Making Conversations about discernible deeds Count

{( speakerName('A') )}

The first 30 years of my life was in Chicago, and my father was a milkman. So as a milkman, it's one notch under middle class that he worked for himself, had his own truck and delivered milk. And back then, milk came in glass gallons and probably went to plastic because all the ones I broke helping him five years old. I remember getting up in the morning, three in the morning, and he'd go chop up ice, these six foot high blocks of ice he had to chop up to put on top of the milk because all the delivery trucks, none of them were refrigerated. Only the big 18 wheelers had refrigeration back then. He had to put ice on top of the milk so he could deliver it all day long. And I've fond memories of that, but it was very humble. Nothing unusual about the upbringing, that kind of thing. And then at 16, I went out to be my first big step towards success, and I became a janitor. I didn't mind being a janitor because business was always picking up. What!?! Anyway, so here I was at 16, and I had two extraordinary events happen relating with other people while I was 16 years old. The first was there was a movie out, and it's actually a pretty good view. And when I say the lady's name, it won't mean anything to anyone until I've mentioned the movie and make the movie reference. Then I'll go, oh, okay, I know who that is. At 16 years old I was able to be bonded, which means insured. So that means if my buffer as a janitor hit some piece of equipment, insurance company would pay for it. Right? So that allowed me to be in expensive buildings and expensive equipment and also expensive homes. And one of the homes I cleaned every single Wednesday, I was there cleaning her house. Back then, it was a million dollar mansion. She had a full time maid, full time Butler, Rolls Royce in the garage. And this was when I was 16, and her name was June Martino. Now, the name doesn't mean anything until someone might have seen the movie. And it was called the Founder. Michael Keaton plays Ray Kroc. And it's about McDonald's.

{( speakerName('B') )}

I've just watched that the weekend!

{( speakerName('A') )}

Okay, well, here's what's amazing. First I want to say I lived the whole experience because I lived in Oakbrook, which is where the world headquarters for McDonald's was. And in the movie, they talk about McDonald's number one. And that was in Des Plaines. We drove by that 200 times or more because it was the end of our milk route every day when I was a little kid with my father. So I witnessed all of this. And June Martino lived in this place called Ginger Creek. It was a suburb of Oakbrook and right next to where I lived. In the beginning of the movie, it says, this is based on a true story. It's true. It's based on true story. It's not the true story. I mean, in fact, there's so much Hollywood spin, and Ray is painted the way he is. Not that way and was not that way. That's all Hollywood spin to get the listener pulled in. And they have sort of a rough guide to make drama. He wasn't even that way. But there are many events that are nodded to that did actually occur during the time frame in the movie. In the movie, Michael Keaton, playing Ray Kroc, talks to a lady outside his office.. June this. June that. That lady is the lady whose house I cleaned every Wednesday.

{( speakerName('B') )}

She went on to become President, didn't she?

