After more than 15 years San Francisco gets a Hockey Team once more! This Friday October 12th, 2012 the Puck drops at the Cow Palace with the San Francisco Bulls facing the Bakersfield Condors.

It will be exciting to see an exciting new ECHL Hockey team with plenty of talented players. Watching them play their first exhibition game of the season this past week against Stockton; they showed great promise. I plan to cheer them on to victory and invite you to attend a few games as well if you are in the SF Bay area? The ticket prices are reasonable and there is not a bad seat in the Cow Palace.

If you are looking for a great night of excitement and fun; the 2012 SF Bulls season might be just the answer!

 http://sfbulls.com/tickets/individual-game-tickets/

Hello World,

You ever heard of Mary Kay of Mary Kay cosmetics?  Listen to a popular quote from her about how to treat people.
And the sign that everybody has regardless of who they are.

Hey you ALL,

Remember how you told your friends and family about how you were going to set the world on fire with your

new work out plan as soon as you got around to it? Well here in this video is your freaking Round TUIT.

Click here to view the embedded video.

No more excuses! It is time to make it happen. And as Zig Ziglar says We’ll see you at the TOP!

Jay Bergers:  Well, good morning, everyone.  This is Jay Bergers at jaybergers.com.  And I have to tell you, I’m extremely excited and have been looking forward to this conversation for quite some time.  I have the privilege of speaking to Weldon Long.  And he’s written a book and he’s got another book coming on the way.  But I want to tell you a little bit about his background.

But first of all, I want to say hello.  Weldon Long are you there?

Weldon Long:  I have here, Jay.  Very nice to speak with you.

Jay Bergers:  Likewise.  Well, many people have no doubt heard of you and perhaps read your book, The Upside of Fear, with the subtitle, How One Man Broke the Cycle of Prison, Poverty and Addiction.  I want to just read a little bit here.  It talks about – in the back of the book – it says, “In his gut-retching memoirs of brutal crime, prison time and ultimate redemption; Author Weldon Long tells a true story of how he transformed himself from a drug addict convict to the CEO of a multi-million dollar business by discovering the upside of fear.”  Wow.  I mean, I read this gripping story and you’ve shared the most intimate details of your life growing up as a child and what took place in your life from one point to another.  Tell us a little bit about your childhood and growing up and how you got started in life, and maybe some of the choices and decisions that led you in the direction that you went.  Give us a little bit of a thumbnail sketch about your story for those people that may not have heard of you before or read the book, “The Upside of Fear”.

Weldon Long:  OK.  That’s great, Jay.  You know, I basically was directionless teen.  My father was in the military.  And – which meant we moved in awful lot back in those days, in the 70s and the late 60s, so we were moving every year or so.  And my dad, like I say, was in the military which I always interpreted that he always had a job but we never had any money and such is the life of a military personnel.  So we moved a lot.  And as a result, I never have any loops to speak of; I was a very insecure kid and a very insecure teen that never, never fit in.  You know, I’d get into a new school and there was always the clique of people who knew each other, and I was always the outsider.  Well, all of that was basically fixed, as far as I could see at the time when I was about 14 years old, the first time I drank a beer.  And suddenly, almost magically, I fit in, I was part of the crowd, I was funny, I was cool, I was everything.  And so, that decision really was the gateway to the next 20 or 25 years of an awful lot of chaos, pain, and as you mentioned, ultimately, redemption.

Jay Bergers:  Wow.  You know, there’s a lot of people on this calls that will be listening to this call, that may be on the blog.  You know, the first thing that jumps out of my mind is there’s a young person out there, there’s a  young adult out there that could be a person in high school, could be a person that might have dropped out of high school.  They may have made some poor choices and decisions, got to started running out round with a gang and getting involved in drinking or alcohol that might be – it might have been in and out of county jail, it might have made some decisions that they regret right now.  And if you could, for just a few minutes, I would like you to speak to that person out there, you know.  It seems to me like you made some poor choices at one point in your early life, but through a series of decisions to make some better choices and surround yourself with a different set of influences, you moved yourself into the direction of redemption.  Speak for just a couple of minutes to that young person that may feel like their life is over and things are hopeless.  Because I know from – based upon reading your book and your story, Weldon – by the way, I know you sometimes like to be referred to as Wally.  Do you mind if I call you Wally on this call?

Weldon Long:  No, absolutely.  Can I call you Jay?

Jay Bergers:  That would be perfect.  Can you speak a little bit to the young adult or the young person that may be in that situation right now and going through a tough time and maybe offer some ideas or input that might encourage them or give them reason to believe that there is hope?

Weldon Long:  Absolutely.  And I think, really, you know I have the privilege and honor, very often, of working with some young people that, you know, have made some bad decisions and they’re incarcerated in a juvenile facility, or in some cases, very, very young adults that are in adult facilities under a variety of circumstances.  In fact, Friday, I’ll be going into one of the state prisons here in Colorado.  A place where, ironically, I spend a couple of years in late 80s.  And one of the things I always like to share with young people, and really, the message, Jay, goes to the people of any age, but sometimes we’re heading down a path and it’s a bad path.  We can get a pretty good waves – a long wave, in many cases – down that path.  And sometimes, we kind of look over and we visualize the life that we wanted, you know, the life that we thought we would have.  And of course, that would have been a different path.  And sometimes, the further you get down that path, if you can imagine a fork in the road, and you’re heading down one path, and it’s the wrong path, sometimes, looking over the other path can seem a million miles away, you know.  And the further you get down the bad path, the further away the good path can seem.  And what I’d like to share with young people, and again, people really of any age, is that while it may seem like a million miles away from the bad path to the good path, the path we’re on versus the path that we would like to be on, that even though it may seemed a million miles away, the truth is, it’s just one small step.  And even if it’s a distance that seems like a gulf or an ocean, it really is just one horizontal step sideways and that horizontal step if a choice and a decision.  A choice and decision that I’m going to take responsibility for where I am, and I’m going to do whatever it takes, no matter how much work it is, to get over on the path.  And immediately, even though the results may not be, you know, manifested overnight, immediately, we’re working in that direction of that new path.  And we’re kind of crossing that divide; we’re cutting a straight shot over, you know, into that other path.  And it’s really never is too late.  It’s about making a decision.  And of course, it’s about desire.  You know, how bad do you want it? You know, if you want something a little bit, just a tiny bit, that, yeah, you want to do it, and you’ll do it maybe if it’s not too much trouble or not too much work.  Or do you want something that’s really huge.  You want something a mile-wide, that you would have to do whatever you have to do, but you’re willing to do whatever you have to do, overcome any challenge, any obstacle, any difficulty to get there.  If you want something that bad, then, well, it may take a few days of a few weeks or a few months or a year, whatever, to get over there, you can immediately start that straight shot over the other line.  But it comes down to a desire and a decision; you have to want it and you have to want it really, really bad.  But from the moment we make that decision, the truth is, there are very simple things that we can do on a consistent basis to move us closer and closer to the other path every single day.  And as I like to say, the essence of The Power of Consistency, which is my next book coming out, you know, life is not about the resolutions that we make on New Year’s Day.  Life is about the little things we do every single day.  And it’s about taking those simple consistent steps, you know, that are consistent with a new vision, a new dream that we have for our life, and doing those little things at a consistent basis.

Jay Bergers:  Wow.  That really resonates with me so much thinking what you said.  I have a number of mentors in my own life; one of them is a gentleman who passed away from cancer by the name of Jim Rohn.  And he talks about – to directly correlate to what you just mentioned, Wally – he talks about most people spend more time planning their vacations than they do planning their lives because escape is easier than change sometimes.

Weldon Long:  Absolutely.  You know what, I’ve read that quote of Jim Rohn many times myself, and it’s so true, that people just don’t spend enough time.  You know, Socrates said, “Beyond examined life is not worth living.”  And I really believe that examining our life, examining our fundamental beliefs, examining what fundamentally we think about life and our expectations of the future, and having a willingness to look at those and subject those to examination, and stop to think about where we are and where we like to be.  I think that’s what Socrates was talking about, you know.  And I think that the unexamined life, you know, can be – can be very empty and not very rewarding but an examined life.  And stop and to think about where do I want to go, where am I, how am I going to get there? It’s a very important process and a very important step in getting over to the other path that we talked about a moment ago.

