Announcer 0:00
From Los Angeles. This is the Echelon Radio Network.

Jerri Hemsworth 0:12
Hi. This is Jerri Hemsworth with the Echelon Radio Podcast. Welcome back, and today we’re sitting with Chris King, how you doing, Chris?

Chris King 0:21
good, good to see you.

Jerri Hemsworth 0:22
What are you doing these days?

Chris King 0:25
Work that’s all, that’s all, that’s all we do. All right,

Jerri Hemsworth 0:27
work, work, work. So speaking of work, tell us what you do. What is Status Flow?

Chris King 0:34
Well, status flow was built to make seemingly impossible things happen as quickly as humanly possible, and normally quicker than than anybody would think. And and we built two sides of the business. There’s a B2B side and a B2C side. The the seemingly impossible can show up for an organization as a new initiative or a new product launch, or something, you know, a pivot. We hear that a lot. You know, they’re doing something that they’ve never done before, and they don’t really know that they can do it on the B2C side, the seemingly impossible is wildly different. Like, it could be a career pivot. It could be, you know, a move out of state or something like that. It could be, how do I get my 26 year old off the payroll that won’t get off the couch? You know? I mean, it just, there’s, there’s any number of seemingly impossible things.

Jerri Hemsworth 1:21
Yeah, that would be, that’s a huge one. I can imagine.

Chris King 1:24
It was actually one of our busiest service lines last year.

Jerri Hemsworth 1:28
Or, how do I get my brother out of the company? Because he’s just an anchor, yeah,

Chris King 1:33
yeah, especially with delicate family stuff like that, you know, how do we, how do we get dad to let go of the thing, and let the new generation kind of, you know, take the ball and run like, it’s like, there’s a lot that goes into these things so

Jerri Hemsworth 1:47
well, there’s, I can imagine that you run into, well, yeah, like you said, family dynamics. But when you’ve got the next generation coming up and they want to do things a bit differently, there’s, you probably run into a lot of fear, lot of people that are frightened, is there, is there a way that you find is, is a great way to deal with that, that that has proven itself over time?

Chris King 2:13
Yeah, we feature a science fact approach. And so one of the things is that people make the mistake, is they they try and avoid fear, or they go in denial about it. They try and ignore it. It takes energy to hold back the experience that you are actually having, right? And so the the thing about fear, though, is that, I mean, there’s a couple things. Number one, if it doesn’t scare the hell out of you, you’re probably not thinking big enough. You’re just not working on the right thing. The other thing is that there’s a lot of energy in fear. Now, from from a physiological, from a neurobiological standpoint, the body, the brain, don’t know the difference between fear and excitement, and so if you can polarize the fear, so instead of being terrified, you’re excited. Well, all of that energy works for you instead of against you.

Jerri Hemsworth 3:03
Yeah, I can imagine that trying to to explain that and walk people through that is got to be an interesting technique for you. And I can imagine, I’ve run into clients who are afraid of doing this or doing that because of the past and trying to get them over that hurdle, as you call it, I think that’s probably what you call being stuck. You know, getting people unstuck, that’s a big part of what you do. And yeah, I’m curious how well your clients absorb what you give them, you know, and the advice and all of that, because you’ve got a very unique technique, I would

Chris King 3:50
Yeah, we’re, we’re kind of a different thing for sure, client. I mean, there’s a joke in there, actually, you know, the clients absorb it very quickly and very well, because they’re paying me enough to do so, this is going to get real expensive real quick if you don’t move so, but I can, you know, I look, I don’t look through the lenses of like productivity or efficiency, right? You know, I kind of get very dismissive about these kinds of things. You know, any idiot can teach you time management skills. So what I’m looking for is leverage, right? It’s an input to output ratio. How do I get a whole lot more using a whole lot less? And I will leverage everything. I will leverage fear, shame, excitement, anger, I will put it all into service. And so the work that we do is actually shockingly uncomplicated. Now it’s not at all easy, but it’s not complicated.

