Don’t do things alone especially in the business setting. There is more synergy and success among two people working toward a single purpose. Whether you’re a seasoned entrepreneur or just starting out in business, you want to have a wise guide to help you accelerate your growth, conquer your career setbacks, and stick with you until you get the result you want. In this episode, Arlene interviews Collette Portis about why you NEED to hire a coach and how to build and implement a system that will scale your business even in your absence. Collette also emphasizes knowing your value and determining your strengths and weaknesses. If you’re willing to invest in yourself and in your business in order to succeed, listen in to this very insightful conversation and be ready to set yourself up to be in a place of advantage!
“Know your own value. And identify your weaknesses because your weaknesses tell you who you need to hire.” -Collette Portis
Highlights:
00:28 The People In Our Path
03:48 The Important Role of Coaches
10:27 The Coach-Client Relationship
14:51 The Right Coach
18:29 Coach vs Consultant
20:49 Benefit of Having a System
27:32 Simple Systems To Implement
33:33 Mindsets To Crash
41:17 Know Your Own Value
Resources:
Book
How much are you willing to invest in your business? Join @arlene_gale & @CollettePortis to talk about why entrepreneurs should hire qualified coaches & how to implement efficient systems. #BookWritingBusiness #BusinessBuildingBooks… Click To Tweet
Quotes:
03:15 “If you can master the mind, then that makes you great.” -Collette Portis
03:23 “That mindset that we pick up from other people can either hold us down and keep us back, or it can propel us beyond what we could even imagine possible.’ -Arlene Gale
12:34 “You can never get to that place where you get to pick the clients that you take on until you have a perspective and an understanding of who you are.” -Collette Portis
22:47 “The difference between a business person and an entrepreneur is that an entrepreneur knows how to exchange a product or service for money but a business owner knows how to create a system that allows that process to continue to happen absent of them.” -Collette Portis
26:35 “The sign of a good leader is the development of other leaders.” -Collette Portis
28:14 “If you’ve not identified where you’re strong, then you don’t even really know you’re rolling your own business.” -Collette Portis
29:03 “You have to identify your weaknesses because your weaknesses tell you who you need to hire.” -Collette Portis
39:40 “If you’re not willing to invest in your business, why should other people invest in your business?” -Arlene Gale
40:49 “Know your own value. Your intellectual property is going to be more valuable than the skill your hands can do at any point.” -Collette Portis
41:47 “There is some knowledge and information that you have to share with the world that has so much value in it. But if you don’t see the value in it, nobody else will.” -Collette Portis
Connect with Collette:
COO and Managing Partner at RED Development Group, Collette Portis, M.Ed. is a serial entrepreneur and speaker. She also founded Collette Portis & Co. and Destined Designs proving that the entrepreneurial spirit of her parents and grandparents certainly rubbed off on her. With 20+ years of experience as a Master Business Coach and Strategist, she has helped business owners, entrepreneurs, and executives through the process of developing their roadmap to business expansion, growth, and sustainability ultimately leading to a lasting legacy. She and her team at RED Development Group have helped clients double their revenue in as little as 10 months and increase the value of their business by an average of 71 percent.
Transcription:
Arlene Gale: Hi, everybody, welcome to Mindset Meets Mastery with Arlene Gale. I’ve been thinking a lot lately, because we’ve had a lot of time to think, right? There are people who have crossed my path, who I’ve learned from, they’ve been mentors to me. I’ve been very blessed in that way that when I got stuck in something, or I didn’t know what the next best step was, or I got overwhelmed with all of the stuff I needed to do between here and there. I knew I wanted to go there, but I didn’t know how to get there. And there’s always been people in my path that I’ve been able to learn from. There’s also been people in my path that I’ve learned from that didn’t have really valuable insights, let’s be nice, shall we be nice today? We’ll set that as a goal. Anyway, we all have people in our lives who taught us great things and have helped us become more than what we could ever imagine that we could be. So that’s kind of the direction I want to go with today’s podcast is talking about our mentors, our coaches, the people who’ve been there for us who’ve had our back. And I’ve got a guest today who’s going to help me expound on this, and really talk about it, and fine tune it as to, what do mentors, and coaches, and people who have our back in the business world, what do they mean to us? Why are they valuable? And why do they matter? Why can they be the difference between a business succeeding, or not?
