Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to the Solarpreneur Podcast, where we teach you to take your solar business to the next level.
Speaker: My name is Taylor Armstrong.
Speaker: I went from $50 in my bank account and struggling for groceries to closing 150 deals in a year and cracking the code on why sales reps fell.
Speaker: I teach you how to avoid the mistakes I made and bring in the top solar dogs of the industry to let you in on the secrets of generating more leads, falling up like a pro, and closing more deals.
Speaker: What is a solopreneur, you might ask?
Speaker: A solopreneur is a new breed of solopro that is willing to do whatever it takes to achieve mastery, and you are about to become one.
Speaker: What is up, solopreneurs?
Speaker: We are back with probably the juiciest episode of the year, and it's only January, so I guess it's pretty easy to say that.
Speaker: Not a very high bar.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: And if you don't recognize the voice already, we have someone that has been in the days of solopreneur past.
Speaker: We have the man, the myth, the legend, James Swiderski back on the show.
Speaker: So James, thanks for joining us again.
Speaker: You got it, Taylor.
Speaker: Yesterday, Taylor is such an exceptional salesman.
Speaker: I was going to bail out on this yesterday, but he got me.
Speaker: He got me good.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: No, I'm happy to be here, Taylor.
Speaker: 100%.
Speaker: I know.
Speaker: It's good to have you back.
Speaker: Does it bring up ghosts of your past being on this podcast, all the times we did it together and stuff?
Speaker: Ghosts of my past?
Speaker: It depends what kind of ghosts you like to listen to, right?
Speaker: Are these Casper the friendly ghost or something else?
Speaker: But yeah, no, it brings back memories.
Speaker: When did Solarpreneur start?
Speaker: It was like...
Speaker: I think like October 2017, right?
Speaker: The podcast?
Speaker: It's fall, fall that year.
Speaker: It's been at least two years, a year and a half, two years.
Speaker: 18, 18, I don't know.
Speaker: Yeah, something like that.
Speaker: But let's just start by acknowledging Taylor's rock steady growing this podcast.
Speaker: I haven't listened to it in a minute.
Speaker: I don't know if people really give you the credit you deserve on it, but...
Speaker: he has a way with getting people on the podcast.
Speaker: I mean, I've yet to see him find someone who wants on the podcast that he can't go ahead and work his magic and get them on the show.
Speaker: So I know everybody appreciates it.
Speaker: And yeah, man, hats off to you, bro.
Speaker: It's cool.
Speaker: Yeah, we'll appreciate it.
Speaker: I wouldn't say everyone.
Speaker: I'm still working on Grant Cardone, Tony Robbins, Russell Brunson.
Speaker: Haven't gotten them.
Speaker: Elon Musk.
Speaker: He's a future guest.
Speaker: I've heard Elon's a hard one to get on any podcast.
Speaker: Yeah, so still got a few.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But pretty soon.
Speaker: But no, we're growing it.
Speaker: And no, same to you, my man.
Speaker: You helped us grow this show a ton in the beginning.
Speaker: And I know a lot of people still, you know, rave about your course, a lot of episodes you've done and a lot of good stuff out there.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's what we'll get into.
Speaker: I mean, a lot of people think you're dead too.
Speaker: So there's that.
Speaker: Everyone's like, never know.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah, that's one of the reasons I was anxious to have you back on is because even I was at, I was telling you off the camera here, I was at Door to Door Con and a couple other events last week and I still have people ask about you like, hey, what's up with James?
Speaker: Haven't heard from him.
Speaker: And it's been like, you know, a year and a half since you've probably done a podcast.
Speaker: Yeah, just about.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That just goes to show that even a year and a half later, you still had an impact on people and people still got a ton of value from you in the short time.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So where do we want to go with this, Taylor?
Speaker: Do you want me to just go into why I left or what do we want to do?
Speaker: You run the show.
Speaker: Ask me anything.
Speaker: It's all open book.
Speaker: Sweet.
Speaker: Well, yeah.
Speaker: Let's jam.
Speaker: Let's get into it.
Speaker: So, yeah.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: Do you want to just tell us kind of what you've been up to, where you've been?
Speaker: Maybe why you got off the show.
Speaker: And then I got some juicy Facebook posts that we're going to read and laugh about and stuff.
Speaker: But yeah, let's hear it.
Speaker: Yeah, so before we get into this, I want to make this very clear that I have left the solar industry entirely.
Speaker: So I have...
Speaker: Zero motive out of this episode to try and sell you anything.
Speaker: I'm not trying to put you into a funnel Not trying to get you to download anything like I'm literally just here to help add value to Taylor's audience because he's I consider him a friend and that's it so
Speaker: That being said.
Speaker: Which is why you didn't want to get on the show for a minute.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: I'm not even an insult anymore.
Speaker: Yeah, well, that's old James we'll talk about where I feel like I have to get something out of every interaction.
Speaker: But I guess the only thing in my intention this episode is if one person in the industry could get some sort of value out of the many, many mistakes, failures, and successes that I've had in the industry, and I'm going to pull back the curtain 150,000%.
Speaker: Way too much probably but I think it's what the industry needs to hear and I think someone's gonna pull some value out of this Maybe it's just Taylor.
Speaker: Maybe it's just one other person but That's kind of the tone.
Speaker: I want to set with the show before we get started.
Speaker: So love it So yeah, um, everyone's really curious to know so I know if anything even if people get zero value I know we're gonna have people tuning in just be like James.
Speaker: What the freak?
Speaker: I haven't heard from him forever He's back on the show
Speaker: But I know you have a lot of lessons to teach us and you told me before that you have regrets and stuff.
Speaker: So I know people can learn your mistakes, obviously done a ton of good stuff too.
Speaker: But yeah, I don't know.
Speaker: Maybe we'll dive into it, but just maybe I guess I'll start with your initial question.
Speaker: So where have I been?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Why did I leave?
Speaker: I think to best answer this, I'm going to back up to kind of my story more or less.
Speaker: Some people know my story, but I want to highlight like the stuff that maybe I didn't say before for marketing purposes.
Speaker: And the problem with the world we live in today is gurus, quote unquote, people that sell trainings and courses.
Speaker: It's a very mixed bag of results you get out there.
Speaker: Um, yeah.
Speaker: You have people who sell courses and people love it.
Speaker: Some people think it's a scam.
Speaker: You have people that sell some sort of service and it's the same thing.
Speaker: And it's difficult to tell what's true, what's authentic in a marketplace.
Speaker: And unfortunately, like I'm one of those characters that contributed to that bigger, I would almost call it sort of a crisis within the entrepreneur or sales sort of space.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: For people who don't know me, and we're assuming people know me, Taylor, but I'm sure there's... But I'm more than confident that the majority of your audience doesn't know me.
Speaker: I'm willing to bet.
Speaker: But in case they don't know me, I got my start in the solar industry when I was 19 years old.
Speaker: I worked with a startup company called Evalar Solar.
Speaker: This is one of those things where...
Speaker: When I was telling people I worked at the startup company to begin with, I didn't name drop them because there's things I did at these companies, which we'll get into that I'm not particularly proud of.
Speaker: And I didn't want it coming back to haunt me, which it did.
Speaker: Spoiler alert, it did in a big way, which we'll get into.
