Gabe Alves Show Notes Page
Gabe Alves was working on a project that was going to digitally transform the way a hundred-year-old company managed its workforce. After weeks of presenting, Gabe finally got approval. Just prior to going live a vital component didn’t arrive. That’s when Gabe learned an age-old lesson that saved the day.
Gabe was born and raised in Perth, Western Australia – his father a Portuguese immigrant carpenter and his mother a fifth generation Australian with Scottish and English heritage.
Gabe is the second eldest of five children with two brothers and two sisters. Growing up in the beautiful bush suburbs east of Perth, his childhood was spent mostly outdoors. Going on adventures, exploring bush tracks and building rockets were all regular activities.
In the late 80’s a family friend who was into this new world of personal computers encouraged Gabe’s parents to buy a computer for the kids to learn on. It was the way of the future the friend said. After much debate, Gabe’s parents purchased an IBM compatible PC for the kids to learn on.
It couldn’t do anything except load up to a flashing curser, however Gabe and his brothers would spend hours carefully constructing pictures on the screen by typing characters.
This was Gabe’s first introduction to the world of computers at the age of eleven, and set the stage for a career in IT.
After finishing high school, Gabe went to Curtin University and studied computer technology. After two years, he was forced to suspend his studies and obtain fulltime work due to financial pressures caused by a change in government regulation. He never went back.
Over the next twenty years, Gabe worked in IT supporting infrastructure. He started on helpdesk, moved on to Team Lead, and ultimately went on to become the IT Manager for a multibillion dollar Oil and Gas Project managing a team of thirty-five staff and a budget of fifty million dollars.
With a major focus of his career being infrastructure on large construction projects, Gabe had many opportunities to work with cutting edge technology to solve problems in the field or just making systems more efficient – these efforts saved huge sums of money for the companies he worked for.
Over time this type of work began to foster a desire in him to consider building his own business and use the skills he had developed through his career to build something of his own. Finally, in early 2017 Gabe accepted a redundancy at the end of his last major project. He has since been working building up his own business.
He now consults, helping businesses through digital change, and is also the founder of TrackMySubs – an online tool that helps businesses and entrepreneurs manage their subscriptions.
Gabe still lives in Perth Western Australia with his wife Belynda and has two incredible kids, Zachary who is nine and Evelyn who is seven – and a force of nature.
Tweetable Quotes and Mentions
Listen to @TrackMySubs to get over the hump on the @FastLeaderShow Click to Tweet
“The fact that you don’t remember is by design and there’s huge revenues attached to this.” -Gabe Alves Click to Tweet
“There’s no default setting that protects the customer.” -Gabe Alves Click to Tweet
“It’s a subscribe-to-everything economy; humans aren’t built this way.” -Gabe Alves Click to Tweet
“When you subscribe to something the lack of action costs you money.” -Gabe Alves Click to Tweet
“We’re wired to buy things and then own them.” -Gabe Alves Click to Tweet
“If you’re finding things are hard, well that’s good.” -Gabe Alves Click to Tweet
“No one is going to own anything, it just doesn’t make sense.” -Gabe Alves Click to Tweet
“When the tuff things come up, just hit them head on.” -Gabe Alves Click to Tweet
“You need to be able to build and develop the trust in your team and get them to do it.” -Gabe Alves Click to Tweet
“If you have to jump in and do it yourself, you’re never going to be a success.” -Gabe Alves Click to Tweet
Hump to Get Over
Gabe Alves was working on a project that was going to digitally transform the way a hundred-year-old company managed its workforce. After weeks of presenting, Gabe finally got approval. Just prior to going live a vital component didn’t arrive. That’s when Gabe learned an age-old lesson that saved the day.
Advice for others
When you can communicate well and talk to a group the doors open up for you.
Holding him back from being an even better leader
Doing the tuff things.
Best Leadership Advice
You need to build the trust in your team and get them to do it.
Secret to Success
Empathy.
Recommended Reading
The Digital Champion: Connecting the dots between people, work and technology
Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
Contacting Gabe Alves
website: https://www.trackmysubs.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TrackMySubs
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gabe-alves/
Resources and Show Mentions
54 Emotional Intelligence (EQ) Competencies List: Emotional Intelligence has proven to be the right kind of intelligence to have if you want to move onward and upward faster. Get your free list today.
