You aren’t going to change the world, and that’s okay.
This week on the If You Market podcast we talk with Jose Palomino about how to win by focusing on business growth instead of trying to change the world. So many companies lofty ambitions get in the way of success. They want to be flashy and conquer the world but they don’t have the fundamentals down.
Jose Palomino is the CEO of Value Prop Interactive where he helps mid-market B2B companies struggling with sales growth win more and better business, even in commoditizing markets.
Contact : Jose Palomino
- Jose’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/josepalomino/
- Value Prop LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/value-prop-interactive/
- Value Prop Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkMN5DNI2nNqXOGRgeE9OKg
- www.valueprop.com (business growth on purpose)
- The Revenue Throughput Podcast: https://www.valueprop.com/revenue-throughput-podcast
If you have questions about the If You Market podcast or would like to suggest a guest, please email us at info@IfYouMarket.com.
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Transcript:
Sky
00:00:07 – 00:00:55
321 good morning marketers and welcome to the if you market podcast brought to you by Mountaintop Data. We are the only podcast that markets the ship out of it. I’m sky Cassidy and today we’ll be talking with Jose palomino of value prop about focusing on success versus changing the world and basically how to win Jose is the ceo of value prop interactive where he helps mid market B two B companies struggling with sales growth win more and better business even in commoditized markets, which is something that I, I noticed that I really love seeing there that that you guys focus even on, on markets that are not quite commodities but turning into that because that’s I think really important and people don’t realize. But I also noticed Jose your company tagline business growth on
Sky
00:00:55 – 00:00:59
purpose. I love that. I love that. That’s so thank you for coming on the show.
Jose Palomino
00:00:59 – 00:01:02
No, my pleasure, my pleasure. Thanks for having us.
Sky
00:01:02 – 00:01:14
So business growth on purpose. Let’s just focus all on that. How and how did you come up with that with that phrase? Is there, it seems like there’s way more thought to it than just, hey, that sounds good at one point and
Jose Palomino
00:01:14 – 00:01:44
You know, it comes the whole backstory is really the history of the business and and the work we’ve been doing for close to 15 years now And often in that small to mid market, you know, companies, they say to to 20 million in revenues, you know, give or take, right. Um they don’t really have a strategic plan of any kind. In fact, they’re a bit averse to the idea of a strategic plan. They feel that’s big company stuff. So, and they’re right, they don’t need 200 page strategic plans. Like if you’re dow or dupont or do
Sky
00:01:44 – 00:01:47
you need a plan for the day, but not like a life plan,
Jose Palomino
00:01:47 – 00:02:14
right? They don’t need a life, but they do need a plan, a sense of how they go to market. So what ends up happening is they, they do a lot of the activities, but it’s never part of like a game plan. And like, you know, even if you are fielding a, you know, a pickup game, uh football, touch football game or something, you would say, okay, this is what we’re gonna do, you would at least make that declaration. This is what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna, you know, I see over here, I think you can, you can probably run faster than that guy on that corner. We’re gonna run around this way and, and so on
Sky
00:02:14 – 00:02:18
having some strategy versus just saying everybody go and we’ll see what happens
Jose Palomino
00:02:18 – 00:02:47
exactly and see what happens. And so you end up with a lot of, we see what happens. So I really thought about that and yet they desire growth, right? At least you know, good, healthy business. I understand you need to grow. You need to be wanting to grow, But they’re not doing it on purpose. So the classic example is, you know, they show up, spend 50 grand on a trade show, you know, the classic 10 by 10 booth outside the men’s room at a major trade show for 50 grand. Um, and they brought all their team out there and they’re showing up
Jose Palomino
00:02:47 – 00:03:22
and they’re saying, okay, well hopefully hopefully we’ll meet some people here that could be useful to us and so on. I said, how long have you been doing this? And this is a very classic, constant conversation I’ve had with many, many owners and they said, well, you know, we’ve been doing it for the last 10 years, the last 15 years. I said, how much business can you point to this show generating for you well, and you get that well, and they go wistfully in their mind thinking, well, there was this thing that came out of how long it was, that was eight years ago. What’s happened since? Why do you still do it? Well, if we’re not here, they won’t know, we’re still in business, I believe, and I still hear that
Sky
00:03:22 – 00:03:30
to defend them, they may be getting good business out of it, but they’re not, they could get a lot more if they had an intentional plan,
Jose Palomino
00:03:30 – 00:03:59
right? So they, so showing up well and what that does to is that means they show up without a game plan as to what they’re gonna do to leverage that moment to your exact, so they come back from that very exhausted from, you know, McCormick center in Chicago? They all got back on monday and all those necessary follow up steps to really take advantage of that investment. They haven’t even talked about it until then. He said, what are we gonna do now? You send cookies? Do we send thank you notes or what we’d
Sky
00:03:59 – 00:04:01
collected contact info and
Jose Palomino
00:04:01 – 00:04:04
having that level conversation.
Sky
00:04:04 – 00:04:09
But they do it a month later to who’s got the contact? We get anybody’s emails. What happens? But
Jose Palomino
00:04:09 – 00:04:29
it’s like, it’s like a couple who gets married and they forgot to send a thank you note to Aunt Sally and now it’s a year later and it’s just too darn embarrassing to send a thank you. So they hope never to run into an salads that maybe at a funeral. You know, that’s, that’s, that’s what they’re hoping for the same thing happened. So, so a lot of those type of behaviors as
Sky
00:04:29 – 00:04:57
well, except for Aunt Sally knows who you are in business when you follow up six months later, it has a more negative effect. Well, I don’t, I don’t know, it has a different effect because typically the responses, huh? Who’s this? Like they don’t remember who you are and they’re like, hey, it was nice meeting you at the show. You might as well not go and send that message, Save a bunch of money. Like you can hack it that way. We’ve, we’ve looked at strategy where we said, what if we don’t go to the show, tell people ahead of time we’re going to go to the show follow up with afterward. Will they even notice
Jose Palomino
00:04:57 – 00:05:01
or even go to the show and don’t exhibit and and spend some of that budget on
Sky
00:05:01 – 00:05:02
really showing people a great time.
Jose Palomino
00:05:02 – 00:05:39
Like inviting them to morton’s or to a circus Soleil show or something, they’ll respond to that and you’ll get a lot more bang for the buck. But to answer your original question, seeing a lot of those things that were done kind of either by culture by habit, but never on purpose. It wasn’t, they were, they weren’t really thinking I can design growth for my business. How do you do that? That was the big idea. So, so we said that’s what we, and you know, we look back on the work we’ve done over the years with, you know, dozens and dozens of companies and we said gee, it seems like we’re always adding the on purpose part to their desire for growth. That’s what we do.
Jose Palomino
00:05:39 – 00:05:46
And uh and and it just kind of came out of that and became the tag that we said best captured kind of the value we bring to the market.
