Bridging Generations in Sales and Outreach

E7 with Tom Martin - What Got You Here, Won’t Get You There

• Butch Nicholson • Season 1 • Episode 7

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In this episode, Butch Nicholson sits down with longtime friend and leadership coach Tom Martin, who shares the winding road from car dealership GM to purpose-driven coach for business owners and executives. 

Tom’s journey is one of growth through change, balancing hard-earned experience with today’s shifting landscape of technology, AI, and evolving client expectations.

You’ll hear how trust, not transactions, built a decades-long customer base and how Tom now brings that same relational mindset into coaching.

He breaks down how business owners can assess quality of life, define non-negotiables, and build systems around the right people not just better processes.

If you're a Gen X or Boomer business leader facing change, this conversation offers a candid and practical look at adapting without starting over.

Bridging Generations in Sales and Outreach is hosted by Robert (BUTCH) NICHOLSON and produced by Fist Bump

Helping Gen X and Baby Boomer leaders turn their reputation into revenue—without losing the human touch.

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(Butch) Welcome to Bridging Generations in Sales and Outreach. I'm your host today, I'm your host every week, Butch Nicholson. This show is where experience comes to level up. I'm excited today to have my good friend Tom Martin as a guest. Tom has an interesting journey to where he is today,(Butch) which will be very helpful for you to hear about. One of the things that occurred to me, Tom, the first car I bought from you was a one-year-old Ford, 1992 Ford Explorer. So if I do the math right, I've known you half my life.(Tom) Yeah, and thanks for the opportunity to do this, Butch. I'm real excited just to be a part of your audience as a viewer and now to possibly share an insight or two for your community. But yeah, that was a long time ago. I was trying to remember,(Tom) I think it was an introduction that you got from somebody, one of your golfing buddies or something. Maybe that's how we did.(Butch) I'll tell a little bit of the story and then let you take over. I needed I can't remember why but I needed a car and I needed it fast and I was playing golf with someone who was friends with Tom and he said hey just just call this guy he'll guy. He'll get it done for you. And he did. And he explained everything, got me a very good deal. I was very happy with it. And Tom, I don't know how many cars you must have sold from that relationship.(Butch) I know for years, well, until you weren't selling cars anymore, I bought all my cars from you and my family bought all their cars from you. We were able to make some good connections. My dad made some good connections for you with the business that he ran. I made some good connections for you where I played golf. So, yeah, it'd be an interesting number.(Tom) It would, you know, probably no way to tell. I think the highest compliment is when you send your parents in, and you don't come with them knowing that, you know, my, my sales team would be able to take care of them, you know, as if you were there. So, but yeah, and you followed me, you know, as our dealership group grew and, you know, whether it was Smyrna or Beaufort, Georgia or Alpharetta, it just seemed like you were there and I appreciate that.(Tom) And, you know, it's just kind of an illustration of, you know, how relationships are rich. You know, we can have a significant balance in our bank accounts, but, you know, true wealth comes from the relationships we have and people who are for us and what we do on a life perspective,(Tom) but also on a professional's perspective. So, appreciated you then and I appreciate you now.(Butch) Well, I appreciate it. I've always appreciated our friendship, not to get too personal, but Tom is one of my go-to guys when I have a real problem And I'm blessed to have him in my life So Tom give us just a little timeline of your career I know you started selling cars in college and you wound up running the whole show. So tell us about that(Tom) Yeah, I never set out to be in the car business. It was just kind of a crazy Thought you know if I'm gonna be a marketing major I never set out to be in the car business. It was just kind of a crazy thought. You know, if I'm gonna be a marketing major, you know, and I might do sales, can I sell anything? And I was familiar with the brand, went to the local dealership, applied for a job,(Tom) and they said, yeah, we'll give you a shot. I had some good mentors early on. And just as I graduated from college, an opportunity presented itself to be in the finance department and you know just progressed over the next you know 15 to 20 years to the point where you know now I'm running running the(Tom) dealership and all the departments and and doing that and just you know really loving it that was kind of my dream. I knew I didn't have the resources to buy my own dealership. So I started aligning myself with family dealership groups that were growing, but they didn't have enough family to cover all their dealerships.(Tom) So I kind of saw the landscape and put myself in a position to be able to do that.