Show Transcript:
Click to access edited transcript168: Gabe Alves: This isn’t something that changes easily
Intro: Welcome to the Fast Leader podcast where we explore convenient yet effective shortcuts that will help you get ahead and move forward faster by becoming a better leader. And now here’s your host customer and employee engagement expert and certified emotional intelligence practitioner, Jim Rembach.
The number one thing that contributes to customer loyalty is emotion. So move onward and upward faster by gaining significantly deeper insight and understanding of your customer journey and personas with emotional intelligence. With your empathy mapping workshop you’ll learn how to evoke and influence the right customer emotions that generate improve customer loyalty and reduce your cost to operate. Get over your emotional hump now by going to empathymapping.com to learn more.
Jim Rembach: Okay, Fast Leader legion today I’m excited to have this guest on the show today because he’s going to give us some insights into the customer experience in our new economy. Gabe Alves was born and raised in Perth, Western Australia. His father a Portuguese immigrant, carpenter and his mother a fifth generation Australian was Scottish and English heritage. Gabe is the second eldest of five children with two brothers and two sister. Growing up in the beautiful Bush suburbs east of Perth, his childhood was spent mostly outdoors going on adventures exploring bush tracks and building rockets were all regular activities.
In the late 80s a family friend was into this new world of personal computers and he encouraged Gabe’s parents to buy a computer for the kids to learn on. It was the wave of the future in the friend his friend said, after much debate Gabe’s parents purchased an IBM compatible PC for the kids to learn on. It can do anything except load up a flashing cursor, however, Gabe and his brothers would spend hour’s carefully constructing pictures on the screen by typing characters. This was Gabe’s first introduction to the world of computers at the age of 11 and set a stage for a career in IT. After finishing high school, Gabe went to Curtin University and study computer technology. After two years he was forced to suspend his studies and obtain full time work due to financial pressures caused by a change in government regulation. He never went back. After the next 20years, Gave worked in IT supporting infrastructure. He started on helpdesk and moved to team lead and ultimately went on to become the IT manager for a multi-million dollar oil and gas project managing a team of 35 staff and a budget of 50 million dollars.
With a major focus of his career being infrastructure on large construction projects, Gabe had many opportunities to work with cutting-edge technology to solve problems in the field or just making systems more efficient. These efforts saved huge sums of money for the companies he worked for. Overtime this type of work began to foster a desire in him to consider building his own business and use the skills that he had developed through his career to build something of his own. Finally in early 2017, Gabe accepted a leaf package at the end of his project he now consults helping businesses through digital change and is also the founder of Track my Subs, an online tool that helps businesses and entrepreneurs manage their subscriptions. Gabe still lives in Perth, Western Australia with his wife Belinda and has two incredible kids Zachary who is 9 and Evelyn who is 11. Gabe Alves, are you ready to help us get over the hump?
Gabe Albes: I sure am Jim, thanks for having me.
Jim Rembach: I’m glad you’re here. Now I’ve given our legion a little bit about you but can you tell us what your current passion is so that we can get to know you even better?
Gabe Albes: I think my current passion really is, Track my Subs, I spend, from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep, Track my Subs, in my head. How can I make it? How can I help my customers? How do I grow their business? And I guess along with that the consulting that I do around helping business with digital change it all kind of fits in together. From passion perspective, I haven’t been as passionate about what I do in my entire career up until now. I was talking to somebody just the other day and he said, he’s actually having a bit of a break from work and he says, okay I’m just fed up of work I just I just hate it. And I said to him, well I actually don’t feel like I’ve got a job, I feel like I get up every day and I actually love what I’m doing it’s just absolutely fantastic.
Jim Rembach: That’s a good place to be and listen to you say that I think—and it also comes with time. I think you have to navigate you have to go through a journey you have to continue to go through the discovery process it just doesn’t happen overnight. When I start thinking about that transition and going to where you are now you’re also on the front edge of this. So, when I talk about the transformation and new economy and the customer experience in that I started looking at the different solutions and jobs and companies that just really didn’t a couple years ago and the whole Track my Subs, it’s a really interesting concept. Can you explain that for folks?