So with that, I want to introduce my guests, Collette Portis. She is the COO and managing partner at RED Development Group. She is a serial entrepreneur who also founded Collette Portis & Co., and Destined Designs. She learned her entrepreneurial spirit by watching her parents and grandparents, that rubbed off on her and has led her to the success that she had today. I guess you could say that her parents and grandparents were her original mentors. With 20 plus years of experience as a master business coach and strategist, Collette has helped business owners, entrepreneurs, and executives through developing their roadmap to business expansion, growth and sustainability ultimately leading to a lasting legacy. Colette and her team at RED Development Group have successfully helped clients double, did you hear that? DOUBLE their revenue in as little as 10 months, mind blowing, and increase the value of their business by an average of 71%, those are pretty good numbers.
Collette, how are you? Welcome to the show?
Collette Portis: I am doing great. Thank you for having me on the show, I’m excited. I love the idea of Mindset Mastery, because if you can master the mind, then that makes you great. So I love it.
“If you can master the mind, then that makes you great.” -Collette Portis Click To TweetArlene Gale: Well, thank you. Well, that mindset that we pick up from other people can either hold us down and keep us back, or it can propel us beyond what we could even imagine possible. So talk to us a little bit about what you do as a business coach, and why is that so important? Why does it help people in 10 months to double their revenue, and why couldn’t they do it themselves?
“That mindset that we pick up from other people can either hold us down and keep us back, or it can propel us beyond what we could even imagine possible.’ -Arlene Gale Click To TweetCollette Portis: Well, the easiest way, and I’m a sports girl so I use a lot of sports analogies. But the easiest way to think about it is any great sport, any great athlete, Michael Jordan had multiple coaches, Kobe Bryant had coaches. LeBron has coaches. All of these people have a coach, none of them got to their place of greatness WITHOUT a coach. They had coaches throughout their life. We understand that as athletes, we understand that as Olympians and things like that. But for whatever reason, we don’t understand it in business. And the point of the coach is to be the visionary and to call the plays so that you know, okay, this is the next play, because the coach has a different perspective, then the player actually has. And the player using the perspective and the vision of the coach is how you become really great. That’s how you get to your place of greatness. And so coaches are important because, one of the main reasons, coaches are important is because we are all humans. And what we do as humans, it is human nature to copy what we’ve seen and repeat what we’ve heard. So modeling is extremely important to human beings. So if you have a coach, they will teach you how to model, they will teach you how to copy, they will teach you how to repeat the right things so that you become a master at whatever it is that you’re doing. And it’s important to pick the right coach, right? Because if I was playing basketball, I would want Phil Jackson. I’m just saying,
Arlene Gale: You mean, you’re not hiring a golf coach to teach you basketball?
Collette Portis: No, now that I want to learn how to play golf, I will hire a golf coach to teach me how to play golf, because that’s where their skillset is. And I’m glad you brought that up because it’s proof that not all coaches are created equal. I don’t know how well Phil Jackson can teach you how to play golf. I don’t know he would be, and I don’t know how many rings he would win in golf. I know he will in basketball because he has. And so it’s about the first thing. First things first, where do you want to go? What do you want to do? Who do you want to be? Then the second thing is, who can you find that’s going to help you identify those things that you need in order to get there and teach you how to model them using a system.
Arlene Gale: Oh, all right. Well, before we go to a system, because you brought up so many great points. Because one thing that comes to mind, at least for me, is I’m an expert in marketing. When I need to fine tune my direction, or adjust, or respond to technology changes or something, for example, I need to hire someone to help me do that. For one thing, technology is not in my wheelhouse. I can spend eight hours messing up my website and hand it to somebody else who can fix it and do what I wanted to do in 30 minutes.
Collette Portis: Yes.
Arlene Gale: So stay in your lane, I guess as part of it. But the other part of that is, even if you call yourself an expert in marketing, for example, I’m too close to what I want to do. A golf coach is looking from the outside to what you’re doing. A marketing expert, even if you’re a marketing expert, is looking from the outside in, they can see things that we can’t see, how do you feel about that? What are your comments? Is there value to understanding that?
