Author: AJ Vaden

Ep 204: How to Start a Keynote Speaking Career with Shep Hyken

RV (00:07):
Hey, brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for taking the time to check out this interview as always, it’s our honor to provide it to you for free and wanted to let you know there’s no big sales pitch or anything coming at the end. However, if you are someone who is looking to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and get to know you a little bit and hear about some of your dreams and visions and share with you a little bit about what we’re up to see if we might be a fit. So if you’re interested in a free strategy call with someone from our team, we would love to hear from you. You can do that at brand builders, group.com/pod call brand builders, group.com/pod call. We hope to talk to you soon. I love
RV (00:55):
When I get to introduce, to introduce you to some of my long lifetime or career long friends, and that’s what we get to do today with Shep Hyken Shep is one of those people who is amazing. And he truly is out there as a leader in his niche and his vertical and this entire industry. And a lot of people say, they’re speakers. And I know if they’re really speakers by whether or not I speak on the same stages with them. If I lose events to them, if I say, who did you have last year? And Shep is one of those guys where it’s like, oh yeah, we’ve had Shep. We’ve had him. We loved him. He’s here next year. Dah, dah, dah, dah. So he is a, in the professional speaking hall of fame. He is also a New York times and wall street journal, bestselling author.
RV (01:40):
He is a customer service and customer experience expert. And this is the author of several books moments of magic to a loyal customer, the cult of the customer several others. And anyways, we’re his here gonna share some war stories about how do you actually build a real speaking career? How do you, how do you actually sell, write and sell books? And and then also I think, how do we create a better customer experience as speakers, authors, coaches, financial advisers, small business owners, let’s call it for our customers. So anyway, Shep, welcome to the show, man.
SH (02:17):
Hey man, it is so great to be here, Rory. You’re awesome. I’ve known you for, I’ve known you for years. Many, many years. I was a kid. I was like, you were in the program when I first met, you know, you were running.
RV (02:31):
I was a volunteer that I was, I was, I was I think the first year I met you, I was the chair of the youth program because Eric Chester was like, you know, leading the thing or sometimes I got volunteered through it. But anyways man. Yeah. It’s, it’s great. So, and I would love to hear about your start to little bit. I think that would be helpful. You know, people hear these terms, New York times, best-selling author hall of fame speaker. Right. And it’s like, well, It happens overnight, right? Yeah.
SH (03:00):
It takes 20 years for it to happen overnight, but it happens. Yeah.
RV (03:04):
So how did you get, how did You get started? Like how did you get your first gigs? Like what did you charge? And you know, like in the very beginning, how did it come together?
SH (03:13):
I’m going to tell you everything, nothing will be held back. I’m going to speak a hundred percent from experience, no opinion. I want to give you data and information and if it works for you fine or not fine, if it doesn’t, but it worked for me or if it didn’t work for me, I’ll tell you that as well. So I’ve been doing this for quite a while. I don’t have gray hair that you can see, but 1983 was the year that I started my business less than a year out of college. And what had happened is go back gosh, 10 years, even before I graduated college, I was about 12. I started a birthday party magic show business. And from there I grew into working in nightclubs and eventually corporate events and other types of private parties, maybe for adult parties. But the point is, is I had a background in performing.
SH (03:59):
Now. All that meant is when I saw a couple of motivational speakers shortly, like I say, less than a year out of college, I thought I could do that. I, I, I don’t stage before. I, I, I, I think I could do that now. I just have to something I have to write about something and I don’t know what it’s going to be yet. And, and so understand that my parents taught me some great customer service skills when I was younger, like saying thank you, calling people up and asking them how they liked the show and getting specific feedback to make the show better. And I had no idea that was all about customer appreciation, process improvement, getting feedback, but that those are tenants of customer service. So I saw Zig Ziglar and Tom Hopkins and we all made, I hope most of us know who they are Zig since passed away, but Tom’s actually out there still kicking.
SH (04:46):
And I bought two items that night. I bought a set of audio cassette tapes and some of your audiences too young to know what that is. And there were eight of them. It was called see with the top, it was total motivation goal setting. I also bought a book how to master the art of selling. And I believe it’s still available today. And I read that book in about three days and I listened to those tapes over and over again, over the next maybe three, four or five days, I was immersing myself in Zig Ziglar and Tom Hopkins. And I went to the bookstore and I bought every, I went and I said, what am I interested in? I bought like three or four books in the entire, the entire bookstore business section was maybe six feet. It’s one shelf. That was it. There wasn’t racks and racks of books.
SH (05:32):
And I was drawn to the customer service experience books. So that’s how I decided I wanted to do this. And that’s how I, I kind of chose my topic at 22. You’re like early twenties, actually 22. When I saw them, I might, I did had just turned 23 when I started my business. Okay. And when I graduated college, I was asked to go to work for the family business, which they own gas stations and they own I mean, it was a small chain of station, so it was kind of a cool job. And I would go from station to station, a little dirty, getting, doing audits, going out in the, you know, checking the tanks and all that with the meter stick anyway base that was in June when I started full-time and in September they said, Hey, we’re selling the company.
SH (06:18):
I went, what am I supposed to do now? So I stayed with it for a short time as they won some things down. But that was it. I mean, a few months later I’m without a job, but that’s okay. I mean, I never really thought anything of it. I just thought this is all part of life and this is what you have to do. So when I went to the bookstore, I’m attracted to like in search of excellence from Tom Peters. And I believe Waterman is his name. And then I saw a couple of books by Ron Zemsky and Carl Albrecht on customer service. So I bought these books, read them. I said, this is it. And how am I going to get clients? And this is to your point, this is how I really got started. I went to the bookstore, I mean, to the magazine store.
SH (06:55):
And I bought every magazine. That was a business magazine, which was like, you know, there weren’t that many, I can’t remember what they were business. We, whenever they were, if they had a full page ad, I thought they’re big enough to be selling something. They probably got a Salesforce. Then maybe they need a speaker. And always the phone number was never the right phone number, take it to headquarters. It was like a call center. I went to the library. There was no internet back then. Remember you wouldn’t remember, you weren’t even born back then,
RV (07:25):
Were you? I was born in 82. So I was [inaudible]. I’ve
Speaker 5 (07:32):
Been in business almost as long as you are. That’s
RV (07:35):
Right. That’s right.
SH (07:38):
Anyway, I tore out all the full page ads. I went to the library and they had these directories. Some of them were on microfiche. Some of them were actually in big volumes of books that I can open up and find out who the current president C you know, executive VP of marketing, you know, all of the salespeople
RV (07:56):
To get clients, but you looked at it as like they’re advertising for, for them to become a client of yours. I love this. So you look them up and you’re like, this company must have some money. And so you, and so you look up their contact information every day and you could
SH (08:11):
See their sales and, and it was, you know, so I went to these directories and I made this list. I call it the target 100 and I made a list of a hundred companies. And I said and by the way, it took me, I don’t know, month and a half to go through. Because even though I said, I’m going to make 20 calls a day. You might only reach two or three people. And there was voicemail. There was no email. It was just, it was, it was, and I put everything in little file cards and I had my little tickler file and
RV (08:40):
CRM,
SH (08:41):
Like, yeah. So there wasn’t such a thing as CRM. Now I did get my first computer. One of my clients was Epson EPS. When they make printer, they also made computers and I, the guy wanted me to do a regional sales. So I went and did the meeting in exchange for expenses and a computer. And I remember my, my first database was floppy disks. All of the A’s were on this disc. The B’s were on this, this, this, oh, wow. Yeah. And so
RV (09:12):
Sorry. So you just called these people up and, and you said, you just said, Hey, I’m a speaker. And you just said, I’m a speaker. I speak on customer experience. And, and, and then you just, and they said, what’s your fee. And you just gave him some number and that’s how you start
SH (09:29):
It. And I don’t mind, you know, I share, I would tell you, I would share my number. It was $500 for a speech. And my goal was in 1983. Remember I’m only 22, just turning 23 if at the end of the year. So this is about, I would say the official start date of my business was I mean, I ramped up a little bit. I had everything ready to go, but August 1st was doors open. Yeah. And so for the next five months, my goal was to get at least two speeches. That would be a thousand dollars a month. I remember my living expenses with apartment and utilities room and board was about 11 or 1200 bucks a month. I had some money in the bank, not a lot. I said, but if I could make a thousand a month, I can make it through this year.
SH (10:12):
If I could make 2000 a month by next year, I’m in the profit zone. And I wanted to double every year. So I learned this from Zig. I created a ten-year plan from age 23, the age 32. Okay. And I hit that plan at around age. I’m going to say right around age 30 or so, I hit my mark five or six years. Yeah, well maybe more like eight, eight years, but it took eight years to where I’m ma so I had a thousand, 2,004,000, so 4,000 and then 8,000. And so it’s like, then I got a hundred thousand gross than a hundred thousand net. And then eventually my goal was a quarter of a million a year in income. And then when I hit that, I had to reset my goals. So that took me to age just under age 40. So now I had a goal for my next decade of my life.
SH (11:01):
And by the time I hit age 40, my goals were starting to change from 100% financial to lifestyle mixed with financial. I even had my wife tell me one day, chef, you’re doing really well. You’re working so hard. You’re never home. And one day you’re going to come home and nobody’s going to be here. The house will be empty. There will be no furniture and you will be on your own. And that was a big eye-opening, you know, whoa. I need to get some balance in my life because I was churning and burning. And but the part I was burning was my life was my personal
RV (11:36):
And all of this just comes from basically finding people that have meetings, contacting them, letting them know that you’re available to speak on X topic, which has not changed. Like it has not changed in 50 years. It’s, it’s, it’s the same thing now where you doing some speeches for free early on?
SH (11:58):
I, you know, I $500. It’s almost for free. Yeah. But, but I would do anything. I mean, it wouldn’t
RV (12:05):
Be considered that today, but back then, I mean, 500 bucks was still like $500,
SH (12:10):
Like making 1200 or 1500.
RV (12:12):
I mean, it’s still something. Yeah.
SH (12:14):
Yeah. And so yeah, the short answer is yes, I would do free. So between 1983 and 1988, I was really rogue on my own, no support. Nobody told me what to do about anything I had. I had found Dottie Walters, which is a name from the past, which you may or may not know. She was very involved in the national speakers association. She had a speakers bureau and she had a directory of other speaker bureaus. And somehow another, I came across her publication. So I bought her book. And so I was learning about the industry, but I was really out on my own, but in 88 I joined the national speakers association. And this is a, this is definitely a plug for NSA national speakers association in that even if you’re a coach, a consultant, even an accountant or a lawyer, if you go with the idea that all you’re going to do is learn how speakers market themselves. It’s the exact same way that every what I would call entrepreneurial and for lack of a better term, I’ll call it a practice type of business would market themselves. Yeah. There’s a lot of advantage there. Right. Anyway. And I would
RV (13:20):
Say too, when we, we S we talk about this a lot, that both, whether you’re cause a lot of our clients are financial advisors, they are accountants, they’re lawyers, they’re chiropractors, they’re whatever is that. And, and as a speaker cause, cause, cause our story about how we started would be very similar. We called out of the phone book, the yellow pages phone book, and we went and spoke for free. But even to this day, the fastest way to take, we tell, we say to clients the fastest way to go from being a stranger to a lifelong fan is a one hour presentation. And so if you just go deliver, I mean, in financial services, they call this the like dinner seminars they’ve been doing that for decades. It’s still work.
SH (14:04):
It does. And you know what, if so over the years a transition from me making those calls to my assistant, making most of those calls doing nothing, the only people I would talk to is if it was set up in advance is an appointment to talk to someone. Not because I’m a that was just seemed to be like, it’s hard to not know because
RV (14:24):
You’re a prima Donna, even though you are, but that’s not why
Speaker 5 (14:28):
You did it that way. It’s not because it’s
SH (14:30):
The same way. Right? It’s positioning you, you know, the guy who’s groveling for money is probably not the expert you want to hire well and it saves you time. Yeah. And, and you know, it was, it was efficient by the way, in the beginning, when I didn’t have an assistant, I just doing this on my own. I would be really, really busy and then nothing. So what did I do here? And that nothing time I would get back the phone and smile and dial, and then I get really busy again. And then when that war wore off, because I couldn’t make phone calls and it was really hard to, to stay and do calls from on the road compared to what you do today. You can’t, we didn’t have a cell phone back then. So anyway, what happened over time is yes. I transitioned to my assistant making most of those calls today.
SH (15:13):
It’s a little different. I mean, my business today is tons of word of mouth. I am, I don’t consider myself just a speaker. If you ask me on the airplane, what I do for a living, I’m not going to say I’m a professional speaker who, you know, but we can get, well, what did you say? I w well, I would ask you a question. Have you ever walked away from a business or gotten off the phone and you thought, wow, that was an incredible experience. That was amazing. Those people are just unbelievable. And of course, you’re going to say, yeah, I go, well, that’s what I help my clients achieve. And it begs for how do you do that? And I said, well I actually write books and hundreds of articles on customer service and experience and companies hire me either to speak at their events, industry events, corporate events, or my trainers go out and deliver training. We have online on demand, virtual video based training, you know? So then we get into the how tos, but we want to set up like, yeah, I totally understand what that concept is before we get into how I do it. But I love that guy. That’s a cool, I love
RV (16:14):
That of going to the average person on an airplane. If you say a speaker, they go, oh, that’s cool. And they would be like, I can never hire you. I don’t know anyone who needs like, but if you go this amazing customer experience and they would go, you should work with my friend. Cause they S they suck. Or you, you would like these people because they really like, you know, customer experience. That’s great winds up
SH (16:35):
A conversation as opposed to a, because sometimes, oh, I’m a professional speaker. Okay. I don’t even know exactly what that is, but it sounds good. And I’m just going to start reading my book again. And by the way, I prefer if they would read their book and that just all
RV (16:49):
You have to do is tell them you’re a pastor or you sell insurance. Or if you say like, Hey, I, I raised money for political foundation. Then they stopped talking
SH (16:58):
To you. There you go. And we won’t say which one, if we can find out who they love, then we go the opposite direction, no matter who it is. So I can be conservative. I can be liberal, whatever it takes to get them to leave me alone. So, but all kidding aside today I’d even said it, you know, we’re coming out of the pandemic, right? And we need to spend more time doing the direct interaction we need to get back in front of our clients. That’s not going to happen by hoping the phone’s going to ring. It’s going to happen because we’re emailing more. We’re going on. Linkedin. We’re finding people that whose titles and their companies match up with my criteria. We’re asking them, Hey, we’re just connecting with people that you think would be interested in my content, you know, or you and I were talking about our annual reports that we’ve created from studies, by looking at different parts of the population.
SH (17:52):
Mine is on customer service and experience. So last year we created the achieving customer amazement report. And we went out and did a study of a thousand consumers, you know, weighted to the census of the U S and we’ve got great insights. That’s what we send to our potential clients. They go, wow, this is pretty interesting. What would you like to talk about it and how it applies to your business? No charge. I would just like to learn what you do. You learn what I do, and maybe we work together. Maybe we don’t, it doesn’t matter, but we’re all friends when it’s over. And the LinkedIn is the new telephone. And it’s great because it seems like the response, first of all, you can send out a lot more queries through LinkedIn or, or make more potential connections. The percentage of getting responses are much higher, you know, based on the effort you put in, I might make a hundred calls in a week.
SH (18:40):
And I’m lucky if I talked to 10 or 12 people, and I’m lucky if it goes 12 people, maybe one of them, maybe two could be interested. And if I can amass a group of about 20 people that might turn into one or two speeches of those people that are really interested. So I actually had, at one point we tracked every number and that’s so important to track what works and what doesn’t work. So as I learned from going to the national speakers association conferences, when I make those calls, there are certain questions that I want to ask that qualify them for me. Now, I got to know my industry pretty well. So I would ask, do you hire professional speakers? And if they say, no, what’s a professional speaker, then we know they’ve not paid for one. I’m happy to explain it to them, but I’m very quick to get off the phone because I don’t want to make a two-step process in the sale. I don’t want to convince them they need to spend money and then convince them it’s me. They need to spend, I just want to find out if they go, yeah, we’ve hired speakers. Well, tell me who you’ve hired. And sometimes they’ll tell me, well, we brought in our best customers. Well, that’s not a professional speaker, but if they say, yeah, we brought in Rory Vaden, or we brought in, you know Scott McCain or Jay Baer, all my friends, I knew
RV (19:52):
Awesome. They got at least 500 bucks. If they’re bringing, if they’re pulling in those guys, they got at least 500 bucks,
SH (19:59):
Right? So, I mean, the time I got to NSA, true story, I was charging a thousand to $1,200 a speech in 1988. And when I joined NSA. So you remember I did magic as a background. I was still doing some magic shows, but I said to myself, as long as they’ll pay me the same thing as it is to speak, I’m happy to do that magic show. So for a thousand dollars, that’s a great gig for a magician. But as my fees started to go up, not a lot of people willing to pay a thousand bucks for a magic show. So I, when I joined NSA, I found a mentor. His name was Phil Wexler, still around, just as birthday, the other day, same as mine and Phil. I went and we did it. I recommended him for some speeches. And he said he was going to send me a commission.
SH (20:45):
And he owed me quite a bit of money. And it isn’t like he owed me money, but he would have paid me that money. But I said, before you write the check and send it to me, would you keep it? But I want a day of your time. I flew out to San Diego. I spent an entire day with him. And when I came back, I tripled my fee. I said, no more magic shows. And I became laser focused on just what I wanted to be hired to do. Now, could that have happened a year or two earlier? Sure. But it doesn’t matter. I was doing pretty well. Anyway. I was booking 150 dates a year. Things were good and I was making a thousand, 1200 bucks a speech. So I went up to 3,500 and never looked back. It was a little scary right away because I lost all of these clients that were used to paying me lower amounts of money.
SH (21:30):
But with by the middle to three quarters of the end of the year, I was making a gross wise as much I’d made the following year. And of course, you know, now we’re, we’re in that sequence. So it worked out real well. But the point is, that’s what I did to get started today. It’s, it’s content marketing. I really think of myself more of a media company than I do a professional speaker. And I do have a business versus a practice. Now, the speaking is like a practice. If I don’t speak, I’m not getting paid, but I’ve got trainers out there delivering my content. We’ve got influencer activity where I’m hired for several months to tweet, write articles. You know, we’ve got all kinds of, I have seven different streams of income that help offset, you know, areas that might get hit hard by a pandemic or by an economic downturn. Yeah.
RV (22:25):
Well, and I think it’s just an interesting shift in general. Like, you start out going, Hey, I want to be a speaker and you, you and I have this in common. I think there’s less and less people today. Maybe not, maybe that’s not right to say, but it’s not like, oh, I want to be a speaker anyways, you and I started going, I want to be a speaker. And then it kind of has it evolves to more of like, I’m not marketing myself as a speaker, I’m marketing my expertise of which I can deliver that to you in a variety of different mechanisms or mediums or, or outlets. And do you think that’s a necessary evolution that that happens or do you think there’s power in just going, Hey, if you want to be a speaker, just market yourself as a speaker, go knock that down. And just, that is what, you know, that’s what you deliver and that’s, that’s the only thing you do.
SH (23:16):
So a great question. And I think the answer really lies in what you want and where you are in your career. If you are an executive who worked as a high level executive fortune 100 company, and you’re at about age 55 or 60 and ready to hang it up whoever that executive is, he, or she might say, I had a lot of experience. People are willing to pay a lot for that. I’m done with the corporate world. I’m going to just go out. And this is kind of like my retirement you career, then it’s okay to have that practice. And I’m totally cool with that. You may be in that world where you’re, this is what you love more than anything. And I say, go for what you love. And if you can make a living at what you love and you actually have stability in it.
SH (24:00):
Great. What concerned me is that I know we’re not invincible, so you always have to worry about, am I properly insured either through life insurance, health insurance, you know, business interruptions, insurance, that kind of thing. But you also need to realize that, you know, you’re not in control of, you know, a pandemic shut people down for a year. You know, I know people that had the leave, the speaking business because they never did. I thought they were successful, but they didn’t save anything. And they weren’t prepared for a downturn. Well, maybe they think, oh, how long could it last two or three months? I was kind of thinking we’d be back in March. Oh, well you backed by September. Right? I didn’t realize it would be September 20, 22, right. Or whatever it is when he went. But anyway, I digress. So to your point, the question is where do you want to go first, 2000 nine 11, 2001.
SH (24:55):
Was it, was it? Yeah. And when nine 11 hit nine 11, 2001. Yep. Yeah. So in December of that year, I’d already signed up to spend the weekend with needle Cobain. We all know Nieto in this, our industry, he’s a guru. And one of the exercises he had us do is an amusement park exercise. And he says, draw your business. Like it’s an amusement park. Now I started in 1983. This is 17, 18 years later. Right. My amusement park, I thought of it in terms of like six flags. There’s that big stage, the main stage where they had that show. And then as you walked out, there’s a gift shop kind of like even going to a Disney, you know, going on the ride and then you have the little gift shop. And then my amusement park had nothing else around it that was in the parking lot.
SH (25:38):
But then I looked to the guy next to me and he was drawing an attraction here in the corner. And another one, I go, what is that? He goes, this is a mastermind group that I put together of my top clients. This over here is a membership group. I created that has, you know, 500 members that are paying me X number of dollars a month. And he had these four or five attractions. And I looked to the guy next to me, same kind of thing I want, okay, what are they doing? They’re bulletproofing themselves from having this as part of their business being wiped out because they have other areas. So I quickly pivoted, if you will, I hate that word because like you turned your back, but I was flexible. That’s the word I showed flexibility. And that I said, I know what I’ll do.
SH (26:20):
I’m going to create a training program from my speaking. By that time I’d written no, maybe two, three books. And so I went to a course designer. I found a freelancer and for about 3000 bucks, maybe 3,500 bucks a week, much more than that. They wrote my training for a two hour, half day full day and gave me ideas for multiple day programs. And then I went out and did my first full day training program. I hated it. It was like, I got to talk for a little bit. Then I have to let them work. And then I got to listen to a lot more that keynoter. But the brilliant thing was I started hiring other people to deliver this content because it was written with the idea that a person who could just pick up a facilitator guide, study it and go do it if they knew what they were doing.
SH (27:04):
And that started the second phase of my business because we were in my mind, one terrorist attack away from the annihilation of being of going to a hotel to have a big meeting, because nobody was going to put their sales people on an airplane or send them to a hotel where, you know, somebody could detonate a bomb and wipe out their company. And I know that sounds morbid, but that was the way I was thinking one terrorist attack away from the end of my business. But as a trainer, I could send trainers to their offices. They could have a training room and my people could train their people. And that’s really what started the expansion of my business. So I, you know, what’s right. It just depends what you want to do, but realize as you get into business, you know, Rory asked me how many people I have working for me,
RV (27:51):
How many people you have working for you about half of them.
SH (27:56):
But seriously, when you want to get into doing this, you start to hire other people and you can hire freelancers, but you’re still hiring a force. And you want to try to, you have to keep motivated. You have to meet. It’s a totally different game. I enjoy that game. It’s fun to me. So that’s where I am today. We’ve evolved to I have seven ways that I make money speaking, sending out trainers on demand, video based training selling books when they come out, by the way, new book coming out, I’ll be back how to get your customers to come back again and again that’s book sales influencer role where companies now hire me just to have me tweet about them, write articles about them, because I’m considered a thought leader in my space after all these years sponsorship, if you go to my YouTube channel, you might see a little ad sponsored by whoever the company is. It’s sponsoring me that month. And we have them sponsor my blog, my YouTube channel, my podcast, et cetera, et cetera. And, and so we’ve got packages for that is that six. And then, oh, number seven is special projects. Like we’ll do special video projects or consulting type projects for companies. So interesting, but it started with
RV (29:07):
One, it started really as a speaker at the speech. And then, and then you, you expanded and turn that expertise into something else. Wow.
SH (29:15):
Well I love
RV (29:18):
That ship. I mean, this is, this is super interesting and I think powerful for anybody out there, you know, going okay, how do you get started? Cause to me, you know, you did this in 1983. You know, I would, I would say for me, I did this really, I feel like between 2006 and 2000 and, and maybe 12, 2 13, and there’s not that much difference. And there’s not that much difference from today. It’s like, you got to find some people who need what you have, let them know you have it and then do a really good job delivering it. And like was pretty much that’s all there is. And then you just do it over and over again. And then at some point you get other people to do it, to do that, to do all of those same parts. Yeah. If you want to, if you want to go that route. So it, I think it’s, it’s super encouraging. And yeah. I wonder where do you want people to go ship if they want to connect with you or like learn more of what you’re up to?
SH (30:17):
Sure. Go to hike and.com pretty easy. H Y K N. There’s lots of free resources. You know, I give away pretty much everything I have. From there you can find my YouTube channel, but it’s, you know, I have 600 videos on YouTube. People watch him chairman meetings. My goal is the more you give, the more you get, they come back and give you information, you know, book you to, to share their information.
RV (30:42):
Well, and I’m, I’m curious to know, okay, so what is you? We didn’t really get into the customer experience stuff too, too much. But what would you say is one great customer service tip that personal brands could do immediately just to like, whether it’s love on their clients or love on their team or like when you go, okay. When I think of like all the speakers, coaches, consultants, practices out there, this is like a small business tip that you go, oh my gosh, like, this is a, you could just do this right away and it’ll make a, make a huge difference in your, your expense.
SH (31:17):
Well, I’m going to give you three. One is kind of strategic and this must always happen. One is a bigger project and one is something you can do right away. And I’ll do them quickly recognize that every interaction that you have with the customers, an opportunity for them to form an impression about you. So manage that interaction. It’s called the moment of truth. I can go on and on about that one, but you get the ideas. You need to see what every interaction is now. That’s number one. Number two is how do you look for those interactions? Create a journey map of every interaction that your clients would have of you from the time they might see something in a website, search on Google to get to your website, how they get to you, you know, do they reach out to you via email phone and the whole plot, the entire process, all the way to where they book you, and then what happens after the booking or what happens, where they buy you or after the sale. And so that’s number two. And that journey, map process is going to take awhile because you think you got it. And then you’re gonna find more and more and more, every little tiny interaction counts. And number three, just return people’s emails and phone calls immediately. And you’ll see what a difference that makes you can do that. Starting this moment.
RV (32:29):
Huh. That’s funny. That’s a big one for AIG. She’s super big on responsiveness. Just even you let them know, Hey, I’ll get to you. Like I saw your email, I’ll get to it tomorrow. Like yeah.
SH (32:40):
You know, it’s holiday weekend. I’ll call you first thing Tuesday or Wednesday or whatever it is. Yeah. Which
RV (32:45):
Is interesting. Cause like, you know, I think of all the people we hire that are vendors, contractors for the house, for the business. And it’s like, the number one thing is like, are they staying in communication with us? So that’s really great. Well, hyken.com. Y’all we’ll put a link to that. You can follow him, get a lots of awe. I mean his, his depth of knowledge and expertise around the customer experience, you can see a super powerful chef. Thanks for sharing. What I think is probably the, not so often shared story about how you got started in this career and have built everything that you’ve become, man. We wish you all the best.
SH (33:17):
Thank you, sir. Great to be here.

