Why We Do What We Do

Joe Zucarello: What’s up everyone? Joe Zucarello here and welcome to Hey Joe, a podcast brought to you by Paragon School of Pet Grooming. Check out our site at paragonpetschool.com for lots of really cool information on a variety of programs, products and to connect to educational resources such as webinars, podcasts, current events, special news, certifications and lots of other helpful information to help you grow yourself, your team, and of course your business. Let’s get started with this week’s episode.

Hey everyone out there. This is Joe Zuccarello, your host of the Hey Joe podcast. And we are going to do something a little bit different today. Instead of having a subject matter expert that I would normally be interviewing, you’re going to get me solo. Not necessarily because we’ve run out of guests — we’ve got a great year already planned moving into the new year for you. But just to take a moment to kind of reflect on the past several months since launching the Hey Joe podcast and to put a public thank you out there to all of our subject matter experts that we’ve brought to the audience along the way these past several months. Hopefully, for you audience members out there, for all of our listeners, hopefully these folks, who have so graciously agreed to spend a little bit of time with us, hopefully you’ve been able to take a little bit – maybe a sliver – of their experience and use it to your business’s benefit.

And I know that by some of the reviews and some of the comments that we’ve gotten back, and even some folks sharing their successes after employing some of the tips and tricks you’ve learned from our experts… I know that they have made a positive impact. So I want to thank all of our experts, all of our Hey Joe audience members out there for listening, but I also want to thank all of the subject matter experts that have again so graciously agreed to spend just a small amout of time and share a small amount of their experience with you. So, there will be certainly more to come in the new year.

So that’s kind of reflecting back on this previous year, but what I want to do now is look toward — as we start to close out this year — and at the time of this recording, we’re going to be knocking on the holidays here in the year 2019. And when this airs, early December, I think it’s a great opportunity between the holidays to just sort of take a breather and look back on the year that was this year of 2019 and what the possibilities and potential are for us as individuals and certainly as professionals moving into 2020.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring to you something that actually helped me transform the way that I approach business, the way that I approach management and leadership, down to every small detail such as the policies, the protocols, the systems, and experiences that I hope for with the people that I interact with. And this is both professionally and personally, but for the sake of this particular podcast I’d like to sort of camp out in the professional aspect of that. And again I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring you this very important discovery that I had several years ago as I was developing my approach to business and my approach to management and leadership. And I will tell you still to this day it remains such a strong force to me that I wanted to share with you as well.

There is a person that is out in the business leadership, business training atmosphere that I want to introduce some of his work to you. But before I do that I want to ask a couple of questions and as I ask these questions, it might take you a moment to pause, and you might want to write some of these questions down or make a note of these things because it will really kind of open your mind and help you identify maybe where this influence might be able to benefit your personal, professional life as well.

You know I ask this question a lot when I do seminars and such, and I ask the question of “What industry or what business are we in?” And I get people that raise their hands all the time and they want to answer, “I’m in the grooming business,” or “I’m in the lodging business,” “I’m in the customer service business.” Sometimes some really keen audience members kinda want to predict maybe where I’m going, like it’s a trick question. And I guess it sort of is, but when you look at what we do as pet care professionals, what is it that we’re really selling, or what is it that we’re really doing? And we’re really selling peace of mind, right? So we’re selling — it could be grooming, it could be boarding, it could be training, but whatever it is, we’ve been temporarily entrusted with the care of somebody’s most precious possession (or precious family member, more often than not) and that’s their pet. And what we’re selling is trust, and peace of mind. So if that’s where we can kind of all agree on where we’re coming to when we’re dealing with our customers — if we’re selling peace of mind, well, how do we build on that? How do we make sure that we’re the company, we’re the pet professional that the customer trusts and values and wants to spend their hard-earned money with us to provide a service for them and their pet?

So again, what we’re selling peace of mind. So if we want to unpack that slightly, one of the questions we should ask ourselves is why we do what we do. Have you ever stopped for a moment and just asked yourself that? Why do I do what I do? Of course the easy answers are to make money, right? So that I could buy, I’ve always said, to buy the peanut butter and jelly to fill my pantry with, right? Well, of course, the money though, is — I’ve always seen the revenue in a business, the sales in a business, the money in a business or even your own personal income — being a reward for performance, right? And sometimes if you’re not making enough of it, it could be the consequence based on a performance, usually poor performance. Well, if you look at money as not the primary driver but performance being the driver and money kind of happens as a result of performance, well now we start looking at things slightly differently.

So if we start looking at performance being our driver, we start to then maybe take a little bit more importance in looking at why do we do what we do. So I focus on that word why because that’s going to set up this introduction to somebody that has made a super positive impact on my career and my personal life as well. And that is a gentleman by the name of Simon Sinek. And Simon Sinek (S-I-N-E-K) has a series of books and the very first one that I discovered — and I don’t know if it’s his first book, but it’s certainly one that I discovered — and it’s called “Start With Why.” It’s not a very difficult read. It’s a paperback book, probably costs you $12 or $13 bucks from your favorite online retailer or bookstore. But Simon Sinek’s book “Start With Why”… when you read through this book and start to be able to take the principles that he’s talking about and apply them to your business, it will open your mind to the possibility and the reality of what I was mentioning earlier which is income is a reward for performance. Or it could be a consequence as I mentioned before. But typically income, or more income, is a reward for performance. So they are definitely tied, and I see them — they are definitely in that order.