Law Professional Corporation

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Episode 2 – John Israel Interview

Podcast Transcript

Sukhi Alberga: Welcome to the BLS podcast. I’m your host and founder of Bridging Legal Solutions, law professional corporation, Sukhi Dillon Alberga. This is our second podcast in a series of educational episodes, featuring groundbreaking entrepreneurs and professionals coming together to discuss the creativity that inspires them and makes their businesses flourish. To be clear, the podcast is not a platform for providing any legal advice, but strictly an educational tool for our listeners.

Sukhi Alberga: It is with great pleasure and thrill that I introduce our guest, John Israel, AKA Mr. Thank You. He is a speaker, coach and entrepreneur. John is the founder and CEO of Mr. Thank You, a consulting that focuses on client and employee retention. He is author of the book entitled. Mr. Thank You Project, a journey to elevate the level of gratitude on the planet one card at a time.

Sukhi Alberga: he had a TEDx talk, has been featured on ABC News, Good Morning America. He has given trusted insight to sponsor like Remax, Ronald McDonald’s House Charity ,and Salesforce just to name a few. Thank you so much, John, for joining us today. I’m so happy to have you on our podcast today.

John Isreal: Yeah, Sukhi. Thanks for having me.

Sukhi Alberga: Thank you. We could just start, if you could simply just share with our listeners, your inspiring project and its impact and your journey as an entrepreneur from early beginnings to present day.

John Isreal: Yeah, for sure. How long you got? I’ll give your listeners a condensed version, but for me, I’m an entrepreneur. We actually run two different companies, but they’re under the same umbrella at this point, but we started initially Mr. Thank You, the brand. The company is a strategic gifting company. We actually help people say “thank you” for a living. We would work with organizations, financial planners, real estate, mortgage, any companies that want to appreciate their clients and team members or business partners. We would provide the gifts they would send out.

John Isreal: We do some of the attorneys as well. Now, that was this [inaudible 00:02:31] heard of this company. We were here for about five years in doing very well. Arguably, I had everything I said I wanted. I was married, bought a house, had a family business, but I was over it. I was overworked, overwhelmed and so unhappy, I was ready to walk away from it all.

John Isreal: I came away and I was complaining about work and my wife looks at me and says, “You know, John, if you can’t appreciate what we have now, who’s to say you’ll be any happier when you finally get what you say you want?” In that great eye opening moment for me, because I was really just trying to chase something to give me happiness. It was just never going to … and it was just more, more money, more business, more clients.

John Isreal: We were achieving that, but it still wasn’t working. So I hired a coach and the coach really worked with me on one major piece of the business, which was our vision. What’s your vision? What are your values as a company? What do you care about? What do you want to be or remembered for? I didn’t have great answers for that, because for me it was about just running a successful business that was going to support my life and lifestyle, but clearly that wasn’t working.

John Isreal: We took forth a new mission, because our business was about gratitude, that went forth on a mission to elevate the level of gratitude on the planet. That was really hard mission. It was very inspiring. However, the problem was that there’s this great quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson and what he says is, “Excuse me, I cannot hear what you are saying, because who you are speaks so loudly,” and what it means to me and I think a lot of people is that you can’t just say, “This is what I care about, these are our values.”

John Isreal: You need to live them in your life. My coach, he’s like, “How could I know that mission or your values without you ever telling me?” It’s such a challenging question, because I think for a lot of business owners, we can say, “Our values are to serve clients at the highest level” or “to achieve this level,” but how would people know that without you telling them? How you live it out in your behaviors and your client process?

John Isreal: It really challenged me to look at every aspect of my life and my business of how we can do this mission of elevating gratitude on the planet. I [inaudible 00:05:01] get off with a social experiment for myself, as the leader to simply hand write five thank you cards every day for 365 days in a row. You total that out, that’s 1825 letters of appreciation.

John Isreal: We add some rules to it. I had to hand write every card. It couldn’t be in a text or an email, not that I’m opposed to that, but I just wanted that process. I, [inaudible 00:05:33] for one person, so it meaning I couldn’t write 75 thank you cards to my mother. [inaudible 00:05:36] after note.

