IAM1799 – Speaker, Trainer and Sales Coach on a Personal Mission to Help People Supercharge Their Sales Team and Be Happier

Rachel Sheerin Teaser 00:00

I'm a professional behavioral analyst. So what I do is I bring in professional assessments prior to arriving. I assign seats of people who naturally conflict in behaviors and I love it because people are nervous. By an hour in people are understanding, not other people themselves. Give me two hours understanding others, hour number three appreciating others.

Then we build on sales, profits, happiness, and communication from there.

Intro 00:27

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 00:52

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast, and I appreciate you listening to this episode. If you've been listening this year, you know that we hit over 1600 episodes at the beginning of this year. We're doing something a little bit different where we're repurposing our favorite episodes around certain categories, topics, or as I like to call them, the business pillars that we think are going to be extremely impactful for CEOs, entrepreneurs, business owners, and what I like to call CB nation architects who are looking to level up their organizations.

This month we are focused on the visibility game, a.k.a. Marketing, Advertising, PR, and Sales. I often say the name of the game is being found in these tools will help you to do that. We have heard the philosophical question, if the tree falls in the forest and no one is around, does it make a sound? If there's a really, really great product or service and no one knows about it, how great is it really? What impact does it ultimately make? This is where we will go into this month. Looking at visibility, branding, marketing, public relations, sales, being the lifeblood of businesses, building meeting companies, and so much more.

This is probably one of the most exciting and probably the most excruciating topics, but we hope this month to demystify and maybe even vanquish the fear and hope and arm you with the tools to be able to increase your visibility. So buckle up and sit back and enjoy this special episode of the I AM CEO podcast.

Hello, hello, hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today at Rachel Sheerin of rachelsheerin.Com. Rachel, it's awesome to have you on the show. What I wanted to do was just read a little bit more about Rachel so you can hear about all the awesome things that she's doing.

Rachel is a Speaker, trainer and sales coach who is an expert in the hospitality industry. She is on a personal mission to help people sell more, be happy and define success on their own terms. Featured in Ink Magazine, This Week in Weddings, Lodging Leaders, and more, Rachel's clients include hotel sales teams, catering companies, meeting planners, and more.

If you're looking to inspire your audience, supercharge your sales team and build a life that's bursting with joy and profits, Rachel is your guru.

Rachel, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

Rachel Sheerin 03:02

Absolutely.

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Gresham Harkless 03:03

All right, let's do it. So the first question I had was just to hear a little bit more about your CEO story and what led you to start your business.

Rachel Sheerin 03:09

I fell into a job after college. I loved serving others. I loved being part of people's joy and that really brought me to the hospitality and special events industry. I loved it. Nights, weekends, full time. It was awesome. I worked in different venues in and around Philadelphia as well as Charlotte, North Carolina, which is my home and my HQ. Long story short is I loved it. until I didn't love it. I think that's a really common story for high performers. Oh, you're going, you're climbing the ladder of success, new titles, new comments in your salary, and all of a sudden what you have loved, that joy you get out of work vanishes.

It vanished for me, and I experienced burnout. So a few years ago, I said, you know what? I can't do this anymore. My employer at the time, I was trying to negotiate a few months off, please hold my job. It wasn't working out and I get that them as a CEO, they needed to do what was best for the company I had helped to build. So I took some time off and what I really discovered my CEO story was what was bursting out of me. Anyway when I am at my best, I love helping people get money. I believe that money's freedom.

I also realized the whole coaching consulting training side of things. I always loved trainers. I loved going to conferences, watching speeches, getting inspired, and you walk out of there and you're like, I'm a changed person. So the one thing that I realized though was, I thought I could do it better and that's how I became a CEO. It's what I love seeing other CEOs do.

Gresham Harkless 04:43

I love that. I wanted to drill down a little bit deeper and hear a little bit more about how you're serving these clients. I know you touched on it a little bit, but could you tell us a little bit more about what you're doing?

Rachel Sheerin 04:51

Yeah, absolutely. I really have two main components of my business. The first one is keynote speeches. I deliver speeches typically in the hospitality industry or to any industry that serves other people. So it could be things like the medical industry, government, and social services, anything from salons to wedding planners to caterers to hoteliers. And if it's your job, to make people's day better, to serve others, and you have that servant's heart, I want to help you with that because a lot of times what we see is a massive amount of burnout and burnout.

Again, it's when joy leaves your work. It leads to high turnover rates, in the medical industry, 74% year over year. When you think about it, let's think about your mom going to the hospital. We don't want three out of four brand-new nurses doing that, right? We need to keep great people in their positions so that they're competent and they're qualified. Now, doctors, they experience burnout. They stick around a long time, which means they're miserable to work with and they're miserable in their life. That's not fair either. But they probably have so many student loans.

