Building meaningful relationships can transform and power your business. Chris Schembra shares his founder journey and unique perspective on fostering impactful relationships.
Build meaningful relationships that can power your business even when you think you have nothing.
Chris Schembra, author of "Gratitude and Pasta: The Secret Sauce for Human Connection" and Founder and Chief Question Asker at 7:47, joined Scott to talk about developing impactful relationships.
Chris knows it’s difficult bringing people together to create meaningful experiences. It’s why they created the 7:47 Gratitude Experience. Through an evidence-based framework, they’ve sparked over 500,000 relationships, at 300+ events, and helped 170+ companies strengthen client and team relationships in profound ways.
Watch the full session: https://bit.ly/2Q92kbC
Have feedback? Connect with Scott Case on LinkedIn
Visit foundersfocus.com to join the live video sessions, watch past sessions, and see what topics are up next.
Scott Case 0:00
Welcome to Founders Focus, a podcast made for founders by founders. I'm Scott Case, CEO and co-founder of Upside, and I created Founders Focus to help share free resources and actionable advice. Together, we're building a community for business leaders, entrepreneurs and founders to come together to tackle today's challenges. This podcast is powered by my awesome team at Upside. Please visit foundersfocus.com to join the live video sessions or to catch up on past topics.
Scott Case 0:27
I'm going to introduce our co-host for today – Chris Schembra is the author of Gratitude and Pasta, the secret sauce for human connection. And he is the Founder and the Chief Question Asker at 7:47. And Chris is one of my favorite connections that has happened over the last, I don't know year or so year and a half, which happened through the amazing boldness of I think it's your cousin who reached out to me on LinkedIn. And for those of you who've met me on LinkedIn, you know I say yes to almost everything. So I said, yes, and here we are with Chris. So Chris, why don't you introduce yourself, and then we'll kind of dive into your founder journey. And we're going to talk a little bit about whatever you want to. So let's go.
Chris Schembra 1:24
Awesome. Thanks for having me, Scott. Nice to meet everybody. My name is Chris. I'm actually calling from a bubble in the middle of New York City. I mean, literally, I'm in like a glass case of emotion, so I'm like that guy. No, I'm not special, I'm lonely, I'm disconnected, I'm unfulfilled, I'm insecure, and I've had a lot of ups and downs in life and learned a lot of great lessons along the way. And I'm just honored to be here with you all today.
Chris Schembra 2:01
I did want to do something as we started. Yeah, Richard said, aren't we all? Yeah, on Richard's note, if you could do me a favor and think about one word that would describe how you feel right now in the moment, put that in the group chat, let's see how we're really doing today. Put the bullshit aside, let's see how we're doing. Overwhelmed. Beautiful. Let's see how we're doing. Overwhelmed. Anxious. Hopeful. Calm. Excited. Awesome. So who is Chris, who am I? I'm a mixture of all that stuff. I'm nervous, anxious, overwhelmed, tired, and at the same time, hopeful, calm and excited. So honored to be here with you. Back over to you, Scott.
Scott Case 2:56
Awesome. Well, you've had an interesting entrepreneurial journey. So I'd love for you to give us the three four minute version of how you ended up founding 7:47, a little bit about what it's about, but particularly like, how did you get to creating it? Because your story is like a lot of entrepreneurs, there's a lot of twists and turns that end us up where we are. So why don't you share a little bit of your twists and turns?
Chris Schembra 3:23
Totally. My entrepreneurial journey starts in the middle of 2015. About six years ago. If you looked at my life then, it wasn't the worst looking life. I had a pretty good life on paper. I was running another company. I was in a different industry. I'd received some accolades, respect of our peers, life was pretty good. But in the middle of 2015, I went over to Italy to produce a Broadway play. And when I was in Italy, it's like I woke up, everything just came alive. It was the art. It was the culture. It was the history of the language. It was the love. Everything over there was unbelievable.
Chris Schembra 4:14
And when I got back home to New York City, I realized this is not it - life as I knew it. I felt lonely, tired, unfulfilled, insecure. The last time I felt those four things at once was in my early 20s. Led me down a deep dark path of suicide, depression, jail, rehab, and I didn't want to go back. So I thought, as every entrepreneur does, how do we get out of this? What do I need to change? Well, I thought back, what was it about Italy that changed my life, and I should bring that to New York City? Well, it happened to be food. And so here's my kitchen in New York City and I started playing around with some different recipes and accidentally created a pasta sauce recipe that I figured I should probably feed to people to see if it was either good or not good. And a ritual began, night after night, week after week, month after month, we started gathering people. And we saw people come alive, they leave that dinner table feeling joy and connected and transformed. And I realized the dinner table had saved my life.
