m going to gut this out, grit my teeth, and white knuckle it for a little while until I can arrive at the arrival land where there’s no pain, uncertainty, and hard work,” you’re not there. Tony Robbins says that business is the art of creating better problems. Problems never go away. When you solve problems well in life or business, your reward is you get more problems. The best part is they’re better problems to solve. That’s the first place I’d start with mindset.

Number two is I would go to the frequency of activity. In every sales business, there’s a certain activity. Everybody knows it. It’s contacting customers. We’re like, “No matter what my ratio is, if I have to talk to 10 people to make a sale, I could spend a ton of time trying to get to 20% where I talk to 10 people and I get 2 sales.” It is much easier to talk to more people. We’re like, “If I spend all my time trying to get better at talking to a few people, I get very small result improvements. If I spend a lot of time talking to a lot of people, not only to talk to more people but I get better at talking to those people.”

Skill comes from repetition in the arena, not from practice in the bathroom. You can practice your word tracks in the bathroom all you want, which is a great start, especially if you’re a newbie. If you’re done with being a newbie, you have to get in the arena. You need to get beaten. You need to get noes. The whole, the land of yes always lives inside the territory of no. Most people don’t get enough noes fast enough in order to get really good at their craft to move the needle.

Number one, we’re going to change our mindset to embrace pain, hard work, and uncertainty and we’re going to quit trying to be exonerated. Number two, you increase the frequency of people that you’re talking to. If you’re talking to 3 or 4 prospects a day, then start talking to 8 and find a way to talk to 15. Everybody talks about the math game to go through, but it is as simple as that.

The third thing is you need in-the-moment feedback. When you’re changing emotionally intelligent behavior, you need awareness of what’s going on, a chance to practice the new and better behavior, and feedback on how you’re doing. Few salespeople I’ve met are willing to do this, but those who are really great do it all the time. When someone tells you no and you’ve overcome the objection, then it’s a no. They’re not buying.

You’re spending time with them. You can invest time. Take one minute and say, “Can I ask? What did I do wrong? I lost you somewhere along the way.” Most people will tell you because it’s over. They know, “We’re not going to buy there. I didn’t like your attitude. You were too aggressive,” or, “You were too soft,” or, “You couldn’t answer my questions.”

I would put this into a process, and I still use this to this day. Every single night when I get home from work, no matter what I’m doing, who I’m coaching, and where I’m working, I go through this little five-minute exercise. In my book, I call it the business journal. This isn’t journaling about your feelings. We’re not trying to heal your inner child. This is about business.

I will sit down and go, “Today, in the prospects that I spoke to and people that I coached, what went well?” I’m going to write down 3 or 4 things that I know went well. I’m going to write down 3 or 4 things that need work. In other words, I didn’t fail. I’m not terrible, but they need work. This is the most important thing. In the moment or on that day after I’ve finished it, I write down, “What are the 2 or 3 things I’m going to do differently to optimize my day tomorrow?”

Most people waste time worse than they waste money. In the United States, the richest country in the history of the world, by the time you get to age 65, 97% of people will not be able to live day-to-day without social security. Everybody knows you need to invest money. Everybody knows that you need to save money. Everybody knows you should do that. Yet, 97% of the people are going to reach age 65 and they cannot survive without social security.

People are the same way with their time. You guys all know the numbers about compounding interest and how it works. I’d be like, “If I take a little bit of money and in my 20s and 30s invest some money, I’m going to be well taken care of by the time I get to my 60s.” Time is the same way. Most people will work 40, 50, 60, or 80 hours in a week and then start over and do the same thing next week. They’ll start over and do the same thing next week with no compound.

Imagine this. What if I took, “What went well, what needs work, and how do I improve it today?” and I stacked that on tomorrow and on the next day? At the end of the week, I take fifteen minutes to look at the week, what went well, and what needs work, and optimize. At the end of the month, I take an hour. At the end of the quarter, I take 90 minutes. At the end of the year, I take four hours. I’m compounding those insights every single day.

