IAM391- Entrepreneur Helps Businesses Build Recurring Revenue Streams

Pablo Gonzalez has had success in Fortune 500 companies, multinational companies, and his entrepreneurial ventures alike. He has had success in the construction industry, the tech industry, and the non-profit world. And he attributes all of it to one skillset- people skills.

He is a guy that definitely wants to be your friend. A guy whose goal in life is to prove the value of human connection to all aspects of your life, starting with convincing the world that the future of business development is community creation.

He’s the Chief Executive Connector in his latest venture, Connect With Pablo. Please welcome…

• CEO Hack: Having a formula for reaching out to people
• CEO Nugget: You never start a conversation with anybody – you enter into a conversation already in someone's head
• CEO Defined: Opportunity of true success in four steps

Website: https://connectwithpablo.com/

A client I'm working with: http://book.onemillionfollowers.com
IG: @pgstorytelling

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Transcription

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INTRO 0:02
Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

Gresham Harkless 0:29
Hello, this is Gresh from the IMCEO podcast. And I have a very special guest on the show today, Pablo Gonzalez of Connect with Pablo. Pablo, it's awesome to have you on the show.

Pablo Gonzalez 0:38
Gresh, I'm happy to be here, my man, appreciate it.

Gresham Harkless 0:41
No problem, I appreciate you. And what I wanted to do was just read a little bit more about Pablo so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing. Pablo has had success in Fortune 500 companies, multinational companies, and his entrepreneurial ventures alike, is has had success in the construction industry, the tech industry, and the nonprofit world. And he attributes all of it. So one skill set is people skills. Here's a guy who definitely wants to be your friend, a guy whose goal in life is to prove the value of human connection in all aspects of your life, starting with convincing the world that the future of business development is community-centered community creation, I should say. He's the chief executive connector and his latest venture connects with Pablo, Pablo, are you ready to speak to the IMCEO community?

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Pablo Gonzalez 1:21

That intro just made me so happy man. I love how that sounds. Yeah, I'm ready. I'm ready to go.

Gresham Harkless 1:25

I'm ready to I'm excited to find out that I'm your friend. So that helps kick everything off on the right foot. But I wanted to hear a little bit more about what I call your CEO story. What led you to get started with your business?

Pablo Gonzalez 1:36

Yeah, I'm going to try to keep this as concise as possible. Because I find that in a lot of podcasts, it's like you give this whole 20-minute backstory and then you'd like to leave no time to get Valley right. So I graduated college when the world was just booming and construction. I went to work for a Fortune 500 builder in this executive and training program that moved me out to California where I was running 100, you know, $150 million business for them.

And I'm sorry, I was running a $15 million business, it was 1.5 million. Totally different. I was running a $50 million business. I had like 150 employees. Out there, I became a green building expert, just kind of by osmosis been in California doing this stuff. When 2008 hit the world ended when it came to construction. I reinvented myself as a green building expert and moved back to Miami where I grew up.

I became I started a green building consulting company that two years in got acquired by my biggest customer which was a hospital builder university did a public project builder. I went in-house as director of sustainability. And then like a year and a half, I went from being just like a super hungry entrepreneur that was just like educating the market and doing all these things and like killing to eat to like super fat and happy with all my processes figured out under this big thing. And I really wasn't working that hard. So I had to reinvent myself again. Because I thought that if anybody ever took a look at how little I was actually doing on a day-to-day basis, I'd get fired. And luckily, I got really involved in the community.

At that point, I started a couple of different young professional groups for a couple of different charities that put me on the board of these charities and this economic development agency in Miami. And then these things happened in succession with one, the CEO of the company that I was at got invited to be on this city for smart cities panel at the Economic Development Agency of Miami. And he didn't want to go so they sent me in his stead.

