Keith Kalfas the Landscape Employee Trap Interview

you're in for one hell of a show Keith Cal is coming on today and this is no ordinary guy ladies and gentlemen this guy is inspirational he's motivational he's one of those guys that speaks from the heart and tells it like it is um we talk about a lot of things today we talk in depth in detail on the character the essence of a person how that influences the way their company goes we talk about the power of writing down goals how to write down goals how it impacts them he is an incredible guest and it was such an honor to speak with him on this program I think you're going to feel his energy I think you're going to feel his message I you can't help but feel it this is an amazing show get ready because you're about to hear Keith Cal fast rock your world so sit back strap in because here we go well today today we have Keith calest from the landscape employee trap video series many of you out there will be familiar with his work one of the things that I want to say if you're not familiar with his work go to YouTube and look up the landscape employee trap Keith calest is quickly becoming the Gary vaynerchuck of landscape videos before we get too much into it can you hear us okay yes I can perfect so you run not only a landscaping company full time but you also do a window cleaning company and then your hobby your passion your interest is in producing videos that reach out to those people that are trying to get started in landscaping that just want to develop their own hope they want to develop their own dream they want to make their own they want to create their own business and you're helping them do that with your videos absolutely what's your inspiration why are you doing this why are you helping so many people what's interesting about uh a type of career like this I I I love I love Gary vaynerchuk and I love uh Tony Robins and all these people that I am inspired by and I look up to because the minute before they go on stage or they're on podcast phone calls interviews all types of media in front of hundreds of thousands of people their mission is to help change people's lives that's their their passion so they might get disturbing phone calls literally right before they go on stage and they still maintain their composure and that's what's great I've been really admiring the quality lately of the people I look up to even in local businesses because when you're face to face with them or You observe them as you know especially the men in our industry you're like wow that guy really has his act together I aspire to be like him it's because the ability to maintain composure despite all the chaos in the environment it's like a flag Post in the wind with the American flag blowing that post isn't going anywhere it's a solid structure that's rooted down to the Earth it's rooted in its environment and it's not changing so it's it's um microburst decision management and when we're when we're entrepreneurs we're businessmen we're contractors especially landscapers we're getting hit all the time with stuff that can drive you insane it just it's maddening it's it's the it's the curse of every business owner when you own your own company you are the chief firefighter everybody looks to you for anwers even when they have it within themselves to come up with a solution they will always go just like water the path of least resistance they will look to a person that can give them an answer when they can have they can find the answer within themselves if they just thought about it for a few minutes so that's where the leaders have to stay strong yes absolutely and staying strong takes practice it's not something that you just decide to do because you can decide to do it consciously but what's happening unconsciously and triggering your fight or flight and your emotions it's what's going to put you into a tail spin during critical key moments now you put that and combine that with a real life business project like imagine you're at a project right now and something happens put you in a tail spin now you're losing potentially hundreds or even thousands of dollars per hour where where wherever you may be in your business now you're in a real bad position so it's you're really it's what you're rehearsing you're rehearsing that moment and then driving that deep down in your subconscious mind which is directly connected to your emotion so the more you rehearse is the more that that becomes your reality it becomes the very identity of who you are you become neurotic and so something as small as what I like to call it in the psychology world it's a pathology if something triggers you and then you develop a a story in your head of what that means then it hits your emotions now neurons that fire together wire together so the parts of your brain literally become so adapted to that that now you could be triggered faster you could be triggered at any moment to go into a tail spin and now you're suffering in the middle of a project your clients might see that your employees might see that and now you can't function and get the job done so start rehearsing I'm getting into self-mastery now I'm with you 100% if you got to fake it till you make it you start practicing practice makes permanent so you practice staying composed you practice staying in control even though inside you feel like you're on fire you want to pull your hair out and you want to you want to go crazy right you you practice outward composure and eventually you master it internally oh composure composure is the perfect word um one of my mentors Evan Pagan he said in a program uh years ago it was actually a program about dating before I uh you know got married and everything I was listening to this stuff because there's a lot of psychology in that and he he he said something that applied to everything to all in our position all men it's you never ever ever lose your composure no matter what under any circumstance now I've lost my composure I mean that's how you learn because the quality of your communication is the quality of your response if you're getting a response from people that is uh not in your favor not what you would like go take a look in the mirror and see how your composure is because start thinking about the people you admire and you look up to the businessmen or maybe the top Moguls or icons they're very well composed people they don't let outward what's going on in the environment affect them they have the ability to divorce themselves from the chaos of the moment see it and observe it like you're looking at a fishbowl then they can decide what needs to be done