Lift Others Up: Lessons on Leadership and Giving from CEO Donnie Boivin

Is building a business hard? And what does it really take to scale a business? Our guest thinks it all starts with self-awareness!

Meet Donnie Boivin. Donnie is an entrepreneur and serves as the CEO and Founder of Success Champions and Success Champion Networking. He’s all about community building and networking. That’s why he spends his days helping small business owners leverage sales and business development to grow and then scale their businesses through programs like Success Champion Networking, Badass Business Summit, Champions Table Masterminds, and the Champions 90 Challenge.

On top of that, Donnie is a podcast host, and his show Growth Mode is one of the most recognized ones globally. He’s also a five-time Best Selling Author and a highly sought-after public speaker.

In this episode of the Think Business with Tyler podcast, we talk about what it’s really like building your own business, the power of self-awareness, the importance of personal branding, and why you should lift other people up whenever you have the chance.

If you want to get some useful networking tips but also learn more about business development, make sure you tune into this episode to hear what Donnie has to say.

Guest-At-A-Glance

💡 Name: Donnie Boivin

💡 What he does: He’s the CEO and Founder of Success Champions and Success Champion Networking.

💡 Noteworthy: Donnie has built three successful businesses and the fastest-growing business peer networking group in the world. On top of that, he’s a published author and a podcast host.

💡 Key Quote: “It’s not about working hard, it’s about doing the hard things that you have to do to actually move the company and business forward. They just happen to be hard.”

💡 Where to find Donnie: LinkedIn

Key Insights

Is building a business hard? Building a business is hard because it requires constant self-reflection and personal development. Your business will always challenge you to become a better version of yourself. It will test you, but it will also teach you. As a business owner, you need to make some hard decisions to move your business forward, but it’s far from the whole hustle-and-grind culture of today.

Donnie explains, “There are just some things that are extremely hard, and you’re constantly evolving to another level of yourself because who you are now got you here, but it’s not going to get you to where you’re trying to go. So what I’ve found for me is working hard is more about doing the hard things, so there’s things that are just not natural skill sets. […] It’s not about working hard, it’s about doing the hard things that you have to do to actually move the company and business forward. They just happen to be hard. They oftentimes take up a lot of time, so people automatically correlate it with this whole hustle-and-grind concept. I go back, do the hard things until the hard things are done.”

Self-awareness is your superpower. There’s nothing more powerful than being self-aware. Self-awareness is about identifying opportunities for growth, both in yourself and in your business. If you want to be a successful entrepreneur, you need to make self-awareness your superpower.

Donnie says, “Being self-aware is understanding why you have the emotional response to a moment. So something happens, you get pissed, you get mad, you get sad, you get happy, whatever. It’s understanding where that emotion actually comes from. And if you can figure out where that emotion comes from and understand that if it’s something you want to keep, something you want to celebrate, cool. Stay with it. Run with it. But if it’s an emotion that comes from more like a triggering standpoint like it’s pissing you off, now you need to go back and understand, is the thing right now pissing you off, or is it something that happened in your past that you’re reflecting right now?”

Everything’s your personal brand. One of the smartest things you can do for your business is to build a strong personal brand. But personal branding is not influencing, marketing, or advertising. It’s simply putting yourself out there and building a reputation around your identity. It’s how people perceive you and what you represent to them.

Donnie explains, “What people don’t understand is in this day and age, everything’s your personal brand. So whatever the platform is, personally, I’m on them all, and it’s me, and I go to the nines and put out a ridiculous amount of content because I just know that the opportunity is too massive to grab market share and to grow at the fastest pace is building a personal brand that’s huge. And I’m staying away from the word influencer because people who are influencers, and it has so many connotations to it, it’s really just building your personal brand in the marketplace so your brand is showing up out there before you do.”

Lift other people up. It’s a tale as old as times; nobody has ever become poor by giving. And the same goes for lighting people up. Business owners are leaders. And leaders should seek to inspire and find ways to lift people up. Donnie says, “As a business owner, what I will tell you, the more you can do that, and you can lift other people up, and you can be their champion, you’ll create so many champions in the marketplace. I, for many years, kind of went through life in a very selfish manner. I was going through it of all right, networking, sales. This is about me making money. This is about me getting to live the lifestyle I wanted. Once I started flipping the script to started championing others, the volume of people that now wanted to work with me, that now wanted to serve with me, now wanted to open the doors for me, just increased tenfold.”

Top Quotes

“When you’ve got such a big purpose that you want to accomplish and you got so many things that you want to do, you’re just going to do the things that have to get done to make sure that you can get there and accomplish those things.”

“Find the person who specializes and completely geeks out on that thing and hire them to be part of the team, and you’d be more blown away than hiring the generalist.”

“It’s actually your staff’s job to build the process, not yours. If you build the process in systems, you’re going to build it so it works for you and nobody else. If they do it based off of your parameters, now other people can step in and do it.”

“Every sales conversation should damn near be the same sales conversation that when they say X, Y, and Z, you should have already heard that a thousand times and know what’s coming next, and then be self-aware enough to go, ‘This isn’t a fit for them.’ Or go, ‘Damn, I’ve got to help them understand that they need to decide to do this because this is exactly what they need.’ And being able to have that kind of conversation.”

“As a CEO, if you’re not personally investing in yourself, going to masterminds, going to these private retreats, getting into these rooms with these people that are doing heavier things, then you’re going to plateau. You’re going to stagnate because there’s a point in business where it becomes high-level networking.”

“I always hate it when people are like, ‘Be on the platform where your people is.’ Everybody says it, but unfortunately, it’s the truth. You’ve got to know where your clients are hanging out, whatever platform they’re hanging out on, then you need to dominate that platform. And what I mean by ‘dominate that platform’ is you need to learn it.”

Links

Success Champions Networking Website

Text ‘Success’ to 817-709-3886 to get a training video about referrals