Speaker: But I worked with this company called Evalar Solar.com.
Speaker: Super groundbreaking startup at the time.
Speaker: They were doing a little over seven figures a year, super small.
Speaker: I was one of their initial team members, and I really had an opportunity to work with that CEO.
Speaker: His name was Spence.
Speaker: I'll keep for his privacy sake his last name, but I worked with him one-on-one, and I was able to learn a lot in the industry about business.
Speaker: digital advertising, sales altogether, how to start and run a solar company.
Speaker: And I worked at that company for almost two years.
Speaker: I was able to have a lot of success with them.
Speaker: That's where I got my start.
Speaker: That's where I learned sales.
Speaker: I made a couple million dollars for the solar company.
Speaker: back then and thought I was some hot stuff at the time, right?
Speaker: Naive James thought he could go out and he can help any salesperson on the planet.
Speaker: So what I did is I went and I partnered with one of my early business partners and we started a consulting company.
Speaker: It was called Seven Figure Solar at the time.
Speaker: And Taylor was one of the
Speaker: not one of the first, but you were one of the first students, I believe, who signed up for one of those courses.
Speaker: And that's how we actually ended up meeting.
Speaker: Yeah, no, I still remember that day.
Speaker: And you guys, yeah, it's weird because you kind of came out of nowhere.
Speaker: I hadn't heard nothing about it.
Speaker: But then I think I just clicked on your Facebook profile.
Speaker: And you guys had it so set up that it looked like, oh, this looks super established.
Speaker: You got all this course set up, made it look super legit.
Speaker: So I got a hand if you guys, if I was one of your first students, it didn't seem like it.
Speaker: I think you guys already have like testimonials up.
Speaker: Funnel looks super- We had a pilot program, but I think you were one of the first paying students.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, so I was stoked to get in it.
Speaker: And that's one of the things I want to talk about is it's very, one of my natural gifts and abilities that can get misused as we'll talk about is the ability to brand something in the perfect light to sale.
Speaker: I know how to position things in a marketplace to just move off the shelf to seem however you want it to seem positioned.
Speaker: And that's something I've been able to do with a lot of solar companies and help them.
Speaker: But it's also something I've misused as well, which again, we'll continue the story to get to that.
Speaker: So I worked with Seven Figures Solar for a while and eventually we rebranded over to Solarpreneur kind of with talking with Taylor about
Speaker: I contributed to the podcast some.
Speaker: There was some back and forth about who actually was in charge of the podcast and whatnot for a while.
Speaker: But ultimately, Taylor took the reins with it and he keeps going with it and I stepped out.
Speaker: And if we go from there, right, where things start to get interesting is my story and background with how I got in the industry involved.
Speaker: is it simply just got inflated.
Speaker: It got changed to match whatever was going on in the marketplace.
Speaker: The little white lie here, little white lie there.
Speaker: And it didn't seem like anything big for a while because we just weren't doing a lot of volume, a lot of traction with seven figure solar or the first year of solarpreneur.
Speaker: But things really started to pick up about when we launched the solar Spartan system, which a lot of people signed up for.
Speaker: And this was...
Speaker: Summer of, it was like spring to summer of 2019 is about when we started the Spartan system and started getting a lot of results and traction with that program.
Speaker: The problem is as these results and traction started coming in, right?
Speaker: I noticed that there was more eyeballs on my background, particularly the things that I was not telling about this startup company I worked with.
Speaker: And frankly, one of the biggest things that caused a tremendous amount of anxiety, honestly, is how I sold solar.
Speaker: Taylor's put out an episode about like lies he's told in solar, you know, being dishonest with, to, to make a sale.
Speaker: And I would say the far majority of the sales I made at that first solar company were unethical in nature.
Speaker: And the problem is I have a way with people.
Speaker: I'm a good salesman, right?
Speaker: But I misused those natural talents and those gifts.
Speaker: And I,
Speaker: I ended up in the Spartan system teaching others in the industry how to do those similar things.
Speaker: And that's why it had such mixed opinions.
Speaker: It was so controversial in nature and me in particular.
Speaker: It's because some of the things I taught, they work.
Speaker: Human psychology, they work.
Speaker: They get people to take action on things.
Speaker: But people who are really ethically aligned, morally aligned, they don't feel comfortable using those tactics and those secrets that I taught people.
Speaker: I feel like sales in general often falls in that category.
Speaker: I disagree with a lot of the old school type of sales tactics because I just don't think they're necessary.
Speaker: I don't think they work.
Speaker: But most importantly of all, I don't think they're ethical in nature.
Speaker: And where I really paid the price on this with that solar company, Evalar ended up
Speaker: basically going bankrupt about, I would say six months after I left.
Speaker: I left right before early signs of bankruptcy were happening because I wanted to try and save my reputation with it and be able to use them as a leverage point to get clients.
Speaker: But they ended up going bankrupt
Speaker: mostly because of the bad deals that it put in through them.
Speaker: I was one of the few people, but I would say the majority of the reason they went bankrupt was because of me.
Speaker: And what happened after that and really putting those deals through is just complete hell.
Speaker: And I'll paint this picture for you because what this looks like is people dinging up your Facebook.
Speaker: We're talking
Speaker: And I put probably 560 deals or something into this company, right?
Speaker: And we're talking about hundreds of customers sending me messages saying I screwed them over.
Speaker: I lied to them about this.
Speaker: Death threats from people.
Speaker: Oh my gosh.
Speaker: Holy cow.
Speaker: The full thing, full blacklisted by every homeowner I knew.
Speaker: I just...
Speaker: Taylor, you always wonder why I change my numbers all the time.
Speaker: It's because of this.
Speaker: Yeah, that's crazy.
Speaker: So do you, I mean, obviously we appreciate you being super vulnerable and stuff on the show, but do you want to, do you mind getting into, I don't know, maybe some examples of what you did or why were these customers so mad?
Speaker: How did you, I don't know, screw them over?
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Here's the deal and the warning and the label.
Speaker: And if you can learn from this, like I learned it in the most expensive way possible.
Speaker: Learning from experience is the most expensive way to learn.
Speaker: And trust me, you learn, right?
Speaker: And you never get away with being dishonest with the sales thing.
Speaker: And I've struggled with that my entire life in multiple things before solar side businesses.
Speaker: It was always the same thing, the same story.
Speaker: comes back to haunt me, end up paying for it either financially, emotionally, you'd name it.
Speaker: And the biggest way that customers at Evalar were screwed over because of me was finance.
Speaker: really I think is a huge flaw in the industry, is just misrepresenting the energy offset with systems.
Speaker: It's the single most fraud-ridden opportunity in solar that doesn't get exposed.
Speaker: I mean, it gets exposed, but nobody talks about it because there's such a...
Speaker: long time period from when you see the actions and results from that.
Speaker: I mean, you're talking a year, two years later is when people really see what's going on.
Speaker: And what happens is very simple.
Speaker: I go in and I tell the homeowner that this system is going to offset 100% of their electricity, but
Speaker: in order to compete with x y competitor i lower that price down and i tell them with the bidding software we use that it's going to do 100 but it's really sized at 70 percent or 80 or 60 and because we pay their bill for an entire year all of their electric bills they don't find out until a year two years later that their system is missized right yeah and i could tell you that i'm not the only guy who's done this um
Speaker: I, I'm not the exception.