Sukhi Alberga: You had some ground rules.

John Isreal: Yeah. We had some ground rules. The last one was the one that shocks a lot people, which was for any and every day that I missed, I would donate $1000 to charity. There was a lot at stake … that’s US dollars, whatever equivalent is, wherever you’re, this, that. That was the commitment. Every day, that’s what was at stake. It was a really challenging year, because I’m not a naturally appreciative, grateful person. I briefly had to … people said it was a project of learning, and understanding what does gratitude even mean? What does it look like to appreciate another person?

John Isreal: The whole thing changed my life, but I wrote a book on it, gave a TED talk on it. Now, when I speak to companies and organizations, we really look at how we teach as principle of what we call “appreciative leadership”. How do you become somebody that your clients don’t want to live without? That your team members want to fight for? In so much of it is based on a lot of the principles we learn from that project, which is why I had to write a book about it, because it was so dense with experiences.

Sukhi Alberga: Yeah. There was one particular story that you had shared that really touched me, was the one it was … there’s countless more, I recommend the book … but the one that I really touched with me was the one where you’re on the plane and you decide to write a thank you card to the pilot. The impact that that had on the pilot and for him to come back and say to you, “In the X amount of” … yeah, I think he was over 20 years or something, that he’s never had anyone appreciate what he does at the level that you appreciated that he was, because you basically said, “Thank you for making sure all of us arrive safely.”

Sukhi Alberga: It’s those little things. It had a huge impact on him. I believe it was worldwide too. Right?

John Isreal: Yeah. Our global mission now is to inspire 74 million thank you cards written around the world. Yeah, which is effectively one person of the world’s population. That’s our goal.

Sukhi Alberga: That’s amazing. That’s really amazing. Today, I think I really wanted to dive in. It goes alongside with your project and what you do as well in your business right now as well. The question of how do you become a business that your client cannot be without? If you could explain how your project … and I think you touched upon it … how it changed your perspective and how you appreciate and value what you do and come from that place of gratitude, but applying it to the business.

Sukhi Alberga: Then after applying it to the business, I think the second part of the question I’d like to ask you is how do you reconcile what you’ve learned with cultivating connections in an increased, automated and digital culture?

John Isreal: Yeah. By the way too, really good question.

Sukhi Alberga: Thank you.

John Isreal: The first one, I’ll address it, a story that came out of the project that changed our business, but it was a personal story. A couple of months into the project, I was writing cards to all sorts of people, like you’ve mentioned. Then, [inaudible 00:09:01] waiters and waitresses, my clients were full on, everyone I could think of. Two months go by and I realized, “Oh my gosh, I haven’t even written one to my wife yet.”

Sukhi Alberga: No.

John Isreal: She’s here every day. By the way, how easy is it for us to take for granted the people that are closest to us? Because they’re always there. I thought, “I’m not going to write her a thank you card. I’m going to write her a love letter.” I go to town, I block an hour of my calendar. I write the best beautiful note. I was like, she’s going to love this- [crosstalk 00:09:35]

Sukhi Alberga: Husband of the year.

John Isreal: I leave the note next to her coffee, because I make the coffee every morning. I make a French press, a coffee. I drink half, I leave the other half in the thermos for her to drink when she wakes up. I go to work and I’m thinking, “All right, she’s going to love this.” The whole day goes by and she never texts me, follows me, emails me, nothing. I was kind of shocked.

John Isreal: I was like, what the heck? I thought I poured my heart out here and she didn’t say anything. I come home. She still doesn’t say anything. We put the kids to bed. At the time, we only had two kids. Now we have four, but we put the kids to bed. She doesn’t say anything. We go to bed. Now she falls asleep, I can’t fall asleep because I’m fuming on my side of the bed, because I’m like “How? Literally, I said everything that I love about you and you didn’t even tell me you got it.”

