The Hidden Advantage of Tactfully Handling Difficult People with Alex Sobol, Part 1

[00:00:00] Alex: Whether in sales or not, but you need these traits to be successful in sales. You know, I would say the traits that always usually come to mind is obviously baseline work ethic. That's just table stakes, but how they can handle difficult people. Because I found in my life, most people you come across in some way or another are difficult.
And if you have a way of handling difficult people that. Is done in a way that doesn't prevent you from still getting the outcome you want. That's a fabulous life skill, and that's a really special trait in selling.
[00:00:31] Mike: My name's Mike Lander and you are listening to Higgle, the B2B Sales Club podcast, where we bring you actionable insights about sales, RFPs, negotiations, and difficult procurement discussions from sales leaders.
Ground leaders and procurement leaders, please subscribe to get updates when new episodes are released.
Alex, thanks Evers much for joining me on Higg all the B2B Sales Club podcast.
[00:00:58] Alex: Yeah, it's great to be with you, Mike. I appreciate you having me and I've been looking forward to chatting with you.
[00:01:03] Mike: Yeah, no, me too. And we had a great prerecord and I'm fascinated by what you do by your business. But before we get into all that, for the listeners, who are you?
What do you do and what's your favorite song?
[00:01:16] Alex: Well, my name is, uh, Alex Sobol. I'm one of the two co-founders of an organization that's been going for about 12 and a half years called the Millennium Alliance. The, you know, the way that to think about us is, uh, we're a premier invitation only community in the US and in Europe for leading enterprise C-Suite executives.
So it's essentially a holistic platform or a 360 degree platform for C-Suite engagement on a global scale. We basically involved into a international multimedia company that provides access to the enterprise technology community through combination of digital properties and high impact. In-person programs for businesses of all sizes that are looking to reach that audience.
So our bread and butter, where we got our start, has been in the in-person event world. Yep. So we kind of have three slices of events of how we do things. We have what we refer to kind of as our multi-day national focused events. So whether there's an event in, um, Austin, Texas, or Los Angeles or over in Europe where I'm gonna be on Sunday in Amsterdam, they're focused on the entire region.
So in America, wherever our multi-day events are, we bring in people from all over the country. If they're in Europe, they're coming in from all over Europe. The format is exactly the same. We'll probably run close to 150 of these this year.
[00:02:41] Mike: Wow.
[00:02:42] Alex: Yeah. They're all C-suite focused. And they're all surrounding either a particular job function in one industry or an event that I'm going, like one I'm going to on Sunday night.
Which is a enterprise CISO program for Chief Information security officers all across Europe, across multiple industries. So for that format, we'll bring 90 to a hundred C-suite executives, and then we'll also bring in, in addition to analysts and thought leaders and authors and all different types of cool people to glue the entire event together, we'll then bring in a number of technology, service and solution providers in the vendor community.
That want a chance to spend time with these executives that are hard to reach for a two day period in a very innovative format. The other two slices of events that we do is we have a more localized event product offering, which is focused on particular cities around the US and Europe. So if we take New York City for example.
There are companies of all sizes that have a very high concentration of accounts in particular cities across a given area, and we host bespoke programs for them in the form of executive five star dinners for them to get in touch with their most sought after targeted accounts. And now starting this year, we built on that model, still single sponsored, but instead of doing just a dinner with 15 of your targeted accounts, we'll do a full day event.
In a city with 50 to 60 of those. And then on the digital side, we have a number of digital properties that we built out for clients as well.
[00:04:13] Mike: Perfect. So before we get into part one, what's your favorite song, Alex, and why?
[00:04:18] Alex: My favorite song's Probably New York State of Mind by Billy Joel.
[00:04:22] Mike: Ah,
[00:04:23] Alex: yeah. I like Billy Joel.
I usually, when I'm landing back into the New York, New Jersey area, 'cause I live in New Jersey. About five minutes before we touchdown, I usually play it.
[00:04:33] Mike: Wow. And that's a bit of a ritual for you?
[00:04:36] Alex: Most of the time. I don't do it all the time. I would say probably 75% of the time. Yeah. It's like generally when I'm flying into Newark Airport in New Jersey, you get a nice view of the skyline.
[00:04:46] Mike: Yeah.
[00:04:46] Alex: And um, I love traveling and I'm excited. I've never been to the Netherlands, so I'm looking forward to that. But there's always, after at least a few days or a week or two weeks of being away where when I'm landing. And I'm coming back. That song just seems like the perfect, the perfect one to play.
