2026 Virtual Planning Workshop Session 3

David Bush  0:00  
You know, there is so many different things that are competing for your time when it comes to leadership, what is your highest priority and are you willing to delegate, delete and delay the things that are not a high leverage activity so that you can focus on the things that matter most? Welcome to the Business Builders playbook, the show that breaks down the systems and strategies behind Predictable Revenue Growth to win in business. In each episode, we're diving into the proven strategies that separate the winners who scale from the losers who fail. This show is sponsored by bdr.ai the AI powered business development platform that automates your outbound prospecting so you can focus in on closing deals instead of chasing leads. Let's get started.

Jenelle Friday  0:48  
Hello, everyone. I know we're still getting people who are joining. So as you pop in, I want to say, welcome. We are getting into session number three of our business builder playbook workshop. So those of you that are new. My name is Janelle Friday. I am the Director of Client success here at BDR, and today I will be your moderator. I love what I do because I get to work with people like Mr. David Bush, who is a co owner of bdr.ai and asking him some questions that business builders want to get answered so they can build a better playbook for 2026 so before we really dive in, I'd like to ask you all to type in one word into the chat for this call that describes how you feel about your sales leadership and operational plans for 2026 maybe thumbs up, medium thumbs down. Just let us know how you're feeling about that we want to be able to engage you live yesterday, in session two, David shared his valuable insights on the benefit of developing a strategic marketing plan and showed us how to refine our plan, which was awesome. We posted that link in the recordings and the business builder playbook workshop and all of the bonus resources and links. So be sure to save that. I'm going to go ahead and drop in the chat right now the link to the workshop that we will be going over in detail today, so it's there in the chat. We had a lot of great questions submitted, but we always like to talk to people who are live. So if you're coming in today with really specific questions based on the last two days, or just based on something new, man, place those in the chat right now, I will make sure that we answer every question that we get. And so really today, here's what we're going to get covered. We're going to recover. We're going to cover, not recover.

David Bush  2:34  
Cover, maybe, yeah, true, a lot of content.

Jenelle Friday  2:38  
Cover, yeah. We're going to cover a review of sales fundamentals, your 2026 sales plan, your 2026 leadership plan, your 2026 operational plan, and your 90 day plan. So as we dive in, dive in, don't forget to give me one word about how you're feeling and any questions that pop into mind. So first things first, right? Dave, we're going to dive in and talk about sales fundamentals. So can you share you have a very simple sales success formula? Let's just dive right in. Yeah.

David Bush  3:10  
Well, love to see those comments in there. And just the transparency is that maybe right now is a real challenging time, because you're becoming very aware of your lack of a plan. And my hope in providing this opportunity for you to do this workshop is not to make you feel self conscious about the things that are not going well. It's to be truthful about the fact that you are where you are because of a lot of different decisions. Right? And that's just your current reality. It's not your future outcome. It's not what is available in 2026 you know, for things to change, we oftentimes have to change how we look at things, and we have to change we have to do things differently. And so we can just chalk up whatever is happened up to this point. Is a great learning experience. I love John Maxwell that says, you know, you win some, you learn some. So maybe right now, you're coming into this event with lots of learning and lots of experiences that can be turned into success for the future. But the success formula that I have learned that has been so valuable to me, it's so simple and it you know, as we oftentimes say, we need to be reminded more than we need to be taught. It just comes down to these four things. If you are going to look at your success in 2026 it's going to be a direct correlation to these four things. The very first thing is your motivation. So on a scale of one to 1010, being the best, you're highly motivated. One being you're not motivated. What kind of a score would you give yourself? And you know, motivation is not a feeling. It's a habit. It's an action. It's like, you know, Zig Ziglar said, you know, when you don't do motivation daily, it's kind of like bathing life begins to stink. And so, you know, you see the world as you are, not as it is. And so if you can go out there and start. To find ways to get motivated. And there's five things that you can do to become more motivated. One, you can watch something that's motivating, like a workshop or an event or a movie or a video. You can read things that are motivating. So there's lots of inspirational books and people that have overcome things that are 100 times harder than you're going through. I just watched a video today about the real life people that lived Black Hawk Down if you've ever seen the movie, tremendously sad environment for people that live through that and lost so many of our our valued soldiers in the process of trying to fight for freedom. And so there's things that you can read and there's things that you can watch that maybe bring you a sense of inspiration. There's also things that you can listen to. So I'm a big audio book person. I'm also a person that, you know, when I drive in the car, I like to listen to things, whether it's podcast or maybe it's just inspiring music. I oftentimes will do work to inspiring music, because it oftentimes will motivate me to get more done. There's also things that you can write down yourself. You know, journaling is a form of self motivation. You can journal things in a positive sense. You can also journal things that just are feelings that you're trying to get out from underneath you. The last thing is, is you can motivate yourself by the people that you spend the most time with. And so if you can spend more time with people that are more motivated than you, or are in pursuit of motivation, they're not allowing themselves to get down and out about the things that are going on in their circumstances. They have hope. They have a desire to improve. And if you can put yourself into those environments, you can increase your motivation. The second portion of the formula is when you take motivation and you add it to your mindset. Right your mindset? We talked about this yesterday. Opportunity is nowhere. Opportunity is now. Here. Are you open and curious of how you could do things better, or are you fixed on the ideas of the past or the current circumstances and how things are just the way that they are. And there's nothing that you can do to change it. If you your attitude determines your altitude. So if you can begin to increase your mindset and start looking up above rather than looking down and going, well, this is all I got. This is where I'm at. There's the idea of dreaming at the street level. The street level is eye level, right? As you're walking through the street, that is your eye level motivation and mindset. But if you put your eyes up, there is no end. There is so much capacity above and most people spend their life looking down at the past or looking at the current circumstances, they don't spend enough time daydreaming about what's possible, and that's the whole concept of why we're spending time planning for the future and dreaming of what could be, and staying motivated and positive in 2026 is going to be the difference maker in not only our lives, but it's going to have a ripple effect into your kids, your spouse, your employees, your staff, your vendor partners, your referral partners, your clients. If you keep showing up with motivation and mindset that's on the positive side of things, and you keep developing your skill set, which is the third portion of the formula, you know there's a difference between willpower and skill power, willpower gets you started, skill power keeps you going. And then there's the idea of thrill power. Is that if you combine willpower and skill power, you start to develop thrill power because you start to see the results of personal and professional growth. So if you apply the things that we've talked about over the last few days and what we're going to talk about today, you're going to start seeing a different result, and you're going to start proving it to yourself that these things can work. And if you keep getting better at them, there's no telling where you can go. And so when you combine those with the idea of personal growth and learning from others what they have learned about things, you can end up having a much higher level of success, and then the final one is action. So action is required, right? Action is the sacrifice that you put into the investment of what you're trying to create. And if you don't put in that action, or you don't do enough of the action, right? There's a difference between a person that sends out 200 connection requests on LinkedIn versus 8000 connection requests. What's the difference? Action? You did more actions, and you can make up in numbers what you lack in skill, motivation and mindset. So if you just do more action, you're going to get, typically, more results. If you're willing to learn from the results that you get. It doesn't mean that you're going to be perfect, but it's going to be better. So motivation, mindset, skill sets and action are the success or they fill the success formula, and your success in 2026 is a direct correlation between those four aspects.

Jenelle Friday  9:53  
I love that, and I know we've talked about how we're we're lyric lovers, right? And I'm from Washington State, Seattle. And so Macklemore is a little bit close to my heart, and he has that song can't hold us down. And it's like, when I when that song is playing, I'm like, Yeah, I get really right into it. And so I've kind of started my day with that song lately. And I like, I'm super picky about music, but sometimes the song just hits you, right? And so like, I want to encourage people too that, like, if you don't have good and we talked about this micro habits. This is one of those micro habits that would be really easy to kick something off. Find one song, right? That gets your blood pumping and gets you excited, maybe makes you jump up and down in your office, like I do, right? Or, you know, you're you're pumping it out like a rocky fan. Sometimes we need to get ourselves into that mindset of just one simple thing that you can do. Martina says, Go Hawks, one simple thing you can do as a micro habit can change the trajectory completely. And so from a from a micro habit to get motivated from a micro habit and your mindset, it could be very simple as coming up with three true statements about who you are, no matter what's in front of you, no matter what's happened behind you, to remind you of who you are. That for me, I'm passionate, right? I'm genuine and authentic in everything that I do. And I love people, I love relationships, I love conversations. And so reminding yourself of who you are, don't feel like you have to eat the world, right? What do we say we eat an elephant one bite at a time. So if you don't have really good micro habits to make sure that you start your day with the things David just talked about, now is the time to throw that five minute right? Jump it out Macklemore song on your calendar in the morning, so that you're doing the action David talked about, don't just listen to the advice, take the practical advice and do something with it so that you can move the needle. Okay, so David, now, can you walk us through a review of the fundamental skills and actions required for a successful sales process?