John Isreal: There’s a moment and this is a key, Sukhi, is that I had to let it go, because if something is done from generosity, from pure gratitude, you can’t expect anything back. That negates the purpose of it. Generosity is something given freely without expectation of anything in return. If I had to check my heart and say, “Why did I even do this? Did I do this because I wanted to express my love to [inaudible 00:10:53] or because I was hoping to hear something back? That I was hoping to hear, ‘Oh, you’re such a great husband, John. I love you too. You’re so great.'”

John Isreal: I realized that I was conditional. I was hoping to hear something back. By the way, running a gifting company, we help people say thank you for a living. What upsets clients more than anything is when they spend good money in a gift, they send it to somebody, and they don’t hear anything back.

John Isreal: I don’t know if you or any of your listeners can relate to that, but it’s so frustrating. I was thoughtful, my heart [inaudible 00:11:23]. I spent good money and is there something wrong? Did I upset you? It’s really weird to not hear things back, but the whole point is what was the goal? Was the goal to actually express gratitude or to get something in return?

John Isreal: I realized in the moment I had to let it go. Something interesting happens the next day. I wake up and I go start making a coffee. I realize we have run out coffee beans, which wasn’t a big deal for me, because I have the car. We only had one car at the time, because we had moved across the country. We’re in Dallas, Texas, in the US.

John Isreal: I said, “You know what, no big deal. I’ll just go get some coffee on my way out of town to go see my clients.” I get to the front door and I hear my wife coming down the stairs. I look up and she is dead tired. We had an infinite of time. I’m looking at her [inaudible 00:12:10] and she is just dead tired. She says, “Oh sweetheart, before you go, is the coffee ready?”

John Isreal: I was like, “Oh, I’m so sorry, sweetheart. We ran out of coffee, which to that [inaudible 00:12:23] a big deal. You could see … Sukhi, I don’t know if you ever had somebody look at you deeply in the eyes, while they were planning to murder you. That was the [inaudible 00:12:37] and I felt terrible, but I needed to go. So, I just left. I go to Starbucks, I get my coffee.

John Isreal: Now, you had to understand. I wanted to do the right thing. What’s the right thing? To take the cup, to get an extra cup of coffee, bring it back home, but it was in that moment, I’m in a major metropolitan area, where if I missed this little window of traffic, I get the worst traffic, am going to be late to see my client. I just didn’t want that to happen, but how often do we get this choice in life?

John Isreal: Business or relationship, you choose. Clearly, I made that choice in that moment. Then I thought, at the Starbucks drive thru I thought, how can you do that? How can you literally write this woman an undying love letter telling nothing matters more to you than her and then leave her empty? I go to the drive thru and ask for a second cup of coffee. I say, “Whatever, I’ll be late. We’ll deal with it.”

John Isreal: I go back home. I leave the cup of coffee in the doorstep with a little note. All the note says is this, “Dear Monica, thank you for working hard to take care of our boys. You’re always worth a hot cup of coffee.” That was it.

John Isreal: You would think I just gave this woman $100,000 bouquet, because when I drove away, I left with the front door as soon [inaudible 00:13:46] outside. She took a picture of it, she posted on Instagram. She says, “Oh my gosh, I have the best husband in the world.” She’s sending me text messages. Kissy face, kissy face, I love you, I can’t wait to see you when you get home.

John Isreal: I’m now [inaudible 00:13:59] about the traffic. I’m like, “This doesn’t even make any sense. Yesterday, I wrote her the greatest love letter, she doesn’t say anything. Today, I leave her a cup of coffee and this is what means everything.” I said, “You know? Whatever, I’ll take it. I’ll take the win for the team.”

John Isreal: [inaudible 00:14:12] take every win you can get, but here’s what changed everything. I come home, we have dinner with the kids, we put the kids to bed. We have this moment where we’re just sitting there as a couple. It’s the best time of any parent’s day, when the house is quiet, everyone is … we’re enjoying a glass of wine. She looks at me and she says, “You know, sweetheart, I got to tell you something. I got your letter yesterday and it was very sweet. I know that you love me, but sometimes I just like you prove it to me.”