So I really focus on two very main keynotes. One is about burnout and how to bring joy back into your life, and also prevent it for other people. Know the signs. I call burnout depression really successful cousin. It is true because everything looks so good. I was a six-figure earner, award-winning director, executive, all this stuff and boy, was I miserable. I was crying on the way to work sometimes. It was tough. So keynotes, I love it. It's motivational, it's high energy, it's very real talk. I'm very low BS when I talk about it.

I think people really respond to that on the training side of things. Just like I said, I saw people training and I said, this is boring, this is like being in school, and I understand, I think school has its place, but adult learners were combating, iPhones, tablets, meetings, chances are you're sitting next to somebody in a training class. Everyone clicks up when they sit down. I'm a professional behavioral analyst. So what I do is I bring in professional assessments prior to arriving. I assign seats of people who naturally conflict in behaviors and I love it because people are nervous. By an hour in, people are understanding not other people themselves, give me two hours, understanding others, hour number three appreciating others.

Then we build on sales, profits, happiness, and communication from there. Because to me, the killer of every single team, it's not talent, it's not skill, it's not education. It's likability in its communication, but if we don't break down those barriers in a real way, I'm not here to talk to you like this. And please look at this slide with all these, sentences on it. Boring, super lame. A lot of my slides are going to have memes or videos or Saturday night live skits. I bring energy to it because what I'm here to do is help people sell more and be happy. Even if you're not in sales.

When people sell more, you represent that company all the time. I do believe employers want their employees to be happy. They just don't know how to do it. I come in and I try and help them with that.

Gresham Harkless 07:55

I wanted to touch a little bit deeper on that likeability piece. Could you talk a little bit more about that and what you mean by most organizations are struggling with that?

Rachel Sheerin 08:02

Absolutely. So, you think about it when a new leader or team member comes onto a team, what is the first thing that manager or maybe somebody introduces about them is their experience. You watch all their kind of repertoire that might fit in and make this person a logical fit. But studies show only 21% of your success in a job is your experience and your education. 21% over 70% is going to be your soft skills and communication skills. I think engineers do a great job as an example. Not to pick on them, but engineers, their genius is walking around, right? I specifically don't do math and they love to do math. What a bunch of weirdos. I love that they are so intelligent, but if nobody likes you, then nobody cares.

You can really see that a lot of times in very dominant personalities, the president right now and Hillary Clinton, right? They both ran for president one won, one did not and you can see that everyone in the world has an opinion about them. Really only ignorant people might say that they're stupid. They're not, it's the way they go about things that makes them so polarizing. That all the time on high-performing teams, people are competitive. People are driven. People do have the same goal in mind, and yet they completely have an obliviousness to how they're coming off and the value of being light.

Sure, it's like a great artist, right? You may meet them as extremely talented a visionary. Oh, my art should sell itself. No stories sell, personality sells. I'm not asking you to change yourself and become the Walt Disney or, look at Steve Jobs, right? Likeability wasn't high on his list. I reserve the right to say most people are not Steve Jobs. They're not. So we've got to work on that a little bit. I think especially for high leaders, when they start having a product, a business, a service that is really successful, they tend to top out around that 3 to 5 million mark.

They struggle and it's always people and they're always losing people and hiring new people and then blaming the people when they leave and that cycle got to be done. It's got to be over because that's our responsibility as leaders to really work on ourselves and then hope to influence others.

Gresham Harkless 10:14

Thank you for expounding a little bit more upon that. Now I wanted to ask you for your secret sauce. This is what you feel distinguishes you or sets you apart. So give us an example of your secret sauce.

Rachel Sheerin 10:22

Yeah, absolutely. I would say to me is being vulnerable and being happy. I think that when you look at corporate training, I think that the chances of you finding somebody talking about happiness for employees in and outside of work, I couldn't find it unless you're going to have some like PhD doctor come in that's going to talk about the science of happiness. I got to be honest, Gresh, I don't have time to care about science. It's not my strength, right? We're all moving forward and very, very busy. It's one thing to know that it should work, but it's another thing to feel it.  I think that's my secret sauce is really putting happiness first and understanding how related it is to every aspect of the business.

If you're happy, service is better. If you're happy, profits are better. If you're happy, daily life is better. Retention is better. Oh my God, people lose weight, they sleep better, they look forward to coming in. How many people have you worked with that when they arrive, you're like, oh no, you should have stayed home, right? And it's every day. So I think happiness from an actual how I do what I do, or back to that secret sauce, putting happiness first for sure, but also just living by the four agreements, which I know is a great resource growing up. I definitely love to talk and I was terrible at following through.

