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 the 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: Okay, so we are live, Heber City, Utah, here at the NOCSTAR event 2021, or sorry, 2022.
Speaker: Years go by so quick.
Speaker: And we have got the one, the only, Mike, Michael O'Donnell on the podcast for the third time.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So thanks for coming back with us again, Mike.
Speaker: It's been awesome to have you on so many times.
Speaker: Well, I couldn't tell you.
Speaker: What a week to be in solar and to be up here in Salt Lake City, DDDCon.
Speaker: We're here at the Noxstar event.
Speaker: There's like maybe 100 guys behind us getting their 2022 off to a big start with Danny Pesci and Taylor and...
Speaker: to be part of that event and sitting out here doing this in this backdrop with the snow and the mountains and the shadow of a church steeple.
Speaker: I feel like the planets are lining up.
Speaker: I know.
Speaker: And I'm just excited to be in the solar world and sitting here with you today.
Speaker: I know.
Speaker: You can't beat this backdrop.
Speaker: We're hanging out by the fireside.
Speaker: It's probably, you know, 30, 40 degrees outside.
Speaker: But, yeah, it's an awesome backdrop, and I'm excited to be able to do this podcast.
Speaker: And so last time we had you on, I think it was, what, a year and a half ago or something?
Speaker: You and I were live at the D2D Con, I think, 4, right?
Speaker: And we were just trying to find a quiet spot.
Speaker: And then next thing you know, we had this huge crowd around us, and it turned into kind of a...
Speaker: Kind of a fun rally, and we had a good time.
Speaker: I know.
Speaker: I think last time we got, yeah, 50 guys or something around it.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: By the end of it, you're both our voices.
Speaker: Yeah, Tyra's going, what the heck is going on in the vendor area?
Speaker: I know.
Speaker: We got a stage over here.
Speaker: Come on.
Speaker: I know.
Speaker: Both our voices were shot, I think, by the end of it.
Speaker: Oh, man.
Speaker: We were screaming and shouting.
Speaker: Yeah, if you can hear my voice right now, trying to, I talked the entire time at D2DCon and trying to talk over all of the noise and the D2DCon was massive and mega.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: this year.
Speaker: And so it's just this roar of voices and trying to talk to each other over that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Take a little bit of a toll.
Speaker: I know.
Speaker: So we got a few less people around this time.
Speaker: Luckily, we don't have to scream and shout quite as much.
Speaker: So hopefully the audio is a little bit clearer than last time.
Speaker: Well, we got the serious guys who are investing big time in their 2022 with
Speaker: the NOxSTARS program that's kicking off this morning.
Speaker: So yeah, great to be here with you with all that going on.
Speaker: Yeah, no, it's a great time.
Speaker: And so what was super cool, like you said, Mike, we just got done with that door org on.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And you guys had, we were talking before we hit record, you had 25% of the golden door award.
Speaker: We did.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's insane, man.
Speaker: I've been proud of a lot of things that I've been able to accomplish in the solar, but
Speaker: I was on stage getting a Golden Door Award, which was dwarfed for me by the fact that we had six individuals who have come on board with a solar company that
Speaker: I'm a partner in, along with Val Baraket and Troy Dombakovic, we own Sun Solar Solutions, which we started in 2015.
Speaker: It became an installer in the last year and a half.
Speaker: And so we had climbed some huge mountains last year and ended up with a huge year.
Speaker: And in the midst of that, had six people in the company rise up to the level of a Golden Door winner.
Speaker: And to see that to be
Speaker: Six out of 25 in the whole country.
Speaker: As somebody who really is focused on leadership and training and making folks successful in the solar world, nothing could be more exciting than to see six of us up there having scored big and gotten on stage.
Speaker: Incredible.
Speaker: So would you say that was more fulfilling for you then?
Speaker: I mean, you got double gold door award, I think it was last year, but would you say this is more fulfilling seeing all the people that you helped get it versus you being able to get it yourself so many times?
Speaker: Like 10x.
Speaker: So the first D2D con I showed up and I had sold 2.56 million and Taggart's like, dude, that's not a thing.
Speaker: And I guess I'll give you two.
Speaker: So that was the double Golden Door Award.
Speaker: And I got that in every year, 2017, 18, 19, 20.
Speaker: This year I had two awards, the Golden Door Award and the Platinum Door Award, which I've had the last three years.
Speaker: That's for having a Golden Door Award three years in a row.
Speaker: So, you know, consistency, I'm proud for my own performance, my own salesmanship of having made that happen five years in a row.
Speaker: That just shows consistency.
Speaker: It shows that you can make this happen regardless of the circumstances.
Speaker: But all of that pales in comparison.
Speaker: to seeing six of the people who are on our team at Sun Solar Solutions succeed and make the 1099.
Speaker: They're getting their 1099s this week.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: Dude, and you and I would be pretty excited.
Speaker: We'd be pretty happy guys to be any one of those six guys looking at what their 1099 number is going to be.
Speaker: That's what brings me excitement.
Speaker: I bet.
Speaker: Is to see guys just get the gold ring.
Speaker: Yeah, no question about it.
Speaker: And I feel like any high performer, I think I hear from everyone, they can achieve the, you know, the awards themselves.
Speaker: But when they help others do it, right, that's almost like a different level of mastery that you have to have.
Speaker: Because let's be honest, we're not all Michael Donald's out there.
Speaker: We're not all getting double golden door awards every year.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But if you can teach an average Joe, because I'm sure some of your guys, I mean, I don't know, you tell me, but we're some of them like average guys, probably not like top sales guys before they started working with you.
Speaker: You know, they were all extraordinary in their own way and their ability to capture the idea that they could do this and then do the work.
Speaker: They're just extraordinary guys.
Speaker: I don't think any one of them had yet been at the top of an industry before then.
Speaker: I got a guy on my team, Scotty, he was managing an Albertsons.
Speaker: He was doing a spectacular job for a big corporation.
Speaker: And what did that pay, a buck and a quarter or something?
Speaker: He made a good income for him and his family, but it was nothing like being the top performer in the solar industry.
Speaker: So I would say every one of the people on that stage, including myself, are making an income that's like four to five X of what they did in their previous deal.
Speaker: Yeah, that's awesome.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I want to talk about some of the things you did to get those guys to that level and help your team.
Speaker: But before we do that, just want to hear about your experience at Door2DoorCon.
Speaker: You were on a panel.
Speaker: And tell me about the panel.
Speaker: Solar sales panel.
Speaker: Yeah, there were some bombs dropped in that panel.
Speaker: And I think some real good information was...
Speaker: was put out for the folks that attended.
Speaker: It was a packed house and it was a great panel.
Speaker: Yeah, that was awesome.
Speaker: And yeah, one of my favorite moments, we're not going to, you know, drop names here.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: But one of my favorite moments is we had a little mini debate on stage and everyone was cheering for Mike up there.
Speaker: Do you want to tell about what happened with that?
Speaker: I have to be honest with you, I wasn't in on it.
Speaker: I was just sitting there on the panel and I was next to a gentleman who tried to drop bombs, but one got tossed to him, I think, and he caught the bomb.
Speaker: Somebody was asking somebody on the panel if it was ethical.
Speaker: to go to the permit office and try to harvest permits and then double back to homes and try to flip those deals with a lower price.
Speaker: And, you know, why don't you go ahead and breach your contract even though you're past your three-day rescission?
Speaker: No, no, no, go ahead.
Speaker: You can cancel any time.
Speaker: Breach your contract and sign up with me and, you know, you'll save money.
Speaker: And he was asked if that was ethical and he was answering.
Speaker: And I don't know him very well and we're not in the same market, so I'm not aware of the...
Speaker: the issue, but I was trying to figure out what he was saying in response to it.
Speaker: I couldn't understand it.
Speaker: I just, I turned to him.
Speaker: I said, so early bird gets the worm.
Speaker: I don't, that doesn't answer that question.
Speaker: I said, so you agree that it's not ethical to go and steal somebody's deal long after the cancellation period and do that by harvesting a permit and things like that.
Speaker: And,
Speaker: And he said, well, I wouldn't say that, is what he said.
Speaker: So I tried to ask him to clarify, and finally, no, finally he said he does think it was unethical.
