Tweet

Influence Like "The Boss"

Written by: Brian Macias

Article Overview: Much of influence is based on passion and showmanship. Every night on tour, Springsteen and other artists conjure up the magic to move people physically and emotionally. It's a great lead to follow!

Influence Like "The Boss"

Last night, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band came roaring into The Palace of Auburn Hills, and absolutely earned every penny of every $91 ticket.

It wasn’t the first time I’ve seen them live, and won’t be the last. My first Springsteen concert was September 4th, 1985 at the Pontiac Silverdome. I was 8 years old. Even then, I knew I witnessed something special, and it began a life-long love affair with music.

There are very few special people who have the ability to naturally influence the masses. Bruce is one of them. In fact, if your looking to build a loyal client base that spans generations, buys repeatedly, and refers religiously, then Bruce is a great model for your business.

A great place to start is by modeling his live show...

The performance always exceeds the hype.

The new album is fantastic. Rolling Stone gave it five stars. Sirius Satellite Radio turned channel 10 into E Street Radio with 24/7 Springsteen songs, concerts, news, and updates from the tour. BruceSpringsteen.net posts videos and set lists from each show. There is a ton of hype.

Even with all the hype, the live show always exceeds expectations.

Your company is trying to build “hype” too. The company is working hard and spending money to create an image with its website, advertising, PR, and marketing materials. Does your “live show” meet or exceed the hype that the company is creating for you? Most of the time, the interaction with salesperson is far below the perception the company creates. Instead of a person matching the dynamic, engaging perception the company creates, you get some robotic, apathetic call center moron.

Be as dynamic and engaging as your company’s hype.

He makes you think throughout the entire show.

Bruce starts every show with a question that requires a response. His new single is Radio Nowhere, and he asks the question, “Is there anybody alive out there?” Appropriately, Bruce opens the show by asking, “Is there anybody alive out there?”, eliciting a massive response from a packed arena.

Throughout the night, his songs push you to contemplate love, life, the government, and your responsibility as a human being. That’s not by accident. That’s the desired outcome.

Are you engaging your clients to think about their situations throughout your entire interaction? Are you spending 80% of the time engaging them by asking thoughtful, open-ended questions? Do you know what kinds of responses you’re hoping to elicit with your questions? Do the responses move you closer to creating a win-win relationship? Are you listening to the responses and taking notes?

Treat your clients as the intelligent, creative people they are. You don’t have to give them the answers. They have them. Your job is to get them to think about their situation and come up with the answers on their own. Getting them to adopt your ideas as their own is true influence.

Start every interaction by asking a phenomenal question. Go deeper and make your clients think by asking questions starting with: can you tell me more about..., what made you decide to do..., how do you feel about..., would you be willing to...


Passion, energy, enthusiasm, belief, preparation and focus all combine with incredible talent raw talent.

Bruce holds himself and the band to an incredibly high standard. His rehearsals are storied to be long and demanding. He’s been doing it for nearly 40 years and has the same energy on stage he had when I first saw him in 1985. He’s having a great time. Watching him, you realize he’s exactly where he’s supposed to be. All the preparation allows him to be in the moment and focus on the crowd.

I recently had a client ask me, “Do you feel like you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be?” I responded, “I really do. What made you ask that question?” He said, “I can tell you love it and feel like you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be.”

Is that the impression you’re transferring to your clients? Are they attracted to your passion, energy, enthusiasm, and belief? Are you thoroughly prepared with your material so you can focus entirely on the client?

Prepare like crazy. Get to know your product or service inside and out. Your preparation isn’t so you can dump your knowledge on your client. It’s so you can focus solely on your client and only talk about the benefits of your product or service that benefit the client when the time is right.

Fans feel energized, engaged, renewed and inspired when they leave the show. You can’t wait to see him again.
My wife and I played Springsteen on the iPod the whole drive home from the show. I’m playing a live Springsteen album as I’m writing this. Instead of feeling like I’ve had my fill, I want more!

Do your clients feel this way after meeting with you or are they happy you’re gone? Are they eagerly anticipating the next meeting or would they prefer to stick a needle in their eye over talking with you?

Record and listen to your phone calls. Take a partner to your next client meeting and have him or her give you feedback after. Videotape your next presentation and watch it. The film doesn’t lie. If you can’t stand it, neither can your clients.

What do you do about it? Re-read the above for starters.

Thousands of people saw the same concert I did. Most allowed themselves to feel, but didn’t think about why they felt the way the did. Most certainly didn’t take the time to relate it back to what they do.

What’s the difference? Passion.

I’m passionate about influencing. I’m passionate about learning more about what makes someone a great influencer. I’m passionate about becoming a better influencer. I’m passionate about making you a better influencer.

Inspiration is everywhere. Passion is the decoder that makes it visible. Think about your business a lot. Raise your level of awareness to the world around you. If you have passion, you’ll see things differently.

Related Articles
  What Is The Meaning Of Leadership?
  Sue Your Boss
  Bad Bosses
  Be Your Own Boss! ~FOR SERIOUS ENTREPRENEURS...SECRETS TO WEALTH
  Organization & Productivity: Can Disorganized Managers be “Trained”?

