Daniel Sweet Full Interview Transcript
Introduction and Background
AJ: Daniel, welcome to the Thriving Through Podcast.
Daniel: Thank you, AJ. I appreciate you having me.
AJ: I always ask my guests the same two questions to get us started, and that is, how long have you been a self-employed consultant?
Daniel: For me, it's been roughly seven years now.
The Decision to Go Independent
AJ: And what made you decide to become a self-employed consultant, to take this path?
Daniel: A lot of it was 20-plus years in the corporate technology world. Having been there, I've always considered myself more of a small company person, trying to interact with people on a less bureaucratic way. I would explain this every time a large company would want to hire me, and they would say, okay, but we could also pay you this. And I said, I mean, okay, I will deal with it. But eventually I got to the point where I was ready to go out on my own and ready to make an impact that I could make with the knowledge and skills that I had built up to that point.
AJ: So you felt like you would have more impact in your area of expertise on your own than at a corporation?
Daniel: Absolutely, and working with smaller businesses than I had been working with. Generally I'd be working at large enterprise type companies, and as a consultant I was moving to a smaller organization where we could make more impact with these same types of things that I had learned.
The Catalyst for Change
AJ: Was there a defining moment when you said yes, I've got to do this? It sounds like you were working at big enterprise level companies that didn't really fit, but the money was really good.
Daniel: It was really when my company was having several rounds of what they like to call reorganizations because they were shifting the way the entire organization was running. It's a 77,000-person company globally. They were doing a lot of changes to accommodate market dynamics. When they started having these reorganizations, everybody thinks about, okay, well, if I'm included and I get sent a little notice saying you could participate, what would I do?
I had been in the back of my mind thinking about it for years, but this made it very real. They're having major restructuring, there's going to be people laid off. If me or my division is one of those, what would I do? I started thinking about it much more seriously at that point. In fact, it got to the point where in the sixth round of reorganization, myself and 4,000 of my closest friends were invited to participate.
To give the company credit, they had a great severance plan. They really took care of their people, even at the severance, and so it enabled me to jump into the consulting world with both feet.
AJ: Nice. So it gave you the cushion to be able to go out and get started.
Early Challenges: The Acquisition Experience
AJ: Thinking back to the early years when you were self-employed, tell me a story about an obstacle or a challenge that you experienced and how you overcame it.
Daniel: Okay, so painfully is the answer. One of the things we were doing in the world that I was working in was small business M&A consulting. As part of that, I connected up with a group to do an acquisition of our own. It was myself and a couple other partners that were going to acquire this company.
What I did not realize at the time was the amount of time and renegotiation and the emotional piece that I would have to deal with on both sides of the table. That was a big part of what I learned through that very long, seemingly too long experience.
Learning About Emotional Coaching
Daniel: A lot of my time, it turns out, was not dealing with the facts or the plans, or putting things into motion or collecting data, analyzing data, helping people get the best out of themselves. Most of the time was spent doing basically counseling.
On the seller side, he was very concerned about a lot of things that could go wrong. I tell people, I still do this to this day, at the beginning of an acquisition when we've agreed that there's going to be an acquisition, everybody has agreed to the basic cost and structure, and we're moving forward with due diligence. I always start with the same story, which is: you are about to start telling people that you are selling your business. You're going to just start with your accountant and your lawyer, and it'll spread out.
But telling your accountant and lawyer particularly that you're about to sell your business is a lot like telling most people in your life that you've just decided for your midlife crisis to buy a motorcycle. Everybody feels compelled to tell you the worst stories they've heard about the worst disasters that have ever happened.
AJ: It's the same thing.
Daniel: Because, and this is what I learned from back then, they get freaked out. People tell them these crazy stories, and they don't want to tell them to you because it sounds crazy, but they're still freaked out by them. So doing the emotional counseling to get through to our objectives that are just, and maybe more important than the technical things we're trying to get done, was a huge learning for me.
Applying the Lessons Forward
AJ: How did you apply it? What was the lesson that you learned, and how did you apply it going forward?
Daniel: Whenever I'm dealing with any coaching or any customers, I will address those kind of issues upfront. I let them know this is going to be uncomfortable. You are going to think to yourself, either I've already tried that and it doesn't work, or I really am uncomfortable with the situation, and I'm going to agree that you are uncomfortable with the situation as we go along.