Gabe Albes: Yeah, maybe I can explain where this came from what’s my story on how it started. It was about two and a half years ago now I was working in my wife business, my wife got a graphic design business and we had this awesome idea about how we could automate the website and have people submit request for quote and we can automate that and create a work order to go through and we’ll sign up to all sorts of plugins with Word Press and all these different applications. As we’re signing up to all these things I’m hitting a trial here and a trial there and sign up to this subscription all over the place and this is all ratcheting up, and you know where this is going. There’s particular one, I’d forgotten about a few but the one that really stood out for me was Dropbox. So we’d signed up to a business plan for Dropbox we had a 30-day trial and then we got busy and I forgot about this trial and $850 came off the credit card and I was so frustrated, I was so annoyed about it I thought there’s got to be a better way to do this. And so and so that was really the trigger point to me and so straight away when I’m on the Internet, there’s got to be an app that looks after this. And yeah, there were few out there but none of them actually did what I wanted it to do. There was a few that sort of kank the bank accounts, I don’t need to kank my bank account but I need somebody to control from my bank account details to tell me what I’m already spending my money on, I know what I’m spending my money on I needed a nice tool that I could get organized with. And it didn’t exist.
Jim Rembach: So that was just for me I thought, you know, I’m going to build this thing. I don’t know how to code I don’t know how to program I’ve never been a programmer in my life. I found a uni-student and I said, hey this is my idea do you want to build it with me? And he said, great. And I hired him and two years later here we are.
Gabe Albes: I started thinking about the whole customer experience aspects of what you’re talking about and as far as me being a company like Dropbox or many of the other companies that have subscription-based models is that I want you to subscribe and oftentimes because you might forget about. But that also doesn’t create a good customer experience because then you start thinking about how it wasn’t fair how they didn’t notify you. If the company is not really customer centric and customer focused they don’t want to notify you because it represents additional revenue.
Jim Rembach: Right, it’s going to affect your revenues straight up. It’s really interesting you said that because I got into this and as this app start developing I started doing more research, what’s the psychology behind all this? I started to build my own app, how do I help my customers in, this was when you wrote to me. And then I’m starting to discover all these psychological tricks and things that companies use to get you to sign up to make sure you don’t remember, they’re not going to send you that reminder, but also there’s this amazing book by Nia Al called, Hooked, and if you haven’t read it and you’re in software you’ve got to read it. It was an absolute ** for me about sort of the addictive nature of apps and how these things are programmed to tap into the human psyche and make you a customer. The fact that you don’t remember it seems such a really simple thing but it’s absolutely by design and there’s huge revenues attached to this it totally blew me away. If you do a search for companies that manage subscriptions for companies there is literally hundreds of millions dollars being poured into these companies because they make other companies hundreds of millions of dollars. And that’s just kind of fueled my passion for my own app even more.
Gabe Albes: Who’s on the consumer side? Who’s looking after the customer? There’s all this money pouring in for customers to make greater revenues more money but the customer is just sitting there handing over their cash at every single month. It’s just like the default setting for this is take the customers money there’s no default setting that protects the customer and you can give me ** up here. As I’m this is kind of like—it’s something that I’ve really gone into and it’s dude up.
Jim Rembach: It’s really interesting that you say that because I didn’t really think about it from that aspect meaning that you’re really providing a consumer protection solution.
Gabe Albes: Yeah, yeah, everything’s going, it’s a pay for everything economy, like a subscribe-to everything economy I should say. Humans aren’t built this way we’re used to buying something and then never have to spend money again. I kind of think of something like an exercise bike. Everyone has these great ideas, I’m going to buy this exercise bike I’m going to do this exercise for months. And so you bought the exercise bike you might get on it for the first three weeks and if you don’t do the training for the next month or so that’s okay I’ve got the bike there I’ll get back onto it next week I’ll do it the week after. When you buy something there’s not an additional sort of hit to your back pocket. When you subscribe to something that lack of inaction cost you money. And so we’re wired to buy things and then own them not pay for them and continue using so we just don’t think about it and so naturally everyone’s tapping into that because it’s a huge source of revenue.
Jim Rembach: It is. It’s interesting as you were talking I started thinking about two particular prime examples of what your meaning is. As far as the whole neuroscience and psychology of all this is that at least here in the States fast food companies never used to take credit cards because they didn’t want to have the transaction fees and they’re like, no, no, no it’s going to eat our profits. What they found was is that people bought 20% more products it was not just the situation where it was an even cut it was like they started making more money so go ahead pay the transaction fee because people are buying more product. The other thing is—I just even had this conversation with my wife the other day where there’s a particular place that I go where we get some of our vitamins and stuff like that and they’ve been continuing to try me get to join their club. And I’m like, I don’t want to be part of your club. You’ll get all of these discounts we’ll send you this free product. And I’m like, first of all I don’t have the time to sort through all of your products I don’t want to try all these products and I don’t want to get stuck getting all of your electronic transactions and information and I don’t want to lose track of this darn membership thing that I’m going to have to pay for and again I won’t get full leverage of, I don’t want your club. For me I’m more conscious of this whole thing and how they try to draw you in but gosh the pressure is just overwhelming.
