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Author: Jason Forrest

Jason Forrest, CEO and Chief Culture Officer at FPG (Forrest Performance Group), is a leading authority in culture change programs and an expert at creating high-performance, high-profit, and "Best Place to Work" cultures. As a sales professional, author, speaker, and management coach, Jason’s job is to empower professionals and executives to unleash their human performance and master their leadership skills in sales, management, culture and service; for the purpose of increasing profit through people.

The winner of four international Stevie Awards for his Warrior Selling and Leadership Coaching training programs, Jason is also an award-winning author of five books, including Leadership Sales Coaching – rated as one of Selling Power Magazine's Top Sales Books. Additionally, Inc. Magazine has named FPG as one of the Nation’s Best Workplaces for 2017.

With a decade of coaching and speaking experience, Jason Forrest is Chairman of the acclaimed National Speaker Association's Million Dollar Speaker Group, as well as The Entrepreneurs' Organization (EO), the world’s only peer-to-peer network exclusively for entrepreneurs. Every year, Jason delivers approximately 100 keynotes/seminars and conducts 850 group coaching calls with sales teams, managers, and executives.|Jason Forrest, CEO and Chief Culture Officer at FPG (Forrest Performance Group), is a leading authority in culture change programs and an expert at creating high-performance, high-profit, and "Best Place to Work" cultures. As a sales professional, author, speaker, and management coach, Jason’s job is to empower professionals and executives to unleash their human performance and master their leadership skills in sales, management, culture and service; for the purpose of increasing profit through people.

The winner of four international Stevie Awards for his Warrior Selling and Leadership Coaching training programs, Jason is also an award-winning author of five books, including Leadership Sales Coaching – rated as one of Selling Power Magazine's Top Sales Books. Additionally, Inc. Magazine has named FPG as one of the Nation’s Best Workplaces for 2017.

With a decade of coaching and speaking experience, Jason Forrest is Chairman of the acclaimed National Speaker Association's Million Dollar Speaker Group, as well as The Entrepreneurs' Organization (EO), the world’s only peer-to-peer network exclusively for entrepreneurs. Every year, Jason delivers approximately 100 keynotes/seminars and conducts 850 group coaching calls with sales teams, managers, and executives.|Jason Forrest, CEO and Chief Culture Officer at FPG (Forrest Performance Group), is a leading authority in culture change programs and an expert at creating high-performance, high-profit, and "Best Place to Work" cultures. As a sales professional, author, speaker, and management coach, Jason’s job is to empower professionals and executives to unleash their human performance and master their leadership skills in sales, management, culture and service; for the purpose of increasing profit through people.

The winner of four international Stevie Awards for his Warrior Selling and Leadership Coaching training programs, Jason is also an award-winning author of five books, including Leadership Sales Coaching – rated as one of Selling Power Magazine's Top Sales Books. Additionally, Inc. Magazine has named FPG as one of the Nation’s Best Workplaces for 2017.

With a decade of coaching and speaking experience, Jason Forrest is Chairman of the acclaimed National Speaker Association's Million Dollar Speaker Group, as well as The Entrepreneurs' Organization (EO), the world’s only peer-to-peer network exclusively for entrepreneurs. Every year, Jason delivers approximately 100 keynotes/seminars and conducts 850 group coaching calls with sales teams, managers, and executives.

Categories
Marketing Personal Development

Your Own Experience Is the Hardest Teacher (But Others’ Experience Is the Easiest)

By Jason Forrest, CEO, Head Coach Forrest Performance Group

What could you accomplish if you had unlimited brainpower and several lifetimes’ worth of experience to bring to bear on solving a problem? The truth is—you do have access to such unlimited power. And it’s not some pill you’ve seen in a science fiction movie. It’s in the people you know.  An effective mastermind group of peers—high level executives from a variety of industries—can be invaluable to your business.

Merriam-Webster defines mastermind as “a person who supplies the directing or creative intelligence for a project.” Wouldn’t it be amazing to have the chance to interact with and learn from someone who could provide this kind of leadership and know-how in an area that’s not exactly your sweet spot? Multiply that level of amazing by two, three, even eight, and you’ll get a sense of what a truly incredible, game-changing resource a mastermind group can be.

A mastermind group—a concept I first learned about from Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill—is a place to share ideas, learn best practices, and benefit from others’ brains, experience, and belief systems. The book calls such a group “a coordination of knowledge and effort and a spirit of harmony between two or more people for the attainment of definite purpose.”

The benefits of such coordination have been invaluable to me personally. For a number of years, I’ve been part of a nine-person mastermind group of entrepreneurs. Each of the eight others in my group has contributed valuable insight that has helped me overcome challenges, specifically in the realms of HR, marketing, and financing.

Here’s how to start a mastermind group to reap similar benefits for your own business:

  1. Assess yourself. Consider all the tasks you’re responsible for and identify a few areas where you excel and a few where your skills could be sharper.
  2. Explore your network. See who you know or could get to know who likely has a strength you’d like to develop.
  3. Assemble the team. Pitch the idea when you meet with potential mastermind colleagues. Be up front—let them know what you’re looking for, and what you bring to the table.
  4. Share the wealth. Introduce connections to one another. Get the ball rolling by finding ways to support a new colleague using your unique strengths.

