Gain The Edge

Jim Padilla is the visionary captain of the ship for a company called?Gain The Edge. He is a master sales trainer, an expert team builder, and a launch expert. He’s got over twenty years of experience in building teams and leading them to success. He has a solid track record of achieving results. More than that, he’s a launch expert. He and his team, which consists of his lovely wife, Cyndi, have led dozens of entrepreneurs to huge success in their launches, driving sales, and surpassing goals and expectations. He shared the stage with Jay Abraham and Les Brown. Jim brings an exceptional level of experience and talent to the world of sales. His real talent is that he can inspire his team to achieve their full potential. Who doesn’t want that?

Jim, let me ask you your own story of origin. You can go back as far as you want. You can go back to childhood or to when you were in school. How did you start thinking about, “I have a talent here of inspiring people, I see that there are some problems when people try to grow a company that I might be able to fix?”

I will go back to childhood because it sets the context. I was born in a pretty unfortunate situation with teenage parents. My dad took off right away. Mom pretty much freaked out and responded with a lot of fear, rage and anger to a tough situation. It was an abusive, loveless and Godless home that I grew up in. I ended up in foster care and on the streets at sixteen running in gangs and getting into lots of trouble and in jail by nineteen.

You can imagine spending every waking moment trying to read the room and figure out how to influence people in your direction, not because you needed them to buy something but because that was the only self-defense mechanism I had. If you didn’t close the sale there, there was a lot more at stake. Little did I know that years later, I’d be making millions of dollars teaching other people how to read the room and influence people in their direction, so that they won’t see you as a threat and they’ll let down their defenses and be able to buy from you.

There’s so much there. First of all, you’re an amazing storyteller. I love that line, “Little did I know.” Suddenly we’re on the journey with you. The premise of any good storyteller is that the stakes are high. If you’re in jail at nineteen, it doesn’t get higher than that. The stakes are pretty high for basic survival. Let’s talk about reading the room. I joke with people now, you still have to read the Zoom even if it’s a virtual call. That’s why I’m big on having people have their cameras on. Even if people are on mute, you can still read the Zoom, the room or the energy a little bit in my humble opinion. Let’s go back to some basics of reading the room in general. Everything from, “This is where I lost them, where they got confused and where they got distracted.” Pick any one of those three things to talk about how people can be better at reading the room.

We can touch on all three of them. There are some common threads, a through-line if you will, for all of them. The first and foremost is you have to come to complete surrender to the reality that it’s not about you. If it’s about you, meaning you have to make the sale. You’re positioned a certain way and you can’t tarnish that. You can’t say certain things but you’ve got to say others. You’ve got to self-censor. If all of those things are in play, you are not focusing on the audience. You are not focusing on the other person, which means you are not going to serve them because you’re in conflict with serving you. That is going to impact all of this.

You have to get to a place where curiosity is what drives the day. You have to assume the best of the person you speak to always. If I assume you’re trying to hurt me, then I now have to start protecting myself. If I’m protecting me, I’m not serving you. Everything has to be outward-focused and you have to come to that place where you believe the best intentions of other people. We have five core values in our company and they tie into our values as people. It’s ownership, relationship, partnership, flexibility, and optimism.

I am an eternal optimist. I don’t mean glass half full, I mean, if you turn around and see that your dog took a crap on that rug, your immediate thought should be, “I have been wanting a new rug.” You have to see the high side of everything. In transparency on that, I had a big blessing from God to help make that happen. He dropped me in a bombshell of an upbringing. I learned at a young age that everything is overcomeable. When I see a problem, I don’t go, “Oh my God, a problem.” I go, “How do I solve it?”

Let’s reframe and restate those wonderful values, not just business but personal because that’s the first takeaway. They’re not separate. We’ve all experienced that now in a much greater way than we ever did. I’m one person at home and one person at work. Now that’s been blended for a while, people are like, “Oh.” These all have to be consistent: partnership, relationship, ownership, flexible, and optimist. This concept of ownership, to me, means you’re not pointing fingers, you’re not blaming other people. The framework of being a partner means that when someone is a little down, you might be there to help boost them up and that it’s a win-win thing. Of course, the relationship is the premise of that long-term view. Even if I get mad or I say something that hurts your feelings, we don’t throw the whole thing away.