Gabe Albes: And there’s one that it happens all the time and it’s often in pay TV. You’re sign up to a pay TV subscription and they’ll say, do you want a sports package? And you were no, no, look I don’t want the sports package. And they’ll say, well how about you have the sports package for free for three months? And you go, well that sounds good. So you, yeah, give me that sports package for free. And you take it on three months you’re guaranteed to forget about it and in three months it stops being free and it starts coming off. And I guarantee nine times out of ten you’ll pay for that at least three or four months probably before you realize, hang on a minute, I’m paying for this foolish package that I didn’t even want to start with but somehow it’s on my bill.
Jim Rembach: It’s amazing how this works. I also had the opportunity—you had mentioned a moment ago or maybe you didn’t but I at least researched and found that you’re actually a coach for organizations going through digital transformation which is just huge right now. We talked before we actually got on the show about how primarily you’re coaching and working with small to medium sized enterprises but digital transformation is a problem for everybody. The keeping up with the pace of change and the consumer expectations is just—you talked about velocity and agility and all of those things companies are struggling. You’re part of a digital Champions Club primarily and your part of the world. Tell me a little bit about what you’re doing to help companies do that transformation and hopefully, of course be more customer centric and not do some of the things that we’re talking about.
Gabe Albes: Yeah, absolutely so. The digital champions Club was founded by a speaker called Simon Wallach. He used to work for Rio Tinto, one of the major mining companies in the world, he used to do this sort of risk analysis and digital transformation stuff within the large organizations similar to some of the stuff that I had done. He came and spoke at an organization that I was with about this digital change and this sort of digital champion’s methodology it really resonated with me. So I reached out to him I said, hey Simon I really love your staff can we catch up for a coffee next time in your town? And we did. And he said, this is my program and he invited me to join and be a coach here on the west coast of Australia. What I really love about it is when I first started to try and consult and try and help businesses I had a real problem with—I thought it was a fraud so I’d go in and someone would have a problem to—I got this process and we need to automate it we need to get an application that’s going to solve that problem and I’ll go in there and help them with it from a perspective of, yup I think this is going to help you and your two bit of analysis and you give them a report. And I knew that when I gave them that report I have a whole bunch of recommendations but I knew they might walked away they weren’t going to do anything with it they just didn’t have the skills they didn’t have those resources in-house that they could actually go and execute it. And so what I really liked about this program was that it’s not about us as coaches to bring out. So we asked for every company who signs up to my program they provide two people and we typically ask for the business oriented person and a technical person so they might be from the IT department and then we also ask for an executive sponsor, it’s really important how we grab those three people. The executive sponsor is there to make sure that it’s got the support of the business. We’ve got a business person so that when things can be looked at from a business perspective and understood that, hey this is a business case here this isn’t just some tech thing that we want to install there’s a business driver for it, and then of course you have a tech person who can help with the implementation and all the nuts and bolts. And so we have a real solid process of, okay, we think you got some problems so we find those problems and then its work history and framing them up and understanding what is the process and what is that process costing the business as it stands. We don’t even look for solutions the solutions kind of like way down the track. Let’s find, what is this worth? Is it even worth solving? There’s so many times you go, oh, look there’s a brand new app out there let’s go install in our business let’s get going but don’t know what it’s solving you don’t know what it’s worth. Well, it’s only ten dollars per user or something like that but you haven’t quantified what it is that’s going to bring that for your business. So we sort of bring that into it so that when you’ve understood your problem you got, hey, look this problem is costing us a $100, 000 a year in lost time. If we spent $10,000 to find a solution, we got a 10 to 1 return on our money. And then all of a sudden you’ve got this business case that stacks up and we get these guys to walk through this process present it to their management and say, these are business case this what we’re going to do and of a sudden you’ve got buy-in and it helps the whole change process. As a part of this we get them to engage other staff members the people who are involve in the problem so when this change happens it’s not also so (15:50 inaudible) and your application gets road our, hi, everybody we’re using this and I know how to use it.
