Bob Hoeffner
The book is scary and it should be scary because it's telling you that you can't work twice as hard and get twice as much, which means that you do have to come up with new ideas. You have to grow, and you have to grow exponentially.
Kristiana Corona
Ever feel like everyone else has leadership figured out, and you're just making it up as you go?
I've been there. I spent two decades leading design and technology teams at Fortune 500 companies, and for years, I looked like I had everything pulled together on the outside, but on the inside, I felt burned out, overwhelmed, and unworthy of the title leader. Then a surprise encounter with executive coaching changed my life and dramatically improved my leadership style and my results.
Now I help others make that same shift in their leadership. This podcast is where we do the work, building the mindset, the coaching skills, and the confidence to lead with clarity and authenticity, and to finally feel worthy to lead from the inside out. Welcome back to The Worthy To Lead podcast. I'm your host, Christiana Corona.
If you're just tuning in, you are catching part two of my conversation with business leader, coach, and serial entrepreneur, Bob Hoeffner. In part one, we explored Bob's incredible journey across industries from building a rental chain in just 14 months to selling one of his companies for over $73 million, and how he approached each chapter with a mindset of continuous growth.
So if you haven't heard yet, I highly recommend going back to listen to the first episode. But even if you're just jumping in here first, you're in for a treat. Bob and I are diving into the book. 10 X is Easier Than Two X by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy. We're uncovering what it really looks like to go 10 x in business and in life.
In this episode, we dig into the mindset behind bold leadership, the identity shift that fuels 10 x growth, and what it really takes to lead through chaos without losing your optimism. So let's dive into the rest of my conversation with Bob.
So one of the other topics in the book that I wanted to dive into today was just sort of this idea of an identity shift and the internal drivers that sort of move us in that direction. And what they talk about in the 10 x book is your future self should drive your present decisions. 10 x is about who you are becoming.
And I really love that idea. And I was curious about, you know, as you thought about those shifts, those 10 x jumps that you've had, what identity did you have to shed to be able to step into that bigger version of yourself?
Bob Hoeffner
I think it's interesting you look at your career minds longer, but I would expect to see similar trajectory as you continue to grow.
Who to thunk? When I was a biology major in college, that at some point I would be COO of a company, or multiple times being a COO, or that I'd build my own business. It was not the norm that it is today to build your own business. When I was growing up as a child, and like you, limited means my dad was a school teacher for 42 years, and everything was kind of modest and people didn't take the chances that they did today. In fact, typically in a corporate career, you work for one corporation or one company in your entire life. So if someone would've told me at age 16, 17, 18 that you're going to take what you have today and become a leader and have an effect on hundreds and thousands of people, I would've.
Perhaps not said they were crazy, but I certainly didn't have any expectation on that. In fact, I remember getting outta college in 1975 and thinking, wouldn't it be great to just earn $30,000 a year? That would be everything we possibly could need as a married couple, and we could have kids in the whole nine yards.
And so I think just grew up in a limiting circumstance, but I think that. The book is scary. There's no getting around. The book is scary, and it should be scary because it's telling you that you can't transact, you can't work twice as hard and get twice as much. And perhaps, it's not even saying you can't do that, but it's saying that.
Wouldn't it be great if you looked at transforming instead of transacting, and you go to a 10 x circumstance, which means that you do have to come up with new ideas. You have to grow, and you have to grow exponentially. You can't have all these if you're surrounded by limiting factors, you've gotta remove them and or you've got to allow yourself to make a lot of mistakes.
Take a lot of chances, play a lot of games, win a lot. In fact, you have to win more than you lose. But take those losses and learn something from 'em, and take those wins and build on the wins. And uh, so I don't know if that answered your question, but I think we're all very, very limited. And yet that's the beauty of being human, is that we can grow.
To become something that we never dreamed of. I mean, the last thing I ever thought I would be is a senior leader working with a lot of folks and having a successful career in business and impacting and being brave enough to try to impact people now by working with more of them coaching's one-on-one.
But when we get into the world that I'm in now, and you're talking about doing much the same, we're now looking at being one to many. It's a, it's another 10 x jump.