[00:05:02] Mike: And is that because you are just interested, very much connected to New Jersey?
[00:05:06] Alex: Yes. I mean, it's a, it's a number of things. One is I do like Billy Joel.
[00:05:11] Mike: Yep.
[00:05:11] Alex: So I do like a number of his songs. That's my favorite one. And I think that's again, my favorite all time song. But yeah, I grew up in New Jersey till I was 14, came back here after college.
I'm 41. I've lived in New Jersey, 33 of my 41 years. Yeah. And in that song, when he, when he talks about just some of the landmarks of New York and yeah, it just, I don't know. It's just, it's just like a, it's a, it, it's a connection. Feeling of familiarity.
[00:05:35] Mike: Yeah. Absolutely. So, uh, for the listeners, we're gonna do a two part episode.
Part one is really about the origin story, what you've done, and where it's come from and what happened. And then part two is much more around kinda like B2B, C-suite sales, what's working, why, what's happened, et cetera. So let's start off part one with why did you start the business?
[00:05:56] Alex: So the stuff that we do, or at least what we initially started to do, my partner and I rob, it wasn't some to us, some revolution, revolutionary idea.
Basically, I graduated from college at the end of May, 2007, and then a week later I started working for a company. Where at that time their main business was trade publications. Industry publications. Yeah. So I thought, I thought I was taking a job to sell advertising in magazines and then when I got there, they started playing around with these type of conferences.
And the first I, after training the training week, I got put on one that was focused on healthcare. I took to the model very fast. It like, just by happenstance the the fit was perfect and. My partner, Rob, was my first boss at the time, right? And best boss I ever had. We developed a really good friendship and the part of the business that we got really good at, or he was already exceptional at.
Was the selling part of the, the, the monetization part of these events, right? The sponsorships and all the pieces around it that generated revenue,
[00:07:03] Mike: for example, for an event. Going back to when you did this for the audience, what are the major sources of revenue when someone's running a big event? Bluntly, how do they make money out that event?
[00:07:13] Alex: So generally it's on the sponsorship side, the vendor community paying for access.
[00:07:18] Mike: So no surprise it's sponsors rather than ticket sales.
[00:07:21] Alex: Yeah. Historically ticket sales kind of wasn't a thing. Yeah, that's something that we've embedded now at our company. But, 'cause there's multiple ways throughout an event, you know, there's, there's added bolt-on type things you can do for advertising and things like that.
But at, at that time period, the main source of revenue has been coming from sponsor access. Rob and I just were really good at it. And as we stayed with the company longer, we kind of learned all different parts of the industry. But the thing that came the most natural for us, which I think is the most important, especially when you're starting up a company, is getting money in the door.
[00:07:55] Mike: Exactly. Right. And by sponsorship, what, what kind of things was the sponsor paying for?
[00:08:00] Alex: So talk about at Millennium now. Right. Just to fast forward and then I'll go back.
[00:08:05] Mike: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:08:06] Alex: At our events now, we, we drive revenue from a couple of different areas. So if we take the event, I'm going to Sunday night for Tuesday in Amsterdam.
Right. We'll have 90 to a hundred of these enterprise CISOs from big European brands. Majority of them pay a small fee to come. It's not a huge fee. It's like six, 700 pounds. Yep. It'll equate to. And the reason that we do that is because we think our events are good enough where the end users should be paying something and it's also just a good sign of commitment and yeah, keeping the event, you know, just making the event stronger and then the sponsors do the heavy lifting.
They pay, you know, depending on access the bread and butter of our model. In addition to, you know, all different types of thought leadership sessions and all different kind of classical things you'll see at events, networking and education. The stuff that separates us from other models is the guaranteed one-to-one private meetings with executives that these technology companies want to talk to, and also these end users for them as well, for what companies in the solution provider world they want to talk to.
So regardless of what any company does, at one of our events, they're gonna get a certain set number of private one-to-one predetermined meetings that's based on a ton of information that's given to make sure that the meetings are relevant.
[00:09:23] Mike: Exactly. So if you kinda go back to when you kind of started, you started at the business, you'd worked for a company, you obviously both left, set up a business to do exactly this.
Only better, I guess, what have you learned along the way and where are you now?
[00:09:38] Alex: So when we were making the decision to leave, it wasn't an easy decision because Rob and I, I'm sure he would agree with this. It wasn't our life's plan to start a business.
