CVC Success Group coach, Jerry Isenhour
Video Transcript
And I want to welcome you to another episode of the Chimney and Fireplace Success Network, our podcast is sponsored by the CVC Success Group where our mission is to provide the tools to help you and assist you in making your business dreams into your business realities. Well good morning, good evening, good afternoon, no matter what time of the day it is. Usually when I do a podcast, I have a guest on but this week there is no guest. Why is that? Because I have got some things I want to share with you. I have got some thoughts to share with you. So I hope these prove valuable to you and help you as we go through the days we are in now and moving forward.
And I have entitled this episode, Hitting the Wall, that’s right, Hitting the Wall, you know, earlier this year, in the months of January and February, is there anyone that could have envisioned how our world would change in just a few short months? There were some time in March, it probably existed, that there was a time that you and your business started hitting a wall. It was like we were running down highways at record speeds and all of a sudden the road was filled with potholes. And everywhere we looked there were obstructions thrown in front of us. T
This life as we know it in the year 2020 as we have undergone one of the worse times in our history, in our lives due to the COVID19 virus. We have dealt with a time that our leadership has decided to shut our economy down in many areas. Now as you listen to this you could be one of different types of businesses. You may be a business that is being able to move this very successfully and have seen financial gain during the strain of 2020.But to be honest with you, many have not, many have hit that wall and due to government regulations and the fears in their market area and the fears in their work forces, even the fears that they themselves had, have hit a wall of their businesses stopping, halting.
This has been life in 2020, as we moved into this period, I often share when I’m talking to people what my personal D-day was for this crisis. The day was March 14th, the location was New Orleans, Louisiana, Sheryl and I had been at the HPBA Expo that week in New Orleans, Louisiana having no idea that very soon the building that we are in would become a field hospital for the city of New Orleans. As people started building up and preparing for the worst, we started seeing hospitals being built in many city civic centers around the country. What was even worse, we watched as they started bringing in refrigerated trailers, these were to be morgues for the dead. It was really a really bad time. And it’s still with us and it’s still ongoing and when will we come out of this? When will we come out of this completely? To be honest with you, I don’t think we will ever come out of this completely.
I think this will be very similar to 9/11, it is going to change the way that we live and the way we do business in the future. Just as many times we enter through metal detectors now to attend public events, I envision a world that very shortly we may be passing through infra-red scanning equipment to attend the sporting event. Where our temperatures are taken just like they check for metal that we might be carrying dangerous weapons into those places. As we look at it our world is filled with three different personalities. We are filled with the optimist and the optimist always feels that the sky is going to be blue, that everything is going to be great and it’s all going to be ok. Another personality that we see a lot is the pessimist. And what does the pessimist do? The pessimist tells us that it’s all going to fall apart, the pessimist is sharing with us, they feel like it’s a plot, they feel like it’s all made up, they feel like someone has come up with this and we have been lead down one of the most fictitious, yelibic roads in our history. Then we have the realist and the realist are people that can look into situation, can draw back and can make the decisions of what they have to do to make the best of today and to plan for tomorrow.
So which are you? Are you a pessimist? Are you an optimist? Are you a realist? As you get up in the morning, what’s in your mind? How will you be moving forward in the coming day? And as I went through this period, even in my own businesses, CVC Success Group, we have been working harder than ever. Why is that? To meet the challenges of our clients who are facing huge walls that they are hitting. The walls come to us not only from the virus, it comes to us from the regulations that were being passed down. It comes to us from the government loaning of money and the various programs that we are going through. We are now facing often the challenge that government assistance is now competing for our workforce. We are finding that some of our people prefer the world of unemployment over gainful employment.
This is the situation we have seen ourselves in and we have seen the situation as businesses owners that many times we have had to seek help from the government in order to get the monies, the funding that we need to continue in business. As we look out at the world and I think to myself, what about all the restaurants in this world that have had to shut down and move to take out meals? I think about the restaurants that myself and Sheryl used to go to, where we would go and enjoy an evening, a nice meal and how that has been disappearing for over two months now. As I record this today’s date is April 16 th. That is over two months since D-Day occurred for me. And as we look at the news each day, we wonder what is going to happen next. We see that now areas are starting to come back alive. The economy is being reopened but we also see that this reopening has its challenges.
Restaurants are not going to be able to seat the full capacity; we are probably not going to have as many people getting together socially or in groups as we did pre-crisis. Social distancing has now become the rule of the day, everywhere we look, depending on the geographic areas we are in, many of our fellow citizens are wearing masks, they are staying away from other people, they are scared to shop. And this has made a definite change in commerce and it’s made a change in the way we train, the way we lead, the way we use our workforces. In fact, if you look at the predictions of business consultants, it is predicted that many companies are going to find the benefit of having home-based employers. And one of the predictions is that commercial real estate is also going to take a fall.