Kristiana Corona
Oh, for sure. And I think something you hit on there around. What we thought success would look like as a child or as a young person, and really how those things can or can be guardrails or limits to our beliefs without us even knowing, you know, like the idea of, well, I could never make more than this.
Because no one in my family has ever made more than this, or I can't imagine a job where I would get paid that much for doing the same amount of work and for a long time. Those types of things can kind of set in until you start to realize, oh, there's so much growth to be had in honing in on those skills and just becoming better and better and better and more valuable to each company until you get to that point where you are, a leader and you are building your own companies and becoming the COO, or you know, whatever that role might be, it feels like constantly shedding one identity for another. At least that's how it's felt to me, is just this, it's never stagnant. It's never, this is who I am, and I've reached the outcome, and we're done now, and now I just follow this track for the rest of eternity, similar to you.
It's just been really like, I think, transformative throughout. Many of the roles where it's like, well, that seems hard at the time, and then you kind of master that, and then you say, Oh, I guess I could lead teams twice as big as that. I guess I could lead teams that are different disciplines than that. I guess I could lead that on a global scale.
I guess I could lead that at a company as huge as Amazon. You know, it's just constantly, you're making those jumps, but it requires that backbone of belief that it's even possible for you. And taking courageous jumps along the way to say like, well, it's not where I am now, but perhaps there's this future for me that's bigger and it's worth taking a risk for.
Bob Hoeffner
Yeah, absolutely. And it's interesting. I think optimism plays a huge role in this, and so does coincidence. You know, it gets to be pretty spiritual when you think about the coincidences as well. But if you're optimistic, typically. You feel like you're going to win, so you take bigger chances. I mean, some of the places that my career took me, I actually started coaching in 2001, but in 2004 and 2005, a good friend of my wife asked me to help him with a new business, and he was the founder.
Well, next thing you know, he's asking me to be his COO and we're going, we're gonna start a music company, which in two. Was online music instruction, guitar, keyboard, bass, drums, and vocal through the internet. That's before YouTube had even taken on. So we had, one of our big decisions was, are we going to stream or are we gonna download?
And we were really limited by bandwidth and capacity at that point. But here he is asking me to go into the music business, and I love music, but cannot play an instrument. And he loves music and is a pretty good businessman, to be honest. Had been pretty successful. But he knew too much of the themes we're talking about that he couldn't do it on his own.
So he invited me to partner with him. And one of the really big challenges we faced is we needed to raise about $5 million to get started, $5 million in 2005. And of course, this is after the internet of boom and must. There aren't a whole lot of people that wanna write those kinds of checks at that point.
We talk to 183 people in about a year period to raise it. Typically 25 to $50,000 at a time. We got tons of nos. In fact, we were happy to get nos because no meant move on to the next person. And we learned so much, and there was so much adversity in getting to the. What would be the first day? 'Cause we promised the investors we would not spend a penny of the money until we reached about two and a half million dollars.
We thought we could be build the company, then it would be successful. It's about optimism. It's about taking chances. It's about being careful about it. It's about surrounding yourself with the who's. But to some degree, maybe you have to be kind of ignorant and just. You've said it, we've said it already.
Sometimes you take what comes your way, and you say, I'll try that.
Kristiana Corona
Hey, that's funny that you say that. It's almost better to not know how hard it is and to just go in and work on it, versus if you knew every single thing about how difficult it was gonna be and the mountain you were gonna climb, you know, would you still have climbed that mountain eagerly?
Bob Hoeffner
Not if we were smart sometimes. I think one of the toughest days I ever faced in business was a Friday. We had, at that point, about 38 or 40 employees in the music business, and payroll was due that day. And we had talked to an investor. It turned out he was a board member, so he had already written a check, but we had to talk to this gentleman, bill, and we needed a check from him to make the payroll that afternoon.
And we needed it so badly that he wanted to go play golf with Dave and I and Dave, and, and he went off to play golf. But I couldn't join them on the first toll because I had to take the $50,000 check he wrote to the bank to make the payroll. And I look back on that, and I wasn't as terrified as I should have been.