Jay Bergers:  If you don’t mind, I want to read a little – a short paragraph from your book, The Upside of Fear, and maybe you can respond to that briefly.  It’s just you kind of jump off the pages.  I’m reading here from The Upside of Fear by Weldon Long where we’re referring to him as Wally today.  And he’s got another book coming out next year.  Do you mind if I read a couple of sentences from your book, Wally?

Weldon Long:  No, that’d be great.

Jay Bergers:  OK.  The Upside of Fear.  I’m reading from page 110 by Weldon Long, “For the bulk of my life, I had lived under a series misconception.  People who were successful in life were lucky.  I remembered looking at successful people and thinking that if they had my problems, they would not be doing so well.  What I came to learn was that everyone has problems in life.  At some time or another, everyone has health, money, relationship, employment, or other problems.  The difference between successful people and losers is not in the nature of their problems; it is in the nature of their responses to these problems.  I began to realize that many people have money problems.  The difference between them and me was that they got a job, maybe even a second job in response to the setback.  In response to my money problem, I had lied, cheated and stole.  And eventually, the quality of my life reflected the quality of my response.  And I was sent to jail.  Suddenly, it seemed so clear.  I kind of came to understand that I had absolute control over how is respond to problems, which was an exciting concept for me.  We can’t control everything that comes our way in life, but we have total control over how we deal with it.  Success in life has nothing to do with our circumstances; it has everything to do with how we cope with our circumstances, and we are completely responsible for our responses.”  Wow.  That, you know, there was a number of kind of aha moments and really things that jump off the pages of your story and your book, but that was one of them.  Do you – can you comment a little bit about what you were thinking when you wrote this book and perhaps speak a little bit about this short little excerpt?

Weldon Long:  Well, you know, Jay, its funny when you’re reading that.  I mean, I literally – I’m standing in my office right now looking west towards as I speak, and it’s a blue sky today and it’s covered with snow.  You know, I live this life today that really was very unexpected.  Not necessarily unexpected by me, but certainly unexpected by others.  And, you know, as you read to that passage, I step back to where I was – not when I wrote that story which was two years ago – but when I was experiencing that aha moment.  It was in 1996.  I remember it as clear as day.  And in 1996, I was 32 years old.  I had already spent about six and a half years in prison at that point.  I started going to prison – the first time – when I was 23.  And by the age of 32, I had already spent about six and a half years in prison.  In 1996, I was back in prison for the third time, and I wouldn’t see the streets again this time until I was 40 years old.  I was going to be there seven or eight years in that last stretch.  And on June 10th of 1996, I got the news while I was in prison, that my dad had died.  And in that moment, I realized that my dad went to his grave knowing me as a theft and a crook and a liar.  And that’s when I began this journey of self-discovery and examining my life and refer back to Socrates.  I remember the first book that I picked up was Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Dr. Stephen Covey.  And I remember reading about the principles of responsibility, of what he refers to as lighthouse principles, you know, kind of universal laws of truth.  And I remember reading those things at 32 years old with seven years left to serve in prison after my father died.  And I remember the experience of realizing, wow, I have created this life for myself.  Everything that I’m experiencing in life, I – a reflection of my though, you know.  And to quote Emerson, “We become what we think about all day long.”  I remember in that same period, I read a quote by Nietzsche , and Nietzsche said, “We attract that which we fear.”  In the bible in the Book of Job, Job said, “That which I had feared has come upon me.”  And I remember in that period reading all these things and thinking, wow, Job and Nietzsche, you know, Nietzsche was an atheist, Job was a Godly man, separated by thousands of years and they were saying the same things; that which I had feared has come upon me and, you know, we attract that which we fear.  And I started thinking about what do I really fear in life.  And what I fear more than anything was losing my kid which I had, he was three years old and I had abandoned him, I feared going back to prison, being broke, being a loser, being homeless, and all these things.  And I realized I had attracted all of those things into my life with my decision, which my choices and that although my life was full of chaos and bad things.  I realize, for the first time in my life, that, you know, my life is not a reflection today of my money problems.  My life is a reflection of how I tried to solve those problems.  And it occurred to me, I remember sitting in a cell having the thoughts that you just read about and sitting there and thinking, my god, I am a hundred percent responsible.  It’s not the snitches’ fault, it’s not my ex-wife’s fault, it’s not the judge’s fault, it’s not the district attorney or the federal prosecutor in this case, it’s not their fault.  You know, I’m here because of the decisions and choices that I made.  And at the same time that it was very overwhelming, like, wow, this is all self-induced, you know, this is self-impose.  And the next thought was like how liberating because if I created this mess, then I can change it.  If I’m here as a victim of circumstance, what are the odds I’m going to get smarter or luckier? Probably not very much.  But if my being here is just a reflection of my decisions, guess what, I can change my choices and decisions.  And so, it was overwhelming, the reality of what I had done to my life and those around me, in society in general.  But in the next thought, it was like, wow, this is so cool because I can change this.  And that’s when I set down that path, that I was changing the course of my destiny.  It would be seven years before I see the streets again.  But I knew right away I was on a different path, I knew my life was never going to be the same.

Jay Bergers:  Yes.  Well, Wally, we’re still having a dialogue about your life in your past and your history and how far you’ve come.  You mentioned that you were sitting in the jail cell and you got the information – the message that your father had passed away.  And it seems like from that point forward, you began a life of self-examination, about accepting the personal responsibilities that Stephen Covey talks about.  You apparently were exposed to or were given a copy of that book.  It seems to me like there were a variety of things that begin to happen in this transformation of yours.  You started to read books and started look – take a serious look at your life and accept full responsibility for the choices you made and where you were up to that point.  What would be some other things that happened to you going through your mind? You did some other things, you read some other things, you started become influenced, and it sounds like, by a whole different set of possibilities.  Is that true?

Weldon Long:  That’s absolutely true.  In fact, there were three books that I read initially that have the biggest impact.  And it’s kind of pathetic looking back that at 32 years old; I was understanding these things for the first time.  But Dr. Covey’s book, Seven Habits, was so powerful.  Around that same time, I read one of Wayne Dyer’s book, a book called Real Magic.  And that real magic was just simple every day miracles of doing the right thing and putting one foot in front of the other.  And then there was another book by Napoleon Hill.  I actually wasn’t thinking grow rich, it was a book called You Can Make Your Own Miracles.  But he talked about some of the things that he wrote about and thinking grow rich about basically how, you know, we become, you know, become our thought.  Another book that was profoundly influential was Victor Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning.  I remember, you know, thinking that, you know, Frankl talks about in that book that you can pretty much deal with anything if you understand the significance and the meaning in the suffering.  And I had seven years of prison left to serve, and I knew I was going to watch my kid grow up, you know, through razor wire, and I knew I wasn’t going to give him the life that he deserved.  But I began to get comfortable with the idea that, OK, my life is going to serve meaning, it’s going to serve a purpose.  And that purpose is – I didn’t know exactly at that time what it was going to be.  In fact, it was many years later, 13 years later when I met Dr. Covey that I realize what that purpose was.  But I became convinced there was going to be meaning to it.  And that helped me deal with the situation, although I had created it myself, you know, I was going to spend the next seven years behind bars, but I was able to cope with that because I became convinced that there was significance in that suffering.  And it took many years to figure out what that was.  But I was convinced there was something going on.