Speaker: So I agreed with him, and he agreed with me that
Speaker: to try to steal somebody's labor and to try to make a huge benefit out of somebody else's success is unethical.
Speaker: And it's just not the right thing to do.
Speaker: I'll be honest, I don't know if he's ever done that.
Speaker: I've had people do that to me, and I think there's a very special place in hell for someone who would think that was a good idea to do that.
Speaker: No, no question there's that.
Speaker: I have fired people.
Speaker: for doing that.
Speaker: I found out I had a little crew and they had discovered they could do that.
Speaker: I had a guy from SolarCity back in the day call me like, do you know, like you guys, this is something you do?
Speaker: And I'm like, no, it's not something we do.
Speaker: Well, check out these three deals and you'll find out.
Speaker: I checked it out.
Speaker: That's exactly what they did.
Speaker: I fired them the next day.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: And they were good performers.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Now sad that some people have to resort to, you know, shady stuff.
Speaker: But again, I don't know anything about the people involved or the market that's involved.
Speaker: I was just trying to get an answer to the question.
Speaker: So I think it's an important question.
Speaker: Yeah, for sure.
Speaker: Because, yeah, no one, that's the worst experience having people do stuff like that on your personal deals.
Speaker: But, yeah, no, it was definitely quite the experience.
Speaker: Everyone's buzzing about it.
Speaker: We have people, like, you know, jumping up and cheering when Mike was debating this guy.
Speaker: And I think we got Sam to create a new maybe debate style for Dora.
Speaker: Oh, yeah, well.
Speaker: People love him.
Speaker: I don't know if anybody's ever going to want to take the other side of that question, honestly.
Speaker: I don't know if we can get a debate going on that.
Speaker: Because I think we should all probably agree.
Speaker: You know, there's some things that might be hard to discern.
Speaker: Is that right?
Speaker: Is that wrong?
Speaker: But there's some things that are just so clearly wrong that when you see them, you're just aghast at the idea.
Speaker: I think you'd have, including the gentleman that was addressed, I don't think he would take that side of the issue either.
Speaker: It's just clearly wrong and
Speaker: I think we should just all agree.
Speaker: For sure.
Speaker: We should all agree on that.
Speaker: Yeah, and stuff like that, I mean, it just makes it harder for all of us as an industry to sell the deals.
Speaker: True.
Speaker: Yeah, for sure.
Speaker: Bad tactics.
Speaker: But anyway, so yeah, if you weren't there, you missed out on some intense... The rest of the panel, by the way, was really fantastic.
Speaker: People were coming up with objections, and myself and others were coming up with, I think, real...
Speaker: valuable answers to what do I say?
Speaker: I think we all want to know.
Speaker: We were out there knocking on doors.
Speaker: We're in the home.
Speaker: We're trying to close and the customer says this, what do I say?
Speaker: And we had a good half a dozen objections come up and
Speaker: Myself and other panelists were able to say, say this to get the customer moving forward.
Speaker: Yeah, no, and I think that's some of the most valuable stuff is hearing the word tracks, which I know is what they talk about here at these Noxstar events and panels like that.
Speaker: Because when we can hear exactly what people are saying that are producing at the level that you are.
Speaker: When you get guys like myself who've literally closed over a thousand deals and you've had every objection come up hundreds and hundreds of times and I've said this and it didn't work and then I said this and it did work.
Speaker: Well, can you save me some time and tell me what do I say that works?
Speaker: I mean, that's a huge benefit for the people that attend and invest in their future with training and conferences to get to those answers as quickly as they can.
Speaker: Start utilizing it to help people go solar.
Speaker: Yeah, 100%.
Speaker: Super valuable stuff we learned and heard.
Speaker: So, Mike, let's jump into now just kind of how you were able to get so many people from your company on the stage there.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So tell me, was it something Seeker you're doing?
Speaker: You guys got some secret drug, some secret sauce you're feeding these people?
Speaker: The secret sauce.
Speaker: I wish I did.
Speaker: I wish I could just hypnotize, guys.
Speaker: You know, I would say the biggest problem we all run into is the fact that it's just...
Speaker: So demoralizing to be out on the doors and knocking and getting our faces kicked in and getting the no and getting the no and getting the no.
Speaker: And my breakthrough came when I realized that what we're all getting paid for is for being able to go to a door and get a no.
Speaker: We're not trying to go to a door and get a yes.
Speaker: My book is coming out March 4th.
Speaker: It's called No.
Speaker: matter what, right?
Speaker: So there's things that we have to do every day.
Speaker: We have to get to that door every day and get prepared to deal with the no.
Speaker: My breakthrough came when I realized that's what I was getting paid for.
Speaker: Like it's weird to spend an hour and a half with somebody and get paid thousands of dollars.
Speaker: And if your brain thinks that's what the money's for, it's just broken.
Speaker: And if you're trying to pay somebody else or
Speaker: hang around and wait for a lead and you know you're some kind of lead baby waiting to be put into a uh an appointment and you're not out there getting the no getting the no getting the no so that you can get into a position to close if you don't realize that every time somebody tells you no I would not like a solar proposal I would not like to see you come back and present that to me like for me I know my math I'm making five or six hundred dollars every time somebody tells me no yeah
Speaker: And the breakthrough for me was when I understood that's my job, that's what I'm getting paid for.
Speaker: So we've gone through lots and lots of people coming to Sun Solar Solutions through the years.
Speaker: We've seen lots and lots and lots of people fail.
Speaker: And it was when I and my partner Troy Dombakovits were able to communicate the things that do work that things really started to take off.
Speaker: When we were able to show people, do this, say this, close with this,
Speaker: that they started to have the type of results.
Speaker: And you and I kind of talked at the very first podcast.
Speaker: I was just starting to catch on to that.
Speaker: And since then, I've been able to share it with the guys that work for me.
Speaker: To have six guys on stage, I mean, it's really about hard work.
Speaker: But if you work hard and what you're doing is not working,
Speaker: then you're not going to make it.
Speaker: If what you're doing is working and you're not working hard, then what you're doing isn't going to work.
Speaker: So you have to combine hard work with saying and doing the things that work together.
Speaker: And I tell you what, when you know the answer, it's easy.
Speaker: When you don't know the answer, it's really hard.
Speaker: Talked to a lot of people this weekend who are working hard and they're knocking on doors and only, you know, one out of five of those appointments is turning into a set.
Speaker: Well, something's going on there.
Speaker: I talk to people that only maybe one out of four or five of their presentations are turning into closes.
Speaker: Okay, well, there's some training opportunity that's going on there.
Speaker: I talk to people that are having 30%, 40% of their jobs that they sell and close, then cancel.
Speaker: That's two or three times what it needs to be.
Speaker: So every single one of those aspects along the way of knocking on a door, turning into thousands of dollars of income,
Speaker: Those are all opportunities to learn how to do this so that it works.
Speaker: And we've been able to put that together at Sun Solar Solutions, communicate that to guys coming in.
Speaker: We lead from the front at Sun Solar.
Speaker: I was on the door getting a golden door up there.
Speaker: My partner Troy was up there.
Speaker: Most of the people that were on stage are leading a team.
Speaker: And, you know, one of the guys in the audience raised his hand.
Speaker: I've been in solar four months.
Speaker: I'm ready to be a boss.
Speaker: Tell me how do I get a bunch of people to follow me so I can make a bunch of money in overrides.
Speaker: And that wasn't obviously the wording of his question.
Speaker: But, you know, my response to him was, what in the world at four months do you have to pass on to anybody?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Like, why don't you get good at this?
Speaker: Why don't you learn how to sell a megawatt of solar a year or enough to get on stage, which is, you know, 1.3 megawatts or 130 installs in a year.
Speaker: Why don't you learn how to do that?
Speaker: And you're not going to have to recruit people.
Speaker: You're going to have people coming up to you going, dude, how do I do that?
Speaker: Will you show me how?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Will you show me how to do that?
Speaker: And that's when you're ready when you've shown you can do it.
Speaker: So
Speaker: At Sun Solar Solutions, we lead from the front.
Speaker: Most of those guys are leading teams.