I don't remember thinking about what happens if we don't get that check today. And it really could have even been a career changer if we hadn't got the check. But you learn to gut it out. You learn to work really hard, too. You were so much of what we're talking about is really optimistic. And yet there are plenty of bad days or challenging days in business, and we've got to roll with those and somehow make it work on the bad days.
Kristiana Corona
And it sounds like it wasn't from a place of this is comfortable. I know exactly what to do all the time. You were living on the edge for quite a while as you're growing this business and you're literally building the plane as you're flying it, it sounds like, and you kind of have to have like guts of steel a little bit to live that.
Close to the edge and know like, okay, I have this faith and belief that I, we're gonna get through this. We're gonna, you know, there's a better destination in mind here, even though I don't see all of exactly how we're going to get there today.
Bob Hoeffner
The light is very dim at the end of the tunnel.
Kristiana Corona
Yeah. It's just paint. It's like, is that a star? What is that? Yeah. As you think about that bigger version of yourself and, you know, making those shifts and the process of, of going through that, um, I'm curious. How has ambition changed for you over time? Like as you kind of were grasping towards these bigger things, um, you know, maybe there were certain things you wanted, things that meant success to you, and I'm curious how those have evolved over time.
Bob Hoeffner
You know, that's, that's a really interesting question. I think I'm, I'm typically ambitious, and ambition plays an important role, especially in choosing team members. You want them to have a good dose of ambition. But I think because of growing up in a family that struggled paycheck to paycheck, I remember taking money that I'd earned on a newspaper route and buying dinner on occasion, you know, running down to the grocery store and buying dinner for the family.
And the good news is we had it and I got paid back, but I don't think I realized what mega success looked like at that point in my life. As I said before, perhaps even a limiting statement was, wow, if I could make $30,000 in my life in a year, that would be really successful. I'll be honest, I wish I was more ambitious early on because in my first restaurant position, I grew from manager trainee to manager, to district manager very, very quickly, and I stayed for 13 years.
And in hindsight, it was way too long because it was a company that was nearly 50 years old, and to become a division manager, the next step up, I really need to be like 45 to 50 years old, which was of course, at that point really old. 'cause I was just touching the early thirties. So I wasn't crazy ambitious.
I think, though, that. Getting out in the world and some of its flying places, it's being on vacation. It's seeing successful people. It's seeing the people that are your bosses and leaders that you learn are, in most cases, really good people. But you start to recognize that I can do the things that they, I can learn to be a good speaker.
I can, I build a good team and we're really successful, and if they can do it, you can do it too. And I think that's a key piece because, and, and this takes us off on a little bit of a tangent, but I've worked with a lot of leaders, and I'm sure that you have too may, perhaps not quite as many as me yet, but you've been in a, you know, place where you had tremendous vision on a company growing, especially in Amazon.
They're not super special people. I certainly am as flawed as the next person. And I never met a perfect leader, and I don't think there is a perfect leader out there. And so you do get a flavor for if they can do that, I can do that too, or I can put a team in place that can accomplish some of those things that I don't know how to do.
So I think that the ambition was set for me, versus being that run through the wall type of guy. Whenever I took a job, though, I definitely ran through the wall and we're gonna get it done. The craziness of building the 40 locations at Rent Mart in 14 months was insane. Just absolutely crazy.
We didn't have a name when I joined the company, but it worked out because we worked really, really hard and took all the resources that we could to get it done.
Kristiana Corona
Yeah. So now that you've kind of been through that arc of your career where you've seen. In your words, maybe mega success or something much bigger than you ever believe possible. What does it look like to be ambitious in this season of life?
Bob Hoeffner
A couple, three years ago, I really thought a lot about what's next, and the right answer or the answer that a lot of folks would certainly have reacted to me with would've been, you're 70 years old, or you're almost 70 years old. At that point, you've been successful.
Just enjoy it, you know, you're retired. Just enjoy it. And, I have friends that, that wonder why I still, you know, do the coaching that I do now. And if they had a flavor for how much work we put into the type of initiatives that you are doing and I'm doing with the course building, they'd be like, you're crazy.
But being a lifelong learner, in my estimation, is certainly one of the things that keeps you young and keeps you interested. Keeps you interesting and so I, I love the learning part this last six months. My wife thinks I'm absolutely crazy, and yet she's been congratulatory. I'm blown away at what you've learned.