[00:09:46] Mike: Right,
[00:09:46] Alex: right. We didn't, it wasn't like we didn't really have too many entrepreneurial, too much entrepreneurial blood flowing through us.
It just happened to be a thing where, like I was saying before we got really good at something, we built up a really good personal reputation inside our company where people knew that we were. People, people not just good at what we did. And in the industry, people were very familiar with us as individuals and you know, who we were and you know, kind of what, what we could do if we went on our own.
So we felt that at the time, you know, it was a tough decision because we felt we didn't like the direction the company was going. We didn't like where the culture was at. I felt very confident. I think Rob did too, in our ability to build a great culture like that was, I was struggling to actually, and I did a lot of soul searching on this.
I was struggling to see a way this wasn't gonna work.
[00:10:35] Mike: Right.
[00:10:36] Alex: And that kind of worried me. And um, someone said to me, I had talked to someone who, um, was a prior entrepreneur and he said, if you really have looked at every angle of this and you can't see it not working, you should definitely do it because.
He had started a business, he had told me and he couldn't see it working and that's why it didn't work. So yeah, we had incorporated in January of 2014 and we started out with three of these national focused programs. We started with three or four people, including me or Rob. So it was just four of us and we built the team over over time.
Now, just to fast forward, by the end of this year, we'll be at 250 people full time. Wow. We were acquired by an amazing firm out of Boston last July, Boston Ventures, and we're on pace to generate a hundred million of revenue across all of our events and digital properties. And the thing I'm the most proud of, again, I think we've just kind of stayed true to what the mission has been.
We're not perfect. There are things in the events world that sometimes happen out of our control, like a pandemic or a weather related event that. Makes the event not as good as it possibly can be, but we always do right by everybody we always own when we make a mistake. I would say the vast majority of time, everything goes the way it's supposed to.
As perfect as we would've hoped. But the, the best part about Millennium really is the culture. We have a phenomenal culture and people generally don't leave us, and it doesn't mean that Rob or I are pushovers and we don't have high standards. We're just very. Intentional on the interview process, who we bring on board.
We just created a great place to work, both in the US and Europe. And that's the thing I'm the most proud of.
[00:12:15] Mike: So in that journey, I'm always, so I, I interviewed someone the other week that had grown a business, a SaaS business in the gifting industry, weirdly, that I was like, how could you build a business in the gifting industry, but very, very successful business.
Lovely guy like you, really nice guy. And he talked about. One really interesting kind of topic, which I think we'll touch also in part two, which was founder led selling doesn't equal product market fit. The only way you know if you've got product market fit is when you recruit strangers who are salespeople that can also sell the proposition and close.
Did you find a similar thing? It wasn't just the Alex Secret source of selling, this was a system. That you could train people in, replicate, and they could sell to your customers as good as you could.
[00:13:02] Alex: So with us, I knew that the need in the market was there and I knew based on our ability, like Rob and I are very humble.
Not cocky in any way, but to me Rob has always been the Michael Jordan, what we do. Yep. And I'm the LeBron James. And in this example. Michael Jordan is the better player,
[00:13:22] Mike: right?
[00:13:23] Alex: But if you think about, I know a lot, I was talking about this yesterday on a different podcast that a lot of young 20 year olds think LeBron's the best player ever.
It's Michael Jordan. For anybody that watched professional basketball in the 1990s, but think about what could be achieved if the two of them played together in their primes. So I had never any concern about the market fit. I never had any concern about being able to train people, 'cause I had done it countless other times.
So there was never a thought in our mind that we weren't gonna be able to transfer our skills to other people. And there was never a thought that this wasn't gonna be received well in the market.
[00:13:59] Mike: And I think we'll touch on it again, probably in part two, but just expand on it now. When you say train people, you are training them in the sales system in your way.
[00:14:09] Alex: Yeah.
[00:14:10] Mike: Did you have a very clear view of the characteristics of a great salesperson for your business and. What they needed to do. So how prescriptive, I guess is what I'm saying. Are you about the way that they sell versus a broad framework and then they can flex?
[00:14:27] Alex: Well, I'm glad you touched upon personality traits because it all starts in the interview process.
I think I mentioned these, I might have mentioned this to you when we had talked previously, I talked to every single person before they receive a job offer at Millennium or they don't receive a job offer at Millennium. They spend about 10, 15, sometimes 20 minutes with me. Generally on a video call, they usually go through two or three rounds of 45 minute to hour interviews and they come to me at the end.