Sky
00:05:46 – 00:06:19
Well it’s kind of hijacked the show because it’s such a good tagline. I love it. Um and I love that it works not only with hey the trade show, if you’re not getting anything out of it and you didn’t even know it, but if you are just like, hey what if you do it on purpose, like maybe maybe your flag team is doing great, but what if you actually run some crossing rounds knowing what’s going to happen on purpose, like you could do way better and it would happen on purpose like that would be great. Um Alright well great show and start to the show on purpose business growth on purpose,
Sky
00:06:19 – 00:06:40
but the topic here focusing on success and and how to win those obviously tie dye hand hand in hand here, but I think we got a whole can of worms to open here. Um Can you, I mean aside from the business growth on purpose or did we already kind of kind of touch it, Can you hit on what, what do you mean by focusing on success and how to win?
Jose Palomino
00:06:40 – 00:07:27
Sure. So one of the things and, and I think there’s been a disservice to the small and mid market business owner in the, in the area of the best sellers. There’s a lot of best sellers out there, right? So you know, starting with, you know in search of excellence with you know, tom Peters way back um and then good to great with jim Collins and then of course something, you know, we’ve talked about this before, you know, start with y with Simon Sinek and or Blue Ocean strategy and every one of those things really um kind of paint the picture of groundbreaking, revolutionary change. So if you’re running a $15 million dollar contract, manufacturer and you read one of those things, you might be inspired, you know, that, that sunday night you say, honey tomorrow is going to be a different week for us.
Jose Palomino
00:07:27 – 00:08:11
But the simple reality is you’re probably not going to change the world. Uh, it’s unlikely if you’re in high tech, maybe you have a shot, you know, you come up with some very unique technology that changes the world. But here’s the thing doesn’t mean you can’t win, right? And so we have to get definitions in place. It’s not about revolutionizing the world, it’s about winning. And I love using this example because everyone gets it right away. It’s another athletic example, but the most aptly named human in the world is Usain bolt, right? So I mean just like who knew? Right? So he’s that’s his name and uh, he wins just about every time he runs and but when he wins, because he’s running against the field of other world class sprinters, he wins by fractions of a second.
Jose Palomino
00:08:11 – 00:08:49
But here’s the amazing thing that happens, even though it’s sometimes it’s a photo finish, right? He’s consistent, but you know, it’s not like he laps the field, it’s 100 m dash and here’s the consistent thing at each each event where he wins, he gets the gold medal, he doesn’t get part of the gold medal, he doesn’t get a frank, they don’t shave off. Okay, you only one by 1, 1/100 of a second. So we’re gonna give you a little bit of gold on the gold medal. He gets the entire gold medal and I tell owners and and other sales leaders that’s especially in the mid market. Um, you only have to be and you have to be though, but you have to be better than your competition enough to win the deal.
Jose Palomino
00:08:49 – 00:09:10
You don’t have to lap the field necessarily. You don’t have to crush them into dust because what happens is unlike any olympics where the second place winner gets a nice silver medal, third place gets a bronze, they they become an olympic medal winner, that’s still a great honor in business, you get your your the first loser, if you’re in second place nothing,
Sky
00:09:10 – 00:09:48
you probably really are the first loser in that second place, you probably put out the second most effort. So you expended the second most amount of your resources to get nothing versus um so I was, I thought you were going with the sports thing saying it’s a sports is a zero sum game and businesses. I could see looking at this both ways, depending on the big picture. Um, you know, in sports, if you just make the pro tour, you’re making good money in your pro, you don’t have to get first. So in that sense it isn’t a zero sum game, but either your first or you’re not also, um yeah, so it isn’t like you’re saying bolt doesn’t get like,
Jose Palomino
00:09:48 – 00:09:49
like, right, but
Sky
00:09:49 – 00:09:55
If he raised me, he’d get 99.99% of the gold medal, but anywhere else, but
Jose Palomino
00:09:55 – 00:10:33
but if you look at the pro tour, that’s a great example, right? So you say everybody on the pro tour makes a living and some of them make a decent living, but the disparity between the person who’s, like, hundreds on the tour and the person who’s consistently winning the masters jacket is orders of magnitude difference between that and that, and, and, and honestly, you know, if you take your top 10 golfers in any given tournament, the the the stroke difference between except for when, like Tiger was Tiger and he was, you know, the equivalent of lapping the field, but mostly it’s pretty close. I mean, what is it to its uh, 280 would be for four days of, of golfing, right? So it’s professional,
Sky
00:10:33 – 00:10:38
the difference between first and last is usually pretty small. They’re all amazing, pretty
Jose Palomino
00:10:38 – 00:11:15
small. So here’s the thing, you’re competing in your space and so you say, okay, I’m one of four competitors consistently. So if you’re winning 25% of your bids, then that means you’re basically in the middle of the road, you’re getting one out of four, you’re one out of four competing for it, if you’re winning one out of six and you’re only one of four competitors, then you really have some lacks something is lacking and what you’re offering, something’s not connecting for your target market or you’re aimed at the wrong target market, which is another real possibility. So the real winners of those are gonna win maybe not 100% of the deals, but they’re gonna start winning more consistent, they win 35% of those deals in a four way, uh, you know, shoot out, so to speak.
Jose Palomino
00:11:15 – 00:11:39
So the the point is, and sky, I just see this time and again, it’s little things are big things, little things are big things going back to your same bolt. It turns out because of his stride length and his height, He needs 39 strides to cover the ground where his average competitor needs 43. That’s amazing. Alright, just because he’s six ft six and he has long legs, so he’s less strides,
Sky
00:11:39 – 00:12:18
I don’t know the runner, but another example, I think of a similar thing and being intentional, uh there was a sprinter that realized if they started off with a different foot in the blocks um when they, when they went over the hurdler, it was a hurdler when they went over the hurdle, then they landed on a different foot and it gave them like one less stride in the whole race or something like that and they said it was it was opposite. So it took some training, but they’re like, hey, both my legs are strong, I can lead off with either one. I just have to train to do it this way. It’s like a baseball player kind of saying, hey, you know what, what if I just taught myself to bat left handed, I could do that. I just need some practice
Sky
00:12:18 – 00:12:45
and suddenly you have a switch hitter and they’re that much better. It was that he looked at it intentionally and said, yes, I can keep just running hard and training and lifting weights. And he’s like, what if I look at these other details and say what tweak can I make? And then maybe the biggest example is the high hurdle. The guy just kind of reinventing how people jump over things and saying, hey, let’s look at this intentionally and see what can I tweaked for a better outcome
Jose Palomino
00:12:45 – 00:12:50
And yet his equipment, his body as an athlete, there were other athletes as equal
Sky
00:12:50 – 00:12:58
or tom brady, deflating a football and saying, hey, my receivers can catch it easier if I deflate it, you know, So
Jose Palomino
00:12:58 – 00:12:59
I
Sky
00:12:59 – 00:13:31
don’t know, sometimes you bend the rules a little bit. Some people will say, hey, tom brady deflated the football and it worked, you know, and they recorded the other team’s uh practices and they beat him in the Super Bowl and then you get the Astros cheating and guess what? They still are, the world champions. They still got the world. sometimes people cheat a little bit to win if you’re not rubbing, you’re not racing. If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying, there’s a gray area there. But let’s get away from the cheating part. There’s a ton of things people can do intentionally to win.
