Mindset, Habits, and Principles for an Abundant Life Ft. Ian Koniak | Revenue Reimagined Ep. 012

Ian Koniak's transformation from a top Salesforce AE to a thriving entrepreneur started with a terrifying roller coaster malfunction. This near-death experience shifted his focus from chasing money to serving others, eventually leading him to build a multimillion-dollar sales coaching business. He emphasizes that scaling requires letting go of control, narrowing your business focus, and obsessively managing your time to avoid burnout. A core part of Ian's philosophy is understanding the literal hourly value of your time. By calculating what your Revenue Generating Activities (RGAs) are worth—often over $700 an hour for sales leaders—you quickly realize the cost of administrative busywork. He advises ruthlessly applying the mantra: "Eliminate, automate, or delegate" to anything that falls below your target hourly rate. Finally, Ian shares his operational playbooks for maintaining peak productivity without sacrificing family life. By leveraging Parkinson's Law to enforce strict working hours and using the 12-Week Year framework to ruthlessly prioritize weekly tasks, revenue professionals can execute at the highest levels while maintaining healthy personal boundaries.

Discussed in this episode

• Why teaching English in Venezuela created the foundational skills for successful sales enablement and leadership.
• How being stuck upside down on a roller coaster catalyzed Ian's transition from corporate AE to purpose-driven entrepreneur.
• The strategy of giving away free daily content for a year to build an audience and attract inbound coaching opportunities.
• Why shutting down two profitable lines of business (advisory and B2B training) was necessary to scale his coaching platform past $1 million.
• A formula for calculating your exact hourly rate to prove why doing administrative tasks costs you hundreds of dollars an hour.
• The "eliminate, automate, or delegate" framework for handling repetitive, low-value work.
• How Parkinson's Law proves that setting strict daily boundaries (like stopping work at 6 PM) forces higher efficiency and focus.
• The application of the "12-Week Year" system to plan weekly priorities and avoid dopamine-driven distractions.

Episode highlights

1. 0:00 — Welcome and Ian's teaching background
2. 3:15 — The roller coaster near-death experience
3. 6:45 — Making daily videos to serve others
4. 10:30 — Transitioning out of founder-led sales
5. 14:20 — Applying the E-Myth and cutting revenue streams
6. 19:00 — Calculating the true value of your RGA time
7. 23:45 — Eliminate, automate, or delegate admin work
8. 27:10 — Parkinson's law and strict boundaries
9. 31:50 — Back to basics: Sales Enablement 101

Key takeaways

• Calculate your true hourly value.
• Eliminate, automate, or delegate admin.
• Apply Parkinson's Law with boundaries.
• Niche down to scale up.
• Prioritize foundational selling skills.

Transcript

First year in business was 2021. I did about 500k in revenue, like 550k. And I was so spread th I was traveling a lot, I was not focused on one thing and I I made a decision at the end of 2021 to shut down two of the three lines of business. Welcome back to another episode of the revenue reimagined podcast.

Our guest today is none other than Ian Koniak, the president and founder of Ian Koniak sales coaching. You are as creative as I am with my business name. Um, and Ian helps AE's go from good to great by mastering the mindset, habits and skills that are needed to perform at the highest level in sales. As a speaker, trainer, and expert on all things enterprise sales, Ian has led national training workshops for Fortune 500 companies, and his message has been shared in a variety of media including leading top 100 podcasts.

With over 100 million dollars, holy smokes, sold in his career, Ian was a for the former number one enterprise AE at the small little company called Salesforce, and is the acting Dean of Pavilion's Enterprise sales school. Ian, thanks so much for joining us, man. I'm happy to be here. It's a long time coming, so thanks for having me on.

It is. Welcome, Ian. Welcome, Ian. And Ian's got not feeling so well today, so we're super uh, grateful for him to stay on and uh, and do the podcast today.

So, uh, we're gonna start off with a Zinger. Um, so let's uh, let's reimagine your role a little bit. So you've done sales for a long period of time. What other role besides sales would you take on as a go-to market leader in the go-to market, um, realm?

