Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to Create wealth through Franchising. I'm your host, Kim Daly.
Whether you're a CEO, a military vet, a real estate investor, or simply in career transition and ready to take ownership of your future, with each episode, you're gonna learn valuable insights and hear inspiring stories from within the franchise industry.
On that note, my guest stories are their own. And as a franchise consultant, I do not make personal brand endorsements or earnings claims, but I do educate, motivate, and inspire dreams.
Now onto the show.
[00:00:44] Speaker B: Welcome back to Create wealth through Franchising podcast and Kim Daily tv. A special guest in my studio today, all the way from America's 51st state. Just kidding, Phil. Welcome to the studio of Kim Daily tv. My new friend, Phil Jilks from focal point coaching.
[00:01:01] Speaker C: Hey. I'm honored to be here on your show today. I've heard a lot of wonderful things about what you're up to and how you're making an impact in the world with what you do.
[00:01:11] Speaker B: That's awesome. Thank you so much. And I'm just kidding, guys and gals. He's from Canada. You get the joke. It's 2025. So Phil is going to start us off today by telling us his own life transformation story. What was happening in his life when he answered the call to franchising and became a focal point franchisee? So, Phil, take us back a few years and tell us how you ended up a franchisee.
[00:01:37] Speaker C: That's a really great question. I was an independent business owner. I was a sales agent for a software company in Calgary, and we were in a patch, funny enough, so it was a niche product for that. I worked with them for 10 years, helped them get the prominent position, preeminent position, vendor of choice in their niche. But we had a falling out. And in that falling out, I realized that the core values between him and I were totally different. So I ended up firing a client. And then I thought, oh, my gosh, I got all this time. I need to earn some money. What else could I do? So I put my resume out there and I got contacted by a franchise. What? There's business coaching. And then I started looking at what the other opportunities were. And then I thought, oh, whose focal point? Brian Tracy. I met Brian Tracy back in the 80s. I was a student of his Phoenix seminar. I met Steve Thompson and his partner at the time. We had a chin waggle, and as they say, the rest was history. One of the things I threw at them is I'm an immigrant to Canada, and at the point in time, my passport had expired they changed the forms and I didn't think I had all the documents to renew it properly. So I told Steven, I said, steve, I'm not trainable. He goes, what? You're not trainable? I said, well, I can't go to Nevada. He says, it's funny you should say that. We were thinking about having a training course in Canada. So here I am, out of necessity to do something. And one of the things that cranks me up is to help people have light bulb moments that it's when they see that they can grow into their potential. That's why I love doing what I'm doing in terms of coaching. That's how I got here. And I've been with focal point for 17 years.
[00:03:15] Speaker B: Oh wow, that's a really long time. I love hearing that. Oh my gosh. Like that's amazing, Phil. So to clarify, so you were kind of self employed, you were an independent contractor to a company. So you were sort of always in control of driving your own revenue and kind of paving your own way in.
[00:03:35] Speaker C: Life for the most part. If we go way back when I was in grade four, I grew up in a family of five, four other siblings, two parents came to Canada from another country, England. And when I asked for money, my parents are blue collar workers and they work two, sometimes three jobs to look after us. So when I said, hey, can I have some money to buy? I don't even know what I wanted to buy. It's probably a chocolate bar, candy bar. I don't remember that part. But I do remember the part when they said no. And you hear all those cliches, what do you think we are made of money? Do you think money grows on a tree? All those kind of things. So I went away and not knowing at the time what I had done until later on in life. If you know what you want, why you want it, you can find a way. So I really wanted whatever it was I really wanted. And again, I think it was chocolate or something. Anyway, I said, can I borrow the lawnmower? I went knocking on doors and cutting grass. So I had a landscaping business when I was in grade four. So it all started from there. And I've been on this journey over the years of selling technology, homes, automobiles, houses, new builds and training. I was with two training companies, Dale Carnegie here in our local marketplace, and another based on cognitive behavior psychology out of Seattle. I became a facilitator, trainer and salesperson for all of those organizations. So all of those things connected the dots for me. As Steve Jobs says, You can't connect the doc looking forward, but you can certainly do it looking backwards. So looking backwards. I've always had a sales because selling is about serving, it's not about pitching. Nobody likes to be sold anything, but we all love to buy. So I help my clients get into a position where they're not pitching, they're actually problem solving solution provider experts. I help leaders and the salespeople get their ideas across without being sleazily and enjoy the process to be solution providers.