Jerri Hemsworth 4:43
Yeah, well, I think people are so comfortable with what they’ve been doing, and I would imagine you show them when they’re stuck. Well, let me put it this way, I know you. We’ve known each other for a very long time. You are right between the eyes. You are very blunt, you know, and sometimes I could imagine some people might not be ready for that to hear right between the eyes. But like you said, they’re paying you a lot. How is it that you came to be just no bullshit. Let’s put it right here, and this is what needs to happen.

Chris King 5:25
Well, I got tired of my own bullshit. I mean, I think that’s really where it started. You know, it’s amazing what you can get done when you get frustrated with yourself. It’s very easy to get frustrated or upset with other people. It’s effective to get upset with or frustrated with yourself and and if you can, in my experience, you know, moving aside the the shame, the fear, the things in service to what I’m doing. I mean, you know, I it’s important to get out of the comfort zone and stay within your range, like there’s, there’s kind of a bandwidth here, you know, I got to get people out of their comfort zone, but I got to keep them within keep them within their what I call their their systems tolerances, right? Different people or different human systems have different tolerances, and same with teams or organizations. So if I can get them as far out of their comfort zone as possible, without taking them out of range of their tolerances, well, that’s where the magic is going to happen, really quickly. And so that’s and I just, I can find that spot for them pretty quickly, and that’s where I can meet them.

Jerri Hemsworth 6:27
Well, where did you, where is your background? Where did you grow up?

Chris King 6:30
Santa Monica.

Jerri Hemsworth 6:32
Santa Monica Sam, oh

Chris King 6:34
yeah, yeah. I grew up in a privileged neighborhood in a scary house.

Jerri Hemsworth 6:38
Oh, boy. But then, what did you absorb from your youth that brought you to where you are today?

Chris King 6:49
That’s a wow. There’s a lot there. Well, my father, he’s he was a huge influence in my life, and he barely graduated high school. He never went to college. He built a career as an electromagnetic compatibility engineer. So, right? He’s one of those guys. He’s an Uber propeller head. He’s, you know, crazy brilliant. He’s kind of socially retarded, and in that way I mean, and I mean that in a clinical, you know, clinical term. But what I what I learned, is how to simplify things, how to break it down, you know, very high level, complicated things, and break them down into very simple kind of ideas, and even to the point where it’s a binary lens, you know, effective or ineffective, working or not working. So and everything is a system. You know, a business, a team, a person, is an interconnected system. And any system can be hacked and recoded, if you understand how that system works. And so, being the son of a systems guy, I became a systems guy.

Jerri Hemsworth 7:54
Well, you were you fascinated as a child or in growing up with how things worked in finding solutions. Or was that something?

Chris King 8:04
No, I, um, I was not particularly interested in the projects that my dad wanted to work on. You know, they were, they were very prescient, like a precision oriented, very methodical. There was a step by step kind of thing, you know, and, and this could be anything from working on the cars in the garage to, you know, the plumbing and the hoses or something like that. I was way too hyperactive. I just, I could not sit still to save my life, and my father didn’t quite know how to reach me, so, so it was difficult for us to sort of navigate each other. You know, I was trying to fit myself into the box that he understood and wanted. But no, it took, it took years for me to get to this point. I know I didn’t come out of a box this way. I was a mess.

Jerri Hemsworth 8:49
I think, Well, I think it’s interesting if we, any of us, who have had interesting parents, myself included, find yourself trying to find a different way, or understand that which from which we came and finding a new path. How did you find a new path after you got out of your parents house?

Chris King 9:12
Well, that was a lot of trial and error. You know, there were marriage, divorce, marriage, divorce, try and figure things out, you know, over time and through my own personal and professional development, I sort of learned a whole lot about how reality unfolds, what my level of responsibility is in that unfolding, and how to start bending it. Because, at the end of the day, everything in my reality, everything in my reality, everything in your reality, in anybody’s reality, is an end result, and just like everything else, it’s the end result of a system. And so once I understood how to start to recode that system, well then I could start making seemingly impossible things happen. And I had to do this for my own life, in terms of career pivots and transitions, relationship reimagination and reinvention. I mean, I’ve I am living in an alternate reality, and I’ve done this several times with things that honestly, I had no business being able to pull off, like, as I look at it. Now there’s no way I should have been able to do that, but I figured it out.

