In this episode, we navigate through how you can build a great reputation. It is something that takes years to build and moments to destroy. Your reputation is envisioned from the outside in and developed from the inside out. Without a good reputation, people won’t buy from us, they won’t trust us and will definitely break up with us in terms of business and financial transactions.

But if you get it right, you get tons of return customers who tend to buy more. You also build goodwill that are the intangible values for any business. It also creates loyalty for a premium and the entire community will be willing to pay more to get a chance to work with you.

So, when it comes to reputation building, what you need to know is:

• Perception is reality: Instead of what you think, it matters what those around you think. So, we need to manage their perception and then manage their reality.
• Shrink the gaps: The wider the gap between perception and reality, the bigger the problems you have. We want to shrink that gap.
• Control active voice: Control the conversations that happen around your business. Get ahead and make sure that you have twice as many positive messages in the marketplace than negative.

Reputation Navigator

Your reputation is huge and it depends on three things:

1. The things that you say,
2. The things that you do, and
3. The things that are seen.

There’s more:

• Trust is the result of doing what you say and saying what you do.
• Role model is the intersection between what you do and what is seen.
• Notoriety comes from the combination of what you say and what is seen.

Also focus on “Who” we are building the reputation with. These are the stakeholders of your reputation:

1. Community
2. Suppliers
3. Owners/Investors
4. Customers
5. Team

We also need to see “What” our reputation is built on. There are five broad categories for it:

1. Financial
2. Relations
3. Quality
4. Governance
5. Social

Manage your reputation on all these levels and you will be on the right path to build it in a great way.

— Begin Transcript —

Hey there, I’m Mel Abraham, the author of the #1 best-selling book, The Entrepreneur’s Solution and the founder of Thoughtpreneur Academy where we teach you how to capture, package and monetize what you know, the ideas in your head, the wisdom you have so you can have more impact, more time and more income.

And welcome back to this episode of The Entrepreneur’s Solution show. In this episode, we’re going to touch on something that takes years to build and a moment to destroy. It’s about your reputation. Socrates had once said that, “You can gain a good reputation by endeavoring to be what you want to appear to be”

And in this episode, I’m going to take you through something that I call The Reputation Navigator and it’ll help you understand what’s important, what you need to manage and how to build a reputation and protect your reputation. If you want to get that downloadable tool, just go to MelAbraham.com/session057 or send me a text. Send me a text to MYLEGACY one-word no-spaces 38470. I’ll make sure that we get that to you.

So, Reputation: What is it?

Well, here’s the deal. We want to make sure that we’re able to build a reputation that is not only your reality but

• Your customer’s reality,
• But your team’s reality,
• Your vendor’s reality,
• Your community’s reality.

In other words, your reputation is from the outside in, in the context of how it’s envisioned. It is from the inside out in the context of how it is developed.

And so, that’s what I want to really kind of drill down on because here’s the deal. If we don’t get this right, if we don’t get this right, ultimately what’s going to happen is that people aren’t going to buy from us.

They’re not going to come to us. They’re not going to come whether it’s a restaurant or a clothing store or a service provider, a doctor office. If we don’t have a good reputation, they’re not knocking on our door and so, that’s one of the first problems we have.

The second problem is that and this is more of the reason the first problem is that they don’t trust us.

So, even if you talk, even if you say something, even if you go out there and try to build something, they’re going to turn around and go, I don’t think so. They don’t see you as a:

• Trustworthy person,
• A trustworthy supplier,
• A trustworthy vendor,
• A trustworthy store, or
• A service provider or something.

You can’t work that way. Ultimately what ends up happening then is that they break up with you.

It becomes a commercial, a financial divorce because they’re not going to do business with people they don’t trust. They’re not going to like.

They say, you do business with people you know, like and trust. Well, if they know you and they can’t trust you, they’re certainly not going to like you and that means they’re not going to do business with you and so they’re going to break up with you.

But if we get this right, if we truly take the time to (1) engineer and build the reputation that we want out into the world and live into it to make it a reality, things can shift because ultimately what happens is that you’re going to get tons of return customers.

