Richard Milligan on Recruiting Top Talent Through Personal Branding

Host 00:00

We were not born with core values. Those come from our experiences.

Host1 00:02

This is what he's giving me for free. I can only imagine what I'm gonna get if I just go work with him.

Host 00:07

I'm a hard worker, but I also grew up in poverty. My dad didn't work 90% of the time that I was home.

Host1 00:11

I don't think it's ever been more important for people to know you as a person in order to go out there, want to do business with you.

Host 00:18

It's more of not a linear line. It's more like the zigs and the zags of life.

Host1 00:22

I love to sell, but I don't think I sell in a way that is sales.

Host 00:25

But I'm showing up and I'm giving things away that most people would pay for.

Host1 00:28

What's up, everybody? Grant Wise here. Welcome back to the Partner Profit Podcast. Excited for the conversation today. I've got Richard Milligan on, who is an expert in the recruiting space and all things relationships. What's up, Richard? Thanks for being here today.

Host 00:42

Yeah, excited to be here, Grant. Appreciate you having me on.

Host1 00:44

Of course, man. Of course. I uh would love, you know, there's people listening to us that maybe don't know who you are. Give us a little bit of the backstory. How'd you get to where you are today?

Host 00:51

Yeah. So I run a company called 4C Recruiting. We're a coach and consulting company that specialized really in like the real estate insurance mortgage space. And I ended up here accidentally. Okay. So it was always a story, right? But uh my journey was I spent uh 15 years in the mortgage industry as a leader building teams. And in the mortgage industry, I built 21 teams, hired over 300 originators. And in 2017, I left the industry to start 4C, which was originally an agency. We were going to recruit four companies and really quickly realized that the way that I recruited was very different and unique than from the people that I was actually giving the opportunities to. So out of necessity, I started coaching spring of 2017. And by probably early summer of that year, I had a couple of CEOs that came to me and said, We're hearing what you're doing within our organization. Would you ever be interested in building a coaching framework for us? And I never thought about that. And so I, as I thought about it, it made sense. And so I took the summer of 2017, built out my coaching framework, went in like the third week of October 2017, had a webinar, brought my entire LinkedIn audience on there, like 100 people on the webinar. And at the end of it, I just brought them value for about 60 minutes. At the end of it, I said, if I brought you value, you can stay on, or I'd like to show you what it looked like to coach with me. And out of the hundred or so people, I had like 45 of them sign up for coaching, pull out their credit cards on the spot. And so I had this revelation, which is that no one ever teaches people how to recruit. And so immediately in that moment, I had 45 hours booked a week to coach. I was like, we became a coaching company. And that's how we ended up in this space. And so a lot of my early coaching clients became today or like presidents and heads of sales of companies. They went on to become the best recruiters inside their organization. And that just has evolved the organization. We I do a lot of traveling and speaking. I've written a book, I do a podcast, I do all those things to bring value to my audience.

Host1 02:41

That's amazing. I know you have an amazing framework. I don't know if you'd mind just kind of walking through it really quickly. When you bring people in, I know you have a little bit of a process. Just kind of help dissect that for us really quick so people get a glimpse into what you're typically teaching.