John Isreal: When you do the little things, that makes all the difference. That changed everything, because when I say that affected our business, it gave me this new perspective of you can’t say one thing, that you value, that you appreciate, that you care about, and then act inconsistent with that. You can’t say, “I love you. I appreciate you,” and then leave someone hanging.

John Isreal: You can’t tell your teammates, your subordinates, the staff, “Hey, I appreciate how hard you guys,” then berate them for the mistake they make on that file. You can’t tell your client, “Hey, we value your responsiveness in client service,” but then not respond to their emails, because they’re getting annoying.

John Isreal: We can’t say one thing, act differently, and not expect it to impact in the relationship. I think that became the challenge for me. It’s a question that I’ll give to your audience, which is the question for the business, which is how do you treat that for which we’re grateful?

John Isreal: If you say “We love clients, we value our relationships. We value our business partners.” Great, how do you prove it? How do you show it? If it’s me, how do you feel that in their client process, the conversations, the emails and how your staff interacts with them and how your staff interacts with each other?

John Isreal: You know what I get. There’s a lot of attorneys listening here. There’s a lot about this, a lot of clients that think in their business it might seem a little different than what you’re used to, but when you want to activate loyalty, think about it. Who are we loyal to? We’re loyal to those that value our presence, that value us being a part of the organization. When you’re in a high stress environment, it matters even more.

Sukhi Alberga: That’s right. Yeah. I think it’s a really interesting points that you’re making here too is because at the same time, what you might think someone values may not necessarily be more valuable to them, when it’s something else that’s more valuable. It’s really trying to educate yourself an understanding of the person or your customer or your client of what they value, what are their goals? What is dear to them? What delights them?

Sukhi Alberga: Then, trying to figure that out and then be able to genuinely show that. I know with our staff at BLS, we do our best to try and do that. I think that’s so important, but I think again, just to bring you back to the question of how do you do that in an automated and digital culture?

John Isreal: Yeah, it’s a great question. Just this whole project, we finished the project. We wrote the book, we started [inaudible 00:17:11]. It’s interesting what happening was we were getting hired a lot for these client appreciation events, a network of clients that find that we do it. I share the story with the whole community and it was really impactful, but then we just got really curious about this idea of appreciation in loyalty, because that was the emphasis, which is we want to keep you. How do we do that?

John Isreal: In doing research of this whole idea, of client loyalty or team member loyalty, as a world becomes more automated and digital, it’s interesting. There’s some research out there. It’s called The Future of Employment is the study. It was done in Oxford. They did some research of basically of human automation, as the world evolves. What they looked at was the likelihood of certain jobs being automated over the next 10 to 20 years.

John Isreal: What they were looking for what is it about jobs that are easily automated and what are not? What is fascinating is we were seeing things real estate agent, 68% likelihood they could be automated. Mortgage professionals, 92% likelihood to be automated, but we wouldn’t see things Sukhi that like animal trainers, 17%. Coaches in Scouts, 13%. Attorneys, 3%. Teachers and educators, 8%.

John Isreal: We were looking at why is it some job are such more highly likely to be automated than others? We realized there was a framework inside of it, of what do we expect or want from people that technology cannot provide? It’s a framework. We call it the “Lead Framework of Human Relevance”.

John Isreal: This is how humans stay relevant with each other as the world automates. L stands for leadership, E stands for education, A stands for advocacy, and D stands for delight. How do these play out for business? L stands for leadership. If someone is added to the team or a client is coming in, what they want from you is leadership. They want certainty. Tell them, “Here’s what’s going to happen. Here’s what we’re going to do. Here’s the process.”

John Isreal: If you’re potentially going to take someone on, that is one of the things they’re looking for. You’ve done something I’ve never done. I don’t understand this. I don’t pretend to be an attorney. Oh, I need to trust you. As the attorney, you need to be able to sell that. On the team, as you’re recruiting new [inaudible 00:19:46], same thing. Are they going to have a better career tier because of your leadership, because of your guidance, because of your coaching? That is something that we actually are seeing more and more in our relationship, that we can’t get from automation technology.

