47: Three Principles for Long-Lasting Business Relationships

Behind Their Success: Ep 47

Paden: [00:00:00] Welcome to Behind Their Success. This podcast is for people who are feeling stuck on their entrepreneur journey or in their careers. It's for people who want to scale and grow their businesses, learn about the power of mindset, or they just know there's more out there and they want to start making change.

Paden: I'm Paden Squires.. I am the host of the podcast. I was never cut out to be an employee. And when I was an employee, I was bored out of my mind. So I made a plan. I studied and passed the CPA exam in eight months while working, all with the end goal in mind of quitting my job and starting my own. I did that in 2014 and it has been an amazing wild ride since.

Paden: So now let's hear from other entrepreneurs and what mindsets and probably more important, what actions they have taken that have created and led to their success. Hello everybody. Welcome back to Behind Their Success podcast. I'm Paden Squires, the host, and today we have Brad Englert on. Let's Brad is the founder of Brad Englert Advisory, and he is an [00:01:00] author, advisor, and technologist.

Paden: He has worked for Accenture for 22 years, including 10 years as a partner. He then served As the, uh, CIO, Chief Information Officer for the University of Texas at Austin for eight years. He recently has his new book out called The Spheres of Influx. In the book, Brad talks about an actionable roadmap for emerging and established leaders to develop and perfect what he calls the critical hard skill of building effective and enduring business relationships.

Paden: He focuses on internal and external spheres of influence. For us. Brad, good morning. Welcome to the podcast. So Brad, you're really into a lot of what you see as very kind of G to success is, his mentors will have been, and, and leading type people. What makes that so valuable? 

Brad: They don't teach a lot of these principles in business school.

Brad: I did this with all my electives at the business school at the University of Texas in Austin. They never talked about it. [00:02:00] Building business relationships. However, it backs where the value comes. And so I think there's a gap there where mentors can help those, especially early in your career. You know, don't be transactional.

Brad: Don't keep brushing down the field. Be intentional, take your time and figure out who are the people that you should be focusing on now, your boss, your director, reports from your manager, and executive leaders. All your standards with your running an organization. And then that's your internal stereotype.

Brad: Influence, you have a lot of impact on those people and them on you. And then your external stereotype influence are those who have less direct impact, customer experience, the influencers. And strategic vendor partners. There are different ways to build all those relationships. And that's where Mayturkey help navigate.

Brad: When I finished the book, I just sat back and I thought, well, what are they? [00:03:00] Three principles that apply to all business relationships. I really had that going in. So it was, you know, after 200 pages and every. Business relationship has for me, components or principles. One, understand their goals and aspirations.

Brad: You know, what are they trying to achieve? What is your boss trying to achieve? What are your director or child or achieve? Uh, second, set and manage expectations. How often we skip over that. We just kind of rush to the solution. But we don't talk about, you know, what do you expect, when do you expect it, when I was the boss, I made sure I was specific about when I needed something, what I needed, I didn't just leave it up in the air.

Brad: And then third, he was genuinely here for their success. When I joined the university, I met with this 40 year old professor, very prosperous guy. I worked with him 50 [00:04:00] years prior and designing the statewide network for taxis. And I said, okay, you'd read some of my notes. He goes, get out of the office and tell them to give it back.

Brad: And there's the best advice, you know, just get out there and meet the people, your peers and influencers. 

Paden: Yeah, and you know, it's kind of interesting you made the point that, you know, universities aren't necessarily teaching a lot of these skills or talking about a lot of these things and you, which formal education, you know, it's hard for them to teach necessarily a lot of soft skills because like, how do you measure that?

Paden: How do you even tell if somebody's getting better at that versus like, you know, like hard skills? It's really easy for, you know, You know, a university to teach mathematics or what have you, because there's like this set process, you can teach that process, but that's, but the real, the soft skills, like you said, are really where all the values at, you know, as a, as a guy that, as a consultant, um, you know, myself and kind of a wealth and tech period that.[00:05:00] 

Paden: My whole business is just business relationships and taking care of people and communication. And of course, I got to be competent in what I do. People want to make sure you're competent. But at the same time, that's probably not even the more important piece, right? It's the relationship. 

Brad: That's where, you know, they really talked about, um, you know, doing that work.

Brad: Go to an event and collect a bunch of business cards. You know, it's like, In 40 years, I've never been to a networking event that led to an authentic business relationship. I had some good cocktails, but you know, 

Paden: nothing worse. It's, you know, in some, a lot of those events or whatever, it's really hard to actually get below the surface, right?