David Bush  11:55  
Let's dig in. Yeah, you bet. So I'm kind of curious. Of the people that are here, are you a salesperson that became an entrepreneur, or are you somebody that became an entrepreneur and then realized you had to become a salesperson, because every entrepreneur has to develop sales skills. You're always selling something. You're selling your vision, you're selling your mission. You're selling your company to a new hire, or you're selling the company to a vendor who's extending credit. There's so many different things that you can you have to learn when you become an entrepreneur. So I'm kind of curious, because Jeff said that there was a statistics out there where it's like at least 50% of all entrepreneurs started off in sales. That's interesting. And there's another 50% of people that didn't, you know, they were really good at something. They lighted they liked creative freedom, or they wanted more time freedom. And so they decided to get into buying a business, or maybe they were very successful in the corporate world, and they just got to the point where they said, You know what, I think that I could go out there and do this on my own. So they're a really good practitioner, you know, whether that's an attorney or something of that nature. So I'm curious to know how many other people out there in that same category, but you know, a lot of this stuff might be review for some of you experienced sales people, but I find that this is really encouraging to me to go back and evaluate, how am I doing in these fundamental skills, because I played football for whatever it is, 12 years, going from sixth grade all the way into playing four years of arena football. And one of the things that I found was every time we showed up for training camp, they taught us some of the basic fundamentals, like blocking and tackling. So there's certain things that we need to come back, and we need to shore up so that we don't forget some of the basic fundamentals. So if this show is resonating with you and you're ready to take action because you want to scale your business faster, smarter with more AI and technology and less labor, check out. Bdr.ai, we help entrepreneurs and executive sales leaders to automate the grind of prospecting so you can focus your time on closing deals and growing revenue where you should be spending your time with AI powered data, digital outreach, automation and done for you, prospecting systems, you'll connect with more qualified leads, book more appointments and build Predictable Revenue without adding more hours to your week or the week of your staff. Visit BDR today and discover how our AI prospect finder and digital BDR agents can help you to build your pipeline and your profits. Visit bdr.ai, where business builders learn how to automate and scale their playbook. So I'm gonna give you these really quickly, and then we'll talk through these. So So most of you in

Jenelle Friday  14:46  
the chat window, so that they can see them? Yeah, you bet I want to wait to review them

David Bush  14:50  
first, I'll go ahead and introduce them, and then you can put them into the chat. If you want to grab a screen grab, I'm going to just show them to you really quick. Can you see my screen now? Janelle, yes, yeah. Okay, all right, so most of you understand the concept of having a sales funnel. And again, there's lots of different people that have different ideas on what is the best steps, but these are the ways that I put them into priority. So the very first thing is, can you identify a qualified prospect, a person that you know could benefit from what you have. They can use what you have. They have. They can afford what you have to offer. And then when you get a chance to meet with them and actually qualify them from the final step, then they actually declare that they want what you have. So identifying qualified prospects that match your ICP is going to be a part of the sales role. There's going to be some things that are going to be done in the marketing department, where you're going to choose a target audience and ICP, and then you're going to have, you know, air cover that's going to do marketing to help you with that. But then you're also going to be able to identify people where you have relationships, or that are in your environment, or that match the geography that you are responsible for, the next one is in the area of approaching. So anytime you have a prospect that you are trying to work with, you're either using some form of marketing to approach them, or you're doing outbound approaching. So some of you are going to have more inbound opportunities, where people are going to be contacting you, either through a referral or something of that nature. But some of you are going to actually be doing outbound approaching we're going to be introducing yourself and networking. The next one would be following up. And the reason why I put follow up here versus later in the process is because most people are going to require use, specifically those of you that are selling a high ticket item, you're gonna, if you have a really high caliber, high profile target audience, or a very hard niche to get into, get in touch with like they have a lot of people that are trying to reach out to them, you're gonna have to spend time nurturing and building relationships after Your initial approach. So you may have multiple approaches and multiple follow ups before you ever get to the point where you actually have a qualified meeting, where you get a chance to determine if their needs justify the desire to buy your products and services. So qualifying would be that next step where you're actually doing a needs analysis, and your understanding what it is that they want, what they need, what they can use, what they've used in the past that didn't necessarily meet their needs, what their budget is. And then you're presenting the solution of what it is that you can do to help them to solve the problem, eliminate the pain, create the pleasure or the desired outcome that they want. The next one would be overcoming objections. And so anytime that you present solutions, you're typically going to be met with some form of resistance. And typically, the better the prospect, the bigger the objection. If they're already working with another person, then you're going to get a response that's going to be an objection or a barrier that you're going to have to overcome, and how well you overcome them is going to be a definite indicator of success. Gaining commitment. Other people may use the term closing the sale. My friend Jim Cathcart uses the word gaining commitment, or the words gaining commitment. I like that because you're not trying to sell something to somebody, you're trying to gain their commitment to purchase something that they have declared, that they needed, wanted, they can use and that they can afford. So you're not trying to convince them to do it or manipulating them to do it. You're just simply helping them to decide and then committing to that decision and then starting and retaining would be more in the area of customer service, is making sure you do a good handoff to client success, or client support or customer service, so that when the sale has been made and there's been a commitment by a buyer, that there's actually success with whatever it is that you're delivering. And that can be a variety of different things, but I'll talk about more of that in detail. But the last, the last piece, is prioritizing and organizing. So a big part of what it is that we do inside of business is we have to know what is our highest priority and who is our highest priority. So those are the basic fundamental skills if you want to use those as a way to kind of screenshot that Janelle will put those into the chat. But those are

Jenelle Friday  19:26  
the ways, even of putting the last one in green, so they're all green.

David Bush  19:30  
Oh, good point. I didn't see that. Hold on one second. Let me do that. Yeah, we'll make it nice and pretty.

Jenelle Friday  19:36  
How about that? There we go. All right, I'm grabbing it right now for everybody, cool.

David Bush  19:41  
So we've got the opportunity to review these fundamentals. Now the question is, is that if you were to give yourself a report card, A, B, C, D, F, which one of these do you need to do a better job on as the entrepreneur and business owner? That you are. And again, if you have a staff of people that you're delegating the role of sales, or you've had an opportunity to get out from underneath that, or you have a business partner that does it, that's okay. But I'm curious to know which of these particular fundamentals do you need to go back and sharpen if you really want to have a better outcome in 2026 because those fundamentals are going to be a great indicator of the portion of the success formula called skill sets. I mean, you could be motivated and you could have a positive mindset, but if you've got a dull saw, you're not going to cut much wood. You could. You could spend a lot of time doing action of cutting wood. And if you've got a dull ax or a dull saw, you won't cut very much. And that may, you know, challenge your expectations, and it may frustrate you, but it's one of those things. The more you learn, the more you become, and the more you the more you become, the more you achieve, and the more you achieve, the more you get done, and the more you earn for the work that you've done.

Jenelle Friday  21:02  
All that. I'm trying to insert this photo, and it just will not

David Bush  21:07  
hold on one second. Let me see if it is it be on my end that I need to make you.

Jenelle Friday  21:11  
I did a screenshot, but it doesn't look like I can insert the image itself into the chat. Yeah.

David Bush  21:17  
Well, we'll, we'll put it, we'll put the text in there, and then we'll make

Speaker 1  21:23  
sure that we get the other right now. All right, here everybody, there you go. There's our layout. Cool.

Jenelle Friday  21:30  
Okay, so what do you think are habits or systems that are going to help business owners improve sales, plan and systems?

David Bush  21:40  
Well, I think the first thing is, is the we talked about this the other day, but it's the commitment to being consistent. So these fundamentals are a part of a process that you have to commit to being consistent with them. So are you committed to being consistent with all of these fundamentals? Because if you aren't, if you were, you know, really good at a couple you can be semi successful, and there are some people that are just absolutely amazing at what they do, and they're really good at identifying and they can make up in numbers what they lack in skill sets in those other areas. But maybe that's not you. So I think that the first thing I would be looking at is what is the habit in regards to being committed to the process and divorcing yourself of the results, marrying that process and divorcing the results beyond anything else. Janelle, I would say that that would be probably the one Achilles heel that I see in most business owners, is that they are too much shiny object. They're jumping from one thing to the next and they don't have enough of the commitment to see something through the process. They want to treat everything like it's an event, or they want to treat everything like a microwave versus an oven. And I think that the world is set up differently. I think that AI is cool, and there's a lot of really cool things that we can do with AI, but I do, I do think that success is still reserved for the majority of people to be a process. It's not going to be an event. Yeah.

Jenelle Friday  23:07  
Well, speaking of AI, let's, let's get into our next area, right, which is your 2026 sales plan and AI outreach engine. So what do you think entrepreneurs should include in a simple and effective 2026 sales plan from an AI

David Bush  23:23  
perspective, yeah, I know that I interviewed a sales professional, sales expert that I followed when I was growing up through the years of being a kind of a young kid in the sales world. His name is Jeffrey Gitomer, and he made a comment that kind of challenged my perspective, but he said, if, if you are in the world of sales, and you are not spending 30 minutes to an hour a day with AI, you are going to start losing opportunities. And we talked about this, I think a day or two ago, Jensen Huang, the think that that's how you pronounce his name, Huang, h, u, A, N, G, he's the CEO of Nvidia, but he has this comment that he says, you won't lose your job because of AI. You'll lose your job to somebody else that does the same thing as you, but uses AI. You won't lose your business to AI. You'll lose your business to somebody else that's using AI to do your business better, faster, cheaper than you. So the question is, is that, how much time are you spending with learning about AI? It is fast changing, and it is overwhelming if you choose to be overwhelmed. But there's also another way of thinking about AI, is that you can choose not to be overwhelmed. I know, for a lot of the work that I do and coaching other entrepreneurs, a lot of times they say, I'm just not good with technology, or, you know, I just get overwhelmed with all that. And I go, Well, I've found that being overwhelmed is a choice. You don't have to be overwhelmed. You can choose not to be overwhelmed. You can choose not to allow external circumstance. Is to overwhelm you. So what is it that you can do with AI? Could you use basic, simple prompts? And there is a process inside of the Business Builders playbook workbook that we've shared. I've shared it a couple of different times, but I'll just throw it back in there one more time, just to make sure that everybody's aware. Let me pull it up real quick. So if you go into the section, there's a whole bunch of different tabs here. We talked about this yesterday. You can go back and watch the previous sessions on how to download this. But there is this sales fundamental tab that you can click on that has 15 questions, and I would challenge you to answer those questions yourself. And if you want to do the cheat code, you could just highlight those questions, and you could take it over. I'm sorry, there's 11 questions, not 15. And you could take those and you could put it into chat GPT, or whatever your favorite AI tool is and you could say, help me answer these questions based on what you know about me and edr.ai so You can put your own company name in there. And yeah, and just do a quick paste and then see how AI answers those questions. And again, because this is my I have the advanced version, or I paid for the subscription so it knows who I am, so it's going to answer these questions based upon the information that it knows about me. Where are the ideal clients paying money? These are good strategies for me to be thinking about where, where will I find my next clients? Who do they spend time with? What are my best marketing strategies? So this simple process of just copying and pasting a list of questions that I never even answered, but because I've been using AI 30 minutes a day or more, I was able to use the information that AI has collected to put together some information that could help me to develop a better sales plan. So a real simple strategy would be to try that out and just see how it turns out for you. Again, we can't just take what AI gives us as the verified truth. Because, you know, down here it says, chat, GPT can make mistakes. Check important info. So you're definitely, you're going to want to think about that. But in terms of, you know, what is your best strategy to gain commitment and close the sale? Insight, value, fit, invitation, diagnose the problem, clearly show the gap, offer, a simple, compelling offer, give optionality. Here's some things that you can do with it, set some expectations and desired outcomes. What's a good follow up strategy? There's things that you can begin to think about that would help you to build a better sales plan, or a sales funnel, some people call it, and that simple, simple step could be everything that you need to start the process, and then as you want to go in there and refine it. That's the cool thing about AI is that you can continue to refine these by putting in additional prompts. And you can say, this is more of my personality. Rewrite the above and use my personality style. So again, AI works off of you, so the more you give it, the more it has to work with. And you could even click on this dictate, and you could actually talk to AI like it's a personal sales coach. And you could tell them what it is that you're struggling with, what it is that you're wanting to accomplish. What it is that you're looking for information on, and it will help you. It'll put content in front of you so that you can begin to refine it into a more

Jenelle Friday  28:50  
verified plan. I love that. So while we're on the topic of AI, I'm just looking for a yes or a no from our audience. Are you using AI? Are you engaging with chat? GPT or grok, which is my preference sequencing. If it's a no and you're not really, you don't know what a prompt is, or you're not, you're hesitant to use AI, let us know that too. But I'm seeing a lot of yeses, which is great. And so then the question becomes, how does AI digital outreach? Jeff, not Jeff, sorry, David, I do it all the time. I don't know what the problem is. I know you are sorry. How does an AI digital outreach engine help a business owner stay consistent with prospecting and relationship building?