Well, it's interesting, um, before I did sales, I was a teacher. I taught English in Venezuela. Wow. And ironically that teaching actually helped me as a sales leader when I was running um sales at Rico, which I had uh 70 sales reps and 10 sales managers under me.

And now in my own business, I actually coach and teach content for training. So, I think being a good teacher really helps in terms of teaching your team how to do their jobs, especially sales people who may be green or new, but also teaching customers about the problems that you solve, teaching um, you know, in all areas of content, with the areas that you can help as a as a business. So, um, I think being a teacher served me really well in my, um, in my capacity now as a CEO and as a um sales leader and as a sales rep. So I would probably like in enablement.

I was just gonna say like like you're you're leading sales enablement, right? That's right. Yeah. That's kind of what I'm selling right now is sales enablement.

I call it sales coaching, but it's uh, you have to be able to teach in a way that people learn and people connect, use stories. You have to be able to connect with your audience or else you're gonna lose the room, right? So I, I, I think that there's a lot of value to teaching and and speaking in general. So I love that.

I think that, you know, there's this I I grew up, grew up. I worked for a company for a long time that had an enablement team of like 25 to 35 people depending on the size. And we did a really good job of training reps. I find that most companies now, and Dale and I play a lot in the startup space, don't have enablement, right?

You might have, you know, a manager who was, you know, promoted, you know, recently, uh, maybe they know nothing about management. They were the top AE, so they should be a leader. Um, but a lot of founders who are trying to transition from founder led sales and everything that you're talking about teaching and telling a story, um, is so important and something that doesn't get done well enough. So you recently, not recently, but you pivoted from working in corporate America to doing your own thing and building, you know, a a massive business by yourself and coaching reps.

What what brought that on? Like, I I I know my reason, I know Dale's reason, but what was your epiphany that was like, I'm done working for Big America? Well, it was uh, more like a near death experience. It was um, sometimes what I call them are god shots or god moments when you just have something happen in your life that wakes you up and makes you realize that life can be very brittle and fragile.

Um, it could be losing somebody, it could be, you know, potentially facing death yourself. And that that's what happened to me in 2018. I um, I got stuck upside down on a roller coaster and I was at the peak of the of the the the drop and it was one of these flying coasters where the You're you're not you're not kidding. You're being dead serious right now.

Yeah. There's footage of it. Yeah. footage online.

people were filming it from the bottom. We were up there for 30 minutes hanging 180 feet in the air and I was staring straight down with nothing below me except a bar, a lap bar. And it was the scariest moment in my life and at that Holy Yeah. at that point it was it was like a It was a really it was an interesting day.

I had been reading a book that morning, um, called The Five Regrets of the Dying. So I don't think anything is coincidence. I think things happen for a reason. And that was already my on my mind.

It was a book called Bonnie by an author named Bonnie Ware. And and she interviewed um people on their deathbed on in hospice care and basically boiled it down to the top five regrets. And one of those regrets is not being living a life true to yourself and not doing the thing you really wanted to do. And when I was up there, I just came to this realization that my entire life I had been living for my own selfish reasons.

I had been living with the pursuit of money and the pursuit of recognition and status. And if I were to fall on that lap bar or that coaster were to break at that time, I would have been a blip in this universe. And all of these kind of, I'll call them gifts or um at that point I had been number one rep at salesforce. I had been really successful and I also had overcome a lot of hardship, you know, and I had essentially this this you know, this array of tools and learnings and teachings that was solely existing inside of me.

And so I thought if I died, all of these lessons and, you know, um, teachings would have been been dissolved in that moment. And I said I I don't care what it takes. Fortunately, the roller coaster after 30 minutes, um, Well, when I was up there, I don't want to skip the story, but I started praying. I said, God, please get me I I'm having heart palpitations as you say this.

Like it was one of the scariest things I've ever been through. But I started praying and I said, God, um, please get me down. I promise I'll start using my gifts to serve others rather than being selfish just to pursue money. And then the coaster didn't stop.

It was still it was still sta it was still still. It didn't go again. I said, God, I promise I won't wait anymore. I'll just just get me down.