John Isreal: E stands for education. This is two things. It’s proprietary knowledge, which is just knowing things that others don’t. Same thing as an attorney, that’s par for the course. You know about the law that your clients don’t. That’s key, but also part of it is continue to education, growth and development. One of the things that we discovered is that, it was really interesting, Sukhi, is that from being hired for doing these client appreciation event, I learned that the companies that were hiring for that, they had relationships with people that after we would do these value at events, the companies would be getting thank you cards and letters and messages from the client, saying how grateful they are to do business with them.

John Isreal: Well, think about that. Most companies and organizations are chasing clients or trying to win business, rather simply be grateful. They get tons of referrals, because of that relationship. Having built in education with clients, as well as the team, how do you constantly provide value by teaching them things? For example, on my team, we’re a small team, only about four people. We have a personal growth bonus. Every book they read, we don’t pay for the time to read it, but if they turn in a book report from any book they’ve read, that is related to the business that helps them grow. Any book they read, we’ll buy the book, and tell them we’ll give them a $50 bonus.

John Isreal: No matter what [inaudible 00:21:27] of businesses they might or get more, but the whole idea is we’re encouraging and they appreciate that we want them to grow and it makes a difference. Third one is advocacy. This is where I think when we did the research that why attorneys specifically have a much lower likelihood of automation, is because what we want from a person that a robot cannot do, is we want somebody to fight for us.

John Isreal: Now, here, this real simple example of that is if you ever had a problem on your phone bill or electric bill or something, and you’ve got to reach out to the company to get your problem fixed. You call them on the phone and then you get … what do you get? You get the automated service. Press one for this, press two for this.

John Isreal: What you do? I don’t know if you’re like me, I’m smashing the zero button. I’m like, “Give me a person. I want to talk to a human being.” Why? Because if we talk to a person, we can negotiate. If we talk to a person, we can say, “Hey, go talk to your manager or fight for me. Work on my behalf.” Especially in the attorney space, this is something that will really be sold to the client. Especially, this is what keeps people loyal.

John Isreal: This is also one of the things. It’s a subtle thing that can completely turn a team member off and will cause them to leave, which is that if there’s a moment where you could fight for them or cast blame, if we don’t fight for them, they start to see, okay, now I know where I stand here, but this might not be a great example, but this is something that I think about.

John Isreal: When I turned 21 years old in the US. That’s the legal age to have your first drink. I was at the beach with some friends, and I had a bottle of champagne. This is 6 o’clock in the afternoon, it’s not even dark yet. I’m pouring champagne, which I bought on my birthday and everyone’s got a dixie cup. I’m holding the bottle, the police show up and they shine the lights on us. They’re like, “Drop everything.”

John Isreal: We put everything down. I didn’t realize, but it’s actually a law. It’s called police on the beach, when you leave it there, it breaks, kids step on it. I didn’t know this at the time. Now, I know. And of everybody, they came up to me, because I had the bottle, they wrote me the ticket. It was on my 21st birthday, hadn’t even had a drink yet. Here’s what was the hardest part about that for me. Nobody said anything. Nobody said, “It’s his birthday. Can we just give me the ticket?” No one said anything. They all turned their backs.

John Isreal: When we think about who do we want to be loyal to? It’s those that will fight for our success, fight for our relationship. In companies and in organizations, that can be tough, right? There’re policies, there’re legal things that you can and can’t do, but just know we want that from people. Hear that from realty. Last minute delight, which is simply doing things that make people feel good. It’s human connection, it’s conversations. It’s client appreciation events. It’s sending gifts. It’s doing things that delight and inspire and get people excited.

John Isreal: That’s what we want that only we can get from human interaction. By the way, that is one of the reasons why social media is actually really important. That is why things like TikTok and Instagram are actually really popular, is because what we’re looking for is entertainment. We’re looking for delight. We’re looking for engagement. That is a platform. They make it much easier. [inaudible 00:25:12] also a platform where a lot of attorneys and service professionals are growing their business from, because that’s what people actually engage with. That’s what they’re looking for.

