Lloyed Lobo 0:02
Welcome to the dealing with Goliath podcast. The mission of dealing with Goliath is to sharpen the psychological edge in negotiation, ethical influencing and high impact conversations for business leaders who want to be more effective under pressure, uncover hidden value, and build greater connection all while increasing profitability. This is the short form espresso shot of insight podcast interview to boost business performance using our five questions in a roundabout 15 to 20 minutes format.

Al McBride 0:29
My guest today is Lloyd Lobo, an entrepreneur and podcast host who experienced the strength of community firsthand as a young refugee during the Gulf War, he co founded boasts.ai, a FinTech platform that reached eight figure revenue using a community led growth model and secured over $100 million in capital. He also co founded traction and powering over 100,000 innovators with connections and capital. Lloyd is the author of from grassroots to greatness, a book that offers tactical advice on building iconic brands, and quickly topped Amazon’s new release charts in startups and business technology.

He has been featured in Fox Business, TechCrunch, and Forbes, to name just one of just a very few and have spoken at the high level events, such as Sastre entrepreneurs on fire, and many, many others. So that was an abbreviation of all the things we could have said introduced it there, Lloyd. So hopefully that was okay. Welcome to the show. It’s fantastic to have you on.

Lloyed Lobo 1:36
Thank you for that fantastic intro, the intro can just be literally few words, because we’re gonna get into the meat of it in this conversation. And you’ve been a great host to many others. And I’m really, really stoked for this. Thanks for inviting me.

Al McBride 1:49
Thanks very kindly, thanks, kindly for coming on. Because this, I really loved so much about what you were doing like, and we were just talking about that before we actually get into it already before hitting record there. So just, you know, who’s your ideal client? And what’s the biggest challenge that they face?

Lloyed Lobo 2:06
Definitely. So the ideal client for me when we started, our company boasts AI, which is a FinTech platform that provides innovative companies with money to build products. If you’re developing new products, or improving existing products or technologies, there’s hundreds of billions in r&d tax credits and innovation funding, like Ireland has it, UK has it? Canada has the US has it. But the problem is, it’s a cumbersome application process. It’s prone to frustrating audits and receiving the money takes a long time.

So we said we’ll automate that process by collecting that data from your systems, your technical data, your financial data, stitch it together, and apply for it and make sure you get the money. And guess what, you don’t have to wait till the government pays it to you. We also have $100 million fund that will give you that money now as you’re doing your r&d and then collect it from the back end from the government. So our ideal customer was any company that’s developing new products or improving existing products.

Now, what’s really interesting and how that shaped was, when we started the company, we picked up the phone. And we started calling all kinds of companies because we didn’t have an ideal customer, right? So we started calling manufacturing and oil and gas and construction, and nobody would talk to us. Nobody would the people are like, Who are you guys? Two guys, I’d never heard of your saying, Give me your technical data, and they’ll give you money from the government and it won’t cost you anything.

It’s free money. There’s no interest that says it sounds dodgy. Or if they knew about it. They’re like, why would I work with my big four accounting firm? Like why work with two unknown guys. And so the evolution from there is what shaped our journey because I think Desperate times call for desperate measures and necessity is the mother of all inventions. And what came out of that learning is why we exist today why the company became successful, why I ended up writing a book why I haven’t been able to sit in Dubai and take a break for a little bit and all of it is rooted in community.

Al McBride 4:06
immunity is so so much. And this is one of the things that I loved about as you said, because so much of your principles float around community. So can you go into you did a whole research it was clearly a passion of yours for the last few years. So can you tell us more about that?

Lloyed Lobo 4:23
Yeah, definitely. So I’ll tell you what led me to the book firstly, right. So I spent my childhood summers in the slums of Mumbai. My mom grew up in the slums of Mumbai. And I was born in Kuwait. My parents, you know, Indian families, a lot of the times back in the day would work in the Middle East. It’s for better prospects. And so I was born in Kuwait, but I spent my summers my childhood summers in the slums of Mumbai. My fondest childhood memories were there watching TV was communal eating food was communal. ponds, wood or puddles would turn into ponds and we’d be swimming in it together. Even going to the bathroom men was communal, right like because they didn’t have a toilet in House. And every summer when I’d go back, I’d cry.

