Ego… Don’t listen to it.

If you’re not listening and have your blinkers on. You don’t deserve to win.

Every time you stroke your ego, you will miss out on:
– opportunities that present itself
– what customers are truly saying
– seeing the bigger picture

And serving your ego will:
– mess with your potential
– serve your own interests
– add no value to you or anyone

Ego f*cks you over.

Keep your feet grounded.
Be humble.
Serve.

Enjoy this raw & real vlog 🙂

Transcript

Tobi: If you listen, the customer will tell you what they want. If you are not listening well, or you’ve got your blinkers on, or you’re completely facing the opposite direction, then you deserve not to win. That’s just me.

Tobi: I took a call last week from a property developer. “Tobi, Tobi, I’m super interested to understand what you guys are doing, and how you’re doing it, and can you tell me more about your story and all the rest of it?”

That was how he opened the phone, and then I asked him a bunch of questions and the phone call went for 25 minutes. He had an agenda. In the end, the guy is someone I’ll probably never do business with because he was full of shit. That guy actually didn’t care enough about who was on the other end of the phone and I wasn’t offended, but I qualified who he is and I qualified his intentions. Quick. Smart.

Tobi: What I really want to articulate is when you are self-serving, when you have your ego to stroke every 10 minutes, because you’re fucking amazing, you don’t realize how many opportunities you’re actually missing. If he would have come at me with, “Hey, I love what you’re doing and this is how I can help you achieve your goals,” versus, “Hey, this is what I have to rent you,” he actually missed out on a massive opportunity, because I wouldn’t have only just taken one property, I probably would have taken ten of his properties.

Tobi: What’s really, really important to understand is the success that you can have as an individual will far outweigh anything you have in terms of chips on your shoulders and egos that you carry yourself. If you are humble, keep your feet grounded, deliver and be of serving, people are going to trust you. People are going to like you. People want to do business with you, and by the way, my success is a byproduct of your success.

Tobi: Notice that I come behind and I am a result of, versus this guy’s approach, which was I’m going to be successful and Tony’s going to pay me to do this. It’s just backwards, man. So, the one thing that I can say to you is ego fucks a lot of people up. So, the success that I’ve had in business when I was younger and I came out with Pet Loo, and we went from zero units to 500 units sold overnight. I thought I was fucking God’s gift to the world of pets. I really did. It was a really humbling experience when I realized that what I’d done was this, and where the market was was way up here and actually I’ve achieved nothing.

Tobi: So I lowered my checks on myself, my ego, and I was like, “Fuck, I’ve got some real work to do,” and I just basically put my head down and just clawed my way up the mountain year after year, compounding, compounding, compounding, compounding, and I didn’t actually check myself. I didn’t talk about myself. I didn’t tell everyone how fucking amazing I was doing. I just kept executing one day after another, blocks on blocks on blocks. 10 years later the business was bought. It was the third conversation that I’d had with PetSafe. I was very, very thankful. I’m very, very lucky that I had something that they wanted to buy.

Tobi: Note the comment there. I had something that they wanted to buy. It had nothing to do with me. I built something that was worth something that they wanted to write a check for, and I’m really grateful for that, and I’m really proud that Pet Loo is now with one of the best companies in the pet space, period.

But, ego messes with your potential. We all have an ego. Some of us have an ego the size of fucking miles. I don’t think that adds value. I really don’t think that adds value. I think you need to check yourself, check where the market is, understand what’s going on, and one of the biggest tools that you can have in your belt when going to market is just listening and understanding the market versus your personal agenda.