{( speakerName('A') )}

Well, when I met her, she had the third most controlling stock in McDonald's. She was actually the first woman to ever trade on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Turner was the man who became ultimately the chairman of McDonald's, Fred Turner. And then it was the man that was from Tasty Freeze that became the President of the real estate company. And those things, by the way, were noded to it, and they were pretty much accurate. But one day I was cleaning June's house because I was in every Wednesday. One of the things that was amazing to me, Wendy, was how approachable she was. I always thought to be successful. And I don't know where this came from. I was wrong, grossly wrong. But I thought to be successful, you had to be me only and be willing to push people down and grab and take and fight your way. And she was so the opposite. It wasn't even funny. The other extreme right, so approachable, so friendly. I mean, even if I was buffing the floor in a room in her home and she walked through and I didn't look up because I was buffing the floor, she would say, Hi. I mean, just that kind of person. So one day I got up all my nerve shaking in my janitorial boots to approach her. You want to talk about conversations? And I went up to her and I said, Hi, June. She said, Hi. She knew who I was. She saw me every Wednesday. And I said, Can I ask you a question? She said, sure. I said, could you tell me about it? And she said, well, what's that? And I said, well, the whole McDonald's thing. I'm not kidding. Wendy. That lady in the movie, of course, that's not really her other than you see her real picture at the end, right towards the credit, put her arm around me, brought me in the kitchen and the entire day told me the entire story. Even had the maid and butlers bringing us food, so she could keep telling me the story. They're sitting in the kitchen where they prepare the food. It was interesting because she started the story where she worked for Ray as when he was a milkshake mixer salesman. It was Prince Castle sales selling the milkshakes and the milkshake mixers. So she starts the story there because that's when she was working for him and all the way through. And then she tells me about a part that is nodded to in the movie. There's a part in the movie where June goes to Ray and says, "Ray, we got a little problem. We don't have any money". He can't believe it. And he says, what do you mean? We have all these? And that causes him to call the brothers and they have this drama scene. I want more percentage, I need more percentage, etc. And he signs on the phone, that isn't how the event happened, but the event itself did happen. So she told me Ray didn't have any money. He was out of money. There was no money in the till. There was no money in the company. So we made an agreement that I would keep working for him for no pay. And he would pay me in worthless worth less than zero company stock. And he would take the bill collectors and the bill collectors were calling me personally for money. He would take the phone calls. So I just asked her, I said, June, why did you do it? I said, I'm 16 years old and I'm a janitor. I work paycheck to paycheck. If I don't get my check on Friday, I'm not showing on Saturday. I need my check. Why did you work for nothing? I would never do that. And right then Wendy, she stared at me with this blank look on her face, eyeball to eyeball, and I realised she just left the room even though she's staring at me. And here I am, I'm 16 years old and I'm talking to June Martino, the icon. Everyone knew who she was in the area when I met her. As she's staring at me, I'm going because it seemed like 30 minutes was like maybe 15 seconds. But I realised I just asked her a question no one ever asked her before. Everyone wanted to know what happened, but no one wanted to know why. And I just asked her, why did you do it? And when she spoke it made the hair stand up on the back of my neck, I still remember what she said, the way she said it. And my first thought right after she made the statement. When I asked her, June, why did you do it? Why did you work for nothing? She answered and said, "Because I believed in Ray". And the way she said it and what was behind it. I realised she just had this revelation why she had done it. And my first thought after that was, that's it, I need to find me a Ray Kroc. That's what I need. If I could find someone that could put me under their wing and teach me, just like he taught her, because it didn't work out too bad for her. I'm cleaning this million dollar home and it was a million dollar home when I was 16, right? So, I mean, certainly it didn't work out too bad for her. I need to find the right croc. So I just threw it out there. Where would I find my Ray Kroc? Where would he be? Where would I meet him? I remember having those thoughts, and it wasn't two or three months later, all of a sudden, the janitorial service where I work, same place that had the June Martino account. We cleaned her home and the home for her sons. They were all in Ginger Creek in that area. I mean, a really nice area, obviously. Right. But right next to Oakbrook, where the world headquarters was for McDonald's for decades. It's since moved, but that's where it was for years. And so we got a phone call to the sanitorial service. And my boss sent me over to meet this man who was opening a diamond store in Chicago land area. So I met this man. He offered me a job, and he became the father I never had. Even though I had a father, I became the son he never had, even though he had a son. And he became my true mentor. And I was so blessed to have him in my life for so many years. And I can share with you that he was a pure genius. And because of that relationship, I became a huge advocate for mentoring. And I tell people, I say, if you don't have