A Consultant's Guide to Reading People & Closing Deals Faster

Selling over 12 million copies of his books worldwide, Surrounded by Idiots author Thomas Erikson knows a thing or two about human nature. But before the global fame, he spent 20 years writing in obscurity while working a “boring” banking job. He joins Michael to reveal why understanding the four core behavioral styles – Red, Yellow, Green, and Blue – is the ultimate hack for sales, leadership, and negotiation, and offers a proven framework for mirroring your prospects to build instant trust. If you want to stop wasting time on pitches that don’t land and start scaling your influence, Thomas shares his blueprint for communication mastery and ruthless productivity.

In this episode, you will learn about:

• The reality behind Thomas’s “overnight success” and why he persisted through 20 years of rejection.

• A breakdown of the Red, Yellow, Green, and Blue behavioral styles and how to spot them instantly.

• The “Mirroring” technique: How to adapt your communication style to close deals faster and cut meeting times in half.

• How to identify a prospect’s personality type without asking them to take a formal assessment.

• The “Ferrari Strategy”: Why Thomas keeps his coaching high-priced and exclusive to build brand value.

• Why “follow your passion” is often bad advice, and why you should focus on what you are good at instead.

• How to scale a global business using a licensing and affiliate model rather than hiring an army of consultants.

• The secret to high-level productivity: The “I only do what only I can do” framework for extreme delegation.

Welcome to the Consulting Success podcast. I’m your host Michael Zipursky, and in this podcast, we’re going to dive deep into the world of elite consultants where you’re going to learn the strategies, tactics and mindset to grow a highly profitable and successful consulting business.

Before we dive into today’s episode. Are you ready to grow and take your consulting business to the next level? Many of the clients that we work with started as podcast listeners just like you, and a consistent theme they have shared with us is that they wished they had reached out sooner about our Clarity Coaching Program rather than waiting for that perfect time. If you’re interested in learning more about how we help consultants just like you, we’re offering a free, no pressure growth session call. On this call, we’re going to dive deep into your goals, challenges and situation and outline a plan that is tailor made just for you. We will also help you identify where you may be making costly and time consuming mistakes to ensure you’re benefiting from the proven methods and strategies to grow your consulting business. 

So don’t wait years to find clarity. If you’re committed and serious about reaching a new level of success in your consulting business, go ahead and schedule your free growth session. Get in touch today. Just visit Consulting Success – Grow to book your free call today.

Thomas Erikson is a Swedish behaviorist and author of the global phenomenon Surrounded by Idiots, with over 12 million copies sold in 70+ languages whose mission is to make human behavior understandable. By applying the DISC model, he teaches practical self-awareness for better leadership and communication. Writing for 20 years before his breakthrough, Thomas now lectures 120+ times a year and impacts executives worldwide. He lives in the Swedish countryside with his wife, dogs, and a collection of classic Land Rovers, guided by one idea: you cannot change others, only yourself.

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Discover more about Surrounded by Idiots

Thomas, welcome.

Thank you so much. Thanks for the invitation. How are you?

Yeah, I’m great. Looking forward to our conversation today. I thought we would start with the fact that you’ve sold 12 million copies of your books, I believe. Maybe more at this point. However, you wrote for 20 years before you actually got published. So you became an ‘overnight success’, as some might say.

Touché, as they say.

My real question to you, though, Thomas, is what kept you going? I mean, 20 years of dedication, of writing, and commitment to it without getting published. Why did you keep going?

I have been called an overnight success. That is actually the case. It’s kind of funny. What kept me going is a great way to start because I got the question quite often, especially from my family. “Why are you doing this? Why bother when no one’s obviously interested?” When you are onto something and you think you have an idea, you need to develop it. You need to ponder what could be done here and what could happen there. What could I achieve? Could I give something to the world? Do I have anything to speak about that some people might be interested in?

For me, it’s always been important to do something good. It sounds a bit cliché, and I understand that, but I’m Swedish. We can’t brag. We have tiny egos. It’s almost illegal to brag in Sweden unless you want to get a punch on your nose or something.

[01:47] – Finding Creative Purpose While Working an Unfulfilling Career

For me, it’s something called an aesthetic drive, which means the strive for harmony. Not necessarily an artist kind of a drive, but I want to achieve harmony in life, some sort of balance. I was working really hard as a banker. I’m an ex-banker. Don’t hate me for that. I was doing numbers all day long, Excel sheets, and financial advice, blah, blah, blah, which I know is boring. Actually, I did it for 14 years. I never really enjoyed it, which is a stupid thing to say. I enjoyed the people, I enjoyed the team, and I enjoyed being a bank director and leading people, but the work itself it was kind of boring. I thought that I needed something else. I needed to do something.

The career went swell, and I made an okay living. I could climb the career ladder. But something was missing. I couldn’t figure out what it was. Then I restarted an old dream about writing books. I started writing horror novels because if I have a heaven or a role model, it’s probably Stephen King of all people. I have read him since I was fifteen. So I started to write, and all of a sudden, my whole life balanced up in a way. It’s hard to describe it better than that. All of a sudden, the job went easier because I was doing some interesting, creative work aside during early mornings and weekends.