Collette Portis: Absolutely. I love analogies so I’m always using them. As the business owner, I am driving my car down the highway. Now, I have GPS that when I get so close to a location, it’ll tell me that there’s an accident or something like that. However, if I had somebody in a helicopter that was above me, watching the lay of the land, they could tell me for sure whether or not there’s a helicopter there. Now Google has this new feature where people will pin if there’s a police officer on the side of the road. Hell, you get down the road and you don’t see a police officer, right? Somebody pinned it a while ago and that might’ve been true 15 minutes ago, but it’s not true right now. So as the business owner, you’re driving the car down the road, you can’t see what’s five miles ahead of you. But as your coach, I’m in the helicopter. And I can see so much of the land that I know whether or not there’s an officer up there. I can tell you real time whether or not there’s an officer so you can prepare for whatever is ahead of you. That’s the difference between being so up close to it that you can’t see. I’m in the driver’s seat right now, I can see those things around me. And I shouldn’t be paying attention to what’s five miles ahead of me, I gotta pay attention to what’s going on around me right here. Well, as your coach, they have a whole different perspective because they’re looking at it from the big picture. They’re looking at the 30,000 foot view of it so they can see the mountains and the ocean. You can’t see that driving on a road inland.
Arlene Gale: Absolutely.
Collette Portis: But if you’re looking at it from a higher perspective, then you can see it. That’s the importance of a coach while you will still get to your destination. If the person in the helicopter is not there, you’ll still get there. But guess what? You might get there three hours later because you ended up in a traffic jam. Whereas, if you had the coach, your coach can tell you, Oh, there something just happened up there, take this road and go around it, which might’ve taken you an extra 30 minutes as opposed to an extra three hours. And that’s what coaches do for us as business owners. My job is to make sure that, if something that could potentially take a year for one of my clients, doesn’t take them three years. Because I’ve been there, I’ve done it, or I’ve coached someone else through this process. So I know the ins and outs, I understand, I’m not so close to it because I’m not the one driving down the road. That’s the importance of a coach to a business. That’s the importance of a coach at any point in your life, whether you’re an athlete or not. But the other thing too, that I say about coaching, sometimes I think coaches don’t get one of the things that made Phil Jackson as important and as successful as he was. Phil trusted Kobe. Phil may call a play while they’re on the sideline and say, this is what I see, so this is what we’re gonna do. And Kobe gets out there on that floor. And him being the leader of the team, he goes, Oh, switching to play. He calls a whole different play, right? Well, Phil trusted Kobe that he would, he saw something that he couldn’t see, because he wasn’t on the court. So while I’m your coach and I might be in the helicopter, I didn’t see that somebody’s bumper fell off their car and is in the middle of the road. That’s the tiny thing that I may not be able to see that caused you to move into the other lane. So as a coach, we have to trust our clients. We have to trust our clients at the same time. It has to be a two way trust relationship, and they have to trust us. And we have to understand why they shifted, but we have to come back and ask the question, why did you make the shift? What happened that didn’t happen? So that we understand how they think and why they’re shifting and moving. Because if it’s something that needs to be coached, then we can do that. But if it’s something that we just didn’t see, it only makes us better coaches.
Arlene Gale: So the key thing there is about the relationship. It’s really important to have a coach who will listen. I give my clients permission to, if I’m brainstorming and I throw something out there and it’s not right, it’s because you know those little nuances in your business that I don’t know, so educate me. And what’s going to happen is with that brainstorming process, whatever we ultimately come up with, I love the word synergy, the whole thing is better than the little pieces so we’ll come up with a better solution. So I love that part about relationships. I also love the part about the super highway, that’s one of my favorite examples. Because, yeah, if you don’t have a coach and you’re on a five lane highway and everybody else does, and if they’re competitors, you’re going to be left in the dust. If you arrive three hours later, they’re already going to have gotten the clients at the destination where you were in such a hurry to go.
Collette Portis: Absolutely. And you’re going to get the least of them. If there’s anyone left, you don’t have a pick. You don’t get to pick anymore who your client is, and that’s the other bonus of having somebody who’s leading you, and guiding you, and helping you is that you get to pick. Because one of the things that I understood at the beginning of me as an adult starting a business, I started my first business at 14. But as an adult, starting a business recognized by the state. One of the first things that I understood is all money is not good money, and every client is not your client.
Arlene Gale: Absolutely.
Collette Portis: But you can never get to that place where you actually get to pick the clients that you take on until you do some very important things, until you have a perspective and an understanding of who you are and what’s going on, then you can decide. Because a lot of times, when we have a poor experience, 9 times out of 10, because we’ve connected with the wrong group, we’re doing business with the wrong people. I have this conversation oftentimes in my branding company, Destined Designs, I get to talk to a lot of people about people who have had their websites done, or their logos created and things like that, and they weren’t satisfied. They weren’t satisfied with what they got. And so I always ask, okay, did you look at their portfolio? What did their other designs look like? Did they have any design that you really got excited about that you really liked, and you really wanted something similar to this. Did they ask you who your target audience was? Did they ask you to send them some images that you really like, or some websites that you really like so that they can understand visually what’s appealing to you?
