The ROI of Caring – Andrew Morello

In business we always talk about Return On Investment (ROI), meaning what is the end result we get from what we put into the business. Usually the ROI is a monetary figure but lately in modern business it’s become more about a return on an investment of time. Today I want to talk about something totally different. I want to examine the Return On Investment of CARING about people and the best example of that in action is Andrew Morello…

Couple of weekends ago I had another amazing opportunity to catch up with Andrew Morello, winner of The Australian version of The Apprentice and now Head of Business Developement at Yellow Brick Road.

Morello was back in town to be a guest speaker at The Entourage Sales and Marketing Bootcamp and gave us all a glimpse into how he became such a successful young gun in business.

While the guy has a LOT of business acumen under his belt his one true secret to success I believe is his phenomenal level of caring about people that he met – regardless of where he met them.

You’ve heard that saying – “Always leave someone better than when you first found them” and Morello embodies that principle to the letter.

He shared with us the story of how he and Jack Delosa, founder of The Entourage  arrived in Melbourne the other night and went to check into the hotel. Upon arriving at the front desk they found the young receptionist close to tears because she had been on the phone the entire evening talking to guests who were complaining about a very loud party on one of the floors.

Can you imagine being screamed at on the phone for something that was not your fault? By a bunch of different people? Who were so angry and were constantly hurling abuse at you?

Not a good scene right?

So in typical Morello fashion he gets to his room and calls up reception to speak to the young girl and tells her “I know you’ve received a lot of negative calls tonight but this is one positive call that you’ve received and I’m going to tell you that you’re doing a great job. The room looks great so thank you very much!”

At this point Jack pipes up and says “Yeah! And you could hear her on the other side of the phone saying ‘THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!’”. He made her night.

It doesn’t take much at all to Change the World for someone does it?

Morello also spoke about how he wakes up at 4:30 in the morning and listens to BBC World News so that he can be informed on what’s going on in the world. Why? Because in his world, he meets people from different backgrounds and do you think it would come in handy knowing a bit about what’s been happening in a person’s home country? That’s POWERFUL Stuff!

He also mentioned how once upon a time he acquired a copy of the Koran so that he could better understand all his Muslim friends and clients.

And then there’s the time when he wanted to see how it felt to fast during Ramadan so he tried it. And then each night he would break fast with a different one of his clients.

Can you imagine how much more sales he would have won from his existing clients?

Last but not least, Morello shared another story of how this guy walked in to one of the Yellow Brick Road Branches and signed up to the company bringing in business of a couple of million dollars. His reason for signing? Two years ago he met a guy at a casino and he had an awesome time at the tables with him. At the end of the night this guy gave him his card and said that if he ever needed anything financial then to contact him.

See when you roll out through life giving as much as you can, you never really know how much will come back to you, but it all does in the most random ways.

There’s that Zig Ziglar saying, “You can have whatever you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want“.

So as an Achiever, what does all this mean to you?

In my business BLKMGK Social, I always teach Entrepreneurs that we’re no longer in the old school transactional economy, where companies held the power in the market place.

Everyone is sick and tired of being interrupted with meaningless advertising messages.  And as a result we’re now in the new Reputation and Relationship Economy, or as I like to call it, The New Social Economy.

And in The New Social Economy your reputation and your relationship with those around you is the new currency and the more you work on those relationships the more you will succeed in business and in life.

So that brings us to this week’s challenge.

The Challenge

As you’ve seen from the stories above, Morello goes insane when it comes to understanding and caring about people and he’s got a lot of techniques that he applies to achieve that. But one of the most simplest techniques that he uses is the FORD principle.

When you’re trying to build a relationship with someone start talking to them and include elements of the FORD Framework:

F – Family
O – Occupation
R – Relaxation
D – Dreams

Morello says if a person will share their dreams with you then you know that you have built up enough trust with them to have the basis of a great relationship with them.

This week I challenge you to Use the FORD principle in practice. See how far you get when you meet someone new. Do you end up talking to them about their Dreams? Or just get to the Family stage? Try it and see how it works!

Let me know how you go in the comments section below or on Facebook or Twitter.

Until we meet again,

DREAM, BUILD, INSPIRE, LEAD! and START CARING!!!

AJ~

By AJ Kulatunga

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