Jerri Hemsworth 10:16
Yeah, you figured it out. You find it interesting, or is it is an advantage for you when you get a new client, or any even an existing client, do they seem to calm down and relax when they know that you’ve been in situations similar to theirs?

Chris King 10:36
I think that probably varies client to client. I think what calms them down is that I don’t have any judgment around whatever it is they’ve gone through like and I’ll and I’m very transparent about my history, like, I have screwed up. It’s very hard to find a way to screw up that I haven’t done right. I mean, I managed to stay out of jail, but beyond that, I’ve pretty much done everything that you know that somebody can do wrong, and so when they understand whatever, whatever is happening in their world, business, personal or otherwise, whatever is going on with the inner workings of a team, I have no judgment, and I don’t particularly care whose fault it is right, because I’m very oriented towards an end result. Really don’t care who said what, who did what, whatever. You know, and it’s, and it’s, it’s very simple, do you want to be right, or do you want to be effective? Right? Do you want to be what? Do you want to be right, or do you want to win?

Jerri Hemsworth 11:34
Right. And there’s really no place for blame. It’s just, it’s useless. It’s a waste of time, because the situation is what the situation is. So let’s move forward.

Chris King 11:44
it’s not just a waste of time. It’s it is a mismatch in an energetic frequency. I’m going to nerd out a little bit here. Everything is energy, right? Even the table that I’m sitting at here. You know, it feels like solid matter, but it’s like 90 something percent empty space. This is just compressed energy. There’s nothing here. So when we think about mental frameworks, when we think about mindset, when we think about our actions, these are all born of frequencies. And so when we get into blame, blame involves victim consciousness. It’s very I’m gonna sound like a West Side hippie here, but it’s very low frequency. Well, if we can get out of that, get into an empowered place, right, which is the antithesis of the victim consciousness. It’s the antithesis of blame. Well, now we can get what we want a whole lot faster, because we’re operating at a higher frequency. The higher the frequency is, the more power it has. This is why Money loves speed. Lawyers will tell you, time kills deals. I’ll tell you Money loves speed because we’re moving faster. It’s higher frequency. It has more power.

Jerri Hemsworth 12:47
Yeah, that makes complete sense. How did you? How did status flow come about? How did you, how did you start?

Chris King 12:55
Uh, well, I was standing in what looked like I had wrecked my life again. So I had, I had just, in the matter of 48 hours, I lost my job, my apartment, and my girlfriend,

Jerri Hemsworth 13:14
That’s a trifecta,

Chris King 13:15
yeah, yeah, it’s like the beginning of strikes, only I still had my car, so that was helpful. And I had a job offer. This guy had said to me that, you know, he wished that I worked for him, so I called him up. Was like, hey, I need a job. And, and he’s a commercial real estate guy, and I went out, I met with him, and he was ready to hire me, and I forecasted, you know, forward a year or three, and I said, Well, I take this job, and then what happens? Okay, I’m, I’m going to be successful, because that’s what I do. But then what. You know, I’m gonna, in the next couple of years, three years, I’m going, I’m going to be in a lifestyle that is going to require a certain income to support, and I’m not really going to be living my best life. And so there I will be trapped once again, in a life of default, instead of in a life of design. And so I rejected the job offer, and I decided I was going to build this company out of the trunk of my car because, you know, I didn’t have a garage, so, so I know I had, I had a network that I could access. And, you know, that’s, that was kind of the running joke is, I got a car, I got a sport code, I got a networking membership. Let’s see what I can cook with these

Jerri Hemsworth 14:31
ingredients. Yeah, and then who was your first client?