“You can never get to that place where you get to pick the clients that you take on until you have a perspective and an understanding of who you are.” -Collette Portis Click To TweetArlene Gale: And most of the time, What is the answer to that?
Collette Portis: No.
Arlene Gale: No. Yeah. I get that a lot too because, again, we’re going to talk about staying in your lane because I get people who call me who are in tears because they’ve already spent money on somebody who told them they could write a book in a weekend. And it turns out to be a little three by five 50 page book. So what was their experience? Well, they did it. Just because somebody has written a book doesn’t make them a book writing coach, they’re a leadership coach, or they’re this, or they’re that, you’ve got to do your due diligence. I mean, nobody’s going to show up at a car lot and say, I want to buy for $50,000 whatever’s next in line. You don’t know if it’s new, you don’t know if it’s used, you don’t know if grandma drove it used, or some teenage boy was doing drag racing with it. You wouldn’t do that buying a car so why would you do that? Buying a business coach doesn’t make any sense to me. Am I missing something?
Collette Portis: No, it’s spending tens of thousands of dollars to do it. I had a lady come to me and she had spent $50,000 on this business coach. And what she ended up getting for nine months is a weekly phone call with 250 people on it. And the 250 people that were on the phone call were supposed to talk amongst themselves and help each other in business. For $50,000, we had an eight week mastermind at that point. She did an eight week mastermind with me in the first two weeks. She had gotten more out of that mastermind with me than she had gotten in the nine months that she was on this, I don’t know what you really want to call it, but she spent $50,000 for it. But she paid attention to what the person said as opposed to what the person had proof that they had done.
Arlene Gale: Well, and I think that that’s an important side note because right now, so much is going online. Look at what you’re paying and what you’re getting, because if you’re doing an online coaching class and it has more than a handful to a dozen people, you gotta figure out what that format is. Are you teaching each other? Or is the coach teaching you? Because if you’re teaching each other, you could probably do that for less money. But that’s my soapbox, I’m moving on now. We’re going to take a quick break, Collette, I’m going to get off my soapbox, and when we come back, I want to talk about what is the difference between coaching and consulting. And then I just want to get some feedback about some of you who talked about systems earlier, and I just want to get a little bit more insight on what you mean about systems. So everybody stay tuned, we’ll be right back with Collette Portis.
Hello everybody, welcome back. Today, we’re talking to Collette Portis about mentors, and coaches, and consultants, and what’s the difference between all of that, those names or whatever labels we put on people, because I really think that there is some confusion about what’s the difference between a coach and a consultant. So as a business strategist, as a branding strategist, what do you say about this important topic?
Collette Portis: So I think the simplest way that I can put it. A consultant is kind of like your therapist. The therapist is never going to tell you exactly what to do, they’re going to keep asking you questions so that you come to a place where you go, you know what? I think that’s what I’m going to do. Well, a coach is in the gang. Your culture is yelling from the sidelines, your coach is totally there, your coach is at practice, your coach is all in your business, your coach is calling plays, your coach is watching the game, your coach is watching tape, your coach is completely involved. That’s the difference between a consultant and a coach. Consultants aren’t really involved, they’re really there to just ask the questions and kind of guide you, they’re like the bumpers on a bowling lane.
Arlene Gale: Hey, how do you know? You’ve been watching me bowl?
Collette Portis: Right. We just want to make sure you don’t go in the gutter. Whatever you do in the lane, you know, whatever. Where a coach is like, no, this is how you hold your wrist. This is how you put your hand in the ball. This is how you swing the ball. This is the kind of the size and the weight of the ball that you need to have. And you need to go for that arrow right down the middle because you kind of throw it to the, you know, that’s a coach. Completely different. Do you need just the bumpers? Do you just need somebody to go, okay, it looks like you’re moving in the right direction. Or do you need somebody to go, no, this is the direction. Take these steps,
Arlene Gale: So you got two pins this time, what did you learn from that? How can you make it better? That’s a consultant, right? And a coach is going, well, that’s okay. But let’s do this, this is where you want to be. You want to get all 10 pins down, this is where you need to land. You’ll start here and get there. I like that definition. That’s by far the simplest and most visual valuable definition I’ve ever gotten about the difference between a coach and a consultant. Very nice. Thank you for that. We talked a little bit about systems, what do you mean by systems when it comes to hiring a business coach? What can you tell us about both as coach and as someone who’s hiring a coach?