In fact, what happens is that when you have a good reputation with your customers, they tend to buy more, they tend to buy more broadly and they actually will trust you in the process. If you turn around and say, “Here’s a recommendation” then they will typically take you up on it because

• You’ve built that relationship,
• You’ve built that reputation, and
• You’ve built that trust.

We see this a lot in the internet space in the context of affiliate marketing. When an affiliate—someone that you’ve got a good relationship with—tells you, “Hey, this person’s a good person and what they’re teaching and what they’re doing is good stuff”, they’ll turn around and people will buy based on the recommendation and they will do things differently because of the fact that they trust the person recommending you.

Same thing with your customers. If you have a good reputation, they’re going to return. They’re going to come back over and over and over again and they’re going to tell a friend, going to tell a friend, going to tell a friend. We’ve seen that all along.

The second thing that happens is this. It builds goodwill.

Now, what’s goodwill?

When you talk about good will, you talk about intangible value, you talk about all kinds of things that can come into play but the bottom line is if you look at businesses, truly successful businesses, and remember, I value businesses for a living, I have bought and sold businesses as we go through it. And those truly successful businesses 60 to 80% of their value comes from what’s called intangible value.

In other words, if I have a product like this pen here that I just grabbed off my desk. That’s a physical product. It’s tangible, I can touch it. But there’s things in businesses that are intangible; you can’t touch. And that’s the relationships, that’s the intellectual property, that’s not the hard stuff and many of the businesses that are out there, their value is derived through intangibles, the good will, the relationships they created with their customers.

The reason that Apple is where it’s at. Now Apple has their challenges just like any other company but they’ve got a tremendously loyal following and such a loyal following that you literally overpay for their products in the sense that, if we were just buying the utility of a computer, I can buy a far cheaper computer to get the same type of stuff done but we choose to buy Apple because

• They built the good will,
• They built the intangible value, and
• They built the loyalty on a variety of different fronts that brings people back.

So, having a good reputation builds good will. It builds value. It builds intangible value as we call it in the business world.

It also creates loyalty for a premium.

Just like I said with Apple. Loyalty for a premium. In other words that these people that are working for you, that are customers or team members or vendors or community that are really there, they have loyalty to a premium.

In other words, they’re willing to pay more to work with you. And I have a number of providers and number of people that I’ve done work with and I know that the reputation I have and the relationship I have with them, they know that I’m not the low cost provider and I don’t make any bones about it. I’m really clear that I’m not the low cost provider and that I’m actually higher than most in the context of what I do but at the same time I built such a good relationship with them, they’ve gotten such good results with me that they’re willing to pay the premium and they stay loyal to me.

I’ve got people that have referred me business since the early 90s and they will not refer business anywhere else because of it and they tell their clients. Look, “Mel’s not the cheapest. He’s actually on the high end. But what you get with him is worthwhile and he is one of the best out there.”

So, when you build that kind of reputation it becomes really, really valuable to you because here’s what’s happened with me for instance. I don’t do any advertising. I really do very little marketing on my consulting site or my strategic consulting site of my business.

Because of the work that I did previously of:

• Building the good will,
• Building the reputation,
• Building the results

Now, there’s this momentum that I get recommended in, in the process.

So, if that’s the why it’s important, what do you need to know.

• What do you do need to know to really, really drive this home?
• How do you build a reputation?
• What are the key principles?

And there’s a number of things. I’m going to just take you through a few that I think are some of the most important and one of the first is to realize that perception is the reality.

It doesn’t matter what you think; it matters what those around you think. I’m going to talk about the categories of people that will determine your reputation. We need to manage the perception and then manage their reality through building our reality.

Let me say that again. We need to manage the perception then by managing their reality through our reality.

In other words, there is this perception and reality and the wider that gap is, the bigger the problem you have. We need to make sure that we manage that which is the next principle shrink the gaps.

The fact of the matter is that:

• You may believe you’re one thing.
• Your customers may believe you are another thing.
• Your team may believe you’re another thing.

The challenge is your reputation is built on:

• What outsiders say,
• What outsiders see,
• What outsiders do

So, they get a chance to determine your reality if your reality in their eyes is different than it is in your eyes. That gap is a problem that we need to close. We want to shrink all the gaps between perception and reality.

And the third is to control the active voice.