What’s important before we get to the last two that I want to mention to the audience is I’ve had this same experience. I’ve done a ton of mindset work, which mindset is key to getting back in the groove for sales, but I realized that I wasn’t using my time wisely in terms of the content that I was putting in or the information I was putting in that was business-centric that was going to help me drive my business.

One of the things that I committed to doing and using my time more wisely instead of watching Netflix at night or a movie is I would spend 1 hour to 2 hours reading a business book every single day. That started to give me this arsenal of techniques and tactics that I could use to start pushing my business forward. It became this compounding effect. I’m still in the thick of it. I still do it. I’m finishing Cialdini’s Influence. That’s one of the things that’s masterful. If you want to change your trajectory, it’s the information you’re taking in.

The Value Of A Business Journal

I love the concept of the business journal where you’re doing 2 to 3 things that you did well for the day, 2 to 3 things that need work, and 2 to 3 things the next day that you’re going to do to optimize your time. Those things are key because it gets into mindset work because you’re focused on what you’ve done and what needs to be done to push you forward, but it’s also setting yourself up for success because you are focused on what you need to do in business to drive it forward.

That is what I’m going to call for, but I’m going to drive this into its own category of feeding your mind and your soul. I’m pretty sure you had lunch. My guess is you have no idea what you ate for lunch, which is true of most of us. That day, you consumed that food and your body converted it into calories that you used for energy to get stuff done. You need to look at books the same way. Leaders are readers. Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers or you’re going to get left behind.

I’ve read a book a week since I was eighteen years old. I’m probably through a good 2,500 books on psychology, motivation, leadership culture, and what’s gone on. You and I can both get a book and we can both read it. I will get ten times more value out of the book than you have because I can connect it to the previous 2,000 I’ve read. For you, it’s the first book you’ve read in 10 years.

Say this out loud, “The world’s going to change faster than it has ever changed. The change is going to come more intensely than it has ever come. My response is, “I’m not really a reader.” Are you an idiot? That’s the stupidest thing you could say that in the most rapidly changing environment that it has ever been, “My approach is going to be to not learn.” Rock on.

I’ve said this before. I struggled with dyslexia my entire life because I could rearrange things. You’re like, “Is that what you’re looking at?” I’m like, “Yeah,” and then you go, “That’s not what it says on the page.” What has helped me become a voracious reader and change that, “I’m not really a reader,” is I read with a physical book in hand, I have my AirPods in, I listen to the book on Audible, and I follow along in my pin, marking it up, and highlighting things. My comprehension has gone through the roof. I make it through 2 to 3 books a week. I’m retaining the information. I’m staying awake. I’m getting the gratification of completing these books. I’ve been doing this for some time and it has become a complete and utter game-changer for me.

You don’t have to be alone when you are reading. You can have something to support you. There are so many people who have the same affliction that I do. This will help you level up. The hack with that is I listen to my books and it takes time to get there. Anywhere from 2 to 3.5 speed depending on the complexity of the book, I get through it and I still comprehend and retain the information because I’ve learned to hear faster, which has helped me read faster.

Let’s use language here because it matters. I want you to consume books, not read them. It’s like you consume food. Most of us have PTSD from school where a book meant a test and you had to comprehend it and you couldn’t. That’s why people stop reading because they have PTSD from school. This is food. I don’t care if you remember what you ate two weeks ago. I care that you have the calories and the energy.

I don’t care what you’re reading. I don’t care if you retain it. What I know is if you’re spending time consuming that book now, it’s going to affect the way you think and talk to people, and then you’re going to do it again tomorrow and the next day. Some of it’s going to stick at your conscious level and some of it’s going to stick at your unconscious level, but you’re going to build a base of knowledge and a set of habits. That’s where the value is.