So not everybody gets to me. Exactly. And I definitely veto a lot of people, but I have an idea of what I'm looking for. Yeah, that maybe some people who interviewed them previously may have missed. I look at sales as all the traits you need to be successful in selling anything are really the same traits you need to be successful in life.
Right. Part of the perks of what we do is I've met a ton of people and a lot of them on paper are at the top of their game in their industry. And you know, I've met a lot of people in general, whether inside the work that we do or just in my everyday life. And I've noticed that for majority of people, there's a common thread of personality traits, whether in sales or not, but you need these traits to be successful in sales that have made them.
Successful at whatever it is they do. Yep. Whether they're the best teacher at a school, whether they're the best hedge fund manager, you know, whether the best coach of a team, and I sum them up. You know, I would say the traits that always usually come to mind is obviously baseline work ethic. Right.
That's just table stakes, but how they can handle difficult people. I found in my life, most people you come across in some way or another are difficult. Mm-hmm. And if you have a way of handling difficult people that is done in a way that doesn't prevent you from still getting the outcome you want.
That's a fabulous life skill and that's a really special trait in selling.
[00:16:21] Mike: Let, let's just that, that rabbit hole.
[00:16:24] Alex: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:16:25] Mike: Because I talked to also our son about the same thing. There's something that happens and I dunno how to describe it, so I dunno if I'm good at that trait or not, but what I, I had a call last, last week actually in the sense that you're, thank you, Alex.
It's about not being phased by it. I had a call last week, which was a. Someone was vetting me to go on a and do a, a training piece for a very big company, for a big sales force. And rightly they wanted to see who I am and how I behave and what I was like. And they were a tough character, very professional, very successful, tough character.
My natural stances, they're just being themselves, they're being reasonable, they're asking difficult questions. I have a an obligation to respond, but if you just answer the question. That doesn't work. You have to find a way of challenging their thinking in a respectful way that gets you to the next base.
Does that kind of ring true or is that just me in my own head?
[00:17:20] Alex: It's probably a little bit, I would say you in your own head. I try to sense of people, I mean, I'm not trying to irritate people when I interview them, but I'm
[00:17:28] Mike: No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Not at all.
[00:17:30] Alex: I'm just like, I'm asking questions that they're not thinking or coming.
I'm not asking them any questions about the role. Right. You know, some of the things I'll always ask are like, why did you leave your prior company? Yeah. Why did you pick the major you did? Why did you pick the college you did? I always wanna know about their family. Yeah. You know, what their, what their parents do for work, you know?
And the reason I do that is I had a front row seat to dealing with difficult people as a child. My parents, god bless them, are two of the most difficult people walking the surf.
[00:17:59] Mike: Right. Okay.
[00:18:01] Alex: Yeah. They're, they're good people. They're good people. They don't have a bad bone in their body, but they're extraordinarily difficult and they've paid the price for that in their life.
When I was about 14 or 15 years old, I started to see that subconsciously some of the habits and the way I was looking at things was similar to how they would
[00:18:19] Mike: That's
[00:18:19] Alex: interesting. And it scared the daylights out of me.
[00:18:21] Mike: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:18:22] Alex: I had to spend, I had to spend a long period of time unlearning.
[00:18:27] Mike: So rewiring some behaviors.
[00:18:30] Alex: Yeah, a hundred percent. And. I then realized, no one said this to me, but I kind of realized it wasn't just my parents that were difficult. There are a lot of people that are difficult. Yeah.
[00:18:39] Mike: Yeah.
[00:18:39] Alex: And if I could look at this, not just to be angry at them for being so difficult and so frankly, emotionally unintelligent and emotionally un unaware, I then looked at it as a gift and that gave me an advantage going into.
College and going into the working world. So I was predis, I was aware of this way before. Most people are. That's
[00:18:59] Mike: fascinating 'cause it's a real lived experience.
[00:19:02] Alex: My mother called me this morning and you know, I should have taped that call as an example of. How to handle someone who's, yeah. Extraordinarily difficult to talk to.
[00:19:12] Mike: So, and this isn't picking on your parents. And I don't, I, I don't wanna get into real deep personal stuff.
[00:19:17] Alex: No, you can't.