Jay Bergers:  I’m looking again back to the book that you’ve written, The Upside of Fear.  And I’m looking in another short little passage that just kind of rings through from what – for what you’re saying.  It says here on page 161 of Weldon Long’s book, The Upside of Fear, “I had a new perspective and I knew that my old life was behind me.  I was pleased that I could see my life from a higher elevation, and I was pleased that the years I was serving this time around would be my last.  I never – I would never be locked up again, I like the way that sounded, I love the way it felt.  I had lived some many years out of control that I seemed at times to be unable to influence the quality of my life.  Now, I understood that while I had no control over things outside myself, I had total control over how I reacted to those things.  Knowing that it was my reaction to challenge that determine the quality of my life gave me a tremendous amount of hope.  There is nothing more de-habilitating than being powerless.  And there’s nothing more pathetic than acting powerless when we are not.  The power to decide is ours and ours alone.  Only a fool surrenders in.”  Wow.  That just – kind of that highlights some of the things that you mentioned.  And it sounds like the books that you read and the circumstances that you found yourself in, you were beginning to slowly make a mental shift, Wally.

Weldon Long:  Yeah.  It was – it was kind of a gradual process.  I guess, you know, when you write a book and you kind of tell them a 25-year story in a couple hundred pages, it’s almost kind of like a movie, you know, that a lot will happen in the couple of minutes in the movie; they’ll fast-forward a bunch of clips.  But it really was a process.  There was kind of an instantaneous recognition after my father died.  But the process in learning what to do about it, you know, spanned really a couple of years.  But all alone that journey, I was learning these lessons.  And they hear and you read it.  And I haven’t read the book, you know, in a couple of years since, you know, since it came out.  And, you know, it just – it was such a process.  It was so liberating and so invigorating to realize that I was not powerless.  And I agree with my words that there’s nothing more pathetic than surrendering that power when, you know, when we don’t have to.  And, you know, it’s definitely been a long journey and there were moments of recognition all along the way.  But, you know, it was so invigorating, it’s so liberating when I finally realize that I had a choice.

Jay Bergers:  You know, Wally, going back to that young person or middle age person or that older person that may be incarcerated now, that may have been in and out of county jail or out of prison, you know, sometimes, I think – I’ve heard people be a little bit cynical and sarcastic and jaded, if you will, and say, well, what does that person know that they don’t know – they don’t know my background, they don’t know the lousy home life that I was exposed to, they don’t know how I was abused or given a set of circumstances and situations growing up in my early life that I had zero control over.  And if they knew where I came from, they’d understand and appreciate much better why I’m making the choices that I’m making, why I don’t have any choice, and there’s not a possibility for me to change and accept that personal responsibility that you’re talking about.  Wally, why don’t you comment a little bit to what I’ve just mentioned? Because I know from what your – from what I’ve read in the pages of your book, The Upside of Fear, and from what you’ve shard with us today, that we can take personal responsibility and we can change.  But maybe that person out there is struggling; they don’t think they have any other options.

Weldon Long:  Well, that’s a really good point, Jay.  And there’s no question that some circumstances for people to get out of are more difficult than others, you know.  Some people have, you know, there is such things as abuse.  And adults in our lives do things, sometimes, to us as children, they shouldn’t do.  And, you know, if you take the example of a youngster growing up in the intercity and his dad was swinging dope, and his brother was swinging dope, and his uncle was swinging dope, and everybody he ever knew was swinging dope. And so, naturally, he doesn’t, you know, as a young person, doesn’t realize there’s any other option except, guess what, swinging dope.  But there comes a time, as an adult, where we do know right from wrong, we do have a choice.  If we’re seven or eight years old, we don’t have much of a choice.  Much of what we do maybe in kind of an immediate reaction to circumstances that we may be in.  But everybody reaches a point in time where objectively, they can stand back and look at the world.  And even though they’ve had some intense suffering, the reality is that at some point, we do reach a moment in time where we have a choice.  And that choice is either to continue reacting in a very self-destructive way or that choice as to say, hey, I don’t have to do this.  Because as adults, you know, we do have a choice.  We don’t always as a kid.  And it may be more difficult, but the more difficult the circumstances became up in, it may be more difficult to make the change.  But it’s like I tell my son who is now 19 years old, that little three-year-old boy that I abandoned is now 19, we have a great relationship, he’s off in college now.  But I tell him all the time, I said, son, we don’t get to just do the easy stuff, you know.  We have to do the hard stuff and the easy stuff.  Because sometimes he’ll come to me and he’ll say, dad, it’s just hard, it’s just its overwhelming.  And I’ll say, son, I realize it’s overwhelming, I realize it’s a struggle.  But we don’t have the luxury in life of just doing the easy stuff.  We have to do the things that are hard and we get to do the things that are easy.  So, I don’t argue the fact that it may be more difficult for some people and others that the struggle may be longer, the struggle may be more intense.  But ultimately, their examples around us all the time of people who have endured, you know, intensive abuse, intensive suffering, and they found their way out of it.  And it’s like that old saying that, you know, whatever – I think it was a Tony Robins’ quote, that whatever one man can do, another man can do.  So, if one person was able to fight themselves out of that situation, another person can as well.  It may be more difficult, it may take longer.  But at some point, we reach a point where we are empowered to make that decision.

Jay Bergers:  So, Wally, in your book, you talk about a time, as you’re going through this mental shift and its transformation, you had made some choices to get a college education.  And if my memory serves me correctly, at one point, you dropped out of high school.  Talk to us about getting involved in getting education and the choices you made in terms of what you wanted to study and what you thought you might be able to shift your life in a different direction.

Weldon Long:  Yeah.  You know, after my father died, I began to seriously examine my life.  Something within me – I don’t believe that education is absolutely necessary to be successful.  There’s a lot of people a lot more successful than I am with less education.  But I decided that education was going to be something important to me.  So, I got my GED, I was fortunate enough to work with a school in California who let me take classes for many, many years.  My mother was having 25 bucks a month to keep me enrolled on the condition that when I got out, I would reimburse the school and pay for my tuition, which I ultimately did.  But I was able to get my GED; I got a bachelor’s degree in law, and eventually got an MBA in management.  And I tell people all the time, you know, I went to jail, not Yale.  But that education was profoundly important to me, and serve as a basis more than anything a feeling of self-respect.  I had such a heavy burden I carried about dropping out of high school.  I was so embarrassed about it.  And so, more than anything, well, I did learn a lot about business and those principle serve me well as an entrepreneur once I got out.  But more than anything, it was the feeling of self-respect, the sense of accomplishment.  I had never accomplished anything in my life up until that point.  And when I begin to accomplish things, even though some of them were little things, the amount of self-respect and self-esteem that came from accomplishing anything was profound, and it was profoundly important to me.  And I would encourage all of your listeners and all of your readers of your blog that, you know, if you’re struggling to find that inner strength, I mean, just set little objectives, little things, and complete them, finish them, you know, cross that one off your list.  There’s an amazing sense of accomplishment and self-esteem that comes from that.  And I’d be more than anything, that’s what I got from education; the fact that I was able to start something and finish it.

Jay Bergers:  So, you were preparing to end your time behind bars and serving a number of years in prison, and you were then released and you were put back into a whole different set of surroundings looking for work.  Tells us a little bit about what career path you chose and what that path looked like trying to find work and ultimately, I know that you became involved in the heating-air-conditioning business, tell us a little bit about that part of your mental shift and what transpired to get you from being locked up behind bars in prison and ultimately becoming very, very successful in that field of endeavor.