For me, that was what kept me going because, in order to survive my paperwork behind the desk kind of career, which wasn’t very inspiring. When I did the writing, everything came into some kind of harmony. I call it an aesthetic drive. It has nothing to do with money, and it has nothing to do with achieving things, winning something, building a reputation, or being famous. It’s nothing to do with that. For 20 years, no one cared at all. From time to time, I didn’t care either, but I kept on going.

The funny story is, I don’t know if you read this, but I published four crime novels. Actually, no one has read them. Let’s not go there. Then I published a book called Surrounded by Idiots. I tried to publish it, really, because I am a behaviorist and an economist. I was doing business working with salespeople. I went to my then-publisher and said, “I have this idea about writing a book about personality styles, behaviorism, and communication skills.” They looked at me with horror in their eyes and said, “What are you talking about? Don’t do that. That’s just boring. No one is interested in that stuff. You’re going to write crime novels. That’s your job here.”

[04:52] – Self-Publishing Surrounded by Idiots Against Industry Pushback

So I couldn’t sell the idea to anyone. I shopped around the whole of Scandinavia really and tried to get someone on board. They all basically said the same thing – I was the idiot. So I had to publish it myself. Here people ask why I did that. You’re not only risking time; now you’re also risking quite an amount of money, some effort, and a lot of bad nights’ sleep.

Still, I had this idea. This is probably good. If I think it’s good, it can’t be that bad. My closest friend said I should keep going. But people within the industry said it was a stupid idea. They said it’s an ugly cover and a stupid idea and to just not do it. You just have to do it. There’s an old saying: if you try something and then you fail, people are going to judge you for it. If you try something and you succeed, they’re certainly going to judge you for it. That for sure happened to me as well. If you never try, you’re going to be judged for that. So it’s just a matter of for what would you like to be judged?

What was the tipping point for you, Thomas, in that journey where you realized you have something here where it wasn’t just your belief, but it was actually validated?

I self-published the book. We printed 3,000 copies. I said let’s print 10,000. Even if I did the payments myself, I said, “I’m going to pay for it.” Even that service said, “No, we’re going to print three because break-even is 2,700.” I said, “That’s not a good deal at all.”

The breaking point was when we printed 3,000 and 3,000, and then I said, “Let’s print 10,000.” In Sweden, we have a huge book sale in mid-February. It’s a national sort of thing. Everyone’s quite excited to buy cheap books and get everything that they haven’t been able to afford the whole year. It’s probably the biggest sale of the year in Sweden for physical books. We put it out there, and we sold 10,000 books in one hour. Then I realized, “Damn, this is good. This is not bad at all. I’m going to continue doing this.”

[07:14] – Building Momentum Through Exposure and Word-of-Mouth

Why do you think you sold that many copies in one hour? Was it just that you were in the right place at that right moment, or do you think there was something that you were hitting on about the book? Because obviously, people weren’t reading the book and then ordering it. They were taking a chance seeing the book and whatever they learned of it in advance and then making that decision. So what clicked? What do you think it was that made it so successful at that moment?

I actually thought it was just exposure. All of a sudden, it was everywhere. This took a year to achieve, so it didn’t go fast at all. I was struggling with boxes in the back of my car as a management consultant, forcing the books onto people. “Here for the workshop group, take 20 copies.” They would say ‘No”, so I would say, “Take ten, take five, take a book, please.”

That’s how we started. I did this for a year. I’m quite persistent when I have to be. Stubborn, some would say. My wife would probably call me stubborn. The point is, when the book got enough exposure to enough people at the same time, people started to talk about it. I started to see the book popping up on Facebook and Instagram and so on. I think it was a mouth-to-mouth thing because I didn’t have any money for ads. I couldn’t do any PR. Nothing. I couldn’t have the books out there as good as possible and traveling around and doing signing sessions.

I think it was when enough people saw it at the same time, it achieved some sort of critical mass, and all of a sudden, ‘boom’. We wallpapered the whole nation with the book for two and a half years. It was number one for 30 months actually. Then I was a genius all of a sudden.

[09:03] – Creating the “Surrounded by” Series and Simplifying DISC for the World

I wonder how you came up with the concept for the “Surrounded by” series. Because you have now Surrounded by Idiots, Surrounded by Setbacks, Surrounded by Energy Vampires. I mean, there’s a whole bunch of these in the collection or series. Where did the original concept come from? Some people would just write a book about personality types, but you clearly defined or created this concept that you then continue to reuse or build on. I’m wondering where that thought process came from.

Well, I can’t take any credit for the system itself. It’s based on the old DISC profile. We dressed it in colors because it’s easier to remember – red and yellow behavior instead of a high D or an i with a low C, or an ENTJ personality. So that’s just easier. I used that system, then I popularized it. I used a very modern-day, simple language. Not trying to sound like a psychologist. I don’t write for academia. I have no trouble with people wanting to write books with a thousand pages where the appendix is two hundred pages. That’s fine, but it isn’t me. I wrote for ‘Average Joe’, the man on the street.