If you notice, they’re all tied together. All of them are interwoven. We talk about them so much here. We make business decisions based on that. We’ve let people go from our team who were fantastic humans. We started realizing, “How come there’s all this friction here all the time?” We started evaluating. We say, “The way they handled that demonstrated no ownership. They didn’t take partners. They didn’t demonstrate any flexibility. There was no optimism, there was only finger-pointing.” It didn’t work and it’s not because they weren’t great people, they don’t fit here. We look at that through all things.

Here’s another huge takeaway you gave everybody, Jim. If you don’t define your brand, values, culture, whether you’re a one-person company or not, then you don’t have a moral compass to decide whether you should take an action or not, “Is this a fit for me or not?” That comes back to what you were also saying about this premise of reading the room and building trust. When you have these five values, as you described, defined, integrated, and not just pieces of paper somewhere, what that allows you to do is to trust your gut even more because you know who you are at such a defined level. That is where most people think, “I don’t need to define my culture. My values don’t matter.” They then wonder why things are hectic, chaotic and not streamlined. Without this map and this compass, moral or otherwise, no wonder you’re lost, both emotionally and in your business.

Part of the success of what you do with companies is you’re digging things that are hard for people, like getting leads, closing business, and getting people to trust you. I’ve never heard anyone say what you said, which is, “If I’m protecting myself, I’m not serving you.” I need to take a minute and let that land not just intellectually but emotionally. You start looking back on personal relationships, maybe breakups or conflicts with friends. What this reminds me of is years ago, when I was in my twenties, someone said to me, “It’s the old question, do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?” It was the first time I’d ever heard it framed like that. All these years later, I’m hearing you say it differently but still equally impactful. Are those things connected?

Yes, very much so. You mentioned the term win-win a little bit ago. Not to douse out your fire on that, but we take a different perspective. I had analyzed this for a while because you hear everybody talk about the win-win. It’s a common term. When I hear the win-win, it implies equality. It implies that you and I are both here to give something to this. Most of the time, it requires me to give you a certain amount and you to give me a certain amount. Usually, there’s some measurement involved. John, neither one of us is equal. There are things that you’re better at. There are things that I’m better at. For us to both be equal, then one of us has to compromise. I’m going to say, “If John is going to give me this much, I’ll reduce what I’m going to give,” or you do the opposite. We’ve tweaked that term and we come from the perspective of win-them. What that means is we show up to ensure they win. That means I give 100% of me and you give 100% of you. If my 100% is bigger, that’s the way it goes.

I love busting myths. We talked about another one we’re going to bust later. That’s why I wanted to go through all of those five to make sure that I was having the same semantic meaning. I’m glad that you said no. Let’s put it in terms of personal relationships. People sometimes can go, “I see myself in that story.” If you’re in a relationship with someone and they’re keeping track of how many times they take out the garbage versus you taking out the garbage, first of all, that’s exhausting. People can get caught up in that minutia because they are coming from that premise of everything has to be equal.

That goes back to childhood. I have two younger sisters and my mom would make us lunch and put out the three glasses of milk and pour it. My sisters and I would hold the glasses next to each other, and if one person got half a millimeter more, we would complain that it wasn’t equal. The poor woman, she’s trying to make kids’ lunch and now we’re like, “It’s not equal. It’s not fair.” If you do that with your relationships outside of your siblings, let alone in the business world, it’s not just exhausting but it’s counterproductive, isn’t it?

It is. I’ll give you a real-world example and our company is involved. We provide outsourced sales divisions for scaling entrepreneurs. We have a strong, well-known client we’re working with who has an internal team. We have our team. There are two different initiatives that are usually happening. While we worked on a project, their team and our team were working. My team kept coming to me. Even if we have a situation, they’re like, “We need to get them to do this. We need to get them to do that.” If the client needs this, I’m like, “All those things we need to get them to do costs money, time or both. What are we going to do?”

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