Speaker: Uh, I know behind closed doors working with, uh, all the solar reps that I did work with, this comes out of the woodworks every single time.
Speaker: So there's a lot of other ways you could screw customers over.
Speaker: I don't love the marketing that happens in the industry, which we'll get into.
Speaker: Um, and I was a big proponent of that.
Speaker: It wasn't as a fraudulent nature, but it's also something I don't want to be tied to in representing as well.
Speaker: And I want to clear out, but yeah,
Speaker: Yeah, man.
Speaker: No, that's big.
Speaker: And I know we talked a little bit off screen too, just about, um, you know, the people you're around.
Speaker: I know, uh, you know, your business partner in the beginning with seven figure solar.
Speaker: Um, you know, we're not, not to put a name out, but yeah, but, but him, he, um,
Speaker: I mean, if you were shady, in my opinion, he was probably 10x of the shady stuff.
Speaker: You rubbed off on me a lot.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I know that's- It's my fault.
Speaker: I'm not going to point the car to the blame at anybody, but yeah, definitely your environment and who you hang out with is of the utmost importance.
Speaker: Even at that company, Evlar, there were some shady people that worked there as well.
Speaker: It wasn't all me, so-
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And no, it's exactly what I talk about in that episode.
Speaker: I did the lies I've told one of the big lies I was telling and probably the biggest trouble I got in the industry was because I took the advice of another kid that was being shady and basically was using this trick to copy the customer's last four of their socials, which you can go back and listen to the whole story in that episode.
Speaker: But yeah,
Speaker: Came back to bite me and the customer figured out this little code we were using to basically hold on the last four of their socials and do a soft check on their credit.
Speaker: Which, you know, it's not a huge deal at the end of the world.
Speaker: But when you get caught doing that, that's going to be a huge deal to the customer.
Speaker: It's like, what are they doing with the last four of our social?
Speaker: Not a good look.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So it w as a terrible look for me, but no, I think that's a great lesson to learn.
Speaker: Just be careful who you're surrounded with.
Speaker: If you have a bunch of dudes in your company, they're doing shady stuff.
Speaker: And, um, yeah, maybe it's time to reevaluate.
Speaker: The other, the other thought on that is it's, it's not, if you were to ask me from the first day, um,
Speaker: working in solar the first time i ever told any resemblance of a lie to someone right if you would have asked me that two years later i would be like blatantly aggressively lying to customers to close deals like total hard selling them at the kitchen table like i was that guy that doesn't leave until they're like forced to sign type of thing and i tell them whatever it takes to close the deal um
Speaker: If you would have told me that I would have done this to hundreds of customers, I would have said you're insane.
Speaker: Like I would never do that.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And when it comes to lying and being dishonest with anything, it's,
Speaker: little bit by little bit.
Speaker: It's one bad influence and you start doing it just one time.
Speaker: You say, ah, maybe I'll exaggerate about some company reviews this time, or I'll talk about how our average customer saves like $3,000 a year on their electricity costs or something like that.
Speaker: And it's just one little thing that just keeps going and escalating.
Speaker: And that's what ended up happening with the Spartan system as well.
Speaker: Yeah, that's huge.
Speaker: Well, let's take a quick kind of break in your story.
Speaker: And I want to like pull up some of these Facebook comments.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And we need to address them or go back in your story.
Speaker: But the first thing I want to pull up is the people you did help.
Speaker: And we already talked about that a little bit, but you did, you know, add a ton of value.
Speaker: A lot of people raved on and on about you.
Speaker: Like this is from a post actually January of last year.
Speaker: So about a year ago.
Speaker: Um, we had a, actually another kid named James or someone made a comment.
Speaker: Has anyone here tried the solar Spartan system with James Swiderski?
Speaker: And then, um, a bunch of people popped in there like saying they had a ton of value.
Speaker: James would.
Speaker: He's like, James has always struck me as an authentic driven dude.
Speaker: And I've never seen anyone say anything bad about him.
Speaker: So got him raving about you.
Speaker: Um, you got a Ben saying, been using for a couple of months.
Speaker: They know what they're doing.
Speaker: um steven says i haven't but it's free media it's very strong and i respect his heart and hard work um wayne says great system devin koretsky says i took the course you want to be top producer in this industry i highly suggest it so you had people uh raving on and on about it so obviously you did some good stuff with it um
Speaker: So I don't know.
Speaker: Do you want to talk about like what you were proud of in the course?
Speaker: Obviously you had some good stuff in there.
Speaker: So what's the most, I don't know.
Speaker: So here's, I'll tell you what was tainted and what was not tainted.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So I had the absolute best intentions with the Spartan system.
Speaker: It was not a cash grab course.
Speaker: When I went into it to make this course,
Speaker: I wanted to make the highest quality sales training that I didn't receive, that I didn't have an example for.
Speaker: I wanted to be the mentor that others in the industry could look to that did teach ethical and honest things.
Speaker: And that's what my goal was because I was taught how to sell unethically and I wanted to correct that.
Speaker: I wanted to teach real things that transformed not only the homeowner's lives, but actually help the salespeople become higher quality individuals, not just become great salespeople.
Speaker: And
Speaker: Because of that, everything I was taught in there was 100% real.
Speaker: Like I didn't lie or make up any tactics within the course.
Speaker: And this is why people got results with it.
Speaker: What happened was...
Speaker: the story I used to sell people and get people involved with the course, my story for marketing purposes was stretched, right?
Speaker: The way that I told people and taught people to sell was still coming from my experience of someone who screwed over a lot of customers.
Speaker: And at the end of the day, like I can have the best intention and try to correct it.
Speaker: But when my foundation in sales was to deceive people, there's going to be things that slip through the cracks with that.
Speaker: The other thing I was in there is there just were strategies and tactics that I had not used on my own success with selling.
Speaker: I had not used at the kitchen table.
Speaker: Yes, I was able to test and use those strategies with students.
Speaker: And it worked for many of them, right?
Speaker: But it didn't work for others as well.
Speaker: And what I wish if I were to go back and change the Spartan system altogether and the training within it would be to cut out the tactics.
Speaker: The biggest takeaway I've learned like in 2020 with salespeople and coaching, you know, hundreds of solar pros is tactics don't
Speaker: help.
Speaker: They're five, 10% of the equation.
Speaker: Um, the biggest thing you could do to be a successful salesperson is just be authentic, be yourself, embrace the flaws, embrace your weaknesses.
Speaker: If you're working with a company that doesn't have great reviews, you tell the customer I've got a company that doesn't have great reviews, but I'm here to change that.
Speaker: I'm here to try and bring people on and change this reputation of this organization.
Speaker: And that's the biggest takeaway I've learned from all of this is that's what cuts through the noise in our marketplace.
Speaker: And that's the biggest thing I'd change in the Spartan system is just teaching people how to be better people has nothing to do with selling.
Speaker: There's no line, there's no magic pill.
Speaker: No, I love that.
Speaker: And yeah, I think a big mistake is a lot of people make is even if your company doesn't have great reviews or whatever, I mean, if you tell someone up front,
Speaker: then it's going to come across way better than them finding out later down the line.