Now, what I mean by controlling the active voice is control the conversation that is happening

• Around your business,
• Around your person,
• Around the things that you do.

Especially, in this social media type of world that we’re in and bad news, it travels even faster. They’re sitting there, let me just grab that. They’re sitting there on their phones just typing, typing, typing. They capture things just by hitting the video camera and they can stream it straight on Facebook and Periscope and Meerkat and 32 other video feeds. So, the reality is that we need to control the active voice. What are people hearing out there? So, we need to get ahead of it in that context.

Now, the gaps if you really start to, we talked about gaps in this last piece but when we think about it, there’s that reality gap which I talked about, the difference between perception and reality. There’s also a gap that we need to manage. It’s called the expectation gap. It is that there are things that may have happened that previously were acceptable but currently are not. They’re shifting and changing preferences. You can call it a preferential gap or preference gap also.

For instance: I sit on a board of directors. We do a lot of work in the ports around the country and logistics. At one point, some of the technology and the ways that we were running the ports was acceptable but now in today’s clean air sensitive environment, those technologies, those principles, those processes are not acceptable anymore and what happens is that, that creates the gap again that we need to shrink and

• Control that active voice,
• Control what is being portrayed out in the marketplace,
• Control how we’re being talked about in the marketplace as we move forward.

Here’s the thing.

• There’s going to be positive messages in the marketplace,
• There’s going to be negative messages in the marketplace, and
• There’s going to be neutral messages in the marketplace.

My belief is that you need to have twice as many positive messages in the marketplace than negative, and if you can have more that’s great. But at a minimum, I need to have 2 times the number of positive messages in the marketplace then I do negative and in times of crisis, I think it needs to go much higher.

And there’s a study out there by Media Tenor and Media Tenor said, “Unless you can control at least 35% of what they call voice share then you’re not going to control the message out in the marketplace.”

So, this concept of being able to get yourself out there to present a voice. Now, you say, “What do you mean, present a voice, Mel?”

Well, I mean

• Your internet presence,
• Your website,
• Your press releases,
• Your speaking,
• Maybe your videos like this.

How are you putting yourself out there and what are people seeing about you? Creating a community. One of my clients and friend Gary Erikson of Clifbar, they’ve got a very, very active Facebook community and they’re really interacting with their community in their in that process and dealing with things at a high level.

Another example of this would be Elon Musk and Tesla. If you recall back, just a little while back, there was a lot of bad press going around about the Teslas catching on fire and that if something gets underneath them that they’ll blow up, they’ll catch on fire, they are very, very dangerous cars and you shouldn’t buy them.

And Elon Musk, to his credit, you talk about the epitome of a great leader. Elon’s one of them. I believe, he is a visionary, he is the new Steve Jobs of our time. He is looking at shifting and changing the world, shifting and changing the community, shifting and changing society in ways that we only dreamt about years ago. An amazing, amazing man.

But he had this challenge where there was a lot of bad press about the Tesla coming in and some of it was; it was of all because they were catching on fire but I don’t know whether the motivation was from the auto industry, the petroleum industry, the gas industry. I have no idea but it doesn’t matter. It’s how he handled it that’s important.

He wrote a letter personally and published it to get ahead of the messaging, to explain

• What’s happened?
• Why those things caught on fire?
• What are the safety precautions?
• What are the statistics?
• Where the myths are?
• Where the fallacies are?

In the sense of the reporting and the things that they’re hearing and not from a defensive standpoint where he was digging his heels and doing that. It was actually from an explanation, fact-based standpoint and a very personal based and inviting letter in the sense of, “If you’ve got questions, if you have concerns, please reach out to me. We’re more than happy to help you out and get you to understand it.”

So, he was very open, very inviting and I think that this is a huge, huge thing. So, control the active voice. Those are the three main principles I want you to consider. Remember,

1. Perception is reality,
2. Shrink the gaps, and
3. Control the active voice.

So, if that’s the case what do we need to deal with in the context of reputation? And now, I will introduce you to this Reputation Navigator. This is something that I use in my consulting with myself, with my one on one clients, my high level clients to allow us to engineer and figure out reputation because I think it’s much broader in impact then we give it credit for.