(Butch) Yeah, that's a, it's an interesting journey because of how many times your job changed, but still in the same industry. Oh, by the way, if you have any questions or want Tom and I to address something or just want to say something, the chat is available. Just put it in the chat, Tom and I'll see it and we'll get right to you.(Butch) Tom, tell us about how the different jobs you had in the automobile industry connected with, I know that you, Tom has a real servant heart. And I know that you always, the things that you believe in have been part of your business.(Butch) Share with us how that evolved as you grew in the industry.(Tom) Yeah, you know, for me, I found myself in positions at a young age leading people. And a lot of times they were much, much older than I was. And so for me, in order, you know, you can go in kind of as John Maxwell talks about, you know, the five levels of leadership, you can go in at level one where you have title and you have position,(Tom) but that doesn't mean people are going to respect you or follow you. So I just early on one of my managers modeled this to me, and it was being in a position to be able to serve those who you lead. Help them achieve great things, help them have a great life and and do some things that would allow them to then in turn respect you because they realize that you were for them and for their success and for their family. And so for me in those early years just trying to serve my team well, my sales force giving them a(Tom) quality of life in an industry that really didn't provide a high quality of life, kind of helped me help them be successful in the business. And then in any industry, when you have a degree of success and an opportunity presents itself, then promotion comes. And so, you know, leading the finance department turned into, you know, leading the truck department and suddenly leading the entire sales department. And so with that comes more people and more opportunities to serve.(Butch) You know, I was just thinking while you were talking, I always talk about know, like, and trust. Things have changed over the years. The way we, for those of us who've been in sales as long as Tom and I have, how you sell something has changed completely,(Butch) but I still believe the reason people buy is the same and people wanna buy from someone they know, like and trust. It sounds like Tom, you built that, took that know, know, like and trust into dealing with the people that work for you.(Tom) Yeah, and that's something that just came to me by like the first mentor I had in the business. And he said, the pinnacle in the car business, which say what you wanna say, the industry kind of built its own reputation. But he said, Tom, the pinnacle in the business(Tom) is if you're on the same level as the family doctor, family lawyer, family, you know, attorney, the, you know, so that the family goes to you. And so if you can build trust with the clients you serve, he said, even if they don't wanna buy the car that you serve, he said, even if they don't want to buy the car that you sell, they still reach out to you(Tom) to get insights and information, then you're in a powerful position because they respect you so much that they're gonna seek your knowledge, your insights to serve their family. And so, for me, most people are coming in to buy a car(Tom) and it's like, I just wanna get this done. I wanna best practice. So you have to have a very short window of time to develop a relationship with the client and then in turn, answer the questions and serve them well. So.(Butch) Well, Tom, to make that point, I've had to buy a couple of cars since you left the business So. Well, you know, Tom, to make that point, I've had to buy a couple of cars since you left the business. And I dealt with some pretty good people, but buying a car, just the process of buying a car is awful. Yeah.(Butch) But to be able to know, to have the relationship you and I had and know that you always had my best interest at heart(Tom) is the reason I kept coming back. Yeah, and to your previous question about technology changing but still trust is key, the disruptors came in and now you can buy a car online, internet buying services all changed, but to create lifelong sales and long-term business, doesn't matter what business you are in, you have to have some mechanism to where the person on the other side of the desk(Tom) doing business with you, likes you, trust you and knows that you're there to take care of the needs they have, and they can come back to you if something goes a little bit astray. And so, you know, technology in some ways made it easier, but sometimes technology can turn a relationship into a transaction.(Tom) And it's on the job, it's the job of the salesperson or the business consultant to be able to still leverage the technology to keep the relationship raw and real.(Butch) Yeah, I agree 100%.(Tom) I mean, we've got to, I need to for me anyway. Maximize the new for me in doing what I do, but the the business owners, the executives I'm coaching now, it's you still have to answer the question, how does this benefit them? You know, if it'll help me create a recap report of a coaching session I have, saves me some time, that's good. But okay, look at the report from the perspective of the person who's getting it. How does this help them? How does this help them accomplish their action steps?