Ep 203: How to Hire Great Contractors with Hanson Cheng | Recap Episode

Listen to the episode below In today’s episode, we revisit our conversation with Hanson Cheng, a rapid skill acquisition expert, speaker, and multi-million dollar earner who helps CEOs optimize their time to ensure more freedom and flexibility. Tuning in you’ll hear Rory and AJ discuss their top three takeaways from Rory’s interview with Hanson, from […]

Ep 202: How to Hire Great Contractors with Hanson Cheng

RV (00:07):
Hey brand builder Vaden here. Thank you so much for taking the time to check out this interview as always, it’s our honor to provide it to you for free and wanted to let you know there’s no big sales pitch or anything coming at the end. However, if you are someone who is looking to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and get to know you a little bit and hear about some of your dreams and visions and share with you a little bit about what we’re up to see if we might be a fit. So if you’re interested in a free strategy call with someone from our team, we would love to hear from you. You can do that at brand builders, group.com/pod call brand builders, group.com/podcast. We hope to talk to you soon.
RV (00:54):
Biggest business blunder ever have I made the interview you are about to hear is not the real interview Hanson. And I have been working on our schedules for like three months to do this interview. We did the entire interview two days ago, and at the end of the interview, I got to the end and I was like, where’s the stop button where wait a minute. Where’s the stop button, no stop button. Because some bone head moved named Rory Vaden forgot to hit the start button. So we didn’t record the entire thing. And Hanson’s been, so you’ve been so gracious man to come back. Thank you for that. I feel like a total bonehead. I mean, nothing frustrates me more than losing time. And so to do it to somebody else is just like sucky. But no, oh
HC (01:47):
Man. Things happen, right? We’re entrepreneurs things, always seeing the not happen the way we planned, but you know, I’m glad we could get it done and do it again. Well,
RV (01:56):
Yeah, so here’s the good news for y’all is Hanson is going to save you some time. We had an epic interview and we just, him and I are newer friends, but we met on a project that he was working with. We have a mutual friend, Celinna De Costa, who is a writer and you know, they’re friends and we met for a thing. They were, they had going on for Forbes, but Hanson is really smart. And as soon as I met him, I was like, gosh, I really liked this guy. I like his brain. You know, he is a speaker, he’s a multi, multi seven figure earner. And he helps CEOs basically figure out how to remove themselves from their company. Either with people or processes. We’ll talk a little bit about both of those. Just so they have more freedom and flexibility and make more money and, and, you know, just more profit and, and be able to have more time on their vision. So he’s really good at streamlining things, automation he has worked around the globe and he, he lives Bali and right now I happened to catch him in DC. So he just, all things, entrepreneur and systems and, and man, the interview we did was awesome. So I couldn’t let him get away without getting it actually recorded, man. So anyways, welcome back officially.
HC (03:14):
Thanks for having me back.
RV (03:16):
So so freedom to ascend dot com is your website. And you’ve worked on a lot of different things, but I think that our conversation, you know, that we had a couple of days ago, what stuck out to me was I was going okay, how do you help entrepreneurs? Who is get their time back? And basically the way I thought of it was, you said, okay, we’re going to either put in awesome people and, or awesome processes. I mean, is that, I mean at a high level, is that kinda, what is that kind of how you think about it?
HC (03:59):
Yeah. I mean, every, every business is different, but we can use the same principles and analyzing how to best leverage the owner’s time. What we do is we just, you know just take an inventory of where they spend all their time, what is moving the needle most and how can you automate that exactly with systems current software. So keeping up with technology out there to replace or reduce the amount of people or time needed and adding people in to either do those tasks or to maintain those, those, the software.
RV (04:32):
Yeah. So the I’m a big nerd, like autumn marketing, automation, nerd, and, and, and stuff like that. And I like a lot of the systems, but I want to talk about the people part here first. And I think the thing that’s so frustrating for so many entrepreneurs, whether they’re trying to hire a VA or a full-time employee, or just a contractor who can get something done, like, you know, like I need a guy, like I need a guy who can edit a video. I need a, I need a gal who can like write some copy. I need a, I need someone who can like build a website or do design me a flyer. And it is so freaking hard to find good people to just like, knock out a job. And you’ve got two tips on this that I’m going to make you reshare, because these were two things I had never heard. But you know, you don’t, you don’t have to dive into those exactly. If you don’t want to, I do want to, I do want to cover them, but like, how do you find the people? Like, what’s the mindset here? And then, you know, like what, what give us like a couple techniques or strategies on this.
HC (05:44):
Yeah, sure. I think what most people default to is searching for job listing boards, like Upwork or Fiverr you know, or Craigslist or whatever it is to find these people and problem with that is we run into a lot of stuff we need to sift through. Right? You definitely can find quality in there, but I mean, it’s, it’s a lot of stuff to sift sifter. And a lot of times as business owners, we just want to get that task done in a, in a, in a hash process. So what I’ve done is like, okay, how can I basically make this process, the system more efficient and what I, so I found this hack. I’ve never heard of anyone doing it before. But what I do is I use this for my actual website was I was like, okay, where do I want my business to be?
HC (06:28):
If I were to five or 10 X or 15 exit, and who are the people in the market right now that are leaders in the what in my market who are 10 times ahead of me, I would go to their LinkedIn profile. And I will look at the recommendations they did. Not that they received, that they actually give, because what that will do it will show me who along the way, in the last three, four or five years have they worked with who experienced that growth or help and skill that growth that I can now talk to bring in as a consultant or ideally how I hired them as part of my team to then they have the blueprint they’d experienced the blueprint, they know where I am, and they knew they know what they did to get to where the person I’m looking at. Gotcha. And so I can just hire them, bring them on. And automatically I absorbed, it’s like a matrix. I can absorb their knowledge, right. Just by hiring them. So this is one way I like to acquire new skills or knowledge is just by hiring people. Who’ve already done it. And the fastest way to find those people is to hire the ones who have been recommended by the people who are invested in your industry.
RV (07:34):
Dude, that is such a practical tip that is, is free. And it makes so much sense. And we have, we have learned and studied so much about recruiting and hiring and we’ve hired so many people, employees. I mean, we’ve hired hundreds of people at this appoint, like between our various businesses. We’ve helped our clients hire hundreds of people. I have never heard anybody share that. And it’s such a simple tip. And you know, when you think about LinkedIn, of course, LinkedIn has its own job board, which we’ve used a ton and, you know, costs, I don’t know, maybe 500 bucks or something. We’ve used Upwork, we’ve used Fiverr, you know, whatever Craig’s list marketplace. Like we do all, all the things. But we have always found that like our best hires come from referrals either from like friends and family or clients, or from people who work here, but on your LinkedIn network, like those are referrals.
RV (08:39):
It’s, it’s like you don’t, and you don’t even have to ask for them, you’re going, who is out there, that’s the best in my space, or that does the best in this, this thing. And then like, we all think about recommendations in terms of who’s given us recommendations. How do I get recommendations, but never have I even thought to go, oh, and there’s an, you know, anyways, so we, you and I recorded this interview. It, two days ago this morning, I went on LinkedIn. I started doing this and I was like, whoa. And I, I found a VA case. I found one person that was like a VA. I found one person who was a social media marketing manager for somebody. And this is like top people. And this is like, the recommendation they wrote was like six years ago for like five years ago before they even became who they are now going, oh man, like they’re right there. And it was really amazing. And I saw a bunch of others, like web developers. I saw membership some, someone who had built memberships for one of these people. And I just, I don’t know. I dunno, Hansen. It was just so simple. And I just can’t believe I’ve never heard of that before, so that, and you’ve done this for yourself, but then also like you can help. You’ll help, you know, what clients you work with. You’ll go do this for them and figure out who they’re hiring.
HC (09:59):
Yeah. It’s very, very easy. Once, you know the process now I don’t even have to do it myself. Right. I can train a very like one of my team members to do this or a VA just say, Hey here are the competitors. Here’s a list of the people that are in my market, who are the best. And I don’t care. Like I want to know everyone they’ve ever given a recommendation and recommendation to, because I may be looking for a social media manager, but they might have recommended someone completely. I’ve never even thought about hiring. And then now that gets my brain to start thinking, like, why did they hire that person? Let me talk to him, shoot him a message on LinkedIn. Hey, I saw that you worked with this person, what did you do there? What were your results? And everyone’s super, super, because it’s just like a referral. Like you said, you, you refer them to who gave the recommendation and you’re like, I’d love to learn more about you and add, I’ve never had anyone not respond in a, in a, in a good way.
RV (10:50):
So do you just send them a yeah, I mean, that’s just so, so cool. And, and it is true. There’s something about LinkedIn recommendations. Like I even find that people will kind of write an Amazon review and there, you know, a lot of times they’re like very forthcoming, but there’s something about a LinkedIn recommendation that feels very like vulnerable and honest and real. It’s like, I won’t write a LinkedIn recommendation for just anyone who asks for one. No. Oh
HC (11:18):
No. It takes some time. It’s not easy. You got log in. You’ve got to go to recommendations. You need to set it up, you know, rent it out. Yeah.
RV (11:23):
Yeah. So, well, that’s awesome. That is such a great tip, you know, and, and, and on the LinkedIn recommendations, I mean, this is not really what we talked about it and not really the topic of this conversation, but the other Jim of how to use recommendations is like you know, like for keynote speaking, we, we have done, this is you go look at other speakers. We don’t really consider other speakers as competitors because they hire different speaker every year. Right. But you go look at who is a top speaker and write on their profile will be recommendations from all their past clients. And if you’re, and you go, like, these are the peop, like, these are literally the decision-makers who hired this person to come speak. And you just never think about using the tool like that. Like, it’s, it’s the, it’s not even just like the cold search power of it. And the social engine it’s like working through real human relationships and they’re all visible missing as an incredible so okay. So then the other thing I wanted to ask you about was you live in Bali, you grew up in DC, right?
HC (12:37):
I grew up in DC. Yeah. How long do you live in Bali?
RV (12:42):
I would say about four years. Okay. So the international hiring place, right. And you always hear of these, like hire someone in the Philippines for two bucks an hour to just like do this. And we’ve had certain things that has, that has actually been, it has actually worked, but in most cases it’s like, it takes more time than it is worth. And you shared with me that there is another kind of secret little thing that you have figured out about hiring, about hiring great people. Can you share, share it with us? Yeah.
HC (13:22):
Yeah. This is, this is a superpower of mine because when I discovered this man, it made, it made hiring so much easier for, for teens of people who have been working here. So I’ll, I’ll just get right to it. So I do have a competitive advantage, so I’m gonna let you know upfront. My, my fiance is Russian and my, my hack is to find groups of people, teams of people in Russia to hire who have been working with each other for specific pieces of, of, of labor in my businesses. And the reason I do that is because like you said, when you hired from the Philippines or India, and you’re looking for the low-cost salary for unfortunately their level of education and, and just their mindset on, on problem solving is a lot different from Western countries. Okay. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but if they find an, a problem they have trouble finding a solution to a problem.
HC (14:21):
They’ll come back to you and you have to basically use your mental bandwidth to figure it out for them. Now, Russians, on the other hand do not, they are very, very competitive. Technology wise, they, they consume so much education Americans, Canadians, like they, cause they want to grow their skills so they can get out of Russia or at least perform on a competitive basis across the entire world. So what I’ve found working with Russians is that they’re, they’re sharp as, or maybe even a little bit sharp enough because they have the work ethic and they have the education and the mentality of like, okay, like what are all the different options we can do in chess? And what I’ll end up in there? Their cost of living is so dramatically lower than ours, that you can get a very, very one of, some of the best teams in Russia. And I’ll give an example. I have a social media team, well, more of a marketing team about four or maybe five people on the team and I’m paying less than 2000 a month. Or, and these are these, these, this agency works with grants like Coca-Cola pioneer, large, massive brands. So I have a lot of experience with the most up-to-date marketing strategies.
RV (15:36):
Huh. So, yeah. So like, what I hear you saying is, you know, each, each culture, like when it comes to hiring internationally, you have to like pay attention to the kind of cultural norms and the like course you do. Right. And it go, yeah, it’s, it’s different. Hiring someone in India is different than hiring someone in the Philippines is different than hiring somebody in Argentina is definitely the higher. And you know, I, I had to think back over the years, I’m like, I don’t think I’ve ever worked with a contractor from Russia. And what I hear you saying is going, Hey, there are certain countries that have an education level. That’s very comparable to what you might see in wherever the U S or Canada, or, you know, w England or whatever name, your pick and the work ethic is similar or better. And the problem-solving skills are similar or better, but the cost of living is still much lower. And and Russia’s one of those places. Are there, are there others, or as right now, is Russia like, well, Russia is also massive, so yeah, yeah, yeah.
HC (16:42):
Yeah. I mean a lot of the Eastern European countries. So my main sources are Ukraine and Russia. Okay. And this is what I call it’s like labor arbitrage. Right. you’re getting a very, very, very high level of skill for Le much, much lower price. Now the trade-off however is English is not a first language. Okay. So and I’m going to introduce you to a soccer. We did not discuss about this up the last conversation. This is another tidbit that I I’d like to add in here. I found, I found a software that uses AI to now repurpose, so I can have a Russian write anything. And they, they use the same structure, but it’s in Russian. I usually translate it. It’s not proper English. And this is where I was struck that man, I still got to hire an English copier.
HC (17:31):
Now I found a software just recently, just a few months ago, and I’ve been playing with it. It works tremendously. So I’ll have a Russian copywriter write email sequence or redo a website. And I will take that, dump it into the stock where that’s AI and it will repurpose it in perfect English. Really perfect. Yep. And now I’m even exploring might maybe even replacing my copywriters because I can take a copywriting. They’d let you funnel, hack your competitors. You see what kind of, what, how they’re speaking to their audience and their what’s on their website, their emails. You can just take that, dump it into this AI software. It will rewrite it. 99% plagiarism free. You can repurpose email copy. You can repurpose website. You can repurpose blog posts is incredible. The software I’m using is called conversion.ai.
RV (18:23):
I thought that’s what you might say. I thought you that’s what you might, you might say. Yeah. I’ve heard about this. Yeah.
HC (18:29):
Yep. And yeah. So this one, this one has closed the loop that had been like, okay, the trade-off is there. They don’t have the, the first or English as a first language. Now that’s not an issue for me. However, I’m still paying the same rates.
RV (18:43):
So that’s amazing. Does it go the other way too? Can you take your English and run it through conversion.ai and move it to like Spanish?
HC (18:56):
I have not tried. I haven’t tried to that. Yeah. I’m not sure I have that, but that would be a really good case study or case use.
RV (19:05):
Huh. Yeah, so this, I think I heard this tool in regards to in, in regards to like headlines and stuff like that. Yeah. Is, is I heard it as like basically like you’ll, you’ll plug in some copy and it’ll kind of like spit back some stuff. So I have not heard about this feature. So actually AIJ is the one. So our CEO, my wife, she’s the one that’s been telling me, Hey, you gotta look at this, you gotta look at this. You gotta look this, I haven’t actually gotten to look at it. But now that don’t tell her crap, she’s gonna listen. She’s gonna listen to this. There’s nothing more annoying than when your spouse tells you something like a thousand times that you don’t do it. And then like some random person says it and you’re like, oh, Hey, let me tell you
Speaker 4 (19:53):
About this awesome tool conversion. He’s like what? I’ve been telling
RV (19:58):
You this for years. But so you’re saying you’re getting a copywriter at a much more affordable price who kind of like understands persuasive marketing, et cetera, et cetera, writes it in their native tongue. You run it through this tool and bam, it spits it out in English for you.
HC (20:17):
Well, they write it in English, but the English is not, you know, it does. It’s just, you can tell it’s not written by speaking person. And then I read the word it. So they do have caught like they work with international brands. So they’re starting to try to find copy, but that’s their struggle in Russia. It’s really hard to find English speaking, Russians who sound like, you know, you can just tell it’s not written by a native English speaker. And so they can get 78. They, you get the idea, but just didn’t sound right. You plug it in here and now it sounds great.
RV (20:53):
Okay. So they are writing it in English, but it’s a little bit of broken, broken English, and then you, and then this cleans it up, basically
HC (21:01):
It’s better than Google translate. Not as good as you or I, right.
RV (21:05):
Huh. Got it. Okay.
HC (21:08):
For the Russians and then a conversion AI polishes it up to where you and I, even better than you arrived. I write it because they did different variations. So you can plug in, like they can write one thing and you can just sit you compose or generate generate journey. So they would come up with unlimited variations of that. So then you can AB test each one and be like, okay, I, they wrote one great headline. I’m going to create this one headline and put it into 20 and then I can give it to my person and they can run tests on all day.
RV (21:37):
Huh. And then see basically split test different headlines and see how they perform. Yeah. That’s how, that’s how ADA described it. To me was almost like a headline generator tool and kind of go in like, Hey, you know, different. Like we could even take our email sequence, put it in there and then it can give us like another rendition to kind of test. So
HC (21:56):
W w I want to real quickly, so re talked about basically SEO and stuff like that. So this is where it’s starting to hit the STL market Flores. SEO nurse are listening. You can actually take, and people have built software. I’m actually working with a developer, build a software where you can go and see, all right, here’s Google’s top ratings for how to make money online. The top 10 articles, take those top 10 articles, dump it into Jarvis or conversion.ai, re spin it. And then you have a brand new article, not plagiarized that you can now clean the top topics from those other articles. And you have your own on your own website without hiring an SEO. Right.
RV (22:39):
Interesting. Yeah. That’s interesting. Cause it’s like, it’s definitely not plagiarism. You’re literally not copying the words, but it’s kind of like you’re taking the concept and the content and then re re repurposing, which people have done for years as you go like, oh, look at what this, this, I want to research this search term. I’m going after this search term, this is the website. These are the 10 that have it. And you go, w you know, what are they doing? And then you’re just kind of like reverse engineering it. But you’re saying using a tool like this kind of like, does the reverse engineering for you? And then you kind of add your Polish and then you do this is like it’s almost like digital war games
Speaker 4 (23:22):
Is like
RV (23:24):
The, the, the future of, of this stuff is going, you know? And, and, and I think that to me, of going, like, when I hear somebody, like you talk at your, like, w dealing live in this world all the time, and I go, there’s a lot of people who don’t even know this is happening still. Like a lot of people are just like, what does SEO mean? And it’s like, Hey, you’re still living that world. Like, you got to pick it up here. Like, you need to do some binge listening of, of some influential, personal brand podcasts and like some stuff, because this is, this is where it’s at. And, and I think here’s what I think is amazing is there are like, this kind of tactic is kind of like a nimble small business tactic applied to a huge, big business concept of like SEO and keyword research.
RV (24:12):
And, you know, just like page optimization and traffic analytics. And there’s like this merger of these like small business hacks, and also small businesses are able to compete with big businesses without having to spend like massive dollars for the clicks because of, of, of techniques like this. And a lot of big businesses are trying to become more nimble and, and smaller businesses are being able to compete. Anyways, I’m coming back to the, to the international thing, you know, is there a place you can go to find great talent? I know you said you have an unfair advantage because your fiance those of us that are married should probably not go get a Russian fiance. Is there is there another way whether it’s Russia or, you know, you mentioned Argentina last time we’ve worked with some folks in Argentina, some creatives that were, have been really, really spectacular w finding the right people overseas, is there a way to do that other than the LinkedIn thing, cause that would lead you to some of those people? Probably.
HC (25:14):
Yeah. How I would do it if I did not have, like, Beyonce is, I would find similar to you kind of went over it, you conferences, finding the speakers that so you could find, if you want a social media person, you can find the top social media conferences in Russia, look at the speaker list and reach out to those speakers. And then just through those connections, figure out okay, who recommended them? Who are they working with? It’ll be a little bit tough because it OER in Russian. However, you can very quickly decipher, okay. Who are the best. But the, the good thing is, is that you’ll know, I, I you’ll be much more likely to be able to afford the best because their rates are so low. Okay. So you don’t have to do a lot of digging for a comparable rate because it’s going to be pretty comparable to what you might. Yeah.
RV (26:03):
So it’s kind of the same way you would, you would find like, who’s the top person, who’s the top expert on blank and English or whatever. Like you would just search it and you’d, you’d see it, but it would be in Russian, but you could also view it through Google translate and be able to kinda like read a lot of those sites. Yeah. And then, and then just reach out to them. You’re going, it’s not that hard to find the top people. It just be, you just wouldn’t have much relationship connection with them. So you got to like, you know, reach out to, or whatever,
HC (26:31):
But you’ll be, here’s the thing you’ll stand out because you’ll be a non rush and reaching out to them. They want to work. And we talked about this before. They really want to start branching out and working with American or Canadian or UK companies. And so if you reach out to them, they’re going to super excited. You may even get on the phone with the actual owner CEO of the company and they’ll bring their, their 18. Right. They’ll roll out the red carpet. And they many times I’ve, I’ve had like zoom call, interview calls with the owner, the, his right hand, man, and then three or four of their top project managers. I’m not sure if it’s a training car or whatever, just to, just to really put their best brains together to work on, on my, my businesses. Yeah.
RV (27:14):
I mean, that’s, that’s interesting. Guess it’s just people, it’s people and going, what, what do they want and how can I help them and where are they? And yeah, that, that’s super, super interesting. So w what I want to talk to you about the PR concept a little bit, so we didn’t get it to chat about this last time, but I, I wanted to understand this. I feel like, I feel like I’ve heard that you’ve created a similar kind of system, which is like, you know, just in general, I feel like how your brain is working. You’re constantly reverse engineering. What is like, you know, labor arbitrage is such a great concept. That’s such a great term. I’ll just go and how can I solve this problem in a different way, in a more efficient, economical way. And I feel like you developed some good process with this related to PR and publicity, which is obviously how we met. We, you know, we kind of met through this, this Forbes article, which wasn’t even under your name I noticed, or Celine’s like, I was working with you all, but somebody else wrote the article. Like I expected it to be under her pen name. And then I was like, oh, this didn’t even come out under her name. So I was like, clearly you were doing something there behind the scenes for relationship building. And like so how do you, like, how are you tackling some of this PR stuff and building relationships there?
HC (28:40):
So very similar I’m reaching out on LinkedIn. I’m just, this, one’s a lot more manual. I mean, when you want to develop a relationship with cause Forbes, contributors or entrepreneurs, they get messaged a lot. Right. And so I, I come in and I’m very, very, very focused on just providing value develop relationships. And once they, I give a lot of free advice and coaching or whatever for this area, they don’t get paid to contribute to these columns. Right. And so they have other businesses. So what I do is I come in and if we click on a good level, I will give free advice. I’m like, okay, I’ve grown up several companies. I’m what are you working on? A lot of them are in my niche, which is building websites for there. And so I give them a lot of value in exchange, not even exchange.
HC (29:30):
I just say, Hey, I have a PR company. This is not based on any exchange or anything, but if they’re a good fit or I have an article that you’d like to publish, like, could we work? You know, basically could I, could I interview some of my clients? And so if you think they’re a good fit and you might write about them, and that works really well, super relationship-based. And I just, I’ve been doing that for a couple of years now. So I’ve built up a really strong network of people that contribute to different magazines. And as I’m growing my personal brand, now I have ins with editors or, or people who can make decisions. So eventually when I build my personal brand, I can have my own columns as well.
RV (30:12):
Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s crazy. Like I think, I think this wasn’t our conversation that I was saying, media is like the thing that has the littlest financial dollar value of anything you ever do short term, but this monster credibility and influence and relational power, which all leads to financial stuff later on. And and yeah, that’s, that’s the thing. Is this going like, what’s, what’s different about the world today is these people are accessible. Like you’re not going through some, like secretary on a phone tree, or like a, you know, some people blocking you to get to the writers. They’re all out there on LinkedIn and Twitter. They’re super easy to find. I mean, we got on good morning America last week because the guy I’d never even met he’s on Twitter. He saw some posts that we made about this national research study that we just, that my wife did that we just, we just published.
RV (31:13):
It’s just coming out now. And he was like, Hey, can I do an interview for you? And, and he reached out, you know, he’s ABC news.com and we’re like, sure, we did an interview. He didn’t even say it was going to be on good morning, America. We thought it was going to be on some late night, late night show that he does. We, we knew he was reputable, but then, then they rerun the story on good morning, America. The next morning, we didn’t even know some, our friend was like, Hey, did you know? You’re a good morning America? And it’s like, they’re there, they’re there. They’re right there. It’s,
HC (31:43):
It’s incredible. Yeah. I mean, I would say maybe three or four, three or four years ago. I, I had no social media for, I still don’t. I haven’t worked on it, but know nothing about me. I met some guy and we became friends. We hit it off. Same thing. We just were talking about business. He wrote an article. This what happened. I found his article on Reddit, reached out to him about, I love your article. We just started talking. And I was like, Hey, something working for me. I figured out a way to hack Cora. And I got a million views in less than 45 days. So I was like, Hey, I don’t know if you’ve heard about this, but I did this. And you know, I don’t know what you’re working on, but maybe you can work at di didn’t expect anything in return.
HC (32:23):
It turns out he was a contributor for entrepreneur. Ended up reaching back out to me like couple weeks later, like, Hey man, I was thinking about your core hack. I’d like to write about it. Had a full feature done on me in entrepreneur, out of nowhere. And then we’ve just became really good friends after that. And yeah, if you’re just providing value out there and you want to be strategic, you can provide that value to contributors of these large publications that you can find on LinkedIn, but you’re not going in saying, Hey, I want you to write an article about me. It’s like you go in and you find out, okay, they might be someone you were friends with. They happen to write for whatever publication, just
RV (33:00):
How can you help them? Which is the, which is true of anything. Like that’s the way you build relationship with anybody is you go, what can I do for you? How can I support you? Who can I introduce you to? Like, what tip can I give you? Can I share your stuff? Like, can I volunteer at your conference? Can I give you an endorsement? Can I like give you a retweet? Like it’s, and this is what people like, just don’t understand. And it’s so freaking simple as you go, how can I add value to this person’s life? What can I, and that’s why, you know, it’s funny. Cause I think Hanson that one of our brand builders courses is called podcast powered and we, you know, we teach people like, Hey, here’s how to like create a unique podcast and the technology. And here’s how you like deal with the, the premise of the show and you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, like everything you needed to know to like launch an awesome podcast.
RV (33:49):
And one of the things that we always tell people is we go look, the best reason to rock launch a podcast is not because of the money you’ll make it’s it’s, you know, hopefully because you’ll impact a bunch of people. But even if like you don’t have that many listeners, there is no faster way to meet. Like anybody you want then to go, Hey, I have a show. Can I interview you? Can I tell my audience about your book, about your website, about your column? I mean, it’s just the, it is the most incredible networking tool in the history of mankind, because you could, you could email that person a million times and call them and they would never respond. And you’re like, Hey, I’d like to interview you. And this is the power of writing for entrepreneur or for Forbes. The it’s, it’s, it’s one of the things I’m doing at success now is I’m you know, here you go.
RV (34:41):
Like we were friends before and now suddenly I’m the entrepreneurship editor of success magazine. That wasn’t even a thing. I don’t think when we met. And you know, there’s all these people that it’s like, they would never respond to me, but now it’s like, because I want to interview them. They’re like, yeah, of course. When do you know is next week? Okay. And it’s like, this is crazy. Like the power of being the media is it, you know, it’s just crazy and anyone can start a podcast or a blog. And then if you get a chance to write for entrepreneur or Forbes or any of these, like Celine does, I mean, it’s lien rights for ton of these. But you’re just giving value to them. Yeah. What you’re doing right here, right here for us. That’s so cool. Y’all so anyways, Hanson is as you could tell, he’s a real smart guy.
RV (35:28):
Like he’s kind of like that guy where you go, I need something. I don’t know who to talk to. I should, I should, I should hit up Hanson and see what he thinks about this. Because if he doesn’t do it, I’m sure he knows no. So who does it? And if you’re going, Hey, I need someone to like build some systems and processes so that my business isn’t like completely dependent on me all the time for everything and every question and every problem freedom, freedom to ascend.com, right? Is your website. That’s where you want people. Where do you want people to go to learn about you?
HC (35:59):
Yeah, they can come to your website. They, if they want to reach me personally they can go to Instagram. My Instagram handle is Canson. Shane H a N S O N C H E N G G
RV (36:11):
Extra G on your instant handle. Cause someone stole your,
HC (36:15):
Another Hanson. J was a little bit quicker on the trigger. Yeah.
RV (36:19):
Chang’s a kind of a tough, that’s a tough last name, man. I mean, you, you got S E N G, but it’s like, it’s like being Smith or Williams or something. You’re just like, you got a lot of people out there you’re racing to secure URLs and yeah. Before social
HC (36:35):
Media, I thought it had a very unique name, but I think there was like seven or eight aunts and chains in the United States. Yeah. Yeah.
RV (36:42):
I, I, my, I got lucky with the Rory thing is there’s not a ton of, not a ton of Rory’s, but I always feel so, so sorry for someone where it’s like, yeah, I have, like, I have one of, one of my buddies is Mark Brown.
Speaker 4 (36:54):
It’s like, oh man,
RV (36:55):
Like good luck. Like good luck. That’s that’s, that’s tough. But anyways man, super creative practical. Thank you for these tips. And we just wish you the best Hansen. Yeah. I look forward to getting to know you more and, you know, seeing how you work on, on these projects and stuff and, and just good luck to you, man.
HC (37:16):
Awesome. Thank you so much again for having me on the Chevron,
RV (37:20):
The good news Hanson. It looks like this has been recorded.

Ep 201: How To Get a $10 Million Business Valuation with Kevin Kruse | Recap Episode