Managing Streaks And Habit Debt

Let’s dive into the fifth one because this will stack it all together for you. The thing is John Maxwell said, “You cannot change something in your life unless you change something you do daily.” Let that sink in. We’re talking about changing our business results. You must change stuff that you’re doing daily. I like to look at it in terms of streaks. I’m competitive. I was an athlete. I loved that. That’s why I love sales. I love business. The best thing about sales is there’s a public scorecard. You can’t hide. When you went to the real estate office, you sold a unit or you didn’t. It ranks. I love it.

I have a saying that most people fall in love with their results or they fall in love with their excuses. Some people love their excuse so much that they dress it up, buy it things, bring it out, and show it to all their friends. At the end of the day, you will fall in love with your result and own it or you’ll fall in love with your excuse and own it.

The best way to deal with that is what I call managing positive and negative streaks. Once you get down through this process, and we’ve talked about our mindset, have gone through the business journal, and you’ve done this stuff, you’re getting real clarity on what you need to do and what you need to not do. You want to start building positive streaks of behavior.

Let’s say that you know that you need to talk to four customers every day in order to sell a product. In the business that you’re in, like a car dealership, you average talking to two people a day. That means you’re going to have to generate two other people to talk to or you’re not going to sell a car that day. You know that. You have to start tracking how many days in a row you talk to four people.

Nobody’s perfect. I’m talking to you in West Coast time at 5:00 AM. I had to get up at 4:00 and get dressed and ready to go through and do this call.  I’m on a streak of about 187 days in a row without drinking caffeine. I have to tell you that I was really tempted to go into the kitchen and grab some caffeine before this call, but I had an 187-day streak. I’m not messing with that. There’s no way.

When you are trying to build streaks from a habit standpoint, what we know is if you start a habit and you’ve had it for 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, or 3 years and you miss 1 day, it’s not going to affect you that bad. If you miss a habit two days in a row, you will get a little more wobbly. If you miss a habit 3 days in a row, it loses over 50% of its efficacy. If you miss a habit four days in a row in your brain neurologically, it’s as if you never had that habit. Let’s go back to our earlier conversation about a 30-car sales guy who hasn’t done that for years but in his mind, he’s a 30-car guy. He stopped those habits so long ago that they’re not even in his brain.

When I work with people and they are trying to work on health and fitness, trying to work on sales acumen, or trying to fill a number of people, I always pay attention to negative streaks. I am not the superstar guy in anything in my life, ever. I told my kids, “Look at me and your mom. We are not the most beautiful people. You’ve lived with us. We’re not the smartest people in the world. From the genetic lottery, you did not win, but here’s what I’ll tell you. Nobody can outwork me. I will bury you. I can outwork anybody, and I have my whole life. I take a certain joy in finding high-talent people and burying them.”

When it comes to that, this is where anyone can win regardless of where you came up in the talent lottery. If I’m working with you to develop that, we want no negative streaks that go more than a day.  If you’re working really hard on talking to four people every day and you missed a day, no problem. Tomorrow, you talk to four people. If you never get more than a one-day negative streak, you will bury everybody that you compete against. It’s not the length of the positive streak because you could go 5 days and miss a day, 4 days and miss a day, 3 days and miss a day, 8 days and miss a day, or 9 days and miss a day. If your negative streak is never more than a day, you own it.

If you want to be a leader, learn how to pay back habit debts. I took a coaching certification class with Heroic. Everyone, check them out. They’re great. At the end of the coaching training after a year, graduation required you to run a Spartan race. You had to demonstrate your ability to face obstacles and overcome them and you understood the material that we were going through.

Here are a couple of hundred of us all going through a Spartan race. When you miss an obstacle in a Spartan race, you have to do ten burpees. There are 30 obstacles. To train, they asked us to do a 100-day burpee challenge where 4 months before the race, on day 1, you did 1 burpee and on day 2, you did 2 burpees. Day 1 was the 1st burpee I’d ever done in my life.