Speaker: Same thing I did with using my trick to get lost for the social.
Speaker: If I were to told the customer up front rather than finding out down the road later, that's when you look terrible and that's when people are going to file lawsuits and do all that crap because they're going to be pissed off at you.
Speaker: I tried to put a quick one on them.
Speaker: We didn't get into that, Taylor.
Speaker: So the cost of this, what did it cost me to do this to this many customers?
Speaker: Let's continue to that.
Speaker: So out of all those customers getting all the threats with everything, what ended up happening is my own company ended up suing me for
Speaker: we'll just say tens of thousands of dollars.
Speaker: We'll just leave it at that.
Speaker: I'm not going to put a, a price tag on it.
Speaker: Um, cause that was the, that was the easy price tag.
Speaker: The hard price tag was what it emotionally ended up costing me.
Speaker: So here's what ends up happening when you do this, when you have people who are just bashing on you on social media, blowing up your phone, you've got to change your phone number because people do this.
Speaker: Um, um,
Speaker: That ends up causing a lot of emotional resistance and fear towards actually communicating with people and forming relationships with people in particular with me.
Speaker: So what ended up happening was I had a genuine phobia of social media.
Speaker: I did not want to even...
Speaker: see Facebook's logo.
Speaker: Anytime I would literally hop on Facebook, my heart rate elevates 30, 40 beats a minute.
Speaker: Like it's like I just stepped on a treadmill.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And I literally had to work with therapists, coaches, and different mentors in all of 2020 to try and overcome like this emotional fear of what had happened with this.
Speaker: And yeah,
Speaker: If I didn't learn my lesson from that, I certainly learned my lesson with the solar community.
Speaker: So what ended up happening is as my story was gaining a lot of traction, fall quarter four of 2019 with the Spartan system and whatnot, the Solarpreneur YouTube channel started happening.
Speaker: getting a lot of traction.
Speaker: Every single day that I woke up, I literally was just thinking, who is going to find out that I'm not legit with my story?
Speaker: Every single day, it's just fear, bottom pit of the stomach.
Speaker: And I could put on a great face with it, but people still see that.
Speaker: You can sense an energy when someone's trying to
Speaker: be inauthentic.
Speaker: And that's why it was so polarizing in nature.
Speaker: And the capital on that is, it ended up just getting to the point of December, January or winter time of 2019.
Speaker: And I just said, I'm done, dude.
Speaker: I can't
Speaker: I can't do this anymore.
Speaker: Like I can't handle the fear with this.
Speaker: And I shut it all down.
Speaker: I deleted the YouTube channel.
Speaker: Stole it for no reason off.
Speaker: Yeah, people got value out of it, but I didn't want any of the
Speaker: even if there's just a little bit of, there's the saying, if you pee in the pool, there's pee in the pool, right?
Speaker: You can't pee in part of the pool and the pool is not contaminated.
Speaker: Like the whole thing goes out.
Speaker: And that's the thing.
Speaker: Even if there was 99% truth in there, which there was that 1%, I couldn't, I couldn't be a representative of that.
Speaker: I couldn't be an example of that in the industry and have that weighing on my conscience.
Speaker: So I had to shut the whole thing down.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: No, and just to tell kind of my side of the story during all this too is, yeah, like you had your story for marketing purposes and all that, but what always happens
Speaker: kind of came to my mind back in those times when we're doing the podcast together um part of it would be like why is James getting all this attention you were super good at the branding and the marketing um but you know I I kind of had the podcast idea from the beginning and um you know started the solar printer podcast which we collaborated on so you really helped me blow it up and um
Speaker: But we've talked about it before.
Speaker: Everyone's like, hey, James podcast is super cool.
Speaker: Like I would get messages sent to me being like, oh, James podcast is so cool.
Speaker: Are you just going on for a few episodes or what?
Speaker: And in my head, I'm like, no, I started this podcast.
Speaker: Like James is the co-host right now.
Speaker: But I mean, I started it.
Speaker: But you were getting like kind of all the attention.
Speaker: And part of it was just, you know, be like my pride hopping in and being like, well, I'm the one out there selling.
Speaker: I'm like grinding doors every day.
Speaker: James is just like mostly sitting behind a computer and doing this fancy marketing.
Speaker: How come I'm not getting recognized more for the podcast?
Speaker: So it even affected me too.
Speaker: And yeah, that's kind of the thoughts that were in my head and you helped me.
Speaker: But yeah, I think it was the same thing as you're doing marketing for the course.
Speaker: I'm like, what the freak?
Speaker: How is James like blowing this course up?
Speaker: He's not even out there selling.
Speaker: I know he has some good tactics, but like you're saying, I know a lot of it, you know, maybe it was like shady stuff.
Speaker: And I mean, I know you had some pretty bold claims in your like marketing videos.
Speaker: So, um, yeah, what was some of that true?
Speaker: How much in your marketing videos and stuff like that, how much would you say is true and like faults of the claims you're making stuff like that?
Speaker: So here's what I don't like about marketing and why I'm leaving the marketing industry as a whole.
Speaker: The internet marketing world, the ClickFunnels, Russell Brunson type of marketing is where I learned my start in marketing, right?
Speaker: The reason I got attention, frankly, wasn't all because of lies.
Speaker: It was because I studied marketing a lot.
Speaker: I mean, and people are good at different things.
Speaker: Taylor's better at connecting with homeowners in the home and relationships.
Speaker: He's better at discipline, right?
Speaker: Those are things I struggle with personally.
Speaker: So everybody has their own gifts and talents with that.
Speaker: I just misused mine.
Speaker: What I don't like about the Russell Brunson ClickFunnels type of marketing is...
Speaker: it just doesn't represent the truth in the best possible light.
Speaker: It's painting the best case scenario rather than the most common scenario.
Speaker: So rather than saying, let's use a Spartan system, for example, the Spartan system works for a very small selection of people, right?
Speaker: And that selection of people are the people who most likely would have succeeded anyway, to be honest.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: It's the people like Taylor that go out there, they work, they understand that you have to have a good work ethic, that there's no secrets, and they're just looking for a couple of tips to help them there.
Speaker: Those people got great results with the Spartan system.
Speaker: Everyone else who was trying to buy that course as kind of a save-all, this is going to help us out of the gutter, like we have no idea what we're doing, right?
Speaker: They didn't put in the work with things.
Speaker: It's not going to help someone who doesn't put in the work at the end of the day, right?
Speaker: So the claims were true.
Speaker: There are basically the only thing that was ever inauthentic was my story.
Speaker: The claims with, what are some of them?
Speaker: The 90% close rate, right?
Speaker: Sounds absurd.
Speaker: Like it's true, but what you have to do to get that 90% close rate,
Speaker: most people are not willing to do at the end of the day.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And I can't sell everybody and say everybody could get the 90% close rate and pretend that it's the most common.
Speaker: Like if you don't get the 90% closer, you're totally screwing up your solar career.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: That's just not the case.
Speaker: And this is how marketing is in our world today.
Speaker: If you see any Facebook ad, it's painting the best case scenario rather than the most common outcome.
Speaker: That's the biggest thing we're really, that needs to be changed to marketing as a whole with solar is we got to stop painting and blowing up and sugarcoating everything.