RV (00:02):
Hey, welcome back to the influential personal brand podcast. It’s your friend Rory Vaden joined by my wife and our CEO, AJ Vaden. We are breaking down the interview that we did with Kevin Kruse. One of our longtime friends who is really successful entrepreneur done several wonderful things and just someone that we look to that expands our horizons and thinking on everything it means to be an entrepreneur and in leadership. So AJ welcome back. Good to see you happy to be here. So why don’t you kick us off, let’s dive into our, our three biggest takeaways from Kevin. And you go, you do it first.
AJV (00:45):
Yeah, so my first one is short sweet and simple, but I think I fundamental building block of entrepreneurship and something that every single person should be asking themselves as they dive into. Do I want to build a business? And if the answer is, yes, how do I want to build a business? And I love this and he talked about it for quite a bit. And I think it’s just really important. And I had never really heard this before or even gone through this process myself. And he said, but as you are in the beginning stages of building your business, ask yourself this question, is this a lifestyle business, or are you building a business that you will want and, or require employees? And so it’s like, are you building a business that you can manage with maybe one team member or a partner or a spouse, or are you actually building a business that will need and require employees? Because those are two very distinctly different businesses with two sets of different responsibilities and outcomes and plans and budgets and time and all the things. And really what that comes down to is you have to, you have to ask yourself, do you want to be leading and managing others? Yes or no. And that will very much dictate the type of business you build. And so it’s really helpful if you know that on the front end.
RV (02:09):
Yeah, that’s good. That’s good. That reminds me of you know, like Dave Ramsey has a thousand employees and everyone comes to work and they’re like full-time. And then one of our other friends and mentors, Andy Andrews has built his whole bursal brand with zero employees. And they are both very successful in their space. I love that. One of the things kind of similar for me was, was my takeaway is that there were kind of like three primary ways that a business is valued. And again, it’s sorta like, you know this, but you don’t zoom out and go, oh, like, this is, this is very simple. This is how it comes down or what it comes down to is that basically a business can be valued on just the assets. What are the, what are the assets worth of a company? So you got, you know, whatever buildings and, and, you know, intellectual property and equipment.
RV (02:58):
And then the most common way that businesses are valued is that they are valued as a multiple of EBITDA earnings before interest taxes, depreciation and amortization, which effectively is profits, right? So there’s a multiple of your profits. And then the third one, which is kind of the fun one that we were talking about on this interview, which is the world that Kevin lives in, and this is playing in is to be a, that businesses can be valued based on a multiple of revenue. So a top line valuation versus a bottom line valuation of profits. And so that is going to mean the value of that company is many times more what the value of a company that is based on, on a bottom line valuation is, you know, is worth. And I thought, you know, that’s just good to know, like if you don’t know, those are the three primary ways that a business is valued. And then I think much of the conversation was which ones are valued at the top line multiple. And what do you do? And how do you get to have, have one of those, which was, which was fun. So that was, that was my first takeaway. Yeah.
AJV (04:05):
My second is kind of a dovetail off of that and the great and powerful conversation that was had around subscription revenue versus service revenue, or one time revenue and how that is just such a key indicator of the way that businesses are evaluated today. And there’s just so much power in subscription-based revenue, specifically, SAS subscription-based revenue versus this one time, a service revenue. And it’s not necessarily to say that one is better than the other, but they are uniquely different. I haven’t had very different valuations. So again, back to, for all of you who are in the beginning stages, what a blessed and overwhelming time that you’re in but really knowing how do you want to set this up? And it’s really, I gathered, and this is how I garnered my internalization of this information. It’s am I building this business to keep it, or am I building this business to sell it?
AJV (05:06):
And in that case, you need to have a long-term valuation strategy in your mind as you’re building out your products and services. And just going, it’s like if you’re building to sell, then subscription-based revenue with a high emphasis on SAS, right? So software as a service would be a key part of making sure you get the highest valuation and the highest sale. But if you’re building it to keep, that’s a different story. And so I think, again, it’s, you know, to me, it’s back to, do you want to manage and lead others? And then are you building this to keep or sell again, it goes back to those fundamental building blocks of how do you build a business that you’re actually going to enjoy and want to do for the longterm. It’s having those two things in mind.
RV (05:51):
Yeah. And so much of being a successful leader is always about like, you know, thinking about the big picture up front and that’s that certainly applies, applies here. And, you know, if you’re going to do the lifestyle business, you might choose to do things that are less stressful. Like maybe they have less value long-term, but there may be less stressful. And my second takeaway was related to that, just a another fundamental, which is the concept of churn. You hear that term churn and to what you were just saying, AJ I think, you know, when you have recurring revenue, you typically have higher valuations. The other thing is recurring revenue is also typically more stabilized revenue, which even if you never plan on selling it and you don’t care about the valuation, recurring revenue is an incredible way to run your business.
RV (06:43):
Another thing that we teach people all the time and in our, in our eight figure entrepreneur courses that a business worth selling looks a whole lot like a business worth keeping. And so you know, recurring revenue is very healthy, regardless if you’re going to sell it or keep it. But if you’re doing recurring revenue, the number one metric you want to look at is churn. And it’s just super simple. If you start the year with a hundred, what did you end the year with? Did it, was it more than a hundred? If so, you know, that’s, that’s a positive churn. If it’s less than a hundred, it’s a negative churn. And when you look at, you know, the value of that company, that’s one of the key metrics they’re looking at. And if you’re just keeping it as a lifestyle business, that should just be a metric you’re looking at to assess kind of the health of your revenue in the, in the delivery is, do you have positive or, or negative churn another symbol fundamental concept that has really, really big long-term impact. So that, that was my number two. What was your, what was your, your third takeaway for Kevin? Yeah. Well, just
AJV (07:45):
A quick thing on that. I think that’s w that’s just a huge concept to wrap your mind around is that if you are building a business to sell it’s, that buyers investors are actually looking for only positive churn. Like it’s not even like a break even it’s like, no, I only want to see growth year over year. So the idea of losing anyone is not in your favor. I just really think that’s really important. And that really brings up the discussion of, again, if you’re building to sell, it’s like, what’s your retention plan? What’s your customer care plan. What’s your, all the things plan. And again, there’s just so many things that kind of go into this of going, if you’re going to have only positive turn and only seek growth numbers, there’s more than you just involved. Let’s just call it what it is.
AJV (08:30):
And so, again, it’s just knowing all these things and being able to see the end in mind as you have the opportunity to start something new and fresh. And I think that’s really important so many times as you know, startup entrepreneurs, we’re looking 30 days ahead, and this is requiring you to look 10 years ahead. All right. And so again, all the things that I think just are important as you’re making those beginning decisions that definitely have domino effects in the weeks, months, and years to come. But my final point not to go on a tangent is just hearing his interpretation and his forecast about how the future of business is in apps, no matter how you slice it. But it’s just like, there is such a demand for SAS products, specifically apps that there is just no wiggle room of getting your way out of it.
AJV (09:24):
If you’re, if you want to build an enterprise business or an eight figure business or a business that will sell, it’s like, this is an inevitable, at some point, this is going to be a part of your business. And that’s, that’s Kevin’s interpretation. I know that’s not the only one in the world but that was his. And I think that was really interesting to hear that there’s such a heavy, infinite emphasis on the app because as a consumer, I I’m overwhelmed by the option of apps. And so to have that many more apps just seems overwhelming to me, it’s like walking into TJ Maxx and there’s so many things in so many places, like I don’t even know where to look and I feel that way a lot about apps. And it’s like, I don’t need a thousand apps on my phone where I only look at one on a daily basis.
AJV (10:10):
And so I thought it was really fascinating to hear his forecast and his prediction of that. And then also comparing it to my user experience where I use apps, but there are very few that I use on a daily basis. And so I think a lot of that comes to the innovation and ingenuity of how do you make an app that becomes a part of someone’s daily routine, not just to have an app for the sake of having an app. I don’t think we need more of that. It’s like, where, where does the app come in play where it’s like, no, it really becomes a part of my daily routine and a necessary part of how I find information, processed information, store information. And I think that’s like a whole nother discussion, but I would say his prediction and my interpretation were very, very different. Yeah.
RV (10:55):
But that’s funny that, yeah, there’s so many apps. Well, and certainly it’s like, there is a dependency on technology for sure. And the value of it is, you know, technology doesn’t call in sick. It doesn’t go on vacation. It’s like, it’s there all the time. It sure does break. It sure does have code updates and bug fixes and all that. But that, you know, my third takeaway was also around apps. And, and to what you’re saying, one of the things that I felt nudged by was like, Hey, we need to, we need to work on it. We need a brand builders app. Like we need to start getting going on this. And just like you’re saying incorporating into people’s daily lives. And, and I think that’s really cool. But when he was talking about building the app specifically, I thought this was a super valuable lesson where he said, the more you can describe it in detail before you start building the app is like the more valuable and, and, and the more likely that app is to succeed. It’s just like you have to do the work of, of translating and documenting as much of that user experience of what it’s going to be like when they open the app on paper, before coding and development ever, ever starts. And
AJV (12:07):
Well, I think that’s similar to anything in life, right? It’s like even at brand builders group, you know, we’re a strategy firm. And, you know, somebody recently said to me, and I thought this was said to, you know, interesting to sit to say thing to say to me since I’m, you know, the CEO of a strategy firm. And they were like, I’m just a firm believer that execution eats strategy for lunch. And I was like, yeah, but what happens when you execute with no plan, right? And it’s so much wasted time and money and energy and frustration. And it’s like the power in strategies, what you just said. It’s like, the more that you can Strat strategically know, what is this do? Who is it for? What’s the benefit? What problem does it ha you know, what problem does it solve? How am I going to have market reach? It’s like the more that you know, that on the developer side, the more efficiently and effectively they are to build this. And that goes to same with building your personal brand, right? The more that you have the strategy in place, you can go to any vendor in the world and have a quality execution plan. Not to say that any vendor will do a good job, but at least you have a plan. Someone is able to execute without having a plan. You’re just throwing mud on a wall and hoping some of it sticks.
Speaker 3 (13:24):
I don’t think that’s a really good plan. No,
RV (13:26):
I don’t. I, I think it’s kinda like, you know, if you were going to set out on a sailboat, you know, execution is saying, all right, let’s learn how to pull up the sales. And let’s just go and, and not knowing how to guide the ship or where you’re aiming or where you’re going to. You’re just like wherever the wind takes me. And people do that all the time. When they build websites and they launch their brand and they write books, it’s just this kind of like often running and it’s expensive. Like it’s not only is it waste time and ineffective. It’s expensive. So amen to, to, to the power and the importance of that. You gotta be dialed in on that strategy and design it on paper before you design it in real life. Like if I had to grab it all in one sentence, that’s how I would say it. Design it on paper before you design it in real life. That’s your company, that’s your website. That’s your road trip. It’s your life plan?
AJV (14:18):
It’s your marriage. It’s your finances. It’s your home. It’s all the things. Yeah. Yeah.
RV (14:24):
So anyways, any, any other thoughts on that one?
AJV (14:28):
This is good. I feel like anyone who is an aspiring entrepreneur, a startup entrepreneur, or an entrepreneur who wants to sell their company one day needs to listen to this episode. Yeah,
RV (14:40):
Totally big, big one for entrepreneurs, real life stuff. And a, well, there, you have it. Go check out the full episode if you haven’t listened to it and either way, make sure you keep coming back. We’ll catch you here next time on the influential personal brand podcast.

Ep 200: How To Get A $10 Million Business Valuation with Kevin Kruse

RV (00:02):
I’m excited to introduce you to one of my quote unquote, real entrepreneur friends. I, today I use that, you know, air quotes just because, you know, personal brands and information marketing. I, I love, I mean, it’s my, my life it’s been our life. But I, I kind of think of it as distinctly different from most entrepreneurs, which are people who, you know, build a widget or a service or something that is not built around the person that has a true enterprise value. And we, we often don’t get to hear from a lot of those people. And so the reason that I brought on Kevin, so who you’re about to meet Kevin Cruz is a long time friend of mine. I mean, at this point we’ve probably known each other closer to 10 years and just kind of been in the circle. So as a personal brand, he’s very successful.
RV (00:54):
He is a New York times bestselling author of nine books. One of his books is called unlimited clients. He wrote one called 15 secrets. Successful people know about time management, which is really when I think our paths really kind of crossed. And then he wrote one called great leaders, have no rules. So he understands personal branding, but as an entrepreneur or an executive he was a co-founder at a company called Connexa, which went IPO, initial public offering. And then eventually got acquired by IPM IBM. He’s also had other companies, a company called ACI, a company called Axiom professional health learning a company just those companies also were acquired. And today he is the founder and the CEO of lead X, which is fascinating. It is an AI powered platform. So artificial intelligence that helps companies scale leadership behaviors and employee engagement. So he knows a lot about SAS software as a service. He knows a lot about personal branding, knows a lot about entrepreneurship. And anyways, I just felt like you got to hear some of the wisdom from Kevin Cruz. So buddy, welcome to the show.
KK (02:07):
Thanks for having me. I’m looking forward to chatting. I have no idea what you’re going to ask me, which is going to make this even more fun. Well, yeah,
RV (02:14):
I mean, I think, you know, I, I was mentioned to you before the show that brain builders group, we’ve got our curriculum and it’s divided into four phases. And our fourth phase is, is, is all really built around what we call eight figure entrepreneur, which is scaling a personal brand into a business and to a real business. And, and I guess my first question would be around that, which is what do you think? Personal brands, people who build personal brands either don’t know or don’t understand, or don’t see when it comes to building an actual business with enterprise value, like, what are they not aware of? And, and you know, that like how do, how do they not think, or how do they think differently than how kind of like a traditional entrepreneur might think?
KK (03:08):
Yeah. And I don’t know it’s a great starting place. And, and I don’t think of it as as a traditional entrepreneur that there’s different kinds of entrepreneurs. I think, I think it’s just, what are you focused on? What do you want? What I mean by that is I think a fundamental question and, and Roy, this is a journey I went on, you know, I, a fundamental question, when you decide to go into business for yourself, is, are you looking to be like a solo practitioner or do you want employees? Because that is a big thing, right? There are, are, do you want to be selling and delivering the work? So, and having a lifestyle, quote, unquote lifestyle business, and you make a ton of money doing that. If you get your brand to the right level and provide a lot of value, or do you want to build a business and it could be a small business, a five person business, a 50 person business that’s a big first question.
KK (03:57):
And if you decide, I don’t want to just be a consultant or a coach, I want to have a consulting practice. I want a coaching practice that gives you some scale. And that decision alone gives you the flexibility in that it’s rare for someone to buy a one person business. Because if that one person gets hit by a bolt of lightning, then you’ve lost the value. You’ve lost the business. But if I’ve built a 10 person coaching company, a 10 person consulting company, there is something there that even if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, there’s nine other coaches and the revenue will keep flowing in. So that’s a big decision. That’s a big wealth multiplier. And I did that the first few businesses when I, when I was younger. But then I saw the power of SAS software and SAS software. The valuations are incredibly different. So if you took a, a $1 million consulting company,
RV (04:58):
Yeah. Let’s talk about valuations for a second and just assume like ticket from the beginning, like, assume someone’s listening. Like they’re going, Hey, I used to be an employee. I started a personal brand. I’ve never even had the conversation about what a multiple is, or even though, or how, how it works, right? Yes.
KK (05:15):
Right. Okay. So if some, if someone, if I want to come along and buy your company, the fundamental question is, you know, what’s it worth, what’s a fair amount and everybody sort of who does this, they’re sort of rules of thumb about it. And, and there are times when valuations, the price of your company, the valuation is lower. Other times it’s higher. Like right now, valuations are very high historically. But kind of a rule is if it’s a service business, you’re going to get your company is going to get valued on a multiple of your profits. So if you’re making, if you have a million dollar, I’m just making round numbers. If you have a million dollar business with a hundred dollars in profit every year, I might come along and I’ll say, I’m going to give you,
RV (06:02):
Hold on a second. So Jessie, you’re saying a million dollar revenue per a hundred thousand in profits. So that’s a 10% profit margin,
KK (06:09):
10% profit margin. And I’m just using round numbers. Sure. I would say to you, I’m going to give you a multiple, a multiplier on that profit. Now it might be seven times the profit. It might be 10 times the profit. If I really like you and you’re growing, maybe I’ll give you 12 times that profit, but you’re basically going to take that hundred thousand dollars of profit and multiply it. Let’s say by 10 and your, your business is worth a million dollars. Okay. So on a service business, they’re viewed as no, there’s nothing wrong with them, but okay. They’re going to probably grow a little more slowly. And they’re complicated because at the end of the day, you’re selling hours. So if I’m going to double the size of the business, I need to double the number of hours I’m selling and delivering.
RV (06:56):
Like that’s the widget. The widget is an hour of somebody’s time.
KK (07:00):
Beautiful, right? Yes. That’s, that’s the widget. Now let’s, let’s say though, that you can figure out how to package your value into something that people will pay a subscription for. And it might be an app. It might be a piece of software that’s traditionally what it, what it is, but the entire world is moving to a subscription economy. We can go down that rabbit hole later, but let’s say now, but you’ll see
RV (07:30):
That with Disney plus. And like, everybody’s gone from like rent a movie at blockbuster to Netflix and Disney, moving to Disney plus and discovery plus, and they’re all there. Everyone’s doing that.
KK (07:41):
Everyone’s doing that. And it used to be when I was selling software connects in the early days, we would go to a company and say, Hey, give us a million dollars. And we’ll put this on your servers. You’re going to pay us 1,000,001 time. And there might be a maintenance fee, a service fee. But like you own that instance of the software by selling a subscription. I say, you know what, you’re only going to have to pay us $200,000, but you pay us year after year after year. And so it’s smaller upfront and you get all the upgrades, you get all the service, but you’re kind of locked in over time. And so back to that valuation, let’s take the same million dollar company with a hundred thousand dollar profit. So the numbers are the same in the business, but if it’s a subscription business, all of a sudden the valuation is a multiple off your revenue, not your profit.
KK (08:30):
