Episode Details

In this episode, we have a great chat with Marty Vids, an entrepreneur, mentor and podcast host, about building rapport, empowering customers and owning your job.

Marty has had quite the eclectic career and life, having started out in his parent's milk bar as a kid, and then moving into the comedy scene as an MC. He has a few great stories from that past life, that's for sure!

A career change beckoned and he landed up at Westpac as a mortgage broker, before leaving that to co-found Mortgage First, which he sold in his mid-30s. But the itch to build another business didn't go away, and he started Mortgage 500, a company he eventually sold in 2016.

These days, Marty is also a mentor, life coach, MC, and hosts his own podcast, The Marty Vids Show.

You can connect with Marty Vids on LinkedIn.

Key Quotes from Marty

On his Formative Years...

• My early days really were a place of work. I would go in with my dad even on a Sunday and help him collect the newspapers and I'd be serving clients probably from the age of around six or seven. From a very young age, I was developing social skills, emotional intelligence skills, but also financial skills.

On what comedy taught him about building rapport...

• One of the projects I did was run a comedy night because I always loved stand-up comedy. I brought that to my country town and I brought in the audience; I'd go to all the shops and say I was running it, I went on local radio. I really went into that promotion phase but I was doing too much, I didn't delegate. I was MC-ing the night, I arranged the comedians, got all the audience in, and I had my mates helping me.
• This guy comes on a bucks night and I was last on stage as the main act and he was just ... Their party was giving each comedian hell and I'm thinking, "What am I gonna do? I can't get on this guy's bad side because they're just gonna come up on stage and actually kill me." I had to think on my feet, but I got him on stage, we skulled a beer together and I said, "Congratulations mate, your life is officially over as of this moment," and I got them onside and they were the best audience after that. It didn't matter what I said.
• I think that's the sort of thing you go, "How do I build rapport in a situation that's very challenging?" You think about that in business negotiation, I mean that's an extreme story there, but it's like how do you build rapport when something's not going well and be able to shift direction?
• There's a big difference between agreement and unconscious rapport. How you can tell - and why this is important - is you can pick the body language. If they're in a similar body stance to you, like let's say you have your arms crossed and they have their arms crossed, people might misinterpret that as just two people that are cold. But what you're looking for is to get physical rapport and that will show up in the body. If someone makes a move like let's say someone moves their right hand and puts it up to their chin, you don't do it simultaneously, but you give it about 15 seconds and then you manoeuvre into that same position while you're having the discussion. What you're looking for on an unconscious and physical level is whether they break that rapport.
• If someone is very auditory rather than visual, you can speak to them with your body posture to the side, not facing them, because that's too impactful for them when you're right in their face. Other people are very kinesthetic where they like to be in each other's face and are more sensitive.