a mentor in my world, we call that naive. That's what we call it. And when you find a mentor, find someone who has done it. Not one of the thousands of educated idiots I've met over my life. And them educated idiots, they have all the book knowledge, all the information. They can spew it all back to you. Zero implementation, zero execution skills they've never done. It just that simple. When you hire an educated idiot, all you're doing is paying for their education because they don't know what, they haven't done it yet. The person who has done it. When you have a mentor, like a Wendy who says, I can help you with conversations because I have thousands of them every year, and I fine tune my skill. A mentor that's done it brings with them all the things that don't work. And there's the education. That's where the real wisdom and value is, the scars on the shins of what didn't work and what blew up in their face and et cetera, et cetera. And I'd like to share just sort of a story, if I can, with your readers, of what an amazing man this really was, this mentor that taught me everything. And then subsequently the commitment I made to him. He taught me about... you know in the United States we had this thing called the Great Depression. And he told me about what it was like to grow up in a Great Depression. And he says it was very challenging times. He said people were jumping off of buildings, committing suicide because they lost their fortunes. He said multimile long soup kitchen lines to get nothing but a bowl of soup. He said it was desperate times. People needed food. And he said, for some of our meals, we even ate cardboard. That's desperate times. And he was walking around, no one was hiring, no one was working. It was really a blind siding. Desperate time. And he went by the store and saw this guy standing in the back of the store. So he just went in, started burning the clock, talked with the guy, wasn't working, couldn't work. No one was hiring. It turns out the guy, when he went and talked with him, he was the owner. He was a sewing machine store, and it was filled with sewing machines. And the owner said, he said, you know, "I bought all these sewing machines or just collecting dust". He said, "there's no customers because people want food. They don't want sewing machines". And he said, "I've let all my employees go. I couldn't afford to keep it". He says, "it's just me. I just come in and keep an eye on sewing machines every day". He says, it's really it. My mentor had this flash in his mind, and he said, well, what if I helped you sell some of these? They guy was a little shocked he said "and what do you have in mind?" He said, "well, people can't afford to buy sewing machines. But how about if we sold them on payments?" And he said, "I tell you what, I'll even back the payments. If someone walks away with a sewing machine, I'll guarantee it. So you'll never be out any money. We can split the payments. I'll set it up and we can split the payments." The guy says, man, go for it. They're just collecting dust. They're all paid for just sitting here, do something right. And the next thing he did was a real stroke of genius. He put together a flyer, and the title line on it was "Women to Work from Home". And he told me he never really fully caught up with all the responses, ever, the fact that anyone was hiring. So he built this huge community of women working from home during the Depression. He sold them a sewing machine on payments, gave them the patterns to make the clothing, gave them the material to make the clothing out of, and then guaranteed he would buy the clothing from them, thus guaranteeing their income. So they could make the payments on the sewing machine and have an income leftover, which everyone really needed to buy food and everything else, right? So from that time, it didn't end. He bought the clothing from them, sold it to stores as handmade, high quality, deep discounted clothing that the stores then could sell to customers who didn't have a lot of money and wanted high quality but at the deepest discount possible. In 18 months, Wendy, when people were jumping off of buildings in desperation, commit suicide, standing in multi mile long soup kitchen lines. In 18 months, he earned $1 million. So when someone tells me they have a business problem, I don't buy it. I say, what's your excuse? And I tell them the story. I say no! And my mentor shared with me, and that was the purpose of the story. He said, in your life, you're going to get tackled 1000 times. Get ready, you're going to get tackled. He said, It's not about getting tackled, it's about getting up. It's not about being tackled. He said, "you don't drown by falling in the pool. You drown by staying in the pool." He said, get out of the water, right? He said, So here's what happens when you think you have a money problem in your life. You do not. He said, I say it again "in your life. In the future, when you think you have money problems, you don't. You have idea problems, not money problems." He said, "because every great enterprise, every solution to every challenge, everything started with at some point, an idea in one person's mind". He said, "So remember that you will only have idea challenges in the future". And so at 19 years old, Wendy, I asked this man. I said, Sam, will you teach me everything? All of it. Don't hold back all of it. And he said, "okay, I will. But I want one thing from you". And this is me asking him. At 19, he said, "I will teach you everything. But this is what I want. When the time is right and you will know that time, I want you to teach as many people as you possibly can. Everything I taught you" So at 19 years old, Wendy, I made an oath. I made a vow to my mentor that has today manifest itself as what we know as Givers University. So that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