Jose Palomino
00:13:31 – 00:14:07
There was one with the helping a client out with, they were doing a trade show and a simple hack is that there’s, you know, that’s what often happens. We get so many people coming through with collecting cards and you know the old the age old thing is you write down on the back of the card, some notes from the conversation you have but then you get immediately pulled into the next conversation and so on. I said why don’t you try this? I said why don’t you instead just have a little recorder. Use your phone and at the end of each meeting just go off Like you’re on a call and record your notes because you can say far more than you can write on the back of the card. You keep adding to that audio file.
Jose Palomino
00:14:07 – 00:14:41
Then when you get back from the show, you upload it to a service. Like to me I have no interest in the company but they that’s who I tend to use because it’s very inexpensive and now you get transcribed all your show notes. So you’re not gonna miss those details, right? So it’s a little hack, it’s the same effort that you’re gonna do, you’re at the show, you want to take notes on your, on your meeting, but you’re moving too fast. So you figure out little hacks like that, they can make a big difference. Now, that’s not macro, that’s not your position in the market, that’s just sales execution. But again, little hacks add up and that’s the real thing that that I help people see
Jose Palomino
00:14:41 – 00:15:17
that you don’t have to, like they say, well, gee, you know, we have the equipment, we have, we make what we make, We’re not gonna be able to spend $3 million Okay, great. Until you get there, we have to find ways to win the race is you’re in now more more consistently more effectively and at better prices than you’ve been getting. Because that’s the other thing, you can always just say, I’m gonna, I’m gonna tweak my win rate in business. If you just decide, I’m going to eat margin to win the business. Well, that’s not a good strategy because it’s not sustainable. Unless, unless you’re really a big company that can bring you a cost structure down
Sky
00:15:17 – 00:15:45
or unless, I mean, unless there’s a lot of extra margin in there. There’s some businesses where it’s just like, oh, wow, it’s a, when you get to the commodity thing, there’s some businesses that are, they have limited competition, strangely, there’s only a handful of players. So the prices are inflated, It’s like, oh, nobody’s gotten a price war. So there’s actually a lot of room for margin here because there’s just not real competition. I guess if you’re in that situation, you have plenty of business though.
Jose Palomino
00:15:45 – 00:15:45
Yeah.
Sky
00:15:45 – 00:15:47
And,
Jose Palomino
00:15:47 – 00:16:26
and, and also launching a price war as you, as you put it, you know, could also, you have to say, okay, be careful what you wish for because now, you know, so there’s, there’s a lot of questions around that. But again, in commoditized markets, it means competition has come in, you’re not alone, you’re not doing soul bids Everything you’re in is like a three bid. You’re always doing bake offs. And what I’ve seen seen skies increasingly in just about every business category. This is true because the world is globalized. Most services are available from anywhere in the world than to anybody in the world. And as a result, and even with the current supply chain issues, but you know, the venture of the world normalized back, you have a lot of competition. Everybody does
Jose Palomino
00:16:26 – 00:16:45
at some form or another. It’s very rare that you are literally standing uniquely on the pinnacle and say what we do, no one else does because there’s always the question that comes to mind when somebody tells me that and I’ve gotten this from custom from a potential client to say, I don’t have competition. I said, really? That’s interesting because that would make, why
Sky
00:16:45 – 00:16:46
are we talking? We’re unique
Jose Palomino
00:16:46 – 00:17:25
in the world, right? Something’s not right? And what happens is the competition more often is the status quo or you know, just the way people have been doing things, they’ve solving the problems some other way. So like when accounting software came in, if they only viewed other accounting software is that competition they missed, They didn’t read the room, which is a lot of companies were still using like bookkeepers like teams of people to keep track of things. Eventually became a competition of that. But the classic on this is a Kodak and fuji. They were so focused on each other for film dominance that Kodak had the first patent on digital cameras issued in the US, but they didn’t understand the opportunity they had.
Jose Palomino
00:17:25 – 00:17:31
And so they kept fighting the last battle, which is, it’s about film until it became like, now everybody is a photographer, if you have a phone.
Sky
00:17:31 – 00:18:12
I was a photographer back in the day when we had film and I was so, I’m very familiar with the Kodak debacle on uh, on the digital thing. And the history is littered with those kind of things. I mean you have the netflix and blockbuster situation and, and, and on and on. So let’s, I want to jump back to the the, focusing on the intentional focusing on, on success and the marketing aspect of it. Little tricks like record the conversation at a trade show. Okay, great. Um, we had back in the day, a lot of competition in the data industry. It’s consolidated a bit. We’re kind of like a commodity. Remember we send out pdf proposals,
Sky
00:18:12 – 00:18:50
two people and that won us a lot of business just because our competition didn’t do that. And what was interesting was we had been sending out some type of proposal. We remade them and we saw winds go up and it was just how professional the proposal looked, not just sending them something, but sending them something to sign. Had everything in there looked professional versus the competition. The details of the deal are one thing, but when they get something from one company that you just lose truck, like this looks like garbage. These guys aren’t, they aren’t legitimate. They know they may have been much bigger than us and much better than us. But if what they were presenting, how they’re presenting, it looked unprofessional
Sky
00:18:50 – 00:19:02
people would, would choose us frequently just because our proposal look professional and and that kind of stuff. So I think those kind of things can help, it’s a little detail, but it helped us win business just because the competition wasn’t. Alright. So we look at that
Jose Palomino
00:19:02 – 00:19:46
again, you know, that’s where the phrase, competitive edge comes from. Those edges were little things that not necessarily that your product was intrinsically better, which is the intuitive reading of that said, okay, you’re going to win because you’re faster. No, like that hurdle you talked about, he’s going to win because he changed his his approach to the race. His genetics didn’t change. He didn’t become faster, but he closed the ground quicker because he actually figured out an approach to it. Right? So it’s the same thing the proposals you’ve just mentioned. And I love that example because there’s little things that you can do. And it comes down to this. I always say to customers. I say, okay, what in the world of your category drives customers crazy. Like what really ticks them off? What is annoying to them, Right? For example.