I think that was kind of the thing all of a sudden. If a sales guy is interested in understanding personality so he can sell better, or if a manager is interested in it so he can lead better, or if someone is a coach, he can coach better. If you’re a negotiator, you can negotiate if you understand who’s on the other side of the table. Those things are quite clear to everyone listening to this.

It’s kind of an, I guess you could call it an everyday psychology thing. Everyone who’s interested in people, which is basically most of us, should be interested if I use examples from people’s everyday lives. Therefore, I didn’t only use consultancy anecdotes. I also used what happened with my wife, with my kids, with my neighbors, with my father, and with my yellow sister. I think when people start to smile and laugh, it’s this recognition that “I’ve been in that situation.”

I think that’s where it took off because people saw they could use this too. “I can use this when I go to this yearly barbecue in mid-July because of this guy over there. He’s usually annoying, but I’m going to test this theory on him and see what happens.” When the book started to spread here in Sweden, I was drowning in emails from people saying this is super smart and actually usable. Even psychologists said, “I went to five and a half years of university. Now I get it. You pointed it out in such a way I can use it in my everyday life.”

I think that’s part of the success. I’m not trying to sound smart here, but I have pondered this for 10 years because it’s been out for 10 years. Then the English translation came in 2019, I think, and then it sort of just took off. We passed 70 languages two weeks ago. That’s great. People have the same reactions all over the globe, from Vancouver to Mumbai to Canberra to Warsaw. People say the same thing: “Ah, I know a guy like this. That’s my wife you’re talking about.” People are basically the same everywhere. Culture differs, obviously, but people generally speaking are very much the same. That’s kind of cool.

[12:49] – Using Behavioral Styles to Improve Sales, Negotiation, and Consulting

So Thomas, you said red, yellow, green, blue. You have the four personality traits based on DISC. For those that aren’t familiar with DISC or even with these four different personality traits, can you describe at a high level what red, yellow, green, and blue mean? For a consulting business owner, how might they benefit from understanding these four different types in their business?

Okay, two questions in one. Let’s see if I can keep this together. Firstly, it’s a two-by-two matrix based on if someone is watching or listening. At the top, you have task orientation. At the bottom, you have people orientation. To the right, you have extroversion. To the left, you have introversion. So you get this two-by-two matrix and then you get four basic behavioral traits. Let’s call them reds, yellows, greens, and blues. These come with specific communication styles. We talk about behaviors, not personalities per se, because that goes actually quite deep.

The Red people are task-oriented and extroverts. So they are fast, dominant, fast-forward thinkers, and very competitive. Some people call them harsh, but they are the winner types. Very result-driven, goal-oriented, and very impatient.

Yellow ones are also extrovert, but they are people-oriented. So they are the smiley ones, the happy ones, the shiny ones. They can inspire anyone. They can sell anything to anyone. They could sell sand to Bedouins and ice to penguins probably. Why not? Have you seen the weather in Ecuador? You say it’s kind of rainy outdoors today. You say yeah, but the sun is always shining somewhere. You see, you have to stay on the positive side.

Then you go to the introvert side and meet the Green factor. They are introvert but still people-oriented. They are looking for stability, calm, kind, very caring, very sharing, friendly people. They are very open-minded to diversity. Everyone’s a friend, but they have low-key behavior. They’re looking for stability. They don’t like conflicts at all. They keep themselves to themselves, hiding their emotions because who’s watching here really? They are excellent listeners, the best listeners in the whole system.

Finally, if you go up to the task orientation again, introvert people are Blue. Here you get yourself an engineer or a tax sheriff or an accountant perhaps. Details, logic, very methodical, and quality-driven. Perfectionistic, some would say.

For anyone who’s listening to this thinking there’s gotta be more than four types of people, of course, these are only the basics. Like when you bake a cake, you need to understand what an egg really is. What does milk do to the mixture? If you put more salt in there, what’s going to happen? Then sugar, what’s going to happen? So you need to understand the base because you can mix these in tens of thousands of ways, algorithmically speaking. Let’s not go into that.

The way you can use it as a consultant- I guess if you’re a consultant, you basically have to get your own jobs. You have to sell yourself, you have to sell your persona, and you have to establish your ethos and look like someone trustworthy. So when you’re in a sales process, it’s really good to understand who is on the other side of the table, especially when it comes to negotiations. Who are you trying to convince here?

If you’re looking at a Red person, do not show them the whole offer; show them the last page. Never, ever open any Excel sheet whatsoever to a Red person, or to a Yellow person for that matter. Give them the last page. You just hand it over. “It’s going to cost a hundred thousand. That’s the price.” “Why so much money?” “Because I’m the best.” “Okay, good.” That’s okay with a Red person.

