What’s up, everybody? It’s Steve “The Hurricane” here, and on today’s episode of “A Drink With The Hurricane” we’re gonna talk about investing in training and why it’s important to do so if you want to hit your goals in 2021. So cheers.

All right, so as we’re getting started, I’m real excited to be sharing this with you because today is actually my first day back in my office in over a week. I had my first professional business trip since the pandemic started, that’s over 10 months. I went to Colorado last week. It was absolutely amazing and incredible and I don’t have coronavirus. So it was a great time and I’m safe and healthy at the same time.

The other part of it, this why I say it’s my first day back, is we had a massive snow storm and we had 15 inches of snow, which kept us close for the first two days. So I’m gonna make an episode later on about how do you deal with emergency weather and situations later. But for today’s topic, we’re talking about training and why is training so important to invest in.

Well, when you think about it, everything in the healthcare industry comes from a certification, that is a degree, you pass your NCLEX exam. If you’re a nurse or a caregiver, you have some kind of license to practice medicine or to be a therapist or a doctor of therapy or a doctor of this. And then you have to have ongoing continuing education to continue to practice whatever certification that you receive. And so that’s how the healthcare industry works. And it makes sense.

I want to take care of and treat patients, I have to prove that I’m proficient and know what I’m supposed to do, but then I have to make sure that I’m learning and continuing to learn the latest and greatest ways to do things because technology, science, and medicine advances all the time. Well, the same thing goes for being a business owner. You know, when I think about my company, Hurricane Marketing Enterprises, I started this company nine years ago in 2012. So it’s almost a decade old. We were established in 2012, June 6th, 2012 to be the exact date.

The reason why I’m sharing this is because where my business is today, how I run my business today is almost completely, entirely different from when I first started it. I used to do live boot camps. Well, the pandemic took that away. We’re gonna do another one eventually, but I haven’t done one in a while. When I first started my business, my bootcamp was one day. Then it went to two days. Now we do three-day bootcamps, and that is the sweet spot for doing bootcamps.

It’s long enough to give people the amount of time that they need to have a transformational business know-how experience from the bootcamp, but short enough so they don’t have to commit an entire week or be gone from their business for too long that they have to have coverage and it become a vacation. So it’s the sweet spot. Now, I didn’t just figure that out on my own. I actually learned that from investing in training on my type of business.

Here’s another example. My office staff. Every person who works at my company, they all, I like to develop people. I’m very good, I’m a trainer, I’m a consultant, that’s what I do professionally, so I like to develop them. I don’t like to hire top salary people with a lot of experience ’cause while they can do a lot of great things coming into my organization, I’d rather teach people my way, come in entry level if they’re the right personality fit, ’cause I look for personality.

I can train you how to do what I need you to do, and then promote the people in my company and have them move up and grow with me. It allows me to promote from within, it allows me to to have managers who are loyal and committed to my company and my organization, and then it allows me to be able to grow the income steadily and grow their income that I’m compensating accordingly based on what we’re doing as an organization.

Now, I didn’t just figure that out. I figured some of it out from my own talent and the way that I train and develop people anyway, but the other part of it was from investing in training to become a better business owner. Back in the day, when I used to be the director of business development for Care Choice, a private duty non-medical home care company, I started out in 2005 as the director of business development. I found little trends, I went to a Brian Tracy training event. Brian Tracy is up there at Tony, it’s like Tony Robbins, Brian Tracy, right, Les Brown, and other motivational speakers, sales influencers, Zig Ziglar, all of the little folks. They’re all at the next tier. Tony Robbins is at the top and then there’s that next tier, that’s where Brian Tracy is.

My first, I think it was like six months into the job, Brian, who was the owner of Care Choice, I asked him if I can go to this Brian Tracy event. Costs $1,000. He sent me to the Brian Tracy event and I came back and it helped me to take a skillset that I already had, I was already a salesperson, I was already developing relationships, and it helped me to hone my ax so that it was sharper so that I was able to be that much more effective out there with my marketing.

Later on, I ran into somebody called Adam Bishop, who was The Referral Man and he was actually specific for home care businesses. kind of like I am. And I went to his event, and I’m gonna tell you at Adam Bishop’s event, The Referral Man, I knew 98% of what he trained me. But that 2%, those two little ideas that I got from his event, I came back to the business and that helped us grow the business by almost $900,000 more than we did the year before from those two little ideas that I didn’t think about doing on my own.

That’s why it’s so important that we continue to train. So you think about what I said at the very beginning. Caregivers, nurses, therapists, doctors, medical professionals have to maintain a license and continue training. But business owners and marketing representatives, we don’t have to do that, but if I want to be the best at what I do, it logically makes sense to invest in that training. And how much should you invest?

It really depends on you and what you’re looking to do. I will tell you that since 2012 I have invested over $150,000 in training courses and programs and certifications to become a better speaker, to become a better entrepreneur, to train my staff so that they can do all the things that they have to do to help run my company. And the result is we’ve generated more than $10 million in revenue for my organization.

So I don’t know anybody who wouldn’t exchange $150,000 for more than $10 million in revenue returned on that investment. That’s a drop in the bucket. It’s a drop in the bucket. It’s not even, what 1%? That is a very, very small investment when you look at the return being what the return is. And this is over the course of time, it’s not all at one time, but it’s always a good idea to invest. So now, let’s go another level further.

I’m a business owner and I want to get training for my marketing representative, but my marketing representative doesn’t want training. I will tell you, in my experience, when marketing representatives don’t want training and the owner wants to invest in training to help improve their skillset to do better for their company, that marketing rep isn’t the right person for your company. On the flip side, I’ve had marketing representatives screaming, “Boss, owner of this company, “I want training, I want to do better, I want training!” The owner/boss, “I’m not going to invest in it. “Shouldn’t you know how to do your own job?” I will tell you that if I’m a marketing person, I worked for Brian right.

Before I became his vice president and business partner in 2009, ’05, ’06, ’07, and ’08, for four years straight, I was his marketing rep. I would not work for someone who if I found training that I wanted to invest in to make me better to make you more money, and you don’t want to invest in me, I would not want to work for that person. Because it doesn’t make, that is, that is flat out ignorant. It is ignorant.

If somebody wants training, you get training for your staff. It’s only going to return tenfold by making that person better. On the flip side, staff, if the owner of the company wants to invest in training for you, take it. Because do you know how lucky you are? Because most companies do not invest in training. I’m gonna say it again.

Most companies do not invest in training, and it is one of the biggest mistakes that people can make. So I mentioned this, 2021, you all have goals that you want to achieve. Marketing reps, business owners. Get the training. And I don’t care who you, you don’t have to go with me. This has nothing to do with me. This has to do with logically.

If I want to hit my goals and if my goals are big enough and if it’s a goal that I’ve never achieved before, I cannot do the same thing that I’ve been doing and get a different goal. If I want to get a new goal, a new level that I’ve never done before, I have to invest in the know-how to achieve that goal so that six months, a year from now I can fulfill and walk the walk.

That is the tip for this week. Take it to heart, I love you guys, and if you want to work with me you know how to reach us. I’ll talk to you soon. Take care.