Then a few years later the Gulf War hit in Kuwait. And it was catastrophe. Right? said there’s no internet. There is no phones at the time, you weren’t sure if you’re going to live or die, the security has lapsed. And I experienced as a eight nine year old kid, the power of community, the largest grassroots movement that evacuated the people to safety. And as a little kid, I felt so strongly aligned to that purpose that I felt like a little Rambo alongside my dad, right. And that was a time where the first day when I heard the news, we went down the building. And everyone just came together to think about solutions not belaboring the problem.

Somebody’s like, oh God, the building from top to six, somebody else’s, like, hey, I’ll organize food, somebody else’s, like, Hey, I have extra room if your family is displaced, and every building became a sub community and communicated with the next and the next and word of mouth spread, talk to embassies, talk to countries and created this large evacuation movement getting people out from Kuwait, to Baghdad to Jordan. That was my next experience with community. Then after years later, I moved to Canada, finished engineering went into entrepreneurship. My first job in my journey, me as an engineer was going into sales.

Because I had asked a lot of people what’s the best skill to learn and they said communication. And there’s no job on the planet, which will force you to communicate day in day out more than sales. If you want to get good at something, put yourself in an environment that forces you to do that something day in, day out. And I didn’t want to do like a typical engineer job. Because these two things were driving my childhood, right the community like I wanted to do something that brings people together. And the entrepreneurial spirit, which today we talk about entrepreneurship as a way to making money.

But really entrepreneurial spirit is about taking an idea to execution and impact while dealing with extreme risk and uncertainty. And that extreme risk and uncertainty. I had the flavor for it from being a part of that Gulf War and working alongside people and the rush of like, oh, is it going to work out? Is it not? Oh, this campus is not here. And we got to go to the next place and supplies don’t exist. It was it was a lot of rush. And I felt that and so went into sales. Now, I need to learn about sales. There was a time I think 2005 or six, I didn’t know anything about sales, and everything I learned about sales and marketing that time, where through sales communities, I joined the HubSpot inbound marketing community went to their events, learned about how to create websites, learn about SEO, learn about sales techniques. And that became my community.

Then when we started boast. And we started dialing into manufacturing and oil and gas and construction, nobody would talk to us. So we started going to startup events. And we found our tribe, we felt like other founders are our tribe, because they’re also at the same spot as us trying to learn. And so we created a community for founders for innovators, who could get access to the money and the know how to build successful companies. And that became my tribe. Until late 2020. We sold half the company and shortly a few months after I departed the day to day. Now what happened when I departed the day to day of the company is I ended up depressed. I didn’t realize this all my life, I was surrounded by community.

And the one time I came into money all my life I was also poor meaning relying on my wife’s wife to pay the bills. He’s the doctor never had a job that paid enough, especially living in Silicon Valley. And now I can turn into money. I’ve hit like this definition of success from my parents society, when I’m depressed, and I started going from place to place visiting different cities catching up with friends and they thought I was crazy. And I think I think things came to a halt when I was in Romania speaking at a conference. And now there’s a conference speaker retreat after conference speaker retreat, and we’re in Bucharest for hours in the boonies. And at two in the morning. Everyone’s sitting by the pool and I’m frantically calling for an Uber and Ober shows up and 40 minutes later, finally, like Uber starts ticking and like we found a car that Uber comes. And I tell the guys hey, wait, I go to my room packed, my bags come down. I booked a ticket to Costa Rica and I tell everyone I’m leaving to Costa Rica.

That’s how crazy had gone. And eventually what got me over my craziness and depression was the fitness community, the peloton community combined with a few fitness enthusiasts. And so I came up on all this free time and I realized looking back that the only time I had everything financially, I ended up depressed. It was because I left the data of the of the company that was built on community ethos, and I felt I lost my tribe. And I started running around from place to place. And I said it’s never the money in your bank. It’s the people or on your tombstone that matter. It’s it’s not the journey, right? We say it’s the journey.

It’s not the destination. It’s neither the journey nor it’s the destination It’s the companions that mattered the most, you could be on a crappy journey on the way to hell, but great companions make it memorable. You could be sipping champagne in a chateau in Paris and feel suffocated and not want to be there. And so I started, I started this exercise and said, You know what, the thing I’m passionate about in my DNA is community. can I leverage this learning to uncover similar learnings from some of the most iconic brands out there, and perhaps serve it as a business lift lesson to people that the only way to build an enduring company is through people through the power of people, not technologies, right? Because yesterday’s innovation is always tomorrow’s commodity. You see, a perfect example is Harley Davidson in the 80s, almost went bankrupt.