Speaker: Most of our guys leading teams are selling at that level, including Troy and I have been doing it every single year for five years in a row.
Speaker: Incredible.
Speaker: And what's so amazing is that, I don't know, probably more when you started, you were always selling at a really high level.
Speaker: But what I've seen over and over in pretty much any sales industry is some of the top guys,
Speaker: They're terrible trainers a lot of times.
Speaker: They can do it themselves.
Speaker: But I think it's a whole different skill set to be able to actually break that down into frameworks that other people can apply.
Speaker: And I know you've had a lot of practice.
Speaker: You've been on dozens of podcasts.
Speaker: You have your own course.
Speaker: You're finishing up your book.
Speaker: So I'm sure all those things have helped.
Speaker: But I don't know.
Speaker: Do you feel like there's a transition point where you sold and, I don't know, stuff you had to...
Speaker: Well, I feel like it's Taylor Armstrong's fault, really, because you interviewed me right away.
Speaker: No one knew who I was.
Speaker: Sam Taggart had interviewed me on the little D2D podcast at the time, right, 2016.
Speaker: But you interviewed me, and at the end of the interview, you're like, so, and I'm like the old school corporate guy who just found solar.
Speaker: I think I have a Facebook account that I may have posted something to.
Speaker: I don't really know, and you're like, how?
Speaker: how can people get ahold of you and follow?
Speaker: Like, why would I want people to follow me?
Speaker: I don't even understand what you're talking about.
Speaker: I'm like, Oh, I don't know.
Speaker: I got a cell phone number.
Speaker: I spit out my cell phone number, which I'm not going to do again.
Speaker: And I have gotten, you know, just hundreds and hundreds of calls from people who've reached out.
Speaker: How do I do this?
Speaker: How do I do this?
Speaker: So it started to force me into what my, my coaching coach is coach Michael Burt.
Speaker: And he talks about activating people's prey drive, which is, you know, one part of the equation.
Speaker: But,
Speaker: You know, he also talks about being able to codify what you do.
Speaker: When Sam Taggart called me up and said, O'Donnell, I'm in Phoenix.
Speaker: I'm coming over to your house.
Speaker: I'm like, cool, Sam Taggart's coming over.
Speaker: Why?
Speaker: He goes, I'm going to film you doing your clothes in your pits.
Speaker: I'm like,
Speaker: Okay, but I don't know what I do.
Speaker: He goes, don't worry, we'll break it down.
Speaker: I didn't know how to break it down.
Speaker: I didn't know how to codify what I did.
Speaker: So I just took people with me all the time, right?
Speaker: And that replicates very slowly.
Speaker: If you've got to get in the truck with me for this to replicate and duplicate, that's like I'm going to be able to help one guy at a time for the next hundred years.
Speaker: I'm going to get like 10 guys.
Speaker: trained in that amount of time.
Speaker: So by you coming to me and then that blowing up and then Sam coming and saying, I'm coming to her, he helped me break it down and codify it.
Speaker: Then had me come to the national sales summits and deliver it and deliver it again and deliver it again.
Speaker: Those things combined into, I do know exactly what I say.
Speaker: And now it's codified.
Speaker: Now it's on video.
Speaker: Sam had that videotaped at my house that day.
Speaker: We had
Speaker: No thought to it.
Speaker: We just recorded what it was I was doing.
Speaker: I had probably 50 guys come up to me this weekend and say, dude, I sold six solar systems my first year and then I got the videos and I've sold 26 of them in the last six weeks.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: And like that's why I do this because like when people come up, young guys in their 20s or whatever come up and say, I don't even know what to say.
Speaker: I'm like, I was about to get on stage one time and speak in Key West, Florida at Bill Murphy's Cheat Code Conference.
Speaker: He asked me to speak after the D2D con.
Speaker: I'm like, oh, someone asked me to speak somewhere.
Speaker: Oh, cool.
Speaker: So I go and I share that.
Speaker: Right before I walk up on stage, this young dude came up to me and said something exactly like that.
Speaker: And I had a PowerPoint presentation.
Speaker: I just threw the PowerPoint in the trash and walked up on stage and talked about what it was he and I were talking about and how that was helping people.
Speaker: Like if you're out banging your head against a wall and all of a sudden somebody gives you a sledgehammer, now you can start attacking this wall with a sledgehammer.
Speaker: That's what that was like.
Speaker: So now I've had the opportunity to do that.
Speaker: And I find that to be the most fun thing I get to do is share that with people.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: No, I'd agree 100% because I don't know if I've told you this, but there's no way I would have kept doing this podcast if I didn't have people reaching out and saying, hey, Taylor, thank you for getting Michael O'Donnell on the show.
Speaker: Thank you for sharing this topic, stuff that helps, because that's the most fulfilling thing.
Speaker: I'm sure maybe you wouldn't have a course or a book if people weren't saying, oh, that's super helpful.
Speaker: No, and I hope I never get used to hearing people say stuff like that to me because I'm still going to go, what?
Speaker: Awesome.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: Really?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's great to hear.
Speaker: But yeah, that was the first time that people started inbound hitting me up.
Speaker: And it's kind of turned into this.
Speaker: I know.
Speaker: And look at you now.
Speaker: You got your face on a banner.
Speaker: It's got the biggest face I've seen on a banner.
Speaker: Dude, I saw it on a little screen.
Speaker: It seemed okay.
Speaker: We were pulling it out of the thing.
Speaker: I'm like, oh my gosh.
Speaker: That thing's freaking me out.
Speaker: He was staring over my shoulder the whole weekend at the booth.
Speaker: So this is the MOD Sales Academy.
Speaker: What Sam and I did that day has evolved in the training and the codifying.
Speaker: But obviously, I've learned a lot, plus putting it into a lot of thought.
Speaker: Brad Lee owns VT Lightspeed.
Speaker: That's where Door-to-Door University is.
Speaker: That's where my videos have always lived.
Speaker: So now I've got my own VT Lightspeed site called MOD.
Speaker: sales academy.
Speaker: And what it is, it's about, it's be like you and I spending the next eight hours one-on-one in an interactive personal method.
Speaker: So Bradley's technology is very, very different.
Speaker: If you've done training on video, that's not what this is.
Speaker: This is a solo interactive experience that's virtual, like you and I are going to just work together.
Speaker: And then it's also produced at like a, literally a Netflix production level.
Speaker: So to, for you to understand what I've learned in the last 1000 closes and putting up 12 million Watts of solar, it's like sitting down having a, a seven hour Netflix binge.
Speaker: And, and it is, it's like, you just like three, four minute segments and the next one automatically starts.
Speaker: And then you're doing it next thing, you know, a few hours have gone by and you've literally heard, you've heard half the,
Speaker: of what I know about how to sell between two and three million watts of solar in year.
Speaker: I say heard and not been trained because as my friend Bradley likes to say, people show people information and content one time and they say, well, I've trained my people.
Speaker: And Bradley says in Nevada, no, he says, he says, that's not called training.
Speaker: That's called exposure.
Speaker: And exposure in Nevada is legal.
Speaker: If you want your people to be trained, they're going to have to see good content over and over and over again.
Speaker: And as Brad says, they've got to see it to the point where they're annoyed.
Speaker: Right about the time they've seen it, maybe seven or eight times, and they're annoyed.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Now they're at the point where when that situation comes up, ch-ch-ch.
Speaker: That bullet's in the gun and they can fire that gun and say exactly, what exactly do I say at this moment to get the customer up and over and on the downside of an objection?
Speaker: Yeah, no, I agree with that.
Speaker: I think people need to hear things over and over and over different ways.
Speaker: I mean, I do podcasts all the time where it's stuff I talked about a couple months back.
Speaker: And then you listen again.
Speaker: I just try to share it in a different way and I still get people where you know, I've never heard anything like that before.
Speaker: That's awesome.
Speaker: I'm like, cool.
Speaker: So on MOD Sales Academy, the team leader can see how many of his people logged in today, this week, this month, how many courses they've gone through, how many times they've done them again, what did they score on the little quiz that comes after each of the...
Speaker: And he can track their progress, he can assign them sections, and then he can see how they're doing so he can move people along.
Speaker: And every company has their own training.