Chris Schembra 5:17
So that's what we turn into a company, that type of connection. We've used the dinner table to spark over 500,000 relationships in the last five years, serving everything from fortune 50 CEOs, Super Bowl champions, Grammy Award winners, Academy Award winners, Hall of Fame athletes and everything in between. And what we ended up becoming really good at is taking people into our experiences, shaking up their system, and having them leave feeling connected and transformed. And so we've worked with the biggest companies on the planet, doing these both in person and virtual, and we built a nice little company around it.
Chris Schembra 5:58
See, upon further inspection, I realized it wasn't the pasta sauce that was doing the heavy lifting at all, especially during the pandemic. No, it's what we talked about every meal. And so at the very first dinner, we asked a simple question. If you could give credit or thanks to one person in your life that you don't give enough credit to thanks to, who would that be? That's a question about gratitude. And that's become the thought leadership of everything we do. That's our guiding Northstar. And yeah, there's been ups and downs along the way, for sure. But that's our company now.
Scott Case 6:38
Chris has written a book about it. And it sort of lays out the connections, and we actually did a session with Chris a few months ago for Founders Focus, maybe we'll pull another one together. The idea of creating relationships through that mechanism of gratitude. One of the core pieces that I see a lot of founders and entrepreneurs struggle with is the combination of loneliness, because we often are very much alone, we're in our own heads a lot. Sometimes we feel like we can't talk to other people around us, especially if they're family members or they are friends, we don't want to look, whether it's weak or fearful, you find yourself alone a lot. And yet, the way out is creating authentic relationships around you that you can connect to and to support you in this. And, I look at your question and the gratitude piece of it as a way of opening up some vulnerability for us all. And that vulnerability helps create that connection.
Scott Case 7:44
So I'm curious about, you start in a place where you're trying to figure out whether anybody wanted to eat your pasta sauce or not, you found out that the connections were there, and then there's more to that business. So talk a little bit about how those relationships come together and sort of why you think it's so effective?
Chris Schembra 8:06
Yeah. Scott, you brought up a lot of great points, just even in describing the thought leadership. There's a thought process out there that being vulnerable makes you weak, being vulnerable is awkward, how can you show gratitude during tough times like 2020, right, all these things we're up against. But the science actually shows the opposite. Science shows that gratitude is one of the greatest forms of servant leadership, humility, asking good questions, connecting with others, it's actually great for business.
Chris Schembra 8:41
And, companies are now waking up to that. Through the pandemic, especially, people have realized that no longer are companies buying from them just based on their product or their price. They're buying from them based on how they treat the people around them, and the people that work for them. People buy from people, not from companies. You actually have to give a hoot about the people you do business with. And that type of connection is great for business.
Chris Schembra 9:14
Google showed in their promotion to emotion study that buyers with a strong emotional connection to your brand are five times more likely to consider purchasing, 12 times more likely to purchase, and 30 times more likely to pay a premium. So it's great for business. And so how we do that is by inspiring - Well, we work people through a lot of different exercises and that kind of thing, but it essentially inspires a new way of thinking. One of humility, one of asking good questions, one of creating safe space, one of being there for others, and on a metaphorical level, if you can be there for others around a plate of pasta or if you can be there for others around this specific gratitude prompt, you can likely bring that into your customer, client, vendor relationships, and scale that feeling. Maya Angelou, the great poet and activist once said, People don't remember what you did, they don't remember what you said, but they always remember how you made them feel. So in a world where feelings are almost being evaporated, because we're automating so many parts of our business, feelings is now the competitive advantage. And that's what we kind of tap into with that gratitude question.
Scott Case 10:32
So, we've got a bunch of entrepreneurs here. How can they put the insights that you have to work? What are some strategies or tactics that they could use as a, take the insights you had and sort of apply them into somebody who's just starting out their business or is in the middle of that grind?
Chris Schembra 10:56
The first thing I'd say is check your ego at the door. You are not special. Each and every one of you who made it to this call, yeah, you've got your own business., yeah, you've got a dream, you're not special. I say that because most people walk around the world thinking that they're special, special for taking a risk, special that your business isn't working out that's the victim mentality. These are different things that create disconnection.