I'll do it now. And I kid you not, that that moment that the the coaster took off and I'm like, well, I guess I'm on the hook, you know, so at that point, that was my journey into I guess entrepreneurship and and I kept that promise and that was over five years ago. So, the rest is history. Holy cow.

How many how many AEs do you think you've helped over that time? Like so you you come off that coaster and you're like, okay, and now I need to hold my promise that I just made to God. Like how many AEs have you uh helped through that? Well, it's interesting because I started without a coaching business.

So my promise, I didn't have a business, I didn't have an offer, I didn't have a go-to market strategy. It was just I need to start serving. So I got a book by Gary Vaynerchuk and it was about social media marketing and it was talking about Instagram and I basically um said, you know what, here's what I'm going to do to serve others. I'm just gonna make a video every single day.

One video a day, a short video to share some of my learnings and um, and we'll see what happens. And so the videos kind of took off. You know, I got a lot of followers, they got a lot of views, and I didn't get any clients per se, right? I I I basically was just giving away stuff and um, but what ended up happening is opportunities started coming to me.

So there's a really good quote by Jim Rohn, which I love, which it it says this. It says success is not something you pursue. Success is something you attract by becoming a more attractive person. So what I did in that next year in 2019 is I started becoming a person who gave stuff away, who was really bringing value to others without necessarily expecting a return.

And I was not doing it for others. I was doing it for my promise. And so what ended up happening is for one reason or another, I started attracting opportunities. In Salesforce, they wanted me to go speak in different SKOs, they wanted me to train on my secrets.

And then coaching clients actually reached out. They said, hey, you know, do you can you coach me? Can you help me? And I picked up my first couple clients in 2019, very very little revenue.

But that's kind of where it all started and it was uh, I I mean the views have been reached like the views of my videos. I'm probably north of five million views in in my YouTube channel, in my LinkedIn. I mean, I have 50,000 followers. I post every day.

So I'm reaching a lot of sales people. But as far as people that have like been through my either my programs or I've spoken at SKOs or signed up for my courses, it's it's definitely in the thousands. Um, as far as people have consumed my content, it's definitely in the millions. So, I'd say paid customers, thousands at this point.

Yeah, that's not, that's not always about paid customers. What? It's not always about paid customers. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing.

For people I reach, I I get messages every day that people from people that aren't my customers saying how, you know, my video inspired them or got them into sobriety or whatever. It's it's those are the things that really honestly keep me doing the free content that I do where, you know, I don't expect anything in return still. The messages like that, I find for me are so much more valuable and listen, I love money as much as the next guy, right? But someone reaching out and being like, this that you said had this impact and caused me to change my life.

Like that is so powerful and comes back and I think it pays in spades more than money any time of the day. You um, so Ian, you you you've built a business, right? It's not just you now. You you have an AE.

Um, I think I heard you say, maybe I'm wrong, that you have a BDR as well. Um, so you have kind of single-handedly transitioned from founder led sales. Like everything that we help founders do all day long, albeit on a much larger scale, like you've done. And I think there's a lot of similarities whether it's your coaching business transitioning from founder led sales or a founder who just, you know, is bootstrapped and is trying to transition from founder led sales.

What was like, what was the hardest part of that for you? Cuz giving up control to me is so hard. I I'm curious what it was. So hard.

Like he can't he can't give up control to anything, so. I control what Dale wears. I I dress him every day. You should do the enegram test.

You might be an eight. An eight, the biggest fear is feeling helpless or out of control. And that's what drives every action. So this is this is not the Adam J show, but very quickly, so I was getting a haircut yesterday because I have so much hair and the barber's wifi was down and I actually called Dale afterwards.

I was dark for an hour and I was having such this is I I need to see a therapist for this. Like I'll fully own that. I was having such anxiety of what am I gonna miss? I'm not in control, something is gonna go wrong.

And you know what I came out and guess what? The world was just fine. It was just fine. Um, gosh, I I guess part of my it's so the transition I'll I'll talk about, first I wanted to just share one story.

Um, the biggest deal I ever closed was a 12 million dollar deal. Yeah. And in the in the peak of that deal, this was when I was at salesforce. I had a trip booked for Alaska and it was a cruise.