Yeah, reputation, reputation but it is huge, huge, did I say huge? It’s huge when it comes down to this. So, here’s what I think reputation is built on.

Reputation is built on the things, on three things.

1. The things that you say,
2. The things that you do, and
3. The things that are seen.

Alright? Now that seems really simple and it is. Bottom line is that you’re saying things, they’re saying things. You’re doing things, they’re doing things. And we will explain who they are doing it. You see things and they see things.

The question is, “Do they join together? Are they consistent?”

If they’re not consistent, therein lies your reputation. Reputation’s built on 3 things.

Now, here’s the interesting thing. When we look at the things that we say, and the things we do; where they overlap that’s where you build trust, that’s where you build trust. When you do what you say you’re going to do or you say and then go do it, you build trust. So, trust is a result of doing what you say and saying what you do.

And then interesting enough is that when you start to look at do and see. So, what you do out in the world and what everyone sees out in the world where that intersects, is where you become the role model. You’re the example.

And by leading by example is one of the most powerful things you can do is that

• I don’t need to explain.
• I don’t need to project.
• I don’t need to broadcast.
• I don’t need to do it.

Let me just live; live quietly. Live it in a way that I become a role model, that those that see what I do will see the power in it. It goes back to the old adage that, “Actions speak louder than words.” And I think that it fits; it fits here.

And then the last piece of this is this. Is that what you say, and what is seen; where those two coincide is where your notoriety comes from. It’s what you’re known for, okay? It’s what people see and what you say in that process.

So, really that’s how I see reputation. We got to manage:

• The things we say,
• The things we do,
• What is seen

Because through that process we create ourselves as a role model, a trusted party in whatever endeavor we’re doing and we create notoriety in the process. But there’s more to reputation than this. And here’s what we need to look at in the context of reputation.

We need to focus on who we’re building the reputation with because it’s easy for us to say, reputation and many of us will look at reputation and assume that it’s in our customers, in our market. But reputation is far broader than this. And this model focused on business and entrepreneurship and success. We can develop this model and I’ve got another version of this model for personal relationships. Same thing.

But who are the stakeholders in your reputation. Remember, your reputation is defined from the outside in and so, here’s the people that I think that we need to think about and here’s the key. You might have a different reputation with each and every one of these and that is a problem.

So, what we want to do is evaluate and how we use this Reputation Navigator is to evaluate and rate where are we as far as our reputation with each of these five different stakeholders?

Our Community:

• What are we like in the community?
• How do they talk about us?
• What do they do for us?
• How do they see us?

Our Suppliers: These are our vendors. These are the people that support our ability to put our business out there, to put our products and services out there, to get ourselves out there to make a difference.

• What’s our reputation with them?
• Do we (part of the expression) jack them around with bill payments?
• Do we turn around and are we argumentative?
• Do we treat them like crap?
• Or do we treat them really well?
• Do we pay our bills on time?
• Do we speak highly of them?
• Do we refer to them?
• How is our relationship from a reputation standpoint with them?

What about the Owners and when I say owners, it might be investors more so than anything else. But what’s our reputation with our investors?

And of course, Our Customers: The people that buy from us. The people that use our services or products.

And then Our Team, Our Employees: It does you no good and I’ve seen it happen over and over again where I see someone in a meeting with a team member and they’re an absolute, pardon the expression, ass. Okay? Just a schmuck and they treat them awful.

And then customer calls and they’re cheery as cheery can be and it’s like this divided personality of one is Jekyll and one is Hyde. That’s not a reputation. To me reputation is holistic. If I have a bad reputation with any one of these five stakeholders then I have a bad reputation with all of them because it’s not real. It’s not real and you can’t manage it long.

So, the key is building a good reputation in these 5 areas:

1. Community,
2. Suppliers,
3. Owners or investors,
4. Customers, and
5. Team

The other part of the thing that we need to manage which we don’t spend a lot of time really digging into as businesses many times but I think we need to is: What is our reputation built on?

And I think that there’s again 5 categories, broad categories where we can build our reputation.

1. Financial,
2. Relations,
3. Quality,
4. Governance, and
5. Social

Most of us would think it’s about quality reputation.

• Do I have a good quality product?
• Do I have a good quality service?