I'm really proud that you're doing these new things of which feels fantastic, quite frankly, because it's a whole set of things that they'd never really even showed an interest in. So I wish I could look out another 10 or 15 or 20 years and know that I could build something that's gonna last that long.
But there is at least. A wall in front of you from the standpoint of how long you can work at it, but I haven't slowed down at this point. Not a lot.
Kristiana Corona
No. And I just wanna share for anyone listening that what it's like to see Bob at work, and he's totally right. He does not slow down. He's one of the fastest responding people I've ever met.
And what I love about that is there is no hesitation. There's no hesitation to worry, to think it, overthink it to, you know, analysis paralysis. Oh, we gotta perfect it. You know, whatever those habits are that you've built over the years, I think are extraordinarily helpful in this phase of reinvention, because you're not slowing down to say, can I really do this?
Can I really make a reel? How do I do YouTube? You know, like you're just going after it. And I think it's so inspiring and I love that energy that creates and that motivates me. You know, when I see you moving through whatever it is that you don't know and learning and saying, I know how to edit in Canva.
I know how to make a video. Here's how, here's how you do ads on Google and all of these things. It's just. It's a great example of what it looks like to get out of your own way and to be able to continuously learn on the edge of your capability and building that capability, and stretching that capability.
And I think, you know, as a newer entrepreneur, that is the energy that I wanna surround myself with. That is the type of people that I wanna work with because I can certainly get in the headspace of. Gosh, this is new for me. I don't know what I'm doing yet. How do I know what system I should use? How do I know that I'm gonna get those sales?
How do I know that that income's gonna come? And it's very easy to fall into that trap of worrying because you've never done it. So I just wanna call that out and say, I really appreciate your learning on display for me, because it's reminding me there is power in doing, there is power in learning as you go.
And that that is in and of itself what's really creating this momentum.
Bob Hoeffner
So you're way too kind. 'Cause I've thoroughly hoodwinked you, and I think that's, it's worth spending a minute or two about. There are times as a leader that afternoon. Where we're virtually begging to get a check to make payment to a wonderful group of people that were working so hard.
They were all shareholders because we couldn't pay them very much. Now there are times that you ask the questions, can I do this? And I think if the, perhaps the key, and I know this is a big challenge for a lot of folks, not everybody can do this, but does that question, can I do it, or look at the challenges I'm facing, paralyze you.
Or perhaps energize you. And I've been really fortunate, and I've been fortunate with the folks that have been around me, including Marilyn and even the kids, that I'm typically not paralyzed. But I have to tell you that there are times when you're like, what the heck am I doing here in a number of situations.
I mean, we built a half-hour infomercial when we were in the music business. And it was four o'clock in the morning, and the first infomercial was gonna be launched at five o'clock, and something wasn't working. And there were team members working on one side of the building on the phone with London, trying to get some type of a IT block removed because of commerce.
And then here I am just desperately trying to get the marketing place because we're get writing a big check for 18 or 19 half-hour infomercials in that first week. Didn't know anything about the infomercials. You really had to do that work with a fellow who taught me a ton. So one of the things that's worked for me is to kind of rely on the term unflappable, because in front of the folks we lead, I think it's very important that you're that person that helps absorb the adversity and even for them and on their behalf.
There've been lots of times where people have looked at me or said afterwards, wow, Bobby, you just, you were unflappable. And the fact of the matter is, I may have acted unflappable. I may have hopefully thought through the problem, and we got to a solution that worked, but underneath, you're really challenged.
And I, I think it's fair that, that, I admit that and, uh, I appreciate the good job I've done and, and helping you understand that generally the positive energies there.
Kristiana Corona
Well, and I think that's the difference, maybe between your external persona or how you present yourself to others versus how you're feeling on the inside.
And kind of the bookend of this sort of 10 X conversation to me comes back to. 10 X is not a comfortable endeavor. If you wanted to be comfortable, you would stay right where you are. You would have no growth. You would do exactly what you do well, and you would just plant yourself and stay there forever.
