Improving Your Life Tenfold

3. Improving Your Life Tenfold

“Surround yourself with people who are more successful than you.”

—Javier Lozano

Bolder Media Solutions

Podcast Transcription

Michael:
Hello, I’m Michael Kurland, CEO and Co-Founder of Branded Group. Welcome to the #BeBetter Podcast. To me, our company’s mantra to “Be Better” is more than a tagline; it’s a culture that permeates our organization, propelling our team to Be Better to each other, our customers and our communities as well as to ourselves. Each week on the #BeBetter podcast, I interview leaders who authentically exemplify how they are being better in their professional and personal lives.

Michael:
Today’s podcast is dedicated to Orange County Coastkeeper, a nonprofit clean water organization, focused on “protecting the region’s water resources so they are swimmable, drinkable and fishable for present and future generations.” We will be pursuing opportunities where the BeBetter team can do its part to keep our beautiful Orange County beaches in pristine condition. Learn more about how you can get involved at https://www.coastkeeper.org/.

Michael:
Thanks everyone for joining us today on the Be Better Podcast today. My guest is Javier Lozano, Jr. He is the National Director of Business Development for CMI Mechanical. Javier, welcome to the show.

Javier:
Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Michael:
We’d like to start off the show with little softball. What do you do and why do you do it.

Javier:
As you introduced me, I’m the National Director of Business Development. Alot of times some people think, so you basically develop business. I would say I do a little bit more than that. I handle the sales and marketing strategy for CMI Mechanical on the national scale, as well as some of it on the local scale too. I have a passion about sales and marketing. I truly, truly enjoy it.

I think the reason why I have such a big passion for it is when I started a business in 2008 at the height of the recession, I had my back against the wall. I signed a five year lease, with nothing more than a personal guarantee, nothing but me, to make this thing work. It was either you fold or you got really good at sales and marketing. Then as things evolved, I started refining my craft.

I decided that I’ve got to start getting some better systems in place. I got really good at it and eventually my passion started growing more towards the sales and marketing side, versus what I was doing. At the time I was running a martial arts and personal training studio. I eventually started seeing that was more of what I wanted to do. This is where I’m at right now with CMI Mechanical. I handle the creation of strategies and deploy some of the strategies that we’re working on.

Michael:
You’re a very interesting guy, Javier. When we met, you told me you opened your own martial arts business at the height of the recession and you were able to come through that with flying colors. No you’ve transitioned into a National Director, doing business development for an HVAC company.

The other things that are interesting to me is that you have your own podcast and you do a great job. You do it all yourself, too. Also, I was checking out your LinkedIn page and, it says you’re a number one bestselling author.

Michael:
I’m curious about that. Where does this little humble part of “I’m a number one bestselling author, but I don’t want to ever talk about this” come from?

Javier:
Basically a couple of years ago I hired a business coach. I’ve hired business coaches throughout my career, just because that’s how you grow in your accountability, and in your knowledge.

He had some other clients and what we did is we all decided to put together a book. It’s called “Influence and Income Online.” My coach’s  name is James Smiley, and he got his clients and other influencers to contribute to this book. I wrote a section on a topic. It was actually about podcasting, believe it or not.  I decided to take that to the next level and started helping to promote it.

Twenty-seven other entrepreneurs promoted to their network of influence as well, too. Essentially the way it works is when you write a book and it reaches number one status on Amazon, then you’re a bestselling author. I didn’t realize that’s what it was. I’m not going to say it was easy, because you have to have good topics, good content, good information. You also have to have the network to actually get it out there as well, too.

I’m not a New York’s bestselling author, but, I’ll take this as a stepping stone for right now. This happened last year. We wrote the book in 2018 and then we started get everything finalized. In 2019, we started pushing it and we’re all just going nuts on it as far as giving traffic to it. Eventually it became a number one book.

Michael:
Interesting. I did not know that. I’m going to now have to add to your number one status and purchase a copy on Amazon. I’m looking forward to reading about the podcasting part. That’s something that is right up my alley these days.

Javier:
There are other topics in the book, but everyone writes a topic about what they wanted to do. I’m going to do the podcasting part. There’s a lot of good information in that book. It’s really cool.

Michael:
You seem like a Renaissance man. Author, podcasting, sales, martial arts. What got you into the podcasting? What made you excited about that?

Javier:
I really enjoy speaking in front of a crowd. Whenever you’re teaching martial arts and you’re doing personal training, or you’re doing group training, you have to talk to an audience. At times, my audience would be as large as 200 people. I enjoy communicating, and sharing stories, and talking about things. It’s a way of expressing yourself, in a sense.