Chris Schembra 11:27
The fact is you have more in common with the people that you're leading and more in common with the people that you're selling to than you could ever imagine. You just happen to be the one who took the risk to start a company, but that doesn't make you special. See, gratitude is this universal human attribute that overcomes that and creates connection. So my one biggest thing is, don't walk around this planet starting this company thinking that you've got something special.
Chris Schembra 11:57
The opposite of specialness, uniqueness, the cool feelings that you get by knowing that you're courageous enough to take a risk with your business, the opposite of that is humility. See, humility isn't people thinking less of themselves, it's just thinking about themselves less. That's your role as an entrepreneur, to put the needs of your team and your customers ahead of your own. You're not supposed to be the smartest person in the room, or the smartest person in the deal. You're supposed to hire the best people for every job, even if they voted against you.
Chris Schembra 12:30
The real truth is to empathize with the needs of the people you serve. And you do that by asking questions, by being humble, by receiving critical feedback along the way, because that's how you innovate. The worst thing that you could ever do is assume you know more than the customer. The best thing you could do is put out some shitty product quick, let it fail, get customer feedback, iterate, and improve. Technically I shouldn't have even said the word failing, there's either winning or learning. And that's the most important thing you can do as an entrepreneur is to have that humble mindset, that servant mindset.
Chris Schembra 13:09
See, I have a big problem with happiness, too. I think happiness is crap. Happiness, most people think of happiness as like experiencing your feelings, and like if you have pain, you should fix it. I'm the polar opposite. I think if you have pain, you should feel those emotions because other people have felt that as well, and if you want happiness, go solve other people's problems. That's what you're doing as an entrepreneur, you're taking the initiative to solve some problem out in the market that a population of people have, solve that problem, have a solvent life learner's mindset, and you will continuously be satisfied with the company that you're building. Oh, it's going to be tough along the way, you're going to wish you weren't even born sometimes. But as long as you have a problem solvers mindset, you're going to keep going on the path. And that's a mission greater than yourself because it's not your problem, it's the problem of a community that you're solving.
Scott Case 14:02
Being of service to others. I talk to a lot of people, especially young people about how do they create relationships, and I say, come in with a perspective of what can you do for the other person, not the other way around. And I was reading a study about, I think it was an Ivy League school, I can't remember which ones I don't want to blame the wrong one. And they do a survey every year, speaking about being not special, and they survey all their MBAs and they ask them some questions about their judgments. And part of the question is, do you believe that your judgment is above average against your peer group? So not against the general population, but of all the other MBA students that are here, do you believe that your judgment is above average? And like the vast majority believe that their judgment is above average in comparison to the judgment of their peers. So we all get in our headspace around somehow we think we're special. There was a great blog post, it's a few years old by a guy named Seth Godin, who wrote about the fact that everybody has 87 things, and his point was, we're all walking around 87 problems, our dogs sick or cats got a problem, our uncle just passed, or whatever it is, we're all facing these things. So, like you said, feel the pain.
Scott Case 15:20
How do you see those things advancing the business? So, okay, I've adopted your point of view, what have you seen or observed that says, hey, taking this mindset helps you create deeper relationships that then actually help advance your business objectives? Because it can feel counterintuitive.
Chris Schembra 15:42
Of course. There's a delicate balance. There's a delicate balance between humility and confidence and leadership. You have to be humble enough to receive critical feedback, to listen to the needs of the consumer, and to build something that fits that market. But you also have confidence enough to see your vision through. So I'm not saying take in critical feedback, don't think about it, and then just do - you got to think about it, process it, have your own vision and then go out and do. But, I think what that brings to the company is not only increased employee retention, one in three employees would take equal pay in position at a competitors firm if they were more empathetic, think about that. All you have to do is step into the shoes of the people you serve and listen to their feelings and perspectives and they'll stay with you. That's it. That's not that hard to do, right. So it's great for retention. It's great for loyalty, but it's also great for creativity, hope, pride, optimism, self confidence, self efficacy, all that kind of good stuff.
Chris Schembra 16:49
See, in the realm of positive psychology, you remember that our thought leadership is around gratitude. In the realm of positive psychology, there's only two things after positive psychology micro intervention that have lasting impact on individuals -mindfulness and gratitude. These are both woo woo things. But gratitude, which is a tool to empathize with your customers with your team, gratitude helps you build that humble mindset. And what happens in the brain when you practice gratitude is it literally rewires.