But what 10 X feels like in reality is that sort of. I am going to just push forward and I am going to do my best to be calm in this chaos and to handle the discomfort of all of this learning and showing up and maybe messing up and not doing it well in service of I know I can get there at some point, or I know that I'm building towards something meaningful.
Right. There's a vulnerability in that.
Bob Hoeffner
Mm-hmm. It's scary. And as I've probably now handed the book to four or five clients and friends, and I do warn them typically that this book may really mess with you. It may really push you in a direction that you weren't prepared to go in. And you may take some chances that are significant, and oh, by the way, they don't always pan out, but you do have to be prepared for that.
It's a phenomenal idea the way the book's been put together. And Dan Sullivan's been a successful coach for 55, 60 years. I actually ran across him for the first time in 2001.
Kristiana Corona
I love that. So if you were to give advice to leaders who think they have to appear like they have it all together to succeed, what would you say?
Bob Hoeffner
Don't even try. I think so much of this is about talking with. Instead of talking at and talking to, I think we share and we, you know, the, the type of meaning that I described before when Doug would get together with the DVPs and Dave and I, and there's a lot of conversation there, and it wasn't all easy and good and it wasn't all, we're gonna just straight line to success.
I mean, it companies struggle. And so recognizing how valuable vulnerability or talking with. Sharing how you feel about things can be to your team, I think, is super important. I think I've always been comfortable in allowing the team to understand what all the thinking was, not just what my thinking was, but all the thinking around them.
And, um. I think when they start to understand the challenges and see the scorecard too, I'm really big on making sure there's a scorecard in front. They can enjoy the journey. They can start to see how they can be part of the journey too.
Kristiana Corona
It feels even more overwhelming I think, when leaders are trying to present a perfect, shiny, rosy persona because it makes other people feel like it's completely unattainable and on the converse side of that, if you don't show any kind of like I'm holding things together through the chaos and you let everyone just experience the drama and the problems, and you bring all that negativity and you make it worse, either one of those doesn't feel sustainable or helpful to building up the next generation of leaders.
And so one of the things I always thought about in my leadership role was how am I modeling what it looks like for someone else to eventually take my place? What does it look like if I am showing up during chaos and I express, Hey, you know what? This is hard. This is hard on all of us. I feel what you're feeling right now.
Let's make space to talk about what we're going through and not brush over it. Not cement over it, like act like it doesn't exist, but let's talk about it. It's hard for me too, but also not making it worse, and not making it so that someone says, I never wanna be a leader. Like that, that job sounds terrible.
I don't ever wanna do that. You know, like how you kind of balance those sides of yourself to role model in a way, what it looks like to handle chaos gracefully, but also not to such a level that it's unrealistic.
Bob Hoeffner
Yeah. With there. And the blame game gets played a lot, and I certainly have played the blame game at times, and sometimes you have to find out where the problem was, and it's either a system problem or a people problem, but the key is to be solution-oriented. And I think a lot of people miss out on that. They get crazy, you know, even things happen on our everyday life. Maybe it's a vehicle accident or something like that, or something happens within their life.
It could be one of a million things and th best thing we can do, or at least what's worked for me best, is to just look for the solution instead of doing the, oh my God, the sky is falling. I joke about what it's like to be a little bit older and have various physical things come at you. And I always I describe it as whack-a-mole.
You know the game that you see at the amusement park. Yeah. And you could dwell on it, or you could do your best to deal with it and having that solution orientation. And I think that's what leaders miss out on the most, is that oftentimes they're looking to lay blame. And you know, we see that in the world of politics as well.
It's all about. No, it's, it's you, it's you, it's you. It's a blame game. But if we're solution-oriented, we can provide that leadership persona that the people need to see.
Kristiana Corona
I love that. Well, I feel like this is a topic I could talk to you about all day long. Um, so thank you for doing this. I do wanna wrap up maybe with one last question regarding 10 x.
So if you were thinking about. The leaders in this audience, what is one small courageous step that you think someone could start taking to start moving towards that 10 X version of themselves in the future?
Bob Hoeffner
First of all, feeling like you can do it. You've got to have that optimism in place and, and I think you've gotta welcome that, but then I think it's about thinking five steps out.