For a Blue person, you need seven hundred Excel sheets. You need proof, evidence, references, and you need everything. For a Green or a Yellow person, you need to look like someone who is interested in people. You need to take it down a little bit and let them speak. Let them have their way a little bit. These are just really quick examples. But that’s actually not enough because it’s not enough to understand who is on the other side of the table. You also need to understand who you are. That’s how I started using this tool specifically because, like with any journey, you’re always the starting point.

Let’s say I called my travel agents. We don’t do that anymore, but let’s say I did. I called my travel agents up and said, “Get me a ticket to Vancouver.” They would say, “No problem.” Then they would say, “From where would you like to go?” Just imagine I told them, “Never mind that, just get me a ticket. Don’t be so problem-focused, send me a ticket.” How will they solve it? Easy answer: it’s absolutely impossible. The journey from Melbourne will be very different from the one from Stockholm. So you need a starting point.

In any communication story, physical or verbal, or actually non-verbal as well, you will always be the starting point. So you need to understand, if you’re dealing with a Yellow person, should you speed up or should you slow down? If you’re Green, you need to speed up, but if you’re Red, you actually need to slow down. These two parts are crucial. But if you build your self-awareness, you can be an excellent communicator and gain fantastic people skills. Nevertheless, Michael, people skills work the same way as with humor. Everybody thinks they have it, right?

[18:47] – How to Identify Someone’s Behavioral Type Without an Assessment

That makes a lot of sense. I’m thinking about those who are joining us, listening, tuning in, who are thinking, “This makes a lot of sense, Thomas. I can see how understanding the person on the other side of the table would allow me to use a more effective approach that would resonate with them and would be better aligned.” But the question that comes up is how do you know what that other person is? If we go to the basic four behaviors, the four colors of behavior, you aren’t going to go to a buyer and say, “Hey, please take a DISC profile before we have our meeting.” So how would you suggest that people understand or try and figure out what color that person is so they can then use the more effective approach?

The best advice I would say is to – it depends on the situation, but just to give you an example – I would suggest that you go Green yourself. Meaning you lean backwards a little bit, you close the lid in the front, you open up your ears, and you really pay attention. You state something. You say something. You don’t start with questions. That’s actually not usually the best case, even though all sales training says you have to ask open-ended questions. Yeah, sometimes you do, and at the end of the deal, you need to ask closed questions. But it’s better to say something a little bit provocative. Like saying, let’s say you’re trying to sell your services to a bank. Instead of saying, “Okay, how big is your budget?” you say something like, “I read in the newspapers the banks have really big budgets for educational investments this year.” Just see what happens. The guy on the other side of the table is going to say, “Where did you read that? Let me tell you.” Then they have to correct you. But when they start to act and they start to talk, you can observe the language, you can observe the body language, and you can observe micro-facial expressions. You can understand what kind of words they’re using. Are they speaking fast or slow? Are they facing you? Are they moving around a lot? Are they using their hands?

There’s a number of things to look for if you’re really paying attention. But you have to make them act a little bit. The best way is not to have them ask questions because then they will be a little bit alerted. They know you’re trying to sell things. It’s better to give a statement, something that is a little bit crazy. It’s actually a really good way to start because they have to act and say something. The need for correction is really strong within people. If you say something really stupid, they have to correct you. Don’t look too stupid, then they won’t buy from you.

[21:50] – Real Results: Mirroring Clients to Build Trust and Close Deals Faster

You’ve done a lot of work, Thomas, with executives around the world in many different organizations. What have you seen in terms of the impact of exactly what you’re sharing with us here and the body of your work? What kind of results have people experienced when they really listen, they observe, and then engage based on the four colors and based on the approach that you teach and talk about in your books?

The first thing is that if you can figure out who is on the other side of the table- the first meeting is, of course, the hardest one. Some people say to me, “Well, he didn’t move, he didn’t speak, he didn’t say anything. There’s nothing to analyze.” Oh, there’s a lot in there. That’s probably a Blue person. Stone face, they had their notebook up and three pens and. “Please proceed.” That’s a lot in there already. But you have to know what you’re looking for. You have to stop using yourself as some sort of blueprint for how this is supposed to go.

I think everyone who’s listening to this is a brilliant person. I’m sure they are professionals, no doubt. However, the client you’re dealing with maybe doesn’t know this. So you need to be smart. The best results I have achieved are when I try to, frankly, try to mirror the other person. The higher up in any hierarchy that you reach, the more Red you will see. If you start with the Chairman of the Board or the CEO – my team and I never go lower than the CEO to begin with. Can we open his door a little bit? Bend it open. Can we put a foot in there? You see, the higher up, the more impatient people are. If you start with your backstory like, “Well, my company was founded in 1962,” get out of here. No one’s interested. Never, ever share that information. They can see that on your webpage if they’re interested, but they’re not interested.

But when you make them speak, if you see a Red person, you just get straight to the point. You say, “Okay, I’m here to do business. Are you here to do business?” They will say, “Yes, sure.” They won’t waste the time. And you can see this. The biggest win is you’re going to save time. When you mirror people, if it’s Red, Yellow, Green, or Blue or a combination, they’re going to feel comfortable, they’re going to relax, and they’re going to be more honest and more open to you.