[00:05:25] Speaker B: Yeah, you know what? So I've been a franchise consultant now for 22 years. And the number one thing people always say to me is I don't want to sell anything. And even if they've been in a sales career and I'm like, why? I think part of it is they feel pressure. Right. Which we can relieve when you change your perception of what you're doing. But also people don't want to be have to be pushy. But I'm like, if owning a business is about finding customers and finding customers is about convincing people to buy your product or service, aren't you always selling? So might it behoove you, if you're going to be a business owner, to actually want to learn to love to sell people and you're not selling anybody when you do it correctly. So I love that setup. And that's going to take us right over into the business coach side of this conversation. So Phil and I agreed. We both love talking about mindset. I am nothing if I am not a mindset coach, and so is Coach Phil. So I'm going to ask you a question, Coach Phil. And I want to kind of see where the conversation goes. So the question is, I bought a franchise. I have all the intellectual property. I have the strategy, I have the branding. But why am I still struggling to be successful?
[00:06:42] Speaker C: Well, I'm going to be totally authentic. Seventeen years ago, when I started this process, I got my first two clients enrolled within a couple of months. And then I was stale, nothing for almost a year. I could sustain myself for with existing clients, but I was struggling to get some new ones. And what I realized was what? I stopped following the systems. The franchises are there because they've systematized the process. And if you follow the process, you're going to have more success than if you try to be a rebel and do it on your own. Right.
[00:07:14] Speaker B: What were you not doing back then?
[00:07:16] Speaker C: In 17 years, we had a mantra was 8, 5, 20, 40. So 8 was going out and having an introductory conversation and the next was having the entrepreneurial call. Like you go and just have a 20 minute conversation, talk about without selling, but promoting the ideas and soft closing. And say, when we get together, I can introduce you to a concept that'll blow your eyes wide open in terms of the three eyes of the Entrepreneur, based on a book written by Mr. Gerber. And there's some really cool things in there. So getting them to get to the next step, which would be to the Strategic Business Review. And then once you get to Strategic Business Review, you're actually getting educated as to where they're at, where they want to get to. And then you can introduce solutions for them and paint them a picture of where they could be if they did all the things we talked about. I wasn't doing that the sales process. I was doing it my own way and I struggled. And what got in the way was that Brian Tracy, who is a big player in the Focal Point family, Focal Point was originally his and his former partner Cam Frazier. And I was at a conference in San Diego a bunch of years ago. Not Steve did he pick on, but his partner at the time, he says, dom, you're going to let the 6 to 8 inches between your ears get in your way. Well, I did. So once I get out of my own way and trust the system and implement it on a consistent basis, then like I said, I've been here 17 years.
[00:08:39] Speaker B: Really good words. I heard trust, I heard consistency, right? Follow the system. I think a lot of people who own a franchise want to follow the system. They may feel like they are following the system. So sometimes you have to go back and almost do a system review, right? To really figure out, like, be honest with yourself and look in the mirror and say, what am I not doing? If I was successful and I'm not successful, what have I stopped doing? It's so funny how when we do something over and over and over and it's working, we start cutting corners. Why do we do that? And then we end up with less results and then we blame other people instead of ourselves. Like that's the human condition, but it's totally a franchisee condition. Trust me, I've sat here for 22 years and heard all the stories. I love that. Okay, so now you start following the system. So back to my question. Let's get deeper. I bought this franchise, I'm trying to follow the system, but I'm still not successful.
[00:09:32] Speaker C: If you're still not successful, if you're brutally honest with yourself, if you take the word responsible and hyphenate it, response Able. You're not taking 100% responsibility. So the idea of the hyphenating is to respond with ability. So take your ability and respond to it. Don't just think about. Don't become a victim because it's not working the way you thought it was. Brutally honest. Are you doing the things right? How effective are you in the initial contact? Are you telling which is not selling, or are you asking questions? Being a tourist, looking for directions, being curious as to what's going on? Not everybody we talk to at the moment is a viable prospect. They don't own a business or they're happy. There's no pain points. There's nothing they're aspiring to do. They're not going to jump ship and hire a coach. Generally speaking, there has to be a reason for investing time, energy and finances. Work with a coach. Now, those that do invest with a coach end up, you know, for every dollar you invest, you'll get five to seven back. But they don't know that, right? Their skepticism, that's totally okay. Skepticism is good. Cynicism is bad. Can't help anybody who's cynical.