[00:19:17] Mike: That's not what we're here for. Describe some of the difficult behaviors. 'cause, because it's people listening, people talk about difficult behaviors all the time, but they don't really describe what it feels like because the feeling ultimately as an emotional human being.
Is what happens. It normally we get triggered by something. A difficult behavior for me is someone says something in a certain way, which can put me on the back foot, can make me feel bad, can make me feel defensive. What kind of difficult behaviors are you thinking about that you recognize as a lived experience?
Experience?
[00:19:54] Alex: So the first thing I would say is a precursor to that is people have to realize that they're difficult. Right. The first thing people have to do is they have to do like, kind of like a stress test on themselves.
[00:20:03] Mike: Yeah.
[00:20:04] Alex: Because if you feel like you're a difficult person, you're gonna struggle.
Now again, that doesn't mean you're a pushover or you're a Yes man, but if people don't wanna be around you
[00:20:12] Mike: Yeah.
[00:20:12] Alex: Or they get frustrated around you, that's a sign that you may wanna change your approach.
[00:20:17] Mike: Yeah.
[00:20:17] Alex: Right. Because,
[00:20:19] Mike: but that relies on self-awareness. A
[00:20:21] Alex: hundred percent. And that, that's also a thing successful, most successful people I'm around is that they're generally pretty self-aware.
[00:20:29] Mike: Yeah.
[00:20:29] Alex: Right. Yeah.
[00:20:29] Mike: I would
[00:20:29] Alex: say. And yeah, they're, they're, you know, I look at people that are challenged that, or make things challenging, and I don't know if I tricked myself into this, but I look at them, people like that, and I say to myself, they probably don't wanna be that way. And the truth is, again, I, I don't have a psychology degree.
But I don't think it really has much to do with me or the person that they're talking to. But the real moment, the real thing that people have to discover is that it's very hard to change people. I tried when I was a young, younger boy and getting into my teenage years to get my parents to change a little bit, but most people I found they're not gonna change.
So the key to dealing with difficult people is if you have to deal with them still trying to get what you want. Even though you have to deal with them, but I would say more, more so that the objective should really not be to try to change people, but just to be, to be around them for what? What you have to be around them for.
Because there's something going on there that's making them be this way, and the odds are that's always gonna be the case. And it's a hard thing to realize with your own parents because. You know, I'll always be the little boy who wished my parents were different in some respects. You know, there, there were some decent moments in my childhood, but it's somewhat of a liberating feeling, and I have to explain this to my older sister who struggles with this, that it's not personal to us is exactly.
And I think a lot of people, whether it's because of social media and there's all these self health experts on Instagram, and everybody now is an expert on interpersonal communication. I just think it comes down to the fact that if people are difficult and they're tough to be around, not in a business setting, they're draining and you don't really, you really shouldn't spend your time trying to analyze them and fix them.
It's more of just kind of an ignore and move on type of thing in a polite way. And if you bring that into the business world, especially in selling, most of the people you're gonna meet are difficult. Yeah. A lot of people don't be sold to. A lot of people have their guard up and you gotta figure out how to navigate that.
And that's why I was saying before is, is that a lot of the traits you need to be successful in life, you need to be successful in sales. And building upon that, it's not just deal dealing with difficult people. Again, I mentioned work ethic, but part of dealing with difficult people. Excuse my frenches, you gotta know how to eat shit.
[00:22:55] Mike: Yeah.
[00:22:55] Alex: And you gotta know how to eat shit. Not just with customers, but you gotta know how to eat shit with people you work with. Right. One of the things I was, I went to the University of Delaware. And, um, a few weeks ago I went back there to speak. I wasn't in the business school, but I spoke to business school kids.
They were asking me what can they do to stress test themselves to see if they've got sort of this natural per favored personality for sales. I said, you could do a couple things. One is you could go wait tables.
[00:23:21] Mike: Yep.
[00:23:21] Alex: You could go try to sell cars one summer. You could go try to raise money for the school by calling alumni after hours after work and asking 'em to give money toward the school.
Those were things that they could do because those are difficult to do. A lot of people think that's beneath them to do.
[00:23:39] Mike: Yeah, yeah.
[00:23:40] Alex: And you deal with a lot of very tough personalities. So I think that more important than any type of internship, people should go back to the basics and stress test themselves to see how they are with people in environments where most of them are gonna be difficult.
[00:23:54] Mike: Good advice. Definitely we could dig into that all day. I worked at KPMG for four years as a business consultant. Brilliant place to learn to be a consultant. Like really, really talented people, great clients, really challenging problems. I learn huge amounts, but you also have to deal with often very challenging partners inside the business.