And we were probably a few weeks away from closing this and there was legal going on, there was business value services going on to create a business case. There was engineering. There was all this stuff and I got on the boat and they were going to charge me like 100 bucks wifi a day. And out of principle, I was like, I'm not that's such a rip off.

I'm just not going to do it. Screw you, guys. And so I called my team and I kind of had set up the pieces in place before I left, but I called my team. I'm like, I'm gonna be offline for a week, you guys.

You guys gotta execute on these key priorities. And I genuinely let go and I was with my family, I was with my wife and her her family, our one-year-old at the time. And this was um, this was a big lesson for me because when I got back, not only was everything fine, everything was better than when I was there. So sometimes things are actually better when you let people do their jobs.

And I've tried to tell Adam that all the time, but Yeah. Yeah, it doesn't it doesn't doesn't let people, you know, you trust people. It's it's hard though because again, you you feel that like angst of like, I need to, if you want something done right, you do it yourself. And you probably will do it better than maybe your salesperson or other people on your team.

But here's the reality. We only have so much time in the day. And if you want to scale a business, you have to be able to allocate your time into the most valuable um places. And I'm reading a book right now and it's uh called The E-Myth Revisited for small business owners.

And it's really all about working on the business versus in the business. And I I really realized it pretty quickly where I was just so much in the business that I couldn't grow and scale the business. So I decided when I first started my business, I had three um lines of revenue that I I had. I had um, I had what was called advisory services where I would probably do something similar to maybe what you guys do and go into small startups and advise them on go-to market strategy and sales playbook and building out their teams.

I had that was one division. I had um, uh, coaching business that I did. Um, where I had like one-on-one clients and then I had, um, I had a a third line of business where it was doing like keynotes and um speaking workshops. Right?

So it was like that's the best that's the best line of my opinion, that's the most fun line of business. Yeah, it is it is pretty fun. Um, so what I realized is I was just taking revenue wherever I can get it. Private coaching here, advisory here, and then a workshop here, and here's what happened, okay?

My first year in business was 2021. I did about 500k in revenue, like 550k. And I was so spread th I was traveling a lot. I was not focused on one thing and I I made a decision at the end of 2021 to shut down two of the three lines of business.

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Visit www.attention.tech. And I said I'm only gonna focus on coaching.

But if I focus on coaching, I can't just do one-on-one because that doesn't scale. So I came up with with the help of some mentors and, you know, my advisors. I I came up with a strategy that would be a um, multiple offer for coaching. I had bronze coaching, which is online, which is just purely selling a course where it would not take any time, effort or energy except building the course, which was a huge endeavor in itself.

Okay. The second tier was group coaching. So I would create a mastermind where people could come in together, we'd meet every week and I'd coach via Zoom to a group of people and the third level would be one-on-one, which would include the online course and the group sessions and some one-on-one sessions. And I launched this April of 2022.

Now, I I had a hunch that this um, you know, was was the way to go. But what ended up happening was in 2022, I was still kind of like, um, weaning off my revenue that was almost all coming from the B2B side. Some coaching, but mostly B2B. And so I still had a couple of those clients.

So I ended up launching and I sold about a million dollars in this new online coaching portal platform. And then the other business was 500k of the B2B stuff, right? So now it doubled what the revenue was. Well, this year we're we're we're recording this on August 10th.

My revenue is over 1.3, I think 1.35 and it's only the online business. I haven't done any coaching apart from, I'm sorry, I haven't done any B2B work apart from the Pavilion Enterprise sales school, which I teach, but that's not, you know, that's not a big big part of the revenue.

So I knew that going all in and focusing on that specific niche was going to, um, I had a really, really strong idea that that was gonna scale the best of the other two, cuz advisory was dependent on me and the workshops was dependent on me, unless I wanted to set up some training program. So that thing I can scale, that thing I can do and it turned out, you know, knock on wood that that was the right bet. And now I get to build that as a company that can be three to five million based on how do we take that to to more people and, you know, build out our affiliate program, build out our sales force, drive more traffic to, you know, inbound calls, et cetera. So now I'm kind of treating it as a SaaS company.