Speaker: This is meant to augment that at a company level.
Speaker: But it's also meant for, you know, there's a lot of guys that belong to little companies that don't have big training deals.
Speaker: And so can you get individual one-on-one training?
Speaker: with the guy in the industry that's had more Golden Door awards than, you know, literally sold 12 million megawatts of solar in the last five years.
Speaker: I mean, I haven't thinking of a moment in history where that kind of opportunity for a brand new guy has been available for anything.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You know, and it's like Bradley says, we've got to get the information from the people who have it to the people who need it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I know.
Speaker: That's what's so cool is because, yeah, when you first started, when I first started, there's nothing like this.
Speaker: Nothing.
Speaker: That's why I started the podcast.
Speaker: That's why people started calling my phone.
Speaker: I'm like, what?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So now you literally have the opportunity to basically sit in front of, you know, a guy that sold megawatts and megawatts and Michael O'Donnell.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Learn specific words.
Speaker: Yeah, we're going to spend the next seven hours together.
Speaker: Is that okay with you?
Speaker: Want to go knock some doors with me?
Speaker: So it's live door knocking.
Speaker: It's live.
Speaker: There's recordings of live closes.
Speaker: It's literally if you and I were going to spend the next maybe few weeks together, it's what you would pick up and learn if we were going to spend the next two, three weeks together.
Speaker: Yeah, that's so powerful.
Speaker: So let me ask you this, Mike.
Speaker: I know you've had, I'm sure it took you a lot of time to put all this stuff together.
Speaker: But what advice would you give to maybe a team leader, manager, whatever?
Speaker: Maybe they're producing at a high level themselves like you were, but maybe they're struggling to get people to actually increase their output as well.
Speaker: So did you, I don't know, anything that you struggled with as you were trying to get your guys producing at a high level for you to get your first guy maybe his Golden Door Award?
Speaker: Any lessons you learned or any advice you'd give to someone that's struggling to get other people to also produce at a high level?
Speaker: Well, I'm sensing a trend.
Speaker: I had six guys on there.
Speaker: I was talking to Jason Newby.
Speaker: He had six guys on that stage that he had personally trained.
Speaker: They weren't all still in his organization.
Speaker: But I'm sensing a trend.
Speaker: The people up there that are getting Golden Door Awards, most of them came up through somebody who have also won Golden Door Awards, who have also performed at that level.
Speaker: So if you're a leader and you're struggling, I would encourage you to lead from the front.
Speaker: Like one of the things, and this is advice.
Speaker: So people say, oh, what do you think?
Speaker: This is advice.
Speaker: So the best thing I've done over the last five years is refuse to become a sales manager.
Speaker: I've never been a sales manager.
Speaker: I don't want the job.
Speaker: If anybody's seen the movie, Glen Gary, Glen Ross, the guy in that movie you don't want to be is Kevin Spacey.
Speaker: Everybody wants to be Alec Baldwin.
Speaker: Put down that coffee.
Speaker: Coffee's for closers.
Speaker: You see these?
Speaker: These are brass balls.
Speaker: These are what you don't have.
Speaker: You see this watch?
Speaker: This watch costs more than your car.
Speaker: Everybody wants to be Alec Baldwin.
Speaker: Or maybe Al Pacino.
Speaker: He's the guy that sells so much in that office, he doesn't have to come to the meeting.
Speaker: They don't want to be Kevin Spacey, the sales manager.
Speaker: So if I had advice to give to those guys, I would say, go get good at this.
Speaker: Go make a million dollars a year selling solar.
Speaker: Go earn a seven-figure income.
Speaker: Then you're not going to have to recruit anybody.
Speaker: People are going to go, please let me be on your team.
Speaker: Please let me...
Speaker: You know, I'm going to move from Washington.
Speaker: I've got Matt's behind the camera.
Speaker: He just moved from Washington to Arizona because somebody said, you need to be on Mike O'Donnell's team.
Speaker: And just you and your family moved to Arizona.
Speaker: Like, I didn't find Matt.
Speaker: Matt's, you know, calling me.
Speaker: And you actually introduced him to me.
Speaker: I connected him, yeah.
Speaker: I forgot that.
Speaker: But that happens, I'm not saying it happens every day, but it happens all the time where people are like, I want to sell 12 million watts of solar in the next five years.
Speaker: Can I come work for you?
Speaker: So that would be my advice.
Speaker: Also, the job, Kevin Spacey, that guy didn't get paid shit.
Speaker: Alec Baldwin makes 800 grand a year and has the watch and the Rolex and the car and all that stuff.
Speaker: Kevin Spacey ain't driving, you know.
Speaker: An $80,000 BMW in that movie.
Speaker: Alec Baldwin is, right?
Speaker: You want to be Alec Baldwin.
Speaker: And then when the company comes to you, and in that movie, Alec Baldwin is standing in front of that crowd.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Saying, put down that coffee, right?
Speaker: He's the one standing up there, and he doesn't get a cent in override.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: He's there because Ed Murphy asked him to drive out to whatever that field branch office, that sorry little branch that it was.
Speaker: They asked him as a favor to go out and talk to those guys.
Speaker: You want to be Alec Baldwin that's leading people for free.
Speaker: Or if they want to put you on your team, you want to look at them and go, look, you can ride with me if you want.
Speaker: Keep up.
Speaker: Right?
Speaker: When I jump out and knock on the door, you get to listen.
Speaker: When I go into a house and you get to listen.
Speaker: And then when you're ready, we'll let you try it on your own.
Speaker: If you end up successful, I'm going to be really excited about you.
Speaker: But I'm not going to spend the rest of my day supervising you, the rest of my time in solar, supervising your day to figuring out if you're working or not.
Speaker: Being a supervisor doesn't pay well.
Speaker: I make more money than a brain surgeon.
Speaker: I do.
Speaker: But if you meet a bunch of brain surgeons and you ask which one of you guys is trying to raise their hand to
Speaker: to be the administrator and the boss and the supervisor of all these brain surgeons.
Speaker: Do you know how many guys are going to raise their hand?
Speaker: None of them.
Speaker: You know why?
Speaker: Brain surgeons make a lot of money.
Speaker: The supervisor to the brain surgeons, that guy don't make a lot of money.
Speaker: If you think you're going to open up a dealership so that you can make a lot of money or be the team leader so you can make a lot of money, guys, owners, they get overrides.
Speaker: Overrides are small.
Speaker: Owners don't get any money.
Speaker: They don't get paid anything except what gets left at the bottom line.
Speaker: A lot of people own companies.
Speaker: There's no money left.
Speaker: at the bottom line.
Speaker: So my advice to you is to keep selling.
Speaker: Be good at this and if people want you to lead a team, tell them I'll lead.
Speaker: I'm not going to be a sales manager but I'll be a leader.
Speaker: They can get on my team and follow me and become part of that and I'll help them and I'll train them.
Speaker: I'll do everything I can for them but if it means I got to slow down in selling, I don't have time for that.
Speaker: That would be my advice.
Speaker: That's clear, you know, that's advice.
Speaker: I love that.
Speaker: Yeah, and I think a lot of people forget that.
Speaker: Like you said, people are trying to get a manager.
Speaker: Oh,
Speaker: I'll have to knock less doors when I manage.
Speaker: I'll just get to go to appointments.
Speaker: Oh, I'll make overrides.
Speaker: I don't have to sell as much.
Speaker: But yeah, to your point, it's like... You should be knocking more doors once you're a big baller leader because now you're showing 10 people how to knock doors.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And something I hear from actually Danny and Taylor McCarthy in there, matter of fact, is that your best, your people you lead, they'll do half of the good things you do, and then it's like 90% of the bad things you do.
Speaker: I mean, look at... A sales manager's job is herding cats.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I know.
Speaker: It's not a fun job.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It sounds like that's what they, I mean, you sold two megawatts yourself and your, your guys sold one megawatt.
Speaker: So.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: I sold two megawatts this year.
Speaker: I sold between two and three megawatts every year for the last five years.
Speaker: And dude, I don't even know what I got paid as a leader.
Speaker: It doesn't matter what I got paid as a sales guy.
Speaker: That's why people ask me what I do.