David Bush  29:34  
I just popped the sales fundamental image, I think, into the chat. I think I was successful and accomplishing that. So, so I'm sorry I interrupted you to say, say it one more time.

Jenelle Friday  29:45  
Janelle, yeah. Okay. So how does an AI digital outreach engine help a business owner stay consistent with prospecting and relationship building? Yeah.

David Bush  29:53  
So if you, if you leverage AI in the concept of using digital outreach, the first thing that you'll get out of it. Is, you'll get out of it consistency. And we talked about that the commitment to being consistent is a massive, massive area of concern for most business owners and entrepreneurs, is that they are they do one thing predictably, and it's that they act unpredictable. And so you know, if you were to go back and you were to look at your activities as it related to emails and to phone calls and LinkedIn messages and LinkedIn connection requests. You know, what would it look like for you for the last year now? Again, this is not a comparison. I'm just asking the question, do you know what you did in the last 12 months in regards to sales activities or business development activities. And if you could go back there and look, would you say that your calendar matched your goal? Because most people, the reason why they don't have the results that they desire, it's oftentimes because they didn't do the work. It's, you know, it's not a matter of hocus pocus. It's a matter of focus, focus. And you know, it's like the work that you've been avoiding is the magic that you're looking for. And so if you want more results in 2026 think about what are the things that I would have to show up to do consistently to get the outcomes that I want. So this is an example of just my personal outreach using bdr.ai I use digital automation to help me to have more activity. So in the last 12 months, I've sent out 80 575 connection requests. Now I have a different target market than maybe you do. You don't have to send out 8575 connection requests unless you have a really large target market. I have a really large target market. So I numbers matter to me. You might be more refined. You might send out 4000 or 2000 but if you sent out 2000 connection requests to people in your target audience, and you got a certain percentage of those individuals, let's just say that you got 20% of those people that accepted your connection request, and all of those people matched your ideal client profile, all of those people were people that you felt were qualified to need, want and afford and use your services or your products. That's a pretty big number, right? 400 new people are now connected to you on LinkedIn, and you can't send somebody a LinkedIn message. You can send people in mails, if you're a Sales Navigator user, or if you're a basic LinkedIn user, you can send people a in mail, but I think that it's five people a month on basic and then you can send like, 150 or something on Sales Navigator when you pay $1,000 a year. But I've sent out five or 5322 messages to people that are my first degree connections. And those messages are a combination of value and invitation. So we use this concept called Give. Give, then ask. I don't send a lot of in mails. I don't see a tremendous amount of value with those. So I send out first degree message messages more than I do anything else. I viewed 1400 or 14,040 viewed profiles. Why is that valuable? Because I'm being noticed. Because every time somebody logs into LinkedIn, they'll see that my name pops up in their notifications because I viewed their profile, I followed 4142 profiles. I sent out 1300 event invites using technology. I didn't do it personally, but it sent it out through the system. I had 16 136 accepted invites. Now some of those people were first degree connections that I sent out a I built a campaign just for my first degree connections. So 387 of those people were people I was already connected to. So you can kind of do the math and go, Well, he still had about 1300 new connections out of 8000 pretty good ratio of building new relationships with people that need, want and can afford and can use my services. I had 831 incoming messages coming back to me. I've got 4343 emails that I sent out in the last 12 months, and that's just through the automation. I obviously sent out more. And then, as far as leads, I've identified two, 277 people as leads, and I've had 91 people that have actually joined us and become a client, just from the people that are inside of this targeted outreach. And I could go in there and break it down by the day, but this, these numbers match up for me. They tell me something, and I'm again, I'm showing you what's possible with automation, because I want you to see the fact that if you go back and look back at your inconsistency, most likely, you probably did not do what you ultimately needed to do to achieve the desired outcome that you wanted. And a lot of it just comes down to just time. Priority, organization, structure and then automation being another part of that.

Jenelle Friday  35:06  
Yeah, well, I went ahead also, too. I'm a big believer in help yourself, right? Help me. Help you. Help me. Help you. Help me, right? So I actually put into the chat a document so you can create an assistant or a project. I think it's called the project in Groc. I don't know if it's called an assistant in chat GPT, but same kind of thing, and you're going to give it an SOP, which is a directive. And so the document that I drop in the chat is a template for that SOP. So you'll see all of the all of the data points that you want to fill out that's telling that assistant or that project, your directive, your parameters, your tone, your preferences, so that it kind of you're you're building in a va, a little bit pre programmed VA, so now you stay within that project, and you can prompt it by asking questions, and it's going to weigh its answer against the SOP. So this is another area where I'm finding a lot of AI users didn't know that they could create an assistant like that within a tool like chat, GPT or grok. So I went ahead and threw that in there for everybody go and grab. It's just a quick word document.

David Bush  36:15  
So and at the end, VA, is that valuable tool? If you have a virtual assistant, you can end up hiring somebody, and you could pay them by the hour to do a lot of this work, or you could help them to empower themselves and augment their work by hiring or by building out a AI agent that allows you to throw ideas to like, hey, craft 30 days worth of social media content based on my background, my experience, you know, go to my website. Look at my about us, you know, build out content, and then now you're handing that off to a virtual assistant. Or maybe, if this at this point in your career, you have to do some of that stuff yourself until you build up a little more revenue. But that gives you the opportunity to delegate and elevate with still getting the best return on your investment, versus paying somebody to come up with the laborious time of building all that for them, right?

Jenelle Friday  37:12  
Well, I mean, I kind of love the idea of a skyscraper. To have this big, beautiful skyscraper that does everything for you, you have to build a solid foundation. And so this SOP and having a directive inserted into a chat GPT agent as an assistant or as a project, is a really amazing way to start a foundation so that you just keep building off of it. You could plug in your website. You can highlight, like, for me, right? I'm like, I want to pull stuff from Brene Brown and Simon Sinek and Daniel Coleman and all these people that's in my directive. So when I'm asking for it to give me some quotes from my list of authors, I don't have to tell it which authors it already has that. So this is a really great way to kind of get ahead of that. Okay, so let's talk about an SOP for lead management. We're going to talk about rope. But my question for everybody in the chat right is rope stands for reply, organize, prioritize, engage. David's going to talk about it, but when you think about rope, if you've heard of rope, of those four things, which one for you right now lands as a priority. So let's, let's dig in, right? David, let's explain what reply, organize, prioritize and engage actually means, and why it's essential for managing leads effectively.

David Bush  38:22  
Yeah, so a standard operating procedure, or an SOP for lead management, is this acronym that I came up with that is very simple to remember, and if you need to write it down, you can. We'll put it in the chat, but it's reply to the people who are replying to you, and if you are not replying to people and throwing the ball back. There's a simple thing that you can do, and I'm going to show you a simple AI prompt that you could put in there. And let me just pull it up, and then I'll throw it in there. So I'm going to go in there. I see my friend Don Hudson, the best selling author, Hall of Fame speaker, Don, I'm so glad that you're here. I feel like that you should be giving this presentation. He wrote the best seller, New York Times bestseller, The One Minute entrepreneur. Some of you remember that book. So, Don, thanks for being here and honoring us with your presence. But if you were to go in there, and if I was just to play like Don Hudson, and I would say, help me. Don Hudson, create 10 Simple questions I could ask senior sales leaders, VP of sales, to collect an easy yes answer. That starts a conversation and opens up an opportunity

Speaker 2  40:13  
for me to talk about my speaking services. Yes on LinkedIn, who are new connections on LinkedIn? So this

David Bush  40:36  
is a simple prompt. I'm just going to put this into the chat too, so everybody else has it, but let's take a look and just see what are some simple things that chat GPT came up with for dawn to ask a simple question. So curious, do you have do you and your team have a dedicated focus right now on elevating sales leadership skills going into next year? Yes or No, are you seeing more pressure than ever on your team to improve performance and consistency? That's a nice question. Do you believe sales teams today need more than just product knowledge, they need stronger communications and influence skills. As a VP of sales, do you find that your team is always hungry and fresh for motivation and practical takeaways they can use immediately? Easy to say Yes, right? So again, if you go out there with the concept of not trying to get people to buy or get people to book a meeting, but if you get them to just give you a simple yes, Hey, are you planning any sales kickoffs, leadership retreats or quarterly meetings where bringing in an outside expert might add value if, if Don asked that 100 times, he's going to get a ratio of results. And again, he's not telling them to buy he's just asking a question that's easy to say, yes, no, or maybe so, right? So if he asked that question 100 times, he's going to get a ratio, and he's also going to get a ratio if he asks 1000 times, what's the limiting factor? Janelle, I'll put you on the spot. What's the limiting factor with Don and how many times he can ask that question,