So I’m going to say like right now, multiply the multiples on a, a, a SAS business, a small SAS business. It’s going to be 10 to 30 times revenue. So if you’ve got your million dollar company there and it’s SAS, I’m going to look at it. Now, look, if it’s like, if I say, ah, I don’t, I don’t trust the leadership. I think Rory’s going to quit on, or he’s not as good as he thinks he is. Or they’ve got some problems here or they’ve got a big competitor that they’re feeling pressure, or maybe they’re just not growing that much. All right. Maybe I’m going to value at one times revenue. So you’re back down the worst case scenario, a million dollars more than likely, I’m going to say, wow, you’re a, you’re a smart thinking entrepreneur who made this SAS business, you’re growing faster than a service business and your profit margins are going to get higher because you’re not selling hours. Once you build the widget, you can sell it over and over and over again. So I’m going to give you to you know, anywhere from, from 20 to 30 times revenue. So if you have a $1 million SAS business ballpark, you’re going to get 10 million to $30 million valuation on that business today now.
RV (09:48):
And if I have a service-based business that does a million dollars in revenue, then I might only get a few hundred thousand, maybe half a million or a million bucks would be 10, multiple, a 10, multiple on a hundred thousand in profit. If I got a 10 multiple of EBITDA on a service-based business, a service-based business to an a million in revenue might be worth a million dollars. A SAS business, doing a million in revenue might be 10 to 30. It’s 20,
KK (10:16):
$30 million. Today is the valuation of that business. That’s how high is that? So it’s assumed that the S that the whole world like software is eating the world. SAS is eating software. So the assumption is if you’re selling a million dollars today and did nothing, the market is going to demand more of that SAS. And again, like if we’re selling time, I’ve got to sell that same time. And this is, I mean, let me just, let’s just talk real world. Back when I had a dozen service professionals, we would build custom training programs for Pfizer pharmaceuticals. Okay, great. We’d land a million dollar project. You’re saying you actually did this. You had, this was one of my businesses in, when I was 25 to 30 years old. This was one of the businesses I sold.
RV (11:06):
You got 12 people on your team and build a custom training program,
KK (11:11):
Right? So we go to Pfizer. We say, Hey, let’s, let’s build some workshops and some training, and we’ll go teach all your reps about sales and leadership and all this. And we get a million dollar contract. Wow. That’s fantastic. Well, what happens January of the next year? Rory I’m back at zero again. So just to get the same level, I got to go back to Pfizer or a new company and say, Hey, do you want a million more dollars worth of workshops? You got to sell it to them all over again, but now what do I do today? I go to fight. Well, I won’t, I won’t say we go to Pfizer. I go to Northwestern mutual. So world’s largest a life insurance company, financial service company. I say to them, don’t give me a million dollars for give me hundreds of thousands of dollars for this leadership app for this subscription. And you’re going to give it to me year after year after year. And they say, okay, and now suddenly I’ve got that 20 multiple, because my leadership training is through a subscription model. It’s not through Kevin showing up in front of the classroom, guiding them through because I’m selling my time.
RV (12:21):
Yeah. Now when you talk about subscriptions revenue, okay, so you have like service revenue, which is this one-time revenue subscription revenue is I’m paying on repeat, but inside of subscription revenue, like coaching, like you can sell a coaching program that subscription revenue is that multiple higher, lower, or the same than like a software subscription revenue.
KK (12:44):
Great question. So, five years ago, it wouldn’t have counted as subscription. Like it had to be softer. People be like, ah, that’s still, even though you’re subscribing, you’re still selling hours. We don’t believe that today you will get credit for that subscription service revenue. If, if you can show that the clients are buying more every single year. So if you sell a subscription to Kevin and I don’t renew, they’re gonna be like, eh, that’s, that’s not really subscription. He’s not keeping it going beyond six months, 12 months. But if you say, you know what, Kevin gave me whatever, $5,000 for consulting services, you know, in 2021. And then in 2022, he gave me 6,000. It was so good. He wanted to keep it up, but he, he elevated to the next level, you know, the 2 0 1 level course. And the year after that, he escalated to 3 0 1.
KK (13:40):
You will get credit for that revenue today, but they are, they want to see negative churn. So churn is a term about when you lose your customers. So if I have a hundred customers, you know, at the start of the year, at the end of the year, I’ve only got 80. I churned 20% of them. Well, they want to see as you start the year of the a hundred customers. And at the end of the year, you’ve got the same hundred and they’re giving you more money at the end of the year than the beginning of the year. So it’s all about are, is it follow the dollar? So it doesn’t have to be software, but software so powerful, but even if it’s not software, are the clients renewing and expanding renew.
RV (14:21):
And you think that service based subscription revenue, let’s say it has negative churn. You think it would get, this could get a similar multiple as a software revenue. They are Roy,
KK (14:35):
Let me, we’ll just, I’ll just say it. So the giant company out there called better up many coaches will have heard of them or be part of the better up platform. Okay. They have been raising hundreds of millions of dollars. They just latest hire was prince Harry. And they’re raising it out of Silicon valley as a tech company, even though they’re selling ours. Now they have a little app that kind of tracks the sessions. I’m sure, you know, there’s, there’s other platforms out there that do that. And the reason why, and for, for years, many of us traditional software SAS are like, how are they pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes? Like this is crazy. And it turns out, I mean, the there’s so much money in the markets that better up is getting valuations. Maybe not as pure as a true software company, but, but like a SAS. I mean, it’s like, Hey, they’re custom, they’re adding customers. Those customers are buying more this year, over last year. There’s a little bit of a tech component. Boom. Let’s give them that 10 to 30 multiple. So
RV (15:44):
That’s amazing. That’s, that’s really, really fascinating. You know, because, so, so, all right. So let me ask you this. When the role of personal brand, you’ve done SAS, you’ve done subscription revenue. What, where’s the real opportunity for personal brands to develop subscription revenue? Like, what are, if you just said, let’s only talk subscription revenue for personal brands, what are different ways they could pull that together? And like, how might that actually look in real life?
KK (16:21):
Yeah. So I think in real life, I mean, you know, so I’ve, I’ve started over several times in the last, you know, 30 plus years, including, you know like when I did the 15 secrets book, I wasn’t known as a time and productivity expert. You were, I mean, other people were, I wasn’t. But when I launched that book, I said, all right, well, you know, let me spend a couple of years earning my, keep, you know, in, in this area, you know, royalties, coaching, keynotes then you start by, then you start adding on, right? So you do the, the the group coaching programs. So that’s the easiest thing. Hey, you’re going to give me now the traditional model is you give me, you know, $2,000, you’re going to get all this online, digital video content. Plus every week you’re going to hop on the phone with me, we’ll have a live group session, and you’re going to go into a Facebook group forever.
KK (17:15):
Okay. That’s a good start. But if you’re buying more time in the values in those videos, you don’t have to deliver it all yourself. But instead of it being, give me $2,000 and you get this eight week program, give me X thousand dollars and you’re in the monthly forever program. And in fact, I don’t know if if you follow him, but a lot of coaches out there know Brendon Burchard who has a pretty big brand, right? And his high performance academy is big and he’s look, he’s successful. He’s got a, of people would like to have his brand and his books in his full workshops. He’s launching an app. I called the growth app or something like that right now. Yeah. So a growth day growth day. There you go. So even someone as successful as, at that level, they realize, wow, all this money I’m making by scaling my personal brand and delivering and all the ways he delivers the ultimate way to scale is get someone to build an app that people will pay for month after month after month. Now, I think a bigger question, Rory is if I can, everybody should do this. Who’s going to be serious about this space. You know, you’re not just buying a talk. You’re not just buying a book. You’re not just buying a two month program. You’re subscribing the way I would to Fitbit or Peloton or something like that. This, you know, this is your ongoing fitness program for the topic of X, you know, whatever your, your expertise is.
RV (18:47):
So let’s talk about apps because on the, on the one hand, it’s like, great. Let’s, let’s build an app and get a million dollars in revenue and sell it for 10 million, no big deal. Like that sounds great. Let’s can we let’s do it this weekend? What do we do this afternoon? Grab a beer. The reality. Okay. Talk to us about the reality of, of apps. You had to go there. You had to say reality. How do we, how do you build one? What does it take? How much does it cost? Where do you find the people? What’s the w w like, give us a, give us a reality check. Cause, cause I mean, literally you’re saying build an app, get a million dollars of, of, you know, ARR annual recurring revenue, and that you might be able to sell that thing for 10 to 20 to 30 million bucks. That seems like a pretty good plan. Talk to us about the actual roadblock it takes to get there. Okay.
KK (19:41):
So let me, let me give you real data, but then, then start with a smaller version of it. So as an example, roughly if Lalit X app is doing a million dollars in annual recurring revenue today, and we are getting valued at around $20 million, what did it take to build that million dollar app? Well, it has taken me four years and about $4 million of investment into building that app. Wow. A million dollars of revenue that I’ve spent four years and a lot of investment putting into that’s one way looking at wow. He spent 4 million and he’s only doing a million a year, the other way, look at his, he spent 4 million in four years and just got a valuation of $20 million. So there’s another, you know, there’s the upside to it. Where do you get that startup capital? I didn’t start on day one with 4 million.
KK (20:33):
So in my case, you know, I was able to self-fund for awhile, but I went to friends and family angel investors and got enough money to do this. Right. Like I I’ve done this before. So it was like, Hey, I’m going to hire a software engineer. I’m going to hire a software designer. I’m going to hire, you know, there’s going to be a small team and we’re going to put a million in and every year and let’s raise that first million and grow. Now, that’s not the way I started doing things 30 years ago though. And I think the easiest thing to, first of all, it’s cheaper than ever before to launch software, right? So it’s whether you’re, you’re buying developers, you know, off of Upwork or whatever it is, whether you’re renting server space on AWS, it is easier and cheaper than ever before to do this.
KK (21:27):
It doesn’t mean it’s cheap and easy. It’s cheaper and easier than ever before. And you know, one of the things that I did with lead ex learning from experiences, I went out and got a technical co-founder, you know, so I Lucas Carlson is my CTO. And there’s different ways you can structure those deals, but you know, you can, if you have money, you can hire an engineer or a couple of engineers to do it. You can outsource to a small firm to build your app, although like outsourcing anything, pros and cons cheap and easy, and you turn on, but like they screw it up or they go out of business and there goes,
RV (22:03):
They ghost you like the, the biggest, the biggest pain on this is getting reliable kelp and people to be responsive and hit deadlines and show up and do what they say they’re going to do. I mean, that’s the 1%,
KK (22:20):
If you’re working with individual contractors, they just, there’s often a reason why their individual contractors, you know, the reason why they’re not employed by somebody. And again, like I learned that the hard way I lost a lot of money and more important, lost time by going to like, Hey, you know, here, I’m a F I’m a full service app developer in whatever country around the world for $2,000, I can build drive. Hey, sounds great. Go. And it’s horrible. It’s terrible. There’s no responsiveness. You’ll spend a lot more going to a small company, maybe one in, you know, in your state or in your country that is geographically, you know, nearby, but they’re going to be more reliable. They’re not going to disappear or ghost you. So it’s not Rory, what I want to say is, first of all, any anyone out there who already has like, they’re already well into six figures, they have a small consulting firm.
KK (23:14):
They should have a digital transformation, subscription strategy in place. Like if I was running a five person consulting firm or coaching firm, I would say, okay, we’re not gonna do this overnight, but how are we going to launch an app one year from today? Like you just have to do it now, if you’re a one person personal brand, you know and you want to do that, your app doesn’t have to do everything. You know? W what is it you want the app to do? Is it just gonna deliver videos? Is it gonna be a little financial calculator? Is it going to be a way for you to give them messages every morning? There’s a lot of different things you could do, and you just add to it, iterate it, make it better, make it better, and then you’ll, you’ll grow it.
RV (23:54):
Huh. And then in terms of app, like what do, what do I need to know as a non-technical person about the language? You know, like what programming languages do they write in? What skills do I have to ask them if they have like, cause you know, I think most entrepreneurs are not the coder that like you’re saying, you, you bring in at, it helps to bring in a technical partner. But like, I mean, is that basically it is going, Hey, you got to have someone that’s a technical partner.
KK (24:28):
Well, no, well you need to either have a technical partner or hire your technical partner, you know, as an outsider. And now I am not technical. So I don’t know, like, I, I don’t know enough about any of those things you asked about to like, maybe I should, you know, but to me what’s most important is not just having the general vision, like, Hey vendor, Hey freelancer. I’m a, I’m a coach in this area and I want to make an app. Like the more you can describe it in detail, the user opens it up and they’re going to see a picture of me or they’re going to open it up and it’s going to ask them to enter their goal, or they’re going to open it up and they’re going to inter there are three strengths, like whatever you need to translate, the big picture into what does the user do when they open the app?
KK (25:22):
That’s what you need to do. And then a good partner will sketch it. Like in, you know, they call it like wireframes templates though. They’ll mock it up before they code it. So then you would say to them, all right. So I’ve told you the use case, you know, I’m a, I’m a fitness coach and I specialize in working with busy executives over age 50. So I want them to be able to put in their, their weight and their fitness goal. And then I want them to look at exercises and have a meal plan. All right. Great. Well specifically, what do you want? Go down, down, down, and then your partner should give you almost like a set of slides or PowerPoint. Okay. Here’s when you open the app, it looks like this and it might be a sketch. It might be placeholders. It might be a stock image, not a picture of Rory on there, but then you’re going to say, oh no I didn’t mean that.
KK (26:18):
I meant this over here. You almost design it on paper before they then design it in, you know, in real life. And the only other key I would say is, is iterate. Keep the loops very short. You know, we, it used to be when I was doing e-learning software, we would work on quarterly releases and people thought that was fast. So every 90 we tell our clients, Hey, over the weekend, we’re going to release this new version. Here’s, what’s new in it. We do releases every week now. So it might be, Hey, let’s add a disc assessment and boom. Now that’s the release of this week. Next week, it’s going to be a new performance report. It’s going to be a new set of nudges or whatever it might be. So just think about, it’s not like you design it and someone’s going to deliver it a year from now.
KK (27:07):
No, you tell your partner, here’s my design. And I want, I want a delivery that I can actually a minimum viable product, an MVP, a minimum viable product. I want an MVP in 30 days. And then they can say, well, what you’ve asked for is too much. And then you say, okay, well what can you do in 30 days? And then boom, they deliver it. And you give them feedback, add a new feature and they deliver it again in 30 days. So it’s more about iteration and, and, and never stopping. You know, it’s always, it’s always improving.
RV (27:37):
And then when do you go for revenue? I mean, do you just like right out of the gate as soon as you can. And do you do, is it like a dollar trial? Is it free for 30 days? I mean, or is it just kind of like you try all of it and see what, see what actually gets people to sign up?
KK (27:54):
Yeah, so great questions. I think, you know, th the sooner you can get real potential customers using it the better. So if you have to give it away for free or give it for free to your current customers, the better like you need real world, Guinea pigs using it, reporting bugs, giving you feedback. So you always want to think of them as like an advisory council. You’ve got your 12 target market users who are always going to have it for free and give you feedback in return for giving you feedback. Then the, the bigger question, it’s a business model thing. And so like with lead ex, when we launched four years ago, I had this vision, Rory that everybody loves leadership as much as I do. And if you look on Forbes, there’s millions of people following their leadership channel. If you look on LinkedIn, there’s tens of millions of people following the leadership, you know, channels.
KK (28:48):
I thought, oh, this is great books. As we know, you know, tons of people buying leadership books, let’s release a leadership app to consumers and let’s do a freemium model. So, Hey, go download this for free, play with it for a month, give us $20 a month like LinkedIn, and you’ll love it. And they don’t show up. They didn’t show up. And LinkedIn did not build LinkedIn initially on consumer subscriptions. So we pivoted and said, you know, who pays a lot of money for leadership development, big companies, you know, Roy, you think about how many people write keynote speaker checks, big keynote speaker checks. It’s not small businesses. It’s not individuals, it’s big companies for their annual event. Like they invest in leadership. They investing in culture and associations. And so we pivoted, and that was my Connexity’s. It’s like, why, why was I trying to think I was the B2C just because I was selling books and doing that stuff.
KK (29:45):
So when you’re selling to an enterprise customer, a big fortune 500 fortune, 1000 company that freemium and stuff, doesn’t, it goes away. Now it’s calling up a director of leadership development or wellness, or a head of VP of sales, you know, wherever you’re in is and saying, Hey, we got this solution. That’s going to transform your culture, your skills, et cetera. Why don’t we do a short pilot to see if it really is as good as I’m telling you it is. And then if you like it, you’re going to write a big check for a year’s worth of usage. And so I’m not against B to C for other people like that. It’s just, wasn’t my background and not my passion. My personal and now corporate mission is to spark the next 100 million leaders around the world. That’s a big number. I’m not going to do that with my books, my articles, my speeches. And I thought I could do it with B-to-C. And we have a free B to C version Rory, but that’s the real way to do it is to get companies, you know, that already have a hundred thousand employees around the world to give it their, to give it to large organizations.
RV (30:56):
Got it, got it. This has been so fascinating, Kevin, like, so it just I just, this is exactly what I hope for this unique blend of someone who really deeply understands personal branding and who really knows e-learning and who knows SAS and who knows entrepreneurship business valuations coming together. Because I mean, look, there’s, it’s no accident. Y’all wide brand builders group is a monthly coaching program. Like it’s, it’s no, it’s, it’s, it’s no secret why we do this. And coaching is something that we have a lot of experience doing and, you know, we’ve, we’ve received some of the benefits of, of some of what you’re talking about. Now, the app thing that that’s a, that’s a new venture, and I’m literally going to have to go have a conversation with AIJ and I’m going to be like, listen to this interview with Kevin, because now we need to hire 15 programmers. And we’re going to spend $10 million in the next couple years because Kevin said it was good idea. And and then if it doesn’t work ominous complainant on you, Kevin, where do you want people to go? If they want to connect with you? I mean, you, you write for, you written for so many online publications, you’ve got your books. Where should people go to connect with you?
KK (32:20):
Here’s what I’d say. If anyone is at all interested in leadership type personal development, just go to your favorite app store type lead X, Lea D X. You can download the free app and check it out. If you’re interested in my thoughts on personal branding, go to master your personal brand.com and you can download a tip. I run the lead X leadership podcast. We’ve got about 400 episodes. People can dive in and just email me [email protected]. And I’m happy to connect with anyone.
RV (32:53):
I love it. Well, we’ll link all that up in the show notes, man. Thanks for your wisdom. And just for sharing so openly about what you’re up to and what you’ve learned. I mean, just super duper valuable. I’ve always trusted you. I’ve always admired you and always just been grateful for our friendship. So keep going, man. We, we, we wish you the best and you know, I just, all I want is a ride in the private jet. That’s all I’m saying. I appreciate the opportunity, Rory. All right. See you, man.