Speaker: I tell them I sell solar.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: What's your job?
Speaker: I'm a salesman.
Speaker: I sell solar.
Speaker: Cause that's what pays all the money.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You know?
Speaker: And, and so that's where the money comes from.
Speaker: My,
Speaker: My advice is to focus on that.
Speaker: That's where the money comes from.
Speaker: Keep doing it.
Speaker: If you're good at it, there's nothing else you can do that pays better.
Speaker: That's awesome.
Speaker: Well, Mike, I know we don't have all... We don't have seven hours to talk, unfortunately, but people have to go get your program here all seven hours.
Speaker: But I know now you're doing... Matter of fact, today you're on your way up to Idaho to do some consulting.
Speaker: Yeah, I'm going to get a chance to talk to the Noxstar audience here for a few minutes and just share with them.
Speaker: And then I'm heading to my buddy, Tyler Green.
Speaker: She's with Idaho Home Solar.
Speaker: He and I are in the circle, the D2D inner circle.
Speaker: And he asked me to come talk to his sales force for their kickoff.
Speaker: So I'm going to make some time to do that.
Speaker: We're driving to Idaho.
Speaker: Never done that.
Speaker: Driving from Salt Lake to Idaho doing that today.
Speaker: Getting there for dinner tonight.
Speaker: I bought a new coat in Park City.
Speaker: I kid around with everybody.
Speaker: I'll post a picture of it later today.
Speaker: I kid around.
Speaker: You want to come to D2D, but you want to stay Sunday and go up to Park City.
Speaker: And they go, well, why would you want to go up to Park City?
Speaker: Because you can go up and try a $90,000 chinchilla coat.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I bought a coat yesterday.
Speaker: I did.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: It's right over there.
Speaker: I wish I was wearing it.
Speaker: Actually, this fire is keeping me warm.
Speaker: It's not a chinchilla coat, by the way.
Speaker: You can buy a nice little kind of a Kevin Costner western coat.
Speaker: But, yeah, come to Park City.
Speaker: Make Sunday a fun day after D2D Con and bring your crew up there and try on $90,000 chinchilla coats.
Speaker: By the way, D2D Con is going to be December 20th and 21st next year.
Speaker: Oh, is it?
Speaker: The first two years of D2D, it coincided with the Sundance Film Festival.
Speaker: Oh, I didn't know.
Speaker: And then the third and fourth and fifth year, it did not.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So we were kind of in Park City by ourselves.
Speaker: But the first two years, we went to Park City and all the people wearing chinchilla coats were there.
Speaker: Like all movie stars and movie guys and all that.
Speaker: People in the movie business were just... And anyway, so next year, it's the same weekend.
Speaker: as Sundance.
Speaker: So book your rooms now because you may have trouble getting a hotel room and plan to spend Sunday up in Sundance for Sunday Funday Park City trying on $90,000 chinchilla coats.
Speaker: A lot of fun.
Speaker: And then on the training.
Speaker: So you got the content.
Speaker: I also do live coaching.
Speaker: People want me like, can you be my coach?
Speaker: Like,
Speaker: I coach the people on my team.
Speaker: And that's how I spend 99... I spend 120% of my time doing that.
Speaker: But I do live coaching in the MOD Sales Academy.
Speaker: And it's $67 a month.
Speaker: So it's just super, super cheap.
Speaker: It includes a live training session once a week.
Speaker: It also includes... And I say includes because...
Speaker: Very few people show up to this.
Speaker: It includes a phone call, a Zoom call every single morning at 7.15 in the morning.
Speaker: It's the no matter what club.
Speaker: It's not coaching.
Speaker: It's inspiration, accountability, and support.
Speaker: What job could you have would require a support group?
Speaker: You know what requires a support group?
Speaker: Knocking on doors.
Speaker: When you knock on doors, you need a support group.
Speaker: We have a support group.
Speaker: And it's funny.
Speaker: We call it, coincidentally, we call our support group inside of SunSolar Knockstars.
Speaker: And it's spelled differently than Danny's and Taylor's company.
Speaker: And they chose it themselves.
Speaker: When they chose it, I thought,
Speaker: That's going to be confusing because you got the other.
Speaker: But anyway, they wanted that name because it's a badass name, Knox Stars.
Speaker: Anyway, we have a support group.
Speaker: It's on Solar.
Speaker: MOD, Sales Academy, has a support group, live coaching every week, a morning meeting to accountability, support, inspiration, get your ass out of freaking bed.
Speaker: The rest of the grownups in the world, they're out of bed on the way to work at 7.15.
Speaker: How many freaking solar guys are out of bed dressed and in the process of already making money at 7.15 in the morning?
Speaker: You're not going to sell 2 million watts of solar if you're not already out of bed at 7.15 and probably still doing shit at 10.30 that night.
Speaker: So if you don't start at 7.15, you can't have that much of a day.
Speaker: And solar is not going to make this kind of money for the next 10 years.
Speaker: It's going to make this kind of money for the next several years.
Speaker: What's happening in this industry...
Speaker: gives people an ability to make some crazy income.
Speaker: You need to get that while the getting's good.
Speaker: So my advice to you is start at 7.15 in the morning.
Speaker: Be in your first meeting every single day at 7.15 in the morning.
Speaker: M.O.D.
Speaker: Sales Academy gives that meeting to people who are looking for it.
Speaker: And I'm there every day.
Speaker: That's why, you know, I don't care if anybody shows up.
Speaker: If one guy shows up when I turn the Zoom on, then me and him have a meeting at 7.15 in the morning.
Speaker: Guess who's going at 7.15 in the morning?
Speaker: Me.
Speaker: That's what's happening.
Speaker: That's what's up.
Speaker: Love that.
Speaker: And I can't believe, you know, that much time of yours, 67 bucks a month.
Speaker: I've been doing it every day for three years.
Speaker: Every day, every single day, I've been having that no matter what club every day.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, that's like one or two percent of a solar deal probably to increase your income.
Speaker: It's made me so much money because of the fact that I'm somewhere every day at 715, that's money.
Speaker: Holding your feet to the fire.
Speaker: My feet.
Speaker: Come help me hold my feet to the fire.
Speaker: That's awesome.
Speaker: And so, Mike, last kind of couple questions here.
Speaker: You're training a team up in Idaho.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Tyler Grange, Idaho Home Solar.
Speaker: He's my circle homie.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Let's go.
Speaker: And so what do you do?
Speaker: How do you, you know, prepare what you're going to speak about when you're consulting?
Speaker: Is it based on, like, what they need?
Speaker: Are you preparing stuff in advance?
Speaker: Or what's your...
Speaker: What's your process for getting ready to like?
Speaker: Well, it starts like today.
Speaker: How much time do I have?
Speaker: And then I got to cut it down to what I can fit into that amount of time.
Speaker: So I'm going to spend a good part of the day with Tyler's folks tomorrow.
Speaker: And that's going to let me touch on, you know, maybe 15 or 20 percent of the things that I like to share with somebody if they come to work for me.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So luckily for Tyler, luckily for his team, he's got the MOD Sales Academy for his entire team.
Speaker: And then I'm going to come.
Speaker: I'm going to hit the highlights of that tomorrow.
Speaker: We're going to dig a little deeper.
Speaker: So his team's already heard this once, twice, three times.
Speaker: So tomorrow I don't have to explain it to him.
Speaker: I just have to go deep.
Speaker: So it really depends.
Speaker: You know, what a sales guy has to do is, you know, read the room.
Speaker: Like some people ask me all the time, how long is a close, a solar close take?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I said, well, you know, I don't know, somewhere between 45 minutes and five and a half hours.
Speaker: Like if they haven't asked you to leave and they haven't signed papers yet, you're not done.
Speaker: So you got to read the room.
Speaker: And, you know, if you were to ask me, Mike, my grandma needs some help.
Speaker: Would you come over and give her, you know, just take her for some exercise, walk around the block?
Speaker: I'd be like, dude, I would absolutely.
Speaker: How about Wednesday?
Speaker: I come walk your grandma around the.
Speaker: we get her a little exercise.
Speaker: And then you said to me, well, how long is that going to take?
Speaker: I'd be like, I don't know.