(Tom) Or how does this help them reflect on the coaching session to be able to really activate what decisions they made?(Butch) Well, speaking of coaching sessions, let's back up a little bit. For some reasons out of your control, you really hit a ceiling in the car market and had to make a change. And time's not near as old as I am, but you were older when you had to make a big shift(Butch) in what you did. So tell us a little bit about going through that transition.(Tom) Yeah, for me, as I alluded to, the technology got involved. There was also a lot of ownership shifts where publicly traded companies, B and E, are coming in and buying out dealerships. And the landscape of the business changed.(Tom) Suddenly dealerships are open on Sundays, suddenly they're open till midnight. And there was a lot of that shifting going on. And there was a lot of moves into treating customers as transactions. As that was happening,(Tom) I was dealing with cancer for the second and third time. And for me, the decision was, okay, this provides me a high quality of life from a financial standpoint, but the quality of life, my wife, you know, is off on the weekends, I'm off on Wednesday, the quality of life ratio, just, it became glaringly clear to me, it might be time to do something else. And so 2014 I took a year(Tom) off just to kind of figure out what that might look like.(Butch) And so tell us where you landed.(Tom) I'm sure the audience can relate to it. You know you're trying to figure something out and then something just keeps popping up in random conversations and different things like that. And coaching just kept evolving. I'll be a businessman's Bible study and a guy sits at my table and what do you do?(Tom) I'm a coach. I'm like, really? And then we're out to dinner, my wife and I, and we meet a couple and she's an attorney, but she's founded a coaching practice. So that just kind of kept coming up.(Tom) And then I was having lunch one day with Chuck Palmer, owns Palmer Dodge. And Chuck said, what are you going to do? And he said, you know, you ought to be a coach. He said, that's what you were doing in the dealership as general manager. You were coaching up your department heads. You treat them as an entrepreneur. You're helping them grow. And I was like, wow. And so, you know, it was I'm kind of hardheaded. It takes a while. But, you know, I kind of said, OK, let's investigate this(Tom) and went through the process of becoming certified and accredited through the ICF global body. And here I am 10 years later.(Butch) That's great. Well, you know what? It was a good point that really what you were doing at the dealerships was coaching.(Tom) Yeah, and that's hard to see Sometimes you need someone on the other side of you to point out where? Transferable skills are from industry to industry There's gonna be you know, I'm sure a lot of people who are watching this who are in that they're in that mode right now They're they're thinking, you know, hey, I, I'm maybe done here, but I'm not sure what next looks like. I know I'm not ready for nothing. So, you know, where can I pursue(Tom) next that may have less emphasis on income, more emphasis on purpose? And so that's where some good self-examination can come in. You know, we both, you and I are in a group huddle with some guys who will speak truth into our lives, say some things we may not wanna hear, but for someone else to be able to help you identify that these skills you have from this job or this industry(Tom) actually are of value over here. And so that to me it took some time and then you've got other things kick in like imposter syndrome and all those other things but the reality of was I needed to hear that truth. That's great.(Butch) So if I understand correctly most of your coaching clients are business owners?(Tom) The majority are, I do a little bit of corporate work and that's kind of emerging leaders who are working with a gentleman who is in his first director position and he's intuitive enough to know kind of what got him there, won't get him where he needs to be now, not leading a project, but leading a team who(Tom) are overseeing multiple projects. And so from that standpoint, so I would say 80% is the medium to small size business owners. A lot of them are family businesses because that's kind of my world. And then about 20% are corporate work.(Butch) So with the business owners or the people in corporate that are leading a team. Even just in the last three years, how we find clients, how we find customers has changed greatly. We were kind of clicking along, we had it figured out. Cold emails were working, cold calls were working. And then just like(Butch) overnight they weren't. People just don't respond to cold outreach. So we had to deal with that, as I'm sure your clients did. And then AI just in 2003, I guess it was, AI went from like something that big big big companies knew about to everybody having access to it.(Tom) And if you weren't using AI by the start of 2024, you were way behind.(Speaker 9) Yeah.(Tom) So how did you guide your customers through those changes?