So the biggest win is you’re going to do better deals and you’re going to save a lot of time because you don’t have to struggle with showing an Excel sheet for a Yellow person who hates Excel or tell them an anecdote from your last weekend to a Blue person who could not care less or waste the Red person’s time. That’s really stupid. I’m sorry to say that’s the worst you can do. Could you cut the meeting from 60 minutes to 15? Now you’re the hero. If you say, “Just a second,” seeing that is a Red person, and you say something like, “You know, I put aside an hour, but I think you and I, we can do this in 20 minutes. What do you think?” Just see them think, “Brilliant. Love this guy. Let’s get to it.” Then you just close the deal.

It strikes me that being able to identify this and understand would be very powerful as an add-on or enhancement to a CRM for a sales team or for an organization where if you can quote-unquote “label” so that anyone and everyone knows is this person Green, Yellow, Blue, whatever, then everything that you do can be based on that.

We sure have a box for that in our CRM. I can guarantee that. I’ve had for 15 years. I recommend it absolutely.

[26:01] – Why Thomas Keeps His Coaching Scarce and High-End

You talked about not starting a conversation with “we’ve been in business since 1962.” Obviously, people can find out a lot from the other person’s website these days. But I noticed that on your website, you don’t put a lot of emphasis on your mentorship or the work that you do directly with executives from what I saw. To me, the spotlight is more on your books, it’s more on your lectures, but I didn’t see a real focus on consulting work or mentorship work. But I know that you do this. So I want to hear from you, why is that? Why is a spotlight not on those things on your website? And how did you get to the decision of where it is today?

There is a specific reason for this and my website is, as every website, under construction as we speak. The time has passed it and it has to be updated. I know that. The reason those things are not in there is – should I tell you the truth? – well, it’s a Ferrari issue.

Ferrari don’t do commercials. They say, “Our customers don’t watch TV and they don’t spend much time online,” which is probably not entirely true. Ferrari is a high-ticket brand, high-level everything. Everything is just high and expensive, and the products are of course amazing. I have never driven one, but I have two buddies who have two each and they say you should get one. I don’t know what to do with it; I think it’s too costly and I’m too old to sort of squeeze myself in there.

But the thing with Ferrari is they build their brand on scarcity. There is a long line to get a new Ferrari delivered and the special models, the numbered series, they build like 400 of a specific one – someone asks me for examples, I don’t know the examples, really. It’s the red car with a big engine. You have to be a collector, you have to be a certain person. Just money doesn’t buy you a Ferrari. They don’t care about the money. They make billions of dollars every year without saying ‘yes’ to everyone. They keep a low-key profile when it comes to what they are offering, but people know it anyway.

My services, when it comes to being a coach and a mentor, are very limited. My time is limited. I travel 120, 130 days per year all over the globe. I write two books per year. I’m starting a YouTube channel, working on online trainings. I do mentorship, but I don’t speak about it because I don’t bring more than maybe one or two people on board per year really. One of my clients actually passed away this fall so there is a spot, but I would fill it with the right people, the right person. The list of people that I’m mentoring is not long.

[29:38] – How His Business Model Works: Books, Trainings, and Global Affiliates

Yeah. Was that intentional from the early days? I mean, often times you see that as somebody becomes more established and more in demand, they adjust their strategy or their positioning to kind of compensate or to connect to that. And so I’m wondering, is that a change that you made in more recent years as your brand and your work has become more and more popularized or more and more mainstream? Or is that something that you did from even the early days?

Alternative B. I’ve always done it like this. I’ve been a coach for 25 years under an umbrella of a consultancy with 18 other people. Now it’s my own business since 2007, something like that. You know, when it comes to how you position yourself in the business matrix let’s call it, you can always lower your pricing. You can always lower the cost of whatever. But it’s hard to go in the other direction. It’s better to start like a high-ticket solution to begin with and keep it a little bit scarce because, well, I’m doing really good and that’s the way I like it. I can’t help as many people that are requesting my assistance. It’s not about money, it’s about exclusivity. There’s 19 people on the list since one guy passed away. I speak with each and every one of them every fourth week. If there’s something going on, someone is integrating or going to sell his family business and he needs some advice outside of the board, we speak every 10th day, perhaps on Zoom like this.

So it’s not about how many sessions or how much time I invest in these people. It’s about who would I like to work with. I get requests on a weekly basis from people asking if I can do this, can we have a chat, can we do this or that. I don’t want to have it like that. I’m not trying to sound like a big idiot here, but it has been working nicely for me for almost two decades now. I’m going to keep it that way, as far as I know, at least.

So you have, in terms of the business or the umbrella, the brand that you’ve built, you have the books, you have your online trainings and courses. You mentioned YouTube is kind of getting in the early innings, as we might say, and then kind of coaching, mentoring, consulting. What’s the makeup in terms of rough percentages of majority/minority of your business from a revenue perspective? Are the books the biggest driver in revenue or is it the online courses? How would you break it down as much as you’re able to share?