Joe de Sena at Spartan said, “Pay back your habit debt.” We were like, “What do you mean?” He said, “If you were supposed to do four today and you missed today, then you can go on to 5 tomorrow but your habit debt is 4. Do nine the next day.” I did that. There were a couple of different days that I missed, like 8, 17, and 23. I was on a cruise. I’m on 85, 86, 87, and 88. Every morning, I get up before my wife and go run around the deck. You could do a lap on the cruise ship. I’d do half a lap and ten burpees until I could get my 80 in.

We had a day where we had to get up at 7:00 and go out for an excursion, didn’t get back until 6:00 at night, and had to go right to dinner. It’s 9:30 at night and I’m exhausted. I skipped 84. I’m making great progress, but it’s habit debt. I’m like, “I’m going to pay it back.” I couldn’t do 165 burpees in a day. I’ve never done that. I took it and did 84 and 21, 85 and 21, 86 and 21, and 87 and 21, and paid back my habit debt. I did not miss another day after that. You want to reduce your negative streaks and pay your habit debt.

I’m 62. When we went to the Spartan race, there were a bunch of people who were 30, 40, or 50 that didn’t do the burpee challenge. They heard about it but they didn’t pay the price. You can do burpees for other people. If you missed an obstacle and you owe 20 burpees, you could do 10 of them and I could do 10 of them and you got your 20. Does that make sense?

Yes.

I only missed two obstacles, but I did 80 burpees for other people as we went through. For the younger, stronger people, I’m the one that did it and I’m the one that helped them get through.

I am going to consider this burpee challenge because it sounds fun. We got a few more minutes left. We’re going to do a little Rapid-fire section here. I know you’re not prepared for these questions. This was free-flowing. This was awesome. This was an incredible value that you gave. Whiskey or kombucha?

Kombucha, hands down. I’m a 100% non-drinker.

Rabbit or turtle?

Turtle.

Little plastic Army men or Sega Genesis?

Sega Genesis.

If you were going into a zombie apocalypse, what would be your weapon of choice?

Food because I can hold them up and let everybody kill each other. I’ll eat my food and I’ll be the last survivor.

My thing is a flame thrower. I didn’t think about food. That’s a good one. What is your favorite phrase for business?

In order for things to get better, you need to get better.

That’s beautiful. Favorite book?

That’s hard. I have five kids. That’s my favorite child.

Give me a book that is one of your favorites on marketing.

You mentioned one of them, which is Cialdini’s book on influence. Marketing is an influence to go through and have that happen. Cialdini’s is one of the classics when it comes to marketing.

It’s a great book. I’ll make a side note here. When I picked up the book, it was a 450-page book. If you look at it on Audible, it’s a twenty-hour read if you were to listen to it all the way through at 1x speed. I’ve been listening to it around three, so it has taken me more than most books take me. Normally, I’m two days. This will take me 4 or 4 and a half days. It’s 7 hours when you listen to it on 3x. Not everybody can listen to it on 3x, but at least it’s one of the first times in a long time I’ve read a big book like that because most are 200, 250, or 300 pages. That’s a little side note. What influential figure would you have dinner with if you had your choice, alive or dead?

If I go dead, I would take Epictetus, a great Greek philosopher and one of the big guys in stoic philosophy. If it were alive, I’d probably take Tony Robbins.

Maybe we can make Tony Robbins happen. We’ll work on that. Let’s say you’ve got a business that’s doing $10 million in sales a year. I write you a $300,000 check, “Here, Mr. Or Mrs. Business Owner.” What would you advise them to do with that check to double their revenue or double their profits?

I would probably divide it into three $100,000 segments. I would take $100,000 and I would invest it in my top 20% people. Remember when we were talking about the 80/20? I’d take that top 20% and get them tools, staff, and software. I would find some way to say, “If you could have some money to get some more tools or things that would make you more productive, what do you need?” I’d go to my top 20%, take the first $100,000, and make them more effective.