Chris Schembra 17:26
So let me give an example. That gratitude question that I mentioned we ask at every experience, and I'll actually post it into the chat right now for the visual learners. Hold on. I just put it in the chat. The gratitude question that we ask at every experience, if you could give credit or thanks to one person in life that you don't give enough credit to thanks to, who would that be? Well, when we ask that question, we get the same similar responses. Mother, father, siblings, teacher, stranger, bad boss, ex lover, whatever, kids, whatever, there's not that many characters that people can answer. But two things happen. Either people bring forth some positive experiences from their past that helped them get to where they are today or they bring forth some negative experiences that help them get to where they are today. For instance, they could talk about a grandfather that drove them to sell cookies on the side of the street, or the third grade teacher that believed in them, or the stranger that saved their life. That's from the positive thing. On the negative things, people bring forth some stories of people that hurt them, they'd like to give credit and thanks to the bad boss that taught them who they didn't want to be as a leader. They give credit and thanks to the ex girlfriend who made them what kind of lover they didn't want to be. They gave credit and thanks to the bully that picked on them, all these kinds of things.
Chris Schembra 19:08
Well, what happens is, when you connect with people over that type of emotion, if you ask this question to your customers, to your prospects, we ask it at the beginning of every sales meeting, that's just the Hello. Because we only want to do business with people who can answer that question. And so what happens is, for instance, when someone brings forth some negative autobiographical memory, and then they talk it out or they write it down, you destigmatize the impact that negative emotion has over you, you normalize that open memory from your past, and you broaden and build the brain's thought action repertoire needed for hope, pride, optimism, self confidence, self efficacy. In your life is where that comes in play. Being an entrepreneur, life's not going to be easy. You're either going to go through some macro economic downturn, like a recession, or some massive natural disaster, like COVID, or whatever you call it natural, I don't know what you call it COVID, some massive thing like COVID, or an employee is going to leave or something's going to happen, it's going to be traumatic. And you're gonna have to get through that. So gratitude, giving gratitude to traumatic moments or obstacles from your past, help you give the confidence needed to get through trying times in the future. And if you build that type of theory on your team, your team will be more resilient, your team will be stronger, and they'll have the psychological safety needed to come up with creative innovative ideas.
Scott Case 20:45
So as you think about it, I love the open source of your question, because it's such a great question to ask people and the fact that you start with every sales meeting there.
Scott Case 21:01
You talked a little bit about the negative experiences that people are grateful for because they shaped them. Lots of entrepreneurs avoid talking to other entrepreneurs about things that aren't going well. And, your point of view is no, actually, it's important to commiserate about that shared trauma. Can you talk a little bit about what's the power behind that? And then how as entrepreneurs, can we be supportive listeners to those other entrepreneurs and create the space for them to be okay sharing that, hey, things aren't going the way that I want them to? And just talk a little bit about that.
Chris Schembra 21:42
Totally. From an optics standpoint, if you see someone walking around or you're scrolling on Instagram or you're walking around, you see someone achieving all these great things, and they don't need any help, and they've got all their stuff figured out. Are you inclined to reach out to that person and hang out? Probably not. I mean, it might feel good in the moment, but over time, that's just going to be like a fairweather friend, that's going to be someone that you get drunk or high or go on a trip with and you have these kind of memories, right? If your life is based on commiserating around positive experiences with other people, that's not friendship. Life is about being able to connect with others through trauma and suffering and failure and obstacles. Because see, people want to help.
Chris Schembra 22:37
Here is the thing about human nature. People want to give when asked for something, well, most people do. If I go up and ask you for, let me take a step deeper, people want to give. And if you are in a relationship, where you're just the one giving all the time, and you are providing and you pretend like you don't need any help, you're actually robbing others of that feeling good about helping you. It actually pays to go and ask for things. Because people want to reciprocate. If I go and say, I have a better time of going to my buddies and saying, you know what, Scott, can you do me a favor? Can I get 10 minutes of your time? I want to ask for a favor, I need your input on something that's going to make him feel valued. If I'm in a relationship with Scott and Scott's like, dude, I just want to help you out, how can I help you out, and you're like, I don't need any help. I've pushed Scott away, he's less likely to want to do that in the future. And you can scale that across your different relationships.