Ep 199: Creating Distinction in Your Personal Brand with Scott Mckain | Recap Episode

Welcome back to the influential personal brand podcast, special recap edition. We are breaking down the interview with my longtime friend, Scott McCain. AJis not with me here today, so I’m rolling. Settle on this. And I, I love the conversation with Scott because over my career I’ve probably had, I don’t know, maybe maybe 15 or 20 conversations with Scott and like dedicated conversations and every single time I do, I feel like it moves me forward. Like it moves my understanding forward. I feel like there’s, there’s these really great insights that I have drawn. And so it’s fun to get a chance to share some of those with you coming off of this most recent interview, which was just, it’s just solid. I mean, he’s just got such solid expertise, such solid insights, such a great example and model of both someone who’s tremendous on stage, you know, the world world the hall of fame speaker designation and then just such a long track record and a career of, you know, diving in to this one topic area of distinction and helping companies create more distinction.

So I think there’s a lot to learn from watching just excuse me, the way that Scott has built his career and, and modeling what he’s done in his own career to really carve out that expertise. But anyways, let me give you my, my three big takeaways in terms of what I heard, what I’m applying in my own life in my own career as part of our team at brand builders group. So number one, he said this, which is funny, cause I don’t, he’s probably said this before, but it’s one of those things where you go, ah, it doesn’t quite, you know, every time you hear it, you, you hear it differently. And this was just such a simple line. He said, no one is loyal to a generic, no one is loyal to a generic, right? Like the, the concept of being generic is, is indistinguishable, like indistinct un-unique, which means you are replaceable.

It means you’re, you’re transferable, you’re interchangeable. There, there is no specific value or no specific thing that somebody can get from your brand that they can’t get from somewhere else. And I think this is one of the things that we talk about a lot at brand builders group. And it’s, it’s a big part of what separates our philosophy and strategy about, about branding and even like content. So our, our, we have 12 courses in our core curriculum, 12 events and in our phase one course, two it’s called captivating content. And we talk about extrapolating your uniqueness into a body of work. It’s extrapolating your ideas. And one of the things that people get so hung up on is is they, they think, oh, well, Bernay brown already said that. Or Tony Robbins already said that, or Stephen Covey says it this way or whatever, like pick your, pick your person, Seth Godin says it like this, or Simon Sinek or, you know, like it, they just, they rattle off or they, they, they, they think of, they think that what they say doesn’t matter because someone already said something like that, or somebody said something about it.

Who was who, who is like, what more well-known than they are. But the whole way you become unique is sharing your viewpoint. It’s your opinion. It’s your story? It’s your path? What have you done? And, and I think one of the great mistakes, it’s, it’s not bad to quote other people here and there, but I don’t need you to tell me what so-and-so thought I can go read their book. I can go listen to them. Speak. What makes you irreplaceable is you sharing with me, with us, with the world, what you think and not even what you think, tell us what you’ve done. It’s why we say all the time that you are most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were because you have walked down a path that gives you all the credibility. You need to speak to that person. And you know, everything you need to know to get past that problem or that obstacle that they are facing.

And because only you can give us your story about how you did it. Only you can share with us your insights about what someone else needs to know, you know, to help them on that same journey. No one else is you. You know, AJ had these t-shirts printed for our company that says your uniqueness is your super power. And, you know, she believes so deeply in, in that. And, and she just draws that out of our think our team and our clients in such a beautiful way, because she’s always talking about you. Tell me about you. Tell me your stories. who are you? What do you believe? What do you know what you have been through? That is unique? I can’t get it anywhere else. I can’t get it in someone else’s video course. I can’t get it in a book. I can’t get it on any other YouTube channel.

I can only get that from you. And that makes you irreplaceable. It makes you one of a kind. It, it, and, and yet, most people won’t do the deep work of figuring out what do they think? What do they believe? And then do the work of polishing it because they write that they write it off. They write themselves off as insignificant. They write their own experience, their own education, their own insights. They write them off as trivial or insignificant, and somehow over estimate, an overly weights or overly attribute the significance and the weight of other people’s opinions. But we can get those from them. We can’t get you. We can’t get yours from anyone except you. So no one is loyal to a generic either. That was, I was so good. Relatedly, I definitely had never heard Scott share this quote, which apparently is from the CEO of Fairmont.

And I loved this. And he said, every moment that I was playing defense against the competition, wasted a moment where I could be innovating to make them irrelevant every moment where I was playing defense against the competition, wasted a moment where I could have been innovating to make them irrelevant. That’s so good. And again, it’s the same thing of like setting your strategy or doing things in your company based upon what other people are doing and going, I want to emulate, and I want to form what I do based on what others are doing either, because I want to be like them, or I want to be different from them, but it’s using the external orienting your strategy based around in an external dynamic, an external force, an external figure, an external company versus just going, what do I want to do? What do I think would be awesome?

What do I think would be cool? What do I think has never been done before? What am I interested in learning? What am I interested in saying, what do I think people need? What do I think is missing from the world that I somehow feel uniquely called or equipped to serve? That’s innovating, right? Innovating. Isn’t going, let me look at what everybody else is doing. And somehow try to like, do something different or better than them. At least not. In my opinion, innovating is going deep inside and saying, how could I do this better? What, what would make this better? What do I think the world needs more of? How could we deliver this in a way that would make it better for our customers, for our team, not what does so-and-so do? What does my competition to, whatever everyone else around me doing, what is the state and the trend of my industry or the world it’s, it’s like, it’s going internally again and, and innovating.

And when you do that, you make them, you make other competition irrelevant, not from the standpoint of like, we’re so much better than you than know that nobody needs you. Although maybe that maybe the CEO did mean it that way. But I think of it as like, they’re irrelevant because they can’t get the same experience from other people that they can get from you because you’re not looking at what they’re doing and trying to emulate it or do the same thing they’re doing. You’re doing it your way. And the only place that someone can come get it your way and authentically your way from the original source is from you. Because you’re the only person who does that. You’re the only person who offers that. So why not lean into that? Why not own that? Why not rest in that? Why not settle in that?

Why not establish and plant your foundation in that it makes you uncopiable. It’s doing things the way that you would do them. And, and it’s just listening to your own instinct, your own intuition, your own beliefs of going, this is how I would do this. This is how I would say this. You know, we’re I had been working on one of our courses, a new courses called pressure-free persuasion. And it’s about, you know, it’s about sales effectively. I mean, there are so many books written on sales. Like it’s unbelievable. I mean, there’s so many people who talk about sales. Why would I go, I’m going to create a book on sales. Is it, is it because I think I’m going to say things about sales that have never been said before, not necessarily, but I do think that I have things to say about sales and selling and the, and the way that selling should be done, that is markedly different from how other people would describe it.

And I know AJ has philosophies that have what she does, which is very different. She does things that you would read in the bestselling, the, what you would read in the best selling sales books of all time. And AGA would say, that’s stupid advice. That’s terrible. I would never do that. I would never say that to my customer and is going, you can’t get that from anywhere, except her from here from our team, like that is our uniqueness. It’s, it’s what we’re saying. What the way we would say it is different. Now are the principles the same? In some cases they are, in some cases they’re radically different, but it doesn’t matter. It’s it’s doing it the way you would do it saying it the way you would say it, being it the way you want to be it. And when you do that, you’re uncomparable, you’re unique.

You’re distinguished, you’re different. You have natural differentiation, not, not artificial manufactured differentiation, because it’s coming from you inside the source. And every moment that you are spending time, you know, comparing it to the way someone else does it, or using that as the, as the primary or the sole basis for how you do it is a moment you’re not, you’re not digging in and listening and praying about and thinking about and meditating on and, and just hearing like what the spirit says to you about how you could do it. And you move in that way because they can’t get it anywhere else. They can’t get it anywhere else. But there’s a lot of people who can teach, you know, StrengthFinders. There’s a lot of people who can teach the seven habits of highly effective people. They’re whatever they’re certified, but when you’re building your personal brand and those things aren’t bad, that’s great.

There’s value. There’s a lot of value to those things. They’re well-established, but the thing they can’t get anywhere else is what do you believe about productivity? What do you believe about sales? What do you believe about marriage or dating or relationships or leadership or entrepreneurship or fitness or health or diet, or like, whatever your thing is that makes you uncomfortable, but it’s doing the work then of listening to that and then owning it and then, and then doing the work of polishing it and not just sharing random half-baked thoughts, but actually developing it and refining it and working it, all these things that we take you through and captivating content to help you go, okay. So let’s, let’s sharpen your ideas. Let’s make clear what your ideas are. Let’s, let’s tighten them, let’s shape them. Let’s poke holes in them, let’s test them and then let’s come out with something that is beautiful that no one else could ever say, because it’s completely tied to you.

Which leads me to my, my third takeaway from Scott and this whole conversation was where he said, it’s the decision is the toughest part, the decision about what you’re going to own and who you’re going to be is the toughest part. And I agree with that. I think one of the things that we wrote in the take the stairs book, which made me think about this, I haven’t thought about this in years, even though it’s in that book is that we spend too much of our time trying to make the right decision.

And instead we should spend more of our time making a decision and then making it right. And what that means is too often, we sit around kind of like trying to do this universal calculus of like, what’s the right move for me to make. And I don’t want to make the wrong move. And we, we think that it’s kind of like we have to choose the right path. And we try to assess based on whatever, some scoring criteria or set of factors and to go like, oh, what’s, what’s the, what’s the right path for me. And I want to make sure I take the right path versus kind of instead, just like taking a general look and going, okay, well, this is generally the way I’m going to go. You know, and I’m going to take out my, my machete and I’m going to chop down the wood and the twigs and the branches.

And I’m going to just kind of make the path like this is the path I choose. I’m gonna make this my path. I’m going to make it right. And, and this is such a, such a simple, but, but profound decision point in your career. Because again, if you’re choosing, if you’re waiting for the perfect path, you’re waiting for it’s, it’s based upon the idea that you could choose the wrong path, right. And you know, there are certainly bad decisions you can make, especially in your personal life, right? There are poor decisions you can make that will have consequences, but when it comes to like setting your strategy, I think less of it is about going, oh, what’s the perfect path. And it’s more of going like, okay, let’s make a general consideration of what I’m good at what I like doing the people around me, the skills I have, the skills I don’t, the market, et cetera.