Collette Portis: Yes. Okay. So can I start with my family?
Arlene Gale: Please do.
Collette Portis: And so I grew up with a family of entrepreneurs. Nobody really had a job in my family. They were all business owners, and they were successful business owners. I mean, they had successful businesses. Then that was my grandfather on my mother’s and my grandmother on my mother’s side, my grandmother and grandfather on my father’s side, my father, my mother, my aunts and uncles, they all have businesses. They all functioned as entrepreneurs.
Arlene Gale: Wow.
Collette Portis: Two of my aunts work, but everybody else was an entrepreneur. And so I got a front seat to this from the time I was born watching them build these businesses. Well, what I came to realize, the older they got, when my father’s father passed away, his business only survived two more months. It was an international business. People will fly across from all over the place, he had an auto body shop, for him to paint, all that kind of stuff. It only lived for two months after that. All the while my father did the same work, my father worked in the business with his dad and I didn’t understand at that point why this business didn’t live on. And then my other grandfather had a record store, and cafe, and a clothing store, and all of these things. But when he passed away, he had none of his businesses. Once my grandmother got sick, the businesses went away. And then my aunts had seven salons between Michigan and Georgia. But every time she would move from one state to the next, she would close the one that was there. Even though she had stylists that had, no less than 10 chairs, there were always nine other stylists working with her and she only used one chair. And I couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t just rent that one chair out to somebody else and keep her salon, you know, but she didn’t.
And now I started my first business at 14, but I noticed something about me starting my business at 14. One of the things I learned from my family is that you needed to, because I did hair. I mean, naturally, I grew up in the salon so I knew how much product I needed. I knew how much product I needed to serve a certain number of clients, I knew all of that stuff. I knew how many hours I needed to work in order to make $500 a week. I had my hour set, all of that kind of stuff. Well, what I came to realize as an adult was that nobody really had a system. Everybody just got up every day, and went to work and did what they were doing. And what I came to understand is that my family really owned their jobs. They were great as entrepreneurs, but they weren’t great as business people. And the difference in my definition between a business person and an entrepreneur is that an entrepreneur knows how to go exchange a product for service for money, but a business owner knows how to create a system that allows that process to continue to happen — of them. And that’s where I don’t see a lot of people getting to, and that’s the tragedy of my family. And it’s the reason why I had to start from zero because there was no system in place.
“The difference between a business person and an entrepreneur is that an entrepreneur knows how to exchange a product or service for money but a business owner knows how to create a system that allows that process to continue to happen absent of… Click To TweetArlene Gale: Wow. And that brings to mind, I heard a long time ago that the best sign of the best leaders is that when you leave the room, those people that worked under you can continue to run the business the way you taught them to run it. So entrepreneurship is different, it’s not necessarily looking at long lasting legacy, for example. Because there’s no reason why your aunt couldn’t have moved to another state or another community and started a new shop, but leverage the expertise of the people she already had in the shop where she was, because that’s creating a legacy business.
Collette Portis: Absolutely.
Arlene Gale: Wow. That’s amazing that that is a very different mindset shift.
Collette Portis: Yeah. But let me tell you, I was on a phone call with my son before we started and we were having this conversation again about modeling. And the reason why my perspective is now what it is, I started working for the federal government at 14 years old. I literally started coaching at 16, working for the federal government. That’s when I started. And when I started noticing all of these different things, and I would always go, Hey, so this process doesn’t make any sense so I’m just going to change it. And they would go, okay, whatever, do whatever you want. And I would do that. But what I started noticing over time is there’s a process in place, but it might need some adjustment. But if we adjusted it, I could get work done so much quicker and more efficient. If I just made an adjustment to this process, or if I completely created a process, well, I took those same things into every job that I had and then into my business so that I could duplicate myself. I own three businesses that I’m functioning in every day. How is it that I can do that? Because I have a system process. I write emails one time. If it’s an email that I’m going to be sending out, it gets written one time. Why would I write it every time I needed to send it? It makes no sense at all, right? I’m going to write it one time. So I’m creating these processes, and procedures, and building these teams of leaders because the sign of a good leader is the development of other leaders. I know I want them to move on. I tell anybody who comes to work for me: “If you leave here and you haven’t understood how to start and run a business, then you failed yourself. That’s why you’re here, I intend to teach you that.” Which is why I’m particular about who I hire, who I work with, who I coach, because you said something very important. I am coaching those who want to leave a legacy. I’m not coaching the solopreneur who just wants to make money right now. That’s not the kind of coach that I am. That’s not the work that I do. That’s not the process, my process is leading to legacy. But I only know that because I actually have a process.