Well, you caught me off guard there a little bit because I don’t have exact numbers. The books are an okay business, but I don’t control that at all because I write the books and then I hand it over to my publishers all over the planet and they do whatever they want with it. Some do it good, some do it horribly bad. That’s just the way it is. It’s impossible to budget your book sales because who knows? Even someone like Malcolm Gladwell or Jordan Peterson, these megastars, they have no clue. If they put out a new book there, no one’s gonna know if it’s gonna fly or die or whatever. It’s impossible. So we can’t lean on that.

So the business is the bigger part. I’m building a network of affiliates all over the industrialized world. That’s huge. That’s growing as we speak because we have these personality assessments, the Surrounded by Idiots method that we have established based on the DISC, but it’s our own way of doing it based on the books connected to leadership and also drivers, motivational analysis, and a couple of more assessments. I’m building a network of affiliates which is growing exponentially right now. That is a number of consultancies in different markets that have a great use for these tools. So we license them and we train them and we give them everything that we know. Then we have quarterly sessions with them, 10 per time usually. We have some spots in Canada actually, by the way. We have a number of people looking for exclusivity, which is impossible because then I can’t control it and quality matters a lot. So that’s growing very much right now. So we’re selling a lot of assessments, actually.

Courses – yeah, sure, that too, but workshops and online seminars. It’s a variety of things, but the theme is the same: behaviors, everyday communication styles, personality skills, all of these things. It’s the same field, but we’re using different tools to reach as many people as possible. Some like to watch a YouTube video, some like to read a book. The content is basically the same, but to reach as many people as possible.

[35:30] – Lessons Learned: What He Would Do Differently in Building His Brand

Thomas, the progression of how you built this brand and business… It sounded like you started off doing – I mean you worked as a banker, right? You’re an economist, you were doing some management consulting work, you wrote the book. What I’m interested in is if you were just to break down what that progression actually looked like. I mean were you going in, doing consulting work and saying, “Hey, I have a book, buy the book,” and did that lead to more work? And then you added assessments? What was the actual progression from the early stage to where you are today in terms of the strategy or the steps you took to build this? And let me give you just one more thing if I can interrupt for a second. What I’m looking for, I want to understand is what did you do? The second part of this question, which I’m actually even more interested in, is knowing what you know now, is there anything that you would do different in terms of the order or of decisions that you made or actions that you took?

I would do a couple of things differently. Probably. That’s the easy part. I’ll get to that. Remind me if I forget about it. I left the banking system in 1999 and became a management consultant full time. I did some internal consulting with certain experiences within the bank and so on, but I became a management consultant, started to use a variety of the DISC tool because DISC is not a brand like Myers-Briggs. Myers-Briggs is a brand. DISC comes in 25 varieties, maybe even more. So we were using one of these and I realized this is a really useful tool. It’s really practical, people understand it. It’s easy to do a workshop or a lecture based on it. You can use it in a number of ways.

So I was doing that and then I was the only one in this consultancy. We were 18 of us. I was the only one with previous management experiences which meant that I went into the boardrooms quite early on. I was 33 years of age and they looked at me and I had to be quite bold to survive out there. But I can deal with Red people. Actually, I’m quite good at that for some reason.

So we sold assessments, we did workshops. I had this idea because at this time I was struggling the 20 years writing at night time, not getting published where we started like half an hour ago. So I was doing that slowly but surely. somewhere around 2007, I think I got the first notes for Surrounded by Idiots. It is today 18 years old, actually, because I had this idea, some sort of embryo in the back of my head, like maybe I could write a book about this. I presented this to my colleagues and they said, “We do not sell books. We do workshops. We sell courses and live classes.”

That was my first mistake. I should not have listened to them. I should have listened quicker to my gut feeling because the gut feeling, based on quite recent research, is more often correct than we might imagine. Actually, that’s kind of weird. We are more psychic than we might realize. I should have listened to my inner drive when it came to that. So it took me seven more years to even put the book together. But then I learned maybe the book would have been different from what it became if I hadn’t built my experience. Who knows what’s the best way to go? That’s really hard to say. But I would probably not listen to people as much as I did.

I was starting to coach the people within this consultancy. Then we went separate ways in 2007, actually, and still I didn’t put the book together because now I was on my own, building my own path into the future. I launched a book, and when it took off, now all of a sudden I got an international audience which I didn’t have before. I was only present in well it’s Scandinavia, but it’s kind of the same thing.Norway, Denmark, it’s sort of Swedish. Don’t tell that to the Scandinavians. But especially the Danish ones or the Finnish people never say-

Scandinavians listening to this, they’re going to hear that, so.