John Isreal: We call this the LEAD Framework of Human Relevance. Leadership, education, advocacy, and delight. When we translate that to just about every industry, it fits. That’s what people are looking for, because we’re not loyal to companies. We’re loyal to relationships. If you’re a leader, if you’re an internal person, that’s what people are looking for, to be in a relationship with you.

Sukhi Alberga: Right. Essentially, you’re saying that to build a foundation of loyalty with your customers and having repeat customers or clients, it’s really the foundation piece is relationship.

John Isreal: Absolutely.

Sukhi Alberga: Yeah. Then also when you talk about how you treat your employees and how you treat clients, how do you retain them? We were talking about being able to … like you said … leadership is the key thing, but it’s also the importance of knowing that you are going to fight for them, that you are going to use whatever skill sets that you have, that they need, that you’re not only just going to provide that, but you’re going to be in their corner sort of thing.

John Isreal: Absolutely.

Sukhi Alberga: Having said that, how do you feel what’s been happening in recent times? We’re living in really unpredictable times. There’re lockdowns and things and all this stuff happening and try to keep building that. What would be your words of wisdom in that scenario, that we’re in right now?

John Isreal: You’re talking about business building in a bit of like a lockdown type scenario?

Sukhi Alberga: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Although, we’re coming out of it now, but a lot of businesses have had to deal with that. Some of them had even had to close their doors. To try and rebuild that or to continue that, what would be your words of wisdom for listeners?

John Isreal: Yeah. It’s a great question by the way, because we dealt with that. We’re doing this virtually in a very different part of the world. I’m going to go to a different framework that is more from the Mr. Thank You Project, while writing a lot of currents. This is actually a basis for … we call it the Relationship Accelerated Formula, which is what do people want?

John Isreal: This is actually helpful to know how to stay in contact with people. We call this the VOW Framework. V-O-W. Values, outcomes, weaknesses, which is what does this person care about? What are their goals and outcomes they’re trying to achieve? What are they struggling with or what are they afraid of? When you know that … now for a lot of people here, it’s pretty obvious, whether they’re afraid of COVID or they’re thinking, there’s this is feeling of defeat or something.

John Isreal: Well, what we do is we’ve reached out during COVID when everything came out, we just started reaching out to clients. “Hey, how are you? How’s your business? How are you holding up? Hey, how is this last thing that we spoke about? How’s your family? How are your kids?” We would just ask these questions and just say, “Hey, you know what, what are you struggling with right now? What’s hard about business right now? What are you dealing with?”

John Isreal: That’s the hard part, because then what happens is when we know what they’re struggling with, we know how to provide relevant value. This is what we would do, is if we had a common themes, we would host a webinar or training for all of our clients on that topic. There are actually books out there on how to run a virtual company, how to run your company when times have gone more virtual. I would buy that book and send it out to every single one of our clients.

John Isreal: If we can get the author to come and give it a little webinar lecture, we would do that. If not, we would send it, but with the note that said, “Hey, I just want to let you know how much I appreciate you, and we want to keep you going. I wanted to send you a book that I found that was very relevant to what you said you were having to deal with. I hope this is helpful for you.”

John Isreal: All this [inaudible 00:29:23], because there’s only so much you can do, but here’s what happens. Things do turn a corner and when they do, and they do need your services, who are they going to come back to? They’re going to go back to the person who actually engaged, where there’s a lot of people who completely disengaged and stepped away. They were just huddling to themselves, rather than engaging with the people.

John Isreal: I think that finding different ways to reach out and make connections and then find out what their needs are, their values, what they’re struggling with, and provide relevant value to them. You stay relevant. Relationships are a function of relevance. For example, if you called me, or someone called me … and number one, we don’t align on values. They’re not going to help me achieve meaningful goal, or they’re not going to help me with any of my problems. Why should I talk to them? Why should your friends talk to you if there’s nothing of value we’re going to provide?

John Isreal: There’s this statement out there, which is, “If you help other people get what they want, you’ll get what you want.” Well, the question inside of that is, well, how do you do that? How do you [inaudible 00:30:28] value? I could just buy you lunch today, but you might be like, “Well, I already had lunch, John.”