And it's really fun. I greatly enjoy it versus being thinly spread in all these different revenue directions. Yeah, and you're you're the second guest that actually talked about the E-Myth revisited. We had a a similar conversation, um, with John Boros.

He said the same thing. He said, like, as a trainer or someone that is doing B2B consulting, like they want you, and so you can never really scale outside of it. Like as you build more people into your business, it's very difficult because if they, if you're buying Ian, you're buying Ian to come do the work versus anything else. The quality control is impossible.

I mean, as much as you want to train someone, it's you and your unique approach, methodology and even personality that makes people want to work with you. So you can do that really well in coaching, but in the B2B space, I mean, either you're going to be traveling all the time. It just doesn't scale past like a million, a million and a half, whereas the group program scale really well to three to five easily. No, you're right.

Like I, Dale and I talk about this a lot. Like I I think we both love coaching. I love coaching new leaders. Um, from a financial standpoint, it doesn't make sense.

You you need so many of them to hit that revenue mark. And from a time standpoint, it it's it's brutal one-on-one. So I I applaud you for that. You know, one of one of the things that you talk about a lot is like mindset and habits, right?

Like you have to have the right mindset, you have to have the right habits in order to be successful. And I think whether you're an account executive, whether you're a BDR, whether you're a founder that's transitioning from founder led sales, it comes down to mindset and habits. Talk to us a little bit about that and like what do you think are like the must haves in the revenue world to make it? Because revenue is changing, like you gotta have certain things or you're not gonna survive it right now.

Yeah, I think from a from a sales rep's perspective, I well, again, for revenue, let me take a step back. For anybody who is tasked with running revenue or driving revenue, your time is extremely valuable. When I think about the mindset, it starts with knowing the value of your time, literally to the hour. And so if I if I go through an exercise, really simple, really simply.

And this is how I priced out my program, my coaching. If I go through a simple exercise, I'll just use it for um a sales leader. What does it really, really successful CRO make these these days for example? 5 550 a year in today's market.

Dale, would you agree with that? Yeah, I think I think that's a fair, fair assessment. Okay. So if if a CRO, if you think about the core qualities of a CRO, what are the or I'm sorry, the core activities which drive revenue that CROs need to focus on?

What would you say those are? I'm just going through this exercise so anyone can do it for the sake of the audience. So what would be like the revenue generating core activities that a CRO would need to do to to really drive revenue in their in their startup, in their business, whatever level they're at. Come on, Dale, test your skills.

What does a CRO do? Yeah, I you know, build out the sales process. Like have a process for your execution sales. Okay.

Build up the sales process. What else? Would you say developing and coaching people would be important? Developing and coaching senior leaders, bringing together, uh bridging the gap between sales marketing and success.

Yep. Understanding the clients and and how they buy and why they're gonna buy, so you can train. It it comes back to training. It's funny.

It's onboarding, training, coaching, Yeah. So so those would be called, we would call activities that generate revenue. Maybe they're not generating immediate revenue. Immediate revenue generating activities would be meeting with customers and actually helping the team close, especially if they're in a smaller company, right?

Where where they need to get involved with the customers. But the the simple exercise is this, okay? If you look at a CRO's calendar or it could be for AEs or VPs of sales, it doesn't matter. How much time in a given day are spent specifically building out the sales process, developing and coaching people, sales, um, you know, driving training and onboarding, um, going and and bridging the gap with marketing, right?

If we look at what is spent there versus what is spent on we're going to call them lower value activities, okay? Maybe what would you estimate in a given eight or nine or 10-hour work day? How much time is spent on those activities? Purely on those versus anything else?

My gut is like two hours out of a 10 eight 10-hour day. Yeah, I was gonna say two to three hours. Okay. So it's funny you mention that because those are the activities that they need to be working on.

Well with sales reps that I with sales reps that I coach, what I call them is RGAs, or revenue generating activities. It's really not much different from sales leader. So with sales reps, the activities are creating, advancing and closing pipeline. Yep.