Weldon Long:  Yeah.  You know, when I got to the half-way house in 2003, when I was released the final time for prison, I was 39 years old, and I had been in prison basically all but about two years since I was 23.  So I got to the half-way house with a bus pass, I got a couple of suits, and I went out trying to find a job.  It took about six months to find a job.  I finally found a job as a salesman for heating and air-conditioning company, and I found out that I was pretty good at sales.  And over the course of the next year, I developed my own sales philosophy, sales models and sales ideas.  And I was initially went and tried to sell the sales training models to companies.  But because I have no track record, no experience, you know, I didn’t have much excerpt at that.  So, in 2005, by that time, I was remarried and my wife at the time decided to open a heating and air-conditioning company, because I was so convinced that my sales model would work.  And starting from our living room with very little capital, mostly credit card advances, we open that small heating and air-conditioning company.  And within 60 months, five years, we grew that to over $20 million in revenue.  And in fact, in 2009, our company was selected by Inc. Magazine as one of the fastest growing small companies in America.  We sold that heating and air-conditioning company after five or six years, and I began doing public speaking and sales training, and, you know, that whole line of work.  And so, you know, it just – it was about putting one foot in front of the other, about staying focus.  When I work with guys that have – or girls that have a criminal record, I tell them, you know, you may not get two or three more chances, but you’re probably going to get at least one more.  And what I tell people is that don’t second guess what the universe brings you.  When I was sitting up in the penitentiary those last seven years and I had this new vision for my life, I wasn’t thinking it was going to be the heating and air-conditioning business.  You know, I thought it would be something cooler than that.  But the heating and air-conditioning business is what came to me.  That was the opportunity that came to me, and I made the very best of it.  I was very good as a salesman and we’re very successful growing our own company and selling it, and now I train, literally, hundreds of companies and thousands of sales people across the country on my sales – my sales training model.  In fact, next week, next Tuesday or Wednesday, I’ll be in Austin, Texas speaking with the legendary Tom Hopkins.  And Tom Hopkins and I do sales training events around the country.  I speak in the morning for a couple of hours and I have kind of a three-part sales process.  And the first part of that sales process is to get the mind right, you know, create that prosperity mindset.  And so, what I’ll do in the morning is I’ll open the Hopkins’ event and do two or three hours of getting the mind right, and then Tom will come in and do four, five hours of his sales training that he’s done for 40 years.  And so, it’s just been amazing to me how one opportunity has led to the next since I’ve been out.  And not only did Dr. Covey endorsed The Upside of Fear, he actually endorsed the book on June 10th of 2009 which was 13 years to the day that my father died on June 10th of 1996.  After he endorsed the book, I was in privilege with the opportunity to share the stage with him and doing event with him at the Omaha – in Omaha, Nebraska at the cleft center.  And it’s just been remarkable.  I did an event recently with a personal development guru, Larry Winget, did an event with Andrea Waltz and Richard Fenton who wrote a wonderful book called “Go for No” .  And, you know, it’s just been amazing to me, as people heard the story and, you know, the personal story of overcoming adversity and then the business success and the failed success, just the doors that have opened.  The fact the power of consistency really as a business development, it’s a personal development book, but also a business development book of the principles that I learned along the business journey, not just the personal journey.

Jay Bergers:  Wally, what strikes me most about what you just said in the last couple of minutes is earlier in our dialogue when we started this conversation today, you talked about who how discovered that you become what you think about most of the time.  And I’m hearing you talk and I heard you mentioned several times Stephen Covey’s book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.  I know you mentioned Tony Roberts – excuse me, Tony Robbins rather, the personal development guru, and the field of personal development is, you know, these two names are synonymous with success and achievement, and not only have you become what you thought about, but it seems to me like you’ve made a radical transformation to a series of choices and decisions that were different from your early life, to the point where you’re now in the ranks of those people speaking, inspiring and training, very much like Stephen Covey has and does as well as Tony Robbins.  That’s quite a huge transformation from where you came in your early days of growing up with a child and spending time behind bars.

Weldon Long:  Well, it certainly has been a transformation.  I don’t know that I would put myself in the category with Tony Robins and Stephen Covey, but I’m honored that you would say that.  But, you know, I find that in my small way that I’m able to reach lives and to have an impact – I mentioned to you that in 1996, I became convinced that there was a purpose in my life.  Although I didn’t know what it was, I learned what it was when I met Dr. Covey many years later when he endorsed The Upside of Fear.  We had a meeting and we were talking, and I was just sharing with him the enormous impact that he had on my life, and how Seven Habits was the first book I read on this journey, and how it’s just so profound for me.  And Dr. Covey put his hand on my heart and repeated three times, he says, “Wally, you have a divine destiny, you have a divine destiny, you have a divine destiny.”  And, you know, I was like, my jaw was on the ground.  Like, what does that mean, you know.  And so I asked him.  I said, you know, what exactly is that divine destiny in your estimation? And he said, to share your story and to help others, you know, transcend adversity and difficulty and, you know, through using your story and the lessons you learn.  And it was that moment that I realize, wow, that’s why I went through this; that’s why I lived 25 years of insanity so that I could share with those people.  You know, of the advantages I have with working with people in whether small groups of large groups, is not many people has, you know, the story of their life more than I did.  And so, by comparison, people can typically draw the analogy that, wow, this guy was a lot worse off than I was.  And if he can do it, you know, certainly, I can do it.  As I tell people I’m an average guy living an extraordinary life.  You know, I’m not an exceptional person in any way, of average intelligence, of average everything, 103 I.Q., I work very hard, I’m very committed to building something great out of my life in helping others, but I truly am an ordinary guy living an extraordinary life.  And I think it serves as hope and inspiration to others that’s really orthoclase [Phonetic] [0:34:32].  But if I can do it, anybody can.  But that really is true with my case, because I don’t come with any special circumstances or pedigree.  It’s just a desire to succeed, a willingness to commend myself to principles of honor, integrity and hard work, and, you know, the opportunities I’ve been given just to speak with these legendary geniuses and wonderful thinkers, and great thinkers of our time, it’s just been icing on the cake.

Jay Bergers:   Wally, we got a bunch of people that read my blog and of people that may be listening to this interview recording sometime in the next weeks and months coming up.  You know, home business – having your own home business and being involved in the network marking industry, a lot of people face a lot of rejection and they want to give up and quit because they sometimes find out it’s not quite as easy as they heard or thought it might be.  And you chose to get involved in the sales game and probably have experienced your share of rejection.  I’m assuming that you’re probably directing some of your time and attention with the power of consistency book that you have coming up next year to how to move forward in the sales arena.  Could you just speak briefly to the person out there that may have just recently started about a home-base business and they don’t really know how to cope with the rejection that they’re getting right now and everyone’s telling them no, and they’re feeling like giving up or they may want to quit.  What would you say to speak into the lives of people like that right now that are so desperate to reinvent themselves and find a better way?

Weldon Long:  Yeah.  That’s a great question.  In fact, I just recently was in Las Vegas and spoke to about 1,500 network marketers at the MGM in Las Vegas, folks that are involved with the whole financial group which is financial services network marketing group.  I’ve got a wonderful friend of mine who’s done so very well in prepaid legal.  And I love the network marketing business because of the spirit is independence and the spirit of entrepreneurship is available to everybody.  What I would tell people, and by the way, just in the side, we do three weekly TV shows each week; live interactive TV shows.  And we actually do a network marketing show at 8:30 A.M. on Monday morning, it’s a live show.  You can go to weldonlong.com and click on the press there to TV button and get more information of the show.  But it’s an actual live 30-minute show we do.  It’s all shot in high definition, the beautiful studio we have.  And it’s all about, you know, taking that next step forward and moving ahead.  But what I would share with people, Jay, in home-base business, network marketing, any sales related industry, and of course, sales is the backbone of any business, right? Nothing happens until something gets sold as Thomas Watson, Sr. once famously said.  But what I would tell people is that no is a perfectly acceptable answer in sales.  I always say yes is best, because ultimately the one I prospect to say yes, right? Yes is best but no is a perfectly acceptable answer.  And I think that sometimes when people are new in business or new in sales, they are scared to death of the word no.  They think people are going to reject them.  And the truth is, accepting a no in a sales career or a network marketing career or a home-base business career, accepting no will never hurt a sales career.  What will destroy a sales career is accepting I don’t know.  You know, that’s what kill sales people, that people at the end of the presentation, the end of the process, whatever it is, very often will say, let me think about it or I’m not sure.  And in settling for that response versus a definitive yes or no lead the way, that kills business and kills sales careers.  So that’s the fundamental lesson.  Now, there’s a variety of ways to do that; there’s a strategy we have lined out in the power of consistency for sales excellence and folks to get more information on that at weldonlong.com.  But the bottom line is, there’s a way you got to get there, there’s a strategy how you get there at the end.  But ultimately, yes is best, but no is a perfectly acceptable answer.  It’s never personal, it’s never a rejection of me personally, and it’s a reject of that idea, that product, that service, whatever it is.  But be willing to push hard enough to get a no.  Sometimes people will ask for a yes, and when they don’t get a yes, they’re afraid to push a little more because they’re afraid they might get a no.  And where that leads them is in that never Neverland between yes and no, that I don’t know, that I’ll call you next Tuesday thing, you know.  And the truth is, if you just push a little bit harder and be willing to  get a no, you’ll be surprise how many times that ends up being a yes.  And getting the nos out of the way and moving on to the next opportunity is never going to hurt you.  In fact, it’s going to make you very wealthy.  One of the other quote that Thomas Watson once said is that, “If you want to double your rate at success, you have to triple your rate at failure.”  So, just get the bad stuff out of the way; get the nos out of the way so that you could focus on the next opportunity.