and go back in and execute specifically and that takes a very what uh I would also like to call masculine consciousness it's an emptiness that you are very divorced from chaos that's a great way of putting it and uh you'll never find those leaders that you admire you you don't you never find them breaking down and when they do you just lose respect for them it's just kind of even though you don't want to even though you want to want to empathize with them when they break down you lose a l they lose a little bit you they lose a little bit from you they lose a little bit from themselves there there's definitely a part in all of us and if there's a a huge part inside of me that I've it's taken me years to work on this and it's called basically if you take Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People amazing book Chang my life rule number one modified never whine or complain so there's a part inside of all of us I want to repeat that never whine or complain to anybody because the moment you start doing that the ego inside of you is really crying out saying you know woe is me feel sorry for me my story my my blah blah as soon as you do that your clients they can feel it they run away from you the people closest to you basically everybody around you and it's a you're saying I'm not strong enough to handle this situation is really what you're saying Dale Carnegie How to Win Friends and Influence People was the first self-help book I read when I was 13 years old and it changed changed my life and that's what hooked me on I I probably do I you know it's all I do just constantly reading downloading books just like you you and I we've been texting and emailing exchanging good books back and forth It's powerful those books are powerful especially when you start to um see the pattern within them and how it can affect and change your life all the different nuances of each book one book isn't really going to do it all for you but when you combine that one book and the subtle things that you pull out of the one book with the things you're able to pull out of a different book and you combine that with a library of different books then you be then you create the whole yes and to tie all this back into your landscaping business because a guy who's who's new or is not into this type of woo woo talk they call it they say how the hell does this have anything to do with my landscape business I'm trying to make money I've got I've got bills to pay I've got employees to pay you know or I'm trying to get my business off the ground I I don't got time for all this because it feels seems very counterintuitive once you really get the ball rolling and you start to drive deep and drill down into this stuff it really is learning how to master your own psychology and master your own emotions because success really starts from within what you like like a tree the roots of a tree grow down into the ground and you can't see those but outward manifestation is what you see the leaves and the fruit growing off the tree so you can look at somebody else all day and say wow how do how does that company have all these brand new trucks how do they do that well if you really look and drive down and find out what's going on in the owner's mind he didn't take any shortcut this guy didn't have it given to him this is somebody who has diligently suffered and gone through a lot of pain and stood up in the face of adversity for years and years and years and you could track it back all the way down he probably started out with a push mower when he was 13 it's just I've done this myself I've look at other people and i' say wow how did they do that and I really think it comes down to going and looking in the mirror and facing your own brutal reality saying these are the cards I was dealt in my life no I don't have that it's really looking at yourself and saying this is where I'm at facing the brutal reality and saying I've got to start somewhere and the sooner you get with that is the sooner you can get going where you want to go and closing the gap between point a and point B one of the points I want to get back to you talked about the woo woo how is this going to help me landscapers business people that make tuning into this program listening one of the things that happened I discovered Audible and that's when the the amount of books that I downloaded read covered back to back cover to cover uh hour on hour that that literally was a GameChanger moment in my company I had been in operation you know 20 30 years experience not 20 30 years of experience before that and when I found Audible and I was able to actually listen to books while I'm operating equipment listening to books while I'm driving uh snow plowing listening to books while I'm going to to uh meetings I had I had the greatest profit margin exponentially by far of any year was the first year that I just discovered these books and started utilizing the tips and tricks and I think to me that was a game changer moment that's how powerful that is that's how powerful programs like your videos are your videos are amazing you get a 100,000 social media downloads per month yeah uh I think between the different networks it's probably uh I think it's hit 125,000 views a month relative to what I it doesn't matter I I really believe that just the more I can drive and touch more people and if if God gave me the ability to speak or whatever it is to do on on on camera to help just get a guy if he's if he's in a funk and he wants to get a business going if if I can do that then I am I'm the student I am uh at At Your Service because that's my calling do I make any money to do this no and I don't care because it's not about them what you get paid the same I do for doing podcasts yeah absolutely this is it's it's an entirely new information-based economy and it's not about being a go-getter anymore it's about being a goger he who gives the most wins we got a World to Change here we have people aren't throwing their hearts over the bar I see a lot of guys out there that are just I mean you go walk around in a public place and you see grown men walking around with with their shoulders hunched over their heads are down they're they just don't look happy their dreams their dreams aren't there they're not realizing their dreams they know there's something there but they don't feel it and they can't find it no and if you could if you could just just open up that guy's heart and shine a little bit of light in there and just watch watch his eyes glow and get excited about something again I mean that's huge you can't put a price on that man and and after the the