For Crumpton and many others in the business of sales, cultivating relationships isn’t just a job, it’s a livelihood and lifestyle. So when coronavirus poised a challenge to fostering relations, businesses were forced to find new ways to connect. Ames said he replaced hotel bar conviviality with virtual happy hours and saw his client relationships grow deeper and richer. “We are social creatures at heart,” Ames said, and those that value connection will adapt.

Finding ways to show you care about others can be simple and subtle, like wearing a mask in groups or bumping elbows upon greeting. For Crumpton and Ames, human authenticity shines not through texting, but in the emotional of hearing someone’s voice on the other end of the line. Smartphones are capable of so much, but today their most important feature may just be the simple phone call.

Relationships are a lot about sharing knowledge, especially between generations. Pedemonte calls this “tribal knowledge.” She said, “Transferring tribal knowledge in the workplace moves information from generation to generation.”

On her path to learning and sharing, Pedemonte talked about some interesting relationships she’s formed. “People come in and out of your life when you least expect it,” she said. One such person was her former high school English teacher. They’ve now become peers and friends, and she appreciates what she’s gained from working with her. 

“I have a lifetime of knowledge, but my lifetime hasn’t been that long. I depend on others to share knowledge with me because I don’t know what I don’t know. People have invested with me, so I’m ready to invest in others,” Pedemonte stated.

Relationship building is critical to success in business. Being relationship-focused allows anyone to grow and evolve. Thinking together often lets ideas bloom, and possibilities seem endless. Being relationship focused 

The CEO of Global Venture Consulting and Founder of Prospector Portal helps natural resource companies get into emerging and frontier markets, including some markets which are post-conflict. .

King wasn’t always a global citizen with a passport full of stamps. She grew up in a small town in Maine but became open to a more international line of work after studying abroad in Cape Town, South Africa. 

She got comfortable and developed close friends and even people she considers family by building relationships in the countries where she works.

“A lot of why I enjoy a lot of the work in those markets is because it’s so relationship based. That’s why we end up doing so many different things is once you build trust in these countries, people bring opportunities to you,” King said. “They know you, they trust you, they know you can go find really good quality partners and companies to bring in to solve any problems. 

“So, you end up getting a really wide range of stuff to work on, and that’s really what’s built out our profile in the region, our partner network and why we get to do so many things that … may look random but are all connected through relationships.”

Greg Crumpton has seen how King leverages relationships, making sure the partners she works with can trust her and putting people’s needs ahead of the numbers.

“I think when we were talking several years ago, understanding how those relationships are to this day still really instrumental in growing Global Venture, those relationships you made, 10 years ago now,” Crumpton said.

This week, Tyler Kern and Greg Crumpton are joined by Jason Banks, CEO and Owner of Banks Electrical Contractors, to discuss how he fell into the electrical field and learned early on the value of obtaining a professional license to help begin a career.

Banks has now owned his own business for 19 years, but he likes to quip that he is still very much operating as a start-up company, because he never wants to stop learning how he can improve.

Make sure to follow along for more episodes of Straight Outta Crumpton, and click here for more episode!

Change is hard, but today’s guest Gwen Smothers has been a trailblazer in facilitating it. As the business systems manager of Piedmont Service Group, a technical facility and energy-efficient solutions company in Raleigh, NC, Smothers maintains all business systems, trains users, and supports process improvements. She owes much of her success to defining the “why.”

“When I first started at Piedmont 20 years, the person who trained me never explained why we did things that way. I soon learned after being on the job, but the why was never addressed. Now that I’m in that position, I always lead with the why,” Smothers stated.

Smothers also discussed her involvement with Women in HVACR, a trade group dedicated to women in the industry. She joined years ago and has been able to attend several conferences where she met a young lady in need of support. “At an HVACR conference, I met a young lady whose father owns an HVAC business, and she needed some guidance about how to change and grow. Since that meeting, the President of HVACR contacted me and asked if I would be a mentor,” Smothers shared.

All the work that Smothers has done on behalf of her company and for the industry, in general, is immense, and she even calls herself a “change agent.” That’s no easy job in any industry, but Smothers attributes much of this to success. “Change is hard for everyone. I have some great support from my leadership team. They provide me with ideas to try in the real world,” she said.

Learn more about Smother’s career as a change agent by listening to the podcast.

Lt. Col. Waldo Waldman, Air Force Academy graduate, combat decorated Air Force F-16 fighter pilot turned sales guru, performance consultant, executive coach and motivational keynote speaker, joined Greg Crumpton to discuss what it means to be a “Wingman” and how it can benefit yourself and those around you.