(Butch) And also, well, how did you do that? guide your customers through those(Tom) changes? And also, well, how did you do that? Yeah, well to me, you know, there's an intimidation with technology, especially something like AI. You know, it's just you don't know it, you're hearing about it. And then the obstacle is who has the time to do all the research from that? So you got intimidation, you got timing.(Tom) To me, AI has been around forever. If you think about it, your voicemail is a form of AI. You don't pick up, it picks up. So where I was in that space two years ago was a lot of my clients are trying to maximize Their time how do I get the most out of life to get the most done?(Tom) So then I can have more time to do the things I want to do need to do for that busy business owner Who's got their hands and a lot of things at work is we we do a little self-assessment examination on how they're spending their time. A lot of a lot of people aren't familiar with time blocking, a lot of people aren't you know familiar with optimizing your your calendar to maximize results. So when I start looking at after their exercise of kind of analyzing the time,(Tom) then we start looking at, OK, what are the tools? What are the tools you can use to help you respond to emails? Or what are some of the tools you can use? And so that's kind of how they wade into the AI space and helping them, A, discover the tool, optimize the tool, and then at the end game,(Tom) make sure the tool is doing what it needs to do. So, you know, from a sales team standpoint, I would say a leader needs to provide and equip their team with all the tools they need to be able to evolve as the landscape of prospecting and client relationship be(Butch) able to navigate that with success. That's great. So I've been in sales for a long time but I've also been a business owner. Yeah. Several times. I was a CEO of a small company in San Diego for three years where the owner wasn't, he really wasn't present and wasn't part of it. So I was running the whole thing. And even now with with Fist Bump, by the way, we're sponsored by Fist Bump. We are very grateful to have them as a sponsor(Butch) and all the work that they do for us. So thank you, Fist Bump. But I'm an investor in Fist Bump, so I have an interest in how the company's doing. And I like to work, I enjoy working, but I'm not gonna work and I enjoy working. But I'm not going to work and not be(Butch) happy. Yeah. And I know it's a it's a real challenge for a business owner, especially a small business owner is, you know, how do you balance family and friends and things to do in business and keeping investors happy and all those things? How(Tom) do you how do you work with small business owners to deal with those issues? To me, one of my, we all kind of have different tagline. One of my taglines is helping entrepreneurs and executives prosper in business and thrive in life. And to me, they have to go hand in hand. I'm not gonna work with somebody(Tom) who wants to kill it at work and compromise their family, that it's not gonna matter to them. The hard part is when someone's unsettled and they're not sure when they're you know, what's kind of off It's it's trying to identify, you know where those areas are that's you know, keeping them from thriving And so I kind of walked through them with that(Speaker 4) For me to keep things simple. I just call them my six F's(Tom) You know and it's a self-ass assessment. Some of your audience may have done a wheel of life assessment, but it's faith, family, finances, fitness, friends, and fun. And so if someone's not thriving, it's gonna be in one of those big buckets.(Tom) And so then it's kind of narrowing it down, to your point, if you're spending a whole lot of time doing all the bookkeeping, doing all the things you're not gifted to do and all the things you hate to do the most, so then it becomes a conversation,(Tom) okay, what things can you do differently in your business or what things can you differently in your life to resolve that and to move from that to where you're moving towards a happier life or you're moving towards thriving. And it takes work.(Tom) It's not easy to course correct because we get into patterns that are unhealthy and we get into situations where it takes time to work ourselves out(Speaker 8) of them.(Butch) Yeah, yeah, I just just popped into my head at either yesterday or this morning, I saw a poll on LinkedIn from a consultant that I follow, a coach that I follow. And it had five, there were five answers to the question of, do you work on weekends? And the first one was never, the fifth one was always, but the one in the middle,(Butch) which had like 80% of the vote was if I have to. Mm-hmm. And I do believe that you can always have to. Mm-hmm. But there are times where you just it's not the best thing to do. How do you deal with the workaholic small business owner?