Chris King 14:35
It was this guy, many names, but just Yeah, no, he was a VP at UBS, and I went to me with him, because he wanted to talk about getting his team to perform better and and there I was sitting across his desk, right, and he’s making more money by the minute that I’m going to see in a month. I got no job. I got a beat ass car with a broken a broken tail light the side view mirror was held on by duct tape. Like the windshield wipers were locked on with zip ties. I mean, it was, it was just not. And all I could think was, Dear God, please don’t let this guy, let me, you know, walk me out to the parking lot, right?

Jerri Hemsworth 15:09
Yeah, right.

Chris King 15:11
And there I was telling him how, yeah, I can absolutely get your business, you know, with kind of exponential increases. And ultimately, in something like that, you got to live the message. If you’re not living the message, you’re not a good, very, a very good messenger. And so when it came to something like imposter syndrome, or I don’t know if I can do this or whatever, none of that was aligned with the outcome that I was looking for. And I looked through a very binary lens, aligned or misaligned. And and I just had that knowing, like I knew I could crush it for him. I knew I had the educational background. I knew I knew what I was doing, and all I had to do was make sure that this guy knew what I was doing. And sure enough, he hired me. I crushed it for him. This was over 10 years ago now. He actually called me about six months ago and was like, Hey, man, I need your feedback on something

Jerri Hemsworth 15:55
interesting, so you came back around, huh? Wow. And then do, did he refer you to other people, or did you, how did you continue to grow?

Chris King 16:06
It was a hustle. It was, it was a lot of face to face networking. It was a lot of chasing speaking engagements, trying to get on podcasts. It was, I mean, it was not fun, it was not easy. And it was important, like, this is nowhere near the dumbest idea that I’ve had. Like, if you know, I decided that I wanted to trash a six figure career and become a radio DJ, which is a dumb idea, but I pulled that off, and I was major market talent for 12 years. And so I was like, if I can do that, like, like, I said, this is nowhere near the dumbest idea I’ve ever had.

Jerri Hemsworth 16:42
Yeah, no, I get it. I get it. Would you call yourself entrepreneurial?

Chris King 16:50
I guess I would. Now, I never would have thought of it, of myself that way. In fact, I had an opportunity to buy a business when I was about 28 years old, but the idea of being a business owner was so foreign to me. But when I, when I track through my history, even working for somebody else, you know, for both, you know, small, medium and large corporations, um, my positions were very innovative. It was very entrepreneurial. In the position itself, it was like, Look, turn Chris loose and let him do what he does. You know, don’t, don’t tell him how to do something. Tell him what you want done, especially if we don’t know how to do it. And you know, one of them, I was working for Plantronics back in the day, and they wanted through two tier distribution. They wanted to create an entirely new product category with no new products and no market development funds. And they needed this to be a success inside of six months. And I was like, well, we can figure that out. So that out. So asked him, What are my resources? What’s my timeline? What’s the goal? Okay, cool, let’s go.

Jerri Hemsworth 17:48
Do you consider yourself a rule breaker?

Chris King 17:50
Yeah,

Jerri Hemsworth 17:51
Do you like breaking the rules?

Chris King 17:54
I love it so much fun. I mean, I because the rules are also it’s, you know, you know, staying within legalities, but, but, yeah, but there’s, yeah, there are a lot of reasons that we can’t do something, and all of them are, are true, right? Like, like, when I went after my radio career, you know, there the the the statistically, was like, Look, you’re you’re never going to get that gig. That’s true. If you do get that gig, you’re never going to make very much money. That’s also true. But I have this, uh, secret weapon that I pull out pretty, pretty frequently when it comes to the rules, when it comes to the logic, I don’t care. I don’t care that I’m not going to make any money. I don’t care that I can’t be done. I don’t care that. You know, the success rate of this is ridiculously small. I don’t care because if I can connect my commitment to do something with my devotion to the thing, and I attach that to a vision of success. I don’t know how to fail.