Host 02:54

A big idea here in recruiting that if you're a leader, especially on the sales side, building your team, your company is not the product that you're selling. You're the product that you're selling. And most people have never thought about that. But in my own store, I have like this moment in time, 2013, I was pivoting out of being a producing leader to a non-producing leader. And I was giving up about $600,000 in income that year to do that. And so I was hyper motivated to build the team that would replace that income. And for the longest time, I just operated pretty spontaneously, like, you know, calling people, what I would say. I always thought, like, you know, it was a bunch of recruiting is a bunch of one-offs. And for the first time at the end of that year, I sat down and like a science experiment really assessed everything that I was doing to that point. And I still have this piece of paper. I drew four lines across or drew eight lines up and down at 32 boxes. And I started with the beginning of what recruited, what I thought recruiting would be, and the ending of what I wanted to end at. And I started to fill in those 32 boxes with what am I going to do when I'm recruiting people? And I didn't realize how little of a framework I had for pursuing people until I started to do that. Well, I built that out. And part of building that out was then also assimilating my language differently to where I had historically said my company's awesome, to now saying, I want to tell you a little about myself. So most of the success that I had was the very last three years I was in the industry. The 18 of the 21 teams I built happened the last three years. And that came from me understanding that I was the product. And so I had to figure out when I launched my coaching, how do I get people to communicate who they are? And I created this framework, I call it the attractive leader framework. And the attractive leader framework is just a leader who's clear on their vision, clear on their core values, clear on their greater purpose, and can communicate that in a sequence. If you think about communication, random communication is really of no value to people. It's like confusing to people. But when you communicate in sequence, it makes a lot more sense to people. So I teach leaders how to actually define who they are, to put that into a language that they could use, and then what is the steps that they would take to actually communicate that to someone? So when someone enters my coaching, you know, the first six to eight weeks, we're really working on that framework. I'm 18,000 hours now into coaching. One of the things that's true is that in all that time coaching, I've only had two people, two leaders ever that have ever been able to come into coaching with me and said they had their vision, they had their values, they understood their greater purpose. So we we understand it, but we don't understand the importance of it, or we would actually clearly define and put in the effort to do that. And it requires a lot of effort to get to clarity in that framework. So I always start people there. We then build the steps that they take. What steps will you put someone through when you're recruiting them? So that's a lot of scripting and you know, frameworks that you'll use in live meetings, and how do we define what's a powerful next step? And where we finish coaching in just kind of like a foundational coaching is then we talk about what's your brand because all of that needs to be framed inside social media today. Right. And I think we forget that. Most recruits today say, and the data supports that, only one out of one out of four recruits today say that they're actually being directly solicited. 75% say they're soliciting the next opportunity themselves. As a leader, you could do everything right. Know who you are, be able to communicate in a sequence. But if you're not showing up in social correctly, you're just not going to win. And so we take that attractive leader framework, and now we ask the question what does it look like for me to show up as an attractive leader in social media?

Host1 06:21

And what does that look like?

Host 06:22

Most leaders start out as producers. In the industries that I coach, we're talking about real estate, mortgage, insurance. Those good producers eventually become leaders in most of most industries. That's how someone becomes a team lead that's now trying to attract that team lead. And so there's this pivot that most people need to make, which is that their content has to shift from one avatar to another avatar, where maybe historically you've produced content and you're a leader in the mortgage industry, and that content's been directed to a buyer or a borrower or a real estate agent has been directed to that home buyer. You now have to have the voice of a leader that brings value to the avatar that's different. And so it looks like you know, Alex Ramossi has this great line where he says that to be successful in selling, you have to give away your secrets and sell the implementation of those secrets. So if you've been a successful producer in any industry, you know how to build a book of business. You know how to create these relationships that create opportunities. So becoming valuable based off of your experience and now showcasing that in terms of content is ultimately how you're going to win. I think the marketplace has changed significantly in that when I look at the people inside my coaching that are winning, the player coach is the one who's dominating recruiting right now. And that hasn't always historically been true.

Host1 07:37

I think it's really important to define what that means for people because I know exactly what you're saying, and I'm seeing the same thing. Could you do you mind defining that just real quick tangent? What does it mean to be a player coach?

Host 07:45

Well, I think let's create kind of a polarizing view. Historically, you've had hierarchy of leaders, and then you've had, you know, people that were producing or understood how to produce that understood how to be successful in the market, but these other hierarchy of leaders really didn't. And it's just a layer of management that doesn't produce a whole lot of value. And what we've seen as companies try to get more competitive is that they've gotten a lot more flat in terms of like there's not a lot of management in the between now. And so that player coach is someone who's played the game, but can also coach to it now. I mean, think of like Steve Kerr, right, in the NBA, like his run at Golden State, like he was someone who played basketball at a really high level that then understood how to coach the player to play basketball at a really high level.

Host1 08:27

Yeah. And I'm I'm I'm even seeing two today people that are still playing the game and coaching it are having an enormous amount of success, like people that are originating loans or doing insurance or selling houses, while also are coaching people on how to do that. I see some of those people right now are just crushing it.