And I shared the stage with a couple of like really heavy hitters, the head of Latin America for like Cisco Systems and the head of the Smart Cities Initiative for Africa, what economic development agency, but it's like the World Bank type of stuff. I mean, and I just sat down, I delivered my thing on how sustainability fits into all this stuff. At the end of the event, I had a line of like six people deep waiting to talk to me, which was a major aha moment for me in thinking, Amen. You know, if I'm up on stage, I generally am seen as someone way smarter than I think I am essentially, right.

So I then took that and applied that to what I was dealing with at work and I wanted to become more valuable. And I wanted to be more of a business developer. So I reached out to this developer who was doing this controversial project that had this sustainable component called transit-oriented development, which is they're building this project that encourages public transportation use.

So I reached out to him, I said, I want to have this panel about transit-oriented development, talk about your project put you on stage with a politician on the board of one of my charities, and a land use attorney that I've done a bunch of projects with. And I invited my young professional groups that I had been stewarding to show up. And lo and behold, having that event for that guy, brought him to the table with a $100 million contract for my company, and boom, I'm a business developer. Right.

So that was that was a major transition point there. Then I started thinking I wanted to test this whole, having a community leveraging stages model in an industry that isn't construction. I was hoping to expand my reach outside of Miami. As luck would have it, I had the chance to join this Amazon software for a seller's startup company.

What I didn't realize that was I networked against somebody that I knew friend of a friend. And I was so excited at the opportunity that I kind of jumped on a burning ship without even looking. So in the first two months of me being there, we went from 500 users to 300 users. And I'm the VP of Business Development, right?

So, not a good look for your boy. And everything that I planned on doing was now very limited by our cash flow. So I went to work doing what I knew that I knew how to do, which was create a little community make that into a stage leverage that. So at that point, I reached out to the 12, the most important customers that we're all doing, like two to $10 million a month, a year on Amazon, started planning these bi-weekly calls where we would provide a little bit of content, and then we'd go around the table like, Hey, what are you struggling with? How can we all help and give each other advice?

Within a couple of months, everybody was like best friends, we planned this trip to Panama, and we spent three days touring the Panama Canal party and getting to know each other by doing SWOT analysis of each other's businesses and adding value. And out of that trip, we garnered all this knowledge that we then created a new course around, that we sold for 5000 bucks a pop, which was a big cash raise for us.

And then we created this event six months later, where eight of them traveled to Jacksonville, to present to the rest of the customer base that was paying 1000 bucks to be in this event about what they're good at. Right. So I put them on the stage kind of what I had seen. At the end of that year, I felt that I did what I needed to do inside this company, I proved that my thing works. I feel like I saved the company through what was a really hairy situation that had nothing to do with me. And I said to my partner, this was a fun experiment. I don't think I really want to build anything with you anymore.

So I went on this 90-day purposeful pause to where I had some money in the bank, I had proven these things out to myself. I had to figure out how to package it. I wanted to figure out where I wanted to be in 10 years as opposed to what my next opportunity was going to be. Which has somebody who loves connecting, I'm always networking and I'm pretty well-spoken and I always get offered a bunch of stuff I fall in love really quickly so I didn't want to make the same mistake.

So I took 90 days and I booked these like five conferences where I started. You know, it was like the Gary Vee conference the Ryan Moran Capital conference, the Grant Cardone TEDx conference, the Russell Brunson Click Funnels right like all these like influencer lead conferences. And after the Gary Vee one, I started thinking, man, all these people here are real sharp, they're doing big things. But they're coming here thinking that listening to Gary on stage is going to change their life. Whatever man, listen, to Gary's podcasts, I've changed my life too.

But I got it in podcast form. And while these people were all talking out to the same five or six people that they came there with are the few people that met I was walking away with, like 1520 New Friends per day. So by the second conference that I had, that I got tons of, alright, these people don't have the same reps and networking and relationship building on the fly, like I have had by being part of these charities that I was a part of in Miami, right? Like I might have a networking happy hour or two, three times a week doing that stuff, right?

And then eventually, when you're on committees, you're like on stage introducing someone, then you're on like panels, right? So like all these different skill sets. So I started introducing myself as a professional networker, and people were like, oh, okay, I want to talk to this guy. What's up with this and never heard of this. And all this time, I'm thinking, I'm just trying to figure out where I want to be in 10 years, not like how I'm monetizing my next thing.