Those are the only things you're paid to do in sales. If you don't do those things, you're wasting your time. Everything else is noise and you're spending time on the noise instead of on what's RGAs, okay? So I go through this exercise with sales reps and ironically, it's really two to four hours, so it's similar.

So let's just use three hours, okay? for this example. 550,000 is what we're working with. You take someone who works three hours a day on revenue generating activities, you multiply it by five days a week, multiply that by 48 weeks in a year.

You have 720 hours actually spent on income producing activities or activities that drive revenue. Divide that by 550,000 divided by 720. Their hourly rate is $764 per hour. So if they're doing something that's not worth 764 hours, dollars an hour, they're costing their company, themselves and their their team money.

So, is this activity worth 764 hours dollars an hour? If not, say no to it or delegate it. So you can focus on the core activities. That is the mindset and actually the habits that simply, if you just do that and nothing else, everything changes.

If you get that two to three hours to six, seven hours and really get good at delegating, at filtering the noise, at hiring people that can do some of those lower value activities, you're going to thrive because you're working in your genius. So I think this is so relevant not only for AEs, but let's take it all the way up to founders. When you're trying to transition and founders want to be involved in every single thing. They want to be on every call, in every meeting.

What is that hourly rate and what could you delegate that you should have other people leading and trusted business leaders who really can take what would take you an hour and a half at that rate and bring it down to 30 or 40 minutes, so the time could be so much more productive. I love Ian that you said revenue, revenue, revenue generating activities. I I say something very similar. Like if if it doesn't produce revenue, I don't want you doing it.

I despise admin work for sellers. Um, because it doesn't it doesn't bring money in the door. Yeah, so so here's the question, okay? If you're doing something repetitive over and over again, the question is, do I need to be doing it?

If you don't, then just eliminate it. But if if you do need to be doing it, can it be automated? Or can it be delegated? Right?

And those usually if you say, can I eliminate it, automate or delegate? If you answer that for things that are low value, the answer is typically yes. So my my um mentor, a guy named Rory Vaden, he's fantastic. He founded Brand Builders Group, which I followed their playbook to a tee, um to grow my business.

He has a a great Ted Talk and it's called Multiply Your Time. Definitely worth watching. And he says the essence of the Ted Talk is spend time today doing things that will save you time tomorrow. So I spend a lot more time now, when I see something that I shouldn't be doing to either hire someone or automate it or eliminate it.

That's or delegate it, right? So I have eight people on my team now. Now they're contractors. They're not all full-time, but I have someone doing my video editing because I don't need to be doing that.

I make a video and they make shorts out of it. I have a BDR now who actually is doing a great job, doing appointment setting and doing some outbound messaging. I have a salesperson that's taking the calls. I have a marketing person that's doing my email newsletter.

He's also doing my LinkedIn, repurposing some stuff that analyzing it, repurposing content that does really well and reposting. I have someone who um is a developer, who's enhancing my online program. I have an event planner that's working with me. And I have um, a virtual assistant, who does like all my TDS tasks that I need to just get done.

I also have an accountant that is doing all my bookkeeping. So I have this great team so that I could focus on growing the business and coaching. Now, I'm still again in the business because I'm delivering, but ultimately I'm trying to get out of the one-on-one stuff or at least minimize it so I can build and enhance the the group program even more and it's it's just I put a cap on it. I say this, I'm not taking more clients because I only have this much time.

So that's kind of the second principle is spend time today on things that'll save you time tomorrow. In in the in the third principle, which I love is something um, it's it's uh, it's called Parkinson's Law. And Parkinson's Law states that work expands to fill the time allotted, okay? So if you have a task that, you know, you give three hours to, you'll spend three hours on it.

But if you only have 30 minutes to do that same thing, you're actually going to work with more focus and more intention and put away the distractions to get it done. So. Absolutely. With Parkinson's Law, what I've what I've done is I've created very very strict boundaries in my work day where you asked earlier, Adam, how do you let go?