Jerri Hemsworth 19:04
Do you think that the fact that, like you say you don’t care comes from, you know what it’s like to live out of the car and it didn’t kill you?

Chris King 19:13
No, no.

Jerri Hemsworth 19:16
I mean, do you think that that ability to, you know, just say, Hey, I know I can. I can do this and with no fear. And as you’re keen to say, and live, you don’t chase and there’s, do you think that comes from all your past experiences of the highs, the lows everything because you’ve walked it.

Chris King 19:43
Yeah, yeah, I, I’ve lived the message in so many different ways. You know, like I’ve done, done work for real estate teams. And they’ll say something like, you know, well, have you ever worked in real estate, is like, nope. And they say, Well, then, how can you help us? And it’s like the fact that I haven’t lived, that I haven’t worked in real estate, is exactly why I can help you. Because we’re talking about innovation, we’re talking about creativity. I don’t have your experience in this, but I don’t have your blinders either, like I don’t have your limiting thoughts, your limiting beliefs. And, you know, I built my life on a Looney Tunes cartoon that I saw when I was, I don’t know, six years old or something like that. It was Daffy Duck riding an invisible bicycle around a boxing ring, and he’s giggling his head off, and he says, I’m so crazy. I don’t know that this isn’t possible. That’s, that’s basically how I live my life.

Jerri Hemsworth 20:37
It’s kind of one of those things, and I say it a lot with with things that I take on, I always say, let’s take it out for a spin and see what happens. And I have a similar mindset to you, in that I don’t fear it. I don’t fear is, is not has never been an issue for me in business, because I’m always looking at the possibilities, and yet I’m able to stay keep my feet on the ground. But I love the creativity of taking the blinders off. I love thinking out of the box, and I get the impression you’re the same way.

Chris King 21:17
Yeah, yeah. The and we have all kinds of tools for this, you know, like, I said, leveraging fear, de risking things, you know, by asking somebody a simple question, like, what? Okay, so what’s, what is the thing you’re afraid of? And then they’ll tell me, I said, Okay, what is the likelihood that that happens? Like, especially at that level, when you think of all of your doom and gloom scenarios, the overwhelming majority of the things that happen aren’t the things you worry about. It’s the stuff you don’t see coming that spins you out, right? I mean, Mark Twain has a quote about this, something about, you know, I’ve lived a very difficult, challenging life, you know, most of which never happened, right? That’s, that’s exactly what it is so and the brain. You know, neurobiologically, the brain doesn’t know the difference between fantasy and reality. It only knows what you’re telling it. So if you can take dominion over your thoughts, and it’s not complicated, right? Because then you can change things, you know, I tell people, I say, Look, when you stop listening to yourself and you start talking to yourself, the script changes.

Jerri Hemsworth 22:24
Yeah, that’s very good point. Very good point. Hey, who’s what’s been your your favorite client so far? Or the favorite? What is it that really makes your soul sing when you are able to work with them?

Chris King 22:38
Ah, that’s a good question. I I I think what I I love doing so much more than the clients expect. You know, I’ve said this, if we don’t give them a 10 to one return on investment, you know, we screwed up. I mean, there’s something. We missed something, because they usually come to us with one specific thing, you know, on the B2C side. It’s gonna be business improvement or, you know, whatever, something under that. But invariably, it’s going to involve every area of somebody’s life, whether it’s an individual or a team. It’s gonna affect all of their lives. The compound interest effect that we get on this is ridiculous, and it’s just again, because I understand a thing or two about how the brain works. And in the brain is super lazy, right? Because it’s an energy hog. It’s like 8% of our body weight. It takes up 25% of our energy. And so the brain wants to be as lazy as it possibly can, and it creates patterns and templates across somebody’s universe. And so if I, if I address something in one place, I’m going to address it everywhere else where those same unconscious dynamics are playing out. And so it’s then, this is how we get the compound interest. A fact,

Jerri Hemsworth 23:51
I can I can imagine that your clients, when they bring you in, are terrified and terribly excited all at the same time. Yeah, yeah.

