The Consigliori's
Profiles of Success
Jim Luzar - First Among Equals

Brought to you by Pasquale Scopelliti & The Recruiting Manifesto
© 2009, All Rights Reserved.

October 6, 2009


In this issue:
  • Introducing Jim
  • Jim's Story
  • Jim's Method
  • Jim's Business Code: The Four Agreements
  • In his own words: Jim's Dream for the MRI Network
  • About the Profiles of Success
Introducing Jim

So... why Jim Luzar, owner of Sales Consultants of Brookfield, Wisconsin?  The choice was obvious and overwhelming.  One of the most spectacular things about Jim is the fact that he has a code for his business and a dream for the MRI family and the recruiting world.  Jim's code is found his business bible, The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz.  In his counsel which you'll read below, Jim shares the story of his work with this book and its meaning and impact on his business.  This alone makes Jim very special, and is an absolute key to his business success.  
 
What are Jim's accomplishments?  I'll detail them in a moment, in such areas as his own desk-level performance, record setting team performance, athletic and family leadership unmatched. Beyond these objective measures,  Jim has something special that made his selection compelling.  His term for this is "soft skills."  By this, he refers to the human arts that make the difference between feeling comfortable and feeling like you just met a long-lost brother.  Jim is the king of the soft skills, no question.  Still, there's something more.  It is his quality of person.  Not just his skills, but his actual character.  I have to state it this way...
 
If I could become more like any one person, I would have no choice but to pick Jim Luzar.  I wish I was more like Jim.  Why?   Jim gives more than he takes.  I might have doubted my judgment if I didn't know that virtually every employee, friend and family member in Jim's life feels EXACTLY the same way I do.  For all of us who know him, Jim is, by way of quality of person, as good a man as we've ever known. 

Turning to his objective accomplishments, the first thing to recognize is his National ranking in racquet ball.  He's not always the top rated amateur in his age group in the United States.  Sometimes he's number 2 or 3.  But, in any given tournament or year, the chances are far better than not that Jim will be the very best racquet ball player, that is THE VERY BEST PLAYER in the ENTIRE United States!

Closer to the recruiting world, as a dedicated member of the Regional Representatives Counsel of MRI, Jim invests uncounted hours serving the needs of all his fellows. 
 
But, what about recruiting and business itself?  Jim stays loyal to his desk, placing powerful people into powerful positions.  He has never stopped doing so no matter how busy he is leading and serving elsewhere.  As a result of his seasoned and dependable, high integrity service, his clients worship him, and the candidates he places build lifelong relationships to him.  That is very important, though it still doesn't capture Jim's real power.

The fact that MRI has twice awarded Jim with Manager of the Year is pretty compelling proof of his excellence as a leader.  Jim continuously sets new team-production records leading the smallest group possible, which makes him one of the great per-desk-average leaders in the MRI family.  More significant than that, Jim has kept each person he's hired since 2002, when he opened his shop.  He doesn't hire often, but the key to his business performance is in his relationship to each performer.  Jim enters into a type of family relationship with each person in his employ, and leads his entire team with simply unmatched passion and care. 
 
For all the worship that his friends and associates rightly give him, Jim is the most regular of regular fellows.  Not only does he give to all, he gives all his respect and sees each soul as utterly worthy in every way.  How then do we reconcile Jim's honest humility with his stunning track record of performance?  Perhaps an ancient Roman expression offers us a clue.  In ancient Rome, during the days of the democracy before the emperors arose, there was wonderful expression describing the most powerful man of the day, "First among equals."  Don't you love the contradiction of that?  That's Jim.  First among equals.
Jim's Story

Long, long ago, back in 1996 to be exact, when I met Jim, I had the hardest time cracking his personal code.  Every client I serve has a personal code, and if I fail to crack that code, I fail to serve my client. 
 
Jim had always been a good, a strong, a consistent and a dependable performer.  In business, he was not well known for knocking the skin off the ball, but to know Jim was, if not to love him, then surely to respect him.  When we met, I believe he had been a recruiter and then a half-owner of a Sales Consultants shop for about 20 years.
 
One of the most challenging obstacles Jim and I faced resulted from my own passionate obsession with the numbers.  As I always do, I kept trying to get Jim to confront the numerically driven nature of the recruiting business.  But Jim is simply no numbers man, at all! 
 
How did we get through that challenge?  Dismissing all the numerical data when working on his people's performance, it was instantly clear that Jim knew everything about each person.  I wasn't able to crack the code from that alone, but it was a starting point.
 
Ultimately, it was racquet ball that cracked Jim's personal code.  Jim's athletic ambitions in his youth were actually thwarted by his extraordinary abilities in all sports.  He simply could not force himself to commit to any single sport.  In his college days, he was offered a spot on the baseball team, with a pretty clear path into the Major Leagues from there.  However, the thought of playing and focusing on only one sport during the entire year rather than changing sports with the changing seasons-was the reason Jim walked away from that path.  Back then, Jim didn't even realize that he didn't have a true dream to guide him.  As a result, a professional athletic career never came to pass.
 