Chris Schembra 23:56
So a great example of the science behind this is in a book written by a man named Sebastian Junger. Sebastian Junger wrote the perfect storm. He wrote war. And he wrote Tribe. It looks like Mark has read Tribe. Mark, have you read tribe? And do you remember what he talks about with community if suffers the value of suffering brotherhoods of pain. Do you remember what he was talking about there?
Chris Schembra 24:41
Are you writing into the chat? Ah, oh, I was just gonna have you unmute but chat works perfectly. What happens he shows, get this, in London in 1940 during the 57 day blitzkrieg of London by the Germans air raids, people went into that feeling or thinking that London was going to suffer massive bomb neuroses, and they were going to cripple as a city. But what actually happened was the opposite. London came together, they bonded together, as Mark says, like minds connect. They had a shared traumatic experience, suicide and depression rates went down, went down. Same thing happened in the early 90s in Sarajevo, suicide and depression rates went down. So people actually crave being in the middle of conflict, because it creates brotherhood. I know it sounds silly to say, but trauma, post traumatic stress doesn't occur from the trauma itself, it occurs from your reaction to the trauma, post traumatic growth is the exact opposite. So bad shits gonna happen in your life, it just is. You can either see it as something that victimizes you, or you can see it as an opportunity for connection. And other people love solving your problems. And you love solving other people's problems, or you wouldn't be an entrepreneur. Think about the mindset of who's on this call, you saw a problem in the marketplace and you want to fix it. Now what if someone else reaches out to you with their problems that they need fixing, you're gonna dive into it, you got to do it strategically, you can't just give away your access and resources for free all the time. But it's a great book to read about that value of connecting through dark times.
Scott Case 26:38
I get thanked a lot for the one on one sessions that I do, anybody can go to www.foundersfocus.com and grab one on one time with me. And I often tell people, it's a selfish act. And they're like, What are you talking about? I'm like, actually, my being of service to you is gold to me, right. So if you get something, that's great, if you don't get anything out of it, that's okay. But just know that I'm investing my time and energy, because it makes me feel better as a result of it, because I feel like I'm in service. And the other part of it is - I've always found it easier to solve other people's problems than trying to solve my own. The trick is reversing that polarity and being comfortable enough to ask other people for guidance, advice, counsel – sometimes just to listen, like a lot of times, I don't necessarily need you to help me solve the problem, I just need to let out some things that didn't go the way I wanted them to or whatever else is happening in our lives.
Scott Case 27:39
You have talked a lot about gratitude as a vehicle, you've talked a lot about basically embracing some of those things like both humility and balance of confidence. When you look at entrepreneurs, there's a combination of that iteration cycle that you talked about - that feedback loop and being humble on it. But also, like, you don't have to reinvent everything. So there's a bit of like a balance between like, what is your special sort of secret sauce? And it's funny, because you literally created your own sauce. And it's like, the world needs another tomato sauce? Probably not. But the vehicle that you found that was really your secret sauce was creating connections between people and the sauce is a nice side effect of the whole thing. How do you get there? Like, how do you know where you're really being innovative and where all the other stuff you should just let go? Nobody's creating their own, you know, QuickBooks in a spreadsheet - it's perfectly good to just outsource that problem. So how do you know where your secret sauce is? And how do you know how to let everything else go?
Chris Schembra 28:59
Yeah, that is the overwhelming question. I'm gonna first say it comes from hard work, not passion. I think passion is overrated. If everybody quit their nine to five to pursue a life of passion, we'd have a lot of miserable people. And dedication to hard work yields what you're actually passionate about and what the market demands. And that's what I figured out. I just happened to find pasta sauce and want a little ego boost to see if it was good or not and I started hosting people. And then I just realized that I could dive deeper and deeper and deeper into subsets of what parts of the experience people loved the most. I kept the food the same, I changed around questions, I changed around different aspects, but I kept it a pretty narrow focus and then just made something of it.