Article Tags: 8 years, bruce springsteen, channel 10, concerts news, e street band, entire show, five stars, hype, love affair, loyal client base, marketing materials, new album, new single, palace of auburn hills, pontiac silverdome, rolling stone, salesperson, satellite radio, spending money, website advertising



Related Forum Posts
Favourite Business Books - The November PROFIT magazine looks at the favourite business books of Canada's most successful entrepreneurs. The top 4 are: 1) Good to Great by Jim Collins 2) The E-Myth by Michael Gerber 3) Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne 4) How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
Motivational Books for Entrepreneurs - Searched but did not find a comprehensive list of books for us entrepreneurs: Here are some of my favorites: Napoleon Hill - Think and Grow Rich The greatest secret in the world- Earl Nightingale...listen to it, then listen to it again. Jeffrey Gitomers books- Red book of selling, sales bible, Green book of getting your way. Your Erroneous Zones - Wayne Dyer Thinkertoys - Michael Michalko How To Win Friends and Influence People - Dale Carnegie The Magic of Believing - Claude M. Bristol How to Talk to Anyone - Leil Lowndes Get Smarter- Seymour Schulich What are yours?
Re: Books You Wish Had Been Written - How did I miss this topic for so long!! haa haa I love it. Ok - procrastinate constructively - I'd probably buy that but then put off reading it...haa haa Hmm...I think someone should write a book about being a sometimes reluctant entrepreneur, or perhaps the reality of business ownership and PMS as a woman in business. kidding aside...I have an extensive library but I would love to see a book that really lays out the emotional side of business ownership. What to prepare for etc. I get the tools and information from reading a lot of biographies but somedays, I would love to go to my library and pull out a reference for 'one the days you dont feel like being the Boss etc..."or 'how to keep your game face on for your staff when stuff doesnt go right. I had a meeting today with a prospect and he was really candid, he said "i want my business to be doing better but I'm not sure if I have it in me today...." Instead of a sales meeting - we went for a heart to heart entrepreneurship coffee. Best 'meeting' I have had in forever!!
Are You a Businessgirl or a Businesswoman? - One thing that has irked me off and on for 30 years is the tendency of people - both men [i:2wryyhvf]and [/i:2wryyhvf]women, to refer to women, whatever their age, as 'girls' rather than women. College basketball announcers, coachers and players do it, as do the fans. These are 'girls' who are between the ages of 18 - 21, that's women in my book. Tennis players and announcers do it. John McEnroe called 'em girls and just when I was getting annoyed at him for being a bit of a male chauvanist, they interviewed player Lindsay Davenport - 30 years old, and she referred to 'em as girls as well. The Bond "girls" were girls up until the 90s, I admit, doing nothing more than providing someone for Bond to bed and rescue, but in the last few installments the "girl" has been more of a power player...nevertheless she's still a 'girl'. And of course there was the TV series The Golden Girls - which I liked by the way, but which featured mature women calling themselves girls And now here it is in the 2000s, and we get this: The Girl's Guide To Starting Your Own Business, by Caitlin Friedman and Kimberly Yorio. Their photos are on the cover - presumably the photo is of them and not models - and they are definitely women, not girls. And what "girly" chapter titles do they give us? "The Scary Stuff" (financial matters) and a chapter on ACTING Like an Adult. (Caps mine). So popular was this book, apparently, that they've now come out with a sequel: The Girl's Guide to Being a Boss (Without Being A Bitch): Valuable Lessons, Smart Suggestions, and true stories for succeeding as the CHICK-IN-CHARGE. (My caps) and once again I was tempted to take the book and throw it across the room. Let's indulge in [i:2wryyhvf]all [/i:2wryyhvf]the cliches, shall we? So I'd like to hear from other businesswomen out there. Do you find yourself referred to as a girl? Do you mind it? Do you like the culture that still propagates that mindset?
Meet Mary Sue Milliken - chef and restaurant owner - Mary Sue Milliken will be at our "Launching an Edible Life" event February 4 in Los Angeles ... come join us! Contact aswift@ladieswholaunch.com for registration details. If there's just one thing you need to open a restaurant, it would have to be a stove, right? Think again. When Mary Sue Milliken and her best friend/fellow chef/business partner Susan Feniger opened City Cafe in Los Angeles in 1981, they had no stove or oven, only a hot plate and a hibachi out back in the alley. Humble digs, especially for two professionally trained chefs-Milliken had attended Washburne Culinary Institute, while Feniger studied at the Culinary Institute of America. Their resumes included stints at three-star restaurants in France, Spago in Los Angeles, and Le Perroquet in Chicago, where they met in 1978-the first women working in that restaurant's all-male kitchen. Rich in experience and vision, but not in funds, they were happy to have a restaurant to call their own and quickly began perfecting a unique, multicultural fare, which incorporated recipes from Greek, Indian, and Thai cultures, as well as their own mothers' recipes. Once they expanded to City Restaurant in 1985, they became culinary icons, recognized for their fresh mix of refined culinary technique and exotic Third World flavors, all dished up with down-home charm and playful enthusiasm. Now overseeing 375 employees between the Border Grill restaurants in Santa Monica and Las Vegas and Ciudad in downtown Los Angeles, the partners have also found time to write five cookbooks, including the recent Mexican Cooking Essentials for Dummies; host the popular Food Network