But, the inner force of that lost dream from his youth turned into a lifetime of excellence in amateur sports.  You can see the power of that lost dream present in Jim's racquet ball today where he is one of the fiercest, most potent, most frightening enemies you'll ever face on the court.
 
And that was my clue.  There was a performance profile gap from world class racquet ball player to steady but unremarkable business performance.  The gap was simply too great.  As I zeroed in on this with him, Jim's fire for domination on the racquet ball court was simply not equaled by any competitive zeal or force in business performance itself.  He served and performed morally, on the court of work, but not competitively.  If there's one thing you can count on when an individual is nationally ranked, they are intensely competitive souls.  That imbalance was our clue.
 
It took us years to work that clue out.  Where did we go with that clue, first?  Absolutely NOT to business.  Having found Jim's power on the racquet ball court, it wasn't too tough to discover his passion as, yes, the veritable king of his family life.  From his commitment to his wife and children, to his function as the most amazing grandfather you'll ever meet, Jim is the most giving and mightiest king on the court of family life.  This was our second clue.  Jim was more passionate about his family and its needsby far, than he was about business performance.  Again, the same profile showed up.  The leadership demonstrated with family, was far more like his racquet ball domination than was his business performance. 
 
How did we break the blockage?  In the end, the answer was leadership itself.  By not bringing the same competitive juices and aggressive fire to the field of business that he always brought to the athletic court, Jim was not living up to his mission, potential and purpose as a business leader.  This meant that he was letting his good people off too lightly, not pushing them forward to fulfill their own hidden and sometimes blocked potentials.
Jim's Method

The answer for transformation was in Jim's natural method of service.  When Jim goes to help a man, he has no clear image in his mind of what the outcome will be in advance.  He doesn't even have a clear image of what they'll work on.  What Jim does is block out all preconceived conceptions and speak to the man soul-to-soul.  It's tempting to focus on such tactics as Jim's amazing use of the word "really."  After he asks you how you are, if you give him merely superficial information, he'll often simply repeat the question, but add an innocent-seeming word like, "really," as in, "Yes, but how are you, really?"  But, to focus on the tactic is to miss the real point of his method.
 
Perhaps we can capture the power and magic here in the one word, caring.  Jim really, actually cares.  When he focuses his attention on you, there is nothing else in the world going on.  The highways empty out of cars and trucks.  The sports stadium grows deafeningly silent.  The TV volume level drops down and the radio becomes quiet.  And Jim just listens to you.  Silence...
 
In this silence you know that a mighty man is present and here to help.
 
As I've watched Jim's business in its spectacular rise, I've seen how each soul he serves rises from every fall.  The source is quite simply his strong helping hand, and his soulful listening ear.  His heart and soul are fully present, here to serve you and you alone.  The great key for Jim was to find the same passion to invest into his own natural method of serviced that he invested everywhere else.  He'll share a bit about the dream that's arisen since, in his own words below.  Now, we must turn to his guide for all this, by way of his business code...
Jim's Business Code: The Four Agreements

Jim is also, for all that, one of the most amazing students I've ever served.  When Jim reads a book, he uses it to guide his action.  Complete comprehension, as we all know, is not always easy.  During each pass of his reading, Jim thinks about the real world.  He thinks about his people.  He thinks about his clients.  He thinks about real world application.  And Jim never cuts corners.  He ponders and meditates until he knows the exact right thing to do.
 
As we turn to Jim's own words, do understand that I asked him to share this with you, and I did so for the following reason.  You will never find a more powerful book to study than Jim's own personal greatest guide.  And, you'll never find a more meaningful proponent of a book and its tenets than Jim.  You'll find his guidance is a treasure you can't afford to dismiss.

Jim's cast of characters:
  • Jim, our hero
  • Diane, Jim's wife
  • Betty, Diane's sister who lives in Rhode Island
  • Ben, Betty's husband (Jim and Diane's brother-in-law)
  • David, Betty & Ben's oldest son who passed away in 2003
  • Lucas, David's son and orphan, Betty & Ben's grandchild
  • Don Miguel Ruiz, author of The Four Agreements
  • The Four Agreements, a book given by Ben, to David, and re-found by Ben...
In his own words: Jim's Dream for the MRI Network

Pasquale,
 
I am deeply honored by your request to share what you call my profile of success, and your interest in my passion for The Four Agreements.  As you know, this book has truly become the foundation and "platform" for my office and me personally.  I would love to tell you that I did a boatload of research about the perfect book to compliment my business but that truly was not the case. 
 