Chris Schembra 29:52
You know, again, the question of like, what's your special thing goes back to what I started the call on saying is like nobody on this call is special. Like, we're just reinventing other people's shit. Like innovation is just history repeating itself looking different. But that's the good news. That's the great news. It's pretty overwhelming to think I'm gonna do something so novel that nobody's going to know what the hell I'm talking about and then I'm gonna hope that people like it. No, you're better off just like fixing someone's broken, repackage goods, and then making it your own. I mean, we were talking about like, even you were asking me what song we should play on the intro. And I was like, let's do something from the 90s, Pearl Jam. Well, the 90s, which is like 30 years ago, 20 years ago or something, it's back in again. History goes like this, right, old technologies. How I think about most things is stuff that was written 2000 years ago, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca the elder, these are great ancient stoics from Rome, 2,000 years ago, right? This is wisdom that stands the test of time.
Chris Schembra 31:14
And so when you're thinking about what product to bring to market, don't ignore what's worked in the past, still a little different. I'm not the first to create a team building and client engagement company, I just have my own look. Instead of calling it Hey, I'm teambuilding.com, It's like, hey, let me make you cry over pasta sauce, we'll call it team building, does that sound good? It's just that kind of stuff. And that should make you feel more comfortable.
Chris Schembra 31:41
There's a delicate balance in the market of making something too original or too familiar. You got to find the in-between. I'll give you an example. My buddy wrote a book called The Creative Curve, his name is Allen Gannett. And he built and sold a great company, he wrote a nice book, he went up to Ben and Jerry's to talk about their creative process for bringing to market new ice cream flavors and they explained that the ice cream flavor has to be unique enough to stand out but familiar enough to be marketable. And he just randomly said, like, what's something on one end of the spectrum that never made it to market, and they opened up the freezer, and they pulled out dill ice cream. And they were like, do you want to taste? And he's like, sure, he loved it. He loved it. But it wasn't marketable enough, it was super unique. But art has to be commercial as well. And so you have to be able to sell something in a familiar way. And I'm not gonna lie, don't go out and do the most innovative thing you can think of, unless you've got the resources to back up a massive educational cycle that you're going to need to educate the consumer on what you're doing. It's better off to go and be like an early adopter or an early majority, where the market already kind of knows what they need, you're just doing it a different way.
Scott Case 33:08
That's a great way of looking at it. There's an analogy or a metaphor, I always get them confused, there's sort of the lily pads like, you know, you want to be like half a lily pad off, not like a whole pond away. And so if you can find that balance.
Scott Case 33:22
We've got about five six minutes here. I want to dive into some of the questions that have streamed by. And so I'm going to ask you for like tweet level questions, answers rather, so give me the 30-60 second edition.
Scott Case 33:36
How do you balance bonding through trauma without prolonged wallowing and avoid getting into misery loves company and now you're both sitting on the couch watching A&E movies back to back eating ice cream?
Chris Schembra 33:49
The trick is to turn it into a positive. There's a great article that was written by a man named Robert Emmons or Barbara Fredrickson about the grateful processing of unpleasant memories. It'll literally give you the formula and the scientific background of Okay, acknowledge the trauma but now let's thank the trauma, turn it into a positive, and then turn that into hope, pride, optimism, self confidence, there's a whole thing on like the broaden and build theory, the Grateful processing of unpleasant memories. But like, spin it into a positive make it part of your story. Kurt Vonnegut, in the 1950s and 60s proved there's a certain narrative structure called man in the hole, you got to get the protagonist in order to get an audience to fall in love with the protagonist, the main character, you got to have them fall into a start here, fall into a hole and then come out of the hole. So it's making that turn to going up. And that's just a matter of perspective. The shifts already happened. The shifts already happened. That's the cool part.
Scott Case 34:56
Yeah, it's much better than anxiety which is about something happening in the future. At least you know what happened. Now it's just a question of how you process it, which is a different thing.
Scott Case 35:05
All right, next question. When you say to your potential client to bring them into your purpose, I assume you mean process, Richard, but like, what..
Chris Schembra 35:16
What do you say to your potential client to bring them into your purpose?
Scott Case 35:21
How do you bring them to you, you ask them the question, but what brings them along?
Chris Schembra 35:26
Do you mean like in like in a prospecting call, Richard?
Scott Case 35:29
Yeah.
Chris Schembra 35:31
Again, it's that damn question, that gratitude question. I mean, we just did it on the previous call before this, we were on some prospect call, we start off every prospect meeting with our gratitude question. Two things happen. If they don't want to take the time to answer my gratitude question, get the hell out of here, I don't want to sell to you anyways. See, I have a little bit of a luxury, I can pick and choose who I want to sell to. No assholes. And so if you can't take three minutes to answer that damn question, I don't want to do business with you at all.