I would take the second $100,000 and invest it in me as the business owner. I would go find a mentor, coach, or somebody who was already ten times further ahead than I was. I would buy their time and get them to look at my business and go through it. I would seek mentorship from outside counsel who could help me turn that and go through it.

I would take the last $100,000 and invest it in the execution throughput productivity of my team. Whatever we’re selling, we have to deliver it. There’s some kind of operational team. I would spend that money on making my operational team more effective. The worst thing in the world is to have a great sales team that can sell and close clients and then back at the home base. You can’t deliver on that. You can’t execute.

Last but not least, walk us through briefly an obstacle that you faced in your own business, how you overcame that obstacle, and what your takeaway is that would help other business owners.

There are too many to choose from to make this a fair fight, but I would suggest that a key obstacle for me was bad partners. I grew my business and then someone said, “We should work together and go through,” and we did. The first partner embezzled money from me. I then got another partner. The second partner five years later embezzled money from me.

I had a chance to get a third partner and wanted to say no because of what had gone on. I wanted to blame my partners for being stupid and embezzling money from me, but looking back, I had a role in all of those. In every one of those, I made a series of decisions that allowed all that to happen. There was nothing wrong with having partners. I was really crappy at choosing them.

I had to overcome this resistance that I had built up that was like, “I can only count on me. I’m the only one that can do it. Everyone’s going to rip me off. Everybody’s going to do this.” Therefore, my business stayed at a very certain level of business because there was only so much I could do by myself. The only way to grow my business was to work with partners and expand, but that meant trusting and using them and I was trying to avoid doing that.

I had to have a long talk with myself and go through them. I listed all the reasons why I created those problems where the partners embezzled money for me, decided which ones I needed to change, and went into this meeting with a new partner in a much different frame set. We, in twelve months, doubled our business because of what he brought to the table. Many people don’t grow because they’ve been burned in the past and they allow their past to define their future. They make poor decisions in the present because of something that happened in the past and because they never owned their side of it and still like to blame other people.

Tell everybody where they can find you and how they can connect with you.

This is easy. ChrisHunsicker.com. That’s the easiest place to find me and go through. My new book, Unstoppable Culture goes over a lot of the stuff that we’ve talked about here. It will be up on Amazon.

This will be another Amazon book because you’re already an Amazon best-seller.

The first one, Unstoppable You, went number one on Amazon. I was proud of that.

Congratulations. That’s awesome. Ladies and gentlemen, Chris Hunsicker. Thank you so much for joining us. Your insight was invaluable.

Thank you. It’s my pleasure.

Important Links

• Chris Hunsicker
• Unstoppable Culture
• Unstoppable You
• Influence
• The Tools
• Heroic

About Chris Hunsicker

Chris Hunsicker is a best-selling author and an internationally recognized authority on organizational leadership and change management. His unique blend of warmth, humor, and dynamic presentation style make him a highly sought-after speaker in the corporate and public sectors. Chris has a powerful gift for touching both the heart and the mind. His keynotes and workshops, best described as e3 (a combination of education, entertainment, and energy), are transformative experiences.

Because of his ability to tell the hard truth with a humorous and dynamic presentation style, Chris has become a trusted advisor to some of America’s most successful companies. His training, consulting, and coaching have allowed him to interact with people across industries and communities worldwide, from China to South Africa and from Europe to Brazil. All of Chris’s work has focused on two critical shifts: moving from insight to action and moving from data to dollars.

Chris is the founder of Hunsicker Coaching International, specializing in organizational culture and leadership. He graduated from Utah State University with a BA in Psychology and holds a master’s in Organizational Leadership from the University of Phoenix. Since 1992, he has worked as a counselor, consultant, and performance coach, engaging with diverse industries such as automotive retail and healthcare, and coaching teams from C-suite to frontline managers.

Chris also lectures annually at CY Cergy Paris University and is the creator of the business coaching app Leading, Loving & Learning. He and his wife, Sherrie, live in South Carolina and are the proud parents of five children and six grandchildren.