Chris King 24:02
They really are. They really are. And

Jerri Hemsworth 24:05
For you to be to help point them in the right direction. And you know, you take on your clients, I think very similarly to me and my team, we’re all in like, we’ve got to believe in them, and probably more than they believe in themselves, in order to come to the next level.

Chris King 24:28
Yeah, yeah. We’re, we are 100% invested. We’re not attached, but we are invested

Jerri Hemsworth 24:35
Exactly, exactly. And there’s times when I wake up in the morning, go, Wait a minute. This is not my company. Why am I thinking about this time at three in the morning and then, you know, having to separate that. But I don’t know that I’d want to run my firm any other way. And I’m curious if you would. I don’t think you would.

Chris King 24:57
I wouldn’t know how you know i. There’s no, there’s no color by numbers for this process. You know, people talk to me about, you know, what’s your process? I’m like, it’s actually your process. So we’re about to find out, you know, because I don’t even really do a lot of advice, you know, it’s not my job to tell people what to do. It’s my job to get them to tell them what to do. Because the general concept is that the client has every answer to every every question they are ever going to have for their entire life is in there somewhere. So I don’t have to figure out their answer. I got to figure out what’s the barrier that’s stopping them from accessing that answer. How do I support them in relating to that, once we remove the barrier, and how do I align that with the outcome that they’re looking for?

Jerri Hemsworth 25:47
Right, right? Very good, very cool. Yeah,

Chris King 25:51
it’s the fine line between coaching and consulting. You know, we say consultants have answers, coaches have questions.

Jerri Hemsworth 25:57
Yeah, and isn’t it when you go into a client, don’t you come with both? I mean, I don’t see how you could do one or the other.

Chris King 26:08
And, no, no, we, it is both. And it’s, it’s so funny. I share this with clients. Quite candidly, it’s not my job to be right. I mean, look, I’m gonna be right almost all the time, but, but it’s not my job to be right. It’s my job to be disruptive, right. It’s my job to interrupt the automated brain cycles, the subconscious brain cycles, the things, all the patterns and the behaviors. You’re going to have something like 70,000 thoughts today. You’re going to make 35,000 decisions. How many of those do you think are conscious? Right.

Jerri Hemsworth 26:41
Very few.

Chris King 26:42
This is why yesterday was the today is the same as yesterday, and tomorrow is going to be the same as it we’re going to make the same subconscious decision. So if I can bring conscious awareness to something, and I can create these hiccups in the cycles, this is where conscious awareness can come in, and this is how we can pivot.

Jerri Hemsworth 26:59
And that’s, I mean, that’s basically how you get people unstuck. That’s completely holding up a mirror, like you said, the answers are there, just bringing them to the forefront and saying, you know, holding up the mirror and, you know, this is, this is the way, and not being afraid to put it between the eyes, as you would do.

Chris King 27:25
No, yeah, once I understand where a client is and I trust my intuition implicitly. I mean, I think that’s that’s probably the biggest tool that we have, is my intuition, and that is never wrong. It’s never wrong. I’m just, you know, I might be wrong about details. I might be wrong about data, but I’m never wrong about energy, you know. And that’s, that’s just a client said you’re like a human tuning fork. So that’s a great way to look at it actually.

Jerri Hemsworth 27:52
there’s your news tagline.

Chris King 27:54
I know, right. I said, Look, you know, the the thing that you’re trying, the seemingly impossible thing that you’re trying to do, is like a piece of sheet music that’s never been played, and your human system or team or company is the perfect instrument to play that music. My job is to tune that instrument.

Jerri Hemsworth 28:09
Very cool. Chris. Love it. Love having you and learning more about status flow. Thank you for being with me today. My

Chris King 28:18
My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.

Jerri Hemsworth 28:21
Oh, I can’t wait to chat again. Take care.

Looking forward to it.

Announcer 28:34
Presented by Echelon Business Development. More than just networking. Way more!

Transcribed by https://otter.ai