And then picking a path and dominating it and saying, this is what I’m going to do. And I’m going to make it work like that, that the decision to make it work is more important than the decision about what should I make work, the decision to make it work is more important than a decision about what should I make work. That’s where we got to get to is, is just going like, okay, this is the path I’m going to make it work. I think about brand builders group, right? And like, we could do all these things we could do. We could do masterminds and we could do live events and we could do video courses and we could do monthly membership sites. And we could do keynote speaking. We could do consulting. Like we could do all of these things. But from when we started the company, we said, we’re going to do one-on-one coaching for personal brands.

We feel like that’s something that not a lot of people do. If they do it, they don’t do it at scale. If they do it, they don’t have a lot of curriculum or structure behind it. And there’s not a bunch of people out there in the market doing it, you know, so was this, and we know how to do one-on-one coaching, not in the personal brand space. We’d never done that before, but, but we didn’t know something. We had built a coaching company before. Right. And that’s where AJ and I, and a lot of our team came from is we had some knowledge and said, this is what we’re going to do. And, and we said, our goal is a thousand messengers. We’re going to find 1000 personal brands that we’re going to work with on a one-on-one basis every single month. And we’re going to go get a thousand messengers.

And we just had our three-year birthday. And interestingly enough, we just crossed 300 active members. I just got the notification this morning, we’re at 301 active members. We’re making progress. Like we’re on the path. Isn’t because we chose the right path. I mean, there’s something to be said for the fact that we chose something that we thought we could do that we thought we could be good at that maybe there wasn’t a bunch of other people do it, but there’s lots of coaching companies out there. There’s lots of people who do one-on-one coaching in, in, in the personal brand space. It’s more because we made a decision and made the D and then, and then said, we’re going to make it right. And this, this happens with choosing your business model. I think this happens with choosing like what’s the right social media platform to be on.

And this certainly has, has this certainly applies to what topic do you choose to talk on? There’s not a perfect topic. There’s not something written in the universe that if you, if you select the right one, then you’ll hit the jackpot and your personal brand is going to succeed. It’s more about just choosing one and going all in on that one problem, all in on that one message all in on that one uniqueness. And you, because, because when you have diluted focus, you get diluted results. And being clear is greater than being clever. And, and it’s like making a decision and making it right is more important than making the right decision. So it’s the decision, that’s the toughest part. And I think what makes it hard as we’re trying to assess, what’s the perfect decision instead of just going, all right, I’ve taken a general account for some factors.

This is the decision and boom, I’m going at it. I’m running at it. I’m chasing it down. I’m knocking it down. I’m getting the machete out. If I have to. And I’m cutting down trees and weeds, but I’m going, I’m not just looking for the easy path. I’m not looking for the perfect path and not looking for the path that other people do or don’t do. I’m looking for my path and I’m going to decide it. And I’m going to make a way, and I’m going to figure it out. And maybe that’s what you need to do today. Maybe that’s where you are at. But this whole conversation from one of the world’s leading thinkers on distinction, Scott McCain, it all pointed. At least me back. It all pointed me back to the idea that you gotta dig deep inside. You gotta, you got to go internal and figure out what you want to be and who you want to be. And if you need help with that, you should call us because we’re really, really good at it. So I hope you enjoy this episode. I hope you do request a call with our team if you haven’t yet. And at some point we get to meet you, but yeah, more than anything, I hope that whatever your path is today that you make a decision and then you make it right, that you, you choose a path and then you make it the winning path. And we’ll catch you next time on the influential personal brand.

Ep 198: Creating Distinction in Your Personal Brand with Scott Mckain

RV (00:02):
You can’t have a podcast and business about personal branding and finding your uniqueness and positioning without at some point interviewing Scott McCain. This man is a legend in our space. He is owns I think the word distinction this is something he spent his career studying and talking about. He’s a personal friend of mine. I very much consider him a mentor. I’ve known him for years. He is is the globally recognized authority on distinction and, and really how to stand out in a hyper competitive market, how to separate yourself from the crowd. So much of what we talk about with she hands wall and finding your uniqueness. And Scott has worked with apple and SAP and BMW and Merrill Lynch, and Cisco. These are the kinds of companies that are hiring him to help them create more distinction. He’s in two hall of fames, he’s in the professional speaking hall of fame, which I share with him. And then he is in the sales and marketing hall of fame as well. He appears in major media outlets all across the country USA today, New York times. And his most recent book is called iconic. How organizations and leaders attain, sustain, and regain the ultimate level of distinction, which Forbes called a top 10 business book. Scott McCain, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the show.
SM (01:30):
I’ve got to make sure to play that introduction for my wife. Just so maybe I’m going to borrow the best Rory. I tell you, man, I’m just sitting here with goosebumps. It is so great to be your friend. It is so great to be your guest. I really appreciate it. Thank you.
RV (01:45):
You’re so welcome, buddy. You’re you are genius. I quote you all the time in so many places with, with, with full attribution. I learned this from,
SM (01:54):
I do the same with you. My friends,
RV (01:57):
There’s so many things, but here’s a personal thing that I don’t know if you even know this, but those people who’ve been following me for years know that when we launched the take the stairs book, we did a bus tour. And that was a huge part about how we hit the New York times. And that happened because of a conversation that you and I had at lunch at an NSA meeting, we peeled off her lunch. And you told me about how you did your bus tour, and then we freaking did it and it worked. And you know, that’s just one of many things that we can point to in our life to say, because of Scott McCain.
SM (02:30):
Oh, you are okay. Well, it’s a blast. I think the other thing is, I don’t know how musicians do it, their entire lives. I was thrilled to do it for the tour, right. I mean, the tour was great, but how they do that for, you know, I’m buddies with the Oak Ridge boys and, and, you know, the, the newest guy in the group has been in the group for 46 years. So the new guy, and he’s been there 46 years and they are on a bus every week, or they’ll not with COVID, but they’re back out and I’m like, how do you guys do this? It’s just, it’s incredible. But again, it is the commitment to the craft, which is different in different businesses and industries. But so I’m just so thrilled for your success. And I I just sit back and see all of the things that you are, not only that you’ve done, but it, you were doing that’s, that’s what really matters. I mean, you, you you’ve attained such significant success and you continue to inspire and inform and lead you rock. Thanks.
RV (03:31):
We are you know, we’re fascinated by your topic and another person that we quote one of your best friends, Larry Winget, we, we say all the time find your uniqueness and exploited in the service of others. And we talk about Peter Xi Han and breaking through what we have named as she Hans wall, which is really breaking through from becoming unknown to, to becoming known, which is really a result of uniqueness, distinction originality being the expert on one thing. And so I guess my first question is just what’s what are the problems of being indistinct? Like what are the problems of similarity and you know, cause there’s some good things about being similar people understand you. I mean, if I were a financial advisor, a real estate agent people get it. I mean, so there’s some good things, but what are the, what are the problems? If you don’t have distinction, what do you have?
SM (04:29):
You know, Roy, when you stood that what popped into my head is because I’m also friends with your beautiful bride and you guys know my wife, Tammy, I will bet dollars to donuts when you proposed, just as, when I proposed to Tammy, I did not get down on one knee and say, honey, will you marry me? You’re exactly like every other woman I’ve ever dated, not a strong strategy in the history of business, regardless of what field you’re in, no customer, no client has ever left an encounter and said, I love doing business with them. They’re exactly like everybody else. We’re attracted, not for our similarities. We’re attracted for our uniqueness. And if customers cannot see a difference between you see, I think many times we’re misled by it by our training, by our thinking. And we think the customers choose us and that’s not a complete way of looking at it. Customers choose us instead of all of the other alternatives out there in the marketplace. And so if they don’t see a distinguishing factor between you and your competitor, then it’s going to come down to price or some other area that’s outside of our control, which is the last thing that we want is we try to take the long view in business about, you know, how do we get repeat business? How do we inspire referral business? You know, none of that comes from being exactly like everybody.
RV (05:59):
Yeah. I mean, I, I think gosh, that’s a really interesting way of thinking about it in the parallel of, of marriage, you know, is of, of your uniqueness. So I feel like a big part of your career, you built upon these four cornerstones of distinction. I’ve interviewed you on them before as relates to business, but we’ve never had this conversation in the context of personal branding, which obviously you understand that you are one, but can you just rattle off for people who just never met you before rattle off the four cornerstones of distinction? And then, you know, I’d love to kind of talk through how those apply to personal brands, because I know most of the work that you do is kind of in the corporate world, people hiring you to speak and consult and do that kind of thing. But I mean, do they, and then I guess, do they apply? I feel pretty confident they do, but you know, so just rip through those.
SM (06:52):
Well, the first one I think in many ways is tough, was stolen and that’s clarity. It’s not only being precise about what we are, it’s being as exact about what we are not. And that’s, what’s really hard, I think, particularly in creating a personal brand because when it comes to a company you know, they can say, oh, well, we don’t make those products because we make the product. But a personal brand, I think is, is a little bit more difficult to attain that we can come back to that. Then the second one is creativity. And, and I learned a lot from research I did in, in your home area, there in Nashville from interviewing songwriters. Because when I, when I started researching this, I thought that I thought the creativity would come first. You know, Hey, think outside the box, all of those things we think about innovation, but I interviewed 15 songwriters and to a person, everyone said, you got to get clear before you can get creative.
SM (07:44):
And the reason we say think outside the box is because we haven’t defined the box to begin with. Right? So creativity is the second aspect. What’s our unique twist on that. Third is communication. And what that really means is narrative. It’s understanding the principles of story and how we can communicate through narrative in a way that emotionally connects us. And, and you’ve done some pioneering work on generational differences as well. Rory and, and, and one of the things that really strikes me is that a great story appeals to every generation. So as, as we try to communicate our brand story, so that it’s appealing in the marketplace, not just a one segment, but to all segments, having a great story as a part of that. And then the fourth and final one is a customer or client experience focus. What does it feel like to experience our brand? W we, we, we think a lot about customer service to the customer experience, but a focus on it means that everything we do is how has this brand, that we’re trying to create, going to impact those that we seek influence. So it’s clarity, creativity, communication, customer experience. It’s fun.
RV (08:58):
So I love that. And clarity to me is the most important, like I agree with all of that. It’s, it’s, it’s it’s basically, you know, we have, we have in our curriculum, we have four phases and each phase has three courses. So we have 12 courses in our curriculum. The entire first one is just dedicated to trying to help people get clear on this. And you mentioned, you mentioned that it’s harder for personal brands, so why do you think it’s harder and how do we get clear on what our personal brand is about? Because I think the struggle is that humans are multi-dimensional right. We have many different passions. I mean, you’re passionate about music. You’re, you’ve got all of these different things you, you know about. You’ve been in business long enough. You’ve had your own business long enough to know a lot about a lot of different things. And yet you’ve been very consistent your entire career of like, you know, I, I am the guy, I am the guy on distinction. So how do we get clear?
SM (10:02):
Well, and you nailed it. I mean, it’s, it’s harder because we are multi-dimensional. And the other part is it seems to be safer to have more offerings, right? I mean, if, if, if I do all of these things, then there’s a range of things that people can choose from. And, and that will open up more opportunity for, for me and my business is what we assume, but instead it’s, it’s exactly the, it’s exactly the opposite. You know, I, I use the old story sometimes about how we shoot down planes in, in times of battle in world war two, what they would do is fill the skies with ammunition. It was called flack, and they would just shoot an abundance of ammunition into the air. So what technically actually happened is we didn’t shoot down their plane. The enemy’s plane ran into ammunition because they just threw so much up there, but these planes would run into the ammunition.
SM (10:59):
Well, now, as we know, it’s, it’s incredibly precisely targeted, and I think that’s a good analogy for what we need to think about in terms of business. But I’ll tell you that there comes to be a point when, when I first started my speaking career, I kind of did the motivational humor, customer service, kind of generic thing. And I went through a personal situation that caused me to reevaluate my business. And honestly, I was trying to look at how do I stand out from everybody else in the crowd? And I couldn’t find anything you know, there, there were a couple of books out trout wrote one called differentiator die. There were, there were a few things out there, but nothing really how to stand out. I, by the way, let me throw in real quick, the reason I use the term distinction instead of differentiation, is that merely being different doesn’t mean that’s going to have traction in the marketplace.
SM (11:53):
You know, if I slap every customer in the face, I’m different, but it doesn’t mean they’re, you know, they’re going to relate to what I’m talking about. So I’m talking about distinction, having a meaningful difference. That that really means something to the people that you’re hoping to connect with. So, you know, I went through that personal tragedy and I’m looking through and how do I stand out? I started researching it and really want to, I you’re taking me back to really one of the toughest points in my life because a speakers bureau that I did a lot of business with bookmobile lot called and said, for goodness sakes, we don’t get any calls asking for distinction, speeches, will you please go back and talk about customer service? And at that point I had to make a decision. And and, and it was the best decision, one of the best decisions of my life, but it was really hard to make it that time because it’s almost like they were dangling this checkout here. If you just, if you just get away from what you’ve said, your clarity is, if you just don’t do what you’re talking about, here’s, here’s a check and I turned it down. And I think that is what builds a brand. Had I accepted that, see, one of the things I find is that when people say, oh yeah, I’m that too. That’s when they lose the clarity, that really creates your brand in the marketplace.
RV (13:16):
Yeah. I mean, you know, you said this earlier about it’s being clear on who you are and also clear on who you’re not. And yeah, AIJ and I had spent so much time doing sales training for corporations in our former business. That when, when we started brand builders group, we were very clear that we don’t do branding for companies at all. We do personal brand strategy, exclusively for individuals. Now, every individual works at a company, but we don’t do the company strategy. It’s the face of an individual. And that every time that we have taken something where someone said, Hey, can you just like do this project for our company? It’s like, it doesn’t, it just, it just creates so much conflict and extra work. And it’s just like, it’s just not what we do. And so I think, like you’re saying, it’s just, it feels safer to offer more things. And it also like, inevitably there’s a time where someone’s going to dangle money in front of your face and you have to say, no, that’s not what we do. That’s hard.
SM (14:20):
It’s really hard. Yeah. And I’m really glad you said that because I think sometimes people think that folks like you and me advise that, but we really don’t know how difficult it is. Right. Because it’s really hard to say no. And the smaller the businesses, I think the harder it is to say no, but it’s one of the best things that you can do. And you mentioned my pal, Larry Winget earlier your friend as well. And you know, Larry says to be really successful, you’ve got to get really good at saying no. And I think truer words have never been spoken. We want to say yes to everything. And I, I, I think we sometimes confuse saying yes and making a customer experience go well, as opposed to saying yes to all of these things that will dilute our differentiation. And so you don’t want to dilute the distinction that you’re trying to create in the marketplace because Hey, no one is loyal to a generic. I mean, w we have a mutual buddy mark Sanborn, and mark talks to me all the time about this latest IPA that he’s trying, or yeah, he’s totally into craft beers. And, and mark and I were talking about, I remember those, maybe they’re still there. I haven’t seen him for a while. At least white cans in the grocery store with just black block lettering said, beer,
RV (15:39):
Chips, whatever
SM (15:42):
Nobody brags about. Yeah, I have that beer, but they do want to talk about this IPA that they’ve found it’s brewed in Maine on the ocean somewhere. And again, that kind of gets to another one of the cornerstones. I’m getting a little ahead of myself here, but you know, you like the IPA or you like the business. That’s got a story.
RV (16:04):
Yeah. I mean, that’s, that’s really true. So you, you also talk about the five factors of iconic performance and going towards the idea of how do we find this distinction, and then how does that, how does that distinction manifest itself? Like in our, in our actual business, in the customer experience and the things that happen every day,
SM (16:29):
You know, what happened is I had written the book on distinction and Fairmont hotels became a really good client. And they, they went through a really cool process about, you know, what, what, what is distinctive housekeeping? You know, what, what’s the distinctive front desk? How do we, how do we take everything that touches the customer and, and even things that don’t, and what would that look like? So they went through this process, they had great success with it. And I’m having Brett first with the CEO of the Fairmont Scottsdale princess, wonderful guy named Jack Miller. And he said, man, we went through the distinction thing. Now, what do we do? I didn’t have an answer. I realized I’d written a book about how to create distinction, but, but not one how to take it to the highest level of distinction and not what, how to sustain it once you get it or how you regain it once you, you know, if you’d lose it.
SM (17:28):
And so I started studying it. It’s kind of a difficult definition, but distinction means you stand out in your field. You know, if you’re a financial advisor in Las Vegas where I live, or in Nashville where you are, you’re the go-to advisor that, that people are referring that’s distinction. You are at the top of your field, in your industry. Yet. We also know that there are businesses that transcend their industry, you know, and they’re the Annapolis. One of the case studies they use in the book, iconic is St. Elmo’s steakhouse. It’s not just the, I mean, they have higher gross revenue than Tavern on the green, in New York city. They’re one of the most successful restaurants in America. So it’s not just that, they’re the best of the restaurants, man. If you’ve got a car dealership in Indianapolis, you want to run your car dealership like St. Elmo’s runs their restaurant. That’s iconic when you’ve reached that level. And so as I studied iconic businesses, I mean, the old cliche is like Southwest airlines and apple and, you know, Starbucks and all those, but even more so regionally, locally the iconic businesses that, that a business that every business in that particular community respected, I found a really five factors. And, and the first one was they play offense. You know, I’m a sports fan and we always say defense wins championships. Yeah.
RV (18:55):
People say that all the time.
SM (18:57):
So I looked at the numbers and more top off offensive teams have won the super bowl, the top defensive teams, more top rated offensive teams. And one of the playoff games in the NFL, then the defensive teams look at what’s happening in the NBA right now. It’s running gun, man. The way you’re successful is firing up a three-pointer not by clamping down on defense, like it was 20 years ago. So, so what I found was that iconic individuals and I kind of like organizations,
RV (19:26):
You know, my high school basketball coach right now is having an aneurysm listening to this because that DCS you’re just you’re attack the fabric. The fabric of the philosophy of it’s been around for some people for a really long time, I’m drawing
SM (19:42):
A blank. Oh, where did he sign up? There? There was a high school coach and he’s, this will be his first year coaching division one colleagues. And I’m drawing a blank on where he is, but he always goes for it on fourth down. They don’t even have a punter on the team. If it’s, if it’s fourth at eight on the two yard line, they go for it, you know, on their two yard line, they still go for it. They always go for it on fourth down. And the S and, and he just says, look at the data. The data shows that the benefit of playing offense and, and pushing the ball is always greater than defense. Now, can you apply that in a business situation? And here’s what the CEO of, of that Fairmont grouped pill me later on. He said, I realized that every moment I was playing defense against the competition wasted a moment, I could be innovating to make them irrelevant.
SM (20:42):
Say that again, every moment I was playing defense against the wasted a moment, I could be innovating to make them erupt, irrelevant. Wow. I just thought, well, when he said that I’m writing that down, man, I got to get that. So, I mean, when we think about whether it’s the clue and Hey, look, I know that speakers use the same examples a lot. Well, there’s a reason for that. It’s not because we’re lazy. It’s because, so it’s so breathtakingly difficult to do. There are so few universal examples that, that you can use, but, you know, Steve jobs didn’t sit around worried about what Microsoft was doing, you know, and, and, and when we use that in our personal brand, as an example, when we play off offense, then it becomes really remarkable what, what we can achieve, because then others, you know, our competition, their natural reaction will be to play defense against us, which puts us in the driver’s
RV (21:44):
Seat. So when you, when you, like, I know you work with companies, but like, cause cause I really buy into this. AIG does as well. We we’ve, we have said consistently that it’s like we don’t care about what other people are doing. Like our philosophy is not even, it’s not even differentiate from what other people are doing. It’s find your uniqueness and exploited in the service of others is what Larry says. It’s like, do the thing that you do. And then it makes other people or other customers irrelevant. And it’s like, but, but the thing I think is people struggle so much with figuring out what is the thing that they can do that no one else can do. What is the thing that they do that is truly distinct or unique. And H how do you help people find what that is?
SM (22:37):
What a great question. And it’s one that’s often overlooked. Jeff Bezos said your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room. Well, that creates an inherent problem. It, it means we’re not in the room when people are saying what our brand is. So what’s the second best thing that you can do. And so few of us do this and it’s it’s was part of my journey to try to create distinction for my speaking business. And that is, I went to the people that were booking me for speeches. I went to speakers bureaus, and I said, when you recommend me, what do you say?
SM (23:16):
And far and away, the answer at that time was a good speaker and a nice guy. Now, they thought that was great. And I realized, that’s the kiss of death, man. I mean, you know, apple is not planning their next corporate event saying, Hey, what we need, the keynote is a really nice person, but they want it. They want somebody that’s known for something. And it’s the same thing. Whether I’m picking a financial advisor or a grocery store or a, any kind of personal service or a speaker or whatever might be, there has to be something that they say. So one of two things is going to happen either. Number one, you’re going to find out that you’re thought of as a generic, Eric, you know, good at what you do and a nice person. And there’s nothing wrong with that. You know, I want to be good at what I do and I choose to be nice, but, but there has to be something more than that. Second is, if what they’re saying is precise and specific, then there’s your biggest clue. You know, about what people are saying about you, that’s what your brand is. And then at that point you’ve reached a crossroad. Are you going to exploit that? And, and as, as you say, and as Larry says, we may exploit in the best part of the term, you know, it’s not bad exploitation.
SM (24:34):
Yeah. And making the most of everything we have. And, and so is that the area that you, that you want to be known for, well then how can we ramp up what we’re doing? So we accentuate that if that’s not the areas, here’s the other aspect. It’s always tougher to reposition and to position, if I’m starting new and I’m trying to position, I have to create a memorable message that that will strike you. And that you’re going to retain to reposition. I got to get you to forget about everything you thought about me in the past, and now start thinking about me in a new way. So if you need to reposition your personal brand, you have to begin by thinking, okay, how do I, how do I come up with a message that’s so compelling? Not only will it be memorable in the marketplace that I want to succeed in it, but it will get those people to stop saying what they been saying about me and start saying, this that’s difficult. But if you don’t understand that principle, you can’t begin on the road to achieve it.
RV (25:42):
Yeah. And then to your point about clarity as a cornerstone, I think that is just super like, that’s the first thing is too many of us never even asked the question. What do I want people to say about me? What are they saying about me? And how do I, you know, change? How do I change those or align those? And we just kind of go out and we’re just like reactive to whatever shows up and whoever will hire us for this or that or anything. And we’re just like, I’ll take it. I’ll take it. I’ll take it versus going, no, this is who I’m going to be. And I’m going to drive this. I’m going to drive this space. But you know, I think it’s, I think, you know, asking your customers, asking the people who have hired you, why have you hired me?
RV (26:26):
What, what is it about me? I mean, that’s a great place to start because like you’re saying either, they’ll tell you, this is why, and this is what makes you unique, or they’ll say no specific reason, which means you’re not really unique. But then after that, do you effectively, just at some point, just decide you go, hell, I’m going to be, I’m going to be the guy known for this, and then you just own it. And you just drive it. I mean, is it that simple as you just go, what do you want to be known for pick it, own it and drive it? I mean, is that it?
SM (26:59):
Yes. I wish I wish I had a workup flex answer to that. But the decision is that I think in some ways the toughest part, because it’s defining what you are, but it’s also saying I’m, I, I have the intestinal fortitude, you know, I, I have the drive and the determination that I’m going to leave these other things behind. And I think that’s one of the most important things, Rory and establishing a personal brand. It’s it’s, it’s what UNH have done. I mean, when, when you said, this is who we are, but you also said, this is who we are. Not that decision, every, everything it’s like a tree. I mean, everything grew up from that planting from the, that decision that you made. And, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s just remarkable the, the power of that decision that it gives you in your life, because it, you know, once you, once you’ve made that decision, then other decisions become more clear. Now it’s a challenge to make them, right. I mean, it’s a, it’s a challenge to, to turn down that check as we were talking earlier. But boy, when you’ve got that initial clarity, then the other decisions that you need to make, tend to become a little bit more apparent.
RV (28:17):
That is so good. Y’all most of this is a matter of just making the decision and then just driving it. I love it. Scott McCain, the book is called iconic. We put of course links to the book and to Scott on our site, Scott, where do you want people to go? If they want to follow them, follow you more, or learn more about what you’re up to.
SM (28:41):
W w where are you? One of the things that folks might do is just go to Scott mccain.com. It talks about, you know, the, the resources we have, the courses that we offer. For example, you got a course that teaches how to tell a more distinctive story, how to create distinction. You’ll find links for everything right there. And it’s M C K a I N a. So Scott mccain.com and that’ll send everybody there, Scott
RV (29:04):
Mccain, I encourage you all to follow him. And this is Scott is one of the smartest people I’ve met. He’s one of the people that we have learned from so much just about these concepts that, you know, have, have shaped our life and are shaping many of your lives by way of following us and listening to what we’re doing. So, buddy, thank you for the work you’ve done. Thank you for your being here and just your support in our life. We’re so grateful for you,
SM (29:30):
The world of you and everybody there. So thank you so much where I, I appreciate it so much, and it’s always great being a part of anything with you. So thank you.