Speaker: It's got to be just cut and dry.
Speaker: Like this is why people do what they do or get results.
Speaker: Yeah, no, I love that.
Speaker: And even now, and you've seen it too, but how many like guys are out there that have taken a singles ClickFunnels course or something like that and then decided, oh, I'm going to go do solar marketing because I know marketing now.
Speaker: They took like a single course and they're putting ads out there.
Speaker: You go on these Facebook groups, you can do a search for like people who got scammed.
Speaker: There's dozens and dozens of people, companies that got scammed by solar marketing guys that say, hey, we're going to run your ads.
Speaker: we're going to get your results and then they pay them thousands of dollars and then ghost them the next day or they get them zero results.
Speaker: So I totally agree with that.
Speaker: For anyone who's listening, if you're considering like hiring agencies or whatever, just, I don't know, go in these groups, get people's feedback and figure out if they're having results before you go all in with these guys.
Speaker: I can provide some insight on that, Taylor.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: I've had an agency, right, for a while.
Speaker: We'll get into the marketing side of the agency because there's some things I want to clear up there as well.
Speaker: And as someone who's actually personally hired
Speaker: agencies and tried to buy solar leads and appointments from providers for my own company I've started, right?
Speaker: I could tell you that 99% of those agencies do not have the intent to screw you over.
Speaker: They don't have the intent to scam you and take your money and run.
Speaker: Yeah, there's occasionally a bad character that does that.
Speaker: What happens is they bite off more than they can chew.
Speaker: They set an expectation, believing full-heartedly that they can reach that expectation
Speaker: And then stuff happens.
Speaker: Like it always happens.
Speaker: And particularly in a volatile industry like solar, an election happens, boom, all of your ad accounts get banned overnight, right?
Speaker: And what do you do when you run a marketing agency?
Speaker: You try your best, but sometimes things go to pot.
Speaker: This has happened to me, right?
Speaker: I've had some solar clients, Joseph Nguyen and I have had some solar clients that just did not get the results that we promised because something happened and we tried everything we could to get the results for them.
Speaker: I would say that we haven't had and to really defend in Joseph's case because he does run the marketing agency at this point.
Speaker: We've yet to have a client that didn't get a significant return on investment from working with our lead gen.
Speaker: So it's not like we're one of the guys who just ghost and do nothing.
Speaker: Yeah, 100%.
Speaker: I mean, stuff happens.
Speaker: No agency is ever perfect when it comes to marketing.
Speaker: So I just want to leave that out.
Speaker: Like as someone who's owned an agency and when you're out there trying to hire someone for your lead gen, we could get into suggestions on that.
Speaker: But the biggest thing you could do is...
Speaker: Obviously look for results and testimonials with things, but have the right frame of mind going in that it may not be perfect.
Speaker: And it's not because of them.
Speaker: It's because of the industry as a whole.
Speaker: And if you're going to play with paid advertising, you got to be willing to lose some money at the end of the day.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: No, I agree.
Speaker: And for people that have their agencies, I think the best thing you can do is be honest with your clients and customers.
Speaker: That's like, if you tell someone, Hey, this is what you can expect.
Speaker: There's going to be some down times.
Speaker: There's going to be some days where there's tons of leads coming.
Speaker: Then yeah, again, people are going to,
Speaker: be way more chill with that rather than going a week with zero leads because you already told them.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: If you're new, if you're new to advertising, tell them you're new to advertising, right?
Speaker: If you're new to solar and selling solar, how long you been with this company?
Speaker: Everybody gets that question, right?
Speaker: Two weeks, whatever the truth is.
Speaker: It's my first day.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But no, it's true because I dabbled with the marketing side too.
Speaker: I actually had a few clients that I was running ads for and it was the same thing I just realized.
Speaker: Luckily, I only had a couple people I was working with so I wasn't, you know, tons of people, me biting off more than I could chew but I realized pretty quick that it took way more work than I was thinking to manage my own ads and then everyone else's ads were trying to get results.
Speaker: Overwhelming.
Speaker: Cause you get more than a couple of people, you're managing a lot of ads and if things aren't working right, people are freaking out.
Speaker: Um, so I got out before I, you know, had a bunch of people that I was trying to manage it for and was honest with them luckily.
Speaker: But, uh, yeah, no, I think that's a big problem with the industry.
Speaker: Um, set the proper expectations, know what to expect and then, um, yeah, just don't lie to people.
Speaker: But continuing on with your story, I guess, where did you guys go?
Speaker: So after Solar Spartan System, what happened after that?
Speaker: Where did you go after you kind of got out of things?
Speaker: So we had two sides of the business for Solarpreneur, right?
Speaker: We had the Spartan System, which was mostly me.
Speaker: You saw me making videos.
Speaker: I did the course.
Speaker: I did the trainings.
Speaker: We did put up that course for free 100%.
Speaker: I will make that clear as well.
Speaker: I know some people thought that I shut them out of it when they paid for it or something like that.
Speaker: I literally just put it up for free to everybody quarter one of 2020 just to clear the air.
Speaker: And there it is.
Speaker: And then we had the marketing lead gen side of the business.
Speaker: I was not very involved with that.
Speaker: That was Joseph, my partner and our team.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And that was all the lead gen, the done for you lead gen that we did for clients.
Speaker: That was,
Speaker: really brought, I would say 90% of like the results and the traction.
Speaker: That really is what happened in all of 2020 is we just did lead gen for our clients.
Speaker: And we didn't really go out there and try to make a lot of noise or get a ton of new clients.
Speaker: We just held on to some of our biggest clients and got them some great results.
Speaker: And 2020 was a big year for us with solar lead gen.
Speaker: We made our clients a lot of money and, uh,
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And the moral of the story of that is, I mean, this year, 2020 wrapping up, it just really dawned on me that I am not, my heart's not in solar lead gen.
Speaker: It's not in the industry as a whole.
Speaker: And I decided to move on from that.
Speaker: We tried to start a couple of solar companies in 2020 and 2019.
Speaker: Me in particular,
Speaker: and things did not go well, we could dive into that, why they didn't go well, and some of the lessons I learned from starting companies.
Speaker: But at the end of the day, it was me just not being all in on solar.
Speaker: I just didn't like the industry as much as I thought I did when I got into it, and it weighs on you.
Speaker: Yeah, that's good on you for identifying that.
Speaker: Yeah, it wasn't for you because I mean better to work something you like than be miserable and just keep spinning your wheels in it.
Speaker: But yeah, I mean that was if anyone knows James, I mean, you know that you're definitely the entrepreneur personality type.
Speaker: You have different ideas practically every week.
Speaker: And you're always working on something.
Speaker: So yeah, I can just remember times where, yeah, in 2020, you give me a call and you said, Hey, I'm starting up a solar company.
Speaker: Or hey, I've got this team.
Speaker: Do you want to come?
Speaker: Can they come knock with you in San Diego, train them?
Speaker: Then I'm always like, yeah, man, send them down.
Speaker: And then wouldn't hear from you.
Speaker: Something doesn't work out.
Speaker: So biggest thing that didn't work out, Taylor, I'll tell you what it is.
Speaker: It's people.
Speaker: My weakness is working with people.