Jenelle Friday  42:13  
how many leads he has in his funnel,

David Bush  42:15  
how many people got on his list? That's a limiting factor. How much time he's willing to put in to actually doing the job. Another limiting factor is, what does he think and how does he feel about sending messages to people? Because that could be a limiting factor. A lot of times. The limiting factor is just simply our own mind and we talk ourselves out, or we lie to ourselves all the time and say, Well, if I said that, they're going to think this and whatever. So there's also what he's thinking, and then there's also just the time factor. And then there may be another thing would just be he doesn't he doesn't want to spend his time doing that. There's other things that he could do than send out 1000 messages. But if technology could send out that message 20 times, 30 times, 40 times a day to 1000 of Don's first degree connections, and he targeted a list of people that he was connected to, or he was connecting to people that met that qualification. And if he sent that message as a simple clarifying question, Hey, are you looking at anything or hey, I have developed a list of sales tools that are extremely valuable to sales teams to help them to get motivated and to get more focused on selling value versus cutting price. Would you like me to send it over to you? Easy question to say, Yes, right? So all those simple things can lead to a very easy way to immediately create conversations. So very first thing that you want to do is you want to think about, how can I reply to the people who have replied to me? If you are not replying to those people, go back to the people, go open up your inbox, and think about how you could just go back there and start a conversation, ask an easy question that's easy to say yes to that starts a conversation. The second thing is organizing people, and you can use in our system, we use labels. So in your system, you might have to use a an Excel spreadsheet. There's different ways to do things on a manual basis, but in my campaigns, I can go into prospects and I can pull up a list of people based upon a label. So with one of the benefits of using technology is, is that I can label my leads and I can say, give me all the people that I have identified with the hot emoji, who are also in a position where they have shown interest in what I do. So it's not just that they're a hot lead, they've also expressed interest. And so now I can pull up a list of people that always or that match that particular label. I've got 184 people, but. Let me just go down even further and say I don't want just the people that are hot and interested, I want just the people that I've identified as a lead. So I'm now not only organizing it with a label, but I'm also prioritizing it as an actual lead. Now there's CRM systems, and you can use your own spreadsheet version, but I went going from a large number to a smaller number to a smaller number. And then I can get even more specific and say I just want to focus on the people that have the hot emoji. I don't want to focus on all the people that are interested. Just give me the hot leads. And now I have the focus, and I can engage these people in a conversation by asking a simple question. So I've got 38 people that I can follow up and follow through with because I've organized them, I've organized them with a label, I've prioritized them as a lead, and now I'm going to engage in a follow up conversation, and I'm going to keep playing catch with them, and that's a big part of what it is that we do is we play catch with people to find out who's interested and who's not. We don't waste people's time, but we throw them the ball and we ask them to throw it back with a simple yes question.

Jenelle Friday  46:11  
I love that, so keep going. All right. We did organize.

David Bush  46:18  
They'll reply. Fly with you. Organize people by label or by category. If you are not using a platform like bdr.ai, if you have a spreadsheet, make sure you're organizing people with a category. Prioritize people based upon how much they qualify as a lead. So we have a situation where you can click on a button and it automatically moves them to a prioritized list, so that when you go to work and you spend 10 or 15 or 30 minutes on LinkedIn, you're not in there scrolling. You're actually going directly to the individuals that you know are a qualified lead based on your selecting of and putting them in that category, and then the final one is engaging in follow up conversations. So if people have not responded to your most recent reply, you're drawing them back into a conversation by asking them an easy question, you know. And if they haven't responded to any prospecting questions, you may want to just move them back into the friend zone and wish them a happy holiday season and ask them if they have any big plans for the holidays. And that's an easy way to get people back in a conversation.

Jenelle Friday  47:27  
One of the thing I love that you talk about is when you reply to people who've replied to you, you're going to get people that reply and say thanks, but no thanks, right? And the one thing I keep telling myself is they still took the time to reply, right? They took the time out of their day to say thanks, but no thanks. And so it under this methodology, I'm like, Okay, well, I'm supposed to reply to people who reply to me, so I still send another message that says, like, thanks so much for letting me know I know that timing isn't always ideal. Can I reach back out in 90 days? Have a Happy New Year, right? It's still an engagement that prompts, I still would like to talk to you, even if you don't buy something for me, I'm still looking to have an engaging conversation relationship with you that can potentially lead to a referral, or in you know, 90 days to six months, they could be interested. But I never like let someone have the final word when they say no, because I always want them to know that your no doesn't mean we still can't have a dialog.

David Bush  48:19  
And we hear this a lot, Janelle, and people say, Well, I don't know how to reply to this. Well, you use AI, and you say, how do I reply to people who don't answer the question with a yes? And then you just keep dialoguing. You keep funneling information back to them until you can start to figure out what is it that I can get from AI that matches what it is that solves my problem. And again, sometimes the first prompt doesn't work. But, you know, here's an example of things I mean. This is not hard. People get stuck on this concept of but I don't know what to say, and in their pocket of their phone, or whatever they call their device now, or their computer, they have the ability to go get the answer. All they have to do is just ask the question, and then in our system, we have the capacity where you can save your replies. So if I go into this particular client right here or this prospect, I can go right down here, and I can open up chat GPT, and I can have book a meeting, and it automatically reads all of their messaging and all of their profile, and it allows me to actually craft a response using AI. I can also go in there and I can click on the template version, and I can select from one of my pre existing templates. So I can select AI strategies, follow up Henry, I wanted to follow up and check in and see how things are going, so you can save your replies in here and open up more productivity. And functionality. If technology is kind of what you're looking to do,

Jenelle Friday  50:05  
why do you think, David, that most entrepreneurs drop the ball when it comes to organizing and prioritizing the pipeline?

David Bush  50:11  
I think that a lot of them are visionaries. They're not operational. They're not and they have so many different things to focus on that the small little focus of follow up and follow through is just oftentimes not on their highest priorities. So you know, if they can delegate to somebody that has that skill set, that's fantastic, if you can give the role and responsibility to do something to somebody else, and they can do it better than you, you know, or even, like Jeff said, 50% if somebody could do it, 50% as good as me, I would delegate it to them. But if you're not in a position where you're able to bring in a lot of extra seat count, you can't hire a lot of people right now. How could you leverage a virtual assistant? Or how could you lever leverage a personal assistant powered by bdr.ai or an AI feature? Or, how could you leverage bdr.ai I mean, our software is a fraction of the cost of what it would cost you to hire a virtual assistant, and that's hiring a virtual assistant, you know, from maybe outside the United States. Most people in the United States are going to get paid anywhere between 25 to $50 an hour. You could go international and maybe get somebody for 10 to $20 an hour and deal with the fact that maybe they don't have all of the skill sets that you need and want, but you could get it cheaper, but if you empowered them and augmented them with AI as a tool, you're going to get 10 times more output than what you would get if you were just hiring them by the hour. Yeah, I love

Jenelle Friday  51:49  
that you're calling that out because you and I were talking about this yesterday. I have a really, a really strong business partner in my past who is empowering a specific team from the Philippines that they're 100% fluent in English. They show up professional they they're working nights. That's what they want, and they're so grateful for every moment and for their paycheck, right? And I think oftentimes we overlook going outside of us because we're afraid of a language barrier or right? There's all different kinds of fears that go through that. But I just want to tell everybody on the phone today, on the call today. If you've not considered that, you should, because there are incredible individuals from all over the world that are prime and ready, that want to be virtual assistants, that have provided incredible value to me and so many of my colleagues. So great shout out there. So now that you know what the rope stands for, if you're willing, throw in an R, O, P or E. Where do you believe you need to spend the most time going into 2026 as you look at your business strategy? And so then let's kind of talk about a leadership plan. And I love this section, because if you are, if you're a Me, myself and I program, you're the leadership plan. You're the leader, right? And I think you've got to look at it from the perspective of, if you're a one man, show you're the owner, the CEO, the president, your operations, your sales, your client management, your support, right? And that can feel really overwhelming. So again, the more David, the more you talk about planning, being intentional and purposeful with the limited time that you have per day understanding your priorities and how much time to give priorities. I mean, that's I think you have multiple hats that you can wear, and you can't wear them all at once. So now we're going to take the leadership hat off the shelf and put our leadership hat on. So let's first kick off and talk about, right, what does a strong leadership plan look like for a business heading into the new year?