When the Japanese manufacturers came in building motorbikes. What Harley did was ingenious, they went and made a community, a company strategy, not a marketing strategy, the President had direct oversight, everyone was required to go out there and create writer clubs, employees became writers, writers became employees over time, they created a movement to save Harley, but they created several movements to donate the breast cancer, and autism bike rallies, rituals around coming together, or through the camaraderie of ridership, right, and then leveraging those rallies to create impact. And hurry is a brand that people tattoo on their bodies.

It’s an iconic brand, right? It’s a legendary, same thing. The same thing goes for any piece of technology. And like we don’t say internet company anymore, like we did in 2000. We don’t say social company, we don’t say cloud company. We don’t say mobile company anymore, right? It’s the same way, there’s so much talk about AI. Eventually, every company will have intelligence, like they do a mobile app, and they’ll have a social element. And so if yesterday’s innovation always becomes tomorrow’s commodity, the key learning was, if you build a community, you won’t become a commodity. And that was true. For all the brands and coming from me, I thought the message would make sense one because built a AI company that’s done well.

Leveraging the power, power of community. So one thing like before we proceed as I talk to 1000 or so people rewatched all the content we have produced over the last seven years on our YouTube channel and looked into the guts of all these iconic brands, I found something very interesting, in every seemingly small, obscure idea that eventually became a global phenomenon had four stages in common from Christianity to CrossFit, every small idea that became a global phenomenon. It’s quite a comparison. It had it had four stages.

And so rather than making the book about four stages, I distilled it into 13 rules that will take help you navigate those four stages, but stage one is people listen to you like listening to your podcast, or buy your product, you have an audience. When you bring that audience together to interact with one another, you start having a community it’s a community. Now what how you go from community to the next level is when that community comes together to create impact towards a greater purpose that is far beyond your product or profit, it becomes a movement. And when the movement has undying faith and its purpose through sustained rituals over time, it become a cult or religion.

And I found that theme very consistently audience community movement, religion boasts made the journey to community but that journey helped us get to 10 million bootstrapped a 10 million ARR with no marketing team, our investors who ended up buying half the company also came through that community. And hopefully someday we’ll have the opportunity to build a movement and, and cult like status, but it’s a long journey. But do you look at another company like Atlassian

Australian tech company, they are worth 40 billion. They last year, their community self organize the 5000 events. How insane is that? Incredible. And it’s a product, it’s a tech product, and their community organizer organized 5000 events, which tells me that you have 5000 superfans will go up there and put their name on the line to to bring your customers together. And that touched like half a million people. And so that is the value of community that you can build going from an audience to creating sustainable rituals that over time takes you to cult like status.

Al McBride 14:38
Amazing. There’s so much I didn’t want to interrupt you. Because you were in a great flow. And I was I was captivated by your thinking by your story. There’s so many things to unpack there, but I love I particularly love the narrative of the story in your head, as you said, from being a kid, embracing that sense of community, that sense of connection. You know, the first thing that came to mind was the three things people need to be happy at work, or a sense of purpose, a sense of autonomy, and most of all, a sense of connection. And you know, when you have workplaces that people love to work in, it’s it’s big part is the connection.

How many times you hear Oh, how’s the new job? Oh, good. What are the people like, Oh, they’re great. That person is gonna be fine. Right? It’s the other way the jobs Okay, jobs, good. How’s the people who are not so great, it’s, I forgot about it leave now. Right. But I love the way you also bring in the AI. And it’s such a, you know, the love and fear. Even people who think it’s the best thing since sliced bread, like it’s going to do the best thing for humanity, there’s still a slight fear around it. But I love the way you’re bringing that in. But saying this is the way you get ahead with AI AI is a tool, you use it. But it’s to enhance this to free us to Bill’s community to build connection. Right, it’s this great opportunity that we’re just at the cusp of.

Lloyed Lobo 16:04
Exactly. And that’s what people miss, right? They think every technology is going to kill human to human connection. But if you look at every single phenomenon that has lasted and endured over time, it’s built on human to human connection, I’ll give you an example. For all the AI that exists that helps you create faster, better, you still need humans in the loop for last mile, I’ve experienced that that’s building an AI company. But what’s even more interesting is looking at the marketing trends.

