But he still considers himself a salesman, and he's arguably the best in the world. Before meeting him, I would not necessarily have called myself a cynic. It's just that I had a pretty good idea of what a salesman does:he's trying to sell you something. So if I had one goal before the meeting, it was "don't buy it".
Cardone consults with several Fortune 500 companies. He offers financial and business advice to anyone through his training platform, Cardone University. He owns and operates seven companies with annual earnings of $150 million, and his real estate company, Cardone Capital, has $1.4 billion in assets. He is an international speaker with 2.4 million Instagram followers and seven books to his name including a New York Times Bestseller. All awesome, but I'm a hard sell.
Our conversation in Dallas was sandwiched between same-day flights to Texas and back to his home in Miami. It included a few selling tropes that, from anyone else's mouth, would probably have made me cringe. The title of Cardone's most popular book is If You're Not First, You're Last , a sentiment I have never personally agreed with. Cardone is also not shy about taking commonly accepted motivational sayings and shredding them as if they were less useful than advice from a fortune cookie.
These are the types of conversations that usually put me off. And yet, put together, all of his sales advice and turns of phrase and enthusiasm never really seemed to form a pitch. They formed a story. It was the story of a guy who hated sales. A guy who was bad with them. A guy who was rejected and still seems to have complicated feelings about it, even though his net worth suggests he should have gotten over it a long time ago. A guy who just wants you to take a risk by playing it safe is getting tougher and tougher.
It can sometimes seem like Grant Cardone tends to speak in sound bites, but those words explain how he got from where he was to where he is now, and I don't think I can tell his story without them. /P>
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Summary“One of the great things that happened to me in my life was the car dealership, and one of the worst things that happened to me was the car dealership.”
—Grant Cardone“Last impressions are more important than
first impressions. »
—Grant Cardone“It takes more work to not succeed than to succeed. I did both. "
—Grant Cardone" People who say money won't make them happy probably don't. »
—Grant Cardone
Cardone was 21 and standing in the unemployment line in Lake Charles, Louisiana, when his uncle found him. He had no money. He hated college, but was a year away from graduating. His uncle insisted that he take a job selling cars. Cardone replied that he didn't go to college to sell cars.
"Well, you didn't go to college to be in the unemployment line," his uncle said. The next day, Cardone was selling cars.
In other words, he was applying for a job at the car dealership. He didn't sell many cars. “I was a bad salesperson, period,” says Cardone. It wasn't cars. By this point in his life, he had already dabbled in insurance sales and retail. He didn't know how to build relationships with customers. He didn't know how to find common ground with them. He didn't want to ask uncomfortable questions.
If you're reading this, you probably know how that part of the story turned out:Cardone got better in those areas, and he started selling cars.
It all started with a mentor he never met. One day, Cardone came across a sales training tape from a southern car salesman, Jackie B. Cooper. At that point, Cardone said, no one had ever shown him how to be a professional salesperson. The idea that there might be a method to sell cars was a revelation.
“I listened to this tape until it broke,” he says. The only part of the tape that wasn't worn was an 800 number printed on it that he called asking for more material. He could buy more for $3,000. “I borrowed the money from my mother and it changed my life.”
The tapes prepared him for every possible sales scenario. He started showing up early at the dealership. "I was rehearsing what would happen every day," he recalls, now more than 35 years later. “I would do [that for] 45 minutes to an hour. “It fits into his natural inclination to teach. The rest of the sales team started noticing that the weird guy who practiced his sales every morning was selling 15-20 cars a week, an almost unfathomable rate. Soon they joined him in his morning rehearsals, with everyone playing a specific role. “The more I helped, the more I learned,” says Cardone.
"The start or stop point for me was to engage in something that I don't like. I realized there was nothing else anyone was going to hire me for. »
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—Grant Cardone
If you ask Cardone, growth is a product of risk. He doesn't seem to have patience for people who stay static and justify him as being responsible. For him, it is irresponsible. “People grow up and take less risk at 25 than they did at two and a half, and what happens is they get stuck in the same problems.”
These ideas are the basis of Cardone's most famous concept and the title of his 2011 book, what he calls "the 10x rule." In a sense, it indicates that whatever you hope to accomplish will probably take 10 times your current effort, but perhaps more specifically, it suggests that whatever your current goal is, it should probably be multiplied by 10.
On the surface, it may seem obvious:try hard and shoot high. But for Cardone, it's the only way to find new answers to recurring questions. "Maybe the question you're asking doesn't solve your problem," Cardone suggests. Imagine you own a small business and want to know how to keep your 10 employees motivated. The 10x rule argues that you should try to figure out how to reach 100 employees. The actions you would take with this goal would help you solve or overcome your current problem. What milestones would you need to hit to get there? What would the budget allocation look like for 100 employees? “It worries you about a whole new set of problems.”
It is more than the rhetoric of hopeful ambition; for Cardone, it is the only solution to socio-economic realities in America. Cardone claims that Google uses the 10x rule, but for them the formula is simple due to the capital they already have:wherever the company wants to grow, just buy the resources to do so. "That's what creates this huge disparity because the guys at the top of the food chain follow such a different set of rules," Cardone explains. Small businesses with few employees simply cannot survive in this environment. They have to grow.
“You stop thinking about the problems of a car salesman and start thinking about the problems of a businessman. »
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—Grant Cardone
My preconceptions aside, Cardone never hit me with the line regarding A.B.C. sales:Always Be Closing. He didn't look me in the eye or tell me coffee is for farmers. In fact, he made it clear that the most important part of a sale usually happens after a deal fails.