David Bush  53:47  
Yeah, I think that personally, you know, the the habits that you keep is going to be a big part of your leadership. So looking at the major aspects of your own personal and professional growth and development, you know, you can't take people to a place that you're you've never been, you know. So thinking about the speed of the team is dictated by the speed of the leader. So if you were to think about your habits based on 2025 would those habits take you to where you want to go in 2026 or do those habits needs to change. And you know, we would say that the very first habit is the habit of the way that you think. You know, habits of healthy thinking, habits of positive thinking, is a very simple way to start feeding your mind right with thoughts and ideas that are going to help you to start building a habit that has maybe a lot more transformational capacity, like the way that you work and the skills that you learn and the food that you eat, the exercise that you do. So one of the very first things I would say is, you know, habits of healthy self motivation and mindset. The next one would be habits of skills development, habits of. Action that are tied to high leverage activity that's extremely important. The next one, I would say, would be priority management. You know, there is so many different things that are competing for your time when it comes to leadership, what is your highest priority and are you willing to delegate, delete and delay the things that are not a high leverage activity, so that you can focus on the things that matter most. And most people are struggling with just priority management. They call it time management, but really, at the end of the day, it's priority management. Janelle, we have to get to the point where we know what's the most important thing, and that's why this planning workshop is so valuable to us as we go into this new year, because if it did nothing more than just help you to remind yourself of what matters most to you. Might be relationships, might be your health, might be some sales practices, might be some sales habits or leadership habits, but that's a big part of it. And then, as from a peak performance standpoint, you know, understanding, you know, if you're growing now, it's a matter of you taking what you've learned and what you've become, and transferring that back into the next person. I heard, somebody I think was my son, that told me the other day, says every every leader needs to have three people that are close to them in their life. The first one is they need to have somebody that is above them, like a mentor or a coach or a trainer or whatever you want to call them, somebody that has done what they want to do, or is maybe a little farther along in their journey, whether it be age or experience or success and significance, but they have somebody that's a mentor or a coach in their life. They have somebody that is a peer that's kind of in pursuit of what it is that they are trying to accomplish, or a similar thing that they're trying to accomplish. So they're kind of on the journey together. So I like to use a mountain climbing experience. Do you know who the first person was to climb? Mount Everest, according to history? Does anybody know off top of their head? I do not. It was Sir Edmund Hillary and his Sherpa, Tenzing Norgay. And what's interesting about that story is, do you know which one of them was the first person to climb Mount Everest? Well, it would be the Sherpa. Right? They've never said. They've never said because there was obviously something to be said about being the first right to the top of the mountain. And rather than coming down and saying, This person was there first and I was second, they said we did it together. And I remember Sir Edmund Hillary being interviewed, which, again, he got a lot of the credit, but they asked him the question. They said, You know, why did you climb Mount Everest, knowing all the things that it would cost you. And he said, I didn't climb Mount Everest to conquer the mountain. I did it to conquer myself. And that's why I think that it's fun to be able to kind of put out a big challenge in an adventure for 2026 because it will, it will demand more of you than you feel like you're capable of delivering, and it'll feel like you're failing certain days. But what you're actually doing is you're growing. You're actually becoming better in the failure process. As long as you don't allow the failure to derail you, if you allow it to refine you, you'll put yourself back into the position, and you'll keep climbing the mountain, and if you put somebody beside you that's in a similar pursuit, and going after something similar to you, you're going to be more encouraged than if you just had the person who was the coach that was telling you what to do. So Sir Edmund Hillary had the John Hunt expedition, which was like hundreds of people that were helping them to get to the top of the mountain. But it was Tenzing Norgay that was the person that was by his side, and then the third person, and this could be multiple people, obviously, in each one of these categories, but the third person we need to have is somebody to teach, or somebody to mentor, somebody to train. Because, as Jim Rohn says, is that, you know, every time I get a chance to share a principle like what I get a chance to share in these last three days, I get a chance to hear it myself. So every time I'm sharing it or I'm teaching it to somebody else, I'm mastering it at a new level. And so thinking about what that looks like in your individual team, you know, what is your training calendar look like inside of the Business Builders playbook? It's kind of a tongue twister, by the way, there is a section in there that you can go in there, and you can kind of think about, what does it look like when you're evaluating your team? Let me jump on, bring it up on my screen. So when you look at your team, and this could again, it could be teams like your you. Know, key referral partners that refer you a lot of business. Maybe they're an independent contractor and they just refer you a lot of business, but you're kind of seen as kind of a coach to them. Or maybe it could be a staff member, sales team member, but if you were to list out the people that are on your team, and you were to give them a grade, you know, a, b, c, what kind of a strategy do you have to improve their performance in the new year and again, having a plan to grow people is going to be a great opportunity to see your business soar. Because if you're able to grow people, you know people are going to end up likely being the thing that's going to help you to grow so think about in your business, what are the things that you can be doing? Who are the people that you want to recruit? You know, do you have individual people that you're nurturing a relationship with that if you could recruit these people into your organization, you could end up changing a lot of people's lives. You could change the trajectory of your business significantly. And obviously, if you have people that are a quality talent, I mean, you could have some people out there that you're recruiting that are more kind of the newbies or the rookies, or maybe they're a B level player, but they're consistent, or maybe there's some a level people that you are going after and that you'd really like to build a relationship with. So putting yourself into a position where you actually have the ability to bring in a team member that's going to be a game changer, like in the world of professional sports, you know, you get somebody on your team that has a high level of capacity, it's going to be a whole different outcome in the next season, because they're going to be a game changer your training plan. Do you have a training plan for your team, if you do have a team, and do you have a training calendar that you can begin to think about, what are the things that I'm going to do to grow our team, and what's a topic that I could talk about at each one of our monthly sales meetings or our monthly team meetings, so I continue to grow and expand, and what does organizational chart look like? This is kind of a cheap version of a cheap version of an organizational chart, but just something really quick. You know, if you're a small organization and you want to grow to a larger organization, one of the things that I found inside of the book E Myth revisited 25 years ago was the concept of building out the organizational chart. And if your name is in all of these positions. It's not the end of the world. You can just simply put your name inside of these positions, and then you can start thinking about which is the first job that you want to delegate and hire to. So if you're down here in this admin stuff, or you're in this operation stuff, and at some point you'd like to have people in those positions, then just identify that you're playing that role, and you want to get out from underneath that. And then there's a little checklist here, if you want to go through, kind of think about, you know, what are some of the things that I could add to my to do list to help me to grow as a leader? Those are all great little tips that I found.

Jenelle Friday  1:02:57  
I love all of this, and I just want to add to I remember, kind of when I was trying to get my professional career together, and I was really struggling and feeling overwhelmed, which I'm sure some of our attending is are feeling overwhelmed. Of there's so much to do, there's so much to cover, there's so much to think about, Love him or hate him. Elon Musk is a man who is one of the most productive and successful human beings on the planet from a output perspective. So I'm not going to go political or whether you agree with his business plans or not, he has something called a 9010 time allocation rule, right? Elon Musk talks about the reason he is so productive is because 90% of his allotted work time and his personal time, he crosses that boundary a little too hard. You miss it. 90% is what he calls signal. He stays on signal. The signal time is what advances his priorities. It's what keeps it on track with the outcomes he's looking to accomplish. And so I color code my calendar for signal, or the other fit for that, or the other half of that is noise, right? So something that I struggle with in my health journey is food noise. I constantly have this voice inside my head telling me, when's the next time we get to eat, and what do I get to eat? It's something I'm working on right now. David, I know you understand what that feels like, right? So if you relate that to business, there's noise in your day. Oh, I just got an email from somebody. I need to go check it. That's noise, because it pulls you and it distracts you from what you're doing. So if you're feeling like I just don't even know where to start, maybe it's time to determine of your priority list, of your tasks to do, what's going to be signal you're on point. You're tracking that signal. You're honing in on what you're supposed to be doing and what's noise, and color code your calendar appropriately so that you can see from a visual perspective how much time are you spending on signal and how much time are you spending on noise. Because then you get to determine the noise stuff I can pass to a VA, the noise stuff, really, I can do for 30 minutes once a day and a day or. Beginning of the day, right? But these are those David's talked about micro habits and being actionable with your list of priorities, and to do's, and to even tackle that list of priorities, you have to start somewhere. So I just found this a really profound concept, because I now can determine, oh, that's noise, or I'm on point, I'm on signal. I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing. I'm driving toward the outcome I'm looking to achieve. So I just want to throw that out there. Wonderful.

David Bush  1:05:25  
That's great stuff. Yeah, I think we all have our own little journey here. And, you know, again, this workshop series was meant to be a buffet. It was meant to be, you know, take what is consumable for you and to put it on your plate. You can choose to not be overwhelmed by just doing all you can do, nothing more, nothing less, just focusing in on what can I do? And then I know I have a buffet. I have a whole list of things that I can come back to, and I can always continue to improve. And a year from now, 90 days from now, I'm going to be a lot better than if I just did nothing.

Jenelle Friday  1:05:55  
I'm going to ask you for three things. David, what are three leadership behaviors that create growth versus stalling growth.

David Bush  1:06:08  
Three, the first three that I that come to mind is the first one is accepting full responsibility. And we could go, we could do a whole nother session reading that. But stop blaming. Stop shaming yourself and telling yourself that you're never good at this, or this is what you always do. But just accept full responsibility. There's always things that we can do better, but if you just accept full responsibility of hey, you know what? I'm going to own this, and I'm going to get better with it. I'm just going to make reasonable progress over a measurable period of time. So that very first thing would be taking Extreme Ownership. The next thing would be is, is that committing to something that you can do consistently for a period of time? We talked about this ad nauseam, so I'm not going to go into more detail about that, but committing to be consistent. What could you do for 2026 every day that matches your motivation level? So you can't match something to a motivation that you don't have. You can't set a goal up here when your motivation is up here, unless you raise your level of motivation to match the goal. And this is where people oftentimes miss their goal, or miss their sales target because they set a goal that didn't match their motivation and commitment level. So if you were to decrease the goal and you were to make it into a minimum viable commitment, micro, micro habit, or habit stacking, they call it. You could begin to kind of climb your way up. And leaders are sometimes the worst at staying committed to something. They're all over the map. You know they're here, then they're there. But remember that people do what people do. So if you do something, what you do is going to speak much louder than whatever you decide to say. So if you tell everybody that they need to be committed, or they you tell everybody to be consistent in something, they're probably not going to going to follow through. But if you are consistent and you're committed, your voice is going to have a lot more confidence and a lot more competence, because they're going to be able to see the fact that you're actually doing what it is that you're asking them to do. So first would be accept full responsibility. I could maybe add to that play above the line. Don't be the victim of your circumstances. Don't be the victim of your employees. Don't be the victim of the marketplace. Don't be a victim of your vendors. Don't be a victim of the bank. Don't be a victim of your clients. Be the creator of the life and the business that you desire. The second one, would I forgot my what I said,

Jenelle Friday  1:08:53  
hold yourself accountable.

David Bush  1:08:55  
What you said, Yeah, commit to something. To be consistent. Be consistent with something. Find something that you can

Jenelle Friday  1:09:00  
be one micro habit. Just pick one. Maybe we start out small and we pick one micro habit. And I'll give you bias for five minutes. I play Macklemore song in the morning, and I get to have a little dance party and dance out to get myself hyped up for the day. That's a stupid micro habit, but it absolutely works and it takes less than five minutes.

David Bush  1:09:18  
Yeah, I have a daily reading commitment that I do, and I know that I try to get information into my head before I do, because I can get in my head about certain things. I try to set those things up from the very beginning. The third one, I would probably say that would be really valuable, would just be set a goal that is something that is exciting that, you know, some people call it a god sized dream, or something that would be extraordinary, but the only way that you were going to accomplish it is that if you had some sort of miraculous divine intervention, or you had something that just took place, you know, that whole idea of Zig Ziglar. Says, you know, have you built your castle or not? Sorry, shoot for the stars, because you may just land on the moon, is what he says. Henry David Thoreau says, Have you built your castles in the sky? Good. That's where they should be. Now, build the foundations underneath them. And I don't know, in your life, if you've ever been challenged to have, you know, a god sized dream, where only the way that, the only way that it could ever happen is if God intervened, and if you had divine intervention, or if something significant happened. But there's a sense of wonder. There's a sense of excitement. You know, if I was to ask you the question, you know, hey, what's the most exciting thing that you're working on for 2006 Well, not much. That's a different conversation than a person that says, you know, one of the things that I'm looking at doing is that I'm wanting to be able to feed 1000 kids in an orphanage and something like, I don't know how I'm gonna end up doing that, but that's something that I could end up, you know, you could end up committing to. So it doesn't have to always be something connected back to success. It could be something that's connected back to significance. You know, a big part of my journey, and the reason why I took the time to write a couple of books, I wrote a book on my health journey, and then I wrote a book on live an extraordinary life, and I'm in the process of writing a book with Jeff on the business builder playbook. And one of the things that I heard somebody say, I can't remember off the top my head who it was, but it was, how many people will you be a part of their story when they say, you know, had it not been for or I met a god, or, I mean, you've heard me quote a few people. Don Hudson's been one of those kind of guys. For me,

Jenelle Friday  1:11:47  
you're kind of a walking encyclopedia of quotes there.