(Tom) Well first of all they have to self-identify that they are and they want to change that. Because unless they're ready to say I want to do something better, I want to have a better life. There's got to be, you know, from from here to there there has to be a there that they're pursuing So, you know, that's the first step year or so ago. I didn't know this at the time but very successful manufacturers rep In an industry reached out, you know found me online and you he said, look, there's some things in my business(Tom) I need some help on. Come to find out after we were through with the engagement, his wife gave him three ultimatums, therapist, counselor, or coach. So I'm gonna take coach over therapist, counselor, nine out of 10 times, that's what he did. what it what it was was he was traveling a lot. He was coming home after being a road warrior(Tom) Building a business providing for his family all noble things But he was not there for his family. It took him, you know, get home Friday afternoon He's toast till Saturday afternoon him, you know, a get home Friday afternoon, he's toast till Saturday afternoon, and then, you know, Sunday afternoon, you know, may engage, but then Sunday night, he's thinking about being on the road in the airport the next morning. And so to answer your question, where once he said something had to change, then we started mapping out what could change.(Tom) And it was potentially just, you know, little things like coming home on Thursday morning as opposed to Thursday night. And he couldn't do that every week. And there were conventions that required. but a small change had significant impact on his life and the relationship he had, obviously with his wife and his two boys,(Tom) and they were in high school and he's not gonna get that time back. So self-identified, had a there where he wanted to be and motivation to do it.(Speaker 7) That's great.(Butch) That's a great change for somebody to make. So, one of the things that I know, again, what I know for me, and some of this I learned from you, processes and systems really helped me because it's that, you know, it gets me out of that. I'm going to do that next. And, you know, next just winds up being four days from now.(Butch) How do you work with those people on establishing systems, processes, you know, repeatable?(Tom) I always say what you need know repeatable. I processes are more natural to them than others. You know, you can, somebody may want flexibility to get a project done by a certain date and time. You know, so when I'm working with somebody, doesn't matter small business, corporate, whatnot, it's, you know, being intuitive enough to know and ask the right questions. What process works best for you? And then how can tell me how I can hold you accountable to the process you put in place?(Tom) So I let them be the architect for the process because some may use technology, some may use pen and ink, but we map it out together. And then my question is, is what can I do to support you and what's the best way to hold me,(Tom) for me to hold you accountable to what you say you're gonna do by when you say you're gonna do it?(Butch) Yeah, logical repeatable processes can make things a lot easier.(Tom) Yeah.(Butch) So, Tom, one of the things I know you talk about are the non-negotiables.(Speaker 4) Yeah.(Butch) So, how do you identify and articulate that and how do you help business owners, sales leaders be able to accept that and do that?(Tom) That's a great question because typically the non-negotiables in a lot of cases involve people. The situation about travel, that's a people. You know, the situation about travel, you know, that's a people. The work on weekends, you know, it can be a non-negotiable, but it's typically probably not to, you know, sit around and watch football all day. It's to, because you want to be engaged with people. So it's a lot easier to map out a strategy around a non-negotiable.(Tom) But to me, I'm just going to be asking you or whoever questions, what's missing? If you look at your ideal life today or your ideal work environment, what are the things that's missing that you need to have in your life or you need to have in your business? And what are the things that, you know, may need to, you know, you need more of? So I was working with a woman who owns a virtual assistance company. And her non-negotiable, ironically, was working on weekends. And because it just seemed like everything flowed(Tom) into Saturday morning and she was missing, you know, going to the dog park or going to the art festival and things like that. And so we just mapped out, said, you know, what's it gonna take? What are the things that have to get done?(Tom) And it was just kind of re-changing the landscape of her week. So. And it was just kind of re-changing the landscape of her week. So some of it was productivity, some of it was making a commitment to herself that she wasn't going to do it. And then it was a matter of, you know, sending me a text or it was cool sometimes she'd send me a picture of where she was on a Saturday just to say I'm not in front of my laptop. And to me, and that's part of the role of a coach(Tom) is to be one of your biggest cheerleaders because life, let's face it, it's gonna drag you down. So sometimes just having that encouragement, that person in your corner, you know, helps keep the momentum alive.