We recently connected with Jim Padilla and have shared our conversation below.

Jim, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. The first dollar your business earns is always special and we’d love to hear how your brand made its first dollar of revenue.

I had spent most of my time in sales and leading sales teams and at the time I was a sales coach/sales trainer (for lack of a better word.)

And when Cindy jumped into business with me and left her- corporate career in corporate retail management, we were really pursuing the advantage point of leadership development. We were doing some sales training. And Bill Baren who was an emerging rock star in the coaching world, was getting ready to do his first intentional one million dollar launch.

And he was looking for us to come in and do the sales instead of training the sales people. And of course we said yes, I’d never done it before, I’d never done a launch.

I wasn’t even quite sure what a launch was.

But we said yes, like the good little entrepreneurs that we are.

And we jumped in. We immediately went and bought Jeff Walker’s book called “launch”. Read it in two days. Recruited a dozen of our friends, clients and colleagues and said “Hey, let’s jump in and do this launch”.

And two weeks later, it was a 1.6 million dollar, very successful, crazy train-wreck-of-a launch.

And it was the most God ordained, God centered and God focused thing because we sure as heck weren’t seeking it, it sought us and it opened the door to everything else that we now do and have been doing for the last decade.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

It was fairly accidental.

I was a lifelong entrepreneur. She was in Corporate Retail Management and she retired from her corporate life and decided she wanted something else to do and ended up jumping into business with me and… it worked!

Honestly it was very interesting at first because she thought she was coming in as my manager, and I was like “I don’t need a manager, I need a partner” but it worked.

We got into this because it was just a way to help people. For me specifically, I got into the sales training environment when I left mortgage.

I was in the mortgage world in the early 2000’s. And when rates turned and you know, the recession hit, people couldn’t get loans anymore, but I knew how to sell and so I started finding people who needed help training on sales, especially in a tough marketplace. So, that’s where I started selling sales coaching because I knew I could teach people to position themselves well and get conversions and things that they needed to do so that they could change their life and business.

Then, of course as Cindy jumped into with me and we started again figuring it out along the way.

We knew how to help people. We weren’t really pros at running a business so we learned along the way that a business was more than just earning revenue.

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

Well that’s two stories. One, she is my wife. And I actually met her through a dating app but way before dating apps were a thing.

Back in the 1990s there was “no swipe right swipe left”. Instead you could go into a dating service, which was usually a physical building, where you go and you fill out all of your forms and you add these hundreds of possible points of connection, you do a video and then they start finding the people who can match with you.

Ironically, I didn’t want to do this but I did it for a friend of mine’s sister who was selling for this organization.

And she’s like “Just go, grab your service and if you go on six dates and you don’t find someone you get your money back” So I was doing this with a sole intention of getting my money back.

And Cindy was my connection number six…

And when I met with her I immediately, literally the first thing I was thinking was

“I just lost my thousand dollars because this woman is a keeper.”

But how did we become business partners?

Cindy was getting ready to resign her managerial career in retail. She did not want to work another Black Friday. And she sat me down and said she wanted to get my blessing to resign. And of course at the moment she had a six figure career and she was our stable income earner. She largely paid the bills with her income and my income as an entrepreneur filled in the gaps around the sides.

But for her to say hey I want to retire for my career she was saying counting on you.

That was the moment I had to really grow up and become a man as an entrepreneur and say I’m gonna take care of my family now and this is no longer entrepreneurship because it’s fun and it’s cool. This is now entrepreneurship because I’m building a legacy and taking care of my family. Andshe left her career jumped into business with me and within the next year plus we’re doing six figures, two years later seven figures and we’re off and running.

Here we are, ten years later, hundreds of millions of dollars of sales later and just incredible opportunities that have been so blessing to us and that we’ve been able to change people’s lives, be so well connected, well positioned.

Are there any books, videos, essays or other resources that have significantly impacted your management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy?

Management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy is tough because we read so much, we both do, and I have read about a book a week as I listen to a book a week on Audible. So we consume a ridiculous amount of content.

And every book that we read is centered around a specific challenge in the business that we’re trying to solve or in our life that we are focusing on so we do a deep dive on it.

I would say one book that really has impacted me the most is “How to Win Friends and Influence People” I think I’ve purchased it now 9 times because I have literally given it to people as I’ve been talking to them.

Of course, the Bible is my go-to because it’s the living word of God. That constantly reads me. It’s the only book that I’ve ever read that reads me instead of me reading it.

And then one other that has just been very potent and instrumental as of late is “How to Choose your Enemies Wisely” with Pat Ben David.

He’s just a man who really understands people.

I really want to understand business and psychology and how things need to be done on a fundamental level and anything that he puts out is something I highly recommend as a powerful quality read.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://gaintheedgenow.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gaintheedgenow/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jimpadilla02
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimpadilla/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/coachjim33
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5LnmwfSlRQhivPtI9IowmQ
• Other: https://jimp360.com/

Image Credits
Andrew Snow