“The sign of a good leader is the development of other leaders.” -Collette Portis Click To TweetArlene Gale: So give me an example of a system that you think is pretty easy to implement but so many people don’t.
Collette Portis: I’ll give one, it’s a tool that I use in everything. My son just graduated with his masters.
Arlene Gale: Congratulations.
Collette Portis: Thank you. Every morning, the week before last at 10:00 AM, just to have a conversation about what’s next. So one of the things that I did with him is two things, I’ll give you two things. One was SWOT, which stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats, any in every business owner needs to understand that. And the other thing was, I had him take the DiSC assessment, which helps you to understand and determine personality types. Why is it important? Because first of all, if you’ve not identified where you’re strong at, then you don’t even really know your role in your own business. And then two, what are your weaknesses? Because your weaknesses tell you who you need to hire.
“If you've not identified where you're strong, then you don't even really know you're rolling your own business.” -Collette Portis Click To TweetArlene Gale: Absolutely. And people don’t want to look at their weaknesses. Do they? They think weakness equals–
Collette Portis: Failure.
Arlene Gale: Failure. Yeah. And it’s not. I mean, if you’re smart, and you know you’re weak, and not just you, but your business weaknesses. For example, I can’t do technology. I find no shame in that because I don’t want to do it either. And I figure I’m supporting other businesses when I hire that out. So yeah, people, you got to know your weaknesses. There’s great wisdom there. I apologize, go ahead.
Collette Portis: Oh, that’s good. So you, you have to identify your weaknesses because your weaknesses tell you who you need to hire, who you need to partner with. Exactly what you said, if you’re not tech savvy, find somebody who is to help you. And then what are your opportunities? And that’s a huge miss. Because while we understand what we’re strong, and we understand where we can, if you don’t take time to process what opportunities you have available, you don’t even think about it. What opportunity, what relationships do you have that could become important to you in your businesses? What knowledge do you have that could come in your business? And an opportunity could simply be, I am talking to Arlene, I have an opportunity to offer Arlene this thing and Arlene has an opportunity to offer me something. So as two business owners, we partner and exchange service, but we both get from that exchange of service, some value that we both needed. I personally don’t believe in the idea of a solopreneur.
“You have to identify your weaknesses because your weaknesses tell you who you need to hire.” -Collette Portis Click To TweetArlene Gale: Well, I don’t either. I don’t either. You cannot exist in the world solo. You just can’t because you are not good at everything. Get over it, you are not.
Collette Portis: Not only that. Where are you getting your supplies from [inaudible]?
Arlene Gale: Oh, absolutely.
Collette Portis: It’s the simplest thing, as simple as that. You’ve got to get your supplies from somewhere so you’re obviously not solo unless you’re creating everything on your own. So you’ve got your strengths, you’ve got your weaknesses, you have your opportunities, and as important as the rest are, what are I threats? What are the threats to my business? You said you don’t do technology, it’s absolutely a threat to your business right now. If you’re not doing anything, and you got to go, I need to make sure if nothing else, I manage these threats because these are the things that could take me out, I’m not having a system. Threat, I don’t know what my process is. You know why?Because I can’t duplicate myself and train somebody to do what I do. If I don’t understand what my threats are, then I can’t protect my business. So the name of my book is G.O.A.L.I.E. And people go, well, why did you name it G.O.A.L.I.E? And I said, well, what does a goalie do? A goalie is protecting the team from getting scored on, protecting the team from losing. If you don’t want to lose, you need to be the goalie of your business, which means, guess what? You’re going to have to take some hits. And sometimes you’re going to have to take some high speed hits too. But you also have to be able to protect, you have to watch, you have to have this perspective, you gotta be paying attention to everything and everybody moving. Otherwise, somebody has got a score on you. And if you let them score too much, you lose, you’re going down. You’re going down, either down or you’re going to lose a cup of tea.