David Bush  1:11:50  
David, so you think about if your story, and again, it doesn't necessarily have to be that you impact millions of people's lives. You know, I know that Janelle has some nephews, I think, and she has an opportunity to impact their lives. But how many people are going to say, you know, had it not been for or, you know, I had this one person, I had this aunt, or I had this uncle, or had this grandparent that always believed in me and always believed in something that was greater than what I could think of for myself, that truly is living an extraordinary life, and that's significance. It's beyond success. And I think that if you have something that's significant, that's in your dream box, or it's in your vision plan, you're going to have a different activity level. You're going to develop the skills that you didn't think that you could develop. You're going to use technology. You're gonna learn how to use AI, because there's this significant dream or goal that's holding out in front of you, yeah,

Jenelle Friday  1:12:48  
and I want to say too, because when you ask that question, my first thought was, well, what's mine? I have a silly one that has nothing to do with people, right? One of the dreams is if, if we ever have the opportunity buy property, I want to create a space for older dogs to die, loved and fed and cared for, because I love animals that I've not shared, but I've two Frenchies that are always with me running around. I love animals. And so my husband's like, you're gonna cry over every dog that you lose. I'm like, I don't care. That's that's a weird dream that I just have this idea of. I would love to be able to do that someday. And so I think if a dream doesn't necessarily have a money, $1 value, attached, or it's like, like you said, How many people can I influence? I love that too, but I think it's okay to have dreams that are some people look at as silly, like, why would you want to do that? But it's been on my heart for a really long time, and so don't be afraid of a silly dream ever.

David Bush  1:13:39  
FFD Friday for dogs,

Jenelle Friday  1:13:44  
I'm stealing it. Man stealing. Okay, so let's talk about, well, let me ask you a question for everybody in the chat, right? What do you think your biggest leadership focus for 2026 needs to be? Is it hiring? Is it training, or is it culture? And if you're a one man show, you can just put one, because it's all about you right now, and that's where your focus needs to be, and that's okay. Okay, so let's talk about an operating system. So David, why is having an operating system so important for scaling a business beyond just the owner?

David Bush  1:14:19  
Well, there's never going to be an opportunity for you to get out from underneath something and have have things happen consistently, unless you have the ability to hand it off to somebody else. And so beginning to write down simple things, like, you know, having a raving fan customer service checklist, and that could be a very simple thing that you start off with, like, if you start off with from the point of conversation to the point of them becoming a raving fan client, what needs to happen in that time frame before you could say that that person is a raving fan client. Like just having that process laid out so that people actually. Usually could see it and go, Oh, I see your system. I see your process, understanding job descriptions. I mean, nowadays it's so simple for you to use AI and to draw out some of these things. You know, let me just throw it out there and just show you one of the things that I'm learning. I'm even learning things that I never even knew where possible. So one of the things I did recently was I said, I'm hiring a virtual sorry assistant.

Speaker 2  1:15:36  
Help me create an SOP for the top 10 functions, I could delegate to a virtual assistant.

David Bush  1:15:55  
So if you think it's hard to create an operational system. It's not so by starting off with certain things like LinkedIn, inbox management and follow up support, hello, like calendar, email and scheduling management, lead list sourcing. Again, there's I heard somebody say one time is that if something takes more steps, every additional step that you add to it adds a degree of complexity. So don't have 1000 steps to complete a process. I don't know if you've ever gone to like an instruction manual, but it's like step 35 and you're like, Oh my goodness. So keep the steps simple, train people on the on the steps, and then you can begin to hand it off and recording a short video on how they can do it. But again, in less than 30 seconds, I came up with a operating system on the 10 things that are the most important things based upon what chat GPT knows about me, it created a list of 10 things. So start with a if you have a Google Drive, or if you have a cloud drive, that you can save items to go create a folder and identify a few different documents that are you can have one individual document, and you could just identify what are the top 10 things that I would like to standardize and organize so that I can end up delegating it so I don't have to keep doing this. And as Jeff said, Janelle asked the question, you know, what if I'm not looking at scaling a business beyond myself? Well, at some point, you're either going to put all of your relationships and all of your business in a boat, and you're going to sail it off without you, because you're going to die or you're going to retire, or you could put all the instructions on how to sail the boat, and you could say to somebody, Hey, I've been using this boat my entire life. I've got a complete Operations Manual of how you can travel the world. It's got all the resources, got all the information, it's got all the nets, it's got all the sales. Would you like to buy that boat? And that boat's going to be more valuable if it comes with an owner's manual, and if it comes with instructions. And if it comes with a crew that can run the boat, you don't have to go out there and build this huge business that's built on a whole bunch of other people. It could just be built on systems so that you can start taking off Fridays, like Jeff was talking about, you know, having a three egg beacon.

Jenelle Friday  1:18:37  
Yeah, I love that. Well, I think, I think you've all, you've identified three specific things that really should be included in a simple 2026 operating system. You want to talk us through those a little bit.

David Bush  1:18:48  
Say that one more time, I was reading Don's Don wrote in here my challenge for 26 it's always kind of fun when you have a mentor that shows up to your workshop. I like that. So my challenge for 26 is to close more deals from my two companies. That's fantastic. I love that. Dawn. Thanks for sharing that. So I'm sorry. Go ahead.

Jenelle Friday  1:19:08  
It's okay. So you you've identified three things that should be included in a very simple 2026, operating system. Let's talk through those three things.

David Bush  1:19:18  
Yeah, let's talk about an organizational chart first. So do you have an organizational chart? That would be the very first thing that I would start off with, because the organizational chart starts to structure, and you don't have to have a real complicated one. You saw the one that I put inside of the business builder work, business builder playbook. So go back to the org chart here and just identify and if your name is in all of those things, out of all of these roles and responsibilities, what would you like to hand off? First, well, marketing. How about sales staff? You say, Well, I don't have any sales people. Well, what if you could hire bdr.ai, to be your business development rep? Up, and it could actually do some of the marketing tasks that you've been used to doing, so that you could free up 10 to 100 hours a month on LinkedIn or email and whatever messaging that you're doing. Could that be a strategy that could be a delegation, or it could be hiring a virtual assistant, and that person may end up doing a couple of different roles. And if you could just identify what the roles are that you're currently fulfilling, then you could go in there and start thinking about what is a job description for this role. And again, going back into this is number two. So putting together your organizational chart would be first. Now go into the idea of creating a job description. So create a job description for my virtual assistant, and now you've just organized yourself in such a way where when you go out there and you're looking for a virtual assistant, you know what kind of person you're looking for, and you could go in there and add more questions and add more prompts, but if you've created a job description for each one of the positions in your future company, you would know who you're looking for. And there's we talked about this the other day, but you know, there's something to be said about the reticulator, activator. When you start putting the things into your head and you have the clarity as to what you're building and who you're looking for, somehow those people just start showing up. So it's not by accident that Janelle Friday is the Director of Client Support with bdr.ai I was looking for somebody like Janelle to do the role that she's doing, and in conversation over a podcast where she interviewed me for a podcast, and I said, You've got amazing experience doing something that I could really benefit from. I think that we'd make a great team. We even liked the same color, black in our clothes. I didn't call her name say, Did you wear your black shirt? But there are certain people that will become attracted to what it is that you're trying to accomplish, because you're sharing your vision with them, and you're clear on your vision, you're clear on your mission, you're clear on your plan, and you've got a role that fits what it is that they're looking for. And so again, taking the time to put in a few prompts, crafting the organizational chart, crafting your job description for that. And then now you're just identifying the qualities that you're looking for, for people to fill those roles. And again, if it's your very first person, you know you're only going to grow to the capacity of the 168 hours in a week that you have. You can use AI to be augmented intelligence, and you can augment the things that you can get done in a day. And you can continue to be a one person business, if you want. But what if you were to think about the ways that you could end up leveraging referral partners as a strategy like maybe one of the things inside your job description is I want to develop 10 strategic referral partners, or 10 channel partners that I could end up using or leveraging to open up doors of conversation, if I mean just going back there to Don's question or Don's statement about his challenge for 2026 is he wants to build more deals for his two companies. So could he identify 10 people that he's going to invest into, and those 10 people could be considered to be sales people. And if he was going to add value to those 10 people, and he was going to share his decades of wisdom and experience and expertise, would those people be willing to help him to find the right people in the sales roles that would hire him as a speaker or use his services for his other companies? That's the kind of stuff that those three things do so org chart, job description and then put together a profile of the person that you're looking to bring on to your team that's going to help you to elevate your opportunities.

Jenelle Friday  1:24:08  
I love that, and you're prompt about creating a job description, right? I like to tell my I like to tell AI act as a researcher and find job descriptions across LinkedIn, multiple industries that fit this job, that have this job title, because then you can say, I like this. I don't like this. I you know, aggregate this, and you can get right. So the more you the more you tell your AI, for those of you that that are just getting into prompt writing, the more you tell AI, who it is, how to behave, the better results that you're going to get, and you can keep building upon that. When it's got its researcher hat on, or it's got its marketing expert hat on, or it's got its sales guru hat on, right, you tell it which hat to wear, and the results are going to to differ and be much more specific and targeted. And I would love to know put in the chat, right? A. What operating areas do you need to focus on first right now, of those three, is it an org chart? Is it a job description, or is it an SOP? I'm curious, and I'm gonna take two minutes. Uh, David Dawn asked me we need to talk about the lion picture behind me. Um, so I'll make it really quick, I promise. Um, I own a consulting business on the side. It's called Lionheart consulting. And Lionheart literally means bold and courageous. That's how I choose to live my life. Every day I saw this painting even before I started, and it just was a powerful image of grace and peace and power and drive it just it felt like it represented who I am on the inside. And so I had to have it. And then when I was looking for a business name, I came across Lionheart, and this was right behind me, and I was like, well, that's kind of a DA moment, so that's where it came from. Dom, thanks so much for asking. I love that. Okay, so then let's come back and then talk David, talk a little bit about how, how can a business owner streamline their operations without over complicating the process? Because I think what you've identified right is, shall we like shiny objects? If we're visionaries and dreamers and company owners, we can get easily distracted with things that pull our attention. So how do we not over complicate the operational side of this with shiny objects that look like that might be helpful for us.