Jose Palomino
00:19:46 – 00:20:23
So I’ve been in categories where I see proposals are so dense and so complex that no one can understand what the heck you’re actually offering. So like just that. And then you talk to customers and I’ve done like customer voice of customer interviews. And he said, yeah, I hate it when they send me stuff. It’s too much information in the case that you talked about quality, you signal quality by the quality of proposal. And this is something that often gets overlooked. We could spend a week a weekend, 80 person hours on a proposal. So we think we know every inch of it. We don’t realize that the people getting that might just glance at it
Jose Palomino
00:20:23 – 00:20:46
and then go to the last page you say. So why put all that effort in? Because that glance they’re making a judgment. We do it all the time with branding. And I’m sure this is what happened, they make a judgment in that moment trustworthy because they paid attention to the details. It’s kind of like, what is it? It’s, it’s apocryphal, I guess. I think it’s bon Jovi with the uh, the red M and M’s or the brown.
Sky
00:20:46 – 00:20:47
Yeah.
Jose Palomino
00:20:47 – 00:20:59
You know, it’s a brown Eminem test, It’s like, did you pay enough attention, did you care enough about the business to put something together? That if I chose to read it, it would tell me your story the way it’s a subconscious
Sky
00:20:59 – 00:21:28
brown M and M test there. I remember I was managing the sales team when we start putting stuff together and I would just get incensed when I would see sales rep sending out proposals that had multiple different fonts and font sizes in them. I’m just like, what are you doing? You filled in information, you change and it’s in a different font. This just looks amateur and people glance at it and that’s what, that, that’s the impression they get the same thing with samples. We sent out samples and it took me forever to
Sky
00:21:28 – 00:21:56
drumming these people, hey, you get the sample, you gotta format it now, it’s gonna be a CS, you gotta change it to an Excel file, you got to change the color, you got a bold this, you gotta make it so that when people scroll, it’s gonna leave the head and heading like that is who our brand is. You said simple. If you go to look at a sample of something and it’s a bunch of smashed excel fields, you have to expand each one. It’s just a hassle and that’s your, the brand you’re taking away from it is oh, these people are not easy to work with their
Jose Palomino
00:21:56 – 00:22:36
stuff is not from this point of view. If I’m your customer or a customer receiving stuff from whoever is trying to sell me something. I know and I believe that what matters most to them at some level is to get this business, like it’s really important to them to get the business. Otherwise, why would they submit a proposal? So if they won’t pay attention to the details when it matters to them personally, like someone’s gonna get paid commission on this and they can’t take the time to not be a pain in my butt trying to unpack, like you said, Excel spreadsheets and have to figure it out. Then how are they going to do it when it, when it’s not as important to them because it’s important to me, right? So like if it’s not important to them when it’s important to them,
Jose Palomino
00:22:36 – 00:22:39
how is it going to be important to them when it’s important to me
Sky
00:22:39 – 00:23:21
and the details frequently aren’t consciously important to the client, like maybe they didn’t notice that when they opened your Excel spreadsheet, they could just view the stuff and when they opened samples from other companies that took a week to even get there. It was all smashed together and it was, they just come away with a feeling of, I like working with these guys and not these guys and they don’t even know why, maybe they don’t, you know, even even notice it. Um, typically we take a break in this show too much to talk about. I don’t waste time with a break. So we’re just gonna, we’re just gonna push on through here. I want to get to something you brought up earlier. Um, you mentioned the books and it’s a sore subject with me. It comes up on the podcast all the time.
Sky
00:23:21 – 00:24:01
So I, I really wanted you to dig into it here for some us, for some for us. Um, I get the feeling these books to some extent and it’s, you know, attacking someone like Simon Sinek, maybe not the best idea, but here we go. Um, to some extent are kind of like the Diet Fads where these people are just saying, okay, I need to sell another book. What’s the concept? What am I going to call this? That sound okay. It’s gonna be the South Beach diet will come up when really what people need to focus on his diet and exercise. You don’t need to buy a new book every single year with a new, unless that actually motivates you to do this stuff and it works. That’s really the only purpose is, it’s like, it’s, it’s a
Sky
00:24:01 – 00:24:32
it’s a hack um Where hey if I buy this book and read it, I will actually do something which is better than nothing. If I buy this expensive exercise equipment, maybe I’ll actually exercise type of uh I don’t need a gym membership, but if I’m paying the more I pay, I find the more I go kind of a thing. But these books seem to just be kind of gimmicks frequently to get people to buy the book and follow them and keep that. Like you just keep coming up with a new gimmick versus diet and exercise for sales and marketing just do the work. Be intentional.
Sky
00:24:32 – 00:25:04
You don’t need to buy a ton of new books. So things like the start with why I always think start with how about finish with why who’s starting with Y. O. But the guy isn’t trying to sell the small businesses, he’s trying to sell speaking engagements to Fortune 500 companies. And so he’s telling them it should be like start with why if you’ve already won, like if you’ve already won then you can have a purpose and all this other bullshit. Um But if you’re a small business uh then maybe start with, I don’t know like doing something intentional to actually win.
Jose Palomino
00:25:04 – 00:25:33
Well it’s kind of like, you know, I call it like a plateau strategy right? So if you’re climbing mount Everest apparent which I’ve never done and probably never will in my lifetime, but nonetheless, um there’s a point where you have to be at a certain plateau, like you have to hit a certain sum it before you do the final client. Right? So some of these books really aim for people on that summit who can actually look at that final climb, not the person who’s down at the very basic amount or not even in, you know, the country, you know, they’re not even all or whatever, but
Sky
00:25:33 – 00:25:37
they want to sell the book to everybody because they can’t just sell for the handful of people.
Jose Palomino
00:25:37 – 00:26:08
So so some things, the way I’ve always viewed it, there’s a, there’s a few that I think have been very useful over time that I have found to be useful that have big picture, but they have longevity. Um and they actually make you think, and I’ve seen the application one is a discipline of market leaders by Michael Tracy and Fred Watson, where they wrote it like 25 years ago. Um and that is a really good book for any owner at any level to really think about the future, what they need to do, how they should steer their company, where they should double down their investments.
Jose Palomino
00:26:08 – 00:26:23
But then you get something like good to great, which is a very good book and it’s a good analysis by the way, most of the companies they touted in good to great no longer are great, right? In fact, g e Just getting, it was announced a couple of weeks ago, they’re being broken up into because they can’t make it as the conglomerate they were.
Sky
00:26:23 – 00:26:40
But I would point out the name of the book kind of something they don’t possibly putting in that book is it’s not calling nothing too great. It’s good to great. So if you’re not already good, you don’t need to read this book, They don’t tell you that there’s like everybody should read this book good to great. No, it’s how to get from good to great, not from where you’re at, which isn’t good yet.