YouTube things start to blow up on my end dude I've cried I've cried during editing my videos and my own wife because I got a homebased studio I got a whole you know studio in my house she was like he doesn't understand what I'm doing she what are you crying about because when you can empathy it's all about empathy when you can empathetically feel and you're getting emails from all over the country guys saying oh my God you help me change my life dude I'm getting my business off the ground because of you and I'll email back no not because of me because of you you know that's a big deal and now that's a big responsibility and it comes with a great calling so I am listening to aut uh audio books all the time I call up audible upset because they won't let me spend more money on my subscription because I have to learn now more and faster to maintain my composure better to make sure that uh my quality of communication is spot on and uh just it's a great responsibility you were talking about audible audiobooks they've changed my life and when you say it's increased your profits and all that that the new guy listening who doesn't listen to audiobooks maybe he's listen to rock and roll or rap while he's working great he's taking the first step he's listening to something while he's working you can go on Audible and be like I'm not spending 22 bucks a month on that I I don't or I don't have the money to spend $5 $20 on a book I would like to reframe that for you and say if this one book that cost you 12 or $15 would make you 122 to $1,500 would you buy it then and it's really about getting you got to rein just part of reinvesting into your own education it's part of all building up your skill sets building up your knowledge there's there's resources out there for you you to use Audible is one of them um the podcast like this if you're listening to this this is a great resource this is my my goal my mission is to educate you to call in experts like Keith calest to call in other people to to say when you're listening to this when you're done go over to the landscape employee trap check out Keith's videos why well because there's a ton of aome information that's going to help you build your business no matter what level you're at even if you're already built up and you just need some inspiration you need a a kick in the pants to get to jump start your day a lot of places you can go to do that and that's what your mission is and that's I think why your videos are so successful because I want to do a little compare and contrast at the moment you know um it takes talent to do it the right way okay not everybody's going to have that talent to produce those videos but you didn't start out in landscaping and um you know doing your window washing company your entire life and before you got into that I think you were didn't you weren't in video production isn't that what you you did before you got into into the yeah that's a funny story I as a kid I loved music I I come from a very because just you saying that triggers some deep stuff inside of me I come from a very very painful broken childhood I know every dog thinks his fleas B the hardest so I'm not claiming that you know wo was me come from a family of drug abuse alcoholism living in homeless shelters things like that and literally we slept in my mom's car almost got taken away by the state things like that this is deep here but anyways as a kid I was very drawn to music drawn to the piano I'm I'm eight nine years old listening to Beethoven and going to the library R renting out Symphonies and things like that and as that grew I started getting into music I started uh record making my own recording studio and I started getting into video stuff and as the internet exploded oh YouTube so I started buying C cameras and creating my own crappy you know homemade uh edited videos and it became this huge passion I was like wait a second I can communicate and get my point across on video so I became obsessed with it endless pots of coffee until the sun came up you know all winter long in between not landscaping and I I became a master audio engineering uh I've you know recorded and produced six albums and I've done and directed music videos but that all started out from just taking a simply simple little crappy camera and growing into all that in that I I got in touch with uh multimedia companies and I became friends with people who uh direct and shoot music videos TV commercials things like that I've been in TV commercials myself as an actor and all that stuff and being around that whole environment really really opened my eyes up to the back end of the media world and making all those connections so it really changed my life and then I was left at when all the you know smoke and mirrors clear I was left with you know a bunch of skills for video I do own some pretty nice high-end cameras and I have the ability to make uh phenomenal uh production videos but I don't have time for that I would love to do that if there if there was a an income structure in place that would begin to work but I really believe just a basic video with the quality of the content being there which is just you standing in front of the camera camera putting your heart open bar and speaking to your audience giving them something good telling them something basic I kind of got off track there talking about all the video production but I want to say uh it's just simple you hold the camera from your face and you speak and you talk and I found out that's really the Silver Bullet so you actually have a natural talent you have an extreme talent for producing content for connecting with your audience and I think part of your ability to connect with your audience is because of the trials that you faced growing up as a kid uh the greatest leaders suffer the deepest scars and still stand yes yes and I mean I when you were telling me your story about uh you know some of your past history I you know I lost my mother to prescription drug abuse I I lost my brother to heroin I lost my other brother to alcoholism so I can kind of relate relate with you with you know how those those hurdles those those things that uh can make you break you can make you stronger if you let them you just got to toughen up you got to take a you got to roll with the punches and I know that sounds hokey everybody says it but you don't ever see any leaders that you really respect or admire that were born with a silver spoon in their mouth if you've never made any enemies you've never stood for anything so you've got to stand for something you got to stand up you got to have the strength to do that and…