[00:10:42] Speaker B: Let's go to this place. So what I see happen is someone comes to me and says, I'm ready to change my life. Help me find the right franchise, okay? And I look at the franchise as the vehicle, right? It's not the end all be all. It's just the vehicle that's driving our life personally, professionally, and financially to a new place. So I always begin with the end in mind, and I begin with a Goals and Dreams worksheet. So before we talk about what kind of franchise you think you want to own, I want to know, where do you want to go? Who do you want to become? Does this future reality that you're aspiring to get to look like with real clarity? So we build this beautiful picture filled, then I come back with three, four, five options, and we get it down to one. And then they finally jump off the edge of the diving board and jump into the pool and say yes to their franchise. And then they call me about six months, nine months year, 18 months in, and they're frustrated, they're tired, and they're broke. So I say to them, okay, so remind me, what was the vision that you were trying to build? They don't have any goals and dreams anymore, Phil. So what happens? This is what you started to say before we were recording that we buy strategy, but that's not what fuels our growth. Correct. It's the mindset. So you can look at all these people who go to Harvard, they have MBAs. Results don't flow because you have a degree next to your name. Where do results come from? Who we believe we are, what we constantly think about. And what do most business owners do in their mindset? Talk about what they're not getting, what they thought they were owed, why it's.
[00:12:30] Speaker C: Not working in the positive psychology world, they talk about, actually, Dr. Shawn Achor talks about where 75% of the times the thing we think about, even yourself, myself, is negative. We react to it. It's the amygdala that kicks in and says, trying to protect us, as one of my mentors taught me, was we stay stuck in our isness. How we perceive ourselves to be, what we perceive reality is, is not necessarily the truth. It's our truth. So we buy into it. So as soon as we step out of our comfort zone into something newer and bigger, brighter, if we don't have a compelling reason to go forward, like the vision you talked about earlier, the one way I talk about this as an example, imagine you're going fishing and you've got a little fishing boat and you've got a automatic pilot on it, and you've got the automatic pilot on a set, on a course, and you're standing in the boat safely casting out and reeling in and casting out and catching nothing. So you take the steering wheel to change course and you're still fishing. But you haven't reset the automatic pilot. So next thing you know what happens and you're fishing and you're not really paying attention to it. You eventually come back to where you started. Our automatic mechanism to stay where we is in our isness, how we perceive ourselves to be. If that's stronger than where we want to get to, then we'll stay stuck where we are. But it does take concentrated effort to go where we want to go. What I found though, is if we do it on a want to choose to love it basis, it's easier. So the only discipline we need to do is to decide where you want to go, have a couple or dozen affirmations as to explaining who you want to grow into, not where you are at. So do that in the morning, do that in the evening, and control yourself, talk in the middle. If you do that, that's about the only discipline you need to move to where it is you want to go. The key is where you want to go, and then keep the vision of that and breathe it, drink it, share your story with people who support you and set course to it take action and get the feedback and adjust to get there. So I'm actually doing a Talk, just a 10 minute one on that very topic, to a group of entrepreneurs, leaders. If you know where you want to go and why you want to go there, stifle a how and take action. You'll get intuitive hunches and feedback that'll help you in the course correction if necessary, or it will validate you're on the right course.
[00:14:45] Speaker A: Hey, Daily Coach fans, if you're ready to begin your own journey to find the perfect franchise, please email me right now at InquireimDaily TV. My services are totally free for you. That's InquireimDaily TV. Now back to the show.