(Butch) Yeah, it's interesting. And I just thought of this while you were talking, and I don't know if it was ever articulated as a non-negotiable, but my dad ran an office, an agency. It had anywhere from 90 to 120 people over the years. But he made no secret about it, he didn't hide it. Everybody knew he played golf every Thursday at one o'clock. And they also knew that he was in the office every Saturday from seven o'clock in the morning to 11 o'clock.(Butch) And that's just what he did and nothing got in the way.(Tom) Yeah, a couple of years ago I was working with two guys left wealth management to form their own firm and just I totally admire both of them for A, the courage it took because they were in a great boutique firm. But they both set out to create a higher quality of life. And they realized the the firm they were working for was, you know, there's a book Andy Stanley wrote about choosing to cheat.(Tom) And so you're going to have to cheat and so you're gonna have to cheat one of the two the the company demanded they they would cheat their family in order to accomplish everything they had to do and they made a commitment to when they started their firm that they would not have to cheat their family. And they would create a staff culture that would not require their staff.(Tom) So they led first and instilled that, and then made sure that was just a core value that a family came first. And I worked with them on what it would like to implement a sabbatical program for them. And so, but I still, to this day,(Tom) I just admire the fact that there are gonna be times that we have to cheat, but it should be a rare exception. Take the CPA, for example. Okay, they're gonna probably be working the weekends in April, just a fact, taxes are due, but that doesn't mean they're doing it in July.(Tom) So, navigating that, choosing to cheat, I think your absolutes, you need to be very clear about what those are and make it to the exception of the rule that you ever compromise those things. So one thing we talked about when we were kind of preparing for this show that I had never thought about in these terms, but you talked about trusting your team,(Tom) but also keeping accountability at the same time. And I would think part of being able to do the things you talk about that let a business owner or a sales leader have a life is to be able to trust his team without standing there watching what they're doing all day every day. Yeah. What processes do you put in or(Tom) how do you address that issue? To me, nothing will I think motivate somebody or give And so, that means that you're not gonna be micromanaging their daily task or whatnot. Cause at the end of the day, and this is the auto industry, it's other industries, at the end of the day, what kind of quarter did you have?(Tom) What kind of month did you have? That'll prove itself out. When someone is not achieving to their ability. That's when coaching comes in. That's when the sales manager or the VP of marketing or sales, you know, whomever is coming in and saying, Okay, you know, we were off by this much on your objective, you(Tom) know, help me understand, you know from a company perspective first What are the things that we didn't do? That we could have done to help you do that What are now some of the things that you believe you could be doing that? You know or didn't do that can do it. So, you know trust and inspect obviously has to happen But communicating, you know, we hired you for(Tom) this role, we believe in you, we know you can do this, and then trust them to do it. That to me, that's been something that was given to me over the years and the positions I've had, and that's some of the things that I talk with the clients I'm working at you know if something keeping them up at night is you know, my sales department isn't producing and So then it's a series of conversations around, you know, do they know your form?(Tom) Are they resourced, you know, I walk them through all the scenarios of the company first before we walk into, well it's just bad fit, you know, and I'm dealing with that with a client right now. You know, it's a company employee that's basically in the wrong position. And so the conversation yesterday was about, okay, where is this person naturally more gifted? Where's their experience level? And it's more in a sales support role, not in a lead sales role.(Tom) And I didn't think about that. I'm too close to the problem. And so he's gonna take the weekend and think about it. And then we're gonna talk about it next week.(Butch) That's good that you have an owner open to that.(Tom) Yeah, sometimes I've been guilty of, that's the problem. And I just make a rash decision rather than you know You know looking at it from multiple scopes you're looking at it from a microscope and then you're looking at it from you know You know take that stethoscope out and put it to your heart and say okay what's my my heart tell me the right way to do to make this move and what's my gut tell me you know how to move forward so one more thing I'd like to hear you talk about just just briefly You talked about bulletproof, but if you don't have the right people pulling the levers and(Tom) you know acting(Speaker 6) Activating, you know the process(Tom) Something then I'll break, you know to me that you know, so many times we see technology fail(Speaker 5) but I think to me it's it's you got the right people in your organization.