When you see brand engagement, meant is going down, right, you can fuel a brand with all kinds of tech and get it to auto push, but brand engagement is going down person to person engagement is going up tick tock inside LinkedIn, just look at the stats, human to human interaction versus human to brand interaction, it’s a night and day, you’re in your personal time, or in your business time you’re engaging more with other people’s content, they may or may not use AI, but there’s human connection, their connection, right? Communication is the rails of our communities of our society of the world we live in, without the way to communicate, you can’t connect. And without connecting, you just have an empty room, you don’t have an audience, let alone a community. So how do you drive that communication? Not through bots, is through humans?

Al McBride 17:32
Absolutely, absolutely. I was reminded of the metaphor, which I keep thinking of when I hear AI, and people are saying, oh, we need to be careful with AI. And we probably do in a lot of ways. But it’s it’s like the birth of photography, you know, 101 20 150 years ago, where half the people are more than half the people settle. That’s painting dead, right? Because photos will just do everything better and instantly and much easier. Right? But the other half people said no, no, this is where finally, finally, we can be free as artists as painters that we don’t have to try and replicate a photograph we can bring it to far more interesting places. Right? And I think this is so similar is that we’re doing an awful lot of any sort of tasks that can be put into an AI to do. We’re now free from that task to a greater or lesser degree. So we’re, what are we best at was humans a creativity, a connection, a community. So I’m loving where you’re going with this. I’m loving where you’re going. So tell us because most of my stuff, to be honest, most of my stuff is kind of connection in terms of one to one or one to few rather than community wide. But I think the same principles are operating there.

Lloyed Lobo 18:48
The same principles of giving of reciprocity or building relationships of speaking in terms of the other person all exists, right? If you do it one to one, you can do it one to many. So the interesting learning was, like I said, when we started the company, we were calling all kinds of people. And nobody would talk to us, the bigger companies, manufacturing, construction, etc. So we said step two is let’s go and start going attending these people’s events. Let’s see if we can build connection. And there’s a negotiation also, there’s this thing about likeness, right. If you’re similar to somebody, it’s easier to negotiate, it’s easier to build a bond.

And we just couldn’t because we weren’t really like them. And we were just starting out, right? We we looked like guys were throwing a bunch of suit jackets on top of their hoodies, or their pajamas. And they were so sophisticated was night and day. So we said someday we’ll tackle this market. But this is not the market we tackle now there was a key learning there. Anytime you want to figure out a market you want to tackle you need a few things. One is can you relate with that market?

Do you have the passion to serve that market because building a product business is fine like you can tackling any market, but building a community led company, you need to have passion for the customer you’re serving. If you don’t have the passion for the customer you’re serving, it’s gonna take a long time. And it’s a long slog building thing, a building, anything successful is a long slog, and you may not last you will give up. So having the passion for that community, something you enjoy, something you can vibe with is important. The other one is, is it a large growing market? The next one is do they have a propensity to pay? And the final one is, is there an ease of access? I mean, it can be you can be passionate about this market.

I mean, let’s say you’re passionate about doctors, and what they’re doing. And it’s a large growing market. But if you can’t access them, because they’re so hard to reach, you’ll kill yourself, right? In six months, you’re gonna have to, it’ll be gone. So I think it’s worth your while to find the intersection of those what are you passionate about and what is easily accessible, especially in the early days. So we started going to the startup events, which were very easily accessible to us, and we could vibe with them. So it felt like our tribe. And the more we talked to them, we realized something very interesting in 2012. All the conversations and events we went to, were centered around high level CEO clarity, just like companies were 2030 50 million in revenue.

The CEO is talking about the aspiration of building this company. And I’m like, all the people I’m meeting are great, but the content is not helpful to me as a founder. And I guess why that was happening was there were a lot of event organizers putting together events, not founders. So I’m like, that’s not really helpful to me, if I want to go from zero to one or one to five. Number two, what we learned was, and this was a small city in Canada in Calgary, where we started the company, although now we’re in San Francisco, and Toronto, and everywhere else. But sometimes you got to start in an area where it’s small, do things that don’t scale, so you can provide love and then expand from there.

And the other thing we found in that city was the media wouldn’t cover startups at all, nobody would want to help startups early. This is 2012, there wasn’t a thing. Certain other service providers we talked to said, Hey, why are you going after the startups they’ll never pay, and then you’ll go belly up our competitors at the same time, like if you don’t want to help them. And your customers are ones that won’t talk to us. We only have to serve our client, because we’re the same ideal customer profile. Fast forward 2023 I mean, the startup market is exploded, right? It was the fastest growing market over time and the bet played out I think, I think one of the key things there is also you got to be contrarian to everyone else and be right, right, when everyone else is running away from something, you got to gravitate towards it. If it makes sense.