[00:15:07] Speaker B: It's amazing. It's also spot on. Basically, we're talking about paradigms. In my coaching academy, we talk from Maxwell Maltz's book Psycho Cybernetics, which talks about this set point that you speak of. So it's beautiful. I love and agree with all of that. If you don't follow me long enough to even know what I'm talking about, you can reach out to me offline and we can have that conversation. You also can reach out to Coach Phil too. It's so spot on and what a great little analogy with the boat. So going back to the question, most franchisees I believe out there who are frustrated and tired and hopefully not broke, but maybe feeling like they're on their way to being broke, I think one of the biggest things that happens is they get all dialed into strategy after training and they lose sight of their true power, which is their goals. You are a magnet to what you are trying to build, but you have to know what you're trying to build. And that's what you were saying at the end, right? That once you let go of the how and you quoted Steve Jobs saying, you know, you can never know the how looking forward. You can only know the how looking back. And so I think most people in a franchise, by the nature of buying an established business, Phil, they buy into the idea consciously and mostly unconsciously, that I'm going to put in my money, I'm going to do this and I'm going to get that. And that's the earnings claim. And that's fundamentally flawed all over the place, right? Because they have to grow into the owner who can serve that customer, who can use the systems and think for themselves, but stay focused on their goals, not dialed into too much of the how to create those outcomes.
[00:16:59] Speaker C: The strategies are great and they're Part of the puzzle, the handful of coaches I get to work with in the franchise I'm in. One of the things we have, I use is there's a five stages that we assess and there's no right or wrong. It's where they're feeling they are. And the first column is, how do you feel about coaching yourself? And the opportunity, the professional service. If it's not a 10 plus that, they're in trouble in my book. Because what's going to happen is people I've heard about coaching, it doesn't work. One of my trainers along the way said, if you don't have that kind of conviction and believability in what you offer and the value it brings and the impact it can have on people's lives, you're going to get outsold by the person who throws you. The objection going, yeah, you're right, it's not very good. You may not say that.
[00:17:44] Speaker B: Do you know why that is?
[00:17:45] Speaker C: Why is that?
[00:17:47] Speaker B: Because we don't hear with our ears, we hear with our feelings. So when thoughts and words come out of our mouth, it's a vibration. And the vibration reflects who I believe I am and how much I believe in what I'm saying. So that's why people don't like salespeople. Because most salespeople come from this scarcity, lack limitation. I need to sell you a car today feeling to make my quota. And then we feel that as the customer and we associate that feeling with being a salesperson. It's all energy.
[00:18:24] Speaker C: That's what professional sellers do. They ask questions, seek to understand. Brian Tracy says, be a doctor of sales. A professional doctor asks a lot of questions before they amputate the wrong thing. A model that I was introduced to is we actually think in three dimensions. We first get a thought or an idea, which then we get a bit of a picture. Might be blurry, might be totally clear, doesn't matter. But you get a picture and then that picture evokes an emotion. The feeling is actually the fuel in our fuel tanks to drive us. So we get the feeling and the emotions. We go back, we get another thought, more thought, and we move forward to another picture and the picture becomes clearer, vibrant, maybe it turns into a movie the more we do this and we get more emotions, and then what happens is that cycles around and around and around with our thoughts and out the other end comes the end result we're looking for. That's known as the self talk cycle.
[00:19:15] Speaker B: When you're asking the very question, why am I not successful? What do you think their self talk is? It's so perfect.
[00:19:23] Speaker C: It is absolutely. It's a really simple model, but it's really, really powerful. So the guy that taught me that was Lou Tice. I'm going to give him kudos. He was a high school football coach and not a very good one when he first started out in this. And he started a company called the Pacific Institute and they had a huge impact in your military, in the ncaa, in Canada and helped made me a better coach, hockey coach, sales coach, business coach, as well as helped the Irish stop killing each other. He helped the Bulgarians go from communism to capitalism to freedom society. He helped with the apartheid. He's no longer with us, but he is in with the people who've gone through his program like myself. He's had more impact on more people with being under the radar. He was never in your face, rah, rah, rah. He was just that calm, cool, collective guy. So he took complicated psychological babble like systematic desensitization to plain English flickback. So it's easy for me to help my clients, whether they be coaches or business owners, athletes or leaders. It's where they want to get to with more of an ease and flow approach. Not to say we don't have potholes. And as we stretch ourselves into something unknown, the extraordinary. I help people take the extraordinary and turn it into their ordinary, their new normal. That's why I love doing what I'm doing, because of people I've studied along the way. I'm not degreed, but I'm working on a degree. It's called the Master's of street smart. And I'll never get the document that says I've done it because it's always evolving.