"The score is in the follow-up," he says. Everyone can claim to have persistence before being rejected, but assuming you put your best foot forward, success can feel like a very long shot once you hear no.
Cardone has heard his fair share of noes. He estimates that the average sale occurs on the seventh or eighth recall. Of course, he doesn't always hear "no" initially. Sometimes it is completely ignored.
Cardone's marriage to his wife, actress Elena Lyons, might be his proudest moment. But they both confirmed to me that she was not at all interested the first time he tried to ask her out.
“I thought he was totally arrogant,” Ms Cardone now explains. "He was like, 'People's lives tend to get better when they're around me. “It was so corny. »
It took him 13 months to convince her to give it a shot, losing a layer of that cheese with each new attempt. They have been married for 15 years.
Cardone is a paradox in some ways:if you press him hard enough, his words might actually sound vulnerable even though he speaks them confidently. He manages to denounce a history of rejection. He told me that the weekend before our interview, he flew to Las Vegas where he secured an audience with Floyd Mayweather Jr., a professional boxer with a net worth of over $550 million. Mayweather isn't exactly known for his humility, and Cardone couldn't hold his attention long enough to really talk business. Midway through the conversation, Mayweather decided he wanted to go shopping, which at that exact moment might have been humiliating for a lot of people in Cardone's place. “I had it and I lost it,” says Cardone. “I have to walk away. But when I walk away, I can't walk away forever. I have to follow up. »
He points out to me that even coming SUCCESS headquarters was a potentially daunting experience. “I have to meet new people; it’s a new environment,” he says. “There are insecurities in all of this with all of us. Overcoming these insecurities is less about trust and more about knowing that the rapport is built over time. Relationships too.
Monitoring is not just about closing. It's about knowing that you're going to have imperfect experiences with people, but you can address, correct, or overcome them by following up.
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There was one thing Cardone really didn't like about his time selling cars. "I didn't like that no one trusted me," he says. “They approached you with complete disdain and distrust. I was not there to deceive anyone, hurt anyone, scam anyone. »
It reminded him that he was a bus boy at a country club at the age of 17 and naively thought that the typical boss would send him a simple "thank you" for his service. This rarely happened, and the lack of acknowledgment hurt him in that he referred to it more than once in our conversation before quickly moving on.
These experiences made Cardone determined to change his situation. Sometimes complacency is a lie, and he refuses to believe it. If he is sure of one thing, it is that the small thought is more difficult than the big thought. "It's so hard to fail," he told me. “Failing is so hard. »
It's not that it doesn't relate to people who are just trying to get by. He is deeply connected to them. While the ignorant hurl accusations of laziness, Cardone knows that those who get by work the hardest. That's the goal.
When I spoke to Cardone's wife, she told me about a particularly difficult time in their lives. The Great Recession was a chaotic time for people who had taken what previously seemed like smart financial risks, and the couple were badly affected. Around the same time, they were betrayed by someone they considered a friend, which caused another financial blow.
She was pregnant with their first child, which meant no acting roles to supplement their income. She remembers Cardone watching the latest financial news of Lehman Brothers' collapse on TV, white as a ghost. She had never seen him scared and asked what the news meant. “That means we are dead,” he replied.
She pointed to the life in her womb and asked if it felt like death. "From that first phone call, you said people who hang out with you, their lives tend to get better," she told him. Cardone locked himself in his home office for hours. When he got out, he gave her a manuscript for her first book, Sell or Be Sold . He told her, "It won't make us rich, but I know what I have to do and I'll never make you worry about money again." Together, they spent the next decade making the sacrifices necessary to build the empire they have today.
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We don't all work in sales.
I'm a freelance writer and I'd say if I tried to sell you anything with my words I'd work in advertising where the pay is usually better. Even so, Cardone insists that he and I have very similar goals, even when I think I apply some vague integrity to the work I create.
"We're all trying to create some kind of art because we're all trying to create some kind of effect," he says. "We all fight for an individual's attention units. He may be right. You could argue that there is a kind of selling applied to your work as soon as you consider someone outside of yourself.
And like most people, there is always a transactional element to my work. A certain percentage of my time is spent writing stories for publishers. It's something that I try to treat as a dialogue between two creators, maybe for my own reason, but Cardone assures me that it's a sale. And it is the one whose result is linked to my quality of life. "As long as you do what you love to do, the more you get paid, the more you love your job," he says. "If you don't do what you want to do, no amount of money will solve this problem. »
In the few weeks since our conversation, I'd be lying if I told you that I didn't think about a few of the things we talked about. During the time I spent with him, there was really nothing he pushed against, which I was ready to do when I walked in. He probably knows he's a nice guy in person, but saying he didn't convinces me of anything. He says that's not how he plans to sell.
You see, Cardone's strategy involves a lot of transparent and honest questions. "I don't try to play tricks on people. If you tell her no, you may need to be prepared to tell her why.
We all think we need a good reason to do something. Cardone expects you to have a good reason not to do anything. Is that the same as persuading yourself to do it? Or is it just a conduit to the decision you really want to make if you give yourself permission?
Cardone told me none of this. He firmly believes that we learn more from success than from failure. He wants to repeat his successes, so he studies and reproduces them. He reminds me that you can't afford to learn from failures in real estate or banking. "If you learn to drive by failing, you'll go broke," he says.
Although it may seem like a matter of perspective, the manuscript Cardone wrote during one of his darkest moments was not about failure. It was about success. "Failure just reminds me of all the doubt and all the people who laughed at me and didn't believe in me," he says. Perhaps rejection still hurts Cardone, but he strives after so many different versions of success that a rejection or failure is less a teachable moment and more a failure on the radar.
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