Jay Bergers:  We – I know that we covered this.  But we had a gentleman by the name of J.D. Donahue.  And he asked the question which I think that you’ve pretty much already answer, but maybe you can share brief a little bit more.  J.D. Donahue had contacted me and he said, when you’re getting interviewed as a gentleman asking, what was it that turn him around? What one thing started him on his transformation?

Weldon Long:  Well, for me, it was a very specific moment in time, it was June 10th of 1996 when my father died, and I was in prison.  And, you know, like many others, when you lose a love one, it’s not uncommon to start thinking about the last time you saw them or the last time you spoke with them.  And the last time I spoke to my father was two weeks before he died.  And we’re having a phone conversation, I was in prison, and my dad says to me, he says, son, you know, it could be worse for you.  And I thought to myself – well, actually, I said to him.  I said, dad, how do you mean it could be worse? I’m a ninth-grade high school dropout, I got a three-year-old son that I’ve abandon, I never had a job, I’m a three-time convicted felon, I’ve never had a home, I got nothing.  How can things be worse? And my dad says to me, he says, son, you know, you could be dead.  And I remember two weeks later when he was dead, and he had died.  And I remember thinking that the nicest thing my father could say to me on his deathbed when he was really trying to be nice to me, you know, I mean, he was really trying to lift me up.  The nicest thing he could come up with is at least you’re alive.  And I realize the first time in my life how pathetic I was in my father’s eyes.  I had diluted myself for many years thinking that they didn’t see me, you know, in really a bad life.  And I realized that when he was trying to say something nice that was the best he could come up with.  I mean, he couldn’t say, well, son, at least you’re a good son to me because I wasn’t, and at least son you’re a good father to your son because  wasn’t, at least you have an education because I didn’t, or at least you’re successful because I wasn’t.  I realize the nicest thing he could say to me is at least you’re alive. And when I realized how pathetic I really was in that moment when my father passed away, that was the moment I said, that’s it, I am changing the course of my destiny, and that’s where I set out to do it.

Jay Bergers:  Well, Wally, you know, just – I can’t say enough kind words about you taking the time today and sharing with myself and the listening audiences.  This may be read in a transcript form or people may be listening the recording on my blog on the internet.  If you want to find out more information about Weldon Long, his story – by the way, Wally, you mentioned you have this book coming out next year, The Power of Consistency.  I think you’ve mentioned it’s coming out in March or April of 2012.  Can you talk a little bit about when the book could be released and a little bit about the overall subject matter in that book as compared to The Upside of Fear, which was really about our personal story?

Weldon Long:  Absolutely.  The Power of Consistency, in many ways, kind of picks up where The Upside of Fear left off.  When I wrote the Upside of Fear, I, you know, I had built the air-conditioning business and we hadn’t even sold it at that point, we’re just getting ready to sell it.  And The Power of Consistency really is about the business and personal development lessons that I learn throughout building that business and subsequent businesses as well.  But, really, it comes down to I believe that if you really want to create, you know, really transformational success in life and sales and business, you have to address three key components, and those three components:  Step one, is getting the mind right, and then we’re creating a prosperity consciousness, I have a process that’s based on the FEAR acronym; Focus, Emotional commitment, Action and Responsibility.  And we teach folks in step one how to create a prosperity consciousness, to create a mindset that can overcome any challenge, that can overcome any obstacle, and the prosper in the face of adversity.  That’s step one.  Step two is you got to get the sales right.  You know, you got to get the mind right in step one, step two is you got to get the sales right.  You got to have an organized systemic approach to sales process.  I mentioned to you earlier that yes is best but no is an acceptable answer.  That’s kind of an example of one of the concepts in the book.  And I talked about how you walk your prospects down kind of a hallway.  And along the hallway are these various trap doors, and those doors are really objection when – and concerns and fears at the prospect has.  And how you close those doors and fill those doors before you ask for the order.  So, step two is getting the sales right.  And we based that on a four-step sales process called RISC, R-I-S-C; Relationship building, Investigate the satisfaction gap, Solve the satisfaction gap, and then C, of course, Closing the opportunity.  And in step three is the most critical step of all.  Step three doesn’t matter if you have the right mindset, if you have the right sales system; step three is getting the implementation right.  If you cannot implement every single day what you’ve learned in step one and step two, it doesn’t matter because nothing’s going to change.  It’s not about what you say; it’s about what you do.  As I like to say, most people don’t have a knowledge problem, Jay.  They have an implementation problem.  People know what to do to be successful, they just don’t do it.  It’s what I call the conundrum of human nature; knowing exactly what we need to do to create wealth and prosperity in our life, and then not doing it.  It’s insanity.  And so, step three, the implementation step is so critically important.  The way we address the implementation step, as I mentioned earlier, we do live weekly TV shows, live interactive TV show that we stream live across the internet where people can call in and ask questions.  And we do those shows on Monday, specifically because everybody has distractions in life and everybody has issues.  And so, we have all of our sales training and business development clients come to us on a Monday, they log in to a live TV show, and I’m able to answer questions.  And my job is to get them refocused and to re-energized and recommitted to their goals so they can set out that week on a positive foot and work towards their goals.  Because inevitably, by the next Monday, you know, distractions go like happen; people get sick, people get divorce, people go bankrupt, things happen.  My job on Monday is to get people to implement on a consistent basis.  So, with that three-step process, and that’s what the power of consistency for sales excellence is really all about:  Step on, get the mind right; step two, get the sales right; step three, get the implementation right.  The cue of effect of all three of those things is incredibly powerful, and it’s how we generate the result and successfully do with our sales running clients, and that’s what the book is all about, mostly.

Jay Bergers:  Well, this has been a very riveting and powerful conversation with Weldon Long, who’s actually known to his friends and associates as Wally.  He’s written a book called The Upside of Fear:  How one man broke the cycle of prison, poverty and addiction.  He has another book coming out that he just talked about briefly called The Power of Consistency for sales excellence and sales turning professionalism.  I want to say thank you, Wally, for your time and attention.  This has been Jay Bergers at jaybergers.com.  When I post this up in my blog, I know that people can go to I believe it is weldonlong.com to get more information about both his television show you have recorded that you mentioned on Monday nights.  What are the best places for them to get the resources? Is that the best place to direct them to, weldonlong.com?

Weldon Long:  Yeah, absolutely.  Weldonlong, W-E-L-D-O-N, weldonlong.com.

Jay Bergers:  That sounds great.  Well, thank you so much for you time, for your attention.  The folks out there that have a chance to listen to this interview, I know will be inspired and will be driven to new heights of success and achievement in the sales arena or just any arena.  It seems like the game of life can be challenging, but you’ve given us some very dramatic illustrations on how a person can make some substantial shift in their mindset that can make all the difference in the world.

Weldon Long:  Well, thank you so much for having me, Jay.  I really appreciate it.  It’s been a pleasure talking with you.  And we look forward to seeing you down the road.

Jay Bergers:  Sounds good.  Take care.  Thanks again.

Weldon Long:  Thank you.  Buh-bye.

To find out more about Weldon Long :

Visit his Website here:

http://www.weldonlong.com/

You are invited to recorded  phone interview that I just did with Tony Hsieh CEO of Zappos.  The call was recorded live Friday November 25th 2011 at 4:00 pm Pacific Time.
Enjoy!
Thanks!