What I started realizing more and more by going live on Facebook, and on LinkedIn, is that we all, to a degree, need to have a platform that we can actually go out and speak and gain a certain level of not just influence, but a certain level of credibility, a certain level of authority, is probably the best way of saying it.

I gained a big chunk of my authority by running a business, by speaking in front of people, by speaking in front of businesses, and in coaching other people on how to improve. I started thinking about podcasting and realized I can totally speak into this, because this is my platform. This is what I enjoy doing. I love speaking about topics that really engage me, like what we’re doing right now, with the Be Better Podcast. Podcasting just came natural to me.

It’s just one of those things that wasn’t really awkward for me.  You talk in front of a camera and you may not know what to say. Now, I’ll map out my conversations, what I’m going to talk about, my topics. That’s how I kind of worked on it in the beginning. Eventually, it grew and morphed into its own self. I had a vision for what it was, and then it was something different. I enjoy the platform to go out and speak on this.

Michael:
That’s kind of crazy how things just morph into what they’re supposed to be, right.

Javier:
Yes.

Michael:
They find their own way, even if it’s not what you expected.

Javier:
I think it takes some time to figure that part out because we all have a vision of what we want, but then once you let your podcast have certain types of guests, then the podcast starts shaping itself. That’s what I learned about running my podcast, Facility and Property Management Secrets Radio.  I had a vision of what I thought it would do, and it’s gotten us some business, but it’s completely transformed itself into something different. It’s exciting. I can’t complain.

Michael:
You do a great job. How many episodes are you into the podcast, as of now?

Javier:
Our episodes, because they are interviews, are roughly 45 minutes long, give or take. What I’ve realized is that some people can handle about a 20 to 25 minute podcast. So I split them into two parts, every episode. If you think about it, we’re at 24, and I’ve got four more interviews that I have to edit and publish. Really, we’ve probably interviewed 12 dozen people or so, and then we’ve got a few others that we’re getting lined up. That’s how we handle it. We put them in a two part series, and we f go from that point.

Michael:
You’ve done all these different things in such a short career. Because you’re definitely a young guy. I want to know what you curious about are right now. Where’s your focus? What’s next?

Javier:
That’s a good question. I guess to paint the backstory a little bit –  I ran a business for 10 plus years and I achieved everything I ever wanted to achieve by doing that. I thought I was going to be running my business forever, until I was like 60 years old or whatever. I don’t tell this to a lot of people, but I got the business name tattooed on my back.

Javier:
It’s in Japanese. The funny part about it is people ask me, “Oh, what is that?” I tell them it’s just Japanese calligraphy. Once people ask more details and tell them what it is and what it means. It’s actually the name of my company. They’re like, “You tattooed your company on your back?” “I was committed.”

This is what I’m going to do. Ten years later, things shaped into something different. I achieved everything I wanted to do in the business. I’m not saying I couldn’t have done more, but I just saw that there was not enough for me to want to continue. Plus I had a family. Young kids, wife, and I wasn’t putting in the time that my family needed. I was being an absentee father. Not by choice, but by circumstances. So I decided to sell. It took me a while to figure out where I wanted to make my next career jump, if you will. Because being self-employed for over 10 years, your thought process is completely different. You’re used to making all the decisions.

It took a little time to figure out where I wanted to take things. I decided to go back into the workforce. I’m going to start kind of exploring this and see where I can go. This opportunity with CMI Mechanical was great, because it allowed me tap into my entrepreneurial spirit, my creativity, and apply that.

Where I’m at now in my career? I want to take this thing to the next level. I do believe that I’ve got the qualities and the skill sets to be an executive, a C-suite executive. When is that going to happen? I have no clue. My goal is essentially to use every opportunity I have and just grow it as big as possible.

With CMI Mechanical, my goal is to bring in as much business as possible. But bring in business accounts that are like those we never had a shot at before. All of a sudden I’m bringing in these opportunities that are we’re actually in the fight for this type of account. We can actually win this. But I’d love to see myself into some sort of higher level, bigger decision making, where there’s a lot of pressure being put on me, if you will.

Michael:
To your point, what you said earlier made me think. You called all the shots, and then you wanted to go back to the workforce. I was the total reverse. I was in the workforce as a Director of Business Development for my previous company. Once that tenure ended, I said, “I don’t know how I’m ever going to listen to anybody else ever again.” So at least now if I’m angry at my boss, it’s me. I can be mad at myself!. So, CEO or something like that, that’s what you’re looking forward to get to next?

Javier:
I never thought I would say that. But then again, I never thought I’d sell my business either, right?

Michael:
I’m going to advise against putting any more tattoos of job descriptions on your back, please.

