Ben's Update: When Entrepreneurs Go Corporate

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If there's one thing we've learned about business and life is that people are the X

factor.

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They constantly surprise us both in amazing ways and not so much.

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We're Ben and Sia and welcome to the Nod On This Business Bites podcast.

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This show is all about real life things we all deal with every day, how they relate to

business and how to make some sense out of our daily chaos.

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Welcome to the show.

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Welcome back to another episode of non this business bites.

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I'm Ben and this is Sia.

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Transitions.

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We all go through them.

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You whether they be a transition at work, whether it's transitioning from one company to

another, whether it's being single to married or single to dating, to dating, to not

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dating.

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We all go through transitions.

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There is a million different ways that people transition.

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And there's some real challenges involved in transition.

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and I want to sit there and I want to talk about a transition that I'm going through right

now.

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Because why not?

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It's my mic, it's my 15 minutes, Sia's given me permission, let's go for it.

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There is absolutely nothing wrong with self-promotions sir, go go!

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Absolutely.

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Over the last 17 years, people have known me as the captain of your brand marketing.

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Well, for those of people who don't know, I burned down the ship December 31st.

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I purposely burned down the ship.

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Your brand marketing is no more.

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I closed it down.

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I've done the last tax return.

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I've transitioned people off.

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It was a whole process.

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And the question is why?

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Why did I do it?

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You know what?

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I wanna go back in house.

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I wanna go back to where I have a team.

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I wanna be back where I can coach, mentor, and lead.

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I wanna be part of a senior management team where I can strategize with other people.

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We can create impact and create the next generation of leaders.

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And you can't do this on your own.

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As successful as your brand marketing was, as much as I enjoyed it,

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Being by myself, being the person that's looking over my left shoulder and my right

shoulder to just say, hey, what do you think?

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Well, I think it's okay.

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Okay, I guess we're going ahead.

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It gets old really quick.

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Now I understand, know, everybody has their life where they're sitting there going to the

grass is always greener somewhere else.

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But we need to there and say, are we happy doing what we're doing?

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And are we going to be happy doing what we're doing in the long run?

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And if we're not,

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If we've reached that impasse, if we've reached that period of our life where we're

sitting there going, I need something more, I need what's next, I need a new challenge, I

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need something different in my life, embrace what that means.

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And that might be doing something on the side, it might mean a wholesale change, it may

just mean changing the color of the outfit that you wear every single day, but you need to

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embrace it.

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You need to sit there and say, what do I need within my life to feel challenged, to be

excited, and to be doing the things that I want to do to be able to hopefully make you a

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better person and a world a better person around you.

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So Sia, let's gnaw on this.

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My friend, my friend, again, I love that song Chacha Changes.

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You know, turn to face the strange because we don't know what our life holds for us.

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But at the same time, you have to be constantly evolving and revolving and evaluating and

growing from those experiences.

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So for you, sir, I applaud you.

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I applaud you for, man, you've been on your own for so long.

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It's gotta be, you know, this is where again,

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fire in the belly, Is you have to wake up in the morning, you have to have those coal

fires going to get up in the morning to say, yeah, I'm inspired.

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I'm jumping up.

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Now granted, when you're a certain age, you're not leaping out of bed like you used to.

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But you know what though, it's amazing.

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When you're doing something that

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You need that lift, know, you need that power lift to get you out of it.

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But when you're doing something you like, isn't that weight just a little bit less?

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What I mean?

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Just a little bit.

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Yeah.

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It's still cracking and groaning and moaning people.

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Let me tell you, aging sucks, but, it doesn't have to be miserable.

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And I applaud you for making that decision to go back.

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think, you know, it is, I think everyone should do it.

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I I've been doing that quite a bit myself the last few, you know, moon cycles of.

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You know, really looking at the business, how am I growing?

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How am I scaling?

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Is it the direction I want to go in?

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Do I need to diversify?

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Is my messaging correct?