I think you bring up a really interesting point interesting point. I had this conversation the other day when it talks about human motivators. An organization is just a group of humans but we can sit there and we look at the whole aspirational side all day long. Hey, we could do this better, hey we could increase our profits, hey we could—all of those are great, however, if we don’t understand the dark side of it, which is really what motivates most of us as the fear component where most of us don’t want to continue to endure pain, that’s just not the way that we’re built it’s the whole fight or flee thing. Until people can really start understanding the dark side of a particular issue it’s kind of hard to get them to really understand what the impact of not doing something is or continuing to do things the way that they’ve been doing. Even when we started talking about those Track my Subs and the neuroscience and the psychology of all of these you did the same thing or are doing the same thing as a coach by having people understand their pain problem.
Absolutely. And by getting them to actually draw out their process and getting the people who do it you’re actually drawing attention to the pain. One of the things that Simon and I have talked about is that’s part of the process we can’t leave them, so here’s the solution, we actually got to make them feel the pain you draw it out on the board as they go through the process, and I go, well this is actually pretty bad this is hurting us and they have to go through that because then they recognize what the value is going to be. For me I don’t see a problem with paying subscriptions until it really hurt me and then it’s like, I’ve got to fix this thing now I recognize this pain it’s loud enough.
Jim Rembach: Here’s the thing too, I was talking about this and talking about the human change and the transformation process some people may say, oh, gosh, you’re manipulating people. Manipulation is a problem when you’re trying to get them to do something that will hurt them in the long run. That’s not what you’re doing here, what you’re needing to do is influence them so that they will make a movement because ultimately what’s on the other side of this hump is something that is fabulous and will actually give them benefit and value.
Gabe Albes: This is such a two-sided thing. It’s all about what is the motivation for it? What’s the drive that you’re trying to achieve here? Is it for good or for evil? What’s the purpose here? And if you’ve got a good purpose here—comes to the debate of whole addictive apps as well. An app that is totally designed to be addictive that’s good for you like maybe it’s a fitness app or maybe it’s something to do with meditation or something that brings your health benefits there’s a real benefit to that being addicted because you know it’s going to help the person that’s the real kind of value there. But if it’s—I keep going back to Facebook and the Facebook’s like machine I call it the continuous scroll you’re scrolling, scrolling looking for dopamine hit something of interest that goes boom in your head and you go wow, quick roll again I want another one. Where’s the value in that other than addicting people for the sake of addiction and staying on an app?
Jim Rembach: That’s very true. Okay, so all of this that we’re talking about here without a doubt positive side negative side change it’s just riddled and full of emotion. One of the things that we like to look at on the show in order to give us hopefully a positive hit of emotion are quotes. Is there a quote or two that you like that you can share?
Gabe Albes: Yeah. The quote that I had was—an old boss of mine he told me, and I think I was just unloading to him at that time this is really hard and he said to me, guys if it was easy everyone would be doing it. It just stuck with me. You know it’s so true it’s really easy to take the easy path but if you’re finding things are hard well that’s good because you’re taking the road less traveled so to speak and that’s the path to getting the better outcome and the greater satisfaction. So, that one’s really stuck with me here, If it was easy everyone we’re doing it.
Jim Rembach: And that’s one of those simple quotes and I even find myself saying that a lot especially to my kids it is so true. It’s just like one of those aha moments when you say it and then also when you feel it yourself. You’re talking also about going through your background and how you’ve come and the path and the pivots and all of those things that you’ve done to get to where you are with being a coach and helping organizations through transformation and then Track my Subs, I know there’s a lot of humps that you had to get over. Is there a hump that you’ve gotten over where we can learn something? Can you share that story?