Chris Schembra 36:05
When they do answer the question, odds are they're going to cry, and odds are they're going to reveal some part of their soul, positive or negative, that they haven't touched in years. And it'll be the exact reset that they need in life. And once I've done that, they're sold, then it's just a matter of talking about price. Who do you want to bring together? How much is this going to cost? And they're going to want to pay the premium because I brought the emotion into the B2B sales experience, like the Google from promotion to emotion study. Great question, Richard. But you got to be bold, you got to be willing to lose people along the way. I'm a focus equals growth kind of guy.
Chris Schembra 36:48
I did want to recommend this book, too. This is great for entrepreneurs. It's Gary Keller's book, The One Thing, the surprisingly simple truth behind extraordinary results. On Sunday, January 24, 2016, I was sitting with my buddy, Dave Lindsey, he built a nice little company that does about $500 million a year with 4,500 employees, and he looked at me and he asked me, What are you going to do as a new entrepreneur? I said, Well, I just won some awards and this and that, and this and that, and I got this pasta sauce, too. He said, what's the worst go to market opportunity? I said probably the pasta sauce. He said, What will your parents disapprove of the most? I said probably the pasta sauce. He said, What are you most emotionally connected to - whether it's your intellect, your heart, your wallet, your network, what are you most connected to? I said, the pasta sauce. He said, Good, give it a shot. Focus equals growth, you can't chase two rabbits at the same time, they'll both get away. Focus equals growth. Do not chase every flashy object as an entrepreneur, you'll end up doing 10 things mediocre instead of one thing great. It's going to take you a while. Passion to profit is a long distance. But if you keep focused on that one thing, which this book will help explain, I picked it up five years too late, one day, you'll wake up and be one of the best in the world at what you do and maybe you'll be able to monetize it.
Scott Case 38:15
Awesome. Yeah, I talk to a lot of entrepreneurs, and my version of what you just said is commit and be wrong. And the point is that you got to commit to the thing, go really hard after it, learn everything that you can, and if it turns out that that's not the way to go, then you're sure, and you know because you left it all in the field around that idea. And then you can pivot to the next thing. But if you try to do it to five things, you can't chase any of them down to your point about rabbits.
Chris Schembra 38:39
I call it the south star principle. You know how everybody's got this woo woo North Star that they're chasing, hey, look, it's out there, I'm going to just keep on doing it and doing it. I don't believe in that. I believe in the south star principle. I made it up on the spot last week. So it could be completely unvalidated. But I'd rather know what I don't want to be in life than what I do want to be in life. Because knowing what I don't want to be in life means that I have experience, it means that I've asked the right questions. Wisdom isn't from having the right answers. Wisdom is from asking the right questions and being a constant life learner. So the more you fail, the more you can learn. And that's what you got to do by focusing on one thing.
Scott Case 39:22
That's awesome. We had a few questions we didn't get to. I'd love to share them with you and maybe we can get some answers and share after the fact if you're open to that.
Chris Schembra 39:31
Yeah. Reverend Jeff Grant about the most of you can't handle the truth, what was that movie with Tom Cruise? Read a great book called Radical Candor. It's a great book on having tough conversations. Brave conversations, brave feedback. Radical Candor by Kim Scott. That's also a good book. I've just given like a whole book list.
Chris Schembra 40:15
I’ve said essentially no original shit on this entire call. I am just a voracious reader and I know how to connect the dots. That’s exactly what I’m trying to say about you don’t have to go out and reinvent the wheel. You don’t have to innovate. Just come up with the new way of talking about what other people have done the hard work to do. And that’s how you’ll get ahead. I mean, there’s not much original stuff I’ve talked about on this call. You notice I credit everybody in every single sentence. I’m just like a nobody. Actually that would make me special. That would be entitlement, victim mindset, all that kind of stuff, so I’m not going to even go there.
Scott Case 40:55
Well, you’re semi-special to me. And I appreciate you being here, so thank you.
Scott Case 41:03
Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Founders Focus. What did you think? You got any feedback for us? Got a topic that you'd like us to discuss, or maybe a future co host? We'd love to hear from you. Just hit me up on LinkedIn at T Scott Case. And join us at www.foundersfocus.com to stay up to date with the latest episodes and join us live every week at our Founders Focus sessions. Hope to see you there.