Paden: And so you're not really, you're not really making any real connections, right? If you're just high level surface, passing out business cards, having, Oh, what do you do? What do you do? Um, you're not really getting to the underneath of like the values that people have and the shared values. Or I had a, I had a 

Brad: woman yesterday who read [00:06:00] the book, she goes, yeah, I went to this networking event and a week later I got an email from someone I met there asking for a donation to their nonprofit.

Brad: I don't even know if there's a transcript in there. 

Paden: Yeah, and it's, yeah, I mean it's just so short sighted, right? So Brad, you know, in the book you talk about communication, and right, you know, I firmly believe almost every problem between humans and the world is just poor communication. So Brad, you know, looking back at your career so far, what would you credit as the best decision you've made?

Brad: When some spouses survive than others, I put pressure on their styles to be good. And I think just providing that safety net was really important for me. 

Paden: Yeah, no, I 100 percent agree with that. Your home life, especially your significant other relationship, if that's not solid, like you can still go have success.

Paden: You can still have some certain level of success, but in no way are you ever going to reach your full potential [00:07:00] without how things are operating at home is going to affect how you show up. You know, on a daily trying to get your job done. So, you know, on the flip side of that, Brad, you make a mistake.

Brad: You've made trusting people who shouldn't have been trusted. So be on the lookout for these untrustworthy traits, fake niceness, no basic respect for pronged eventuality, no accountability, not taking responsibility for their damaging actions, spreading the rumors about you to others, dastardly being about others to you, lack of empathy, failure to uphold.

Brad: Commitment and always seeing themselves as fate when they are off from the devil. That's a good one. 

Paden: Yeah. You know, and it's tough, right? And some of those things, like you just, you know, you don't know, you don't know until you get into the fire or into the doonages, you know, when you interview people, everybody shows up and generally interviews pretty well.

Paden: Right. Like they, they put their best forward, but like, and especially in the hiring retention world, [00:08:00] it's, it's really like, you don't know until somebody's in the job and doing the job. And. And what truly what kind of person you are and the best piece of advice I've ever got around employees and stuff like that is to uh, hire fast and fire fast.

Paden: I have to 

Brad: learn to 

Paden: fire 

Brad: fast. I know. That better as I get older. Especially if they're dishonesty. You know, it's just like, you just can't put up with that. 

Paden: And there, there's a huge difference between like, okay, they don't necessarily have the skills or whatever. We can develop some skills. That's right. So Brad, thinking back, you know, on your career again, what is one piece of advice you'd give to your younger self?

Paden: So say you're, you're starting back at the beginning of your career and you could tell yourself one piece of advice. Well, what would that be? 

Brad: Flow down. You don't have to rush to the solution. Sometimes it's better to think about it longer. Sometimes the problem goes away, you know, cause we're relaxed. [00:09:00] And so I think just.

Brad: Not breastfeeding, just being more, give yourself some mental space and time to solve 

Paden: problems. For me personally, that's a great bit of advice as a guy that's, um, maybe characterized as impatient or just, you know, I want to get things done and move things forward and all those types of things. And that's like, that's good.

Paden: You know, it's helped me move along and get to the point now. It's true, it's, it's hard sometimes to enjoy the ride a little bit, right? Yeah, that's, that's, that's great advice there, Brad, of, of, you know, like, often we get in such a big hurry and, you know, they, I've always heard the metaphor, but they're like, hey, you're rushing so fast to climb the ladder, you better stop and make sure you're climbing the right ladder.

Paden: Um, because often we're just running, going, going, going, and we may get somewhere and realize, wow, that's not even where I should get or wanted to get. We didn't even take the right time. To think about where we wanted to be. So Brad, what's the best way people connect with you? I know you got, you know, your book out, the, [00:10:00] uh, the Spheres of Influence.

Paden: There's a 

Brad: link in there to the book. There's some sample pages you can take a look at. It's actually an Amazon bestseller in three categories, which I'm happy about. Uh, leadership training, mentoring, and coaching. It's customer relations. And those were actually my target areas. So it's 

Paden: really pleased with that.

Paden: Brad, it's been a, it's been a great conversation with you and I appreciate you coming on and, uh, we enjoyed you on the show. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. If you found it valuable, please rate, review, and share it. That is the best way to help us build this and reach more people as we're trying to accomplish our goal of help creating more healthy, wealthy, and wise entrepreneurs.

Paden: You can follow us on social media by searching for me, Paden Squires. Or going to www.padensquires.com on the website and social media. We're always sharing tips of personal growth and there we can actually interact. I'm looking forward to it. Thanks [00:11:00] guys.