Jose Palomino
00:26:40 – 00:27:15
And and the the one that I think that I’ve had the most difficulty with in terms of how I’ve seen it affect people as a blue ocean strategy. It was a great book in the first half of, it’s very inspirational second half on how to do it is not that practical and it’s written by two like Harvard professors who were like Harvard professors, you know, it was that they had that that sense to it. And you know, their answer was look at circus Soleil that competed with Ringling Brothers and against Circus, they became the uncircumcised. Well, you know, I think of my clients that are making like a mixing machine and they’re doing you know $20 million dollars a year selling this very highly specialized mixing machine
Jose Palomino
00:27:15 – 00:27:53
they’re not going to become the UNmiK sing machine, they have to sell more of that mixing machine. So to your point, it’s blocking and tackling is often overlooked. It’s it has to be done strategically, it has to be done intentionally. I do believe people can have, I think it’s good to have an aspirational goal for your business. You should want to be better, you should want to be special in some way and you have to find a special in what you’re already doing. And that’s what I love to focus in on is to really help people sky to see what you’re already doing. That might be more special than, you know, but you never looked at it and that specialness might be enough
Jose Palomino
00:27:53 – 00:28:09
to create some air gap between you and your competition just because something and you’re something you’re doing every day, but you may not have thinking and you know, I have a real example of this was a company was delivering home heating oil, So you think he knows the total commodity, a literal global commodity. He didn’t know number two
Sky
00:28:09 – 00:28:19
but I would guess there’s a lot of companies that make a lot of money and do very good business doing it. They don’t have to feel like they’re failures if they don’t become amazon or something like that.
Jose Palomino
00:28:19 – 00:29:07
Absolutely, absolutely. But and and but that’s an interesting challenge for he knows that the market shrinking through no fault of the participants in the market. In other words, people buy new houses, they build, they build them with natural gas and mined not oil exactly. They go they’re going from, you know, so they say so they go from oil to gas, but what turned out and they all use a formula to figure out when the homeowner needs to receive new oil. Right? Very simple. They called the algorithm. Well, it turns out that the algorithm is only like 95% accurate. Right? So my client to reduce overtime, okay? Because they were running they were doing emergency runs on saturday and sunday because people are running out of oil, They commissioned a specialized algorithm. They worked on it for like two years.
Jose Palomino
00:29:07 – 00:29:41
And when I asked him, I said, well, how how accurate is that? And he said, well, 60,000 deliveries last year, we only missed nine. That’s 99.99, So we created a campaign and this is the point of the story Scott. We said, others make promises. We make guarantees. We have the no run out guarantee. If we if you sign up with us for automatic delivery, if we let you run out of oil will fill your tank for free. No one could make that guarantee because everybody would be terrified at 5% misses would be like you eat up your profits.
Jose Palomino
00:29:41 – 00:29:59
Well, it turns out this company now is able to enjoy even in a declining market, they enjoyed roughly 30, 40, 50% more margin per gallon than any of their competitors because it’s a better level of service. And by the way, did they change anything? No, they had already done it, but they did it for other reasons. They did it to save on overtime.
Sky
00:29:59 – 00:30:08
But it was a great marketing. Um, part of that product, part of the service becomes their marketing hook kind of, but it wasn’t their intention when
Jose Palomino
00:30:08 – 00:30:26
they, when they did the work. And, and, and when you look at a lot of, a lot of companies, you probably, if you’re listening to this, you’re probably doing some clever things that you did for other reasons and you need a set of eyes on it to say, hey, is this something that would be important to our target customer? That’s the differentiator.
Sky
00:30:26 – 00:31:04
You’re finding a differentiator that you don’t think is, you’re like, what, what can we do to our product? And you’re saying, hey, it’s probably already in there. You don’t necessarily need to do something. Um, like just look around your company and find the thing that, and here’s the key. I would say in that it doesn’t have to be. And you said it. So I’ll repeat it. A giant differentiator. Like we have half the cost or whatever. It’s, it’s something that marketing can make sound like a big differentiator and the people sometimes you see this in commercials and, and you’re like, oh, if you really look at the commercial and pay attention what they’re saying a big weight, why would I give a damn about that.
Jose Palomino
00:31:04 – 00:31:05
But
Sky
00:31:05 – 00:31:26
normally you don’t look at it and think about it, you just think oh yeah, I like that. Oh yeah. Oh that sounds great. It rhymes, it has some uh you know alliteration to it. So so I like that so frequently. The marketing differentiator doesn’t have to be some big massive world changing thing. It can be some little thing that they did for accounting purposes.
Jose Palomino
00:31:26 – 00:31:50
It could it could be for that but it’s it’s but it but the acid test on it is is it something That would be especially in B two B. That would be important to your target customer. Does it help solve a problem? And of course in the case of you, if you’re dependent on oil to keep your home warm, it really does matter that you’re not run out of oil and middle of winter. Alright, so like that’s not a small detail really matters.
Sky
00:31:50 – 00:32:08
I don’t ever get the heating oil thing because I live in L. A. Okay. And then I grew up in a rural area and we just had if it was like we deliver firewood, I get that you won’t run out of firewood. I think about it that way maybe. But the heating oil thing to me sounds like are we in medieval europe or something like
Jose Palomino
00:32:08 – 00:32:19
that throughout the Northeast and you go further up into like the the new England Area, People have 285 Gallon tanks in their basement and the truck comes by and fills it with oil?
Sky
00:32:19 – 00:32:20
Nothing?
Jose Palomino
00:32:20 – 00:32:35
No, it’s a definite thing. It’s a definite thing. It’s an interesting and now it’s, it’s a declining thing and you know, 100 years and I won’t be a thing maybe, but it still is because it’s very expensive to convert your from a oral heater to like also, you know, uh, regular oil gas, space heater.
Sky
00:32:35 – 00:32:59
People from those areas want to blow the minds of people from like California and west coast, just start talking about the whole heating oil would just be like, are you making this up? This sounds so fabricated. It’s so foreign. Whenever somebody brings it up, I think, wait, that’s still around. I didn’t know it was still a thing, It just sounds ancient, like uh, like you’re gonna have people making lamb bread
Jose Palomino
00:32:59 – 00:33:04
because there’s because there’s no bread available in the growth. You mean you buy bread pre baked?
Sky
00:33:04 – 00:33:50
How do you even bake bread? Come on. That’s made up. Yeah, So sorry for the tangent there. But the heating oil always always throws me off. Um, so let’s, you’ve thrown out a couple of great examples um, on some like little tweaks people can do. But you guys have this, this thing in your company and we normally get into the company after the break and into you after the break, but we’re not doing a break. So here we go. Um can you, can you tell the audience a little bit about about yourself how you came to uh to be, where you are, how you came to, to found value prop and then we’ll get into value prop kind of what you guys do and hit on your guys competitive edge program, which I think is all about this whole topic of focusing on success.