Well, the answer is I I've I've decided that I'm starting work at eight and I'm done by six and in between from 12:00 to 1:00, I'm taking a lunch with my with my wife and my family. And I stick to those boundaries. And what's happened is I've that forces you to pick what you're gonna focus on and prioritize what you're gonna focus on, okay? Um, and by doing that, not only do you work more efficiently, but you can choose where you're spending your time in those higher value activities.

So that to me is is really important is like if you give yourself the weekend, you'll you'll work on the weekend. If you give yourself a week I'm selling more than I I would bet 90% of founders within two years. I'm over two million. I'll be an Inc 5000 company next year, okay?

Because I am efficient and I'm very intentional with how I how and where I spend my time and it's not coincidence. It's because I study time management. I work on myself. I'm very committed to my family and I'm gonna do this without I want to show people you can run a very successful business without getting a divorce or without, you know, having your kids raised by the nanny.

So I I see that a lot. Yeah. That's why I put Do Not Disturb on when Adam tingles me 400 times a day. I'm like, I'm in deep focus, leave me alone.

Yeah, deep work. That's right. Deep work. So that's kind of like the mindset and habits.

I I know I touched on a lot, but those are kind of the three of the guiding principles that I use. And I have a lot of tools. It's amazing. No, they're they're all valuable, right?

And at the end of the day, like you have to have the right mindset to be successful, no matter what your role is. And I love how you talk about spending time with your family and like I I'm good at time management. I'm not great at it. Like I block out time to pick up my kid from school.

Like that's non-negotiable, but I do find myself. I used to pride myself in saying like, oh, I can multitask, right? Like I can talk and I can, you know, do the slack message and respond to the email and at the end of the day, I was good at a lot but great at nothing because I wasn't focusing on anything. When you get really nuanced up to your point, I could do this from 8:00 to 8:30 and it's got to get done by 8:30, you're going to do a whole lot more than oh, it's got to get done by noon.

Yeah, 100% and and the other question is like, okay, while you're doing those things that are outside of work, are you preoccupied with work? Are you thinking about what's next? Are you thinking about That that's the other thing is like, what is the quality of those relationships or engagements? And I think again, for me, it's a lot easier to turn it off when I can tell myself I've done all I can within the time that I've allotted.

It's really hard to turn it off when I when I when you just roll like it's just rolling. Like you have no boundaries. The boundaries are super important. Um Yeah.

And and just knowing you're like doing all you can. I think that's You get to a place where you say I'm doing all I can. I prioritize. So this last system is a system I use called the 12-week year, which is every single um, week.

I I create in the beginning of the week or on Sunday night, I create all the things I want to do and then I rank them in order of priorities and this has been I've been using this for about three years and this is how I grew and scale my business. It really is magical because it forces you to plan and prioritize what's most important, especially where everyone watching on YouTube is pausing their screen and taking taking a picture of that document so that they could steal it. I can I can give you guys the document. I can give it to And I'm I'm going to set some boundaries and tell Dale that he is no longer allowed to message me at 10 o'clock at night.

Not allowed, Dale. Not allowed. But that's how I I mean it really is like an exercise in planning. This is most important.

I do that once a week and then my lower brain that wants to go to dopamine, wants to go to distractions or busy work, whatever, has this as a guidance saying, nope, your higher brain said to do these things. So I I know what I need to be doing cuz it's already been planned out by my my smarter self, if you will. We all have these two brains if if Yeah. And at the time you had some thinking power.

Um That's right. I mean, I've learned so much today. And and one of the things that we talk about why we started this podcast was giving more than we receive. It was we feel super lucky.

So you're you've offered up something free to the audience. So um, please give the audience what you uh, what you want to provide. Yeah, I I um, I'm offering a 30-minute free coaching session. So I don't do a lot of those but I am I am signing up because with everything you dropped today, I want that.

Um I start I I charge $1,500 an hour for coaching. So it's worth a good amount. It's an incredible incredible um, value, incredible gift where someone um, is gonna learn so much. I think this might be the highest ticket value item we've had so far.

Uh, we're gonna have to do a little something special. This isn't gonna go to some random newsletter subscriber. So make sure make sure if you do get this coaching, you come prepared. Come in with your questions.