Arlene Gale: Or combination of the two, but that’s another story,
Collette Portis: And then to couple that with the DISC assessment, and the love, value, and understanding one of your own personality types and others. The value of understanding your all personality type. I’m a Gemini, and people go, Oh, my God. And I go, no, I’ve learned how to use my tools so I am very nice, but you don’t want to negotiate with them because you’re probably not women. As simple as that. Why? Because I’m well-studied because I am a Gemini. And because I am a Gemini, when we get to that place, we only talk about what we know, for sure. Because we’ve studied it, not because somebody else has told us. And so when you sit down and negotiate with me, you need to know what I know because I know and not because somebody told me. But I understand that those two tools were given to me because I’m a coach. My purpose on earth is to help these businesses grow. And so why wouldn’t I get the gifts that compliment that purpose? I’m analytical, I’m critical, but I need to be in order to be a great coach. So it’s the reason why I am, because I’ve learned to use my tools to build people as opposed to tear them down. And when you don’t understand purpose, a lot of times, that’s what happens.
Arlene Gale: Absolutely. There’s so many great nuggets here, but I want to put you on the hot seat real quick before we leave, are you ready? I love this part of my show. So we’re talking about mindsets and myths, think back for you personally, before you had the success, what was some myth or mindset that you had that could have hindered you if you had continued to listen to that little voice, what is just one that you had starting business at 14, or 16, or even any of the businesses you started recently.
Collette Portis: That I could do it on my own, and nobody can do it as good as I can, I’ve got it. If that myth, if it’s going to be right, you’re going to have to do it yourself. Oh, my God, it’s the biggest lie. And then another one that I still wrestle with today, I’ll be honest because some of these things, we don’t get over, we have to learn how to manage them as I grew up impoverished. Although I had all these entrepreneurs in my family, I grew up in poverty. So the poverty mindset is something that I still work on today. I’m listening to podcasts, and reading books, and talking to my wealthy, really, really wealthy friends and mentors and things like that is the reason why I select the mentors that I select. Because the wealth mindset is something way different than the middle class or the poverty mindset. What do people understand how much it costs to turn the switch off, flip the light switch each time, up or down. They understand that that costs you money. We don’t understand that in the middle class and in impoverished situations. Your parents told you to turn the light off any time you leave the room. Well, wealthy people like my wealthy coach told me, do you know it costs 76 cents every time you flip that switch up or down? And so if they’re not leaving that room for more than 15 minutes, you just cost yourself money. Listen to what your mom, and your grandparents, and aunties or uncles told you to do
Arlene Gale: Well. And that’s why so many people that have money have it because they know the cost of doing business, they know the cost of flipping that light switch and how they can either get around it or manage it so that more money stays in their pockets. So with the mindset, I want to go back to this mindset, I can do it all by myself. If it’s going to be done, right, I gotta do it myself. How are you able to overcome that? Because of that, I hate to tell you but that’s a control issue, right? Coming from one control freak, recovering control freak, it’s a control issue. So how do you change that mindset so that you can build the legacy businesses that you’re talking about?
Collette Portis: You want to know the answer?
Arlene Gale: Yes, Ma’am. That’s why I asked the question.
Collette Portis: I got a coach, I got a favor, and I had an opportunity to live with my mentor who was a millionaire for 90 days. And part of that was we had to start a business and in 90 days, which we did. It’s still going, it’s probably three or four years old at this point. But living with him helped me to change that whole idea because he talked about, there were eight of us, he would talk about his role, and our role, and how we got to his role. And there was a system, and we did things, we were up every morning at 5:00 AM. And every morning you got up at 5:00 AM, you ate a little something for breakfast, you worked out by 6:00 AM, you were in the shower by 6:30, you were dressed, downstairs, and ready. By 7:00 o’clock, you were headed into the office. We had a morning routine, that was a process. We knew when we got to the office exactly what needed to be done. We knew it and we could duplicate it. And because we could duplicate it, we knew what the numbers would be because we had a process. And so he taught us that you have to have a system and that leaders breed leaders. I didn’t know anything about personal development at this point. So we watched Les Brown, and we watched John Maxwell, and we listened to Jerry Clark, and we watched so many different documentaries about money and the 1%. And when I tell you, that man gave us an understanding of money that we never would’ve gotten ever. We never would’ve gotten it in any other situation, but he had a process. He understood that, okay. And because he had a process, he understood, he could tell at what point in the program you would be feeling this way or thinking this way. And he had something to resolve, you would have something to resolve it. And so now, when I’m building a system for my own company where I’m building a system or helping my clients build systems or processes, they understand it to that point. We do a three day business strategy bootcamp, I know exactly what’s going to happen mid day on day one. I know how people are gonna feel. And what’s funny about it is I tell them at the beginning of the day on day one, this is what’s going to happen. And then when it happens, nobody remembers that I told them.