Yes, that’s one but that’s the foundation. What about being financially responsible? Think about Enron. Think about Bernie Madoff. Think about Worldcom.

What happened is that there was a gap between what the perception was in the marketplace and the reality in the business was, and so what did they do? They lied. They cheated. They stole to try and keep the perception up rather than being real. So, their ability to build a reputation in the financial arena was destroyed. Absolutely destroyed.

What about relations?

What are my relationships like?

• With those stakeholders
• Employer relationships
• Vendor relationships

So, I can build my reputation

• On a financial level
• On a relationship level
• On a product or service quality level
• On a governance:

How do I run my organization?
How do I run my business?
How do I interact with the government entities, with the taxing authorities?
Am I cheating? What am I doing?
What kind of reputation do I have with how I treat that?

And then last, and I think this is huge in today’s world is: Socially.

• Are we socially responsible?
• Do we dump stuff into our water system that could be harmful?
• Do we use processes that can impact people?

We had a horrendous, horrendous example. It’s a great example of what not do with the gas company out here in Los Angeles. You may have heard it, up in Porter Ranch where they had a gas leak and they didn’t tell people about it and people were getting sick, they were getting nose bleeds, they ended up having to move out and it took literally what it seemed like forever, I think, it started (October, November, December, January), I think it was 3 or 4 months of this process of having to go through this.

And I think, quite frankly, those people as far as I’m concerned and this is just a personal thing, the people that were responsible for suppressing that information and being that irresponsible, I think were criminally negligent; that’s just my opinion but let’s not go there here.

• But are we socially responsible?
• What does that do to their reputation?
• What happened to BP petroleum with the problems that they had and how they handled it or mishandled it in the process?

And dealing with the perception and the reality and being socially responsible in that context. So, here’s the deal, when it comes down to your reputation,

• It’s about the things you say
• It’s about the things you do
• It’s about what’s seen

And we got to manage that reputation with 5 different stakeholders, the who:

1. Community,
2. Suppliers,
3. Owners and investors,
4. Customers, and
5. Your team.

And we manage that reputation based on 5 categories of what’s.

• We want a good reputation from a financial standpoint.
• We want a good reputation from a relationship standpoint.
• We want a good reputation from a quality of product or service standpoint.
• A governance standpoint, and
• A socially responsible standpoint.

And when you do that and when you manage your reputation on those levels you are assured, at least a higher probability, to building your reputation in a good way.

• So, you build that intangible value,
• You build that good will,
• You build those repeat customers, and
• They will refer you.

So, get out there. Build that reputation in a great way.

I hope that you found this of value. I hope that you take this to heart and start to think about and evaluate,

Do I have a good reputation?
Do I have that kind of reputation with each and every one of these stakeholders?
Do have that reputation in each and every one of these categories?

Use, download The Reputation Navigator. Let it help you try and analyze this and figure it out so you know where you need to spend your time to shrink the gap, build your reputation.

And if you need that just go to MelAbraham.com/session057 or text me MYLEGACY one-word to 38470. I’ll send you the download link. If you found this of value and I certainly hope you have. The comments that I’m getting from so many people about some of the broadcasts have been amazing. Just subscribe so you can stay on my list and I can get a chance to keep giving you tools, tactics, strategies and things that will help you in life, success, wealth, business.

And if you want to ask me a question. Have a specific question, just go to AskMelNow.com. Leave me a question. I will be sure to try to bring it up and maybe we get it on one of my upcoming episodes of The Entrepreneur’s Solution show.

And if you would do me a favor? Do me a favor and share this with a friend. Share this with as many people as you can because I think it’s important. I think our society needs to see this shift in paradigm and to look for other directions to build their life their way and that’s my way of being their entrepreneurial mentor, their success mentor and give them access to some of the tools and strategies that I’ve used for myself to build the businesses and build the life that I have but also for my clients.

So, again I hope that you found this of value. I look forward to hearing from you, seeing your comments, seeing your notes and helping you out.

And until we get a chance to see each other again,

May your vision be grand, your journey epic, and your legacy significant!

See you soon. Cheers. Bye!!

— End Transcript —

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Like this? Please share it and help a few more people bring their dreams out of the darkness and give life to them again. Cheers, Mel

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