Host 08:44

Yeah, I think there's a lot of reasons for that. One, like to get to high profile coaching is expensive. I mean, like in the industries that I'm in, you can easily spend three to five thousand dollars a month on coaching. And if you're that player that wants to get to the next level but isn't able to invest at that level, the player coach gives that to you for free. I mean, their entire sales culture is developed around producing mentorship and coaching and honing your skill sets, right? So that that sales culture is a whole nother level when it's being led by that player coach. And when I say sales culture, what I mean is what are the rhythms of being on that team, right? Because culture is what's the environment or the experience that you have while you're at the company? Well, sales culture is specific to selling. So if I'm the player coach, man, my mentorship is of significant value to you, right? The other thing is this is that I extract information from the market of what's taking place and what are we experiencing in real time. I'm not waiting for a feedback loop. So I immediately know, like uh, your conversation a day in the mortgage industry, like a player coach said, Fannie may change their guidelines on condos. Well, the player coach knows that. The non-player coach has no clue. That's 45 to 60 days away from understanding that.

Host1 09:51

100%. In the efforts of time, I'm gonna go to this question because I think it is a critical thing for people to understand. You said that most of your success came in the last three years. You built 18 of the 21 teams in the last three years, and what you had realized is that you were the product. And in teaching people marketing, advertising, and sales over the last 15 years, one of the things that I've really grown to understand is that the personification of a brand matters. And I think it's it's never been more critical than it is today to describe what I mean. If I say Tesla, what do we all immediately think of? Elon Musk. He's he's the personification of the Tesla brand and all these other companies that he has started. And I think like in an AI world where all of that stuff's taking off, and I talk about this on the show all the time, you know, building trust in a post-AI economy and all these kind of things. I don't think it's ever been more important for people to know you as a person in order to go out there and want to do business with you or want to work with you, or you know, let you recruit them, or whatever, whatever the thing is. Why, in your words, like why does that matter so much is that you are the product? Like people get to know you as a person before they go and buy the thing. Why is that so important right now and and back when you did it?

Host 11:03

The data says that the average American sees somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 advertisements per day. So if you just go through your Facebook and you start to scroll, I mean, it's every other content piece is an ad today. And we've gotten so accustomed to being in the matrix where things aren't that human. I think that we crave the connection, the human connection. And this would have been 2017. I saw a survey from a company which was 13,000 top originators in an industry, uh, the mortgage industry. And they asked them this question how did you get up to your next company? And only one out of four said they were directly solicited. The other 75% said they came in the peripheral. They sourced the opportunity themselves. And as I got to think about that in 2017, I was like, well, personal brands playing a major role in this. And so I began to coach around it in 2017, going in 2018. And what I found is that most leaders won't develop, won't define their personal brand. It's too much effort for them. They're focused on the business, the business, the business. So I launched a social media company in 2018. And how I launched it was I went to my executive leaders and said, I'll charge you a nominal fee. I'm going to create content for you every single day on LinkedIn. I'm going to grow your connections for you, but I want to show you proof of concept. And by month four, I literally had $100 million producers that were messaging them in their inbox saying, Can we have a conversation? So we launched that into a company and over the course of the next five years, built a team of roughly 40 people that created content for leaders before we shut that brand down. I have this moment in time, 2020, early 2020. I had at the time I had 11 writers on the team, and I had my writers pull their best content that they'd ever created in terms of engagement. We measured as a company the top 25 content pieces we've ever produced. These were like mini viral content pieces. What's fascinating to me is that what we were working to do was to recreate a framework that we could actually operate within to just recreate those opportunities. 24 of the 25 were stories. Like that blew me away. Like 24 of the top 25 content pieces were stories. Leaders saying, I'll never forget, or here's how I got in the industry, or I'll always remember, this leader impacted me in this way. They weren't generic style content pieces. And so there's that human piece is such an important connection. You can relegate some of this to AI for sure, but don't ever lose your humanness. Like your stories are your experiences, and AI will never have its own experiences. And so I just think that human connection, it's it's imperative because with it is the emotional connection, not a decision-making opportunity. It's like your company is your company. You've got a toolbox. I can make a decision around that, but I can't connect emotionally to the machine. I can connect emotionally to Grant. And that piece, your content, when it shows up as an emotional connection through a story framework, is powerful for you as a leader that wants to recruit.