But the reason you're uncomfortable is the same reason you haven't gotten to that next step. It's the discomfort that is that barrier that you have to get through in order to achieve the next thing. You know what to do in almost every case in my coaching. They know the possibilities. It's not a surprise to anyone, but getting there is the challenge. They haven't been there because it's like an electric fence. They walk up and they hit the electric fence and go, oh, I'm not sure I want to do that. So addressing that early is what I do now.
AJ: So they don't get blindsided by it.
Daniel: Absolutely. And they still don't like it, and it's still unpleasant. But at least they can go, yeah, you told me, okay.
The Psychology of Consulting
AJ: That's a really important point. Self-employed consultants, especially those who are not using a coach or a mentor in the process, don't expect the uncertainty and the questioning and the resistance to things that they really want to do in their mind but they just can't seem to get to. The second-guessing is very real, so you address it right up front.
Daniel: I keep saying that there's no real magic to coaching. It's because, again, they know what the answers are. It's just being able to say, hey, no, I promise, once you get through this obstacle, it's going to get better and you'll get that result that you're looking for. But you have to get through the obstacle.
AJ: And often they don't know it in here and in here, but they may not be aware of it. So part of your job is to pull the doubt up from them and help them come to clarity.
Daniel: Absolutely.
Moving Beyond Referrals
AJ: You mentioned when we talked that while you've been in business seven years, you've only recently started doing what you called systematic marketing. What made you finally decide to move beyond just referrals and networking?
Daniel: At a certain point in every business, you've got to get beyond effectively your network and the network of other people in your company in order to grow to that next stage. Everybody knows it, but it's another thing to learn or pay for or engage in. For me it was that we had good referrals coming in. We had good relationships with folks, but we wanted to grow the business to the next level.
Now what we're doing is we're learning and doing at the same time this whole, mostly digital marketing world, how to present our message to people who don't know us and don't love us already and people who haven't heard from somebody else who said, hey, yeah, they're great. We're just learning in new ways to get our message out there to be able to present our expertise to people so they can feel comfortable in hiring us and narrow that message down to the people we can help best.
Barriers to Early Marketing
AJ: What held you back from marketing more systematically in the early years? Or did you feel you didn't need it?
Daniel: I don't know that I didn't feel that I didn't need it. Everybody talks about you have got to bring clients somehow. But for small businesses, especially consultancies, one of the challenges of marketing, if you don't know marketing, is to hire it out. And there are very few marketing companies and venues built for small consultancies. They're talking about, yeah, if you just invest 8 or 10 grand a month for the next 24 months, this is going to bring some great results. Okay, that's cool, but no.
There aren't a lot of those type of agencies that are available to small businesses. So first of all, I had to interact with a lot of them to figure that out. And then a lot of again, what I felt comfortable with was being able to reach out to the people I know and people who know them to be able to present what we do and be able to get referrals from that. Because it worked early on, I didn't feel a need to layer another 10 grand a month on to do a pretty branding campaign.
The Decision to Write a Book
AJ: One of the decisions you made relating to your marketing system was you made the decision to write a book. Was this always part of your plan, or did something specific trigger this?
Daniel: The book wasn't always part of my plan. What I had operating in the back, what I told people for probably three years, is that I was going to be presenting a series of videos that talked about the issues that we usually deal with in our consulting. It would reveal a problem, talk about solutions in a way that displayed what we can do and had done, but in a short video and do that out on social media. So I had collected a lot of these topics in the back of my head for years but just had no time to do it.
What occurred to me is that I could take effectively all of that knowledge and pack it into a book, make that the first approach to here's all this knowledge in one package so that it could be consumed and reviewed. And again, I can display my expertise. But at the same time, that becomes the repository that I can still take from and do articles on and take from and do a podcast on and take from and do a video on. So it becomes the central point of launching something.
Launching the Book
Daniel: What really pushed me over the edge was I've got to get something launched before the complete five-year plan. The book was a good way to get that knowledge out there, and then I can piggyback on that in a lot of different ways. We've launched the book, and I've learned a lot about that again.
AJ: We're recording this interview on July 24th, and you just recently, within the last couple of weeks, launched the book.
Daniel: Exactly. We launched the book, and we're learning how to promote it again. There's lots of promotional agencies that will charge you $42,000 to go on a tour and whatever, but we said no. We're basically doing it in house. We're doing little pieces. We're learning how to do this. We have the book, and we've announced the book on social media and told people about that. We're emailing and doing that.
Multi-Channel Content Strategy
Daniel: We've also created a podcast based on the book that is effectively taking the topics chapter by chapter, and we have a discussion about that chapter and that topic again. People can listen and learn about the topic and hear two people discussing it and get more familiar with it and more comfortable with getting to the book, getting to us.