And you have to have that opinion on it and be strong and not waver. So the media wasn’t covering them. And we found two opportunities now with two guys with an obscure website, no SEO, no social proof. So we said why don’t we host meetups where we invite people who are 4 or 5 million in revenue, and can talk to somebody who’s at 01. More intentionally, it’ll be more technical. And so the first meetup we did 10, people showed up, and the message went from buying my stuff to say, hey, we’re hosting an event, inviting the CEO of x, who said 5 million in revenue, they’re going to talk tactically about how they got their first 10 customers. And first investment, you got a few spots would you like to join, there’s going to be free pizza did the co working space, no cost other than the $20 or $30? It costs to order three pizzas. And the next one, like 20, people showed up and 25.

And more and more people showed up every time he hosted those events. And one day, we had a event where 200 people came to the co working space. And now the guys running the co working space. Like this is not a meetup anymore. Yeah, this is this is a full blown conference kind of thing you’re running. And you can’t do it here. I mean, you go and get a new and everything you don’t hijack our AV and stuff like that. We took we took their AV screen and put it in the middle of the co working space and hijacked all the desks and so on. At the same time, what we did was we reached out to the local newspaper and said, Hey, can you give us a column we’ll cover startups and they’re like, No, it’s not a market we cover and whatever kind of thing, right?

And so what I did was I reached out to some second tier blogs, tech blogs, and ask them for a column covered a few founders shared it with them. And a founder when covered will go and socialize it with all their family that thing got like a few 100 Tweets, retweets likes, went back to the newspaper and said, Hey, see this column? It’s performed really well. He’s he was so amazed with the traffic and gotten the shares. I’m like, I can do this way your blog every week. And I pointed out that all the other blogs are not getting that kind of retweets and shares. So social proof again and trying to goad him into some FOMO.

He said, Fine, I’ll give you a blog post. And instead of coming, random startup advice, I just called the blog startup of the week because I thought like what would drive shareability startup of the week feature of the company. And I shared it again with another founder who had covered as startup your your the startup of the week, first startup of the week for the local newspaper, although it’s just a blog that they could take away anytime. They shared it so widely, that the editor calls me and I’ll never forget that day in like before the week is out. And he said, This is blown up. If you commit to writing it every week, we’ll give you a print column. I wasn’t getting paid, by the way. I’m like, Fine, I’ll do it, do it for free. And so I wrote that column every week. And it’s expired.

Two things or three things. One, we got a backlink every week from the highest Domain Authority website, that there could be an R and our seemingly secure website now got link juice, SEO juice up the wazoo. To our brand got social proof, we went from being two unknown guys to being like, Oh, you write for the Calgary Herald, right? It’s local newspaper. And the third thing is, when every sad Monday morning, an entrepreneur goes at six or 7am, to the local newspaper stand to buy a paper, they’re buying a bunch of papers and taking clippings and sharing it on social. So it creates this loop. And now then we had a forum where intake form where people could apply for startup of the week. So it started building our email database.

And then we would invite them for the meetups. And that started fueling our community. And so a couple more learnings from that whole experience where if you want to be build anything great in life, you need three ingredients. One is communication. Communication is everything. Two is creation, you need to be able to create, and three is consistency, compound interest, and on consistency over time is what we call it. All right, success. So those three things, the second framework is extremely, extremely helpful, actually, when you’re negotiating and building social proof is nailed down your ideal customer. I mean, I describe how you figure out who to target.

But once you figure out who to target, you got to figure out what are their aspirations and goals? What are their problems and what gets in the way that really understand them. See, what we did was we started going to all the startup events, having lunches and dinners with startup folks, and then participating in hackathon. basically figuring out where they eat, breathe, drink, sleep, and going there, and spending time becoming one with them. Once you have a good understanding, and you know, like maybe 50 100 200, burning questions problems they face, then you have a good understanding of this ideal customer profile, you want to tap into their aspiration, a lot of us tap into problems problems are like, Okay, I need to solve this problem. And it’s an immediate thing.