Gabe Albes: Yeah. I think we got enough time, I’ll go through it as quickly as I can. When I was looking for badge for all of the guest’s project I had the opportunity to do something different to the way we’ve done it. It was a construction job and it was a very remote site. To give you an idea of scale we had about 5,000 construction workers and we had to move those construction workers from the camp where they all resided and every morning we had to get them on a bus, 70 odd buses actually, and move them to the job site which was about 12 kilometers away. Now, the typical way of managing the workforce would be using turnstiles, you got a badge and walk up to the turnstile you hit the turnstile and it lets you through. The e problem with this if you can imagine moving 5, 000 people at the beginning of the day on buses you get them off then you swipe the badge and 5,000 people have to go through banks and banks of turnstiles and then the job site itself was two kilometers long no one could walk to their job they have to get back on the buses again the logistics of that hours to beginning in the end of every day. And so when this job came across over to me to say, okay guy your turn is you can get this turnstile installed get over the trunks and all the things done I said, there’s going to be a better way. The thing that came to mind, I do a bit of running, did a triathlon and you go to these events and you get given beep then you run over the mats at the beginning of the race and at the end of the race you have mats too and your time pops up and they email later that says your race was this long. Surely there’s got to be something out there that we could do to replace this system, so that’s what we did, I say it just to roll off the tongue like that that’s what we did.
Anyone who knows Spectral they’re an old company they’re 110, 120 years old company they have their ways of doing things they’re construction management everything else this isn’t something that changes easily. I think about this presentation I put together and I must have presented it 10, 15 times. I’ve presented it to one or two people and they’d say, oh that’s great guy, I want you to go and present it to somebody else so I presented it to them. And I go, yeah, that’s really good I want you to come present it to someone else and this went on literally for weeks and weeks we presented it over and over again and every time I did it would tweak a little bit I adjust a little bit you could say that there’s going to be a few people who are detractors. There’s few people who said, no this is never going to work it’s not the way we do it, I’m not interested, you could tell that they just didn’t want to have to do the work to do something different then you have to do the job and this is going to be a change. And so it was really interesting to try and get this over line that it was about convincing and selling the story that it was good for the project it was good for the company and that the people who are detractors—essentially I targeted on their bosses I need to convince their bosses and then they will tell these guys to bring him into line and essentially that’s what happened.
It ended up being a really great success but there’s one thing that I wanted really sort of mention about too—after spending about $2.5 million getting the system all set up we’re ready to implement and I had a shipment of tags, these are electronic tags that every employee was going to wear that will enable them to be detected when they move on and off the site. And I got a phone call from Perth, this is about 1,200 kilometers away the job site, I got a phone call from Perth and all these tags, 3,000 of them had missed the truck they weren’t going to be on the truck so we weren’t going to be able to get them to the signing time. I thought that’s okay we’ll just put them on the next plane. Because of the remoteness of the site all the workforce would fly in and out of aircraft it was just too far to drive in every employee would travel to and from work on an aircraft. All these badges went to the airport, I’ve got a phone call from the airport saying, Gabe these devices can’t fly. I can picture in my head exactly where I was sitting where I was on the site and I was like my whole world just collapsed I’ve just spent months and months and months and $2.5 million and all this time convincing this project and this company that this is the new way to go and I’m like, my job’s over that’s it I’m done, that’s it. And I had forgotten that each of these device was a radio transmitter and of course you can’t have radio transmitter on aircraft and I also had a lithium battery and they have these rules against batteries, and I just thought, that’s it my job’s done.
After panicking for a minute I thought well I’ve got at least try. And so I called the guy who was in charge of our aircraft contract, he used to manage our contract aircraft. I said, Rocky, I’ve got a problem this is what it is. I told him the situation. He goes, Gabe, don’t worry about it just leave it with me I’ll call you back in a couple of hours. Four hours later he had a written approval from the airline that this device had received an exemption and was allowed to fly, so the project was back on. It was at that moment that I realized that my relationship with Rocky, the guy who enabled this, I had been doing that relationship for about three years. I had known the guy and I’d never required anything from him I always took the time for him always go get to know him he was there when I need to call in that favor he could not help me fast enough and that moment to me was just relationships at everything you cannot do things on your own. And if you think you do you’re going to come to a point where you’re going to need somebody’s help and if you haven’t got that relationship network that friend or whoever it is to call on you’re just going to fall in a hole and that that whole project would have died right then because there wouldn’t be anyone else. But the right person I had the relationship with turned out to be quite simple but if he wasn’t on board that would not have happened there’s no one else who would have made the effort to get that done.
Jim Rembach: That’s a really good lesson for me to me to hear and I’m sure everybody else too. Sometimes just taking that moment to give and acknowledge and all of that can pay off maybe five ten years down the road. You can’t ultimately invest your time and effort and into people seeking the game you just do it out of your normal self.