{( speakerName('B') )}

Wow! It's not often you get me shut up for so long.

{( speakerName('A') )}

Yeah, that's right. You're the conversationalist. I mean, this is really something.

{( speakerName('B') )}

But yeah, my ears are pinned back and I've made some mental notes there EA. And as I've said, I watched The Founder at the weekend. So it's quite fresh in my mind. And what struck me initially was that my husband suggested putting it on, knowing full well that it was a business based story. He knew that I would be interested in that, and that's normally not what he's interested in at all. His based on a true story are war, espionage.

{( speakerName('A') )}

Action! Adventure! Drama... spy! Right!

{( speakerName('B') )}

I did sit on the couch and did that, "Oh, my goodness. Your pitch, your milkshake machine pitch is just it's the chicken and the egg man."

{( speakerName('A') )}

Yeah.

{( speakerName('B') )}

Well, your pitch isn't working. So change your pitch because the machine is still the machine and the pitch is not working. So that's the obvious thing to change. So you could see then later in the film when he was starting to call for franchisees, come and work at McDonald's, come and own the dream. You could see the difference in that pitch because he believed it. So when June said, I believed in Ray was because it was probably the first idea that she could really 125% get behind him. She'd seen it in him in idea after idea, which is brilliant. I think my LinkedIn profile says every good conversation starts as an idea in somebody's head. So you've just said that. And yeah, there are no excuses. There are excuses or there are mistakes. Which would you prefer to be the person that goes ahead and makes a mistake and learns from it, or the person that just excuses themselves from learning.

{( speakerName('A') )}

For sure. And obviously in the beginning he listens to the record on persistence. That's sort of the end of the movie where he talks about how important that is. And I certainly concur with that. It's not the only thing, but it certainly is a very important thing to keep getting up every time you get tackled and get out of the pool. When you fall in it, don't stay in it because that's called drowning. I don't know. I got to tell you, I've probably watched it fifteen, twenty times by now, but because it's weird how I feel like I can remember June telling the story as I'm watching the movie. I remember hearing it virtually almost four decades earlier watching the events, and I'm just like shaking my head. At the end. They make it look like Ray took advantage of the whole thing with the percentages that they were supposed to get. A percentage never happened. There was no dialogue on it. They never went to court. You can't tell me with attorneys on both sides that if there was an issue like that, they would have went to court. The dialogue never happened. June never referenced it and said, but they don't talk about the fact that the million dollars back then tax free, was about $9 million today.

{( speakerName('B') )}

Yeah, relative.

{( speakerName('A') )}

And if Ray hadn't come along, they would have had their stand. That would have been worth maybe 50 grand at the most and maybe 100 grand, she said when they gave him the price, she said he literally tore the office part. He tore it apart because he said, I built this thing. Now I've got to pay almost $20 million between two of them in today's dollars, right? Almost, because I built it. He said, if I would have just went to the deal, he said, well, I could have got it for 50 grand. He says now is $20 million because of what I built with all these franchises. And also they don't include that there was an airplane, he had to buy them a Piper Cub. So it was all Hollywood, right. But the events nonetheless, and certainly the McDonald's brothers fared very well. And there was never a handshake deal on percentages like that. And Ray would have never agreed to it to begin with. He would have never even done it right. But that's Hollywood spin thrown in. Their rumour, gossip enters in and they throw it in the story to make it interesting. Truly what is interesting is that what he did event was duplication, the importance of and he recognized immediately it was all about getting more units. If you remember, the brother said, we're not interested because we think it's much better to have one good restaurant than ten not good restaurants or there's some kind of reference like that. And the brothers say that and Ray says no. So it was because of that that made McDonald's the icon that Wendy's and Burger King and all the rest of them emulated later on because he had that forethought going forward. So I had my Ray Kroc, I found my Ray Kroc, and I can submit to you. It was because I asked the right question. My mentor said later on, I said, whether you know it or not, inadvertently, you tripped on the right question. When you said, where would I find my Ray Kroc? You never said you're not going to or why aren't you going to another. He said that wasn't the question you automatically knew you were going to. You were just wondering where was he? How are you going to meet him? Totally different mindset. And I can share with you that all the things that we teach in Givers University, all the things I share that I'm blessed to share. I didn't make up any of them. I was simply a conduit because my mentor convinced me that I can do it. What? Anyway.

{( speakerName('B') )}

I am a believer of experiential without experience, and that experience can fuel the imagination so that you can see yourself doing something before it's even happened. And if that wasn't true, why do we have deja vu, right?

{( speakerName('A') )}

Yeah. And then you'd have to have vuja de, which is something that happened that you wish that didn't. That's vuja de. That's the opposite, right. Just like that. So I want to share with your readers. That one of the things that we teach that's so important today. It's totally free. There's two things we're really focused on now, teaching people how to build their own giver community. And we identify the difference between a taker community and a giver community. And there's very distinct differences. And I want to share with your readers that, first of all, I say we love everybody. I say it again, we love everybody. And we teach a skill of how to separate the person who we love from their deeds, which we may not love. And we teach a skill of awareness, a skill of observation that's not being taught anywhere else. Observe them doing certain things because your talk talks and your walk talks, but your walk talks louder than your talk talks. So watch their deeds. Watch what they're doing. And from observing their deeds, now you can begin to decide, should I bring them closer in my life? Because givers always bring with them the three W's of a giver, which is wisdom, wealth, and wellness, or when I see them doing certain deeds, I'm watching them do these things. I'm not listening to what they're saying. I'm watching their deeds from that. Should I now begin to discern and respectfully, not rude or nasty, respectfully, begin to distance myself? Because if I bring them in closer, they're going to run havoc on my life. And I ask your readers, think about all the times you stomp out fires. Think about all the times that your stress level goes up. They have something in common. There's a name attached to them. And if we could learn the skill of how to discern in our relationships of who those people are. So when we say giver, we're not labeling a person because we don't label people. We're identifying giver deeds when we say giver, when we say taker.