David Bush  1:26:24  
Think the best thing to do is just to establish your your rocks in your calendar, you know, EOS and the book traction talks a lot about, you know, your your rocks for your next 90 days. So just knowing what your priorities are, so that you can stay focused on being accountable to those things that are the most important, and then to delay the rest, there's going to be a lot of things that are going to get thrown at you. So the question is, is that, are you going to continue to be distracted and overwhelmed because there's always these new things, or are you going to stay laser focused? And so going back to those you know, simple things of organizational chart, job descriptions profiles to fit the job descriptions, and then what are the standard operating procedures for the core functions of your business that you can begin to document that wouldn't be hard for you to train somebody else on, and somebody else could maybe train themselves on it with a little help from video and from Ai. So those are the things that I think were are going to be the simplest. And I heard Brian Tracy say one time that simplicity lies just beyond complexity. And think about that for just a second. So think about this obstacle called complexity, and that over that hill, or over that speed bump is a better simple life. So simplicity lies just beyond complexity. So you're going to have to go through some level of complexity, such as, you know, where do I put all this stuff? And how do I do it? And, you know, I don't know where to start, and it didn't come out right the first time. There's going to be some of that stuff that is going to try to roadblock you and stop you. And if you don't have motivation and mindset and skill set and action to keep moving forward, you will end up stopping, and then you won't end up accomplishing what it is you want, which is the simplicity. So from an organizational start, our standpoint, this is a simple version. This is kind of what I did inside of, you know, Google Drive. So if you have a Gmail address, you have a Google Drive account, drive dot Google, and it'll open up. And you can create folders inside of the cloud. And then you can start identifying things inside of your operations plan that says, you know, what are the things that I need to organize? I need to put my accounting, my case studies, client or onboarding, presentations, client tracking. So again, just think about from a structural standpoint, what are the things that I need to put into a simple, organized structure so I can hand off to people, and that's an easy way to keep it simple. No extra

Jenelle Friday  1:28:59  
cost for that. Yeah. Well, I think that kind of leads us into our final topic before we wrap up today, which is right, our 90 day plan. And I really want to give you some some breadth width here to dig into this. Because I think when I, when I kind of go over my mind the last three days and everything that you've covered, I think there's so much to go. Oh, that was really important, but that was really important too, and I really liked how you're talking about that, and how do i right? So I think this is a really great way to bring all of this now together into a 90 day plan to give people, because I'm all about tactical application, right? You know I need to do I need you to tell me how to take what we've done and turn it into something that's going to move the needle for me. So let's talk about first, how does a 90 day plan help turn an annual strategy, which is all in the back of our minds of here's what I think 2026 should look like, can look like, hopefully will look like, into real execution. I'm driving forward to that business objective now.

David Bush  1:29:59  
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I love the visual, and I'll just show this quickly here. This is a I love the concept of Mount Everest because it's, you know, Mount Everest is 29,029 feet. It's a long ways up, and there's many people that have died on the journey trying to conquer Mount Everest. But if you think about your 90 day plan is kind of your own version of mountain climbing or Everest. So when you think about if this is where you are right now, and what you would like to accomplish is at the peak of that particular you can say that that's 90 days, or you could say this is a full year, or five years, whatever, but you're going to have some zig zagging. It's not going to be a straight line. And so if this is where you are today, where do you need to be at by the end of January? What would be a reasonable target that you could accomplish by the end of January? Think about that right now. What are two or three things that are SMART goals, things that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound or time sensitive. What's two or three things in order of priority that would take you from wherever you are today, based on what we've talked about, to wherever you want to be. Maybe it is to talk to bdr.ai about outsourcing your business development. Maybe it is about, you know, developing your job descriptions and building your organizational chart and starting to build out your SOPs. We talked about a lot of things, but we don't, we don't have to take those things in chronological order, there's things that are powerful right now that you may need to just jump on. And then what would be reasonable and doable in your mind, if you did all you can do, nothing more, nothing less. What would be something that you could accomplish by the end of February? And then if you were to think about the end of March, what would be something that maybe you couldn't accomplish in 30 or 60 days, but you could accomplish in 90 days if you just continue to spend a little bit of time and your calendar match the goal. Remember, when we go back into our calendar, the thing that's going to be a major indicating factor of whether or not we are where we want to be 90 days from now is how our calendar looked. Did we practice the habits of motivation? Did we practice the habits of a healthy mindset? Did we practice the habits of skills development? Did we improve our skills? Did we read anything, watch anything, listen to anything, journal anything? Did we talk to anybody and share our dream or share our our challenges with anybody and get their opinions on it? Because if we did, we should see reasonable progress.

Jenelle Friday  1:32:50  
Well, I think hopefully, for those of you who have attended over the last couple days, you've written down of the questions we've asked, that's your priority, that's your focus. That's where I'm starting. That's where I'm moving towards, right? So if you've if you've proactively been taking notes and writing down what is top of mind or top of priority list for you through the last couple of days, you should have a really good idea of where to focus your time and energy and create that 90 day plan. So let's talk about the tactical pieces. David, what should someone include in their plan to create momentum quickly.

David Bush  1:33:25  
Well, go back to the simplicity of the motivation piece. You're only going to do the things that you're motivated to do. So what's the benefit of doing the things that you are telling yourself, yeah, this is a good thing to do. What's the benefit of doing it? If you don't have a good reason of why to do it? You know they say, the bigger the why, the harder the try. So do you have clarity on the reasons of why it would be beneficial to do something? And when you look at your calendar right now, what does it look like for the next 30 days? Is there anything that I could see? There's this great concept of, if you use the word treasure, if you break down the word treasure into an acronym, it stands for time. If I was to go in there right now, and I can look at your time, could I convict you of being somebody that was committed to doing what it is that you say you want to do in the next 90 days? The next one is resources. Do you have money set aside or time? Energy resources would be all included in that that you're going to invest into the thing that you say that you want to do, and if I don't see it in the form of your checkbook, if I don't see your debit card investing into the thing that you said that you wanted to do, then you really don't treasure it. You don't value it, right? The next thing would be, is eager? What are you the most eager to accomplish? Do you have a compulsion to get this done, or is it just a whimsical idea that you thought of when we had this this session? Are you able to do it? Now some of these, some of these things, you may have to go in and delete things out of your calendar. You may have to delay things, you may have to delegate some things before you could take on this new responsibility. So it, are you currently able to do it? And then the S is, do you have the space to do it? Give the margin in your calendar? Do you have the resources inside your workspace? Do you have the space to bring on another staff member? I mean, there's obviously some space constraints that you have as a organization. You may have to go out there and expand before you can accomplish and add a new thing to your service type or your products, but that could be a thing to look at utterances. So the word utterances is, how much are you going to talk about this in the next 30 to 90 days? Who Could you share this with that would increase your accountability to do it? Don put it out there and he put it right into the chat. Could you show up at our weekly Power Hour on Tuesdays for all of our BDR clients at one o'clock central time. And could you surround yourself with people that are committed to doing something over the next 90 days? That could be a very simple commitment that you decide to do if you decide to partner with us as a client, some of you are already a client. So utterances is a big part. The more you're talking about something, and the more you say it out loud, the more convicted you become to do it. That's why, you know you hear a lot of sports people that are talking to themselves. They're actually verbally speaking out loud what it is that they want their mind to think, because they know if they say it out loud, their mind gets a chance to hear it. That's another thing about journaling. So if you're actually in a position where you're journaling every day, you can move yourself into a state of mind that you wouldn't be in if you weren't writing things down. Let me, let me before

Jenelle Friday  1:36:51  
you move on from that. I just want to, I want to drop some neuroscience back to compound on that. So actually, because I'm a student neuroscience, all of your senses have a have a measured weight, what you see, what you say, what you smell, what you hear, what you touch, what you taste, your brain measures kind of like a weighted balance of Well, I do, do I give this more attention? Do I give this more attention the things you say, your brain gives more weight to than any other sense in your body. That's one. The second one is when you speak, your brain is creating a new neural pathway. Your brain likes habits. So that's why, when we talk about that's when people talk about verbal affirmations. It's not just a feel good exercise. You are literally changing the chemistry in your brain, the gray matter that makes up your mindset, imposter syndrome, your internal voice, that inner critic, that's the gray matter in your brain, and you actually are in control of that element of your brain by the words you say out loud. So there you go. You know,

David Bush  1:37:53  
I kind of had a little bit of a challenge just, you know, with the concept of affirmations. I don't know why, but somewhere in my journey, I kind of built a negative belief that it was a little bit kind of Woo, woo, and I didn't really like the idea. And then I heard somebody say that an affirmation is just telling yourself the truth in advance. Yes, I love I thought that's a and I could buy into that. I couldn't really buy into that, you know, concept of just speaking things out loud. For some reason I attached it to the wrong thinking, weird.

Jenelle Friday  1:38:24  
David, it's weird to say because I do it in front it's weird to stand in front of the mirror and look at myself and go, I am a beautiful woman. I know that's weird. It's weird to say, but it's like, again, it comes from a place of deep truth, that I know that I am because of a husband that reinforces me every day, right? I believe that I am because I've made the decision that I am, but it didn't start that way. It started with me standing for the mirror going, Yeah, I'm beautiful, whatever like, it's weird to say. So if it feels weird to you, it is weird at the beginning, but I promise that the science behind what David's talking about is real, and you can look it up, right? But this is one of those, again, it's another micro habit, right? I love David that you start your day with reading. I love that we start our day with music and positive affirmations. Because, again, you wake up and you start your day that way. And I tell clients on the side, through Lion Heart, end your day that as well. Because you may have things that happen throughout your day that spin you off course, that discourage you, that make you feel bad about yourself. Maybe imposter syndrome is louder today than it was yesterday. So close your day with the same type of micro habits, which are right? Great music. I'm a big music person. Verbal affirmations to reaffirm your truth that are always true no matter what. Reading a book, putting good in, what's the saying? Put good in, get good out, right? So those micro habits are so critical if you are an individual who's struggling with overwhelm, burnout, fear, imposter syndrome, questioning your abilities, these tiny micro habits, while they seem silly, are scientifically proven to make immeasurable changes in the way your mind processes. Is internal thoughts and external information.