Gabe Albes: Yeah. I think it’s got to come from a place of natural communication. If you go out there trying to build these networks intentionally it’s going to feel fake it’s not going to be real it’s not going to happen people will see straight through it. It’s more about taking the time when opportunity presents itself just to talk to someone get to know them sometimes that’s all it is. If you’re passing someone in the corridor you’re meeting someone just take a few moments it might just be a minute or two just say hi, how’s it going? How was your weekend? Just have that friendliness rather than, I’m too busy I’ve got to keep going.
Jim Rembach: Yeah, put down the cell phone, right?
Gabe Albes: That’s right.
Jim Rembach: We talked about the coaching we talked about family, that’s important to you, you’ve got a lot of things going on but if you were to say you had one goal, what would it be?
Gabe Albes: Look, Track my Subs, is it for me at the moment that is that is my passion it’s hobby, as I said before it’s the I wake up thinking about and how do I just get this into the hands as many people as I can. It’s one of those things that you always doubt yourself, have I done the right thing? Is this going to be successful? What does success look like? All these kind of things. But then every day I’m getting somebody who comes back to me he sends me a note messages me through our support system and says this just saved me some money—or this thing’s amazing—when I first looked at it I thought ahhh you know he’s a really a problem and as soon as I start getting into it I’m like—this is like—I love it. And when I hear those things it’s good, I’m getting that message out there I’m helping people. The world’s not going to change we’re going to go down this place no one’s going to own anything it just doesn’t make sense to own anything if we just don’t have the tools we’re going to be destitute because we’re going to be paying money on stuff we don’t need.
Jim Rembach: Well the Fast Leader legion wishes you the very best. Now before we move on let’s get a quick word from our sponsor.
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Alright, here we go Fast Leader legion it’s time for the Hump Day Hoedown. Okay, Gabe, the Hump Day Hoedown is the part of our show where you give us good insights fast. So, I’m going to ask you several questions and your job is to give us a robust yet rapid responses that are going to help us move onward and upward faster. Gabe Alves, are you ready to hoedown?
Gabe Albes: I sure am, go ahead.
Jim Rembach: Alright. What do you think is holding you back from being an even better leader today?
Gabe Albes: I think doing the tough things. I think I still struggle in doing the tough things sometimes I win sometimes I don’t but if I could get better when the tough things come up just hit him head-on I think I’d do a lot better.
Jim Rembach: What is the best leadership advice you have ever received?
Gabe Albes: The best leadership advice was, Gabe, you can no longer do anything you need to be able to build and develop the trust in your team and get them to do it. If you have to jump in and do it yourself you’re never going to be a success.
Jim Rembach: What is one of your secrets that you believe contributes to your success?
Gabe Albes: Empathy, one hundred percent empathy. Taking the moment to think about the other person’s circumstance and before you open your mouth it goes an absolute huge way.
Jim Rembach: What would be one book that you’d recommend to our listeners and it can be from any genre?
Gabe Albes: The Digital Champion by Samuel Waller, that’s just got the framework for doing digital changing your business like I’ve never seen.
Jim Rembach: Okay, Fast Leader legion you could find links to that and other bonus information from today’s show by going to www.fastleader.net/gavealves. Okay, Gabe this is my last Hump Day Hoedown question, imagine you were given the opportunity go back to the age of 25. And you’ve been given the opportunity to take the knowledge and skills that you have now back with you but you can’t take everything back you can only choose one. So what skill or piece of knowledge would you take back with you and why?
Gabe Albes: The ability to speak to a group of people. One thing that I wish I had solved many, many years ago was the ability to public speak and the amount of doors that open up when you can communicate well and talk to a group is absolutely phenomenal. Unfortunately, I only solved my problem about five years ago but a lot of pain and suffering but it’s something I just wish I’d done when I was ten years old.
Jim Rembach: Gabe, it was an honor to spend time with you today. Can you please share with the Fast Leader legion how they can connect with you?
Gabe Albes: The best way is probably to connect to me through LinkedIn or they can go to Track my Subs webpage and go to support and it’ll get you through there as well.
Jim Rembach: Gabe Alves, thank you for sharing your knowledge and wisdom the Fast Leader legion honors you and thanks you for helping us get over the hump. Woot! Woot!
Jim Rembach: Thank you for joining me on the Fast Leader show today. For recaps, links from every show, special offers and access to download and subscribe, if you haven’t already, head on over the www.fastleader.net so we can help you move onward and upward faster.
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