Respectfully, Jay Bergers III

Call Transcript:

Jay Bergers:  Welcome everyone, it’s four p.m. my time, its Pacific Standard Time seven p.m. Eastern Standard Time.  I’m here on Black Friday, November 25,^, 2011.  This is Jay Bergers III at jaybergers.com and I have the distinct honor and privilege on Black Friday today to have a brief dialogue and conversation interview with Tony Hsieh, who is a CEO of Zappos.com.  How are you doing today, Tony?

Tony Hsieh:  Great, how are you doing?

Jay Bergers:  I can’t complain probably ate a little bit too much turkey.  Tell me what Thanksgiving was like for you this year?

Tony Hsieh:  My parents came to Vegas from [indiscernible] [0:00:42].  I live in Vegas as my brothers and we ended up having a group of about—it ended up being about 50 of us just hanging out and eating a lot of food.

Jay Bergers:  Does that mean you didn’t have to be behind a hot stove.  You had someone else do all the preparation or did you get involved in the food preparation as well?

Tony Hsieh:  I made the turkey and then everyone else brought a side and so its kind of a pot luck type of thing we do every year.

Jay Bergers:  Nice, nice.  Well, I thought to myself it’s funny because I’ve listened to other people talk about you and Zappos.com.  I had the distinct honor to meet you.  I don’t know if you remember when you guys were doing the delivery—delivering happiness—the bus tour across the country, you guys came and spoke at Web 2.0 with the bus that was parked out there at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco and it was just very fascinating and interesting to meet you and Jenn Lim and the whole team there at the Palace Hotel when you were speaking as one of the keynotes.

Tony Hsieh:  Yes, that was definitely a fun experience that was part of our book tour.  We went on the road last year for three and a half months in the Delivering Happiness bus and that was—I think that was towards the end of our tour.  We went from there to Portland and then Seattle and that was the end of the tour.

Jay Bergers:  For those—the people that are listening on this call and might listen to the recording down the road in the future, there’s a lot of people that say I’ve heard of that Zappos but it’s because my significant other, my spouse, my partner has ordered something from there and we get emails from you guys.  Tell me what is Zappos and what is Zappos all about?  Just give us kind of a thumbnail sketch of what Zappos.com is all about.

Tony Hsieh:  Well we started out in ’99 selling shoes online and today we actually sell a lot more than shoes.  We sell clothing and even beauty products, house ware, kitchenware, and for us it’s definitely evolved overtime.  We went from really focusing on just selling shoes to building the brand to be about the very best customer service and customer experience and the way we do that is by really focusing on company culture as our number one priority.  So our hope we decided if we get the culture right then most of the other stuff like delivering great customer service or building a long-term enduring brand or business will just happen as a natural by-product.

Jay Bergers:  Okay so I’ve had the pleasure of reading your book and I’ve been re-reading it again, “Delivering Happiness,” and I just mentioned a few minutes ago about the Delivering Happiness bus tour.  In the “Delivering Happiness” book, you talk about being in middle school, you talk about your first exposure to studying computer programming including being recommended by a teacher to a course in Pascal and all your different experiences, tell us a little bit if you don’t mind about your early childhood.

One of the stories that really jumped off the page at me that is maybe you’d be willing to share a portion of that story is your first foray into the online marketing world of having your own button business as a child.  Could you just share that story with us briefly?

Tony Hsieh:  Sure.  I guess I’ve been pretty entrepreneurial for most of my life and when I was in middle school I had a business where—it actually wasn’t online, it was a mail-order business where people would send in a photograph and a dollar in a self-addressed stamped envelope and I would turn it into one of those buttons that you pin on like you might find in a presidential campaign.

Jay Bergers:  So they would find you in the Free Stuff for Kids book or was that the Boy’s Life ad that you placed?

Tony Hsieh:  Free Stuff for Kids where you can order free and up to a dollar items and so I basically just wrote a letter to the publisher and said I wanted to be in next year’s edition and they had no idea how old I was or anything and then I found out that they were listing me in the book and that ended up making about—bringing about $200 a month and so that was pretty exciting at the time when I was a kid.

Jay Bergers:  So you were earning $200 a month.  Now what age were you when you started that business?

Tony Hsieh:  Sometime in middle school so I would guess maybe around 12 or so.

Jay Bergers:  Okay and from reading about it in the book that was the business that you eventually passed on to other people in your family.

Tony Hsieh:  Yes, when I went to high school and then I passed it on to my next younger brother and then when he went to high school, he passed it on to our youngest brother.

Jay Bergers:  So I draw a parallel or a comparison.  I don’t know Tony if you’ve ever heard of the story.  I’m sure that you have.  They talk about Nordstrom’s being definitive in customer service over the years and there was that one story about how the guy bought a pair of tires and he returned them to Nordstrom saying he wasn’t satisfied and they gave him his money back but Nordstrom never sold tires and I look at you and I look at Zappos.com as being the online Nordstrom story of the modern day.

Tony Hsieh:  I guess our approach is a little different in that we don’t have one single most story that all the employees know and tell to other people.  For us it’s more about each interaction being its own individual stories and that’s kind of how we built our brand over the years.  It’s really one story at a time, one phone call at a time and so when customers call they talk to one of our customer loyalty representatives who aren’t trying to get the customer off the phone, who aren’t reading from scripts and so on and really our goal is just to have them develop an emotional connection with each customer.  Actually a few months ago, we set a new record for the longest phone call ever which was eight hours and 23 minutes long.

Jay Bergers:  Eight hours and 23 minutes, were they just shooting the breeze and having a personal dialogue with the or were they actually talking about—between the difference in ordering this item or that item?  What was that all about?

Tony Hsieh:  I think it probably evolved over time.  It probably started out as an order and then over time I think they still keep in touch.  It became more of a friendship type of conversation and in press that’s great because really we want to build those emotional connections with our customers.

Jay Bergers:  So correct me if I’m wrong Tony but the call center and the philosophy you have with your employees, many companies out there who outsource their call centers to some other country and they place a very low priority and a low value on those workers and they have a time schedule where they want to get them on the phone and off the phone as quickly as possible.  You at Zappos and your whole philosophy with the call center, with the employees, many people would look at a call center employee and what they’re traditionally paid as an entry-level position that doesn’t have a lot of merit or value but you’re obviously taking a different approach.  Can you talk about your approach to the value of your employees, the value of the call center representatives and your philosophy towards customer service?

Tony Hsieh:  Yeah we really—our number one priority is company culture and so that goes back to making sure employees are happy and making sure that they feel like they’re continuing growing and learning both personally and professionally so not only do we help them with training and mentorship on the career side but we also have someone full time on staff who’s a life coach and basically works with employees and helps them set and achieve whatever personal goals they wanted to set.  It could be anything from weight loss to saving up for a house to really anything.

And what we found is when employees are happy then they’re a lot more passionate and a lot more engaged.  They deliver a better service and ultimately that makes customers happy and when customers are happy they tell their friends and family about us and that’s really how we’ve grown over the years.  It’s just through repeat customers and word of mouth.

Jay Bergers:  So what inspired you to bring on a life coach that you just mentioned on to the team and did that happen when you first joined Zappos or was that something that evolved over the time that you brought on your own personalized version of a Tony Robbins that people could interact with without having to pay an exorbitant monthly fee to get life coaching or get goal setting help like you just mentioned.  How did that come about?

Tony Hsieh:  I think like most things at Zappos it’s very organic.  It wasn’t planned for ahead of time and we didn’t have that from the beginning but just over time as employees came up with ideas and so on for what they like the company to be about and what they like to see in the environment.  We’re always pretty open-minded in trying out new ideas and now it’s become a permanent thing.  It started out as just something to try out on a short-term basis and we found that a lot of our employees really like the whole idea of having a coach for their personal life as well.

Jay Bergers:  Can you share with me a little bit about the core values of—if you want to mention a couple of them people off there with Zappos—you’ve mentioned several times in the call today about the culture, the company culture, looking after your employees, treating them as extremely valuable and important as part of the organization.  Can you just share a little bit about what the core values are?  If you don’t want to mention them all maybe just mention a few and just talk about them very briefly?