They’re going to hate me for it. But I think they understand what I mean. The culture you know, the Swedish culture, Danish culture, Norwegian culture, we understand each other pretty okay so we can deal with each other. We can have a great time without feeling like we are sort of- we’re close neighbors, I would say. The book came out and I realized I have a bigger mission here. I have big shoes to fill. Then I really started to understand I can actually contribute to regular people. So I started giving open lectures, evening lectures, selling tickets with a specific kind of provider. I realized more and more that people are actually interested in this. I did that for quite some time. The best year, I did 162 lectures in 365 days. I never slept. I lived in a taxi or on a plane somewhere. It was just crazy. That’s not recommendable. Don’t do that. Don’t fall for the new shiny object syndrome there because I got a little bit carried away. My wife kept me grounded and said, “It’s good that you’re working, you’re providing for the family, taking care of us, we love that. But we also would like to see a little bit more of you in real life.”

But the roadmap was… I didn’t have a roadmap. That was maybe another mistake. I couldn’t say these were the steps because it sort of happened to me. I never considered myself an entrepreneur or some sort of driving force in the world. I saw myself as a sales guy, a behaviorist who liked to “edutain” people because I’m pretty okay on stage really. I saw people taking in what I was lecturing on about. So I knew that was onto something. And it just grew and grew. People started asking questions, “Shouldn’t you do this? Shouldn’t you do that? We have a proposal here. Should you start an affiliate program?” Which was my wife’s idea basically. So we did that last year and as I said before, it’s growing.

What I’m not doing is consulting. I don’t have consultants. I have trainers, I have behaviorists, I have salespeople, I have admin and all of that. But I do not do consulting as in gathering small groups in workshops. Like 20 people from Company X, “We’re going to define our fundamental values.” I don’t do that anymore. I’ve done that thousands of times. I don’t like to do that anymore because I’m done with that. And I’m not hiring consultants. If you want to use my tools and do that in your hometown, fine. I would love to help you out. But that’s one thing that we’re staying away from because selling time is not a good business really. There is just so much time.

Going back to the example, if you’re selling time, you need to really put the price level at the right level immediately. It’s hard to go up. It’s easy to negotiate yourself down from a medium-sized ticket to a low ticket. From a high ticket to a medium. That’s a tough business and I’ve been there for 20 years. I know it’s really hard work. I was struggling in the beginning of my career quite a lot. I don’t regret it. It was a good way of learning how to really put in the real work there. I learned a lot. Obviously, I met a lot of brilliant people who trained me and taught me brilliant things. Staying out of consulting with people. The only consulting I do is directed toward the affiliates and the partners everywhere.

Right, so you’ve structured your model that way. Is there anything else that stands out to you, looking back in terms of the steps that you took to grow the business to the point that it’s at today, or even to develop, promote the books that you would do, you would do differently?

Well, again, I never, I haven’t, I never strive to try to be what I am today. And that doesn’t sound very inspiring at all.

You just became it.

Reality just fell into my, onto my head or something. I know this doesn’t sound inspiring or very useful information, I understand that. I’m sorry to disappoint some of you who’s listening to this, but sometimes life provides you with opportunities and the worst thing you can do is to at least not have a look at them, you know? Of course you should have a look and say, “What is this? Could I learn something from this? Could I do something good? Could I contribute something valuable to the world? Is there something that I can actually give people?” Because if you’re good at what you do, you’re going to get paid, that’s for sure. If you deliver an excellent service and you are trustworthy and your ethos is very well respected and all of these things, you’re going to get well paid. People are going to respect you, that’s for sure. But you’re never going to figure out everything. I mean, just look at all of the great corporations in the world today. They didn’t have a roadmap either. They tried. They- all a trial and error and some of them stumble and then the people go bankrupt nine times. And then all of a sudden now they are geniuses and so on. And some get lucky the first time, like Google or Facebook (based on a stolen idea) But what do I know, you know? So just read about the twins this morning.

[46:02] – The Truth About Passion, Persistence, and Doing Boring Work Well

I think what resonates with me, Thomas, is your story. Number one, you really took the time to develop a body of work that was based on insights. You took this concept that already previously existed, DISC, but you brought it and made it more accessible. You gave it your own unique spin, opinion and clearly developed something that resonated with the market. I think that’s one thing that a lot of people skim. They try and move too quickly. They don’t actually develop true insights. The second thing is that you committed and didn’t give up. As you were saying, “It took me 20 years to publish.” I was thinking about Howard Marks. He’s in the investment world, Oaktree Capital Management in the US, and he has this letter he sends out once a month or something along those lines. He’s shared something very similar, that for many years, I think well over a decade, he was writing this monthly newsletter that nobody read or nobody responded to. There was just zero response. But he kept going. And it’s because he wasn’t just doing it for others, he was also doing it for himself. It was part of his process. I think that if you’re not working in an area that you’re truly passionate about or that you enjoy, there needs to be some connection, otherwise you’re going to give up. But you didn’t give up. And ultimately that’s what helped you to create what you have today. So I think that’s a powerful message or multiple messages and little nuggets for people to consider.

Right, that’s a good point. There is a lot of really stupid advice out there. “Follow your passion. Follow your dream. Listen to your heart.” Don’t do that. You can’t live on that really. If I should follow my passion, I would sit alone up in the attic over there writing books 24/7 probably, and never sleep and never eat or drinking too much whiskey on Sunday afternoons. That’s a really stupid idea. Don’t follow your passion. You have to find your passion in something that you’re good at.