[00:24:16] Alex: Sure.
[00:24:17] Mike: And, and they weren't doing it to be unpleasant, it was because this was a professional business. The had very high expectations of how people behaved. And one thing I always remember was one of the simple tests, and similar to what you said, Alex, about the interview process. It, it was, theirs was like four at that point, I think there were four or five stages, and stage six was you met a partner and you met a partner.
And I met Barry and I met a partner for 15 minutes and it was the airplane test. Barry asked No business questions, no technical questions. Nothing at all. He wanted to find out could I sit with him on a plane and not irritate each other for a couple of hours, because if that worked, chances are I'd be quite good with clients and it, it's always stuck with me.
I still caught to the state of the airplane test, can you be with this person? Can you spend time with them having a coffee, being on an airplane, whatever it might be, and just enjoy each other's company, even if you've got different views. Different opinions, different approaches to life. Can you sit with each other, challenge each other's thinking, have some fun and walk away going, I enjoyed that.
[00:25:31] Alex: I love that example. That'll tell you, you'll know everything you need to know on a five hour plane ride when you sit with someone that you don't know that well. I, I, I probably can't think of too many other better things you could do.
[00:25:43] Mike: Because you're captive.
[00:25:45] Alex: Oh yeah,
[00:25:45] Mike: it, yeah, it was a great, yeah. Anyway, I thought that was a great way of interviewing people and I carry it with me to this day.
[00:25:53] Alex: Yeah,
[00:25:53] Mike: that's Before I close part one, one or two more questions, Alex, about the, kinda like the business. Give me just one or two examples of the big things you learned along the way of growing the business. And then give me something about the darkest moments.
[00:26:07] Alex: I'll start with darkest moments. The truth is we haven't really had too many dark moments.
I think the most anxiety provoking moment was when COVID hit.
[00:26:14] Mike: Yeah.
[00:26:14] Alex: One, because I personally was anxious about it, but I was also kind of, you know, I don't do well with sort of like the unknown.
[00:26:22] Mike: Mm-hmm.
[00:26:23] Alex: Like the unknown in the sense of like the COVID unknown, like when is this gonna end? I, I got all kind of anxious about the idea that you could have it and not know it and you could give it to somebody.
I would say that was the, the most anxiety provoking time because we didn't know what to do. And then fortunate for us, Rob, who's the less anxiety provoked partner, he realized that we should have turned virtual for the time being. Right.
[00:26:48] Mike: Yeah.
[00:26:48] Alex: I couldn't really see people wanting to do what we do virtually for two day periods.
But weirdly, it was a boom for the business. It felt weird because the world was struggling, but we did really well in COVID. That was a really good case study to show that our type of business is probably as close to as a recession proof business, as you're gonna find. So other than that, it's not been really too many dark moments.
It's been, it's been a lot of good moments.
[00:27:11] Mike: And what were the breakthrough moments? What were the things that intentionally or unintentionally 'cause to get to the valuation, you've got to now on the scale. There are some pivotal moments. You don't just grow that way. I mean, you can't just grow that way incrementally client by client, but there's normally some kind of acceleration moment where things really take off.
[00:27:31] Alex: So I think it, it's when the people that we had spent a ton of time training in different departments, but mostly in the sales function, became sales leaders themselves and are doing their jobs better than even Rob or I ever could in our heyday.
[00:27:47] Mike: Yep. So
[00:27:48] Alex: we're now like. Like if you take the nineties bulls, for example, we're past 1998 when everybody retired, right?
And the new wave of NBA talent has come in and not one-on-one would be better than Jordan, but doing what they do, they're better than, they're better than we could ever be. So I think that was a real breakthrough moment because that really allowed for like, we were always accelerating, but that even kicked the acceleration into higher gear because they were fully on their own functional.
Building people under them and it just kind of snowballed from them. The story with us is I think a lot of entrepreneurs, Mike, they get some that are successful or have early success. They forget what made them successful, and then they become a version of themselves that they think they need to become.
Right. I think that we always were very cognizant, like we know what works and we know what people appreciate. They appreciate like a good work environment. They appreciate honesty. Rob and I are in the trenches like
[00:28:49] Mike: Yep.
[00:28:49] Alex: All the time. And it's not like we read that in a management book. Yeah. We just like to sit with people and just like not, not being who you are.
