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Transcription of interview with Jay Myers on November 18, 2013.
Douglas Goldstein, CFPÆ, Financial Planner & Investment Advisor
Jay Myers is the president of Interactive Solutions.
He is an author and speaker.
He wrote a couple of fabulous books called Keep Swaying and Hitting the Curveballs: How
Crisis Can Strengthen and Grow Your Business which is coming out in January.
Douglas Goldstein, financial planner & investment advisor, interviewed Myers on Arutz Sheva
Radio.
Douglas Goldstein: Youíre a real hero to entrepreneurs.
You described in your book Hitting the Curveballs because you took a company that was earning
not so much money and during the worst economy of my lifetime, you more than double the revenues.
How did you do that?
Jay Myers: It was an interesting time that we have built a business from really a point
of crisis where the summer of 2007, Iíd lost 80% of my sales team through various turnover
issues whether it would be one guy wanted to start his own business, another guy went
to work for a large company and I think it was one of those moments where you had to
kind of decide what to do next and look back at your business and say where we at, were
we that perfect before.
Weíve done about 11 millions dollars in sales.
Weíre sort of stagnated, kind of stuck in neutral and when all of the crisis hit us
and those people left along with an employee of mine that actually passed away, a best
friend of ours passed the way next week and my wife got breast cancer, all this stuff
happened.
It was literally like of those moments that was crazy kind of like how was this all happening
and the business stuff is unraveling, personal life is unraveling, what do you do next and
it was an opportunity to really gather ourselves from a professional standpoint in the business
and say ìWe werenít that perfect before, letís go try to make this business bigger
and betterî and then obviously from a personal standpoint to deal with the tragedies that
were there that we can earn the business and grow the revenue, but certainly from a personal
standpoint those were issues that were just having to work through.
It was an opportunity.
Douglas Goldstein: Your business is in video conferencing and the fact is when business
is bad, people donít want to travel and they are looking for ways to save and you seem
to have a solution designed for a bad economy.
I want to give you all the credit in the world for making this company to something fantastic
but do you think it might just be sheer luck that you are in the right industry and the
right place at the right time?
Jay Myers: When weíre talking about 2007, at that point, Iíve been in the industry
for letís say 17 years, so weíre 17-year overnight success.
The industry got a kind of catch up with the time, but actually very candidly, it was the
right moment in time for the technology to really grow.
I think also to understand that when something happens in the wave that is coming at us that
itís not a moment to panic, itís a moment to assess where youíre at and to look at
what you can do for the future.
In our case, we rebuilt the sales team with some really high energy skilled young guys
that really had no industry experience.
When I say skilled, in the sense of they were hungry and they saw an opportunity.
The other thing is when youíre looking like the recession in 2007 and that was some of
the first months of it and everything was that look at your business and when youíre
in a difficult time like that, thatís not the point in time to start getting [cue] with
your business and start trying all these things and dabbling and other sub-businesses and
everything, little type of new things to see that that can work.
What worked for us was we stuck with what we knew in terms of the technology, we double
down in our investment whether it would be in healthcare and [inaudible 0:05:24] and
things that didnít worked for us in the past, we just did more of it.
Douglas Goldstein: You said that you didnít panic.
How do you make yourself into type of person who doesnít panic?
Jay Myers: Itís tough.
Iím not going to tell you that itís just instinctively easy to do, you just do it but
I think like the investment business, my industry is a strategic type of sales process.
It is long term and you canít look at anything in a vacuum and just like in the investment
business with video conferencing, telemedicine, business learning, we have relationships to
the clients where the sale didnít happen from the initial meeting to the point of sale,
it may take 2 years or longer.
So what we look at was what are we doing right in our business at that point in time and
what can we do even better to grow within this difficult economy and we were laser focused
on it at the applications.
We do healthcare, it was emerging to be a big market so we made a heavy investment,
telemedicine and also educational because we do with it at difficulty economy, people
are going to back to school.
They get their masters and get more qualifications for job.
Those are important ingredients.
The other part of it is, you got to believe in yourself.