“The more I grow in life…you start realizing who those people are that you can build those ‘Wingman’ relationships with. The way that you gauge that in business or life is somebody that you feel comfortable with going to for help,” said Waldman.

For more leadership and relationship insights from Lt. Col. Waldo Waldman, head to his website where he is offering a free download of his audiobook ‘Never Fly Solo’ to listeners of this podcast.

Todd spoke on the podcast about the lessons that he has learned over the years from watching the way his father conducted his electrical contracting business. “He really believes in the importance of relationships. Of the great gifts he has give me that was certainly, from a business perspective, one of the most important ones that I saw and wanted to embody,” Boucher said.

He went on to explain that it’s important for him to forge authentic relationships that speak to the values he personally holds. And while some might only associate relationships with clients, he said that everything starts with the way you interact with your own team.

“Your relationship with your team is what enables you to have really meaningful relationships with your customers, and if you don’t have that unity inside your organization you can’t project that outward. It doesn’t manifest into relationships with your customers if it’s not authentic within your company,” he said.

Greg Crumpton was joined for this episode by Howie Barber, Operations Manager for Atom Power, Inc. They discussed their longtime friendship, team-building during COVID-19, and the impact that Howie has had as a youth coach for multiple sports.

On this episode of Straight Outta Crumpton, Greg Crumpton & Tyler Kern sit down with Paige Adair, Interior Designer at Little Diversified Architectural Consulting, to talk about the evolution and necessity of remote work.

“I know that before I go to the doctor, I’ve already Googled all of my symptoms” Adair told Greg Crumpton.

“I think there’s a lot of beauty to both clients who are very engaged and clients who are more hands off,” Adair said. “It’s nice to have clients who understand the process, but I also like being able to educate a client.”

She admits that she’d been drawn to the arts since she could write letters to Santa Clause when she asked for art kits nearly every year.

Paige didn’t decide to buy-in on an artistic career until she received a piece of advice from Greg Crumpton years ago.

Greg told her that anyone can learn business, but if you are creative and have passion, you ought to pursue it.

As unlikely as it sounds, Greg is a great person to give that advice. He and Paige go way back – back to before Paige was even born. And, he was right. Today, Paige does indeed know business as well.

“Trust is key to any relationship,” she told Tyler Kern. “Whether it’s with a client or with anyone in your life.”

Paige commented on trust and remote work. She pointed our that as society develops and advances, remote work is something that will continue to rear its head in workflows. In those situations trust is essential.

Teddy didn’t become an expert in social media networking until he left the technology industry and started his first sales job in 2005.

“I asked a salesperson at my new place of business what it took to be successful, and he said cold call like a wild man. I knew this was something I wasn’t excited about doing. Then I started to take an interest in LinkedIn,” he said.

Teddy knew the people he wanted to engage were on LinkedIn; they just weren’t doing anything on the platform. He became more invested in finding ways to network on LinkedIn and leveraging it as a relationship builder. After a few years doing this in his sales role, he was ready to start his own business.

“At first, I called myself a networking strategist, but no one knew what that meant. Then I thought changing it to social media strategist would be more impactful, but that didn’t translate to corporate America. Then I reframed it as using social media as a business tool and that began to resonate with companies,” Teddy said.

Make sure to follow along for more episodes of Straight Outta Crumpton, and click here for more episode!

On this episode, the duo is joined by gardin, LLC. founder and CEO Adi Avin. Avin’s gardin is an interior plant design studio in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Crumpton and Avin said their relationship is founded on a share love for simply talking business. The foundation of many a good relationship is having something in common, and business relationships are no different – it doesn’t take a specific interest or hobby to find common ground, either.

“If we’d see each other out (during the pair’s time in the ballroom dance industry), we’d both just kind of move to the side and talk business,” Avin said. “It’s much more interesting and fun, and I’ve always just loved bouncing ideas off Greg. He’s got so much to contribute. I would say he’s really been like a mentor to me.”

“Scar tissue’s hard to beat,” Crumpton said.

Throughout this episode, Crumpton and Avin offer insights from each of their perspectives on business relationships, give and take, spreading awareness of others’ journeys and businesses, and the value of paying it forward.

“The amazing thing is that Greg has put the word out on my business, and he’s completely selfless,” Avin said. “He wanted nothing in return.”