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Am I, you know, servicing my clients correctly the way they want to be serviced?

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Well, that sounds very naughty, but I'm not meaning that way.

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But you know what I mean?

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It's.

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And if your heart isn't there, then it's just not there.

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You're to have to find it.

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It's like, okay, everyone in the audience raise your hand.

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If you're in a relationship.

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Right?

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You can't stay in a long-term relationship without constantly evolving with each other.

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One person can evolve and if you don't, guess what's going to happen?

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You're going to see that helixing of like, like, like you're gonna see carved out and it's

going to be that person's evolving, evolving, but you're going to be that stalwart.

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Well, guess what's going to happen?

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You are screwing your relationship up because what's happening is they're carving away at

what could have been an amazing, you know, nail.

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Right?

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Well, I also look at it as that whole image that you're doing is one evolving around the

other and all of sudden the second one goes flying off into space.

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Correct.

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And it's gone.

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And it's gone.

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And it's gone.

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And I got to tell you, man, I, I, again, I really applaud you on this because when I

decided to leave corporate America to go to entrepreneurship, right.

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I got to tell you, man, I never thought about entrepreneurship.

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thought I'd be a career person for the end of days.

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And I literally lost that fire, that coal went freaking out.

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And, you know, I hate to say it, but it was a blessing in disguise, you know, like getting

riffed.

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I'm like,

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was what I needed to say, suck it up, buttercup.

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You didn't, I was happy and I should have known better.

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How long was I miserable for?

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You know what I mean?

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So let me ask you this.

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So Ben, what is it that you're looking for?

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Because I got to tell you, my friend, the idea of going to corporate for me is like

glutton for punishment.

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So why are you wanting to go back by friend?

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Because I would love to hear the pros.

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Cause maybe I need to hear it again.

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Right.

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For me, the excitement is customer experience and stakeholder relations.

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It's the problem solving.

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It's problem solving at a national or international level.

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It's sitting there going, there's big, meaty, chewy problems that need to be solved either

within an organization or outside an organization.

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know, client relationships change.

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You know, I love when stuff is bent, broken, or bedlam.

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If you look at my LinkedIn profile and if you look at my website, it's when things are

bent, broken or bedlam is when I'm happiest.

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I love the fact that things are just not going right and said, OK, what's the problem?

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And not just what's the immediate problem, what's not what's obvious, but what's the

underlying systemic issue?

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Yeah.

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And being able to fix that problem.

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And I don't know.

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mean, either I'm going to end up in a consulting firm.

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or I'm going to end up in a large organization or mid to large organization in probably a

customer experience or a customer relations type role, you know, because these are the

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problems that are not solvable by AI.

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In fact, AI is, is, is, is what's causing the issues in a lot of respects is because

we're, we're overreaching with AI.

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AI is everybody thinks that the AI is the end all in BL there.

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And you know what AI does amazing things.

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Don't get me wrong.

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AI does amazing things, but it's a matter of understanding when is the time to do the

handoff from the AI to a human being and making sure you have trained people on the inside

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that can sit there and actually listen to people, understand people, value people,

empathize with people, and be able to solve these problems because that's why people come

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to us.

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People come to us because they have problems.

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We can solve the problems.

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It's worth them spending their money to have us fix their problems because for whatever

reasons they can't do it themselves.

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But that requires a human interaction at some level.

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Now technology will probably be part of the solution.

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I'd be surprised if it wasn't.

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But without that human interface,

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the technology will just do what the technology does and it's gonna make the problem

worse.

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And that's where my passions lie.

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So do you think you going back to corporate gives you the opportunity to be the inside

person to affect change versus being an outside person encouraging the change?

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that that kind of the difference?

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I want to be the person who can turn the screw.

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I want to be the person who can actually turn the screw.

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I want to be the person who can help bring teams together and get rid of the silos and

build better communication amongst departments and be able to sit there and say, look, how

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do we work together to be able to affect change both inside and outside and realize that

it's not a cost center, it's a profit center.