[00:20:50] Speaker B: Listen, when you do what we do for as long as we do and it makes everybody laugh. I was just presenting companies to a beautiful couple today in Jacksonville, Florida and I was looking at them and I'm like, you know, some people have accused me of being a marriage counselor. And they both laughed hysterically. Because even as I was saying like, this is what I heard you say together and separately they were laughing. They were like, wow, you were really listening. Well, and I'm like, well, I've done what I do for a long time. So I think that we pick up these honorary degrees along the way, become an expert, you know, meaning you put more than 10,000 hours into your craft. We'll never have degrees on the wall for, but we have it in our hearts and in our mind which is more important Coach Bell? Correct. It doesn't come from a degree on the wall. It comes from who I really am and what I really know.
[00:21:33] Speaker C: I was at a three day workshop called JVology and she's a self made millionaire, worked with Bob Proctor. So a paradigm shifter. And when they had her come into the room, we were in a hotel, four or five hundred people, and had us all stand. And as she's coming in, a lot of energy and a lot of noise and she gets on the stage and we started to sit down. No, no, stay standing because I'm going to ask you a few questions and then you can start sitting down. So if you're here and you have a degree and please stay standing. If you don't have a degree, sit down. And then some people sat down, some people stood up. State stood up. She asked the next question. So how many of you that are standing up with a degree are using your degree in the business you're in? If you are, please stay standing. The rest you sit down. So a majority sat down. There was a handful that stood up. And the point she was getting at was the whole system is messed up because you get into debt, go after something you think you want to do, turns out that's not what you want to do, you end up not doing that. Not to say that the university level of education is a bad thing. It's not a bad thing, it's just it's not necessarily the best way. So what if you were to reverse engineer that and go and do information interviewing to place businesses, industries, people who are working in that space and find out if you really like it and then if you do like it, then go find the right school for you so that you're using your passion, your energy and getting educated to support that in a place you want to get. I heard that from another fellow who said the same thing. Not to eat up the whole time. It's just the things we think about and move towards. Sometimes we're going there because it's comfortable, sometimes we're going there because a wiser advisor, older person could be your sister, brother, who's a couple of years older and you believe them and you tap into that. You don't go and explore and be a detective to find out what's really important to you. And when we do that, life is easier. So why do I do coaching? For exactly that reason is to help people go to where they want to get to. One of my favorite stories is a young woman, she's just turned 50ish. I think she's living in the dream. So when I met her 16 years ago was a referral. She said it was a wishy washy goal. She wanted to get out of the frigid cold in the winter in Alberta and go to some tropical location as a single mom, raised her kids, grow her practice as an accountant. And I says, yeah, well, we could work on it. I just found out like 16 years after working with her, she's posted on Facebook, she says, who the heck is he? He's not a female. He's not a single mother. What does he know? That's what she was saying 17 years ago. She's living in Mexico and has been for 16, whatever years now. And she only just told me that. She says, who are you? You're not even a female. You never had kids.
[00:24:12] Speaker B: And I loved your setup. It was like the perfect ending to this interview because here you are saying, you know, the degree to reverse engineer the process to go do ask some great questions and figure out if this is something you're really going to like and then go, well, isn't that the way that we explore franchise opportunities that Kim Daly can help you do as a franchise consultant? So you don't have to invest in the business to realize you don't like it. You're going to go through a process. You're going to validate with other people who've already said yes to this, maybe even spend some time out in the field monitoring what they do to get a visual and say, is this the kind of work I can see myself doing? And then you're going to be able to invest in the franchise and become a franchisee. So if you're sitting on the sideline today and you are inspired by this conversation and you're ready to begin your journey, will you know that Kim Daly wants to be your franchise consultant? So please follow the link in the description right now and I will reach out to you so we can begin that conversation. And if you're a business owner and you found this conversation very insightful and you're thinking a little bit deeper about why you may be stuck in a negative self talk loop. Well, you know, you have two amazing coaches right here. Coach Phil up in Canada and Coach Daily right here in Seacoast of New Hampshire, we are both here to help you. So all of our contact information is below. Thank you so much for watching until the end. And Coach Phil, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and for being our special guest here today on Kim Daily tv.
[00:25:47] Speaker C: Thank you.
[00:25:48] Speaker B: It's been a pleasure. And until next time, my name is Kim Daly, and I want to be your daily coach.
[00:25:58] Speaker A: You can find more content just just like this on my YouTube channel at KimDaily TV. And if you're inspired to take the next step to explore franchises matched to you, please email me right now at InquireimDaily TV. That's InquireimDaily TV.