Stay tuned for more episodes of Straight Outta Crumpton coming soon.

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A friend and business associate of Crumpton’s for more than 20 years, Jones explains that after a tour in Vietnam, his career in technology—which he amiably mentions has been strewn with both successes and failures along the way—began in the telephone industry some 40 years ago. After the breakup of the Bell system, he helped to grow a long distance entrepreneurial company which was later sold to MCI. From there, Jones helped startup and run several local telephone companies, built a fiber network from Atlanta to Columbus, GA, and eventually began working as a consultant, primarily in the southeast, “helping companies get into this thing called the internet” during the late 1990s.

“I began to get the idea—because I was helping little ISPs collocate,” Jones says, “that you could have a facility and they would have to provide entrance facilities for you to connect into the network. And I began looking, thinking, ‘Hmm, this could work. This thing called data centers that I’m beginning to see come, that’s nothing but a central office basically.’ And a friend of mine—who’s still a very close friend named Nick Kottyan—showed up one day at my office and he said I’ve got an idea, and it turned out I had the same idea. So, we wrote a business plan and that business plan is ultimately what birthed Peak 10.”

The two took their plan to an attorney who advised them that the business was going to be capital-intensive and that they should come back to him when they had between $1 and $2 million in financing. Within six weeks, the pair returned to the attorney with $1.5 million in hand. Astounded, the attorney asked how they had accomplished it.

“Well, I haven’t burned a lot of bridges and I’ve made a lot of friends along the way, and those friends believed in me. And they know that the money they’re willing to put up—they have to be able to put a check in the trashcan if it doesn’t work.” Jones said. “That’s how we got started.”

Backed by an additional $18 million from some private equity firms, and with Jones and Kottyan eventually at the helm, Peak 10 truly came into its own, selling two different times—once in 2010 for $400 million, and again in 2014 for $730 million.

When people ask what the key was to Peak 10’s success, Jones replies, “Look, I’m not the smartest guy in the world. I have a BA in Economics from the University of Virginia—I’m not an engineer. But what I figured out was how to have about twelve really smart people play well in the sandbox together, and how to make that team have the same beliefs and have the same trust in themselves and the people we work with.”

“Trust is my gold standard,” Crumpton agrees. “It was just really cool to hear that journey and how many of those moments involved people—from that initial $1.5 million raised with the friends and family around, and then being able to go out and raise $18 million locally—that’s just…that speaks to you and it speaks to the relationships.”

Tune in to the podcast to hear more about the importance of relationships, the responsibility that goes with a title, the value of talented, decisive team players, the art of listening intently, and more. And stay tuned for more episodes of Straight Outta Crumpton coming soon.

“Over the last year or so, we’ve done several podcasts with the company that I work for, which is an awesome company. But this is, you know, a little bit more in my particular vein of what I do, and that’s more about people—it’s more about relationships, and in particular, how those relationships play in our day-to-day lives—in work as well as personal.”

With 38 years in the HVAC & mechanical industry, Greg has come across a multitude of great people, forging and nurturing unique, long-term interpersonal relationships within the HVAC sector that extend back over the years to form what could be referred to as ‘a tribe of trust’.

“It’s all about the people that you trust and, you know, most people can hold that little basket of trust in two hands, and there’s a couple of dozen people in there that you feel like are in your tribe. Then you hope to implore your feeling and your sentiment of giving back to that tribe, where then they reach out to a half-dozen or two dozen people in their hands. You just try to spread it through a grassroots level because it really is hand-to-hand combat.”

With at least 13 guests lined up to join future “Straight Outta Crumpton” podcast episodes, Crumpton is excited about the diversity of personalities that will be showcased. From “the King of Sales” Jeffrey Gitomer—both a personal friend and world-renowned business and sales coach that focuses on interpersonal relationships and how to engage with people, to a business partner that will chat about how his and Crumpton’s relationship grew over time, as well as an up and coming 28-year old architect that is changing the skyline of Charlotte, NC.

Says Crumpton, “We got really, I think, a strong lineup, so looking forward to kicking it (the podcast) off.” He goes on to say, “MarketScale does such a good job of working with us and helping bring common people like me the ability to talk to the masses on things that may or may not be relevant, but if one person gets one nugget out of a conversation, then mission accomplished.”

Stay tuned for the first episode of “Straight Outta Crumpton” coming soon and be sure to subscribe to MarketScale’s Building Management podcast to get more in-depth commentary on the hot topics and groundbreaking innovations transforming the industry.