Speaker: How big is your block?
Speaker: What's your grandma like on a 50-yard dash?
Speaker: I'd be like, I'd have to show up, meet grandma, and she comes down the drive in a walker.
Speaker: Or she comes out with she got her tennis shoes on, she'll be like, let's go.
Speaker: I don't know that till I get there.
Speaker: I don't know that till I'm in the midst of it.
Speaker: So same thing in a training.
Speaker: It's all about where is that group?
Speaker: What are we going to talk about?
Speaker: My problem is they usually come after me with a hook.
Speaker: And they're dragging me off the stage.
Speaker: Like, dude, we said an hour, and it's an hour 45.
Speaker: We need you off the stage.
Speaker: Anyway, so that's a hard question to answer.
Speaker: The question is, what do we need to talk about?
Speaker: And then how much time do we have?
Speaker: Yeah, okay.
Speaker: No, I know different levels, difference.
Speaker: I mean, if they've been through your entire academy, I'm sure you're going to be going.
Speaker: Yeah, for me, it's a matter of cutting it down to what do we have time for.
Speaker: Yeah, okay.
Speaker: And then for those that do want to go get your program, can you give us just a preview, like maybe some of the topics it covers or things like that that would be super valuable?
Speaker: Maybe how you came up with some of the topics?
Speaker: It's four courses inside of the academy.
Speaker: The first course is the nine-figure mindset.
Speaker: And that addresses the chief problem that all the successful, knowledgeable, talented people have, which is you come into solar, you figure out how much money you make, and you start calibrating your effort to how much money you need.
Speaker: And I did the same thing.
Speaker: My partner, Val Barricade, had to come to me.
Speaker: I'd been there.
Speaker: They'd made me a partner because I sold a weird amount of solar in the first...
Speaker: three, four months, right?
Speaker: And they made me a partner in the company.
Speaker: Then I started like bringing home so much money, Marshall and I didn't know what to do with it.
Speaker: Like, I don't know, why don't you just wipe out that credit card and just wipe out that credit card.
Speaker: You know, 25 years in corporate America making a multiple six-figure income had landed me in the exalted spot of $40,000 in debt.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: So within a few months, Marshall and I had like paid off this 40K in debt.
Speaker: I don't know why we paid off the mortgage.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You know, then we're like, so
Speaker: And then as soon as I didn't have a bill, I didn't have a mortgage anymore, and all my bills and debt were all gone, all of a sudden I started to calibrate my effort.
Speaker: Now instead of 150 kilowatts a month, 200 kilowatts a month, I'm posting 40 kilowatts, 50 kilowatts.
Speaker: And dude, that's multiple $10,000 income.
Speaker: And I don't have any debt.
Speaker: I started to calibrate my effort to my needs.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And then I had my partners come to me and go, dude, this is not what we made you a partner for.
Speaker: We thought you were going to blow up the whole world.
Speaker: I'm like, we know you have the ability to blow up the world.
Speaker: What is this 40 kilowatt a month thing?
Speaker: And I had to take a hard look at myself.
Speaker: And I'd say, what is this really about?
Speaker: And then that coincided at the same time with the net metering deadline.
Speaker: I had to ask myself, we have this net metering deadline in Arizona in 2017.
Speaker: And if I can sell two or three of these a week,
Speaker: Will I be able to live with myself when I knew I could have sold two or three a day in this six-month period?
Speaker: Will I be able to live with myself?
Speaker: And that created a gear that I didn't know that I had.
Speaker: And then when I crashed on the other side of that gear and I'd added it up and somehow it was 2.5 million watts of solar, and Tiger's like going, dude, you need to do your math.
Speaker: People don't sell 2.5 million.
Speaker: I know.
Speaker: Well, it's a solar.
Speaker: I'm like, no, that's what happened.
Speaker: I'm like, okay, well, how do I keep doing that?
Speaker: You know, what's the answer to how to, and the answer is mindset.
Speaker: And I got super lucky at D2D Con that next year, Jeremy Andrus was speaking about mini habits.
Speaker: And he talked about, you want to get in shape, do one pushup a day.
Speaker: I'm like, all right, that's the stupidest fricking thing I've ever heard.
Speaker: But I saw guys like shaking their head like they knew about this one pushup thing.
Speaker: What was this one pushup thing?
Speaker: I ordered that book.
Speaker: It met me at home.
Speaker: That changed my life because I'm not a, I'm a lazy, undisciplined guy.
Speaker: I'm a lazy, undisciplined guy that looks like a workaholic, right?
Speaker: Because I'm reacting to the opportunity appropriately and I've overcome the
Speaker: The obstacles in my personality and my history, which is not good, and my upbringing, which is not a track for success.
Speaker: I don't have anything leading me to this kind of success.
Speaker: And yet, when I learned how to go from zero to one, and that's why I talk about that.
Speaker: The biggest distance on planet Earth is the distance between zero and one.
Speaker: Because what's in the way is inertia.
Speaker: And the nine-figure mindset in the academy is about getting out of being a victim.
Speaker: to inertia and to start to be the recipient, the beneficiary of momentum.
Speaker: And all of that happens between zero and one.
Speaker: But people talk about your why.
Speaker: That doesn't speak to me.
Speaker: I don't even know what is your why.
Speaker: I'm not listening well enough when speakers are on stage talking about stuff like that.
Speaker: You need to have, well, I don't know what that means.
Speaker: You know, but am I or am I not going to have enough money to be completely retired?
Speaker: A nine-figure mindset means I don't need any money to live exactly the way I want to live by the time I want to retire.
Speaker: For me, that's five years.
Speaker: If you follow me around and I look like my ass is on fire and I don't have any bills to pay, why is your ass on fire when you're a... Because I'm trying to create a nine-figure net worth.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: I'm going to try to create a nine-figure exit out of the solar industry and retire by the time I'm 65.
Speaker: That's not a long time from now.
Speaker: Bradley was talking about on his podcast, why do guys get so productive in their 50s?
Speaker: And it's because you stop chasing skirts and you start chasing your legacy.
Speaker: You don't have all that other BS in the way.
Speaker: You're over your midlife crisis.
Speaker: So how can you acquire that mindset in your 20s?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And it's nothing I've made up.
Speaker: It's what I've learned from Steven guys at many habits, what I've learned.
Speaker: And the big, the big game changer is thinking grow rich and everybody talks about that work, that book.
Speaker: But in my academy, I teach you to use it as a textbook.
Speaker: That's awesome.
Speaker: Use it.
Speaker: What do I do this morning?
Speaker: And if you know that as a textbook and you think you've read Think and Grow Rich and you didn't have a mantra that you read this morning that had your chief main objective and what your net worth is going to be in three years and five years and ten years, then you're talking about reading Think and Grow Rich, but you did not treat it as a textbook.
Speaker: And so you've got to acquire a nine-figure mindset.
Speaker: That's course one.
Speaker: Course two is really about the doors.
Speaker: How do you overcome this vehemence, this cataclysmic response to the word no?
Speaker: How do you overcome that and start treating no as a revenue event and then turn that into a machine that provides you with exact, and what do you exactly do?
Speaker: say.
Speaker: From there, you got to move into the compelling presentation.
Speaker: If you get invited to the kitchen table and you're not lighting their ass on fire, if they're not saying to you, holy shit, how in the world do all my neighbors not have solar already?
Speaker: This is either not true or all my neighbors would have solar.
Speaker: Are you lying?
Speaker: What is going on here?
Speaker: Like you should be presenting information to people in a fashion where they're like, how do I not have solar yet?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You know, and so that's the compelling solar presentation.
Speaker: And almost everybody is selling it wrong.
Speaker: Everybody thinks they're going to show up and roll up like they do in California and say, oh, look, it's $167 a month cheaper.
Speaker: You should go solar.
Speaker: Yeah, I probably should.
Speaker: Sign here.
Speaker: In the rest of the country, we're rolling up going, look, it's $37 a month cheaper or it's $7 a month more.
Speaker: Dude, in my solar presentation,
Speaker: How much money solar is per month less than what you're paying whoever Edison is not part of my presentation.
Speaker: That isn't even a reason to go solar.
Speaker: Hopefully it's less.