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Customer experience, if done properly, is a profit center.

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Bad customer experience costs millions and millions and millions of dollars, if not

billions of dollars, every single year for organizations.

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Actually, I'm in the middle of researching a new ebook on that particular topic.

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And the challenge lies is the fact that

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Organizations look at customer experiences as expense center.

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How long do we have our customer service people online?

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How long until they can get to the next call?

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How long can they, know, everybody's being pushed off and the quick solve and the quick

fix, instead of realizing, wait a second here, we've got 150 people calling in today with

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the exact same problem.

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How do we fix the problem instead of just listening to people complain about it?

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How do we actually fix that problem to take those 150 people times 300 days a year or how

many ever days a year your customer experience team is on the phone out of the queue?

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Now you're always gonna have more problems.

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There's always gonna be challenges.

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Whatever there's a company, there's challenges.

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Nothing is perfect.

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But the trick is to figure out how to make things better.

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And by doing that, what you're doing is you're allowing people to focus on

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what really is a problem instead of something that's fixable, that's something that's

easily fixable and is going to delight customers to be able to turn them into champions,

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turn them into people that tell people about your company and people that spend more money

and become more profitable clients.

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Dude, I can tell you're gearing up.

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everyone, hey, anyone that like joining our show, shout out and give Ben some help here.

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Look, none of us are hiring managers necessarily, or if you are, reach out to Ben, but we

know people who know people.

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So maybe not, might not be a secondary contact.

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Maybe it might be your secondary contact that knows a tertiary contact for you, right?

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And an intro is an intro.

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I think, you know, you've been so gracious about sharing your thoughts and opinions.

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And I think you, you'll serve up some great word nuggets and thought nuggets that, um, you

know, I'm just going to go ahead and say it peeps.

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Help a brother out.

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Let's go.

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Let's know on this together and keep on going.

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I don't want to lose Ben and Ben, by the way, when you do get your corporate gig, you

better not be dumping me.

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We'll do our best, know.

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My goal is part of the contract is to try to keep this show running.

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Hell yeah!

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That's what my goal is.

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There's never 100 % promise, but that's what my goal is.

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Look, there's nothing, there's nothing in corporate that we're saying that is going to be

anti.

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And if they are, I might coach you on, advise you on, maybe that's not the right company.

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Cause any company right now that doesn't believe in the personal brand that makes their

company look good of like, look how bad-ass my employee is.

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Louise.

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Yeah, I'm shouting out corporate.

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Okay.

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Maybe I'm still a little negative.

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Maybe I, I'm not the candidate that goes back.

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So Ben, more power to you, my friend.

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I am wishing nothing but the best.

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Well, thanks.

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And if people want to find out more, go to I am Ben Baker dot com.

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That's what that website was designed for.

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That website's designed to get people to understand who I am, what I do, why I do it, who

I do it for and the value I add.

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So, you know, I'm a branding guy.

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That's what I do.

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I don't build a resume.

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I build a website.

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You know, why why go in for a penny when I can go in for a pound?

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Can't say more my friend.

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can't look, consider this a verbal reference people's.

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So send all the HR folks this way and here you go.

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I can absolutely 100 % vouch that Ben Baker is going to deliver increased communication,

break down the silos and actually make your business more profitable.

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Hey, let's leave it there.

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Share this podcast with whoever and whoever you know.

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And if you want to contact me directly, you can through my website and let's have a

conversation and talk.

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So let's leave it there.

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I'm Ben and we'll see you soon.

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Hey hey hey, thanks for listening to another episode of Not On This Business Fights.

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If you liked what you heard, be most humbly asked that you like, share, and hit that

subscribe button.

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If you want to communicate more effectively within your organization, contact ben at

imbenbaker.com or meet

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brilliantbeanmedia.com.

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can help you build your community, brand awareness, and personality through digital

content and podcasting.

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We cannot wait to hear from you.

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See you next week for another episode of Nom This Business Pites.