(Speaker 3) And what are the tools, the processes they need to be successful? So. Something you go back to sales where we are, OK, you have a a a lead that comes in.(Tom) OK, you have a process for how a lead that comes in. Okay, you have a process for how a lead, whether it comes to the website, whether it's a phone call that comes to the company, or if it's somebody who walks in the front door, if you're a retail operation. If that phone call isn't taken and it goes to voicemail, if that person isn't greeted in a gracious way that lets that person know(Tom) that we appreciate them being here, if that form that gets filled out isn't followed up, the process isn't going to work. It's just going to fail. So you've got to, I believe, people first. You've got to have those things in place and then you, you know, have the process around.(Tom) There's a tipping point then where a prospect becomes a customer where they're thinking about doing business with you. And so, you know, who are the people that are in that role? You know, if they're not the same person. And then when someone raises their hand and says says yes, I want to buy from you and Become a client, you know, who are the people there?(Tom) So I really think you know as a company grows then it requires more people and maybe more adaptive processes But then when they're a client you want to retain them, you them, who are the people who are responsible for that? I think where we fail is we just, in a lot of cases, don't have, we're too processor system oriented, and we're losing the people aspect of it.(Tom) And that may be why, too, we see so much turnover. Is we're not overtly communicating. We're communicating to the people Hey the process works what's wrong with you as opposed to? Developing and evolving the people and allowing them to input on the process(Butch) Yeah, some of the best I was making a big mistake when I was running that company in San Diego and I got some great advice for a coach and she said, you're trying to put your company together around the people that you have. what you need to do is figure out what the company needs to do,(Tom) then hire the right people to execute. Exactly. Exactly. And again, it doesn't matter what bit, if you're working with a HVAC client, that whole thing, you need someone to say, I'm thinking about doing business with you, to say, I'm thinking about doing business with you software company, I'm thinking about buying your software, then there becomes a prospect becomes a customer becomes a client. And then the client is someone you retain. But having the right people at every stage(Tom) of the process, and having them totally mission driven and value, have a strong core value perspective, you know, the processes will evolve over time. So you can't be married to your processes, but you can sure be married to your people.(Butch) That's great. That's a great way to wrap this up. What I was gonna What my observation was, what I was going to say is, we've been talking for about 40 minutes and we probably spent 35 minutes talking about people and five minutes talking about other stuff.(Speaker 4) Yeah.(Butch) Business really comes back to that trust. If you can trust your people, the processes will work out. If you have the greatest processes in the world, but you can't trust your people, you're gonna(Tom) fail. Yeah. And to your point, I love that, Butch, is you can equip people with processes, but unless you're empowering them, both from a motivational standpoint and that believe in you, trust in you, that empowering part is really the wind that is in the sail. That's gonna get them through adversity.(Tom) I got a client dealing with tariffs right now. The fact that they know the business owner believes in them and trust them to make the right decisions and to take care of the customers, even if the price goes up, do the right thing. That's gonna get through just about every single situation,(Tom) if not all of them.(Butch) Well, that's great. Well, listen, if you're a baby boomer or Gen Xer, I wanna leave you with this. This isn't about starting over. This is about evolving. And it's the same wisdom, just with new tools.(Butch) And if you've been successful, if you are the person, the process the processes will change but the value that you bring to the table will never(Tom) change. Well said. You got anything else you want to leave us with Tom? Hey this has been a blast. I really enjoyed it. And if anybody would want to reach out and talk about anything we shared here, throw a comment in or whatnot. I'd love to keep the conversation alive and learn from all of you.(Butch) So Tom, where's the best place for people to find you?(Tom) You can find me on LinkedIn and my website, Tom Martin Coaching as well. You know, that's it. And you know, my website has all my contact information from that standpoint, but really appreciate the opportunity(Tom) to be with you today, Butch, and to with your community. Well, we appreciate your time today, too, Tom. It was very insightful and educational, so thanks. Thank you. And just remember, we're evolving. We're not educational, so thanks. Thank you. And just remember, we're evolving. We're not(Butch) starting over. It's the same wisdom, new tools. See y'all next week.