This week on Clarity Compressed I sat down with someone who’s the embodiment of a career entrepreneur. Jim Fitzpatrick has been in the automotive world for over 20 years, owning and managing a dealership, then starting an advertising agency with his son, founding the CBT Automotive Network, and most recently the Atlanta Small Business Network.

Jim found a lot of great solutions for problems he saw, first in automotive and now into the universe of small businesses (98% of the ENTIRE business economy is made of businesses between 1 and 500 employees) in Atlanta and the world. As someone who founded a company with his son and works everyday with his wife, he is also a real example of how family business can work. He gives us some pointers on that very topic. If you want to hear more about true entrepreneurship, tune in to the podcast.

Entrepreneurship has been a common theme throughout Jim’s career. I’m not talking about it in the sense of valuing your time like money or constantly trying to make business connections.

I’m talking about entrepreneurship in the sense of seeing a problem, looking at your resources and passions, and then addressing it.

Time and time again, this has been how I’ve proceeded in my life.

Take Congruent, an agency that’s my main focus right now. Congruent started over five years ago, not as a business but as a solution for a problem we had at Image Auto. We needed to keep everybody aligned with the mission, vision, and values of the company even though they were spread out all across the northeast region. I saw a growing problem in the company, and dug in to find a solution to address it. This resulted, years down the line, in a successful marketing agency.

This approach to entrepreneurship -- actually making changes to solve problems instead of just complaining or throwing your voice into the ‘conversation -- ties back to last week’s episode. You get to choose how you feel and act. You might not have control over the outcomes, but your personal choice lets you control you. Your response to challenges.

On this week’s podcast, I spoke with the AJ Amyx, a growth strategist for creative entrepreneurs. I’m a big fan of AJ’s energy and insight, so I was glad to get him on the pod. I’m really happy with this episode and the CLARITY it brings to some life concepts that are important to me.

Mutual Agreements vs. Unspoken Expectations

A big standout from our conversation was the concept of agreements versus expectations. This is a personal one for me. I take clarity seriously. Good communication is one of my core values. And even I end up falling into the trap of expectations.

It’s easy to leave a conversation thinking you’re on the same page with someone -- that you have an explicit agreement -- when all you really have are expectations on both sides. Say you meet up with a colleague you see occasionally and leave things on the note that you’ll “connect soon”. Does that mean making a phone call or sending a follow-up email? When are you supposed to connect, tomorrow or next week? This sort of thing happens all the time. AJ and I talked about how important it is to stop leaving expectations and start making agreements.

Download This Episode's Worksheet on Avoiding Workplace Drama

The Drama Triangle

The Drama Triangle was the other concept that resonated with me. It’s a lot to get into here, but you should skim the Wikipedia page or this article. While the article focuses on personal relationships, like I said at the top, I believe that “work life” and “home life” are all part of the same field. Improving your understanding of relationships will help your entire life.

The Drama Triangle appealed to me because it’s an intuitive way to see when you’re slipping into negative positions. I frequently try to play the “Hero” and fix everything for everyone. That ends up making people too dependent on you and takes away their power. It’s also easy to fall into the “Villain” box and have a super negative outlook and effect on people. Or the “Victim” role, where you feel like the world’s out to get you and you feel powerless.

Did This Resonate with You?

I love meeting like-minded people. We get inspired off each other's experiences and ideas, and it brings a new perspective. If you connected with anything we said in the podcast or simply have a question you're struggling with, you're always welcome to drop me an email or connect on social.

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Right now, there’s all sorts of talk and murmurings about a coming recession. If you weren’t in business ten years ago, then you might not really understand what it’s like to do business in that sort of climate.

I talked about doing business through the 2008 recession back in episode 31. To recap: It’s a weird time to see stock prices drop, sales plummet, bailouts happen, etc. When there’s all sorts of upheaval in the marketplace, everyone gets scared. Those conditions create a lot of fear and that makes doing business harder in many ways.

One thing that I’m happy about now, even if there might be a recession on the way, is that I’m in the brand-building business.

Brand is something that holds its value. Even when the markets drop. Even when budgets shrink. Even when sales plummet.

And the great thing about 2018 versus 2008 is that we have an idea that a recession or a market correction could be coming. We’re not going to get caught by surprise. And we can get prepare for it by building up our brand.

GRATITUDE is like a universal topic this time of year. I personally have much to be grateful for: my wife, kids, and family. A strong business. And this great community. A community built on sharing best practices and a "rising tides raise all ships" mentality.

