How To Build Trust When Nobody Knows Your Name
At 22 years old, Sean Kirby had a fiancee, a baby on the way, and an hourly wage that would not cover a car payment. He also had something worse than no money. He had no network.
Everyone he knew was still in college or had just walked out of it. Nobody in his peer group was buying insurance or thinking about retirement. The people who could afford what he sold had no reason to trust a kid whose main qualification was that his last name matched the sign on the building.
That is the position most people are in when they start something. Not broke, exactly. Just unknown.
The Trust Gap Is The Real Problem
Most new business owners think they have a sales problem. They buy the course, they practice the script, they rehearse the objection handling. Then they get on the phone and nothing happens.
The issue is almost never the pitch. It is that nobody has any reason to believe you yet.
Trust is the currency that has to exist before a transaction can happen, and it is the one thing you cannot shortcut with effort. You can outwork a competitor. You cannot outwork a stranger’s skepticism.
Sean names the problem plainly. “I had to figure out a way to build trust quick.”
That sentence is the entire job description of anyone starting from zero.
You Sell Five Years Up And Five Years Down
There is a piece of wisdom Sean picked up from his father and business partner, Mike Kirby, that explains why so many young professionals stall out early.
You sell five years up and five years down. That range is your natural peer group, the people who already know you and already trust you enough to take your call.
At 22, that math is brutal. Five years down puts you in a high school hallway. Five years up puts you with people who are still paying off student loans. There is no market inside your circle of trust, and there is no trust inside your market.
Most people respond to this by trying to buy their way out of it. They run ads. They cold call. They chase referrals from a network that does not exist yet.
Sean did something slower and, as it turned out, far more durable. He decided to build the trust first and worry about the selling later.
The Learning Not Earning Year
He calls that stretch a learning, not earning year.
That framing matters. It is not a euphemism for a bad year. It is a deliberate decision about what a season of your life is actually for. When your income ceiling is capped by your reputation, and your reputation is capped by the fact that nobody knows you, the highest return activity available is not selling harder. It is becoming known and becoming useful.
For Sean, that meant starting a podcast in a small Indiana town where nobody else was making one. Not because podcasting was trendy. Because it was the cheapest tool available that put him in a room with people who would never have taken his sales call.
The economics were the whole point. It was bootstrapped. There was no ad spend. The barrier to entry was a microphone and a willingness to be bad at it in public for a while.
The Easiest Yes In Business
Here is the mechanic that made it work, and it transfers to almost any industry.
If you call a business owner and ask for an hour of their time to talk about your product, the answer is no. If you call the same business owner and ask for an hour to talk about them, the answer is usually yes.
Sean puts it this way. When he asked people to come on and talk about themselves, they would ask what a podcast was. They would ask who listens to it. The honest answer was nobody. They came anyway.
That is not a trick. It is a recognition that attention is the most under supplied resource in most communities. Local business owners rarely get asked thoughtful questions about what they built. Being the person who asks makes you memorable in a way that no follow up email ever will.
And you learn. Sean spent that season learning how to connect, how to communicate, and how to ask a good question with a camera running. Those are the same skills that eventually made him effective in a client meeting.
Trust Compounds Quietly
The payoff did not arrive on a schedule.
When 2020 hit and rules were changing weekly, Sean already had a platform and an audience of local business owners who trusted him. So he used it. He put out episodes explaining PPP funds and EIDL programs while everyone else was still trying to figure out what was happening.
Months later, a friend in the same industry told him one of those episodes had been worth roughly twenty thousand dollars to his business, because it surfaced a subsidiary that qualified for relief he did not know he could access.
Sean never pitched him. He just published something useful during a week when useful was scarce.
That is what compounding trust looks like. It is invisible right up until the moment it is not.
How To Apply This In Your Own Business
The tactic is not the point. The podcast is one delivery mechanism among many. The pattern underneath it is what you can copy.
Pick the medium you already consume. Sean chose podcasts because he was listening to them while painting a nursery. You will stay consistent with a format you actually enjoy.
Build a reason to talk to people you cannot sell to yet. An interview series, a local newsletter, a roundtable breakfast, a case study project. Anything that lets you approach someone with a give instead of an ask.
Choose the channel nobody in your market is using. Being the only person doing something in a small community is worth more than being the thousandth person doing it well in a large one.
Publish when it is inconvenient. The highest value content you will ever create is the thing your audience needs during a week when nobody else is explaining it.
Three Beliefs That Keep People Stuck
“I need a bigger audience first.” Sean’s early audience was effectively nobody. The value was in the relationship with the guest, not the download count.
“I will start once I look more established.” Waiting to look credible is how you stay invisible. Credibility is the output, not the input.
“This is not real work because it does not produce revenue this month.” Trust built now is revenue collected later. The two are separated by time, which is exactly why most people quit before it pays.