I mean, I was a good banker. That’s why I stayed for 14 years. I never loved it. It wasn’t horrible all the time. Obviously, the people were great. I worked with a lot of inspiring people and they taught me numbers and really useful things. 90% of the stuff was just boring. But I’m good at doing boring stuff. Sometimes you have to. You can’t just give up because it’s a hard day or a hard week or even a hard year.

If you’re onto something and you’re good at it, make sure you find a way to reach the public with it or the marketplace or whatever your target group might be. If it’s not working, you’re doing something wrong. Add something. Don’t tear it up by the roots and throw it out the window. Do what you’re good at and try to find some passion, some energy in there. Accept the fact that building a business – and everyone’s listening to this building their own knows this – 80% is going to be a struggle. That is just the way it is. But hey, it’s life.

I’m too old to listen to “I have to feel right and I have to feel good.” I would love it to feel good every single day, but it doesn’t. That’s just not this kind of planet, as Jim Rohn said. Great guy by the way, missed by many. This is this kind of planet. It’s a struggle. You have to just buy into that whole concept, I think. But you’re right, I didn’t give up. I am a bit stubborn. I have a really high Blue bar. So if I’m onto something, I’m never going to give up.

I’m getting better and better as the years pass to not listen to the wrong people really. If someone says, “That’s not going to happen,” well, I have to look into this.

Well, I think your comment about Jim Rohn, right? “You’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with,” I believe came from Jim Rohn if I’m not mistaken. And so I think this is a really important point when you’re working on building success. It doesn’t have to be in business, it can be in any aspect of life. But making sure that you’re surrounding yourself with the right people that inspire you or help you to level up.

You know what I did? I hired the whole family. Everyone is working here. It’s not only family but all the family is in here. Because they are benefiting the most from me doing good. I’m not going to be around forever and my wife starts talking about some legacy. I say, “What do you mean legacy? I’m not that old.” She says, “You know you can’t be on the road for 20 more years.” Of course I can be on the road for 20 more years! But she wants to have me at home. So the family is always dedicated and they are sort of bought into this. Some work with admin, some with sales, some with training. My wife, by the way, she’s the CEO. She’s the most Red person you can imagine. Only Red, nothing else. No Yellow, no Green, no Blue. You understand her immediately.

[51:39] – Productivity Mastery: Delegation and Only Doing What Only You Can Do

Well, I have one final question before we wrap up because I want to be conscious and respectful of the time that we have in the calendar. You’ve talked about 120 days on the road. You’re traveling, you’re writing two books a year, you’re creating online content, courses, videos. You still need time to drink your whiskey on Sundays and drive your Land Rovers and be out with your dogs in the beautiful Swedish countryside. What one thing or two things, when you look at how you are able to manage all that, you feel is key to success for you to be not only productive but also effective? And is there anything that, knowing what you know now, you would have done sooner or started sooner to help you to be as productive and effective as you are?

That I can answer to. I was too slow to hire people because as an ex-banker, I know how to calculate risk. Hiring people is a risky business because who knows, will they behave or will they just cost me money? So I was dealing with receipts and filling up the car and doing some admin stuff, which is really stupid because I am by far the most expensive asset in my business. In this firm, I am the most expensive person.

I should have hired people 10 years ago, but I didn’t. These days, I only do what only I can do. Showing my face on a camera when it comes to social media or YouTube, giving lectures live, writing my books. That’s all. Everything else I delegate. Literally everything. I don’t even – I tell my assistant, “You need to fill up my car.”” No problem,” she said, “You buy me lunch.” I said sure. That’s cheaper than I waste 30 minutes to go as we are living on the countryside. I can’t fill the car up here; I have to go somewhere 20 kilometers one way and then 20 kilometers back.

I only do what only I can do. That’s the best advice I could give. Even if you’re struggling, you think you’re one person or you’re two people or you’re five people, make someone else do the stuff that you don’t have to do. And before you think that’s going to be costly and expensive, well, it depends on what you do instead. If you’re working on your business and developing your business and learning new skills and spend time doing sales, then it’s the best investment you can ever do. That sounds so hysterically simple-minded, but it’s the truth.

I totally agree.

[54:36] – Where to Learn More About Thomas and Surrounded by Idiots

Thomas, thank you so much for coming on. I want to make sure that people can learn more about you, about your company, about all the books that you have out there as well as the upcoming ones. Where’s the best place for them to go? Where would you like people to head over and check all that out?

You mentioned my website. It’s called surroundedbyidiots.com. Everything you need is up there. Things will be moving around and it looks kind of old style, which I like, but hey, I’m not in charge of the website anymore, so there you go. That’s the best way to start. You can find me on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/thomaseriksonwriter/, probably on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/surroundedbyidiots/. There’s a YouTube channel called Surrounded by Idiots slowly growing.

We’ll make sure to link all that up so people can find their way to it. Thomas, thank you so much again for coming on.

Appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me.

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