We also launched a newsletter on LinkedIn. Newsletters are their own world again, another learning. Building up, if you haven't built up a giant email list, launching a newsletter is going to be very difficult. But launching on LinkedIn where we have been building a network for years actually is a much easier thing to do. LinkedIn makes it real easy to do. When you do a newsletter, it sends it out to everybody you're connected to. So within two days, three days, we had 1,300 subscribers, which doing that manually is a much longer process.
Daniel: So doing these things in different modalities to stay in front of people—we've got a book, we've got podcasts, we've got articles in the newsletter, we're going to have some videos. I promise it won't take me years. Different ways to reach people. Every coach is aware that people learn in different ways. So if you create a little continuous content in the way they learn and then make it a different way for the way other people learn, you can cover everybody. This is what we're learning how to do.
Book Details and Distribution
AJ: What's the name of the book, and can people get it on Amazon?
Daniel: Yeah, so the name of the book is Unlocking Small Business Value, and then it has a five-mile-long subtitle that tells who it's for. It's for small business owners who are considering selling and don't know anything about the sales process and also don't know how to increase their valuation before they get there.
It is available on Amazon. Yes, it's again another learning. It's available as an ebook on Amazon. I'm making a hardcover and a softcover available, but I've discovered the wonderful intricacies of creating a cover for it that has to line up perfectly. They don't really help you. They just say, nope, what you submitted is wrong, do it again. So we're working through that to make the print versions available.
Using the Book as a Lead Magnet
AJ: Is it something where you charge for it, or do you use it as a lead magnet? How do you use your book to market your business?
Daniel: Both. We do charge for it on Amazon. We've made two packages. There's a package on Amazon that I think we finally listed at $9.99. They encourage kind of that price, so it makes it very accessible and they can get it downloaded and move on with their life. We've made a launch package available that has a lot of other reports and consulting with us as part of the package. Really, it's people self-selecting how ready they are to talk about moving down the road, what transition looks like, as to which package they take.
We're definitely using it to help customers self-select, and in the end, using it as all of it as a marketing of our company.
Lead Magnet Strategy
AJ: You have multiple lead magnets. So you've got the book, which is a low-cost lead magnet, not a free one. You do webinars. How do you decide what lead magnet to use for different prospects?
Daniel: We should probably be more strategic about that. What we do, though, is in creating the different lead magnets and just the creation of what we've put together, we've done two things honestly. One is we think about the most common problems that our clients have. What are they constantly asking about? Those repeated questions you always get. So we kind of took a bunch of those and put them together, and I'll be honest, I used somebody else's brain called AI and said, okay, here are the kind of questions we want to cover, here are the kind of questions we get. What is the best way to write an overall report around these questions? And kind of got a structure for it. I mean, we still wrote it, but AI helps you think through things a little bit better.
Leveraging AI for Content Creation
AJ: Yeah, I use AI all the time to help structure, to help brainstorm. It's a real—my husband calls it STM, smarter than me.
Daniel: Yes.
AJ: Because it is. It's like, why shouldn't we tap into this brain power of more than just us to benefit whatever tasks we're doing?
Daniel: And there's a lot that we do that can really be amplified by AI. We're experimenting with it right now. Honestly, I thought up when I couldn't sleep one night, I thought up an idea for an app, and I gave it to AI and said, here's what I wanted to do, can we build that? And it said, oh, sure, and told me, do this, do that, ask a lot of questions. Then it packaged it up in a document that said, here are the requirements, here are the specifications, and here's the architecture, so I could feed that to a code-creating AI and it would start to build code. And then again, this is all an experimentation, which is what AI is kind of built for.
AI Team Development
Daniel: I said, okay, well, what if I don't want to develop it myself? Because, I do come from a technical background, but I'm a script jockey at best. So what if I don't want to code it myself? Can we create a team of AI agents that can code this? And it said, oh, that's a great idea. Yeah, we could do that. It specced out what each team member would do, what their responsibilities were, what their limitations were, and what they had final say on. Then it created a document with all that in it and said, feed it to the code agent and it will create these different personas that will hand off work. It described how they would communicate.
Right now I've got it working on this app that it's building without me. I don't know how well it'll work. It's an experiment, but it's also a $17-a-month experiment, so who cares.
AJ: And it's presumably an app that you will charge money for, a future source of revenue. And why not experiment and see?
Daniel: Exactly. When you can have a seven-man team for 17 bucks a month, it's not a bad deal.