Speaker: It's not less in every market.
Speaker: The answer to how much solar costs is one word.
Speaker: Less.
Speaker: And by the way, that has nothing to do with why you want to go solar.
Speaker: So you need to learn to teach people why they want to go solar.
Speaker: And it's got to be so compelling, like literally their ass is on fire.
Speaker: And then you're going to hear the next sentence come out of their mouth almost every single solitary time.
Speaker: This is awesome.
Speaker: I think, oh, whatever they just said that was embarrassing.
Speaker: Like they're going, oh my God, I said that in front of the salesman.
Speaker: Like I'm an idiot.
Speaker: I just showed the salesman that my ass is on fire interested in this product.
Speaker: That is not a good negotiating tactic.
Speaker: The next thing that comes out of their mouth is, are you going to email this to me?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And you know what that means, right?
Speaker: I want to buy this.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: On a different day.
Speaker: Can you come back tomorrow morning so I can sign paperwork?
Speaker: Are you free Friday?
Speaker: Because you're my man.
Speaker: I'm going solar.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Now, I have to tell you, I didn't come up with...
Speaker: Most of this, this is not stuff I invented.
Speaker: I was lucky enough to walk into a solar sales office in 1983 that was being run by a bunch of guys who had sold aluminum siding for 30 years.
Speaker: You think Glengarry Glen Ross with Alec Baldwin's a good movie?
Speaker: Everybody watching this podcast right now should go find the movie Tin Men with Danny DeVito.
Speaker: Tin Men, okay.
Speaker: Tin Man with Danny DeVito, Rich and Dreyfus.
Speaker: Those guys are out knocking doors like the movies about them knocking on doors.
Speaker: They're in kitchen tables.
Speaker: They're sitting in living rooms talking to people.
Speaker: They're saying, can you come back on Friday?
Speaker: Those guys learned what to say when someone says, can you come back on Friday?
Speaker: So that they were doing paperwork in 15 minutes.
Speaker: And I learned it in 1983.
Speaker: And I went out and I went to my first deal.
Speaker: And they were on fire, interested.
Speaker: And then they said they wanted, could I come back?
Speaker: And then boom, I just pulled out that little song and dance they showed me how to do and they signed up 10 minutes later.
Speaker: I went to my next appointment, they did the same thing.
Speaker: I went to my, I sold three of these in one day.
Speaker: The very first day I started, just by doing what they did and telling me, saying what they told me to say.
Speaker: And it worked.
Speaker: Just from the movie, what they say?
Speaker: No, no, not the movie.
Speaker: The movie's about tin men.
Speaker: I actually sold solar by guys who were tin men.
Speaker: And they had started a solar company in 1980.
Speaker: And they showed me, A, how to get to the door.
Speaker: B, how to do a presentation that's so compelling that they make a fool of themselves.
Speaker: And then number three, what do you say when they say, can you come back tomorrow?
Speaker: So what do you say?
Speaker: Can you give us the word?
Speaker: Dude, it's literally a four-hour course because it starts before you get to the door.
Speaker: you're going to start building a frame.
Speaker: And really this frame that you're going to hang a door and then close the door becomes a corral.
Speaker: You're going to drive them into a corral.
Speaker: And when you tell them that I'll tell you, the title of that course is called I'm not coming back.
Speaker: Now, if you tell someone at the end of a presentation that I'm not coming back,
Speaker: So you need to buy today.
Speaker: They're going to throw your ass in the street.
Speaker: Right?
Speaker: You need to build a frame, hang the door so that when you say, I'm not coming back, they go, oh, that's right.
Speaker: I knew that.
Speaker: And you close the door and do paperwork.
Speaker: And it's that easy.
Speaker: If I had $100 in this bill clip for every single time, I would have bet the whole wad that this was not going to work.
Speaker: But do it anyway.
Speaker: There's the hammer, there's the nail.
Speaker: Can you come back Friday?
Speaker: There's the today only clothes.
Speaker: There's the hammer.
Speaker: There's the nail.
Speaker: There's the hammer.
Speaker: Sure, I'll come back on Friday.
Speaker: What is that?
Speaker: That's every salesman's instinct.
Speaker: It's my instinct.
Speaker: And it's the idea that you don't want to make it awkward.
Speaker: I don't want to confront their bullshit excuse.
Speaker: I don't want to actually do my job.
Speaker: When they say, are you going to email this to me?
Speaker: We finally arrived at the moment in time.
Speaker: Why we sent you to the house.
Speaker: Yeah, we could have done a YouTube presentation of Michael Donald talking about solar.
Speaker: It would have been better.
Speaker: Maybe.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But the reason we sent you to the house is because you have to help.
Speaker: We're going to their, we're invited to their kitchen table to help them.
Speaker: And what we're there to do is perform a service.
Speaker: We're there to help them with this one crucial issue.
Speaker: And that's to get over this objection that they want to do it tomorrow.
Speaker: Can you come back on Friday?
Speaker: That's the service.
Speaker: If you learn how to do that, then you'll be helping them and you'll be performing a service at the highest level.
Speaker: Yeah, well, that's the job of the closer, too.
Speaker: Anyone can go and tell them about solar.
Speaker: Anyone.
Speaker: Tell them it's going to save money.
Speaker: Solar sells itself.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We can send a YouTube video.
Speaker: I know.
Speaker: Really, we've arrived at the part of the program why we sent, you know, a heat-seeking missile with a supercomputer attached.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: But we've got to teach the supercomputer what to say.
Speaker: We got the heat-seeking missile.
Speaker: You got to the table.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Now, is the supercomputer properly programmed to go from can you come tomorrow to doing paperwork in 10 or 15 minutes?
Speaker: That's the key.
Speaker: And that's called closing.
Speaker: Love that.
Speaker: So yeah, for our listeners, it's not all one magic word like Mike is saying.
Speaker: There's a series of steps you need to follow, and that's what he goes through in his program, in his course.
Speaker: And then as we wrap up here too, Mike, can you tell us just about your book that's being released too and maybe what the difference is between that?
Speaker: Like why should people get the book and the course?
Speaker: Any differences?
Speaker: Well, they should not get the book instead of the course because it's only 20 bucks.
Speaker: There's going to be a lot of this stuff that's going to be in the book.
Speaker: The book is called No Matter What, right?
Speaker: And it's basically, it's a, it's a story of my journey through my years where I thought I was being successful with golden handcuffs on how I made the transition to solar.
Speaker: And then how did I overcome my character defects that were keeping me?
Speaker: And the title, no matter what comes from what I heard, those, those guys that I met 30 years ago that were showed me how to sell solar.
Speaker: I met another group of guys 30 years ago that showed me how to not drink one day at a time.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Cause I was an, I am an alcoholic.
Speaker: And they had a real simple recipe.
Speaker: The recipe, you like here, you want to say, sir, here's the recipe.
Speaker: Here you go.
Speaker: Man, this is great chicken soup.
Speaker: I don't know how to make chicken soup.
Speaker: Oh, let me give you the recipe.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So they gave me the recipe.
Speaker: They said, don't drink.
Speaker: and go to meetings.
Speaker: Go to meetings for 90 days.
Speaker: Every single day, go to meetings for 90 days and don't drink in between.
Speaker: That's the recipe.
Speaker: Sounds kind of silly and simple, but if you go to meetings every single day for 90 days and don't drink in between, you're going to end up sober 90 days.
Speaker: That's how you start.
Speaker: I've been sober 38 years.
Speaker: That's how it started.
Speaker: And I would call my sponsor and I would say, I can't go to a meeting today because, you know, my sister's graduating, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker: I can't go to a meeting today because, you know, I've got this big thing.
Speaker: And I hear, dude, no matter what, go to a meeting today.
Speaker: There's meetings at midnight, eight in the morning, no matter what.
Speaker: Get your ass to a meeting.
Speaker: Even if your ass falls off.
Speaker: Pick your ass up, take it to a meeting.
Speaker: And that's what's helped me be successful in solar is that mentality.
Speaker: That's what the book is called.
Speaker: It's called No Matter What.
Speaker: Little asterisk there, even if your ass falls off.
Speaker: But it's the recipe.
Speaker: It's awesome.