I grant Cardone's conference, I started realizing all the different ways you can monetize being on stage from the, you know, the fee that you'd get as a speaker, to how you can capture the lead and then nurture it. And then the info products and all the different things events, all the different constants you can do that was big, that was a big finding. For me, it was this guy, Pete Vargas, his presentation. And again, I keep adding people to my list of people that I'm meeting all these things.

And then I went to Russell Brunson, and I got to really understand the info premiership business model. So I finished this 90 days with like a real clear picture of how I can monetize just about anything because I went through all these but more importantly, had a new Excel sheet of like 300 people that I've met, that I'm like, following up with that I have categorized with wants and needs and what they do and things of the sort.

And I started trying to work that into a business model. At first, I thought, I had this speech that I gave before I left Miami about the value of networking, how to do it tips, and tricks, as someone has always done and I thought I could go on stage. And then I can have this training course in the background with like a book of like free book plus shipping and then an upsell.

As I kicked that down the stream, people kept asking me, why don't you Why don't you have a mastermind I would love for you to put together a mastermind and I really wasn't comfortable with the idea of charging people to be my friends at this point in my life, which I mean, I was in college I was in a fraternity so and then at one point as I'm as I'm exploring, and I'm still seeking my I get introduced friend of a friend to this guy, Brendan Kane, who had managed a big movie studios Digital Media Department for seven years, then went off on his own to build some big platforms for a couple of really famous people like Taylor Swift and Rihanna and whatever.

And then after all that success, he was getting tired of everybody's tongue and it's easy to build these followings for celebrities. So he devised the formula and he said, I can do this for anybody in 30 days, he built a million followers for himself. Then he wrote a book about it.

Now he's touring everywhere speaking and getting these like big consulting contracts. So when I talked to him, I was just kind of picking his brain about how I become a professional speaker, because I was trying to break into that, right, because I value stages more than anything, right? That's why I'm so grateful to be on your podcast and to be on stage, I appreciate it. After I'm done, like picking his brain, I approach it, like I approach all relationship building, and I'm like, How can I help you, man? How can I be a value to us? I'm not really sure.

Like, what what are you struggling with? He's like, Well, you know, man, I've got this group, that, you know, I'm killing it getting these like 20 $30,000 consulting contracts, but I want to scale my influence. And I want to help more people. And I've got a couple of groups that I'm trying to do that like $ 1,000-month Consulting Group and a $50, month group coaching group, and I'm not getting people to stay on.

So I'm not paying enough attention to what I need to be doing. And I'm just off doing other things. And I'm like, Dude, this is exactly what I did at the last place that I was at. And I'd be happy to give you everything that I've learned from it, or schedule a couple of calls and let you do your thing, or schedule robo calls or workshop it out with you.

And then you go do your thing. Or if you want, I can send you a proposal of exactly how I would implement it, what would you pay me for this is what I would do is like, that's what I want to do, I want to provide as much value as I can to my people, I want somebody that's done this to just, you know, show up and tell me how to tell me where to swingman, and I'm gonna hit home runs. Right. And that's how it started.

Gresham Harkless 11:30

That makes perfect sense. I wanted you to write especially this, I want to ask you, I guess for what I call your secret sauce. And this might have been what you already touched on. But it's whatever you feel kind of makes you unique and makes you different.

Pablo Gonzalez 11:40

The actual secret sauce that has developed and my superpower is that I genuinely find something fascinating. And everybody that I mean, like I'm very, very interested in you. And I know that there's this quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson, that every man I meet is in some way my superior, and from that I can learn from them.

Gresham Harkless 11:58

Incredible superpower is an example of a secret sauce. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit. And I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. This might be an app or book or a habit that you have, but something that makes you more effective and efficient.