David Bush  1:40:02  
So yeah, so if your if your mind has built some wrong thinking ruts, start Uttering some things out loud to start building some new truth trenches, and start building those neural pathways that are going to be built towards success into significance, rather than to lacking in failure and things of that nature. So we talked about time, we talked about resources, we talked about eagerness, we talked about abilities, we talked about space, we talked about utterances. The next thing would be recreation. So what are the things that you could be doing to re energize yourself so that you have the energy to go do the things that are going to require effort and sacrifice. And, you know, business development is often one of them that requires energy and energy drinks, coffee and all those things are not going to be the things that are going to be the ultimate indicator of energy. It's oftentimes going to be plugging into a power source, right? You know, having a reminder for your own benefit of the reasons of why you're doing it, developing that skill power to be consistent at it, having the thrill power of reminding yourself of actually seeing yourself enjoying the benefits of your labor, and then obviously tapping into a higher power. You know my personal story, I would be lying to you if I don't, if I wouldn't tell you the whole story, which is that I rely on a higher power to do some of the extraordinary things that I've been able to do. It's not been by myself. I couldn't do it all on my own, and everybody has their own journey with that. But tap into that higher power and know that there's an energy source that is far beyond you that can actually give you the energy to do the things that are only a god sized dream could accomplish. And so the last one is energy. Tap into your energy source. What is the energy source for you? Where are you going to get energized that's going to give you the dopamine, serotonin, and all those good little chemicals that are inside your brain to keep you excited to do the thing and not stop until it's accomplished. I love that,

Jenelle Friday  1:42:09  
and I think, you know, you talk about dopamine start tongue, we're going back to the science of that, right? But, but your brain is habitual also in that, the way I've been telling my brain to be happy old habits or food, right? So my brain knows that I can go get a quick fix of dopamine or serotonin through eating something, something that I like, and I've conditioned my brain that way. So it takes physical effort to say no in those moments and not reward that action, but find something that's a healthy replacement for that, because the brain still needs those chemicals too. So it's like identifying things that you know are not good. Maybe it's binge watching TV, it gives you those flood of hormones, but it may not be really good for you in the long run. So I think this is also a really great challenge for you, if you're on this call today and you know that you have habits that are feeding you happy feelings, but it's not really the best use of your time. It's not healthy for you. Now is the time. I hate New Year's resolutions, but Right? We're talking about a business plan and how you spend your personal time, the people that you spend your time with, how you give of yourself and how you receive love. Five Love Languages, saying, kind of, how are you energized? What? What gets you out of bed? What gets you excited? What gets your heart pumping? What makes you feel like a million bucks when you're done with it? Those are the things that that feed our souls, that eventually reach the mindset, that create habits that lead to the success that David's talking about. So, David, what do you think the key is to staying focused on the right priorities? Over the next 90 days,

David Bush  1:43:49  
I've heard people say that having a visual cue is a really, is a really cool aspect of staying focused. And so, you know, some people will like wear a charm on their arm. Or, you know, for me personally, I can tell you that I use a let me see if I can show you on my screen. So I created a vision board for my screen saver. So it's just a visual reminder of the things that I want to be do and have and visualization. So having a visual cue that kind of trips the trigger motivation, right, having the desire or the reasons of why you want to do this stuff, because, if it's just a visual cue, and it's not tied to a why statement, which why stands for what heals you. And so I created this vision statement, or this vision vision board, because it had a great purpose and meaning behind it. And then the actual, the action is going to be, the thing that keeps you focused is being committed to being. Consistent, showing up every day. How are you going to become focused on it? You're going to commit to being focused on it, and you can use visual cues to help that. But the end of the day, it rises and falls on your commitment and your ability to be persistent with it. So I have to have my phone with me. It is my business. It is my lifeline. It's my relationships. It's I'm not addicted to it, but it is something that is a very valuable tool to me. So I put my motivation in a place that is easily seen and easily found. My I have my phone on a lock screen, so every time I'm inactive for a certain amount of seconds, it trips the trigger and goes to the lock screen. So what happens? I have to force myself to look at the vision board. Other people will put a little sticky note on their rear view mirror. Some people will put a little sticky note on or in the refrigerator. So when people were trying to get healthier, they put a little acronym that could be the word, why, what heals you. And you remind yourself, the food is not going to heal me. That's a temporary self medication. What heals me is. And then you go back to your why statement could be on your bathroom mirror. It could be, you know, the idea of, I'm a big guy. I'm a streaker. I like to have streaks. I like to have a certain number of themes where I do something. Don't get your mind off to the side. No, I know. I love I'm a speaker. I love to create streaks. And there's something about creating a streak. And so, you know, it may get into the habit of doing something that's very small, but you do it consistently for seven days and 14 days, or 21 days, you start to build this motivation, and there becomes this thrill, power of creating this streak. So what is the thing that you could do consistently for the next 20 days of 2025 that would carry you all the way through the end of the year? And I know a lot of people are saying, hey, you know what? I'm going to really hit this hard come 2026 I mean, you know, Monday, January 5, it is going to be on like Donkey Kong. Well, let me just tell you a little secret. Is that as far as I know, you don't know what's going to happen in the next 20 days, you could be delivered a tremendous amount of bad news. You could be tremendously discouraged, depressed, disappointed. There could be a lot of things you could win. You could win the lottery. There's a lot of things that could happen. You're not a fortune teller, as far as I know, and so think about what is it that I could do today? Because if the sooner that you take action on your motive, the sooner that your motivation changes. So how do you get how do you increase focus? You don't delay. You don't push it out there into, you know, someday aisle, you actually put it into your calendar today. You know, many people say, you know, what's the best day to make a change in your life? Any day that ends. And why? Because, if you have that as being today, or some people say, Well, yesterday ends and why? No, it's Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. So think about what could you do today that would be the minimal viable commitment that you could actually commit to, to start habit stacking and start moving you forward and developing your overall master strategic

Jenelle Friday  1:48:25  
plan, I love that. Well, we're gonna, we're gonna work into wrapping up here, I would love to know if you're on online and you've been with us, be brave if you've not responded yet, and tell us. Tell David and I, after these couple of days, what do you consider to be your number one priority after you get off the call today? Where are you focused on? Right? I'm also going to ask if anybody has any questions, because we do have some time here for David to be able to answer specific questions if it has to do with the the workbook that he's given you, the Excel, the the Google Sheet that he's given you, or anything he's covered in the last three days. If you have any questions, now is the time to ask. And then I also just want to give David, obviously, right? We're here to represent vdr.ai so let's just give a little bit of idea of how can vdr.ai support the execution of everything that you've covered over the last couple of days?

David Bush  1:49:18  
Yeah, well, obviously, there's a tremendous amount of tools that you can go out there and take a look at online. I'll just show you a couple of quick things here. All of the resources are going to be here till the end of the month. So if you want to take advantage of the online tools, you can do that, we'll make them available to all of our clients ongoing. But if you'd like to create

Jenelle Friday  1:49:39  
any tools, David, the I slacked you the AI directive prompt. I guess people aren't able to download it from the chat. Would you add it to the list of resources?

David Bush  1:49:50  
Oh, you're saying the documented.

Jenelle Friday  1:49:52  
SFD, yeah, I slagged it to you so you can add it.

David Bush  1:49:55  
Okay. So, yeah, we'll put that not right down here with the other resources. I put the links to. Of different resources that we talked about yesterday. And then we've got the all the bonus resources here, but you can go into our solutions, and you could just go to all the solutions. You can watch this short little video on what we do. But you know, if you're looking for data, if you want to find a better quality list of people that match your target audience, we can help you with that. We do include 1000 records of digital premium records of your target market with each one of our digital outreach subscriptions. We've got our pipeline pipeline partner option, which is where we provide you with more concierge services. It's called done with you. It's not done for you, but we do take off some of the load by offering you virtual support. And then we offer you personal one on one support, where we review your campaigns, we talk you through challenges. If you're more of a person that says, hey, you know what? I think I can do this stuff. I can pretty much handle things on my own. I don't need a lot of hand holding. If you can just get me started, we'll give you four weeks of onboarding, and then after that, you use our virtual support. So for less than, you know, the cost of a fraction of an assistant, we call this a fractional virtual assistant, you could have digital outreach automation hitting on your target market. And then if you want outbound dialing, we offer that service as well. We'll give you the dialer if you want to make the outbound dials, or we can actually outbound dial on your behalf. And then we offer a couple other options as well if you'd like to take advantage of those. You know, our goal today is to serve and we want to support all of you in hopes that we can win you over for an opportunity to compete for your business when you're ready for more business development resources and Representative definitely.

Jenelle Friday  1:51:45  
I appreciate that. Well I put in the chat. We've had such great interaction. So thank you to those of you who were bold and brave, right, bold and courageous to submit your thoughts, ask questions, give feedback. We're really grateful. We appreciate the attention. We appreciate the support so much. And David, this has been a real pleasure just to give you the opportunity to share your wealth and wisdom and show people why I was so excited to come and work with you, because this is the kind of leadership we need more of. I think we need more people who are willing to openly share and give back to their community without requiring $1 fee to get there, and your desire to empower your community through your experiences, through your trial and errors and your successes, is such a profound thing to have as a leader. So I just want to personally thank you for what you're doing and continue to do for our community, and for taking the time out of your busy schedule six hours this week to give back to our community. So thank you for for the time.

David Bush  1:52:45  
Yeah, you bet. And thanks for being a great moderator. And if we can serve and support you all in any way, we're willing to give more time and energy. And if what we do@bdr.ai is not a great fit for you, we'd love the introduction to somebody that you know, like and trust, that could benefit from the support we offer. And if you want to talk more about your personal plan for 2026 reach out to us@bdr.ai and schedule a time, and we'll we'll definitely give you more resources and tools to help you to reach your goals in 2026 thanks for tuning in to the Business Builders playbook. If this episode gave you some plays that you can start running in your business today, hit subscribe and share with another revenue leader who's tired of the pipeline grind building Predictable Revenue isn't something you figure out alone. Whether you're looking to automate your prospecting with bdr.ai, or you just want to talk through the growth challenges you're facing, reach out. We help business leaders just like you to build systems that actually scale. And if you're ready to stop being your company's Highest Paid Prospector, let's have a conversation. Reach out to us@bdr.ai until next time, let's keep building You. You.