Speaker: And that's, that's ultimately the reason most of my ventures have failed in some degree defined failure, whatever it is like for me, you know, running like a, trying to run like a seven figure agency is not my end goal.
Speaker: I don't, I'm not in it just to make a bunch of cash.
Speaker: Like,
Speaker: I'm looking for like a super, super big impact.
Speaker: And I just don't have what it takes at the time right now.
Speaker: It's something I need to work on.
Speaker: It's being vulnerable with people, relating to them.
Speaker: One of the biggest things I think and regret with the solopreneur audience and whatnot and why it didn't blow up even further.
Speaker: It's because of my lack of vulnerability.
Speaker: I never showed the side of me that struggled with things.
Speaker: I always framed myself as like some all knowing whiz kid of solar.
Speaker: That's super good at this.
Speaker: And ultimately end of the day, that just makes people feel like crap.
Speaker: It makes them feel intimidated.
Speaker: Like I can't do that.
Speaker: James works a hundred hours a week.
Speaker: I can't work a hundred hours a week.
Speaker: I've got a family, right?
Speaker: And this is what happens.
Speaker: I would stiff arm and keep people at an arm's distance.
Speaker: And I didn't seem relatable in any way.
Speaker: And, uh,
Speaker: Part of that is because of my fear of rejection from what I did with that early solar company.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And yeah, I know a lot of times when we would talk, I mean, you would tell me, oh, dude, I recruited a huge team.
Speaker: Like practically overnight, sometimes you'd be like, oh, yeah, and I got dozens of people that are ready to work.
Speaker: Literally does happen almost overnight too.
Speaker: That's the thing.
Speaker: Like I'm really good at getting people in.
Speaker: I'm not good at keeping those relationships.
Speaker: Gotcha.
Speaker: So when you said all that, you actually did have the people, it just more keeping these, those people.
Speaker: And then I guess getting them to actually do their thing after that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I'm good at, I'm good at acquisition.
Speaker: It's never retention.
Speaker: Gotcha.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So like I, you know, I've done things where I'd literally go recruit an entire solar company sales team, like in two days and then I get them in, get them psyched up about what we're doing.
Speaker: But there's, there was no, at the end of the day, things fall apart because there's no follow through with the relationship.
Speaker: I didn't like communicating with them.
Speaker: I didn't really like training them on a consistent basis, like one-on-one time, that type of stuff that is required.
Speaker: with starting solar company.
Speaker: I guess that's a takeaway to anybody who's considering they see the opportunity in solar is, uh,
Speaker: Really look at what it takes to run a business.
Speaker: It's my only advice on that.
Speaker: Just because you're good at selling solar does not mean you could run a solar company.
Speaker: There's a huge difference.
Speaker: I know a lot of people who are all-star salespeople.
Speaker: Taylor knows them too.
Speaker: And they don't run very good companies, some of them.
Speaker: It's a very particular person to run an organization with that.
Speaker: It's interesting.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: True, true.
Speaker: And yeah, I know when we talked, I don't know, maybe six months ago or something, you were trying to start actually like a door-to-door team and everything.
Speaker: And maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think you knocked like tons of doors when you're in selling.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So did you find any disconnects maybe when you're trying to do that?
Speaker: Would you think maybe people look to you like, oh, he hasn't knocked a ton of doors or...
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: Do you think that made it tougher for you to want to start a door-to-door team?
Speaker: The reason it was tough to start the door-to-door team, again, just came back to the... I was trying to start... I was taking a final stab at something that I had...
Speaker: not build a steady foundation on yet.
Speaker: That foundation was the people skills again.
Speaker: When it comes to like the age old question of does the founder and CEO of a solar company have to be good at the thing that they're teaching their team to do?
Speaker: I don't think that's correct.
Speaker: Some of the best entrepreneurs and mentors that I've personally had, they're terrible at
Speaker: at the thing that their team does.
Speaker: I know so many solar CEOs that couldn't knock a door and sell a deal to save their life, but they go and they find the right people who are great at that.
Speaker: They go find the guys like Taylor or Michael O'Donnell or those types of guys and they let them, they build leaders out of those people.
Speaker: Yeah, and I lack that skill.
Speaker: I lack the skill of building leadership and that's why I couldn't run a company at the end of the day.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Well, no, I love the vulnerability and I'm just pulling up some of the other comments.
Speaker: Let's get into it, man.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: There's some funny ones too.
Speaker: I mean, rapid fire me, dude.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, so someone made a post, does solar Spartan training still exist?
Speaker: And then you get a bunch of comments.
Speaker: One guy's just like, nope.
Speaker: And then one guy's like, is this the AWOL kid?
Speaker: Hey wall kid.
Speaker: That's fine.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And, um, you've never seen any of these posts, right?
Speaker: Cause you just left all the groups and I've seen, I've seen stuff, but again, yeah, I've got a phobia of social media, so you didn't see me on there.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And then, but yeah, I understand why.
Speaker: I mean, another guy says, well, this, this looks like a great investment.
Speaker: And they post a screenshot of your Facebook profile that says, that doesn't talk anything about solar.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: And then, yeah, another guy's like, wow, that's a name from the past.
Speaker: Didn't he burn a bunch of people on Legion and then ghost everyone or something like that?
Speaker: He still posts solar tactics and training.
Speaker: Not sure what happened to him, but last I heard, he was doing a massive challenge and disappeared.
Speaker: I'm assuming the challenge didn't go well.
Speaker: The challenge is funny.
Speaker: I haven't heard anything on that challenge in a while.
Speaker: I don't even know you're doing a challenge, but...
Speaker: Well, this was like a year and a half ago.
Speaker: Yeah, I might as well bring it up.
Speaker: That challenge is when I said I was going to close 50 deals in a month.
Speaker: Oh, remember that?
Speaker: Yeah, it didn't go well.
Speaker: People know that.
Speaker: I should have just posted and owned up to it.
Speaker: Instead, I decided to ghost out and just ignore it, basically.
Speaker: Face up to your problems.
Speaker: Lesson learned.
Speaker: Your mistakes.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: Another person's like, WTF did I just walk into?
Speaker: There's a lot.
Speaker: But yeah, then this Devin guy comes and says, I bought the Solar Spartan service and still use them for my leads today.
Speaker: Got a ton of value.
Speaker: Yeah, Devin's a client.
Speaker: It is cool.
Speaker: And then another person says, one word, hashtag run.
Speaker: This is the Solar Scammer class of 2019.
Speaker: So yeah, I mean, you caused an uproar.
Speaker: But yeah, anytime, especially when you had your following and your credibility and stuff, then you just kind of disappear.
Speaker: People are obviously wondering, like, what the heck?
Speaker: Where did this kid go?
Speaker: And I think, again, that just speaks.
Speaker: It's red for rumors, right?
Speaker: If you stop talking, this is not the first time that I've ghosted and rumors start going about and some are true, some are not true, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But no, so I think things are going better for you.
Speaker: Obviously, it's better now that you've decided kind of what you want to do and, you know, that you didn't want to get into solar.
Speaker: So, yeah, do you want to talk about that?
Speaker: What's James up to now?
Speaker: What's James doing now that he's out of Solar Legion?
Speaker: What's your next big idea and thing that you're doing out there?
Speaker: Let's hear it.