When we started to raise the money, we only had about 15 people that we even thought we could talk to. In the end, we talked to 183 people. Dave kept score. I didn't, but he actually told me he was talked to 183 people. And so it was a spidering effect. And so if you're a leader or you're someone who [00:28:30] wants to open a new business, you have to really think out about the different challenges.
You know? Okay, so how will I get funding? How perhaps, will I get a second round of funding? Am I going to stop at one location or maybe multiple locations? How am I gonna build the team? Oh, everybody's saying that you get good people. So how am I going to be the person who gets really good people? And so to some degree, it absorb everything that's happening around you in the marketplace.
I use the term, which occasionally gets people's attention. You sometimes you have to get naked, you have to really allow things to. Come to you and so that you can really examine them. So yeah, I think thinking out, but it oftentimes falls to how important the optimism is. Years and years ago, I think.
Like 30 years ago, Metropolitan Life, you know, big insurance company, big life insurance company did a study. At least not to my surprise, and I don't think it'll be surprising to you, 88% of their successful salespeople were optimists. You do have to feel like you can do it. You can win that game.
Kristiana Corona
The other thing that I think this question reminds me of is back in the day, kind of talking about the big, hairy, audacious goal or the impossible goal.
I think one of the things that we forget about is when we set those kinds of goals, it feels scary and exhilarating, and it just completely makes you throw the playbook out. So whatever you've adopted and you know your structure and how you've gotten things done up until that point, it's not gonna work anymore, and it forces that process of saying.
Woo. Okay. If I thought that I wanted one location, but now I say, well, what do it look like to have 10 locations? Or if I thought about $500,000, but now I'm thinking about $2 million. How you get from that jump, you know? Um, I remember this time at Target we had this VP of product who was really focused on these B hs, and we created this audacious goal for a quarter, and we said we spend millions of dollars in call center costs for these orders.
And if we tried to establish a goal to get the call center's dollars to zero, what would that be? How might we do that in one quarter? And everyone was kind of like running around with their hair on fire. Like, no way. That's impossible. We haven't been able to do that in 25 years. That's impossible. But the impossibility of it was the brilliance because the team, the people came together differently.
We changed everything about how we worked. We moved everyone to the same floor. Instead of doing rhythms and routines every few weeks, we did it every week. We changed things to periods of days instead of weeks. We were. Communicating completely differently. And you know what? We shifted that number more than they've ever seen.
It didn't hit zero, but it sure got close because we had to throw out everything that we thought we knew. And just completely get creative and innovative in that space. And so that always in my head is resonates as this example of bold leadership and going for something really big that sounds impossible.
And when we do that for ourselves and we think about it that way, you know, we may worry like, oh, I'm gonna disappoint myself. I won't get there. But really at the end of the day, that's not what happens most of the time is you're so proud of yourself because you're like, I took on this challenge. That was so much bigger than anything else I've ever done. And look what I can accomplish
Bob Hoeffner
And the breakthroughs and you know, you were for one of the companies that was a poster child, is a poster child for breakthroughs because it started out as a bookseller, a bookseller against Barnes and Noble, and a couple other brands that were on the street. And here they are as a bookseller on the internet, and a place where you could find any book.
And they've grown into a company that is the biggest distribution network in the world. And then now so much more when you look at Amazon Web Services and who knows what's next, and you couldn't plot that out at that point. And I'm sure people said they're crazy. The blockbuster videos were replaced by Netflix, and today Netflix is a lot more than video delivery.
They create some of the best movies on the planet. You know, when you look at Apple and and so many of those types of things, the key is for us not to limit ourselves. Yeah. Yeah. So much of what we talked about today has huge implications in how we look at Maslow's hierarchy because the steps usually take time, you know, to go from survival, to safety, to security, and ultimately to self-actualization.
That book is crazy valuable and that it helps us just slide up and gain a sense of success that normally would take many, many, many years to get. The whole idea of 10 X is so scary because it accelerates you whether you like it or not.
Kristiana Corona
Mm. Yeah,
Bob Hoeffner
So you can move up pretty quick and probably slide up and down a bit along the way, but it's one of the neat things in the book, and honestly, one of the scary things in the book. Are you prepared for it?