Ep 197: Fueling Your Own Creativity, Innovation, and Productivity with Juliet Funt | Recap Episode

RV (00:02):
And we are back with the influential personal brand podcast, special recap edition of the interview I did with our good friend client and a, I would say mentor someone I’ve known for years Juliet Funt. And I have shared the stage speaking with Juliet on literally the biggest stages in the world. I mean she speaks at world-class events for world-class organizations and I’ve just, I’ve known her for years and we’ve gotten the opportunity to, to walk with her. And some of her creation around the, this book that she’s working on, which is now a a real life, a real life, a real life thing. And it is a, a joy to get a chance to talk to her about that. And obviously that’s what we were talking about. Fueling your own creativity, innovation, and productivity with this concept that she refers to as white space.
RV (01:06):
Obviously today I am rolling solo. I’m filling in for AJ who doesn’t make every episode as a, as a CEO of a fast-growing company, the mom of two toddlers she’s always got a bunch of stuff going on, so we try to catch her as much as we can. But today I’m rolling solo and I’m just gonna run you through my biggest takeaways in terms of how I’m applying, what Juliette was talking about in the interview. And then obviously in her new book a minute to think which I will tell you, I have read cover to cover. I am not able to read the book, all the books of every single podcast guests that we have on most of the people we bring on very familiar with, or I have read something of theirs in the past. This is a book that I have read cover to cover.
RV (01:51):
It is absolutely brilliant. Well-Written well edited, well-organized sharp, meaningful, clear, powerful, useful, and practical. And, you know, we touched on some of those concepts in the, in the interview. And so the, the first one to me is just that we all need more oxygen. Like we need need oxygen in our life. What she calls white space oxygen is to a fire. What are white spaces to our calendar? What oxygen is to a fire? It is just air it’s. It is margin. It, it is, it is openness and that is not a sign of weakness, or it is not a compromise in productivity. It is a necessary fuel. It is necessary to fuel productivity. And I love the way that she describes this, which is thoughtfulness interlaced throughout your day. What a great definition, thoughtfulness interlaced throughout your, and the benefit. And I thought this was super elegant and she’s super elegant in her writing.
RV (03:05):
Is that, you know, she said that the benefit here is that deceleration kicks in and you can listen to your own wisdom, how powerful and profound is that you can listen to your own wisdom. And so often so many ways. And so many days we’re going so fast, just sprinting from the next to the next, to the next to the next. It’s like trying to build a bigger fire by just piling more and more stuff on top of it. And there’s, there’s no oxygen, there’s no space, there’s no room to breathe. There is no fuel to grow the thing. And so I, I just love that. And I love the, the eloquence of being able to listen to your own wisdom. I think that is truly one of the most defining things that we do at brand builders group that is different from other, I guess I would say, you know, copywriters or people who help do, you know, identity for a brand is that we help you find your uniqueness.
RV (04:15):
We, for us, our belief is that the answers inside of you, it’s not, how are you different from everyone else? And it’s not. What do you do in relation to other people? It’s what do you do? What do you actually believe? What path have you walked down? And so much of this is being able to access your own intuition, your own insight, your own instincts, or as she describes it, your own wisdom. And in order to do that, you need white space, white spaces to your calendar, what oxygen is to a fire. And I just think that’s a brilliant, brilliant metaphor. Absolutely love it. The second takeaway for me, it was really just a question and it’s, it’s a very simple question and it’s super direct, but man, it hit, it hit me hard. And I think this question hits hard and I hope it hits hard for you.
RV (05:15):
And here’s what, here’s the question? Where are you doing high quantity, low value work? Where are you doing high quantity, low value work. And if you’re a leader if you’re not, you’re an entrepreneur with a team, or if you’re a personal brand, even managing a team of contractors, where do you have the people around you doing high quantity, low value work? Where are we running a bunch of manual processes, a bunch of, you know, manual things following a set of steps and a checklist that was created 10 years ago that, you know, we don’t even look at anymore isn’t even relevant anymore. And I just, I think this is super powerful. And I’ll tell you, one of the adjustments that I made immediately after listening to this interview was you know, our, our, our team runs the content diamond. Those of you that are, are members of brand builders group, like your members in our, our coaching community.
RV (06:13):
You know, we teach this content diamond process of repurposing content, which is brilliant and it’s amazing, and it totally works. But I, I was auditing, I went back and it was looking at some of the steps and I noticed that one of our steps is to embed a link to our YouTube video. Like we do a 60 every week, we do this five minute video and that’s, you know, we publish that on my YouTube channel or on our YouTube channel, if it’s the company stuff. And then we put it on my blog. So the bolt, my blog, Rory Vaden blog.com is the one place that you can go to access, you know, like everything that I’m doing. And so we make this really nice five minute YouTube video every week. Well, we also distill that down into a 62nd kind of teaser video.
RV (06:58):
And we embed that teaser video in LinkedIn, in LinkedIn pulse, which is LinkedIn’s blogging platform. And what I realized is we’re getting killed in the algorithm because there’s this external unique link to YouTube, which the, the, all the social media companies hate, they hate when you link to outside things. Cause that’s their whole goal is to keep you on their platform. And so we’ve got this, this one step in our process, which is embed a YouTube link, which is, you know, from years ago and our team is just doing that and we’re not watching and going, wow, we’re getting crushed in our reach, in our views. We’re not reaching anybody and going, we’re running this checklist, we’re spending however much time we’re doing it and going, we’re getting almost no value from it. So that was that was one of the things immediately that we’re, we changed in our business as a result of this interview.
RV (07:51):
And that was, that’s a question that I would ask for you, where are you doing high quantity, low value work? I think it is the, the, the, this is something that we talked about in our second book, procrastinate on purpose five permissions to multiply your time, which is that the human brain gets addicted to insignificance and trivial tasks. Why? Because when you cross an item off your to-do list or you hit delete on something in your inbox or you mark something as complete in your project management software, the human brain releases dopamine. Like if you monitor the human brain like under brain scan, there’s, there is a release of dopamine when we complete things. So we feel good. It tells us good job. Congratulations. You’re, you know, you you’re done. The problem is that the human brain releases basically the same level of dopamine, whether it’s a trivial task or a significant task, well, trivial tasks are take much less time and you can get a lot more trivial tasks done and get a lot more hits of dopamine.
RV (09:04):
So the neuroscience of your brain actually begins to work against you. You become addicted to that feeling the same way that you know, somebody is addicted to substances, like someone’s struggling with substance abuse is addicted. It’s this feeling, but in reality, what moves your business forward is not the volume of tasks that you complete, like ultra performers know that success is not about the volume of tasks you complete rather just about the significance of them while often the most significant tasks take a longer time. So you don’t check them off as quickly, which means you don’t get the hit of dopamine as frequently, which means that your brain left to its own devices. It was going to pull you back towards the insignificant, towards the trivial, towards the, the minutia, the mundane, in some cases, the meaningless. And we get addicted to this high quantity, but low value work and, and so many businesses.
RV (10:02):
And so many personal brands die on the hill of quantity. We’re just doing too many things and they’re not stopping and slowing down and decelerating and taking a moment a minute to think as the title of Juliet’s book is they’re not taking a minute to think about, does this really move the needle? Is this really valuable? Should we continue doing this? Is this high, high impact, very significant work. And if you don’t do that, you literally become addicted to the opposite. So that was just a powerful reminder for me and just a great reinforcement of some of the things that we should know, but, you know, we kind of lose sight of, and then the third, the third big takeaway least, you know, just for me listening to Juliette. And, and again, it’s, it’s, it’s really wonderful for me to be able to have this interview because I’ve read the manuscript cover to cover, like we’ve, we’ve walked with her a lot through just kind of helping her organize some of this.
RV (11:08):
And, and I mean, I, this book is going to be incredible. Y’all this is going to be a major book. Like, I think this is going to this that’s. The other thing is you know, random side note here is you should go, you know, to her site and you should watch what she’s doing. Cause this, I think this is going to be a really big business book. That’s going to have a lot of staying power. And it’s gonna make a big splash in the space. So you know, even if you don’t buy it for yourself, I think it’s like pay attention and watch what she does and how she does some of these things around the launch. But the third takeaway, which is another kind of sobering simple passion is just, are you scared of quiet?
RV (11:55):
Are you scared of quiet? Are you scared of sitting with your own thoughts? Are you scared of sitting still? Are you afraid of trusting that things can actually work out for you without your full control? That is a deeply profound concept and question that I just love how she ties it into like the practicality of every day, you know, productivity, but that is where the deep work happens. And you know, that’s why so many clients who work with us at brand builders group, you know, they come through our phase one course, one brand DNA experience. And they’re amazed at how deep the work is for most of our client. Well, for all of our clients, the very first encounter with us as is almost like it’s cathartic, it’s therapeutic. It’s, it’s, it’s almost, it’s almost spiritual because we’re going on this deep introspective journey of figuring out what is your uniqueness?
RV (13:06):
What is the problem that you can solve in the world that no one else can solve? What are you uniquely positioned to do? How, and who are you uniquely positioned to serve? And that’s what happens. First, later comes all the mechanics of here’s, how to launch a podcast and here’s how to write a book and here’s how to do a book launch. And here’s how to create a keynote. And, and, and here’s how to get booked for a keynote speech. And, you know, here’s how to build a company. Here’s how to do a sales call. And here’s how to build the funnel that dah, dah, dah, like we’ve got 14 events, 14 different two day experiences in our formal curriculum, as of right now. But the very first one finding your brand DNA is this, this deep work. And there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of exercises.
RV (13:47):
There’s, there’s not that much education. I would say in our very first phase one course, one of our, our whole journey, because a lot of it is just questions. We’re basically just peppering people with these questions that, you know, they go through this sort of like self exploration to find their uniqueness, to figure out who they serve, what problem do they solve? How do they solve it? And what’s the fastest path to cash solving that problem. But so many of us are scared of the quiet. We’re scared to be reflective. We’re we’re, we’re, we’re S we’re scared to be introspective. We’re scared to just listen to our own wisdom. And I think when, when you force yourself to, to have some quiet, you force yourself to face your fears.
RV (14:46):
It is in the quiet that we are unmistakably confronted with the things that challenge us, which is scary, but it also puts us in the ring with our fears. It puts us face to face with our fears and inevitably, and almost always, we beat those fears. We conquer those fears. We find the answers. We defeat the problems in that quiet. So while it is scary, it’s also tremendously empowering. And I believe, and I have experienced from my own life. And I believe this to be true for you is that if you take a moment to sit in the quiet, those fears and concerns may come up, but then you can see them. And if you can see your fear, then you can face your fear. And if you face your fear, you can defeat your fear. If you’re willing to sit in the quiet and inside of that silent conversation of prayer and meditation, or just being with your own thoughts, you are allowed to experience and explore the miracles of everyday life to write your own escape from the mental prisons of limiting beliefs of our own construction. So take a little time to have a little white space, white spaces to your calendar, but oxygen is to a fire allow for some quiet allow for a minute to think and know that your highest value work will come from your highest value answers, which you will most likely find in your quietest times. We’ll catch you next time.

Ep 196: Fueling Your Own Creativity, Innovation, and Productivity with Juliet Funt