Managing Long Sales Cycles
AJ: When we talked earlier, you talked about a long sales cycle for your prospects. So when they come into your ecosystem, it takes them a long time to decide to hire you. How do you balance that long sales cycle with keeping your pipeline full?
Daniel: There's a past and there's a future. What we've done to date is mostly it's a slow education process, but it's been very hands-on by us. On average, a small business owner is going to think about selling or transitioning for about one to three years before they do it, before they talk about it to anybody. Nobody knows, it's all going on in their head.
When we finally talk to them, obviously they have a lot of questions and concerns, and so we'll start to talk through those. But it usually ends up we talk through a topic that's on their mind at that time, and they go, okay, well, yeah, I don't think I'm ready for this yet. So we're not going to continue at this point. Okay, that's fine. Then we manually will keep in contact with them over time because we know all of this grows and develops as they're thinking about it. We'll come back to them and say, yeah, I had a couple other questions, let's work through these issues. It's a lot of that before they finally get to, okay, let's really do this.
The Manual Process Problem
Daniel: That sales cycle is fine. I mean, we're okay with it. People have to make it from here to there mentally. You can't push them into it. They have a process they have to go through. They have to, it all has to click. But the problem was it was very manual.
AJ: Exactly. Yeah, that and probably pretty custom—manual and custom and important, but kind of limits you a little bit on scalability.
Daniel: Exactly.
Future Automation Plans
AJ: That was in the past. You said there's the past and there's going forward. What are you doing now, or what are you preparing? How are you preparing to change it?
Daniel: This was kind of part of the book plan. The idea was to create and notify the entire world about the book that is exactly about those conversations they're having in their head, but they can have them with a book instead of us in person. As they acquire the book, as they sign up for our newsletters, that type of thing, we can be kind of dripping emails and videos with those topics that they're always asking about. While the individualization of the advice is unique, the general questions are still the same.
We can give a lot of information in a newsletter, in a video. Now we can drip that to them while they're thinking through these things without us investing a ton of time individually into those conversations. But they can still get to those points, think through the issue, make it click, move on to the next one. We can be drip marketing over the time that they're thinking through these things to help them. I mean, in the end, the goal as a coach is always to help. We can help them think through their process and think through the things they need to do and be prepared for, while at the same time becoming their go-to source for that type of information, which it turns out is somewhat difficult to find.
Building Trust Through Content
Daniel: We can prove our experience to them over time when it's not threatening. We're not on top of them saying we can do this for you now, hire me now. Instead, over time we're saying, hey, we've done this and it may apply to you, and we've done this and it may apply to you, over a long period of time. So when they are ready, we're the natural place for them to reach out to. I just say, okay, I've been looking at all this stuff, I've been reading all your stuff, and we've had this kind of call from content we do and other things. I've been looking through all of it. Okay, we need to talk. We need to get moving on this. So they're ready now. They've been educated as though we educated them in person, and so they've got a lot of the pieces in place already.
AJ: So the decision should be faster because they're kind of going through that 12-to-24-month process with a lot of content from you, but all automated, so that when they do enter the active sales process, it's a shorter close.
Daniel: Exactly. We don't have to educate them on a lot of issues. They've already effectively self-educated. So they know what to expect.
Identifying Buying Signals
AJ: How do you know when to start getting buying signals, so you know to make them more active? You're nurturing them through drip content.
Daniel: The buying signals are usually when they come back with more specific questions. We have little branches that you can select. One of the things we do is we do a high-level valuation of a business. It's inexpensive compared to what's in the marketplace and relatively easy. It doesn't require us digging through your company in depth. It's high level. It's pretty accurate, but it is a rough order of magnitude, but it's based on the largest database for such things in the country and their recent sales. So it has real information for that industry, for that size.
That's one of the little branches we have where we're offering those things as we go, because one of the things that they want to know obviously is, if I go through all this trouble, how much can I get for my company? What's it really worth? Because they've heard what other companies sell for. They have their impression. Usually it's I worked here for 20 years, so it's got to be worth 16 billion dollars. Somewhere in between is the truth.
Low-Cost Entry Points
Daniel: That's a common request that we can solve easily, quickly for a very specific amount of money, low, low cost, and it indicates that they're now actively thinking and ready to kind of pursue that path. We have a few others like that that are just branches they can take when they're ready.
AJ: So they show volition, and you give them ways to signal their buying intent with low-price things, not free but low-price things, and then you can start the more intensive sales process from there.