You have to believe in yourself that you canít panic because the world has fallen apart,
you have to say ìWeíve done well with this business, weíre going to do well in the future,
what works for us is this, letís go do more of it.î
One other quick thing I want to tell you about is in the world we all live in today where
you have so much deception, so many of these employers doing all these crazy thing with
their companies, Iíll say this, we came up with a concept.
We have this talent meeting a.k.a Jayís Dance Party and itís actually a quarterly or sometimes
more frequent meeting where we get all the employees together, we discussed whatís out
there, whether it would be how the recession is going to affect our business to whatís
going on in the industry, just an open forum to discuss and the employees really are gratified
by that.
We are an open book around here, we are very transparent.
I can remember in 2008 when the recession was really in full force, I have a lot of
young people work for me and they were concerned.
They were worried about where weíre going.
We have those meetings, we air out the concerns.
I think you may remember one chapter of the book where I said ìHey guys, hereís how
it goes.
This is not a phony little pep talk, hereís the deal.
Weíre going to choose not to participate in the recession.
Weíre moving forward.
Block all that stuff out, Iím not going to listen to it, turn off your radio, turn off
your TV for a while, come on sports, whatever makes you happy but donít listen to negative
stuff.
Hereís what weíre going to do, weíre going double down on telemedicine, weíre going
to double down on business learning, weíre going to go forward, weíre going to be aggressive,
weíre going to go get ourselves foodî and you know what the first year of recession,
from the time I lost all those employees to the next year, we went from 11 to 14.5 million
in a year.
I think a lot of it has to do with the mindset.
We were focused on ìWeíre going to get through this.
Weíre choosing not to participate in the recession.î
Douglas Goldstein: Itís obvious that the main theme I would say of your books is simply
that you must be able to learn a lot from baseball.
Do you really feel that people can learn something about running a business from one of those
small teams like the New York Yankees?
Jay Myers: I actually think they can and I know it sounds a little corny to promote the
book and everything about all this stuff, but I think here is what I have observed.
Baseball, if you watch the Yankees or whoever play, the game is very methodical.
Itís almost a chess match.
You have the ability to do things but you canít do anything quickly in a chess match
or a baseball game.
I mean you can but the game is 3 hours, itís methodical and if you look at the way the
business in my industry where you look at the fact that anything has to be kind of long
term so whatever moves you make, you have to consider the future and thatís what we
did with our business.
So we look at it as a big baseball game and moving players around and doing different
things.
[Inaudible 0:10:53] things in the book that you know you got a kick out of is the farm
system.
When we had all the people that left the company in Summer of 2007, we had a choice to make,
we can go out and have a quick fix and try to get all this experienced people and we
decided that didnít really make sense to us so we decided to hire all these young guys
and bring them in and do like the baseball guys do, train them to the farm system to
look what you wanted to be in a few years.
So it wasnít like we got to have instant success, we do is going to take time for them
to develop and they did and they have done a wonderful job.
Douglas Goldstein: We would give people a chance to get an advance free copy of the
book that youíre coming out with called Hitting the Curveballs.
The idea was that the first person who can tell us a keep swinging story that he did
something methodical and kept going would receive a copy of the book.
Go to www.goldsteinongelt.com, click on Listener Letter, give us the story, Iíll send it over
to Jay.
If he thinks itís a real keep swinging story, heís going to send you a copy of his new
book coming out in January, Hitting the Curveballs.
Tell people how people can keep following your work.
Jay Myers: I have two websites, www.jaymyersceo.com and www.isitn.com.
Douglas Goldstein, CFPÆ, is the director of Profile Investment Services and the host
of the Goldstein on Gelt radio show (Monday nights at 7:00 PM on www.israelnationalradio.com.
He is a licensed financial professional both in the U.S. and Israel.
Securities offered through Portfolio Resources Group, Inc., Member FINRA, SIPC, MSRB, NFA,
SIFMA.
Accounts carried by National Financial Services LLC.
Member NYSE/SIPC, a Fidelity Investments company.
His book Building Wealth in Israel is available in bookstores, on the web, or can be ordered
at: www.profile-financial.com (02) 624-2788 or (03) 524-0942.
Disclaimer: This document is a transcription and/or an educational article.
While it is believed to be current and accurate, divergence from the original is to be expected.
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The opinions rendered herein are those of the guests, and not necessarily those of Douglas
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