As we look out here and we fill up our automobiles, our cars, our trucks, have you noticed how low the fuel cost is? What is happening is the supply exceeds the demand It is now a common staple; it is not how many miles you get to a gallon of gas? It’s often how many weeks do you get to a tank of gas or even to a gallon of gas. I know in my own life, I feel that my car, on March the 15 th and it was into mid May, just last week when they finally had to have more gas put into it. As we look at it, it’s changing the way we live, it’s changing our habits, it’s enacting new turns. If you are hearing a research instead of turning to start taking their leisure time at home, what we call a staycation. We have people that are at their homes a whole lot more and they are seeing things that they want to get done. I’m one of those people, I have been looking in my water garden for a number of years knowing that it was time to turn all the plants over. The liner was starting to leak so now we have this project going on in our own backyard.
I have engaged my grandson and he is out there, has moved a pile of rock and we are dislodging the plants, we have built temporary holding areas for the plants to go in while we are changing out the lumbers. And that’s what a lot of people are doing and that’s what we have to do, is see what it’s going to be like to succeed in the new next. You know as I listen to other people I’m hearing of the incidences of the COVID 19 striking within their workforce, where it strikes someone and it has resulted in close to mutiny in some workforces because we have the optimist, the pessimist and the realist. As we look at this, can we put ourselves into a glass bubble? Can we isolate ourselves from the rest of the world? Is it determined that we got to be that way? Is that our future?
You see I think that is the big thing we got to look is, how are we going to move forward? One of my coaches and mentors is a gentleman by name of Randy Pennington. And Randy called this the new next. Before I heard Randy say that I thought it was going to be the new normal, but it is not going to be normal. It is going to be the new next. And one of the thoughts that Randy also shared with me was, that the world really hasn’t changed, what’s changed is, the illusions have been pulled back. We have been living in a country where when we went to grocery stores for years and years, we had our regular goods were there. When this started, all of a sudden the supply chain changed. We saw the normal every day products that we need, all of a sudden in short supply. There is even prediction of what this is going to do to the food supply in this country. What’s going to happen as far as the supply chain and this could even affect the businesses that you are in. How are your materials going to get to you? Will there be a shortage?
Many times, that is what we see when we come out of a recessionary period such as we did in 2008, 2009 and 2010, there were shortages. And these shortages at times have caused additional problems. There was a period of time between 2003 and 2007 when we had a sheet rock shortage in this country and what happened was, we started importing sheet rock, dry wall from the country of China and now today we are finding out that this sheet rock that was brought in, because there was none that could be sourced from U.S. sources because there was shortage is now causing problems in homes resulting in some really massive reconstruction work need to be done because of the health risk this is giving us in our homes. And these things continue to grow. So, as we see, what we got to remember is, it is just like Randy said and he quoted Margaret Thatcher, the prime minister of Great Britain. And what Miss Thatcher said, ‘it’s not that the world that changed, rather it’s the illusions that we were under that had been pulled back.’
You see this is what this has revealed, it’s revealed those who have the gumption, the drive, to go to the next level when they’re faced with adversity. This could even be the people that you sit and admire, the people that have the charisma that you may have looked at as those role models. How are these role models doing during this period? What are the examples of the role models in your life that you look up to? That you look to for inspiration? Are they giving you the strength that you need and the ideals that you need in order to move forward? You see that’s one of the things that we did in our company because we work with companies across the United States, so what did we do? Immediately we started assembling our client base and having regular weekly roundtable discussions. This would be going on for, since the seventeenth of March on every Tuesday night I invite all my clients together and we have in depth discussions about what the world is doing and what changes we have to do in business.
And during this I have been extremely lucky because many of the friends and associates that Sheryl and myself had spoken to, this group of people, we have had some super guests that had come in and had reacted and mingled with our clients. They have included a story, study cast, there is people like Tom Ziegler, the son of Zig Ziegler, Clay Wingit, Randy Pennington, Scot McKain and others that are coming in, not coming in and charging to help people, rather coming in and assisting our clients due to their friendship with myself and Sheryl. And it’s been a phenomenal thing and that’s what we got to look at. You know one of the things that I have often heard said through this crisis is, we are all in this together. But as I look at the world around me I am wondering, are we really all in this together? Or is it a period that we are continuing with the classic, one upmanship that so many people have to do? Is that where we are at? Or are we truly all in this together?