{( speakerName('A') )}

So we don't identify a person as a taker. We're identifying taker deeds. So even by virtue of actual checklists, we give free checklist. One of my favorites, the 25 Dues, it's an actual checklist that can print off, and we want to print it off, put it in your pocket, begin to use it in discerning with your relationships, and watch your productivity and happiness go up, because you won't be stomping out as many fires every day because those people just aren't around you. So I'm a self improvement person. I know you are. I know many of your readers are, but no one's really teaching us. Wendy, what about the other guy? What if he's doing it wrong. What should I do about that? If I welcome him in my life and he's not doing it right, and he chooses not to do it right, he's going to make me collateral damage. And all of a sudden, a big part of my productivity time is going to be stomping out these fires that I didn't make to begin with. So to discern who we want to have around us is a critical part. So there's two ways people can get all of this. First, they go to our YouTube channel. It's one word Givers University. Just do a search, go on there and look for there's a public playlist that's called how to build your own "Givers Junto" community. We use the term Junto. It's actually a Spanish word from 1600s then later on, Ben Franklin picked it up in the Junta, by definition, is a group of people that have gotten together for a common purpose or interest. That's a juneato, aka a community. And so we identify the difference in what's a taker community and what's a giver community. And what are the components that make the difference? Napoleon Hills book, Think and Grow, which he does an excellent job of explaining the mastermind principle. And when he started explaining that it was new, it was novel. So he explained what it is. He does not explain anywhere how to do it, right. And that's where we come in. We teach people. How do you build this mastermind group on steroids? Where I've seen in the past, I've seen good people get together, and then two or three months later, it just sort of dissipates and falls apart. And that was always a curiosity. Why didn't they stay together? So we looked at what were the reasons? Why did that happen? So they should go to their YouTube, go to Givers University. It's all one word, no spaces, and then look for the places. How to build your own Givers Junto community. And there's 21 episodes. They're all two minute clips. So it's 21 two minute clips starting at the beginning. If they go all the way to the earliest one, how to identify a giver community versus a taker community, then we also walk them through the things a component community should have. Then we also walk them through how to do it. There are seven steps. D-I-S-C-E-R-N. That's the word discern. We use it as an acronym. Each letter represents a step of building that community. And then we just finished up now, which are after the 21st episode. The agenda, what do you do each meeting? Now that you got your group, what do you do? What do you say? What do you talk about? Right. So from beginning to end, it's a free resource. We want people to use it. Even in the descriptions. We have things they can make copies of. I mean, we're out there doing that. And the other thing they can do is go to our website giversuniversity.com they'll see a place where they can sign up for a newsletter. We're not spammers so the moment they sign up they're going to get an email that says do you want to talk to Givers University? If they don't answer that they'll get nothing else from us. That's it. That's the end of their conversations. If they answer that and say, yeah I want to talk to Givers University 2 hours later they're going to get this checklist called the 25 Dues. Download it, print it off, put it in your pocket, begin to use it as a reference guide with discerning with your relationships and building the right kind of community around you and how critical that is because businesses opening and closing faster than before, products being antiquated overnight faster before when it's all done, what do we have left other than our relationships and you, Wendy are a critical part of that because you teach people how to communicate and have conversations as a part of those relationships which is such a critical part. So I thank you for having me on your show and be able to share with your listeners and certainly be able to share with you this information.

{( speakerName('B') )}

Thank you for coming and giving us all so much. It's been absolutely well, I don't know but I've just looked at the clock and it's just sped by so I know that that is a good and valuable use of our time. Thank you.

{( speakerName('A') )}

You're welcome. Thank you so much have me on your great podcast.