In 2003, my wife, Diane, found out that her nephew David, her sister Betty's oldest son, died at age 34, leaving his 6 year old son Lucas, without a father and a mother.  David was living in Florida at that time.  When his father, Ben, my brother-in-law, went to Florida to pick up Lucas, he found Don Miguel Ruiz's book in David's things.  Ben had given him that book since David was really having some tough times in his life.  He knew that David had been diligently reading the book and he then gave it to Betty to read as a support for coping with the loss of a child AND then having no choice at age 59 but to adopt their beloved grandson and raise him in Rhode Island.  Betty then shared the book with Diane and then Diane asked me to read it as well since she found it so compelling, too.  The rest is history as the saying goes.
 
When I read it, I could see why the family needed something like it, but it moved me in a different way as well.  I quickly found myself thinking of how many times those agreements came into play in my business of recruiting.  It quickly became the core set of beliefs for me, deeply engrained in my mind and then immediately put it to use here at SC Brookfield.  I hand wrote the agreements on a large sheet of paper and prominently displayed them in a common area where everyone would see them from the bullpen and when they left the area.  They could not possibly miss seeing them! 

The Four Agreements

I bought a copy of the book for each member of the team and we read it together one chapter at a time.  We reviewed that chapter and openly discussed what it meant to them both personally and here at the office.  Slowly but surely we finished the book.  Then, I saw immediate results. 
 
The "platform" I was creating for everyone here including myself, was to build tremendous strength from within as opposed to strictly MRI training techniques which are excellent but lack what I call the "soft skills element".  When I have my weekly one-on-one meeting with my team, many times they bring up one of the Agreements and how they used it in application in the office or at home.  I found them using my teaching and support to improve life at home which has had a direct effect on their success here at the office.  We have consequently built a culture of honor, integrity, no excuses but only results and a "swagger" that has propelled us to twice being named Office of the Year at MRI Network. 
 
That "swagger", the ability to handle situations with a sense of calm and uncanny grace is very evident here now and continues to get us through even the toughest of economic times. When I get reminded myself by someone here that I was making assumptions or may have taken something a bit too personally, I know my work and teachings have been deeply rooted in my team!  I have built this team on this foundation with no turnover at all since the year 2002 when Mary Burback joined my team.  She has been instrumental, along with my wife, Diane, in helping me to carry out my dreams here at SC Brookfield.  The support and understanding that Diane so graciously gives me at home coupled with Mary's uncanny knack of always reading my mind at the office cannot be measured.  I could not have done it alone.
 
I did mention "dreams", didn't I?  I have been asked many times by other owners the "secret" of hiring and retaining successful people.  All of our AE's have been Pacesetters and I consider Mary and her support team to be Pacesetters as well.  I truly have a teaching and learning culture here, perhaps formed by accident, but nonetheless, that is what and who we are.  I spend much more time on those "soft skills' with my team than the traditional training employed by many. 
 
As an example, Joe Bilicki, a perennial Pacesetter for many years works the Construction market where the "soft skills" may be non-existent in some cases.  I have spent many rewarding hours with Joe over the years teaching ways that the Four Agreements can be applied properly in his industry.  You would have to ask Joe but my guess is he may tell you that quite a few deals may have been saved over the years as a result of good work that was done.  The credit goes to him as he has responded magnificently to a "fresh look" at his industry.  
 
I guess I have always gone against the grain, but I do know who I am and what is important to me.  That is to truly serve my family and fellow human beings with the greatest honor, strength and integrity that I can possibly muster up each and every day. 
 
My dream, if you will, would be to somehow have the entire MRI Franchise Network enjoy the same successes and wonderful things that have happened for me and those that I serve.  Perhaps by embracing the immense power of Don Miguel Ruiz's book, The Four Agreements, I sincerely believe that the businesses and lives of MRI owners would be greatly enhanced.  Maybe it could serve as that "guiding light" that so many of us have been seeking for a long time. 
 
That is truly my wish that the MRI Network, as highly successful as it has been, would somehow REALLY adopt the Four Agreements principles into our core training.  How cool would that be if all of us "would be impeccable with our word, not take things personally, not make assumptions, and always do our best"! 
 
I also mentioned not being able to do all of this alone.  You, my friend, have been instrumental with your encouragement, constant challenging of me and your flat out belief that I possessed "gifts" that needed to be shared with others; for this, I truly thank you more than you will ever know or realize.
 
As always, truly wishing you all the very best,
 
Jim 

About the Profiles of Success Series

In each edition of this free series available only to TheConsigliori.com Newsletter subscribers, I will profile the story of how a top recruiter rose to the top of the field.  What challenges did they face?  How did they overcome those challenges? What advice do they offer to fellow recruiters based on their experiences? You won't want to miss a single edition of this series in considering how to unleash the champion inside yourself. 

Thank you for reading, and if you know anyone you believe would also benefit from this and coming Profiles, please forward this email to them and tell them to sign up at www.TheConsigliori.com.
Yours in honor and faith,

Pasquale
 

P.S.  Do you own a copy of The Four Agreements?  If not, you can order one very inexpensively by clicking here.