Daniel: Exactly. The way we think about it is the free stuff gets you in the funnel. The people who are serious are willing to start investing money in this process, and so it may be a tiny cost, but there will be a cost to take one of those branches. That's how most people and businesses prove what they really want to do—they'll spend a little money on it, or maybe a little more money on it. We want to create that small hurdle that proves that they're really ready to do something. It's not about the cash generation of it, it's about just creating a hurdle that they go over and say, okay, I'm so ready that I'm willing to pay for this.
AJ: I'm not just dabbling, but I'm kind of seriously dabbling.
Daniel: Right.
The Feast-or-Famine Cycle
AJ: Yep. When you get busy with client work, what happens to your marketing efforts?
Daniel: It tanks. At least it has in the past because it was all manual. Like most consultancies, we have this pattern. The work is slow, we start reaching out. We do a lot of marketing, we do a lot of content. Work picks up, we don't have time for anything else. The marketing stops, the work goes on, the work drops off. We start to go, oh, I wonder if this is going to continue? Yep, then we start the cycle all over again.
AJ: The dreaded revenue roller coaster or feast-or-famine cycle. Yeah, absolutely. And you recognize it. So now how do you smooth it out? How do you continue to keep your focus on marketing when you're busy with client work?
Daniel: Well, that's where a lot of this automation comes in. The way we've built it, and we've spent some time, still going to do more of it, but the way we've built out with the book is the design is once you drop into the book funnel one way or another, it's going to automatically put you in one of our sequences, and that's going to continue onward. There's going to be ways to branch off from there that we talked about that they purchase before they talk to us. I mean, they can clarify of course, but they effectively will purchase before they talk to us. So by the time we engage, they have already spent a little bit of money.
Building Automated Systems
Daniel: We've made all that automatic so that it's going to continue even when we get busy. The more automated we make it, the less and less effort it takes from us. We're trying to push all that direction to have at least a solid, ongoing automated system that is ready for anybody to come in. At that point, you just create new entry points, new lead magnets to bring people in, new branches to bring people out, but the main core of it is always operating.
AJ: Yeah, like 24/7.
Daniel: Exactly.
Advice for Your Younger Self
AJ: If you could go back seven years, knowing what you know now, what marketing advice would you give to your younger self?
Daniel: Well, so one of the first things I would do that is, again, just like my clients, I knew some things I should do but didn't do them. I would start a newsletter right away, create lots of ways to get into our newsletter so we can be collecting those email addresses and regularly following up with them. We really didn't do that. All of our stuff that we did was again very manual, effective, but manual.
Everybody's good at some piece of this already. What I was good at doing is creating social media posts based around current events that applied to small businesses, and I would create that connection, and I could crank those out easily and quickly. I was good at that and I did a lot of that. Again, it gets us attention, it keeps us top of mind, but it's just one piece of a larger strategy.
Setting Up Infrastructure Early
Daniel: I would from the beginning put a lot of those other pieces in place. They don't have to be big. You may have a newsletter, it doesn't have to be printing something daily. It could be printing monthly, and that's fine. You can build that out, and if the time comes when you're ready for more, then you can fill in the gaps and make it bimonthly, then you make it weekly, and if you wanted, you could make it daily. But starting to set the structure of it early is absolutely what I tell myself is get that done now so that as people are coming in, you don't forget about them and you've got to have somewhere to put them.
The same thing, I tell all my customers, I'm a tech guy, so I did this early on. It didn't occur to me that people weren't doing this. Everybody I interacted with needed to go into a CRM so that I can keep track of them and my communication with them. And then all of our systems need to interact with that CRM too, so that we know where they are in the process. I had a CRM that I used 75% of the time. I would again do much more automation, much more system-based stuff—just again, it's the cobbler's children have no shoes—the same stuff I tell my clients, I would do more intently and make sure that was all set up.
The Importance of Owning Your List
AJ: Yeah, start that email list, because you can have thousands of followers and connections on LinkedIn, but you don't own them. If LinkedIn were to lock you out of the system, you've lost them all. Even when you have them, I've heard recently that impressions are down significantly. Whatever LinkedIn is doing with their algorithm, we're not getting rewarded with the impressions that we used to get. You're depending on a channel that you have no control over. You have no control over the algorithm. So getting that email started right away, that's really good advice.
Daniel: And for those of you on LinkedIn, something you should put on your calendar quarterly is to go into the LinkedIn settings, select privacy, and have it do a dump of all of your contacts. It will provide all of your data to you upon request, and you can store that away and ideally put it in your CRM. But at least you can have a copy of it so that if anything ever does happen, you still have all your contacts.