Does that make sense?
[00:29:00] Mike: Yep,
[00:29:01] Alex: it does. So I just think that for us it's just a classic story of giving people a good place to work. You know, obviously paying them well for the work that they do. And treating them respectfully, being honest with them, no matter how hard or how easy it is. And, um, being in an environment, doing the work with them, in a sense, doing your work with them, even though it's different work.
It's not a revolutionary thing that we've done. We just, we're good kind people. We expect results. We look for high character. We're big on accountability. Yeah. So I think the three things that make Millennium special are culture training and just the accountability piece that. We want everyone to feel, including us.
[00:29:41] Mike: Just before I close part one, if you go back to the days when it was just the two of you and you've gotta sell your way to the first success, what I would call the first million. If you were giving someone advice, if they're driving in their car, they're doing a school run or they're going to work, what's the biggest advice piece of advice you'd give around selling about generating the first million of revenue?
What's the thing that they have to focus on?
[00:30:07] Alex: They just have to focus on doing what they need to do to get it done right? Like you almost have to put your blinders on. Ignorance is bliss mentality. Like I always say, like eyes on the prize and the prize is different at different stages. But if the first prize is to get to your first million dollars in sales, is that the prize will be the prize.
Which is yeah, get to, you get to a million dollars. So I think that if someone is starting a company and they possess those traits that don't allow them to get bogged down with the noise. And they just focus on the goal. Like you just gotta think to your, everything needs to be reverse engineered from what the goal is.
And if the original goal is get to a million dollars, every decision you make should be based upon, does this make it easier for me to get to the million dollar total or does this Exactly. That's how we've run Millennium. Everything's, you know, we keep people's feelings in mind and, but everything is reverse engineered from.
Is this gonna get us the outcome we want faster or is it gonna get us there slower or not get us there at all? So if you're honest with yourself and you go through that exercise and you have the type of personality that's already built to make you resilient and make you able to handle rejection and make you able to navigate difficult people in difficult situations, then that should be the only thing that you're focusing on in your professional life to get to that key objective.
[00:31:23] Mike: And so if we go back to, my God, the Stephen Co Days. Start with the end in mind. The seven habits. I've forgotten when it was written. It must be the 1970s.
[00:31:33] Alex: Oh wow.
[00:31:34] Mike: Same thing. Start with the end in mind. Stay focused.
[00:31:37] Alex: Yeah. We don't like to miss targets at plenty. We don't like to miss. We don't like to miss objectives.
And we set realistic goals and, and this is not just a Rob or I thing. This is a senior management thing. Like we all kind of get it. And one of the reasons why. I interview everybody is because, I don't know. I mean, we we're, we're bringing on a, um, a corporate style CFO on Monday. He's a great guy. I know he is gonna be a great addition.
99% confident. And those obviously are different types of interviews.
[00:32:08] Mike: Yeah.
[00:32:08] Alex: But for people that aren't in senior management that we're interviewed, that could be entry level, they one day could be there. So it's just kind of like what I've been saying a few times on this session is that. It really all starts in the interview process, not just because someone, a bad egg, can make your culture bad, but because as you grow, you don't wanna have to deal with trying to explain to people what you're looking for in terms of.
You know the type of traits in trying to figure out a tough problem. If you get it right from onboarding and the interview stage, you're less time trying to
[00:32:42] Mike: Yeah,
[00:32:43] Alex: the rest is
[00:32:44] Mike: much easier. Much
[00:32:45] Alex: easier. Yeah. The rest, it's just much. It's just much smoother.
[00:32:47] Mike: Exactly. Alex, it's been amazing. So I'm now gonna close part one and then we're gonna open part two, but closing part one.
Alex, where can people find out more about you?
[00:32:58] Alex: So people can find me. I mean, I'm not really that active on social media. Millennium Alliance website is mill all.com, MILL dash a l.com. Fun fact, when Rob and I started the business, the first domain we bought, we spelled Millennium wrong. It had one N and we didn't realize Millennium had two ends.
Um, that's a true story, great story, great story. we're very heavy on LinkedIn. Those are the two best places to find us.
[00:33:26] Mike: Alex, it's been a real pleasure. Thanks.
[00:33:28] Alex: Thanks, Mike.
[00:33:30] Mike: Thanks for listening to Higgle the B2B Sales Club podcast series with your host Mike Lander. Please subscribe so that you'll catch all the next episodes.