You now have the makings of a mutually-beneficial mastermind group. Here are a few experience-tested pointers to keep it going strong:

  • Don’t confuse your role within your company with your role in your mastermind group. In your own company, you’re a leader and likely seen as the mastermind. In contrast, your mastermind group should consist of peers—each with valuable expertise. No one is the leader, and your role is not to manage or be managed. It is simply to share experience.
  • Think outside the industry. You won’t get really varied skill sets or transparent best-practice sharing if your mastermind group consists of a bunch of people in your own industry. Look to other fields—banking, IT, medicine, nonprofit, government, etc.—for colleagues who can help you see things in a whole new way.

Assembling a mastermind group and staying in regular contact with its members will put each member in position to thrive—both professionally and personally. This kind of mutually-beneficial group is one of the best ways to take advantage of the “work smarter, not harder” mindset.

About the Author

Jason Forrest | CEO, Head Coach Forrest Performance Group As a sales professional, author, speaker, and sales coach, Jason’s job is to empower professionals and executives to unleash their human performance and master their leadership skills in sales, management, culture and service. Jason grew up under the influence of his father (a business owner and professional salesperson), his mother, (a persuasive speaking professor), and Zig Ziglar (his Sunday school teacher and world-famous salesperson/motivational speaker). Jason learned sales by selling rather than observing. These influences and experiences shaped him into who he is today-a salesperson first, a trainer on a mission, a national speaker, and a coach who pushes sales organizations to become the best version of themselves. Every year, Jason delivers approximately 92 keynotes/seminars and conducts 850 group coaching calls with sales teams, sales managers, and executives. See him in action at www.ForrestPG.com

Categories
Best Practices Growth Management Personal Development

The One Big Reason Your Process is the Path to Profit

Everyone loves a process when it produces results. But what about when it doesn’t? What happens then?

I’m a big process guy. I founded my company around them, to the point that the profit-driving selling methodology we teach to our clients is rooted in the process. We believe that when you find and adopt systems that work, you can radically improve your sales using the same baseline methods. You just need to trust the process, follow through and let the results take care of themselves.

In truth, it’s easy to follow processes when they work. They create true workplace cultures by placing value on the same things, generate certainty with your employees, and they drive profit in a way that more spontaneous approaches simply can’t.

The tough part is staying true to the process in the event it doesn’t produce the desired outcome. Those are the true gut-check moments, and if you want to continue growing, it’s key to stick to your guns and trust in the process.

The New England Patriots learned this lesson the hard way in the Super Bowl. Malcolm Butler was the Patriots’ best cornerback for the entire 2017 season, and he played 98 percent of the team’s snaps up to the Super Bowl. Then, suddenly, he was riding the bench. He played just one play in the big game, a meaningless play on special teams. Other than that, he sat and watched from the bench with the rest of us.

The big question: why?

Patriots coach Bill Belichick is also fond of his processes, so much so that it’s become known as the Patriot Way. Whether it was because of a team infraction or just because the matchup favored the backup, Belichick opted to stick to his system and sit Butler. It didn’t work so well. The Philadelphia Eagles racked up 374 passing yards, backup quarterback Nick Foles threw three touchdowns and the Eagles scored 41 points. They also won the game.

It’s all too easy to criticize the Patriots’ system when things don’t go right. Surely they would’ve had a better chance if they started Butler, right? If this was the result, shouldn’t the Patriots overhaul their system so this doesn’t happen again?

This same conversation happens over and over in corporate offices and boardrooms every day. An otherwise successful process doesn’t produce the desired result, and suddenly it’s time to throw it out and start over again. The problem with this thought pattern is that it doesn’t leverage past success and takes a nearsighted look at a farsighted concern.

The Patriots’ system is without a doubt the most successful in the history of the NFL. Under Belichick they’ve won the AFC East 15 of 17 seasons and won five Super Bowls since 2001. But it also hasn’t been perfect. They’ve lost three Super Bowls and even missed the playoffs twice. The temptation during those trough periods is to blow it up and start over. Clearly the process has failed, so it’s time to move on. Or so many of the prevailing theories go.

The truth is that what separates the Patriots from everyone else is that they stick to the process even when they don’t reach their desired outcome frame now and again. Setbacks are inevitable in life. No process is perfect, and even the Patriots undergo some necessary tweaks and maintenance every year. But that relentless and repetitive focus on the process over the results is the reason why the Patriots win so much, not the reason why they lose.

So even if the decision to sit Butler didn’t work out on an individual level, the systematic framework that created that decision is the entire reason why the Patriots were there in the first place. The same adherence to the process produced the Tom Brady draft pick and everything that came after. That’s why Belichick had no regrets about his decision after the game. He trusts his process in all circumstances.

Psychologists call it tunnel vision. In a crisis or a setback, it’s easiest to focus entirely on what’s happened in the moment as opposed to seeing the grand plan you’ve already put in place. Think of a child knocking down an entire Lego village they’ve built because they messed up the placement of a window in one of the houses. You’d teach them to fix the window and keep the rest of village standing, wouldn’t you? It’s vital to view your company’s processes the same way.

This is what separates companies that have long term success over flash-in-the-pan companies that have quick success and then fade away. Companies like Apple and Space X developed processes they trust even when the market dives, or when a product doesn’t work as intended. Companies that hit bankruptcy either didn’t develop a successful process, or they didn’t follow the one they already had.

This is every business’s greatest challenge and greatest reward. Develop a process that works and stick to it through tough times. You’ll be amazed at the results on the other side of the setback.