Javier:
It’s funny. My being a CEO is something that is crossing my mind. I’m actually reading an audiobook, called The CEO Next Door. I’m not sure if you’ve heard of it.

Michael:
I haven’t. Tell me about it.

Javier:
It’s a great book. I do a lot of audio books. I read it when I go to work. Essentially, it just talks about how a lot of us think that a CEO is going to be someone like these big Fortune 500 companies. We have to take into account that there are a lot of actual companies in the small to medium sized businesses, that are anywhere from $5 million, $20 million, a hundred million dollars that also need CEOs and board directors.

There are opportunities in these areas and your odds are much, much better at becoming a CEO in these in these companies. They say your first eight years of your career, it should be X. Then your next 6 to 10 years should be doing Y. Tthen once you hit your late forties to early fifties, this is where you start implementing what you’ve worked on the past 15 plus years. You start trying to get into these C-suite roles, or onto boards and whatever. Then you can start working towards becoming that CEO. It maps everything out.

They have this entire statistics behind it. They coach people to become CEOs, and also coach people to actually achieve that. They’re taking surveys, they’re collecting data, and they have all this data they’re spitting out saying, this is what our data’s actually showed. It’s really, amazing. After reading that book, I’m not finished with it yet, but as I’ve been reading it, I am thinking, “This might be something that I want to entertain.” It’s crossed my mind and I’m not going to discount it. It’s something that I’m curious about.

Michael:
I think from my experience, I am what you just described, the CEO for the smaller company. I’m self-appointed, so that’s probably the only way I was going to get to be a CEO, at least before my fifties. I think you’d make a great CEO. I think you’ve got all the chops to do it. I hope that in 10 years if we’re still doing our podcasts and we’re still coming onto each other’s shows, at some point you’re CEO of CMI, or some other company that would be happy to have you.

Javier:
It’d be great. It’d be exciting.

Michael:
What motivates you to be better? Because it seems like we’ve talked about these career paths, and you definitely have a little strange career path, which is really cool. You’ve succeeded at everything you’ve done. So what motivates you to be better and to be able to jump to a new place and then start over, and then become successful doing that as well? Why do you keep changing and what is the motivation to keep going?

Javier:
That’s a great question. I’m very competitive. I don’t share this very often either, but I’m also a former world champion athlete. I used to compete professionally in sport karate, and I won a world title in 2001.

Michael:
I just keep finding out all these great nuggets about you here.

Javier:
That wasn’t an easy task by any means. There was a lot of pain and suffering before all of that. I remember back when I was teaching classes to my students, they would see my trophies and say “You must have won all the time.” I’d, “Do you see the trophies for fifth place and eighth place?” They’d say, “No, where are those?” I’d tell them, they don’t give those out. They’d ask “What do you mean?” I’d tell them “You’re only seeing my successes. You didn’t see all my failures.”

Javier:
I’m very competitive. I don’t like to lose. I don’t enjoy coming in second place. It goes to the extreme of like Talladega Nights, where Ricky Bobby’s dad says, “If you’re not first, you’re last.” I’m not saying that my kids have to act like that. That’s a personal thing for me. But I can’t do things for fun. It has to be competitive. If there’s something that I’m good at doing, I have to win.

At sports, martial arts, I had to win. That was the only option. Getting second place was not winning. I didn’t settle for “Oh, you had a good match.” It was, “No, that wasn’t the plan.” People would say, “Why don’t you just go back and compete for fun?” “No!” That’s like telling Tiger Woods just to go enter a tournament just for fun. He’s not going to do that.

Javier:
That’s where my mentality is to be better. I have to win. I have to be the best at everything I do. There’s things that I know I suck at, and I’m okay not trying to be the best at it. But, if there’s things I’m actually decent at, then I want to find every way possible to leverage my opportunity, whether it’s education, whether it’s networking, interacting with top level people. Whatever it is, I’m trying to do that.

An examples is with the audio books. On average, I’ll read one, maybe two audio books a week, depending on my drives. If I’m driving for a half hour, I’m listening to an audio book. Since last year, 2019 October to now I’ve probably read like 15 plus audio books.

Javier:
Then I’ll go to a place where I don’t do anything for like six weeks and my mind is over loaded. Then I’ll go back to going nuts again. I’ve been reading a ton of books and educating myself on improving my marketing, improving my sales, improving my leadership skills, improving all these things. I reflect and say “Okay, I can see that, I got this. I don’t have these skill sets yet. I need to see what I can try to do about that.”