Speaker: Yeah, so there's primary things I'm starting and building right now.
Speaker: One is because of the mistakes I've made and solely the lessons I've learned with it, the number one takeaway that I'm most passionate about is personal growth, right?
Speaker: It's helping.
Speaker: And what I enjoyed most about the Spartan system is
Speaker: Wasn't like the tactics and anybody who actually took it knows that it was not super full of solar specific tactics.
Speaker: It was really focused on personal transformation, how to become a better, higher quality human being.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And the rest gets taken care of.
Speaker: That's what I'm most passionate about.
Speaker: I'm starting a personal brand with things.
Speaker: It's not industry specific.
Speaker: It's really focused on helping individuals become more conscious of themselves, understanding what
Speaker: where they should be in life.
Speaker: What are they good at?
Speaker: What are they not good at?
Speaker: And the biggest lesson out of 2020 is I learned what I'm really not good at and I learned out what I am good at.
Speaker: One of the biggest things I was great at was
Speaker: getting and rallying troops to come in towards a unified mission, gathering people, getting attention on things, branding and finding opportunities within a marketplace that people have not tapped out.
Speaker: There's a lot of ideas and things that I was unable to execute on
Speaker: in the solar industry that I know someone's going to pick up the baton and go through.
Speaker: One of my gifts with that is I can really foresee the future with things, with where brands and industries are moving as a whole.
Speaker: And that's why another reason why the Spartan system caught attention was I saw a very specific loophole in that industry, an opportunity, a problem people had not had solved yet.
Speaker: And that's what I help do with brands with what's called Epic Brand.
Speaker: So it's an agency I started where we help brands identify their strategy within the marketplace, how to stand out in a marketplace and web design, branding, stuff like that.
Speaker: to really position themselves.
Speaker: And then the personal brand thing is something you could just follow me over on YouTube.
Speaker: I just started posting there last week.
Speaker: I'm going to be building that up going on different podcasts and whatnot to talk more about the lessons I've learned from my experience within the industry.
Speaker: So if anybody's interested in that, you could just Google me and find me on social media and you'll see a lot more.
Speaker: Awesome.
Speaker: Well, I think I can speak for everyone when I say, uh, we appreciate all the value you did add.
Speaker: Cause obviously to this day you affected a lot of people.
Speaker: Um, you know, again, people talk about you when I go to all these conferences and stuff still a year later.
Speaker: Um, so yeah, we all appreciate that.
Speaker: And I think even though, yeah, we've all made mistakes and you probably made more mistakes than, you know, a lot of other people do.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: we've all made them, but yeah, I think you've added a ton of value and, um, made up for some of the stuff that you probably regret doing.
Speaker: The last thing I wanted to ask you, James, you talk, we talked a little bit just to kind of about like the emotional side of things.
Speaker: I know, um, you probably definitely had the anxiety.
Speaker: You talked about having coaches and mentors to kind of probably help you with meditation and all this stuff you're going through.
Speaker: So I can only imagine, um,
Speaker: That gets tough going through all that, maybe knowing that there's stuff you weren't doing right and maybe not being completely honest with people.
Speaker: So do you have anything that helped you or do you want to speak to that side of thing?
Speaker: Maybe stuff that helped you going through all that?
Speaker: Yeah, I'll be brief with it.
Speaker: That's one of the big things I am going to be helping out with my own personal content because that was such a difficult challenge to overcome.
Speaker: I really had to dig into the weeds with how to become more emotionally resilient and really heal those wounds that were taken, right?
Speaker: And at the end of the day, if you're a sales professional, a marketer, a business owner in this industry or any industry, you're going to face emotional rejection.
Speaker: You're going to face pain.
Speaker: You're going to face fear.
Speaker: That is one of the core beliefs I believe personally, and I'm a pretty religious guy, that we're on this planet is...
Speaker: to learn how to overcome these things so that we can evolve as people.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And, uh, one of the biggest strategies that has helped me by, by and large is embracing fear.
Speaker: It's not running from it.
Speaker: And again, you heard my natural tendency is to ghost, right?
Speaker: It's to move away from the problem.
Speaker: And that's the other reason I didn't want to get on a podcast like this, this time last year, right?
Speaker: I was not ready to do that.
Speaker: It literally took an entire year's worth of work.
Speaker: And believe me, in 2020, I would say,
Speaker: 80% of my time was just working on fixing James.
Speaker: It was not on building companies to an excessive level.
Speaker: Things were running with lead gen just fine.
Speaker: It was working on me overcoming these things.
Speaker: And the biggest thing I can advise to anybody is to pick up meditation.
Speaker: It would be a huge part.
Speaker: It's meditation gets a lot of crap, right?
Speaker: And a lot of people love it at the same time.
Speaker: However you need to start, start.
Speaker: Whether it's an app like Headspace where I started years ago or if it's going full-blown meditation, right?
Speaker: Start meditating.
Speaker: And the reason we do that is our world is so noisy, so chaotic, right?
Speaker: You need to take that time to really kind of flush out the system.
Speaker: What that allows me to do personally is become more present, not thinking about, oh, what is this person going to think about me?
Speaker: Or was this blah, blah?
Speaker: It's just being present in the moment and seeing exactly what comes to mind.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: my natural tendency is to over prepare things right on this interview.
Speaker: I'm like, Oh, should I have Taylor send me all the questions people are going to say and prepare with?
Speaker: I'm like, no, did I, I've learned my lesson with that.
Speaker: I have zero preparation.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: At the beginning, I was trying to kind of plan it out a little bit.
Speaker: You're like, no, let's just, let's just roll with them in.
Speaker: That's what's changed.
Speaker: I just show up in the moment.
Speaker: I say what needs to be said and what's on my mind with things.
Speaker: Meditation has allowed me to do that.
Speaker: Another thing is what's called a resource.
Speaker: It's called the Sedona Method.
Speaker: There's a book on it.
Speaker: It's called the Sedona, S-E-D-O-N-A, Sedona Method.
Speaker: Basically what this is, is it's not just, and people say embrace your fear, right?
Speaker: Use it as fuel, right?
Speaker: That's cool.
Speaker: That's the idea, but what, how do you actually do that?
Speaker: Right?
Speaker: And this is, this is the how part you take a fear.
Speaker: So let's take my fear with social media or whatever it is.
Speaker: Right?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: I take my anxiety.
Speaker: What does it feel like in my body and my stomach, right?
Speaker: With that in me, it was in my stomach, right?
Speaker: Started making me kind of sick with it.
Speaker: I really feel that.
Speaker: And I sit with that feeling for a while.
Speaker: And what happens when you and Taylor, you know, it's like, what happens when you sit with a pain?
Speaker: So you like stub your elbow on something, right?
Speaker: And you press on it, how people do it.
Speaker: What happens?
Speaker: goes away.
Speaker: Goes away temporarily, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: This is how our body and our mind works.
Speaker: When we press on pain and we give the attention it deserves, it goes away.
Speaker: So the next time you're on a door or you feel that anxiety of like, oh, what if they say no?
Speaker: I feel that resistance rather than go do something else or try to distract yourself or something like that.
Speaker: Sit and visualize the pain.
Speaker: Close your eyes and just feel the pain.
Speaker: I can promise you it goes away.