Host1 13:45

That's so good. It's the stories. Like it's always the stories. The most successful people I know are some of the best storytellers that I know. I think that it's how society relates to everything. Like we all have a story that we've got to tell. I've certainly seen the same thing when it comes to content. Like if I'm just pushing stuff out there that has no story integrated into it, it gets virtually no traction. Even creating videos, like the videos have to tell a story. I'm preparing an event right now for next month. It's an event that we've done very successfully for the last couple of years. We've had six of these, and I'm changing it up. And I'm like, we have to go deeper. We have to get more granular. We have to tell a better story. And I'm really excited to see what's going to happen from it. But I I could not agree more. And I don't think it's that surprising. Like it's it's the stories that you tell that really ultimately help you create those connections. Do you have a framework for telling a great story that you're typically teaching people to use when they're creating content to build trust on social?

Host 14:37

Yeah. Well, if we if you think about your story as a timeline, I'm 52, so I graduated from high school in 92, went to college in 93. It's like as you start to kind of think about your timeline, there's stories there. But I think the best way to think where your stories exist that are going to resonate with your audience, it's more of not a linear line. It's more like the zigs and the zags of life because life is not linear. You're never always moving forward. Sometimes you're moving backwards, sometimes you're moving in a lateral position. But to ask a leader this where have you experienced significant change? And there's always a powerful story there. Now, the challenge is that when leaders are recruiting, depends on the maturity of the leader. But a lot of leaders feel this need to have like the golden wand to never have failed. And your con your stories of significant change almost always have conflict and struggle in them, right? And so when you think about any movie, it's like, where's the beginning? Where's the confidence struggle? Where's the overcome? That's a powerful story. It's like all of our favorite movies fit within that framework. I'll give you an example of this. I had a leader recently that was like, I'm struggling to create content. And I was like, okay, Rick, let's just walk through, let me ask you a question. Where do you get angry in a good way? Like, where is righteous anger show up? And he was like, oh, like immediate response, like, oh, I can't stand primaas. I can't stand arrogant people. And I was like, well, and so I just was started doing some digging, like, hey, what's your story? Like, how did you grow up? And his story was that his mom divorced at a very young age, dad left them. They he grew up in a trailer house, like super low income. All makes sense why his righteous anger would be, I can't stand arrogant people, right? And so sometimes you can back into your stories by just even having a good question. But when he was done, Rick had this powerful story of like how he was raised by a single mom who overcame, right? And now how he's in this position of a of number two in command at a company, and how one of his core values is humble, right? It's connected to his experiences. And so I think there's a framework there that if you reverse engineer this and you ask yourself this question, where are my core values? Your core values, you we were not born with core values, those come from our experiences. So, like I'm a hard worker, but I also grew up in poverty. My dad didn't work 90% of the time that I was home. That's my story. And so I totally have taught my kids work ethic and have lived that in front of out in front of my kids. Well, if I sat here and I think about my story, I've got a pretty powerful story around leaving home at the age of 19, having grown up in poverty, having a massive chip on my shoulder, and just forever being the hardest worker in the room. Right. Now it needs more framework there, but there's a story there. Your values are always connected to your stories. And so when I'm teaching the attractive eater framework, core values is a big part of that. We were really digging beneath the surface to say, where have you experienced significant change? Because a lot of times your values will surface in that season of significant change. Like I started 4C because I'm an entrepreneur at heart. I want to have autonomy and freedom. I was leaving an organization that for the third time I'd been to a company that had actually said something that wasn't true in a massive way that impacted me and my team. And to some degree, I was just like, I'm done with this. I'm gonna go find great leaders and partner with them and help them grow. So my values are all over the story of even how I started my company. So that for leaders is a great place to go. You'll have some some stories that will have different variant levels of influence and power, but your stories of of change are where you have the most influence.

Host1 17:55

That's so good, man. I I know we're running out of time, but I always like to ask this question. We're talking so much about building relationships. You know, what we're talking a lot about is going one to many and creating, you know, telling your story and doing that socially and and creating connections and building trust. How do you take all of that and how do you turn it into revenue?