Come in with areas that you need help with. It's not, hey, great to meet you. Here's our coaching session. Like if you want to learn from someone who's done it and who's doing it, come with your with your Maybe maybe the maybe the thing is they gotta ask a question in the comments so that we can like see who's gonna ask some of the best questions to uh come prepared.

Yeah. I coach lots of founders, lots of sales leaders, so yeah, just uh come prepared. Adam J is coming to spend 30 minutes with the end. We're gonna take you away for yourself.

I'm gonna I'm gonna take it for everyone. As we wrap up, Ian, I'd love to throw some uh some rapid fire at you. You game? Yeah.

All right, here we go. What song would best describe your revenue strategy? So right now what's coming to me is that song. I don't even know who sings it.

It's my life, it's now or never. And I can That is um, that is Bon Jovi. Um. So it's now or never.

In other words, like go all in. Like stop waiting for perfect and go commit every single day to what you want. So that's coming through my head right now. I love it.

I love it. Unplanned, unscripted. Love it. Uh if you had a crystal ball, which one revenue trend or strategy that you see taking hold in the next 12 to 18 months?

Man, the the sequences I see right now are beyond awful coming out. And if that's what humans are paid to do, then I would sign up for AI and improve it any day of the week. So I see AI taking over some of the BDR type positions in in the near future because what I'm getting is just crap. It's unpersonal, it's generic, it's terrible and I I I think a robot could write better than most of what I get.

Or maybe a robot is writing it. I don't know. But that's it. It all starts with, hi, Ian, I hope this email finds you well.

Um, it it's garbage. Garbage. You get 'em every day. Garbage and please don't unless you want me to block you and unsubscribe you and report you as spam.

So you can only choose one. Are you gonna focus on customer retention or customer acquisition? And let let me ask that a little differently. Not for your business, in the scheme of revenue today, should the focus be on customer retention or customer acquisition?

Gosh, it depends on the type of business. I mean, I have to answer it in the lens of sales because that's my background and say cast customer acquisition because without customers, the business is dead. But if you're a SaaS company and you need to be sticky, you better make sure your product works, you better make sure there's adoption and customer attention is right there with it. Now, my business, again, is buy us because people sign up for a year of coaching.

Yes, well, I'd love to have me in their corner forever, right? Some people just might be committed for a year. It's not core to their business actually running, right? So, um, that's I'm focused on both, but a little more leaning towards customer acquisition to be to be honest.

I love that. I love that. Um, what's uh so earlier in the show, you talked about you were gonna go out of sales and go as uh sales enablement leader. Tomorrow morning, you wake up.

What's the first thing you do as the sales enablement leader of the new organization? Man, I would I would uh have them all sign up to my course. I wouldn't build it out. I really wouldn't.

I would find really, really good trainers and bring in the outside. The problem with sales enablement is it's very skewed towards product or our specific. I mean, I know that's I'm not joking. Like I would find something that's focused on selling skills.

Cuz all the enablement out there is like on the product or the pitch deck or, you know, here's our process. Whereas like what people need now is selling skills. How do you do discovery? How do you actually have a human human conversation?

How do you talk to people? How do you actually propose and be direct? What what is good communication look like? What is good um email copywriting look like?

There's so much actual basic skills, which the fundamentals are being neglected right now. And it's really scary. 101. Get back to sales 101 people.

Sales 101. I would do selling skills training. And if I couldn't do it all myself or didn't have capacity, I would I would get some help. That's for sure.

I love it. Ian, thank you so much. There was so much value dropped in this. Where uh where could people find you?

How could they follow you? Where uh what's the best way to find you, man? So, two places. One is LinkedIn.

I'm posting uh all the time on LinkedIn every day. If you like my content, follow me on LinkedIn. Subscribe, um to my YouTube channel. I put new video trainings every every week out.

If you're interested in coaching or training or um having your team coach with me potentially, um go to untapyoursalespotential.com, untapyoursalespotential.com and then you could read all about the courses and programs. We do both teams and we do individuals.

Awesome. Ian, thank you so much. This was great. Thank you, man.

Appreciate it. My pleasure. It's a lot of fun.