People in the entrepreneurial and business worlds often speak about the same things when they talk about their path. We’ll say we want to 10x our business or hack our growth. We’ll talk about grinding every day and leveling up. The thing we sometimes don’t talk about is the pain of it; the transaction costs.

On the latest episode of Dealers Compressed, I wanted to continue a thought from last week. When we have difficult conversations, it’s obviously a point of pain, but a lot of constructive things come from them. This pain is part of something I call the TRANSACTION OF GROWTH.

There are costs to growing. There’s pain. Think about how your body gets stronger. You work out and physically push your limits so that your body adapts. To build muscle and gain strength, your existing muscle has to tear and regrow.

That’s an analogy for transaction of growth.

In this week’s episode of Dealers Compressed, I touch on the concept of transaction of growth and how it fuels my gratitude this season and all through the year. It’s something important to keep in mind. I’ve never looked back after a hard day’s work and regretted it, even if it cost me something. And that’s something I’m grateful for.
 

I don’t have to tell any of the readers here that it takes A LOT of work to build momentum.

My professional colleagues are in the throes of this work day-in-day-out.

The truth all of us know: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS AN OVERNIGHT SUCCESS.

The same is true about getting to the point where Dale Pollak would give me a number of hours in the middle of the day to talk about the industry and some deeper topics as well. This story actually began about 2 years ago.

The spark: 

I had met Dale briefly at a dealer event and sent a follow up email asking if he’d be willing to be interviewed for a podcast I was starting. Its important to note this was NOT the ‘Dealers Compressed’ podcast I’ve been producing since the beginning of the year. It was actually called “The ReInvention Podcast”. Although I recorded 8 episodes, it was never formally launched. Dale agreed.

You see, as the founder/CEO of Image Auto, a cosmetic reconditioning company serving over 100 dealers and dealer groups, I decided I wanted to more fully understand the problems our dealers were facing and do whatever I could to

It was a nice interview, but it was just one of MANY points on the journey. I did more interviews with people like Gary Vaynerchuk, Adam Robinson (CEO Hireology), Glenn Pasch (CEO PCG) and more. I attended conferences, read articles, talked to our dealers and then…stepped up the game when Dale released his latest book, “Like I See It”.

The smoke:

That book hit me right between the eyes. It addressed all the issues I was seeing, hearing and learning about and added some profound and practical insight in a way only a visionary like Dale could. I knew this was the perfect opportunity to get serious about trying to make an impact on an industry full of people wanting to be better…wanting to thrive.

I felt like Dale had placed a golf ball on a tee and handed me a really big driver.

February of 2018, Dealers Compressed was born.

It actually started as an idea to create simple, one minute quick-cut videos that summarized each chapter, but as usual, once the creative juices started to flow, a full-blown production ensued. This was the point where leveraging my creative agency, Congruent really kicked into high gear.

Before I knew it, we had concepts, scripts, shoot locations, crew and gear. The result was a fully produced content series complete with polished animations, visuals and frankly, something our industry really hasn’t seen before.

Of course, I told Dale what we were up to and really peaked his interest. When I let him know we were finished filming and gave him some details, he emailed,

“Paul, Wow, that’s really exciting.  How will you position your video, and how will it be used?  I’m very intrigued. Much thanks, Dale”

When I send him our first episode prior to release I had a panic moment.

I JUST GOT FACT CHECKED BY DALE POLLAK!

I’m happy to say that we were able to satisfy his inquiry. Maybe he was just testing me.

We then launched dealerscompressed.com with a new video weekly. I thought, we need to deliver this in podcast format too, so we did. I decided to give a few minutes of introduction to each podcast and we were off to the races.

The format evolved, the audience began to grow and we’re connecting with more and more like minded dealers and industry partners. The progressive type, the change makers, the trouble makers…my favorite type.

The fire:

I sent a request to do a sit down interview with Dale at the vAuto headquarters in Chicago and guess what…he said YES. 

As a result of all this learning, creating, producing and overall hustling…my community is growing and more and we are getting better, together.

In June of this year my auto reconditioning was acquired by Dent Wizard International and in addition to helping them better serve dealers, I am digging into Congruent with some, what I believe to be, game changing creative branding and marketing offerings for auto dealers. I want to give the industry something to talk about as we help progressive-minded dealer groups significantly LOWER their ad spend per unit by deploying sophisticated (and fun) branding and creative marketing.

I’m looking forward to speaking at the upcoming Driving Sales Executive Summit as well as NADA 2019.

When all is said and done…I’m still not sure Dale understands what I do.

Frankly, I’m still trying to figure it out, LOL.

Be patient.

Work your face off.http://pauljdaly.com

Pursue Clarity.