shows "Too Hot Tamales" and "Tamales World Tour"; and launch the Border Girls brand at Whole Foods Market. What we learned from Mary Sue: Not every venture will be successful, but every experience will be worthwhile. "You've got to bounce back and just keep going. They're all great lessons to learn." Words of Wisdom "I think we both subconsciously were willing to start in a really meager setting, just because it was an opportunity not to work for a man." Penniless But Passionate "We had come home [from France] with the intent to open a restaurant together, and we didn't have a penny to our names. I was 23 years old. I had not been to college. I had no idea how to launch a business. None. Susan had a degree in economics and had been to chef's school. She's five years older than me. But she also didn't have any idea how to launch a business." Cook What You Know "First of all, you just copy things. But then, it starts to be a very personal cuisine, which is what we basically used those three-and-half years at City Cafe for-to create our own personal style of food. And it was so well-received. It started out as country French food, and it kept expanding all the time." Eclecticism, Not Fusion "We did some really groundbreaking stuff. This was in 1984, and still, when our City Cuisine cookbook came out in '87, people said there's nowhere to put this book on the shelves of the cookbook aisles, because you guys are all over the map. And there just wasn't that kind of integration of different culinary ideas. We never called what we did "fusion." We always felt like we stayed very true to the Greek cuisine, or the Indian, or the Thai, or the Mexican, or the Scandinavian, or whatever it was." On-the-Job Training We slowly started learning about business, so when we launched City Restaurant, which was really the thing that put us on the map, it was a 125-seat restaurant with a full-on kitchen. It was on La Brea. We raised the $660,000, and had to do a whole prospectus. I'll never forget, my net worth was $12,000, and Susan's wasn't much more. But we were able to learn by the seat of our pants, and we've been learning ever since." How Much Is Enough? "We were just making educated guesses-or uneducated guesses. In the end, $660,000 was not enough money at all. We were completely short, and we had to get an angel to come in and sign a guarantee on a bank line of credit for us. Really, it was a stressful opening, because we only had like two-and-a-half days in the kitchen with food before we had to open the doors to the public because we were so broke." Hindsight Is 20/20 "If I knew then what I know now, I would have somehow found some financial bridge so that we could have had a little more practice before we opened. I mean, literally, the first couple weeks, there were nights that we didn't even go home, and we were really burning the candle down to zero." It's a Man's World "I think we were both ready to be on our own. And the prospect of working under men, and working our way up, and trying to fight through all of the barriers, looked less fulfilling than just starting out [on our own]. Even though we didn't even have a stove, we still opted to start out calling our own shots." Know When to Grow "The growth ... it's a really personal thing. It depends on how equipped you are for the challenge and stress of growth, and how your business is doing. I mean, we've grown where things worked out really well, and we've grown where it's created a big strain on the existing businesses, and the new businesses didn't work." On Losing Money "When I look back on it, I think, 'Well, I didn't go to college. That's about how much college might cost me. I'll just chalk it up to experience.' Now I have an even better understanding, and luckily, it didn't happen at a time when I really couldn't afford it. But I'll tell you, being an entrepreneur and being in business is a real roller coaster." A Thankless Job Has Its Rewards "When the Food Network came asking for us to come and promote our second book, and they noticed we were funny and how we finished each other's sentences, they said, 'You girls should have a TV show.' The reason we should have had a TV show was that we did all of this really thankless teaching before that, and I'm not even sure it brought bodies into the restaurant. A lot of people might have looked at it as a waste of time. But I think you never know what skill you're going to develop, [and our teaching gave us the skills we needed to do the Food Network show.]" Be a Great Boss "We learn a lot from our colleagues, and from other companies that we want to be like. We're always looking for innovative ways to really make our workplace so phenomenally attractive that we can't lose good people, and we can attract the best. Those are big goals for us all the time." My Most Rewarding Business Moments... "... are when one of our past employees mentions how working for us made a difference in their lives. It's the best feeling in the world!" Be Good at Everything "You have to be a great leader, as well as a great cook, as well as organized, because it's a business of so many details. I think there are a lot of restaurants that fall through the cracks because they're missing the boat on something, and customers just don't come back." All Work and No Play "You have to be willing to walk away when you have a pile of work on your desk and stuff that you really should get done. You've got to be willing to walk away and clear your mind and be in the moment with your children or your husband, or whoever. You have to convince yourself that it's equally, or more, important than your job." This Featured Lady was profiled by Sarah Tomlinson, a Los Angeles-based freelance writer.


Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Tweet

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

The Death of the Sales Magazine

Intro to Search Engine Optimization

The Future of Online Marketing

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.