Jose Palomino
00:33:50 – 00:34:33
Sure. Should I appreciate that. Yeah. So after what I’ve been probably a little over a 20 year career arc and mostly in technology, mostly sales and marketing. So I had actually done programming, project management and so on. Um I came to a point when we moved to this area of the country. I’m a native new yorker born and raised, I always say I’m a new yorker living outside of philadelphia. So that’s where I live right now and I saw a gap and the gap was this, that the discipline of strategy, marketing and sales were treated like three different, completely unrelated buckets. Large companies do that very well. They keep him in silos and you know, don’t touch my territory very territorial. It’s just how it is in most large companies.
Sky
00:34:33 – 00:34:38
They’re already large though they can do all kinds of things. A small company can’t do they have gravity
Jose Palomino
00:34:38 – 00:35:14
exactly. But now when you move down into the mid market, what you lack, there was not a lack of integration, but it was a lack of skill or awareness of how those things can work together. And so you had business owners saying, well we’re solving our, we’re solving our marketing with let’s say just we’re gonna buy a discreet service allegiance service or we’re gonna do adwords, we’re gonna do a new website, we’re gonna do a trade show thing and they’re doing all these pieces and I said wait a second stop, you know like time out like Let’s come up with a game plan right? And so again and again I started doing that work and so I started the firm uh close to 15 years ago
Jose Palomino
00:35:14 – 00:35:27
and with an eye towards really building out processes, methodology that helped any size company. So because my heart was really with that entrepreneurial owner who has to worry about payroll, right? That that that person very much on my mind.
Sky
00:35:27 – 00:35:59
So that’s a tough wait a second. That’s a really tough to say I’m gonna start a company. Typically people, it seems like with a company like that are working at a company and then they start providing a service and you kind of spin off into a company because you have to have a couple of big clients and usually it’s your old company becomes your first client. But to say I’m going to start a company and then I’m gonna go after this this industry that’s going to be really hard to sell and really hard to get any money from because they don’t have much of it, like how did that work early on in the business, how did that formation actually happen?
Jose Palomino
00:35:59 – 00:36:15
Yeah, well, the first step was I took time out from my last position, I said, okay, I’m gonna take about six months to a year and I’m actually going to interview as many people as would be willing to talk to me and I’m gonna actually tell him what I think should work at that point at 20 plus years experience. I’ve seen lots of great examples, I had
Sky
00:36:15 – 00:36:17
some market research first
Jose Palomino
00:36:17 – 00:36:28
real point of view, it wasn’t looking to hustle up business, it became my way, that’d be great, but my goal was to validate that I had the right ideas that made sense, especially for the size audience. I was aiming for,
Sky
00:36:28 – 00:36:32
if you had recorded that you would have had a podcast.
Jose Palomino
00:36:32 – 00:37:06
Well, I mean, I actually ended up with like a book as a result, you know? So there you go. So, uh but yes, it was, that idea was I wanted it to have, I wanted to approach this very systematically, but I wanted something that was flexible enough that people could see themselves in the process. Sometimes processes feel like you’re putting on a hair shirt and it’s like, it’s too much, you have to be flexible, it has to be realistic and it has to be right sized. The other thing, I have been exposed, working in other small companies when you bring in the big the the consultant whose only experience was a big corporate
Jose Palomino
00:37:06 – 00:37:19
and they come in trying to tell you this is what we gotta do. Porter’s five forces analysis and we got to do this and that and also you’re looking around saying, hey dude, we just like I’m working this deal right now, can you help me with that deal? That’s what you want. So they’re
Sky
00:37:19 – 00:37:27
jumping, they’re saying let’s spend the first two weeks on your company’s why and you’re like, hey I got to close this deal, can you give me the correct correct? So
Jose Palomino
00:37:27 – 00:38:07
so there is, you know, there’s so over the years I’ve developed kind of what I think is like the right balance, you need to have some thought put into it and at the same time you also don’t wanna overthink it because you’ve got to implement right, so you and your going concern, you have to make payroll now you have to make stuff happen. So we got that down, you know too much tighter things. So so that that journey for me was very much, you know, certainly the entrepreneurial journey, I think what the impetus behind it and I’ll just share this very quickly with you scott. I was doing business development for a market research firm, they were competitive with gardeners, so they sold and I handled their I. T. Leadership accounts worldwide. I had a meeting
Jose Palomino
00:38:07 – 00:38:37
Well I had to bring in our specialist who was all of like 28, years old at the time and I was a business person and we were meeting with a VP at IBM who managed a billion dollar piano And this 28 29 year old, very nice young man, very smart was giving all this advice and I wanted to speak up about what I thought they should do. But that wasn’t my role. I was biz dev it would have been like that, it would have been like the Butler of Downton Abbey speaking up about a family issue at the dinner table, it would be like odd.
Jose Palomino
00:38:37 – 00:39:05
So that moment sealed in my heart I said I got to be the one giving the advice. I can’t be doing this, I I can’t just be getting other advisers who I don’t think candidly and I don’t mean this to be you know boastful, but you know can’t can’t carry my shoes on the advice they’re giving. So that’s really what got me on track. And about a year later when we moved down to this area took a year off to to really think it through and that launched value prop interactive as a result. So
Sky
00:39:05 – 00:39:40
I love that because you frequently hear these stories of people saying you know I watch Michael Jordan play and I was just like I want to be a basketball player, that’s awesome. I’m like really? Because I think maybe if you watch like somebody who’s terrible, you’d say I could do that better. Maybe I should be a professional. Like if I watch Michael Jordan play, I’m like, well, I’m never playing basketball, That ain’t gonna happen. You saw this, you were sitting to me, this guy and you were like, Holy Ship. I should be doing that. Not him. I shouldn’t be sitting here listening to him. I should be doing it. I’m better than that. Um, so it was the, the realist
Sky
00:39:40 – 00:39:49
version of being inspired to do something is typically saying, hey, I’m better than that. Not, wow, I could never do what that guy’s doing. So let me try to do it. Let
Jose Palomino
00:39:49 – 00:40:03
me try it anyway. Right. Right. Exactly. Yeah. That’s funny. Uh, yeah. I mean, I remember when I, we went on a family vacation to Italy And I went to Florence and I saw Michelangelo’s David Wright, 15 ft tall sculpture.