Speaker: And then once it goes away that first time, go and do the action.
Speaker: It's going to come up again, right?
Speaker: But give yourself that moment before you go and do the sales call.
Speaker: You go and follow up with customers to really feel that resistance.
Speaker: Everybody has it.
Speaker: Trust me.
Speaker: I have not met a single person that
Speaker: owns a business, is a salesperson who does not have this.
Speaker: And it doesn't go away either.
Speaker: You've heard Michael O'Donnell on the podcast before.
Speaker: He says every fiber of this being is screaming no when he has to go knock doors, right?
Speaker: This is a man that's made millions off of knocking.
Speaker: It does not go away, trust me.
Speaker: And it's because we're human at the end of the day.
Speaker: So giving it that attention, go check out the book Sedona Method.
Speaker: Love that.
Speaker: No, I appreciate that.
Speaker: And I think that's one of the most...
Speaker: the biggest thing we're lacking in the industry is people taking care of themselves mentally and just being able to manage this anxiety.
Speaker: Cause even Michael Donald, he's talked about it.
Speaker: He had, you know, a long period of his life where he struggled with, you know, drinking too much, um, alcoholism, stuff like that.
Speaker: Yeah, and a lot of people I know in the industry go through divorces, addiction, stuff like that.
Speaker: Because the truth is we're all high-performing people.
Speaker: We're high-producing people.
Speaker: If people don't know how to manage their emotions, what are they going to turn to?
Speaker: Maybe it's, you know, drugs, maybe it's alcohol, porn.
Speaker: There's lots of things.
Speaker: Well, yeah, Taylor, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention on that.
Speaker: Cause that's, that's my wheelhouse now with those types of things.
Speaker: It's the reason we have addictions and vices and things like that.
Speaker: And what I didn't say too, is like at the time of the Spartan system, like I was literally drinking every single night without fail for like six months.
Speaker: Like I never thought I'd be an alcoholic, but like strict definition of alcohol, all of it.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: The reason we have vices and addictions because we're not being present with who our true selves are, right?
Speaker: We're trying to, because what does alcohol do?
Speaker: What does porn do?
Speaker: What does watching binging movies do?
Speaker: It forces you to be present in the moment.
Speaker: right?
Speaker: And that's why people like it because that is yourself, right?
Speaker: You are someone who is present.
Speaker: That's your true self.
Speaker: It's not the person who's trying to deceive somebody.
Speaker: It's not the person who's worrying about something else.
Speaker: It's you in an abundant state present.
Speaker: That's why I like meditation is it helps you reach that state.
Speaker: So that's it.
Speaker: If you struggle with something, a vice of something like that,
Speaker: rather than turning towards that vice, the best and fastest way for you to grow your results externally with sales, with marketing, or personally, relationships, any of that, is to just stay present with yourself, to embrace that pain of what your body's trying to teach you, right?
Speaker: You feel that
Speaker: sense of something's wrong as a warning sign that you need to fix that, not you need to go drink or do whatever the other thing is.
Speaker: Um, it's easier said than done, of course.
Speaker: And I guess the final thing with this is I actually highly recommend therapy as well.
Speaker: Just working with therapists, not even a performance coach, like someone who could literally just talk through those things that you don't tell people that are only known behind closed doors.
Speaker: Uh,
Speaker: that was one of the big reasons I was able to kind of overcome this whole thing with the solar thing is I was able to tell somebody about what I've done and worked through it.
Speaker: So, yeah, I love that.
Speaker: So yeah, definitely if you are struggling, even guys that aren't struggling, I mean,
Speaker: I hear from coaches, high performers that seem like they have everything figured out.
Speaker: Even they have therapists.
Speaker: So I think that's kind of a myth is you don't have to be hard for struggling with stuff to need a therapist or someone to talk to.
Speaker: So I think they can help everybody.
Speaker: um so no I I think that's huge um go manage your emotions because um that's I think kind of the dark side of the industry just being high performers because unfortunately a lot of guys fall into those traps and vices so um you appreciate your feedback on that and um I think that's all the questions I had for you James we really um loved having you back on the show and um I mean I'm glad I could convince you I didn't have to sell you very hard but
Speaker: I'm glad I could convince you to come back on the show.
Speaker: But any final words of wisdom or lessons you learned or anything that we didn't cover that you want to share before we peace out here, James?
Speaker: Yeah, just focus on authenticity is the biggest thing the industry needs altogether.
Speaker: We like to put up the habit we have is we like to call it flex, right?
Speaker: If you go into any solar group, what do you find?
Speaker: It's one of two things.
Speaker: It's
Speaker: Someone bragging about their success within the industry.
Speaker: Hey, look at us, fast growing, did blah, blah, blah, right?
Speaker: Total just dick move, right?
Speaker: Like that doesn't actually help anybody, right?
Speaker: What are they doing?
Speaker: It's all purely selfish.
Speaker: But
Speaker: Most importantly, they're trying to show something, right?
Speaker: They're putting their card out there and saying, hey, look how tough we are, right?
Speaker: Realize that there's stuff behind closed doors you just don't see.
Speaker: As someone who's, I've coached and mentored so many CEOs in this industry.
Speaker: There's stuff you just don't see.
Speaker: I'll just leave it at that, right?
Speaker: There's certain things I can't say, but it's not what it appears to be.
Speaker: And then just realizing your strengths and doubling down on those.
Speaker: Like, you know, in general, if,
Speaker: you are a good salesperson.
Speaker: I mean, and as frank as it is, like, I believe anybody could be, you know, fairly good and make a decent living at sales if they're not a natural salesperson.
Speaker: But at the end of the day, you know if you have it or you don't have it.
Speaker: So.
Speaker: Sure, love it.
Speaker: Well, appreciate you, James, being vulnerable and coming back on the show.
Speaker: And even though you're not really in the industry anymore, but I know you'll do awesome.
Speaker: You got talent in what you're doing.
Speaker: And I'm sure guys will reach out to you if they need help on branding and all that.
Speaker: So thanks again, my man.
Speaker: And we'll hopefully have you back on maybe five years or I don't know, maybe the next year or something when James is doing the next big thing.
Speaker: But thanks again, my man.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You got it, Taylor.
Speaker: Thanks, man.
Speaker: Thanks so much for tuning into today's episode.
Speaker: I know when I got into the industry, I had almost no resources like this.
Speaker: So I hope this show is helping you get the success you deserve.
Speaker: If you found value from anything in this episode today, think about someone who can benefit so you and I can help people fulfill their potential.
Speaker: Zig Ziglar said, if you help enough people get what they want,
Speaker: you will get what you want.
Speaker: So I promise by sharing this, it will help you grow and improve.
Speaker: The value bombs on today's show will take you one step closer to success, but it's always to the degree that you apply and execute the principles.
Speaker: I've spent the last few years interviewing the top solar experts and helping other reps and businesses discover their potential.
Speaker: If you want more help achieving your goals, then I put together an exclusive video training on three hacks that helped me close multiple deals a week while knocking less than 10 hours.
Speaker: And who doesn't want that?
Speaker: So go check it out at webclass.solarpreneurs.com.
Speaker: Once again, that's webclass.solarpreneurs.com to get exclusive access to the training and take your skills to the next level.