An inspiration is a long term thing, it helps you build something and during right, you’d latch on to the aspiration and what gets in the way. So problem, you can create content around for today. And you need both, but the aspiration is forever. And once you have that understanding, then you start mapping out the circle of influence for that ideal customer, meaning who are other people they follow. So I make a list of them and I can invite them to my show or speakers to my

gives me great content, and I get the social proof. What other channels where do they hang out? What other channels do they participate in? So they read TechCrunch? Do they hang out on LinkedIn? Or are they on Tik Tok? So that gives you your distribution strategy. And the last one is what are the tools and services with violence ancillary to yours. So that will give you a list of people to partner with sponsor with. And so when you then start implementing that strategy into your content creation mechanism, you have maybe a podcast or a meet up with a speaker sponsored by with a with an ad or a discount from some soup tool or service they buy.

And maybe the guest host the episode guest host wouldn’t be another media influencer. And when they come to your event, or they come to your podcast, they’re like, Oh, this feels like my tribe. And when you do that over and over and over again, you build social proof you build visibility and credibility. But you also build this thing where you draw reciprocity from them you’re giving and giving and giving so much free stuff that they want to give back. You build familiarity and the only way to win is doing that is being visible and credible and then eventually the Money Follows.

Al McBride 29:50
And all of this comes from caring that you actually care your you know your reason you’re trying to understand their situation their needs as all While you’re saying their aspirations above their problems or struggles, it’s because you actually care. And I love that, as you said, because they can people pick up on that they can tell instantly if they’re being sold to, or if it’s actually like a win win, or is it you actually care about my situation? I love that. That’s the that’s the founding block of the whole structure. But amazing, amazing story of how you build that sense of community. That sense of, as you said, that sense of feeling for tribe, that when people came on your show, or if people came on as a guest, that they thought, yeah, this is right, this feels like him in group that I meant to be in this communal. Exactly.

Lloyed Lobo 30:38
And you don’t want one really interesting thing is, as I talked to all these companies, these community led businesses, these enduring brands built on the power of people, the people, there were very similar values amongst all of them. Every company needs to have an enduring purpose to be community led, in addition to a vision, mission, and values. Now you can have any number of values that’s important to the founders in the early days. And

over time, but to be community, your community sustain number, I call it the camper framework, and I’ll dive into what camper is. But my theory is if you Institute camper proactively and your company into your community, you will build a happy campers, which just sounds cheesy, but C stands for connection. These companies, they foster genuine bonds, build bridges and nurture relationships, because when people feel connected, right, it empowers them to grow and support one another. The next one is autonomy.

You grant freedom and independence while encouraging responsibility. When people have the space to make their own decisions, they take ownership right. And nobody wants to be micromanagement let alone in a community led business is a marathon of the heart and mind, right? It’s a labor of love. So when you’re getting people to volunteer and everything, and you try to control them, they check out, you have to give people autonomy. And I give the example of adolescents community, hosting 5000 events coming together on their own, or the Harley Davidson community which created these movements, if they didn’t have the autonomy, and you say, Oh, these are our brand guidelines, and you can put the logo here and you you got to take our permission for your host event using any of this would happen probably not right person. Yeah, so the autonomy is key.

The next one is mastery. They enable the people to hone skills, expand knowledge and pursue excellence. When you help people become experts in their field. They grow. They drive growth for your community. More importantly, they inspire others also to reach their full potential. And so you got to help them become masters. The fourth one is purpose having a purpose that’s greater than your product, or your profits. Right? When your culture is encouraging people to make a difference. They found they find fulfillment in their work since 2023. Everyone, despite they’re afraid of the jobs and layoffs, everyone has the ability to learn social media is everywhere. I can go on Upwork and get a gig, I can go on Fiverr and get a gig I can drive an Uber, I can basically relocate to a cheaper place. As silly as it may sound, and I can do some consulting gigs and make a living and pay less tax and live happier.

So if I have to go and be on somebody else, to time. Time, I have so many different ways to live laid off, that actually are doing well by just doing consulting. So the purpose whether or not your community led company is going to be key looking into the future is like, Hey, am I just lacing the pockets of a company? Or am I creating impact that’s beyond the profits? Like a Patagonia right they promote environmental stewardship and donate a percent of their profits to nature preservation. The fourth, the fifth one is energy.

They create great energy and enthusiasm and when your culture is full of that lively energy. You know, people want to jump out of their seats and do something right you look at some of the biggest movements and iconic brands it’s built on energy. If there is no energy, your checkout and you might go to a conference and you may meet the best people and have the best food and learn the best content but then a speaker comes out and just drinks the energy and everyone you find them now in the hallway. Right?