Kristiana Corona
Are you prepared to push yourself to that level or to experience success at that level? I think that's so fascinating because a lot of people won't realize how different it feels. Until they've gotten there and they're like, whoa, wait a minute. You know, I kind of to the point of building that awareness over time about what I didn't know, and sometimes you don't know what you don't know, but then when you show up you realize, oh, this is asking for me to, you know, really step outta my comfort zone in a very different way than what I'm used to.
Bob Hoeffner
Yeah.
Kristiana Corona
So Bob, if people are interested in following up with you, um, where should they go to find out more about you?
Bob Hoeffner
Probably the easiest place, and the one that's easiest to articula,te is optimize my franchise.com, which is, you know, my website, which speaks of the coaching opportunities. Which I still do some coaching at the executive level or at the, I shouldn't say executive level at the success level.
Cause I typically work with people that are optimistic and want to do special things with their life. So it's not always executives. Very often it's individuals. One of my best clients is a really good friend who bought a cruise planners franchise during COVID. The good news is it only cost him $3,900.
The bad news is most of the first year was cancellations during COVID, and uh, he's super successful today, and he is just a blast to be with. But optimism, my franchise investments probably the easiest place to learn, but you can find me at various places on in YouTube and social media presence is growing. And, um, it's Instagram.
Kristiana Corona
You're on Instagram and Instagram.
Bob Hoeffner
Yep. Yep.
Kristiana Corona
Ah, that's so great. And
Bob Hoeffner
At the course I put together is about standing out in the marketplace. So the Franchise Awards do a great job of training their system, and it's about protecting their brand. And you pay for the brand. If you're buying a Chick-fil-A or a McDonald's, most of what you're writing a check for is to buy a phenomenal brand.
The fact that when you open a Chick-fil-A, there's gonna be a liner around the building the first day. They also protect their system and help you learn the system. But most franchisors, and of course, I was a franchisor multiple times, we didn't coach people on running a business or on how to hire, how to interview, how to market, how a network we coached on.
How to buy cars when I was in the rental, the car rental business, or how to buy food, and what product was appropriate in the restaurant business. So the way I approach the Optimize your franchise investment course is it's everything that you don't typically focus on in the franchise or training. So hopefully there's that compliment because it's about.
Leadership and expectations and a bad day and the things you run into. There just might be a couple stories kind of weaved into there. Some of which you've heard today.
Kristiana Corona
You have great stories.
Bob Hoeffner
My poor wife, she walks by the door so often and hears stories multiple times, and she's like, you told that story again.
Kristiana Corona
Oh, I love it. Yeah. I mean. Can there really be too many times telling the same story?
Bob Hoeffner
I don't know. I don't know. And, and, and it's only fair to her because she hates me to talk about it, but certainly the biggest 10 x breakthrough in my life was Marilyn and I were engaged after only knowing each other for 20 days.
Hmm. It's crazy. Um, neither one of us were looking to get in a long-range relationship, but certainly. That happened very quickly and the question just popped out and, uh, it's been the greatest. Success of my life. 'cause it'll be 50 years next year.
Kristiana Corona
Congratulations.
Bob Hoeffner
Thanks.
Kristiana Corona
All right. Well, I appreciate all of your time today. This has been such a joy. Thank you for sharing your stories and your wisdom and just kind of revealing what it's like to be on this 10 x journey. I'm sure there's a lot of people who have resonated with what you said today.
Bob Hoeffner
It's been a lot of fun, and hopefully there's some value there. And, um, you know, I really, really appreciate you spending the time. It feels good. To talk about some of these things and successes and even some of the challenges because, and hopefully it helps.
Kristiana Corona
Well, thank you so much. Thank you so much for joining us today. I had a blast talking to Bob again, and I always do. In fact, this is pretty much what all of our conversations feel like when we're talking. If you haven't already, I would highly recommend getting a copy of the book 10 X is Easier Than Two X by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy. I'll make sure and add the link in the show notes for you. And if you're enjoying these podcast episodes, don't forget to subscribe so that you get all the new ones as I release them. You can subscribe at worthytoleadpodcast.com/subscribe. Thank you so much for listening. Keep showing up, keep doing the work that matters, and keep leading like you're worthy to lead because you are. Bye for now.