John Isreal: Then, doing that gesture is actually super irrelevant. The whole goal of our relationships is relevant. That’s one of the frameworks, which is we think the VOW Framework of Human Relevance, values, outcomes and weaknesses, knowing those about the person and honoring those in the relationship. The LEAD framework, providing opportunities for education, leadership, advocacy, and delight, and just doing little things like that.

John Isreal: That’s when you show that relationships matter to you by sending gifts or following up on your phone calls during the hard times, people will show up for you 10X fold in the good times. That’s really what we all want, is we all want them to be there when things turn the corner.

Sukhi Alberga: Yes. I think in some industries, it used more of a transactional exchange between the consumer companies. I think even with COVID and coming out of that, and in recent events that are happening in the world too, there is a more of let’s connect. I need to have a connection. I want to foster a relationship. Like you said, everything that you said, I think comes all together of what it truly means nowadays, to be an entrepreneur and to have the type of clients that you want, or you are targeting.

Sukhi Alberga: First of all, knowing who they are is essentially really important and understanding what they need. At the same time, recognizing what their goals are and being passionate about that and helping them do it, and what you can provide. I think those are really key things, but I really want to respect the time here too, as well.

Sukhi Alberga: I just wanted to say, if you had any departing words for someone, either who’s starting a startup business, or has an existing business, any departing words in such a different time that we’re living in, that you think would be one thing you’d want our listeners to have, a takeaway from today.

John Isreal: Yeah. I think it’s really simple, is to take the time, to appreciate what and who is in front of you. It’s easy as a startup to look at everything you don’t have. You don’t have this funding, you don’t have this employee, you don’t have this product or item or technology. You can sit there and be unhappy and upset and angry about what you don’t have, but what we learned through positive psychology is that when we’re in a state of unhappiness or lack of appreciation, we perform poorly.

John Isreal: We don’t have a positive outlook on the vision or the future. If you can take the time to, with the little that you have, appreciate it, and actually not just write it in your journal, but just take the time to appreciate your coder or one of your engineers or someone like that. They’re going to be loyal to you, [inaudible 00:33:30] in hard times and that’s what we want. We want those people to stick to it, in the long term.

John Isreal: Take the time now to build those relationships and with each and every client. Then if you’ve grown and you’re bigger, here’s the bigger challenge, is actually when you have all the clients and you have the business and now you’re thriving, sometimes we can get so focused on LEAD generation and client thought. We’re so focused on the clients. We don’t take the time to step back and actually just love on and appreciate who we already have.

John Isreal: We all know that feeling when we lose a key relationship. We know what it’s like to look at someone’s desk when they’re not there and then have the email in our inbox to say that someone else took another opportunity, or to reach out to a client when the contract is over to try and renegotiate and they’re like, “We’ve already made a decision.”

John Isreal: We’ve all had something like that happen, we know the feeling in the pit of our stomach. How do we combat that? Is we take the time, we take the time to build a relationship, because it’s easy to quit a job. It’s easy to quit a company. It’s easy to not stop doing business with a company. It’s much harder to do that with a relationship. Take the time to appreciate what and who you have, whether you got a little or whether you got a lot.

Sukhi Alberga: That’s such valuable information. I’m so glad you shared that. I think our listeners can take a lot from that and I hope they will too.

Sukhi Alberga: Thank you so much for taking the time out again and giving us such invaluable insight. It’s been fantastic. I really enjoy talking to you and sharing your remarkable story. Thank you so much.

John Isreal: Thanks Sukhi for having me. If you guys want any more info on it, the book is available on Amazon. Just search Mr. Thank You Project on Amazon, you can find it there. If you want to stay in touch with me on social media, everything is @themrthankyou or our websites just Mrthankyou.com.

John Isreal: If you have any questions about giving a speaking or training for teams or workshops, we do a lot of that in person. Also, of course what’s great is because the virtual, we do programs all over the world for organizations, which is what we’re doing here. Thanks for having me.

Sukhi Alberga: Thank you, so much with a pleasure. Thank you.

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