Sky
00:40:03 – 00:40:05
No, I mean,
Jose Palomino
00:40:05 – 00:40:10
you realize that’s insane because there’s no glue. Then like,
Sky
00:40:10 – 00:40:11
you know,
Jose Palomino
00:40:11 – 00:40:21
like there’s no repair work that’s like you either got it right on the first on the chisel stroke and it’s, you know, it’s a, it’s a masterwork for the ages, but, but
Sky
00:40:21 – 00:40:45
I think I’m going to start a business selling all the Davids, the 1st 50 David’s they got wrong like this one. Yeah, one of the legs got locked up broke by accident and I’m sure they didn’t get it on the first try, Come on. There’s a whole bunch of like reject David’s out there somewhere buried, find them and start selling the made the head a little bit too small on this one. Let’s try
Jose Palomino
00:40:45 – 00:41:30
it again right now. It’s just but but you’re you’re right. Yeah. I just, it was at a point in my life where I felt I had something to contribute, something to give back. I have been building into it and, and, and I wanted to really give it a, I felt that I wanted to share and, and I really resonated, hadn’t done a couple of entrepreneurial things earlier in my life. Um, I I felt I could really relate to that business owner that when they read the corporate material or they went to academia, like through a small business development center like Warren or whatever. Great helpful people, but not really connecting with your reality in that company. And I thought I could relate to that person, but also show them. I’ve also seen how it gets done and how you have to work it.
Sky
00:41:30 – 00:42:05
That’s the reason I was surprised by your kind of how you came to start your business. I mean, typically you don’t create a product for these small companies that are really hard to sell and don’t have much money because they’re really hard to sell and don’t have much money that you don’t, you don’t right The book necessarily to them, although maybe you could do with the book, but you come up with the the big philosophy that gets you in front of the Fortune 500 companies. You come up with the how to be successful where you can sell it for $1 million $1 a pop. So you end up getting everybody who wants to become successful, gets this,
Sky
00:42:05 – 00:42:15
oh here’s how you do it and it’s look at what the successful people are doing versus well maybe look at what they did when they weren’t successful yet.
Jose Palomino
00:42:15 – 00:42:37
Let me let me just hit on that a little bit those guys because if you take your classic $10 million.00. E. M. Small O. E. M. To make a machine a part of a supply chain. Part um you know they have to sales reps on staff, they’re doing to trade shows a year. They’re maintaining their website and they actually have an S. C. O. Firm and maybe they’ve even experiment with Adwords or something like that
Sky
00:42:37 – 00:42:39
we’re talking about here, right?
Jose Palomino
00:42:39 – 00:43:12
Yeah. Yeah. But but altogether you’re adding, if you added up you’re spending half a million dollars a year trying to drive your top line on a $10 million business. So for you to invest less than that amount to get to point that firepower, it’s not unlimited firepower but it’s some firepower in the right direction makes sense. And I have found uh I found no lack of business owners in that category. That 2 to $20 million dollar range that will make the necessary investments. There are some, no doubt, okay, my
Sky
00:43:12 – 00:43:37
mistake, I didn’t clarify ahead of time in my mind, we were talking about um million less than a million dollar companies. You’re saying mid market, not, not small, mid market to to yeah, then there’s a way more room to do business. Um people who go after the solo preneurs and stuff like that. I always feel like that’s maybe not the best market unless you have a mass, you have to, you have
Jose Palomino
00:43:37 – 00:44:00
to be a master is doing some sort of like, you know, e learning kind of thing. And what I found actually, you know, I made a couple for it because, you know, I’ve been doing this for a while and with, with startups, right? Especially like tech startups because that’s my earlier background and I know I could help them, but what happens is if they’re too, if they haven’t been beaten down yet by life experience, they’re too darn sure of themselves
Sky
00:44:00 – 00:44:01
and
Jose Palomino
00:44:01 – 00:44:08
it’s just hard for me to connect. So I like dealing with confident people who have some enough humility to know they don’t know everything
Sky
00:44:08 – 00:44:18
right. They know they’re not the best anymore. They don’t think they’re going to change the world, like we started with, it’s not, you’re not going to change
Jose Palomino
00:44:18 – 00:44:34
then at that point. And I’ve had, you know, I’ve tried, I said, listen, you might consider, you know, I’m not trying to have a battle of egos with that. I’m just saying, hey, I want to help you. This is something you might consider and no, no, we got that. We got that. So you hear a lot of, we got that at that point. I know that’s not a good parent with me.
Sky
00:44:34 – 00:45:12
If they still think they’re amazing, you’re like, yeah, until you, I love that until you get beaten down and you realize, oh, I am not the best and I’m not going to change the world. I do need help. Maybe other people know stuff you get humbled and again, the opposite of what people, you just say, oh, I won. The Super Bowl is so humbling. No, when you get your asking and you don’t make the playoffs. That’s humbling. Not winning the Super Bowl doesn’t humble you. I’m sorry getting you’re asking humbles you not, not the people always get this stuff so backward. It’s so weird. Um, okay, we’re running short on time here and we havent barely got to, to your company or specifically to this competitive edge program you guys have.
Sky
00:45:12 – 00:45:22
Um, it’s kind of what we’ve been talking about the whole time I believe, but can you give some specifics break it down a little bit for what, what your competitive edge program is,
Jose Palomino
00:45:22 – 00:46:08
right? So the competitive edge program is a 90 day program where we work with a single company and their leadership team and we meet every week and we work through the development, what we call the competitive edge blueprint, basically designing that plan covers the value prop, their target customer target problem, how they’re going to actually generate opportunities at bats and how they’re going to do better on the sales process. I had to actually execute against those at bats at the end of that period of time. They actually have an actionable plan. These are all like simplified, it’s not the 100 page document, it’s really more of a picture of blueprint. Think of blueprint is a really good thing. So they’re thinking of building their success, they want to win more and that’s what you need. You need some sort of design.
Sky
00:46:08 – 00:46:33
So your tailor creating a list of like really getting another business and creating, here’s a list of to do is change this, change that. I had somebody go through google adwords awhile back and I realized, oh way more people need this. They’re like, why is this checked? And that’s not, that’s dumb, unchanged. This change that. And I was like, wow! In 10 minutes, somebody who knows what they’re doing, can look through certain things and just be like, nope, turn this off, turn that on, turn this and you’re like, oh now it makes sense. Yeah. And that’s why
Jose Palomino
00:46:33 – 00:47:19
we call it, we call it a done with you consulting engagement. I am a consultant. I’m the chief practitioner, Have lots of experience doing this with companies and you know, generating $250 million 10 years, just the companies I’ve worked with. So the goal though is to working through a process and here’s the real, the real thing of it that I think is it’s exciting to me doing it and exciting for people to go through it. You could do this as a three day mountaintop retreat and just bang through the discussions, the materials and so on. What happens by day three, everybody’s fried, Nobody remembers, okay, no one had time to think about anything really. You’re just banging through to the answers. So by doing it as a weekly session, a leadership team meeting for 90 minutes. We cover one topic, we can go deep
Jose Palomino
00:47:19 – 00:47:53
the next week we can actually recap and people have been thinking about it. So you know, I thought about it and this is something else we haven’t mentioned and this is possible. So you you make this something and this is really critical for anyone who owns a business and has a couple of people on their leadership team, you need everybody to be on board. So it also doesn’t work. If I just work with the owner, the ceo, we go off to the mountaintop when we come down like with stone tablets and say here’s what we’re gonna do and the rest of the team, the person in operations, a person of sales, whoever is doing any kind of marketing, the CFO saying, well, you know, if he had asked me, I would have told that’s done
Sky
00:47:53 – 00:48:13
well, I think that stone tablet story has a part. I believe that that people tend to leave out, they brought down the stone tablets and said, who’s with me, come over here. Everybody else go over there and then they slaughtered the people who weren’t with them. So as a company, you can just say who’s on board with this and then fire everybody who’s not on board or you can work with everybody
Jose Palomino
00:48:13 – 00:48:34
worked with everybody. Get it. So, so what you end up with it, I think something that creates a lot of generated excitement and then clarity and then the things are always right size to what can you do like that? This process led to that oil example I gave, which is a real world example of just digging and digging in and finding something and said, let’s build on that as opposed to we’re gonna tear everything apart.