Al McBride 34:39
Is every energy disaster is key? Yeah, absolutely.

Lloyed Lobo 34:44
And and imagine now if every talk in a community event is like that, then people will no longer come by the energy is key. And then the last one is recognition. I can’t say this enough. We’re in a human to human world and for the foreseeable future will be until we live in a world where robots are buying from robots, humans will continue to rule the world. And the best way to make people keep coming back for more and more beyond my connection, autonomy, mastery purpose, energy is actually recognition. When you celebrate achievements, no matter how big or small, and value the unique strengths each individual brings to the table, you will have people who go from loving you to like being unstoppable for you.

Al McBride 35:30
So it’s, you know, I tell my clients, it’s about that sense of appreciation. Which is that recognition, right? That’s where people can really feel the connection. They feel respected. You feel even loved. appreciated. Recognized. Absolutely. Spot on. But look, Lloyd, it’s been absolutely fantastic talking with you. So where can listeners learn more about you? Where can they? When can they get your book?

Lloyed Lobo 35:59
Definitely. So I’m active on LinkedIn, Lloyed Lobo, Double L. O Y, E D Lobo. and my book will be on from grassroots to greatness.com. We’ve designed it with some love. And the book is colored. So even if you don’t want to buy the digital, you can get you can get the sort of collectible version if you want to. It just gifted to people or whatnot. Right. But I, yeah, I want it to be accessible to all. That’s why I put it up for 99 cents of people will ask Why don’t you make it free?

Yeah, when you make it free, what happens is it’s unmetered distributed, right. And when it’s 99 cents, every review on Amazon becomes a verified review and the word spreads. So the digital copy is on Amazon for 99 cents. And if you want the hardcover, you can get it on Amazon as well. And it will have an accompanying notion book with templates for each chapters. Each of the chapters would like details on how do you actually create the thing from A to Z. And we’ll go academic on it. And the book is meant to be talking through the frameworks with stories, so a lot more stories, so even my nine year old could read it. So thank you so much. Check it out on from, from grassroots to greatness. And owl, drop me your address, I’d love to send you first week of October, I signed hardcopy, and

Al McBride 37:27
that will be fantastic. I’m looking forward to that. I’ll buy it on digital copy. But I’d love the hardcopy as well. I’d love to have both. That’s fantastic. So thank you so much for coming on the show. Lloyd. That’s been absolutely fantastic. And as I said, all those links, and references will be obviously below the video and below in the podcast notes as well.

Lloyed Lobo 37:46
Definitely, this book actually closes a big chapter of my life. When I was starting my career as a kid, a lot of people told my mom, you know, your son will amount to nothing, he is a bomb. And you know, I don’t have a master’s degree. I barely made it. I didn’t finish high school and I finagled myself into engineering. They didn’t so long story for another day. And you know, just bumbled around startup to startup that failed. And one day my mom asked me when actually, I married my childhood sweetheart, but before the wedding, my mother in law said the same to my mom that you know, I’m worried that you’re my daughter is a doctor, but my kids are doctors, your son’s being a part of companies that are shutting down. I feel like he’s going to survive off my daughter, and he’ll never amount to anything.

And despite building a successful company, it never felt like I hit that mark. Because my mom asked me that day. Are they right about my son? Did I make a mistake? Never working and sacrificing my career to raise you did I raise you wrong? And so with this book, my goal is for to be a best seller so I can give copy one of the best similar to my mom and say, No, you didn’t you didn’t raise me right. You didn’t raise me wrong, you raised me the right way. I may have not done my master’s degree or, you know, not been a bum but a bunch of big people in business find the book valuable. So it completes that journey for me. Thank you so much. So

Al McBride 39:11
that’s a real victory. I love the way it’s not $100 million company. You know, it’s a book.

Lloyed Lobo 39:19
It’s the book that matters because I because I said right there right. As soon as we killed the money sold half the company, I ended up depressed and started going from place to place. I didn’t want to think about the money. I thought I lost my tribe and then I realize the value what what what is more important to having money and being on a private jet with people who don’t care for you or being in a slum somewhere with people you love and you can laugh every day. To me that was it. So this became actually a bigger victory for me than anything else. So thank you so much for featuring me on your show.

Al McBride 39:54
Outstanding. Thanks so much, Lloyd. Thank you.

Lloyed Lobo 39:57
Take care. Bye

Transcribed by https://otter.ai