Tony Hsieh:  Sure, yeah, and for anyone’s that’s interested, you can just do a Google search for Zappos’ core values and see what they are.  We have 10 core values and they essentially serve as a formalized definition of our company culture and so there are things like pursue growth and learning or deliver wow through service, or be humble and so when we interview people we actually do two sets of interviews.  The hiring manager and his or her team will interview for kind of the standard stuff like looking for fit within the team, relevant experience, technical ability and so on.

And then our HR Department does a separate set of interviews purely for culture fit and so we actually have interview questions for each and everyone of those values.  I’d say probably the one that trips us up the most during the hiring process is the be humble one because there’s a lot of smart talented people out there that are also egotistical and for us it’s just not even a question.  We won’t hire them.  But the conversation at a lot of other companies especially larger companies might be well this person even though he’s egotistical and might be annoying and rub you the wrong way a lot of times he’s going to add a lot of value and therefore we should hire that person.

And that one hire may or may not bring the company culture downhill but I think if you keep making compromises like that over and over and over again that’s why most large companies don’t have great company cultures and for us we don’t want to follow that same path.  Most companies as they get bigger the culture goes downhill and not only do we want to prevent that from happening but we actually want our culture to scale and get stronger and stronger as we get bigger and so that’s why the interview process is so important and then we also build that into performance reviews and it’s really just a big part of everything we do at Zappos.

Jay Bergers:  If my memory serves me correctly, I believe it was you and Sanjay when you got started with LinkExchange you guys went to college together back at Harvard a number of years ago, is that correct?

Tony Hsieh:  Yeah, we ran a pizza business together in college and then after we graduated started LinkExchange.

Jay Bergers:  Wasn’t there somewhat of a direct correlation between your motivation to create this set of core values in terms of when you first started LinkExchange how the company culture—I don’t know if I want to use the word eroded but whatever—what you used to describe it, it sounded like in the beginning you were living, breathing, sleeping under the desk doing all those kinds of things to make LinkExchange the end all, be all and you were just happy to spend all the time at work and then eventually as it grew into more employees you became disillusioned with that.  You want to comment on that at all?

Tony Hsieh:  Yeah it definitely changed a lot over time when it was just 5 or 10 of us that was a lot of fun.  It was kind of your typical dot-com back in the day.  This was in 1996 and as we started growing it was pretty exciting and we started hiring friend and friends of friends and it finally got to the point where we had kind of tapped out our personal network of friends to hire so then we started hiring people based on interviews and resumes and so on which we didn’t have any experience with.  I think we definitely learned a lot through trial and error and I think we did a decent job in terms of hiring people with the right skill sets and experiences but we just didn’t know any better to pay attention to company culture and not everyone would hire.

Jay Bergers:  Speaking of Black Friday, we’re sitting here Tony, we’re talking with you on Black Friday, it’s one of the busiest shopping days of the year online and offline, and I guess I just wanted to ask you in these uncertain times what kind of results do you expect from today and from this quarter with Zappos given the state of the times that we’re in today?

Tony Hsieh:  Well we’ve been lucky in that we’ve continued to grow year over year every year and so for us in the group we’re definitely looking for both this holiday weekend and Cyber Mondays to be hopefully be a record setting time for us as well as the rest of the holiday shopping season where—I guess Cyber Monday is really the big kick-off for us and then everyone in the company including myself we all hop on the phones to help handle that extra volume so it felt so great from a teamwork and culture perspective.

Jay Bergers:  So how do you contrast and compare the level of business and volume that you hope and anticipate to do today on Black Friday versus Cyber Monday?

Tony Hsieh:  It’s interesting because when Zappos first started the media kind of made up Cyber Monday.  It wasn’t an actual big event online and then over the past 12 years each year Cyber Monday has gotten bigger and bigger and it kind of became a self-fulfilling process just because the media keeps talking about it.  It’ll be interesting to see what happens this year but it’s been—it’s definitely changed and so it’s hard to predict exactly how Black Friday will contrast with Cyber Monday for the online realm.

Jay Bergers:  Interesting.  Well, it’s no surprise to me or anybody else that follows you online or follows Zappos online but you’re a big Twitter guy and you’re a big social media person as well as Zappos.  Give us a few insights if you don’t mind regarding how Zappos has become so successful at building a brand arm offline using social media and any suggestion that you might have for someone wanting to do the same thing in their knits or from their business or their own start-up.

Tony Hsieh:  That’s kind of interesting because we never really decided on a social media strategy or anything and for us it’s really just about making sure we hire people whose personal values match our core values and then we just tell them just be yourself and because if you hire people whose personal values match the corporate values then every employee is just automatically living the brand 24/7.  And so, we tell our employees feel free to Tweet whatever you want or put on Facebook whatever you want just really the only rule is just be real and use your best judgment and same thing with conversations over the phone or when reporters come and visit our office we have them take the tour and then afterwards we tell them to walk around and talk to whoever they feel like.

We don’t do really any media training or PR training and so if a reporter talks to attendants and employees they’re not going to get the same sound bites or phrases but what they will find is authenticity in their actions and the passion will come across and so really I guess consistency more in the attitude and in the actual words.  And so that’s our same philosophy with them we don’t really have a special strategy or anything that’s just employees expecting themselves and it just happens to be through Twitter or Facebook or whatever.

Jay Bergers:  So I have some questions of people have mailed in or listed out for me to ask and hopefully we can get to all of them but we’ll try to shoot out of few of them.  We got Cory Shanes from the 24/7 Entrepreneur ask the following question.  How do you distribute your vision policies and goals throughout your organization and to your new hires?

Tony Hsieh:  Well, everyone that’s hired goes through the exact same training as our call center representatives and it’s a four-week training program and all of it is done before you start the actual job that you’re hired for.  And so, whether you’re an accountant, lawyer, or software developer you go through this four-week training program first and that’s when we go over company history, our philosophy about customer service, the influence of company culture and then we have people come in and talk about the different core values and how those values have affected them not only in their work but also in their day to day lives and so that four week program is great for getting everyone on the same page and then in terms of policies we’re pretty anti-policy because usually most policies are used to address the 1% of people or situations at the inconvenience of the other 99% so we’d rather just deal with that 1% than try to come up with policies that make life more annoying and bureaucratic.

Jay Bergers:  Uh-hmm well a gentlemen by the name of Max Fleischer wrote in, asked, “I’m sure the road to a billion dollars had its share of bumps, did at any time the light at the end of the tunnel was so hard to see, what kept you going, Tony?

Tony Hsieh:  Well yeah there are plenty of bumps and I talk about that in the book, “Delivering Happiness,” but I think the main thing is just the people that were—that the culture and the people that are still with the company today it was really this feeling of we’re all in this together and everyone is just really passionate about the company, really believes in what [indiscernible] [0:24:36] and we all supported each other during the tough times and I think that just goes back to showing how important culture is because if I didn’t enjoy the people I was being around then I think all of us would have given up a long time ago.

Jay Bergers:  A young lady by the name of Marcelle Allen of yoursocialmediaconcierge.com asked me the following question.  How do you decide Tony to have the 100% free return policy and would you ever change your company decision on that policy?

Tony Hsieh:  No, it’s one of those things where we just listen to feedback from our customers in the early days and said they felt buying shoes online was pretty risky so we were just trying to help figure out—try to help figure out what would make it less risky from a perception perspective and came up with the idea of offering free shipping both ways and definitely it does affect our bottom line but we really view the shipping cost as our marketing cost.  It’s a way of investing into word of mouth.

Jay Bergers:  So I don’t know if you ever heard of this guy by the name of Charlie Tremendous Jones but he had a quote years ago that he said, you’ll be the same person today in the future and 20 years down the road except for two things, the books that you read and the people that you meet.  I guess I’m curious if you’d be willing to share with us some of the books that you’re reading now or have read that has impacted you and maybe a few role models or mentors, a couple of people that have profound influence on your life Tony.