Then I’ll just look for more books and continue to learn in those aspects. I’ll do podcasts as well, too, where I listen to other podcasts outside of industry. Things that are going to help kind of raise my game, if you will. I guess the last part is my circle of influence. I’m trying to get myself around people like yourself and other successful people that are either entrepreneurs or business leaders, that have things that I could try to strive for. That’s where you create collaboration. You talk, you ask questions, you do all these things, and you start seeing certain trends, and certain things that people are doing. All of that makes me want to continue to push myself. As I surround myself with more successful people, I continue to say, you know what? I want to achieve this. I want to achieve this. I want to do that.

Michael:
You touched on your rabid audio book habit. What’s the best book? What book would you recommend to the audience that you read, that’s for being better? What’s making you strive to be better? The best one you’ve read, at least, so that we can talk about that a little bit. You got 30 to choose from, right?

Javier:
I’ve got a ton. My phone is loaded with books. They all have a special place in my heart, to be honest. I know it sounds weird, but they all have something special for me. But I would say one of them transformed me to reshape my business, and the other one transformed to go nuts on what I’m committed to doing.

The one that helped me reshape my business was called “Build to Sell.” It’s essentially where you build your business to sell it, even if you don’t plan on ever selling it. At the time when I read that book, it was everything in my business ran through me. I said to myself “You can’t scale this.”

If I die, the company is going to die. I used that as a stepping stone to help me figure out the systems I needed to create in the business I was running. To the point where it was like clockwork. That helped me sell the business eventually.

But the book that I think that’s been probably the most positive for me is the 10X Rule by Grant Cardone. Have you read that book?

Michael:
It’s actually in my queue of audio books to read. Funny story, I was in an Uber and I was going to the Staple Center. I got started rapping with the Uber driver, and he tells me the same thing. That it’s a great book and he’s reading it right now. For whatever reason, I downloaded it.

Michael:
That’s serendipitous, right? Some guy’s going to tell me in an Uber, that’s an Uber driver to read a book. Sure. Why not? I haven’t actually started listening to it yet because I just finished a book on audio myself, and I do it a little different than you. I do one audio, one paperback, and then switch back and forth. Because I don’t have the attention span to focus on two books at the same time. I’ll just get lost in my ADD. It’s on my list of things to do, but tell me more about it. I’m curious.

Javier:
I’ve never read a book where my heart rate was going the entire time – 10X the entire time. Grant Cardone talks about just 10X-ing everything.

So, ten times your effort on something. A good example is if we’re going to start a podcast, don’t just start a podcast and see what happens. Start a podcast, and start publishing a bunch of stuff, going nuts on it. Then start actually promoting it in every area that you can humanly imagine. Everything.

Same thing with your marriage. Don’t just be satisfied with your marriage, 10X your marriage. Level it up. Find ways of how to improve your marriage in all these aspects. He talks about these other things that are interesting. People talk about him always, saying, “Grant, you’re everywhere. You’re annoying. This is frustrating.” Yada, yada, yada. He goes, “If you’re complaining about me then that means that you’re seeing me enough to where I’m basically annoying you, and you know who I am.”

Michael:
Like the peacock rule.

Javier:
Yes!

Michael:
We have a couple of seconds left here, and I have to ask this one question. What do you consider yourself to be an expert at? And what’s your best advice, to our audience?

Javier:
I would say probably personal branding. I would say I’m a pretty good expert at that because that’s what I do. That’s how people find me out on LinkedIn, on Facebook. I’d say the biggest advice is produce content that’s valuable. Don’t put stuff out there that’s junk. Also, interact with people, actually have conversations with people. Don’t just post something. Comment on and interact with people. That’s going to eventually create you as an authority in what you’re trying to do. Creating your personal brand allows you to gain more authority and influence, and it allows you to become an expert on what you’re talking about. You start learning more about other people as well, too.

Michael:
Javier, that’s great advice. I totally agree. I think we align a lot on the personal branding and networking. It’s all about building relationships, being present, and listening.
Javier:
I agree.

Michael:
I really appreciate you coming on the show today. I wish that we could go a little longer. We’re definitely going to have you back in the near future. There’s so much to talk about.
Javier:
Yes. I’d love to.

Michael:
Yes, great. Thanks for coming on and audience, thanks for listening. I appreciate you guys for tuning in, and we will talk to you next time.

Michael:
I’d like to take a minute to thank you, our valued listeners. My intention is for this podcast to inspire you, in some way, to be better.  Change starts from within and radiates outward. Therefore, start with being better to yourself and only then will you recognize how to be better others and your community. Thank you for joining us today! If you want to learn more about Branded Group, then visit us at www.branded-group.com. From our website you can follow us on social media. Also, always feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. Until next time, Be Better.