I have seen some people that have shared tremendously during this period. One of our team members here at CVC Success Group is Donovan Blanks, and I have seen Donovan rise to the occasion of helping our clients and participating in and facilitating their training remotely. I have seen Tim Reed producing so many webinars that the young man is exhausted. Actually yesterday he did one webinar and as soon as he completed it he immediately stepped into another webinar. It was all because Tim wants to share the ways you can get through this and be successful on the other side. I look at Brandy Biswell, one of my team members and how Brandy has stepped up to the plate and has appeared on many of our open trainings over the last few weeks and one person I wanna recognize especially is my wife Sheryl Isenhour because as I’m recording this she’s actually sitting in her office going through a two day recertification course to maintain her Zigler Certification
She did two days last week, she’s doing two days this week but during this and I look at Sheryl and I look at how she keeps putting it out, where she’s a CEO of one company IBD Outdoor Rooms and she works with our company doing hiring for people and helping me with coaching clients through their challenges and what she is doing hiring for clients across America and I think to myself, that woman is truly phenomenal in the way that she keeps doing this day after day after day and never gives up, never gives up. She just keeps going at it and she just makes me so proud to see someone, that with her skills and her determination. And it makes me so proud to know that she is right beside me. As my mentor, my best friend and more.
So that’s the question that goes down to you and I am going to ask you a question that make it a little hard. Whenever this crisis started, one of the resounding words and some phrases that I heard was, don’t waste the crisis. Now when I first heard those words, I had to do some research. Where in the world does this come from? Who came up with these words? And what I found out was the words, don’t waste the crisis, were commonly attributed to Winston Churchill but actually goes back into the sixteenth century with an Italian philosopher who wrote that quote at that time. It was also used by President Obama’s administration with one of his chiefs of staff during the 2008 to 2010 financial crisis. Which was, don’t waste the crisis.
You see, that’s the thing that’s the thing, so the question you ask as we sit here in the middle of May, have you wasted the crisis? Have you truly worked in it since this crisis has been underway, to build the culture of yourself, to build the culture and the skill level of team members? Have you truly been a leader of did you revert back to being a follower? Did you have to depend on someone else to lead you? See this is when leadership becomes the most important thing because leaders are who are going to put the fire in the people hearts, in the people’s stomachs, that they lead. Leaders never light a fire under people, rather what does a leader do, they light a fire in people. They light fires of hope, they light fires of where you can go. So as I close off this episode, I want you to understand, I understand where each and every one of you have been over the past two months. I understand these walls that you have hit.
I understand what it is like when you get up and wonder, will there be a tomorrow? And what will be in this tomorrow for me? Why do I understand this? Because to be honest with you, I hit this wall ten years ago, in time far, far away, at this point it seems like it doesn’t exist. But this is what I know, the walls that I hit, the challenges that I underwent, the downfalls that I took, they made a change in me. They really have and this is how I know it, I got an email this morning from an old friend of mine, who watched a class I presented this past week. This was a very close friend even before I started my downfall and what she shared with me was, that she had attended my class this week and that the change that I had went through since these earlier times, was amazing to her. And I hear other people tell me this also.
So you go through life and you regret the things of your past, sure you did, we all did. I do, I’m sure you can but at the same time, how are you going to get out from these walls and move to where you envision you can be? You see because one of the things that I have done is, I have found out that, I thank my lucky stars that I went, that I hit some significant walls a decade ago and I had to change everything that I do, my role in life, my occupation, I had to learn new skills, I had to learn to beat that, look at myself. I learned that I was you know the biggest problem I had in my life was myself and I faced this, I faced this. So that’s what I’m gonna encourage you to do. Prepare for this new next. Move into it. Look through the windshield. Please, don’t run your life based on what’s in the mirror. If you base it on what’s in the mirror, you know what’s gonna happen? You’re gonna have head on collisions. You can’t drive by what’s in the past but what you do do, is keep these memories of the past. This is the tuition that each of us pays in life, is the life experiences that we have.
And by having these life experiences and deciding how we can be better and how we can move forward in the future, take advantages of the life lessons that we have learnt that can propel us to where we want to go in life. So with that first of all I really want to thank you if you sat through this, like I said, I had a few things I wanted to say today. Therefore, there is no guest, I have had some great guests on here lately, people like Bob Daniels and others have really shared a lot of fantastic information. But this was an episode that I had some things I needed to say, I had some things that I wanted to share with you and I shared these things with you in the hope that they will benefit you to move forward the way you want to go. When I wrote my book, Chaos to Reinvention, this was probably one of the hardest tasks that I have ever taken on in my life because what I did, I exposed my insides in this but at the same time, I wrote this so no one would ever feel sorry for me, rather that they could benefit from the experiences I had and they would be able to use the tuition that I paid to move forward. You see I have been here before, I know what it feels like and I can share the frustrations that you have, I understand them, so with that, my best to you today.
As we move forward through the month of May and we start seeing America reopen, let’s keep our optimism up, let’s keep our pessimism under control. But most of all, let’s be a realist and let’s move on and get to the next level. The level we envision, what I call, our dreams. Thanks for joining me, this is Jerry Isenhour, let us know here at CVC Success Group how we can help you turn your business dreams into your business realities. Let’s have a phone call, let’s talk, maybe we may have the answers that you have been searching for. See you next time on the next episode of, The Chimney and Fireplace Success Network.