Pablo Gonzalez 12:10

I think that the way that I reach out to people via email, or via, or hit them on the DM, or whatever I'm doing, I have a formula for it. And I think it works really well. Now, I'd be happy to get to right like I have a formula for that and have a formula for how to make intros. But when I'm reaching out to somebody, I always start with the word you instead of I. Because when you take a selfie of a group of people, and you pass it around, what's everybody looking at themselves?

So if you start with the word you, you're more likely to get that person's attention. The other thing is when I introduce people, right, like I said, I look at everything as stages, when I introduce myself to people and this is a big part of why I'm successful is because I like connecting with people. I use that as a stage as well. I say Gresh me Pablo, problemy Gresh. Pablo Gresh is this guy who's got the CEO podcast, he's unlocked all the secrets of CEOs.

And he's got the stage that he helps people with. It's a brilliant lead magnet. And he's a genius at marketing. And he can help you do all this stuff. Gresh me, Pablo, Pablo is obsessed with human connection. He wants to connect with everybody else. He has a wide network, I'm sure he has a lot of value to offer you.

And if you have a client to tell that you want to turn into a community, man, he can monetize it for you and create all this passive income. I hope this has been fruitful, happy to connect with everybody. Right? So I write a little paragraph about each person and why they're freaking awesome, and why I think they're awesome. And then I say I think the two of you would get along great together because you're both extraordinary people.

Gresham Harkless 13:28

Yeah. And I think that's perfect. I love the strategic step-by-step process by which you do that. So now I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO nugget. And that is a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. Or if you can happen to a time machine. What would you tell your younger business self?

Pablo Gonzalez 13:43

I'd say the biggest mistake that everybody makes, is assuming that the person that you're speaking to is already thinking what you're thinking. And by that, I mean that you never start a conversation with anybody. You are simply entering a conversation that's already going on in someone's head.

Gresham Harkless 13:58

Yeah, well, I definitely appreciate that. And I wanted to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO, and we're hoping to have different quote-unquote, CEOs on the show. So Pablo will just being a CEO mean to you?

Pablo Gonzalez 14:09

Being a CEO is having an opportunity at true success, the way that I define true success, has four steps. The first one is to find something that you love doing that you're really, really good at. Step two, find a way to use that for others. Step three is to find a way to monetize that while still being genuine.

So you are doing something you love that you love doing that you're really good at, you're serving others with it, and you're also making some money on it because you create so much value that people want to pay you now because you have to trick him into being your customer. And then number four is his definition of success, which is building a business around that to the point where you have freedom and but freedom. I don't mean that freedom is not the ability to do whatever you want. The freedom is doing.

Gresham Harkless 14:55

Absolutely, Pablo, I appreciate your time. I appreciate your your your your work. work even more and all the awesome things you're doing to make the world a better place, I wanted to pass you the mic so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional, you can let our readers and listeners know. And then of course, how best they can get ahold of you, and find out about all the awesome things you're working on.

Pablo Gonzalez 15:11
I think that if you are somebody who is trying to create content around yourself to grow your personal brand, and you're trying to scale your impact, instead of just serving people that can pay you 10,000 20,000 30,000, you want to figure out how to get like a group of people that can pay you 50 That you can scale out. That's what I'm doing for people right now. As I said, my mission is to prove to the world that community creation is the future of business development. And that is the customer that I would like to talk to, apart from that like I said, I want to connect with absolutely everybody because I'm a connector.

And I think that I can have some kind of value to your journey. If you're listening to this. And you connect with what I'm saying. I would love to help you figure out whatever you're trying to communicate whatever you're trying to do. I'm always trying to help people. The best way to reach me is my email address is youshouldatconnectwithpablo.com My Instagram is PG storytelling. So Pablo Gonzalez storytelling, PG storytelling, and my website are connected with pablo.com

Gresham Harkless 16:08

Definitely, I definitely appreciate you I appreciate all the value bombs that you dropped today. We will have those links in the show notes as well so that everybody can connect with Pablo as the saying goes I appreciate your time again and I hope you have a great rest of the day.

OUTRO 16:23

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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