The Long Game Is Still The Fastest Game
Six years later, Sean can trace a meaningful share of his professional life back to a manic decision made by a 22 year old who mostly just needed to figure out how to pay the bills.
He did not start with a strategy. He started with a constraint, and he chose the one move available to him that built something he could not buy.
Time is the only asset you cannot make more of. The question is not whether you are spending it. It is whether you are spending it on things that compound.
If any of this sounds like where you are right now, whether you are building trust from scratch or trying to make sure the business you built is actually working for your family, that is the conversation the team at Performance Financial has every day.
Transcript
Darren: Tell us a little bit about who you are and why this kind of content and this podcast is so important to you. How did we get here?
Sean: So I’ll take you back. We’ll back it up a couple of years. In 2019, I was a 22 year old kid. I had just gotten engaged to a wonderful, amazing woman who is now an amazing mother and wife.
We got engaged in New York City, November 3rd of 2018. We flew out there, and I took an advance on my commissions because I had no money. I had to ask for two months of commissions up front so I could take her on this trip. I proposed to her the way she wanted to be proposed to, which was pretty much in the middle of nowhere with no one watching, in the most populated small city in the world.
Darren: Wait, wait, wait. In New York City?
Sean: Yes. She wanted nobody around when she got proposed to.
Darren: All right, it was her night. How did you pull that off?
Sean: So there is this old abandoned sky track that they turned into a walking park. One morning we grabbed coffee and we went on this big walking track. There are other people walking, and then I found this little alcove, like an alley, and I said, look over there. When she was looking, I got down on one knee. We kissed, and it was amazing.
Then we went up to the One World building, the highest point you can go. I spent $200 on a bottle of champagne. I took her to a Broadway show. This is all future money that I am spending. We are spending that advance, man. So I spent the advance, and then we finally get home. We tell everybody, we are so excited.
And what I tell people is, we got engaged, and then four weeks later we found out we were five weeks pregnant.
Darren: Oh, whoopsie.
Sean: We had already decided on a wedding and how many people we were going to invite and all of this stuff. Fortunately, unfortunately, we kind of had to pivot some of our plans.
I can tell you, when I was growing up I always thought the right way to do it was get engaged, get married, have a couple of babies when you are 30 and finally financially sound, and then go through the kid’s life. Unfortunately, but so fortunately for us, we got thrust into adulthood so quickly.
Darren: So you are how old at this point?
Sean: 22. I was a kid.
Darren: Wow, man. 22.
Sean: But I remember immediately realizing that I had no idea how to take care of a kid. I was not in a financial position to have a kid, and I needed to figure it out. All I knew is that I needed to sell more. I was in a commission based business, and at that point I was a glorified customer service rep who had never really learned how to sell. That force of action put me in a position where I learned what I had to learn so that we could do it.
My wife is a nurse. She was making great money. I was making 11 bucks an hour.
But the podcast, the original iteration of it, at the time it was called the Performance Group Podcast, came out of that manic stage of my life. Oh shoot, we have got to do something.
I knew at 22 that I did not have a network. Everybody I knew was still in school, or they were just coming out of school. They were not buying insurance. Most of them were still on their parents’ insurance. That is just where I was in life.
My dad always said you sell five years up and five years down. That tends to be your peer group. So five years down, nobody had anything. Five years up, still nobody had anything.
Darren: Five years down from you, they were still in high school.
Sean: Correct. I had to figure out a way to build trust quick.
My dad had run his business for a long time. He had a lot of trust with his clients. At that point I was just a punk kid, a nepotism baby, you know what I mean? I had an office next to my dad’s and I listened to him talk every day. God bless him for it, because I learned a lot of lessons through that window, listening to him speak with clients. A lot of those you hear me say now. I always say, my daddy always said, mama said, like The Waterboy. But we learned so much about how to build trust.
So I started this small podcast. I started finding small business owners, because at that point nobody knew Sean.
Long story short, my dad retired as president and CEO of two $10 billion insurance companies back in 2004. He moved to a small town called Pendleton, Indiana. He bought the downtown laundromat and opened his financial practice next door, and immediately stirred the pot in this small town and said, here I am.
I was eight. We were used to a different lifestyle in Iowa, and then dad buys these businesses and fires all the employees. Not because they deserved to be fired, but he put in cameras and most of them quit. It was a cash business.
Then he did not have anybody to watch the laundromat on Saturdays. So what it turned into was child labor. My dad would drop off my sister and me and he would just leave us at the laundromat. Most of the time our job was just to make sure nothing bad happened.
We had a little box TV and the old phone.
Darren: Living your best life.