Tony Hsieh:  Yeah, there’s a lot of great books like when I give presentations I talk about “Good to Great” by Jim Collins and also “Tribal Leadership” by Dave Logan and there’s a couple of other co-authors as well.  “Peak” by Chip Conley is a really good book in terms of—on a personal side, “The Happiness Hypothesis” by Jonathan Haidt is a pretty interesting book because he looks at philosophers and religions and cultures from different time shares and each of them has a different philosophy about what happiness is and how to achieve it but then he compares it with actual scientific research that’s been done and either agrees or disagrees with different parts of their belief.

So that’s pretty [indiscernible] [0:27:11] and the current book I’m or the latest book I finished reading is called, “Triumph of the City,” Ed Glaeser and he looks at cities from all different time period including Rome, New York and Detroit and looks at why some cities thrive and some fail and actually we’re taking a lot of those, the research from that and applying it to what we’re doing here in terms of helping revitalize downtown Las Vegas.  And so, for anyone that’s interested in learning about our revitalization efforts for downtown Vegas you can check out downtownproject.com

Jay Bergers:  I have time maybe just for just a couple of more questions I know you got to take off very soon Adam Packard has a question he talked about, what is the one thing you would do differently if you were starting over and what is your biggest leadership challenge?

Tony Hsieh:  I think the one thing I would do differently is have the core values from day one.  We actually didn’t roll out our core values until five or six years into the company and it was one of those things a lot of us, myself included kind of resisted in the early days because it felt like one of those big corporate things to do and I think the reason we felt that way is because a lot of companies especially the data companies have this thing called core values or guiding principles but usually they’re very [indiscernible] [0:28:44] that kind of read like a press release the marketing department put out.  Maybe you learn about it on a web site or day one of orientation but then it becomes this meaningless plaque on the lobby wall.

And for us we wanted to come up with committable core values and by committable meaning we’re actually willing to hire or fire people based on whether they’re living up to those values completely independent of their actual job performance.  And so when you use that criteria—it’s actually a pretty hard list to come up with and took us a year to come up with our 10 values and my suggestion would be the sooner you start it then the easier your life will be because if you’re starting it when it’s just yourself or a couple of co-founders then basically your company’s core values should just be your personal values and once you’ve figured that out then you’re done so yes that would be my advice.

In terms of the biggest challenge, I would just say I think this is true for any business just finding the right people.  There’s always more things to do and really found that the growth of the business is more constrained by the people that you have other than external factors.

Jay Bergers:  You shared with us about some books that you’ve mentioned.  If you could mention a role model that’s had a profound influence on your life, it could be a family member or someone else that you look up to for guidance and leadership or you’ve been impressed by or influenced by, who might that person be in your life?

Tony Hsieh:  I don’t think there’s any single person but the way I think about it is, no matter who you meet, even if they’re not in the business world there’s something you can learn from them and you just have to figure out what that something is.  And so I try to do that with anyone that I meet.

Jay Bergers:  In closing, every executive and CEO Tony I’m sure has a different system to productivity, organization, goal-setting, a to-do list, the best way to get things done, planning your day-week-month, would you be willing to share with us what strategy or what system you’ve used ever since you came on board Zappos or back in your college days?  What type of system do you use or strategy in terms of prioritizing your day, your week, et cetera?

Tony Hsieh:  I guess I don’t really have a system but I guess the main thing is to realize that you, as an individual don’t scale and so always try to find great people and then hand it over to them even if it’s stuff that—I think initially it can be a little hard letting go of some things that as the company grows you have to be able to hand stuff off to other people.

Jay Bergers:  So you’re talking about delegating things out or maybe not.  What your best at and knowing what your best at and just doing that and focusing your attention on those things and delegating out the rest to competent people around you.

Tony Hsieh:  No, even if you’re the best at it, it’s sometimes—a lot of times don’t make sense to delegate it out because there’s just not enough time in the day to do everything.

Jay Bergers:  Okay.  This is Jay Bergers, I’ve been speaking live on this interview with Tony Hsieh.  Tony I want to thank you for your time and the call.  Just in closing, you talked about Cyber Monday coming up and we’re here in Black Friday, November 25, 2011, what is the best way that people can connect with you or with Zappos or get more information on the Cyber sale going on on Monday or if they want to find out how to order stuff online, where would they go and what suggestions do you have about getting in on the sale?

Tony Hsieh:  You can just go to our homepage which is at Zappos.com and then for any questions that people may have they can email CEO@Zappos.com and also if anyone is interested in getting a copy of the Culture Book which is something that our employees—like about what the Zappos culture means to them we’re happy to send out a free copy of that.  It’s a physical [indiscernible] [0:33:18] so just include your physical name and address when you email CEO@Zappos.com.

Jay Bergers:  And finally if people go to Vegas are you still offering a live tour that you gave to me when I came to Vegas and you had someone pick me up at the airport and you toured me all around the facility in a very small group setting?  Is that still going on there at Zappos?

Tony Hsieh:  Yes. We have one or two hundred people go through our tour every day.  We offer tours Monday through Thursdays and you can just go to the web site tours@Zappos.com to sign up for a tour.

Jay Bergers:  Well I feel a little bit like a little kid in a candy store, it’s been a very distinct honor to be able to have a chance to have a brief conversation with you Tony.  I wish you tremendous success ongoing with Zappos and really thank you for taking the time out to speak to us today.  This is Jay Bergers of jaybergers.com with a conversation with Tony Hsieh.  Tony, thank you so much for your time and I wish you all the best success.

Tony Hsieh:  Yeah, thanks for having me.

Jay Bergers:  Take care, goodbye.

Tony Hsieh:  Take care, bye.

END

To get more info regarding Tony Hsieh or Zappos;  go to their site at:

http://www.zappos.com

Email Tony Hsieh at: ceo@zappos.com
Get a copy of his book “Delivering Happiness” and get the “rest of the story”.

Thanks for your time Tony Hsieh! You are an inspiration!

PS. Anita B. at CLT Zappos dot com is the bomb! My slippers arrived during the call! Whoo hoo! Thanks! Anita

the great Adam Packard has embarked on a journey to read

365 personal development books in one year!

Check out this interview:

Follow his progress here:

http://www.pda365.tv

Enjoy!

Jay

Today’s blog post is a quote from Jim Rohn.

According to the great Brendon Burchard there are Ten Reasons why people do things and/or don’t do things!

1. Future Value:  When we evaluate the impact that it will have on our future success

2.Intrinsic Value: For example “You sensed it when you took on the challenge that you would feel more engaged.” Feel better as a person.

3.Utilitarian Value: I can see how that directly gives me a benefit which is helpful to me to solve a problem. Do this- get and have this.

4.Opportunity Cost: By taking on this challenge what else could I be doing… a.At what cost to my family, friends, etc.

5.Delay Time (gratification delay time)   How long until success happens? I can’t see the reward coming fast enough.

6. Personal Control: Will I take that challenge on-    Might think:  “I can’t make a difference?” which leads to apathy and lack of action.

7.Social Support/ Connection   Will there be cheerleaders around? If there are no other people to support me. “I wanted to but lacked the support and

approval. I’m scared to do that because I can’t do it on my own.

8. Bandwidth:  I’m too busy. There is already too much on my plate! If your plate is already too full; you believe that you are too busy! You’re not too busy-just busy doing the wrong things!

9.Resource Availability: Will I (do I) have the things that I need to take this challenge on? We hesitate because we don’t believe we have the resources to take

this new thing on.

Tony Robbins said:  “It is not about your resources. It’s about your resourcefulness.”

10.Autonomy: to control that challenge or project and yet to put my own uniqueness to it. “Can I be autonomous enough?”

wOw Brendan!  I can’t wait to get new insights tomorrow!!

“Oz never did give nothing to the Tin Man that he did not already have”

A few lyrics to an old song by the band called America.

So what does that got to do with YOU?

What this means is you don’t need some amazing book

or to spend a gazillion dollars on a course to determine

the secret code. All that you need to do is harness the God

given talents and abilities you already have!

Are you more like Tofu or the marinade?

Tofu is kind of bland and takes on the flavor of the seasonings or marinade you surround it with…

If you are more like tofu than you are being influenced by your negative uncle charlie.

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you are more like the marinade than you are influencing people in a positive way.

I suggest you be more like the marinade!