Arlene Gale: Told you so.
Collette Portis: Yeah. I told you that it was going to happen, but it’s okay because I have a remedy for it, because I know it so well, because I built a process around it and procedures and all of that. And it blows my business partner’s mind. She’s just like, I don’t get it, this is too much. But because I have a process and I paid attention, because I’ve repeated it over, and over, and over again, then I have the ability to do that. That’s what makes businesses grow. That’s why we can double revenues in 10 months. It’s the reason why we can increase the value of a company on average 71%, because we do that and we have partners who help us do it
Arlene Gale: Well. And it goes back to, I think the golden nugget here for everybody to remember and get from this is, ‘you can’t do it all by yourself, and you need to hire mentors and qualified coaches to walk you through the process using their systems to help you develop your systems because that’s how you’re going to succeed.’ That’s the bottom line. I always ask people, if you’re not willing to invest yourself in your business by hiring a coach, hiring the best mentor or coach for X, Y, Z situation, why do you think you should be able to ask other people to invest in your business? If you’re not willing to invest in your business, why should other people invest in your business?
“If you’re not willing to invest in your business, why should other people invest in your business?” -Arlene Gale Click To TweetCollette Portis: Absolutely.
Arlene Gale: So that’s the nugget. I want people to take away from this, your wisdom is so great, there’s so much. But people, you can’t do it by yourself. That’s the bottom line. Any last words of wisdom you want to leave them with?
Collette Portis: The one thing that I hope, anytime I have an opportunity to speak to business, those that you work with. You’re a writing coach, and I think a lot of times authors give away their value. It’s important to first know who you are and what you want to offer the world, even if you’re writing a book. A lot of times, we don’t understand the value in that one thing, that thing can take you to six figures, it doesn’t take long and it doesn’t take much. Yes, it’s going to be hard work, but know your own value. Know that every word you write down is your own value. Your intellectual property is going to be more valuable than the skill your hands can do. At any point, you can hire anybody to take one widget and stick it into another one. You can hire anybody to do that, but the process of thoughts and putting these thoughts together and causing them to function in a way that allows someone to be helped or to overcome something is more valuable than anything. And I think we don’t value thought and thinking enough. And that’s why I think a lot of times as authors, we’ll write our words and we get pennies for them. We shouldn’t, we should get more for the written words that we write than we ever should for transcribing a medical record or something like that. There’s some knowledge and information that you have that you have to share with the world, your own personal story that has so much value in it. But if you don’t see the value in it, nobody else will.
“Know your own value. Your intellectual property is going to be more valuable than the skill your hands can do at any point.” -Collette Portis Click To TweetArlene Gale: Absolutely. So tell everybody how they can connect with you, where they can find you on social media, your website, that sort of thing.
Collette Portis: You can find me on LinkedIn under Collette Portis or RED Development Group. You can find me on Facebook under Collette Portis or RED Development Group. You can find me on Instagram, on Collette Portis or RED Development Group. Or Twitter, Collette Portis or RED Development Group.
“There is some knowledge and information that you have to share with the world that has so much value in it. But if you don’t see the value in it, nobody else will.” -Collette Portis Click To TweetArlene Gale: Where are your coaching packages and programs like that where people can look at what you do as a coach, where are those accounts?
Collette Portis: Those, they can go to reddevelopmentgroup.com or redwomen.win, redwomen.win or reddevelopmentgroup.com.
Arlene Gale: Awesome. Well, it’s been great. Lots of great information. I hope people will, if they’ll just pick up one thing and use it to move forward, it’s all about the next best step. So thank you, Collette, for being our guests today and for all the wisdom that you shared with us. I appreciate it.
Collette Portis: Thank you.
Arlene Gale: I want to leave everybody with this thought, “Don’t let anybody else dictate your story. Don’t let anybody else decide what is or is not possible for you, because you have the choice to write your story your way every day.”