Sean: No cell phones. They just left us there. So we would get dropped off every Saturday, and this was my first taste of having a job. We would do other people’s laundry. It was pay per pound, or whatever it was back in the day. We would fix equipment. If somebody lost a quarter, if the change machine went out, we were the people for that.
But I am not sure I ever got paid.
Darren: Are you just realizing this now as you are talking about it?
Sean: I am sure there were checks cut and put into an account, but no one ever gave me the validation. You made $30 today.
We also did not have any food there. So I would take the quarters and I would call the bar across the street. Back then it was called Donnie’s. And I would say, can I have a hamburger? And they would say, yeah, it is X amount. And I would take $10 in quarters, because that was all the money I had, and I would go across the street to the bar. They would come outside and I would hand them quarters and they would hand me my sandwich.
Darren: A whole sack of quarters.
Sean: Yeah. And I would go back and eat my food and wait for my parents to eventually come pick me up.
Darren: That is amazing. What I love about this story is that you said something interesting. You said nepotism baby. And yet everything I have heard you say, and I have even heard you tell stories off camera, I do not think your dad treated you that way at all. He instilled some really good work ethic and almost put you in positions to figure it out, where nepotism really was not a part of it. Did you feel that, or did somebody say that to you?
Sean: I think it is that now, where we are in our business today, I have always had this thing. We just had Cody on earlier talking about that chip on your shoulder. I have always had the chip that I am not a silver spoon. I have lived an amazing life. My dad is a great provider. We have had all of these amazing things. I stand on the shoulders of giants is what I tell people. Where we are at today could not have happened without as much blood, sweat, tears, and capital that dad put into it.
But I think anybody who grows up with an astounding father, which I am sure you can relate to, knows it is a lot to live up to.
So fast forward. That cute little lesson of showing up to work and doing the doggone thing, but also, you have got to eat.
Dad had built so much trust in that community over time that I needed to figure out a way to reintroduce myself into it. And the only way I knew how to do it was based on the medium I liked most. I was in this learning, not earning year of my life. Ruby was born in July of 2019. So the end of 2018 and early 2019, you are getting ready for a baby room. And when you have no kids, you have a lot of time on your hands. I needed to consume as much knowledge and learning as possible. Podcasts were a huge format for that, as you are painting a bedroom, or putting together furniture, or organizing baby clothes.
So I really took that to heart. I thought, I like this medium. I think this can work, because no one else is doing it in a small community. And more importantly, I can get people on that I care about, or do not know at all, and ask them as many questions as I want. And it is really hard for them to say no.
They may not have answered my phone call if I called and asked for their business. But if I say, do you want to come on for an hour and talk about yourself? And they go, well, what is a podcast? I say, I can explain it to you. Who listens to it? Nobody. But come on in.
Darren: Even then, a lot of people do not necessarily think of it that way. They think, man, somebody asked me to be a part of their show. And that is super interesting. It takes a little bit of courage to put a microphone and a camera up and have those conversations. But what you did was say, hey, come on and let me talk about you. And you used it as a bit of lead gen, if you will, to get to know people, to build trust, like you are saying, to have conversations.
Sean: And I learned a lot. I met some really amazing people who were already in my community doing awesome small business things.
And then in 2020, obviously the world shifted pretty quick. That turned into a cool outlet for us to get information out to the community, because so many things were changing so fast, especially for small business owners. PPP funds, EIDL products, all of it.
Darren: I did not even think of that, the fact that you could educate through kind of a crazy time.
Sean: We were blessed, and it was perfect timing. A buddy of mine, we are in the same industry. We did not talk a whole lot during that time period, but he said, dude, I am pretty sure you made me 20 grand. I said, what did I do? He said, when you were coming out with those episodes, I had a subsidiary business that qualified for PPP that I did not realize would have.
So now, as a 30 year old, six years later, I can see the Kevin Bacon effect of it. Have you heard of that? Six degrees of Kevin Bacon.
Darren: Six degrees, man. We could get to him.
Sean: We need to get him on the pod. Come on, Mr. Bacon.
But then, I was just trying to figure out how many people I could connect with, what I could learn from them, and who they knew. I really focused all of my energy there. I was learning how to connect and communicate, and then selling came naturally after that, because you had built the trust. I was in this big trust exercise at the time, but it all stemmed from this incredibly manic boy who was just asking, how can I pay the bills? I need to do something.
And the nice thing about podcasts at that time is that it did not cost a lot of money. I was bootstrapped. I was not doing ad spend or anything like that. It gave me a good opportunity to learn the chops of everything.
Darren: You were practicing on camera, connecting with clients, having conversations, positioning things, asking good questions. You got to learn as you built something.
Sean: It really allowed me to learn how to communicate at a high level. Not that I was not an adult at 22, but we all know 22 year olds. I was not an adult at 22. So I am so grateful for that time.