Speaker: to a seven figure income in sales.
Speaker: Wow, love it.
Speaker: So where if they want to get your book, is it released yet?
Speaker: Yeah, they can go to the same website, mod sales academy.com and they can pre-order the book.
Speaker: It's $19.95.
Speaker: I'll be telling everybody the day it's coming out so they can help me become a bestseller on day one and stuff.
Speaker: And it's a great story.
Speaker: It's a great book.
Speaker: I wrote it.
Speaker: It's a real achievement milestone.
Speaker: That my coach, Michael Burt, said, you know, you want to be taken serious and get invited to speak on stages, then you better, you know, you better do some work.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So that's the work that I've done over the last year is to become an author.
Speaker: That, by the way, was one of the bullet points on my every single day think and grow rich mantra.
Speaker: One of them was to become a bestselling author.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: If you would have asked me to rank that on the odds that that would actually come true, I would have probably put a zero next to it.
Speaker: Like, I don't have any plans to really become an author.
Speaker: But vaguely, I would like to.
Speaker: By having the right coaching, to have Coach Bert on my team, giving me and putting the fire under my ass to do the work and get the coaching that I needed to make that happen, now it's a reality.
Speaker: That's awesome.
Speaker: Well, no, we want to congratulate you, Mike, and the awesome success you've had, and you're taking it to the next level by doing, you know, a program and a book, and I can't wait to see what's next coming up for you.
Speaker: So all our listeners, make sure you go support Mike.
Speaker: Let's make him a bestseller.
Speaker: I want to see that.
Speaker: March 1st, no matter what.
Speaker: New York Times bestseller.
Speaker: Let's go.
Speaker: Just go to modsalesacademy.com.
Speaker: We'll pre-register.
Speaker: We'll get you one now.
Speaker: Lots and lots of people at D2DCon signed up for a pre-book.
Speaker: Lots of folks signed up for the university, so
Speaker: I got a lot of work to do.
Speaker: Let's do it.
Speaker: We'll post all that in the show notes so you can go check it out.
Speaker: And then again, if you want to hear more about the mini habits and a lot of other things we went over, go back and listen to the first podcast we did.
Speaker: It's probably two years back or so.
Speaker: So go listen to that.
Speaker: He talks about mini habits.
Speaker: That's how you can get my phone number, by the way.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I have the same cell phone number.
Speaker: So there's the nugget.
Speaker: Go dig in through the old podcast and you'll get the Mike O'Donnell cell phone number.
Speaker: So he's not going to say it on this podcast, but he's going to make your work for it this time.
Speaker: So go get that.
Speaker: And then last couple of questions before we wrap up here, Mike, can we do just some rapid fire objections?
Speaker: Let's go.
Speaker: Just so people can, you know, get something tangible today.
Speaker: That sounds like that panel we had the other day.
Speaker: Okay, let's do it.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So, yeah, Mike, this all sounds great, but you know, we're moving.
Speaker: It might be like a year or two, so I don't know.
Speaker: It doesn't sound like we should do it if we're going to move soon.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So it sounds like you're moving someday.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Is your house listed yet?
Speaker: No, but... Okay.
Speaker: Well, and by the way, we're not talking about you going solar.
Speaker: We were just talking about you getting the information about going solar.
Speaker: There's a high probability that you're going to be handicapped selling your home in a year or two if it doesn't have solar.
Speaker: Most of the utilities around the country, particularly the one that I'm in, have an absolute ironclad limit to how many homes can go solar in a certain neighborhood.
Speaker: And if you wait too long, you're going to find out that they've reached that limit and you're not able to go solar.
Speaker: Selling your home in the Green New Deal.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: In the midst of this unbelievable inflation that we're having and having a house that absolutely cannot go solar is going to be a huge problem.
Speaker: You may find yourself on a list of people who can't sell their home.
Speaker: None of that matters because we're not talking about you going solar.
Speaker: We're just talking about you getting the information so that you understand if this is a good move for you or not.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Boom.
Speaker: Let's do it.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: How about, you know what, Mike, this sounds great, but we don't really want to go into debt.
Speaker: Sounds like it's a lot of debt to put on our home.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We don't like the debt.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You know what?
Speaker: I don't know exactly how you feel.
Speaker: In fact, I'm a big Dave Ramsey fan, right?
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: And let me tell you, my sister's a big Dave Ramsey fan.
Speaker: She didn't want to go solar either because she didn't want to take on the $40,000, $50,000 in debt.
Speaker: Let me tell you what she found out.
Speaker: She talked to her realtor, Rob, right?
Speaker: Another good friend of mine.
Speaker: Talked to him and found out that he had dozens and dozens of homes sold in the last year.
Speaker: Every single one of them sold just like that for a much higher
Speaker: more, you know, higher price, better deal.
Speaker: And she also found out that what she did not acquire was debt.
Speaker: When you go to Las Vegas and you spend $15,000 blowing money on whatever you blow money on in Las Vegas, you come home with $15,000 in debt.
Speaker: That means on your balance sheet, you have a big negative.
Speaker: And on the other side of your balance sheet, there's no positive.
Speaker: When you buy a home for $500,000, right, you have a big $500,000 mortgage, you're right, that is a negative, but that's not debt, especially if you were able to get the government, weirdly, to pay for the first $100,000, the first 26%, and the house is worth $650,000.
Speaker: Now your balance sheet isn't negative more, it's plus more.
Speaker: Why?
Speaker: Because you acquired equity, right?
Speaker: So we're not talking about acquiring debt.
Speaker: We're talking about acquiring equity.
Speaker: When somebody goes solar, yes, there's a loan and that's a negative, but on the other side of their balance sheet, there's a plus.
Speaker: And the plus is 26% higher than the negative.
Speaker: The day they go solar, their net worth and their equity goes up by 26% of the cost of the solar.
Speaker: They just became that much more wealthy.
Speaker: That's how rich people get wealthy.
Speaker: They use other people's money at a low interest rate.
Speaker: They service the debt with money they were going to have to spend anyway, i.e.
Speaker: if you were buying a house versus renting a house.
Speaker: You had a $2,000 mortgage or a $2,000 rent.
Speaker: Should you not buy a house because you don't want the debt?
Speaker: Dude, that's stupid.
Speaker: Like literally and actually stupid to pay a $2,000 rent when you could have paid a $2,000 mortgage for the same house.
Speaker: Because over here, you were acquiring equity and appreciation and wealth.
Speaker: Over here, you had an expense and you did have...
Speaker: You know, the debt is you're going to have to do this every day for the rest of your life with no asset, nothing on the other side of the balance sheet.
Speaker: I would argue that if you don't go solar, you're going to have all the negatives and none of the positives.
Speaker: That's debt.
Speaker: Hmm.
Speaker: Boom.
Speaker: Where do I sign?
Speaker: Right here.
Speaker: Let's go.
Speaker: Love it.
Speaker: Well, Mike, thanks for coming on the show today.
Speaker: I know we've got to let you get up to Idaho here.
Speaker: We've got to get on that stage first.
Speaker: You and I jump up there and talk to the Knox Star University guys investing in their future today.
Speaker: It's going to be fun to say hello to them and get to say a few words.
Speaker: Danny Pesce and Taylor are just doing a spectacular job of teaching people how to
Speaker: get their game on in the door-to-door world and in the solar world.
Speaker: It's going to be an awesome event.
Speaker: So guys, make sure you invest in yourself and one of the best ways to do that is go get Michael's program, go get his book and again make sure you shoot him a message, let him know you appreciated him coming on the show today and third time, this is the first guest we've had on three times.
Speaker: Well I'm the first one to get a Golden Door Award five years in a row so I don't mind being the first one.
Speaker: By the way, I'm going to be the first speaker at the very first solar
Speaker: in April this year.
Speaker: I'm looking forward to that.
Speaker: I'll probably see you there.
Speaker: And hopefully I'll see a bunch of you there as well.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: So we'll see you guys there.
Speaker: Go grab your tickets for that.
Speaker: Me and Mike will be speaking at that event.
Speaker: So we'll see you guys there.
Speaker: And Mike, thanks again for coming on the show.
Speaker: Hey, solopreneurs, quick question.
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