What I realized was that if I'm going to live the kind of life I am and serve the way that I want to serve, I've got to follow through and I do everything the second I finished with a client. I don't care if it's pulling an all-nighter. I can sleep on the plane ride home, but I want to make sure that they're getting everything. And it keeps me in line too.

Gresham Harkless 11:55

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. It reminds me of this quote I think I heard a long time ago where a kid was sitting in class and everybody was asking like, what do you want to be when you grow up? And he said he wanted to be happy and then somebody said, you didn't understand the question.

It was like, no, you really, you didn't understand the question because that's something that I'm achieving to do. So it's great that you have that. You try to impart that upon the people that you're training and you're leading.

Rachel Sheerin 12:14

So true. That's awesome. I love that quote.

Gresham Harkless 12:16

Yes, absolutely. Now I wanted to switch gears a little bit and ask you for what I call a CEO hack. This might be an app, a book or a habit that you have, but it's something that makes you more effective and efficient as a business owner.

Rachel Sheerin 12:26

You know what? I'm gonna go a little woo woo on my hack. It's not an app. It's not a book, though I love a lot of those things. It's actually a daily email. If you google notes from the universe. It is an email that comes out daily and it's by this guy named Mike Dooley and I've never met him. An odd guy, definitely in connection with the universe. Does a lot of retreats in Peru and the long story short is this email. Have you ever had something delivered? That's so simple. It just blows your mind for a day. Or how about a week or how about a year or how about your life? These notes from the universe emails, they arrive every single morning. I'm an Eastern standard. So it arrives around 3:30 in the morning. It's the first thing I look at in the morning.

That's right. I break the rule of no email first thing. I only read this one and the way it is, it's a note literally from the universe telling you some kind of universal truth that's out there. A few days ago, one really, really hit me hard and I share it a lot of times with my clients or with my Instagram followers. It was about how time, the record time for climbing Mount Everest is just a little under nine hours. Let's talk about something I didn't know. What am I doing with my nine hours? Why am I going to limit that? It's like Beyonce and I have the same amount of hours in the day, but you could climb Mount Everest in nine hours, like what? Come on.

I think that there are lessons. You don't have to do anything if you miss it. It's no big deal, but they're always waiting there. And for somebody who wishes they were a meditation guru, but never meditates, it's a great mindful pause to start your day off with. So Google Notes from the universe sign up. You can always unsubscribe, but I think it's a game changer and it does help with happiness for sure.

Gresham Harkless 14:06

Yeah, that definitely makes sense. Now I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO nugget, and this is a word of wisdom or piece of advice, or if you can hop into a time machine, what would you tell your younger business self?

Rachel Sheerin 14:15

I would say that you can own the privilege and the joy of influencing others. That you owe it to the world, to yourself, to go big in whatever ways you really feel called to and be unapologetic about it. But really it's such a privilege. It's a privilege to get to be here with you. It's a privilege to get to wake up in the morning. It's a privilege to be able to influence other people.

If somebody gets something from one of these hundreds of podcasts, you're doing Gresh, a victory achieved. This is what it's all about. So go get after it. I just heard a Jim Rohn quote, and I don't think I'll ever forget it. And it said, don't wish life was easier, wish that you were better. I was like, yes, we have the privilege to get better. We have the privilege to influence others and when we make it, that's showing other people they can make it too.

So own it and, dig into the joy of being somebody that can influence the world and change it.

Gresham Harkless 15:13

There you go. I definitely agree with that. So I think that's definitely a great CEO nugget. Now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition for being a CEO.

We're hoping to have different quote and quote CEOs on the show, but I wanted to ask you, Rachel, what does being a CEO mean to you?

Rachel Sheerin 15:26

That's such a good question. I would say being a CEO to me means that you have a great responsibility to be in charge of your life, to influence others, and to make a difference in the world.

We are not the cog in the wheel. We're the entire machine and that's an awesome responsibility with the right perspective.

Gresham Harkless 15:47

Absolutely. That definitely rings home and rings true. So I truly appreciate your time Rachel, for taking your time out with us. What I want to do is pass you the mic, so to speak. Just to see if there's anything additional you want to let our readers and our listeners know and then also how best people can get ahold of you.

Rachel Sheerin 16:01

Thanks. Yeah, if you want to reach out to me the best way, I love emails. So please email me. hi@rachelsheeran.com. If you want to see very cute pictures of my pitbull, you can catch me on Instagram at rachel.sheerin.

Gresham Harkless 16:15

Awesome. Thank you so much again, Rachel. I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

Rachel Sheerin 16:18

Thanks, you too. Gresh.

Outro 16:20

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.

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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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