Host 18:10

Yeah. Well, I remember how I started this organization in 2017. I a couple of premises there. I don't like selling. Okay, which seems silly because in my organization, I'm the chief seller in the organization, but I hate selling. But what I do love is bringing people so much value that they're just like, if he can bring me that much value externally, there's got to be more value internally. I had this conversation in the last hour. I'm telling you, like clockwork every single week, three to five meetings of people I don't know. These are people that somehow find my life calendar. At the end of my podcast, recruiting conversations, it says, You want more recruiting conversations? Here's how you access Richard. Okay. If you go to my LinkedIn at the very top of every post, it says, here's how you book Richard. And so when I started the organization, I just decided that I was going to produce an immense amount of value and that I believed that people would actually find me valuable enough to think that I could bring them more value. So podcast a week turned into two podcasts a week. Uh newsletter once a month turned into once a week, turned into twice a week. Okay. Content creation, writing a book, writing articles for magazines that I don't get paid for. Like it for me, it began with that premise of that, of just outvaluing anybody in the little narrow niche that I'm in. And that I was confident if I did that, I would win. And the easiest place for me to do that was to show up in social media. In fact, LinkedIn, like LinkedIn, number one place. If I just, if someone said you can't have anything else, but you can have one platform, I mean, I can convert two to three people a week off of LinkedIn. But I'm showing up and I'm giving things away that most people would pay for. And for me, that's been like the number one thing in my business. Like if I had to start over in any industry doing something, I'd become the expert. And then I would just out I'd outproduce in terms of free value in all the social platforms in a podcast, a newsletter, wherever, I would produce more value than anybody else in that space. And that's not sexy, Grant. And so most people can't get excited about that because a lot of it, you can't automate a lot of that as you grow. But in the beginning, a lot of it was like framing my thoughts and getting clarity on my voice and you know, all of that. So, but if I started all over, I would go right back to that same place and I would start there all over again.

Host1 20:14

I always heard this, I can't remember exactly who it was from, but it was teach and educate and then justify, especially in service-based businesses, which means teach people how to do what you do and then just justify why they should let you do it instead. And I've seen this in the info space, I've seen it in the service spaces, I've seen it, I've seen it in all kinds of industries, along the same vein of what you're talking about. It's just give people so much value for free to what your appointment is, is like, well, if this is what he's giving me for free, what I can only imagine what I'm gonna get if I just go work with him. You know what I've seen, especially in the coaching space, is you know, the the person is typically missing the context. Like, I get what Richard's saying, this makes a lot of sense, but how does this apply to me? And this is why coaching is so valuable, I think, because you can pretty much call plays. It's like, oh, this is your situation. This is what you need to do with this information, this is how you specifically need to go action on this. And um, I could not agree more. Just give as much value away for free as you possibly can, and people will rationalize to themselves why they should be doing business with you. I love to sell, I'm the opposite of you. I love to sell, but I don't think I sell in a way that is salesy. I am a great listener, I like to ask questions. I'm convinced that people will sell themselves. I don't need to be doing the selling. So my job as a salesman is just to be a facilitator of asking really good questions and letting people come to their own logical conclusions on why they should be doing things. And I I take that mindset into marketing and advertising as well. I just couldn't agree more with everything that you said today, man. I appreciate you so much for spending some time with me. I know we're we're we're kind of out of time here. I always like to ask this last question is how can the listeners of the podcast partner with you? What's important to you? How can we help you grow right now?

Host 21:48

Yeah. Forcerecruiting.com is our website. That's a great place to go. You can subscribe to my newsletter. I already said I'd do two of those a week now. So that'd be a great place for you to start the journey. If you go there and you register the first seven days, you're gonna get an entire playbook as a leader for how you can recruit and how you can grow. That'd be a great place for you to start.

Host1 22:06

I love it. I love it. We'll make sure that we link up those things in our show notes. And if you're listening to this, I highly encourage you to reach out to Richard for sure. I've gotten to work with him pretty closely, and uh I know that there's an enormous amount of value that he adds to the people he gets to work with. So, mm Richard, thanks again, man. I appreciate you being with me today.

Host 22:20

Thanks for having me, Grant.

Host1 22:21

Awesome. And thank you guys for continuing to listen to the Partner Profit podcast. This has been another good one, and I'll see you on the next one. Bye bye. Peace.