AJ: Nice. That's—yeah, I think I knew that, but I don't do it. So I have increased so many connections that I need to do that. I'm making a note to self. Thank you for telling me that, absolutely.
What You're Procrastinating On
AJ: Well, we're nearing the end of our time together. I have one more question, actually two. What marketing activities are you avoiding or procrastinating on, and why?
Daniel: A lot of the marketing that I'm avoiding is doing a lot more of the interactive marketing. Something we should be doing, we know we should be doing, is more very basic video, call it a podcast if you will, but a video podcast where we bring on somebody we know, even a client, partner, somebody we know who does good at something in small business, and just have a quick discussion. Doesn't have to be an hour, could be 10 minutes, 15 minutes, and I know that's impactful. But I'm still not doing it. My fear is that if I start, I won't be able to maintain the time to do the cadence that I want to do with it, and so I do nothing, which of course is always the wrong answer.
Starting Small and Outsourcing
AJ: Yes, because the advice that you just gave a moment ago is start that email list and you can do it monthly and then increase the cadence. So you could do the same thing with this—what can you realistically do even when you're busy, and then do it and at least get it started. And you also can hire. I would never have launched this podcast on my own. I use a company out of England, and they do everything. They find and initially reach out to find me guests. Then I do all the interviewing and all of that, but then they take it over and they do all the editing, they do the thumbnails, they do the putting it up. I wouldn't even know how to put my own podcast up on YouTube. But that's okay with me because it's enabled me to focus on promoting each episode and I don't have to worry about producing each episode.
So there's always, with marketing, especially when we're just starting out, it's easy to say, oh, I can't afford that. But marketing has to be done, and you're either going to spend your time or your money on marketing. It's going to take one or the other and usually some of both. So one of the things people need to ask themselves is, is it better to outsource it so that I can focus on the things that only I can do?
The Marketing Intern Option
Daniel: Well, there's an in-between option, by the way, that one of my clients did that I thought was amazing, and I again ought to do. It is, especially if you're just getting started, bring in one, maybe two marketing interns from a local college. They are much more digitally native anyway, and they'll make great suggestions and they'll run with "edit this video up so I can put it on social media." They know how to do that. They can put it together, they'll throw it out there. They're really good at it. It gets them great real-world experience. They can talk about all the different views and connections and everything they created for people, and you get a very low-cost, sometimes free helper to do this work with you so you can learn it too, because we can't know everything. It's sad and pathetic, but there it is.
AJ: Yes, absolutely. I like that idea. Yeah, marketing interns. Also gets connected into the community.
Final Advice for Self-Employed Consultants
AJ: So the last question: what advice would you give other self-employed consultants?
Daniel: Most of the self-employed consultants that I know, the biggest challenge they have is really the sales aspect of the job. They're good at talking to people they know, and they're good at getting business because the people that know them know they're capable. But learning more about the sales piece of it, and the great news about sales in 2025 is that it's much less scripts and psychology and aggression than it once was. It's much more about proving value to people that just don't know you and learning a lot about the modern version of sales is going to help them quite a bit in making that thing they're doing now, maybe on the side, maybe they just started, a permanent thing that can grow nice and big.
AJ: Yes. How did you learn about sales?
Daniel: I was forced into it when I was in the big company world. I was a tech guy, but at one point they kind of pushed me into kind of a sales engineering role. So this is what you're going to do now. I said okay. And so then they ran me through a lot of training, a lot of sales training, enterprise sales courses. I mean, I did not appreciate it at the time, of course, but I probably took hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of training courses during my time in these big companies.
The Power of Practice
Daniel: Doing that and then practicing it in the real world was how I ended up getting that skill, the repetitions. That was the big thing for me is putting
Daniel: Doing that and then practicing it in the real world was how I ended up getting that skill, the repetitions. That was the big thing for me is putting it into practice. I can learn about anything, but if I don't do it, it's gone. But being forced to put it into practice is the way I ended up inculcating the knowledge into my actions.
AJ: Good. Yes, practice, practice, practice. Get out there and do it sloppy, do it before you're good at it, because you'll get better.
Daniel: Exactly. And you'd be amazed at the number of people that they'll still buy from you even though you're doing it very badly, because they need it. They need the thing you're selling.
Closing
AJ: Yes, exactly. Well, thank you, Daniel. I have really enjoyed having you on the podcast. And that's a wrap for this week's podcast. So keep thriving through.
Daniel: I appreciate it.