Sky
00:48:34 – 00:48:42
And it sounds like you don’t have a prewritten playbook, you’re coming in understanding the company, oh, here’s what they can do specifically for their situation. Absolutely. We
Jose Palomino
00:48:42 – 00:49:23
work through. We, we have definitely a process that we walk them through, but I don’t go in there saying, I want you to be this kind of business. I always tell owners, look, you have in mind what kind of business you want to have and what you think is possible. So I’m gonna rely on that as a, as a, as a north star for us, right? And if it’s not ambitious enough, I’m gonna help you a little bit. But again, you don’t have to, You want to change the world. You know what they mostly tell me. I love to see 5-10% growth year over year for the next five years, that’s real growth. I mean that’s like that’s a significant or I’d like to, I’d like to preserve my margin because they’re being killed on margin at that size company.
Sky
00:49:23 – 00:49:27
Like I don’t even want to grow, I just want to stop getting my asking. Absolutely. And
Jose Palomino
00:49:27 – 00:49:51
you know what I’ve seen, I’ve seen companies have grown like this, but their cost structure came up right alongside of it And the owner that used to own a $2 million $10 million dollar business, but isn’t making any more money, right? So I said, well gee you’re you’re like five times bigger, but your personal take home is like the same, That’s not good. You have to find a way to make money because that’s the end of the game. That’s the thing that keeps you in the game.
Sky
00:49:51 – 00:50:26
I love the practical. I mean, so many of these consulting things seem like, you know, back to the sports analogy, you have the three day things like, well we can’t do anything like tactical here. Um, so let’s just have it be a pep rally people will feel great when they come out, but you’re not really getting any takeaways. If you try to pile that on them and just like you said, they get saturated quick and then nothing’s gonna happen. You seem like you’re coming in and saying we’re gonna rework your playbook, not just give you the one I already printed out and say go with this, we’re gonna make a play book just for you. We’re gonna work with your people to to to make this fit your team kind of unhappy
Jose Palomino
00:50:26 – 00:51:01
documenting as we go along. So literally like if I’m doing this more typically over zoom with the leadership team on zoom. We’re actually, as we’re working, we’re putting the answers down as they’ve come up with them. So that at the end they not only get the recording of the session, which maybe they don’t have time to listen back to, But they took that 90 minute meeting and they got it distilled down to like here’s the one pager related to this, here’s the one pager related to that. So you put that together, putting that into action, then it’s very easy because you you actually have the plays, you need plays in the playbook, right? Or we prefer blueprint, but that’s the same idea
Jose Palomino
00:51:01 – 00:51:40
and that’s where we get them to and then of course, you know, just the background and experience that I bring to the table helps sky candidate. I love solving the problem and they know I have enthusiasm for their challenge and once they know that then we’re working with them as kind of like, I’m I always tell the owner I’m on your side of the table. That’s why we don’t do implementation right. As a firm, we don’t do, we’re not going to redesign your website, we’re not gonna set up your Adwords campaign if you need those resources and you have somebody you like to work with, we don’t care will help you work with them, but we want you to give them better instructions. So you get a better result, which a lot of owners don’t know how to task these people
Jose Palomino
00:51:40 – 00:51:53
to do things that they’re at the they’re really kind of like, okay guys, you’re the expert, tell me what to do and I’m saying no, no, you can actually give some direction uh you know, enough so that that that practitioner that you’re hiring can do a better job for you
Sky
00:51:53 – 00:52:33
right? Right. It sounds to me a little bit like um just to wrap it up here, like, like your business is a um Mr Miyagi style business where you’re saying also going back to the one thing something you said earlier that I really loved your saying you need to work with people who’ve been beat up a little bit, you didn’t go find the bully and say I’m going to train you to really kick some mass because he’s gonna be like, I’m already kicking, ask, what are you talking about old man. Um like you find the kid who got beat up and he’s willing to listen and like, hey, you want to learn how to defend yourself and and maybe win. He says, okay, I’ll listen to you. Um
Sky
00:52:33 – 00:52:49
All right. So, um, let’s let people know where they can find you here. Uh, we’ll have this all in the show notes to, but your linkedin profile, probably a great place to communicate. Value prop dot com for your company website, is that correct? And then you’ve got a podcast,
Jose Palomino
00:52:49 – 00:52:51
yep,
Sky
00:52:51 – 00:53:01
that’s the revenue throughput podcast, we’ll have a link to that on the in the show notes to at um, if you market dot com any anywhere else people should should know to get in touch with you.
Jose Palomino
00:53:01 – 00:53:18
Yeah, they they they can find it off the menu, but if they want to deep dive on this idea of competitive edge of building and sharpen their competitive edge, they go to value prop dot com forward slash edge and we’ll tell them all about it. I mean, all the details on it and then how to get in touch with me if they want to talk about possibly doing it for their company.
Sky
00:53:18 – 00:53:27
Excellent. So if you’re $100 million company Jose will still take your money, but it’s probably not the best fit If you’re if you’re what? Like 2-10 million to 20 million.
Jose Palomino
00:53:27 – 00:53:33
20 million where the own I always say with the owner still has their hands on the steering wheel,
Sky
00:53:33 – 00:53:42
right? And you’re having some now, what is the point in that, that there’s somebody that can get stuff done versus a committee that you have to try to squeeze stuff through?
Jose Palomino
00:53:42 – 00:54:04
Yeah, I think there’s one is that there’s a clear leadership there, right? Otherwise you end up with somebody who has the title of president. But the real owners are like in the shadow background and I’ve seen a lot of smaller firms and it’s not as effective. So I like and, and plus the passion. I like work and owner. It really matters like change matters. It’s personal. It’s not business. It’s personal,
Sky
00:54:04 – 00:54:22
yep. Excellent. All right. We’ll check out the show notes if you market dot com and you can find more information there on Jose palomino and value prop. And thank you for listening to the market podcast where we believe if you market the ship out of it with a competitive edge, they will come