RV (00:07):
You friends that I have that are scary, smart, super intelligent Juliet Funt is one of those friends I’ve known her for years, basically met her as a kid running around at the national speakers association when I was like in my early twenties. And she is one of the best speakers in the world. And I’ve shared some of the biggest, some of the biggest stages that I’ve ever been on. She has been there too, and we’ve kind of hung out, you know, my second book hung out a little bit in some of her space. She has a concept called white space, which is really about helping people just kind of reclaim their, their strategic pauses and thinking time and giving, giving them the time to sort of have more, a bit of margin and a, a bit of breadth in their daily life, so that we can be more creative and more productive. And so we’ve hung out a little bit in some of those circles and she’s just kind of an expert on, you know, managing all this busy-ness and overwhelm. And she got a great book deal. I’ll leave it at that. She got a very wonderful book deal with a major publisher, which we maybe we’ll talk a little bit about some, because she’s fresh done with turning in the manuscript for a real massive project. And anyways, Juliet, it’s great to have you welcome back
JF (01:29):
To I’m so thrilled to be here.
RV (01:31):
Yeah. So the new book is called a minute to think it is, and we all need to us talk to us about what is white space submitted to think what, what is all of this? And, and why does it matter?
JF (01:45):
The, there is this need for oxygen in the system of our days, and we needed it before the pandemic, but boy, howdy. I can’t even imagine a time in history that we needed it more. And that, that oxygen is really the foundational metaphor. It’s kind of, if you imagine you’re building a fire and you took paper and pine needles and logs, and you stack them all up and you tried to light it, nothing would happen. But if you added one critical ingredient of space, everything would beautifully ignite. And we are the same in our work is the same. And our creativity is the same. And yet we don’t have that oxygen. There’s no oxygen to feed the fire.
RV (02:21):
Mm. That is such a beautiful, distinct, sharp, accurate metaphor. There’s just, there’s no space. I mean, in the concept white space, of course, you’re referring to like calendar eyes, like you’re talking about counter space, everything is crammed together. And, and it feels like, especially with COVID like you used to like walk down the hall to a meeting and at least have 10 seconds to like walk down the hall to the next meeting. And now it’s like one zoom is over and the next zoom is starting. There’s like, literally not a breath right before we’re just running to the next thing.
JF (02:57):
The tactic we’ve discussed is if you can’t get a bio break, you just wait for a really chatty person and then you can mute P and returned before they, before you, you have to double check the mute, but that’s sometimes the only respite to get to get a second. And it’s so inhumane to begin with, but it’s also so unproductive. It’s so unproductive to take people that you’ve worked to find and hire and head hunt in these genius pieces of talent, and then put them in a deoxygenated environment where they’re just going to shrivel. It’s a, it’s a lot.
RV (03:28):
I mean, so why is that? Like, why, why is it so unproductive? I mean, a lot of the people listening are pretty hard driving, you know, entrepreneurs, solopreneurs practitioners. Is that really true? I mean, I don’t know that everyone takes that as truth to go, like, you know, maximize every second of every day. And it’s kind of like some of, some of us, that’s kind of how we got to where we are. Right. And so you’re saying, well, Hey, you should, you know but I think the oxygen metaphor is so good, but like, I guess what, what gives you so much confidence or like to go like, Hey, that’s not actually productive. Like at some point that caps out,
JF (04:09):
First of all, we can look into, I know you have a lot of entrepreneurs, solopreneurs authors, writers authors, speakers, but first you, if you start with the corporate heck a heck hole, if there’s a appropriate way to say that, of course work that there, there, there is the easiest place to quantify the problem. So when you ask employees, what part of their work feels wasteful and meaningless, and like, it’s just a drain on their entire lives. They will report 20 to 30% of the tasks that they touch are stupid. And if you take those 20 to 30% of those illogical, unnecessary nonsense tasks, and you quantify them based on the salary value of that human being per hour, you can actually come up with a distinct number. It’s a million dollars for every 50 people annually is spent on work that has no value.
RV (04:57):
Whoa, say that again?
JF (05:00):
Yeah. I’ll give you even a visual. It’s a million for $51 million for every 50 employees. But that means, think of it as if you took 12 out of every 50 people and just let them eat Doritos and play video games all day long. And that was their entire contribution. That’s the level of waste.
RV (05:15):
That’s the job that I want right there. Retos and play videos and the crash. Yeah. The rest of you suckers are cranking out the work and getting stuff done. 12 out of 50 people just not doing anything
JF (05:30):
So that, and that wasteful that willingness to let that much waste in the system comes from the fact that we worship activity and not productivity, and that they are two different things that just because we’re moving and checking boxes and doing doesn’t mean we’re actually producing, building, creating something of value. So that common misperception is the seat of the corporate example. Then you move to all of us, the speakers, the the people who are just working it, yes, we have to work incredibly hard to get where we’re going. But little sips of thoughtful time are necessary to make sure that we’re not working. Blisteringly hard in the wrong direction. In order to, if you take a moment to reflect on where you’d like to go, what’s your highest value? What is the most important thing that I can touch next? These critical junctures of thoughtfulness change the nature and the trajectory of the work that you do do so that it’s not just mania heading in any direction that you, that your head that you’re pointed.
RV (06:28):
And I think that’s actually a pretty accurate description of personal brands. It’s kind of mania, right? It’s like, I’m on Instagram, I’m on Snapchat. I’m doing my podcast. I’m like trying to do a speaking gig. I’m working on a webinar, I’m building a funnel, I’m writing email copy. I’m doing my group, my, my graphic design. I’m updating my press kit, like, right. Like, and, and, and so are you saying to work less, like, is that the, is that the goal here is to, is to do less work less?
JF (06:58):
No. For, for those corporate people I’m talking about, we want to remove that wasteful work, but I’m not talking specifically about working less. Although I do think that there are fascinating framings being put out now by people like Michael Hyatt, who’s entire giant teams on a six hour day and finding it exactly as effective as an eight hour day was. So there, there are interesting people playing in the work less space, but that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that without the ability to pause in between the activities of what you do, you can’t oxygenate those efforts correctly. So let me, let me walk you through what it looks like in real life. When you finish writing the pot there, script for your blog, and then you’re going to move to checking your new headshots. And then you’re going to check to w oh, your Instagram feed.
JF (07:42):
If you’re jumping from one to the other, to the other, you don’t have time to do a few things. There’s no time to digest the lessons or reflections from what you just did. And there’s no time to plan appropriately to be spectacularly. Excellent. In the next thing that you pick up, there’s no time to shift your mind from human being interactive on Monaco mode to deep creative work mode. When we don’t have transition time. And the, those little spaces open up the day and they infuse it with thoughtfulness, creativity, purposefulness, they allow us to catch ourselves before mistakes, like answering too fast to an email or responding too fast to a question. This habit of thoughtfulness, interlaced affects everything.
RV (08:27):
Yeah. So you’re not this isn’t like a, you know, take a six month sabbatical yoga retreat every year. And like, do that really? You’re saying thought, I love that, that last phrase, you said thoughtfulness interlaced throughout the day. You know, and I was thinking about it makes the first thing that came to my mind was that, so a brand builders group, we’re a classic example of this. Like we started growing really fast, got a marketing team. And then the marketing team went off in a thousand directions and everyone started doing stuff. We literally got less results with like 20 people in marketing than we used to get with two. Because everyone was like, they just start, they were just competing for, they were just competing for priorities. Nothing was actually going forward. It was all like going sideways. And then we’re like, okay, we’re going to do one launch a month. There’s only one thing that we do every month. Because even if you only do one thing a month, you’re not actually doing one thing a month, you’re doing that thing. But you’re optimizing the thing that you did the month before. And you’re preparing for the thing that is coming next. And we had no space and time before that, cause it was just a constant like race. And you’re saying that happens all the time, low value,
JF (09:51):
Quantity work. If you think of that phrase, it’s not something that you want to be producing as a company, but many of us are generating low value, quantity work. And one of my favorite metaphors for this as if I, I spoke to a mole scientist once who studies moles, little, the little burying kind of critter, and what they do in mole land is they don’t have any specific direction that they dig, but they dig very, very fervently for the entire day. So they just put their little paws up and they just go in any direction. They happen to be digging and then they give it their all. And they really work hard all day long, but that’s, we don’t want to be moles. We don’t want to be randomly going in any direction. We want to be purposeful and thoughtful. So it just a minute ago, you and I were talking in prep about I’m four weeks away from book launch, the craziest starting, the, the opportunities are raining down.
JF (10:45):
Should I be writing to clients? Should I be on podcasts, should be, I’d be writing special print media. And I took a minute and we got slow. And we said, what? I said, what is the one thing? What are the two or three things? And just that deceleration will kick in your own wisdom. It’s just a matter of getting off the speed for a minute to say, oh right, wait a minute. I’m just realizing that I just prepped 400 emails on a project that I’m not really invested in, but I’m just getting off on the sending, sending, sending, sending, sending. And if we take a minute to think before that you can avert all that work.
RV (11:22):
Yeah. I wonder how much of it is like, it’s really weird. There’s like because on the one hand it’s overwhelming and exhausting and daunting and all of those things. But on the other hand, it’s almost like we do this busy-ness as a defense mechanism from having to like stop and really go is what I’m doing really matter. Is this really smart? Do I really even enjoy the thing that I’m doing? And it, it feels like we do that. It’s almost like we’re addicted to moving fast. Cause it like prevents us from having to sit with our thoughts
JF (12:03):
And deep work is really scary. So the Cal Newport style deep work where we go in and we create things that are like one gorgeous piece of sushi. That’s sitting on a platter that’s so rich and so flavorful that you don’t need anything with it. That that’s just spectacular. That kind of work to produce tight. Gorgeous, rich work is really hard. And it’s really lonely. If you’re into any degree in extroverted person, you like relational tasks, I write to you and marketing writes to me and sales writes to marketing and I chat with you and I’m on zoom with you. So all of that relational stuff, factors in to what we miss when we try, try to slow things down and do quieter work. So there are a lot of addictive and habitual and adrenaline based reasons that we avoid it. But sometimes that’s where the gold is.
RV (12:54):
Talk to me about that when it comes to writing your book, because this is the world that you’ve been living in here for the last several months is like you go from being this incredibly successful speaker and you got this training company and you’re working with major companies. And you know, like when I’d say I’ll Dulia to speaking at events, I mean, she’s, she’s doing events where there’s 10,000 people in the room. There’s there’s 85,000, a hundred half a million people watching live 7,500 in a room, 30,000 watching on a live stream, a big time stuff. You go from doing all that to be like, Hey, your manuscript’s due in four months. And now you are, this is that’s exactly what you just went through, right? Like how was that experience for you?
JF (13:40):
That’s why I didn’t write a book for 20 years because know, being alone. I don’t like that. Just me and the empty word document is a terrifying place. I will clean the kitchen. I will check social. I will research orthodontic things that my children need. I’ll do anything to try to avoid being in that scary, lonely place of just me and the paper. But the way that it worked for me was when the moment was ready, the right agent and the right message and it all kind of crystallized. And then I had to figure out what the writing process was going to be for an extroverted person who was scared of the quiet. And what worked for me was always writing on retreat. My writing style was that for a year and a half, I went away one day a week and wrote, and there was no email, no children, no husband, no same environment, nothing I’d go to a hotel or I’d go somewhere else. And I would be alone with the book and that kind of compartmentalization has always worked really wonderfully for me. And it worked really, really well for this.
RV (14:45):
So, so I want to talk about the editing process. So I love that and I, I right. The same way except both of my books I wrote in a week. So I do it. I just, I like disappear from the world for like seven days. And just, it’s like a, it’s like a what do they call it? When you like binge like a ranger, like a bender, it’s like a binder. It’s like a writing bender that and, and cause it’s the same way. It’s like the only way I can really like get focused is to like be, you know, just to remove from everything. But then you actually get the book written and people are always, people are always off when they talk to me because they’re like, I just got my, I just finished my manuscript and I go, congratulations.
RV (15:35):
You’re 20% of the way done from having an hour towards having that actual book. Oh, so true. They’re so mad at because it’s like, I think writing is one of those things you can hear. It’s you know, Mitch Hedberg used to describe pancake. Do you know who Mitch Hedberg is? No. Oh my gosh. He’s one of my favorite comedians. He died of a drug overdose, which is sad, but he was really brilliant. And he used to say, it’s like pancakes at the beginning, they’re all warm and fluffy. And then by the end, you’re just fricking sick of them, like writing the same way. Like you’re like, oh, this is so exciting. I’m writing my book. And then, and then it’s just like, then you have to edit. And you’re like, I’m so sick of this. I want to read. So talk to you about the
JF (16:23):
Editing. How about when you’re done, I’ll go back to that. But how about when you’re done editing and you finally get done with these sticky cold pancakes and then they go now, the next year of your life is going to be being on podcasts, repeating back the same pancakes for the rest of your career. It’s very difficult. The funny thing about the editing process was how unprepared underprepared I was for what exactly was going to happen. So I’m with a major publisher. Okay.
RV (16:49):
For the editing pro you were under prepared for the editing process
JF (16:53):
Completely because so Harper Collins is our publisher. I have a wonderful, wonderful publisher named Hollis. And on the day of January 1st, when we turned in the book, we had a party because the book was dead and I turned it in. It was finished. And then they send back around about a month later and you sit down and go, oh my God, there’s two days of work in copy editing and checking all this stuff in this round to read it again. And then you send back all those changes. Then they send back another round over the course of three or four months. They sent back round after round on the third round, after being on retreat, intensely editing round one and round two of what I thought was a completed manuscript. I sent back 290 changes on the third round. So some of that is just my own perfectionistic tendencies and how much I care about this particular book, being a spectacularly unique and beautiful book, but it’s not done when you think it’s done.
JF (17:45):
You think it’s done when you turn it in? It, it isn’t even done until the day that the printers rip it out of their hands and say, we have to have this now, or we’re going to miss the deadline. You just keep tweaking it. And then as I told you, before smart people start to say things that you wish you’d written in it, and now it’s finished and you go, oh my gosh. If I just had that conversation with Joel, before we locked the manuscript, I would have completely changed a, B or C. And I’m prepared for that to just keep going.
RV (18:14):
I mean, this is, what’s crazy too about a book, right? Is like, you go through this, you know, and it’s, it’s a lifetime to build a platform. Then you give a proposal, you get an agent, you get a deal, you do the manuscript. There’s 75,000 edits. Then you’re just exhausted. Like you ran a hundred mile race and they’re like, congratulations. You’ve reached the starting line, which is now you’re going to do your book promotion for the next eight, eight months. And then at the end of it, all you sell the thing for $22 and 50 95 cents. Meanwhile, you could throw your iPhone on record a video course and sell it for 500 bucks by this afternoon. And that’s, but that’s what I think makes books so beautiful and still so relevant and so important. It’s it’s the work that you do. It’s the, the amount of space and oxygen that, that went into building this beautiful thing and over and over and refining it.
JF (19:09):
It’s a lot of great things. I mean, it is a, if you got a decent advance, you’re going to be very old and gray before you even see a dollar of that 22. So that’s another thing is this is the most free work I’ve ever done in my career over the last three, three years on this book. But the beautiful thing about writing a book is it takes content that is in a raw form and it causes you to sit with that content and tweak it and play with it and marinated and step away from it and come back to it. And the end of it, you open it up almost as if you hadn’t been part of the process and you say, this is wonderful. And it, it comes to fruition like a child growing into him, you know, like a boy growing into a man there’s this day where you look at and go, wow, I have goosebumps right now telling you the story of getting goosebumps about looking at it, because you think now it’s ready. It works. It’s clean, it’s easy. Maybe it’s enjoyable. And wow. It came together and that’s, that’s a Mo the most thrilling, creative process that I’ve ever been involved in. And that has nothing to do with whether it’s sells or makes me famous or makes a dollar from here.
JF (20:16):
And this,
RV (20:18):
Everything you just described, the beauty of that, which we’ve in the context of this conversation, been talking about in these, what we would call and take the stairs harvest season of focus, but it’s almost like white space in a minute to think it’s almost like you get a little bit of that in everything you do. If you just breathe for a second, you kind of infuse that same level of creativity, wonder and innovation into your entire day. Just like little bits of it. Time,
JF (20:54):
If you have the habit of the pause inside your bones, what happens is that it naturally shows up for you without trying. So on those writing days, I would write or edit for 12 hours. But if I happen to catch out of the corner of my eye, a pretty sunset while I was writing, or if I happened to notice that my hands were really enjoying the warmth of my tea cup while I was holding it, it would be second nature for me to pause and go with that, go with that for a minute. If I was writing and I had a little grain of an idea in some critical voice at all, that’s silly or not worth it. My habit of the pause would tell me to stop and hang with it for a minute before dismissing it. And so what happens is once the pause becomes your practice, it comes to you naturally like breathing and you get the sense of pausing going, going pausing. I definitely believe that there are harvest seasons. I believe that balance is like the stock market and, and it goes up and it goes down. And right now I’m in a book launch. And not as balanced as I am in other times, but if you can think of it as an interlacing, just a beautiful sign curve of go stop, go stop, go stop. I believe that you’ll be stronger, longer and better in the work that you do.
RV (22:08):
That is marvelous. So w the, book’s called a minute to think where do you want people to go to read about it? Find out about it, connect with you,
JF (22:19):
Juliet funt.com is where you can get the book. Hopefully that you’ll share with your team, because we have a very, very strong impetus for people to discuss this work together. So it comes to life. When you say, I think, what do you think about this? And how can you apply it and what feels safe in the world of busy-ness to take pauses? It’s a wonderful thing. And they’re, they can also take something called the busy-ness test, which is a quiz that any of your listeners can go to to understand where are the most pernicious thieves of their own time, and where do they come from and how they can stop them uniquely for them?
RV (22:51):
Love it. Well, we’ll link up to Juliet funt.com and also the book a minute to think it is called, check it out, profound, powerful, insightful both accelerating and decelerating to your life at the same time. Really, really a magic Joel. I’ve read through the entire manuscript. I absolutely love it. Fully endorsed this book, check it out. Juliet, thank you for making time for us. And we wish you the best. Always. Great. Thanks.

Ep 195: How to Dominate Your Niche with Chester Elton | Recap Episode

RV (00:02):
Chester Elton was our guest this week on the influential personal brand. And this is the recap edition of that episode. I am joined by my partner in shine, AJ Vaden we’re breaking down the interview because you know, we both know Chester for a really long time. We haven’t seen him in a while, but he was an influential person in our, in our life. And so it was great to reconnect and Aj, welcome to the show. Looking forward to getting your thoughts on this,
AJV (00:32):
Looking forward to giving you all my many opinions.
RV (00:37):
Yeah, so I think looking back at this episode, to me, it really was about how to dominate a niche. And that is something that chester and his writing partner business partner, Adrian have really done. They’ve, you know, they were the carrot guys and they carved out this like very specific niche that they have just dominated for decades at this point. And my first big takeaway, which is going to be something near and dear to your heart, AJ I know it’s just having proprietary data helps you dominate. And, you know, I look at when I look at some of our, the most successful like speakers specifically that we’d know, I think Sally hogshead and Jason Dorsey and I think David horsehager and Chester Elton, and it’s like these folk, Tom Rath, these folks have proprietary data that really is real data. And it really helps you kind of like define a niche. I also think of Michael Stelzner does this really well with social media, Chalene Johnson
AJV (01:46):
And the list goes on.
RV (01:47):
It goes on. So that was my first big takeaway. And I know obviously in the, not so distant past you lead our national research study trends and personal branding. And so I, I figured, I don’t know if that stuck out to you, but that was a big takeaway for me.
AJV (02:03):
Yeah, that’s that was my first point, probably in a little bit different context than you just shared. But I did, I literally highlighted this quote with that having proprietary data helps you dominate period. It helps you dominate. It helps you get on media and helps you clarify your niche. It helps you reach a new target demographics. It helps you with credibility. It helps you in so many different ways. It helps your content strategy. Like there’s countless ways that it helps. But one of the things that really stuck out to me that I thought was really important in this interview is that EBIT, it’s not just having the data. You have to understand the data and that data gives you credibility, but it’s not necessarily the data points that people remember. It’s the stories that people remember. And because you have what your job is as the owner of the data is to learn how to truly understand RVit and interpret that data to the general public, and then take that and create a story with that data that helps your audience.
AJV (03:16):
So to me, it’s like having the data is the given it’s the requirement, it’s the necessity. We’ve probably heard it 12 times this year. So far, that data is the new differentiator, right? It is the new competitive advantage. It’s like information and data and proprietary data is the new competitive advantage. But having the data really isn’t good enough, right? You have to understand the data you have to interpret. The data we have to do is take that data and create stories. That mean something to your audience, because it’s the stories that they’ll remember. And so, as an example from this interview, I thought these were some things that stuck out to me is that he had, they had a a hundred thousand people take this motivators assessment, right? And of that 18% referenced, severe anxiety at work. But by 2020, that 18% had turned into 30% of the workforce.
AJV (04:24):
But then if you just parcel that out and just look at millennials and gen Z, it was 42%. And the story that really started to form for me is, you know, our, our kids are the generation right after gen Z. So I’m like, well, gosh, what if like, if we don’t start making some serious changes, like what does that look like for my kids? And what you’re saying that we’re telling these young people who are graduating high school or college, or, you know, trade schools were saying, the moment you entered the workforce, almost half of you will experience severe anxiety.
Speaker 3 (05:04):
What, so
AJV (05:05):
Those are the things to me, it’s like, it’s the data, but it’s really the story that the data tells that I think you really have to own. So I know that was a long point. I’m like the other one’s shorter, but that was most significant to me. Yeah,
RV (05:17):
No, that’s, that’s good. I mean, it’s hard enough to get data and then it’s hard to interpret it and make it and make it applicable. And that’s one thing that they’ve done. And, and so I thought that was good. So the other thing that stuck out to me from this specific interview, obviously Chester and Adrian have sold, sold a lot of books and they’ve gotten a pretty sure portfolio is, is who they publish with, or have published most of them with. And just, just a good reminder, which we know. And we, we talk about and we you know, we teach people, but what publishers are really buying is your marketing plan. It’s it’s the, the author’s job is to sell the books. And we actually did our bestseller launch plan event last week at the time of get compared to this recording when, when we’re actually recording this. And one of the things that we said, which we’d never really said before, so clearly is that most authors build a book and then try to build an audience. And it’s extremely difficult. Like you have to build the audience first and then build the book for the audience. That’s how the book, that’s how the book becomes successful. And so anyways, I just thought that was a good reminder as always to, to just go, yeah, like a huge part of this is just marketing. Not necessarily who has the best ideas.
AJV (06:39):
No, I think that’s really good at that. Did not make it on my top three lists. So that’s, that was good.
Speaker 3 (06:44):
I didn’t even pick up on that,
AJV (06:47):
But that’s true, right? It’s like, if you have the audience then it can carry any product or service versus build the product and then try to build the audience. That’s really good. No, my, my second thing is probably just something that resonated with me stronger is that if you try to be too many things to too many people, you become nothing, right. If you become too many things to too many people, you become nothing. And I love this. And he said, it became really clear to Chester that the place where business people go, his audience with LinkedIn, and we’ve had this discussion in our house here recently
Speaker 3 (07:25):
About like, think about it. All right. So that’s probably
AJV (07:28):
Why it just really stuck out to me is that, you know, linked in is the place where this professional crowd goes to source information, find service providers, you know, do all the things. And it’s not that Instagram and Twitter and TechTalk and Facebook and YouTube, aren’t other really important platforms. That’s not what I’m saying. But I thought this was just really good is that you got to figure out where’s your place and what is the thing that you want to be to your people? And what place are those people going? And, you know, he said it was LinkedIn. So we went all in on LinkedIn and because they went all in on LinkedIn they got into this influencers program and because they got into this influencers program really, really early, they got more opportunities and then more opportunities and more opportunities.
AJV (08:18):
And to me, I think that just is, it speaks really, really clearly to a lot of our audience where it’s so overwhelming to think about, okay, I’ve got to create content for all these different platforms. And some of it needs to be original, some can be repurposed, and then I’ve got to do all these things and all these platforms, which is, I think is really important. Right. And I think you do need to be all the places, but it’s how much of you needs to be in all the places. And what if you just said, okay, I’m going to do what I need to do to make sure I’m spreading my content everywhere, but I’m also going to go all in on the one platform that I most resonate that my audience modes, my audience most resonates in, and I’m going to just like double down on that. And that was LinkedIn for them because they said, that’s where we found that business people go. So that’s probably also my platform, which is why it stuck
Speaker 3 (09:06):
Out to me that it was really just
AJV (09:08):
A great reminder of you don’t have to be all the places all the time and be all the things to all the people. Yeah,
RV (09:14):
No, I think, I think that’s, I think that’s true. I mean, for me, like, I, for whatever reason, I’m drawn to Instagram, like just the usability of it. We post stuff on LinkedIn on Facebook, but like I spend most of my personal time on LinkedIn and I think it’s sorry, did I say Lee? I said, LinkedIn, I meant Instagram. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Whereas you’re, you know, you’re more on LinkedIn and I think, well, it’s interesting when
AJV (09:38):
It comes to personal I’m on Instagram way more.
Speaker 3 (09:44):
Right, right. That’s really cool. But
RV (09:45):
Your voice as a content creator is more for LinkedIn. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, to that note, so this was my third takeaway, which it was powerful to hear him say this. Cause I’ve, I’ve thought about this before. And I’ve, I’ve kind of heard some studies, although they seem not super reliable, but that it takes four or five impressions for someone to buy your book. You know, and I’ve heard all sorts of numbers. That’s why I’m saying like, there’s a, for different studies quoted on this, but not in any that were totally authoritative that I feel confident repurposing here, but just as, as a kind of like a general you know, anecdotal, anecdotal kind of an observation that he was making, which I would totally agree with is that, you know, people have to see you in multiple places. Like it’s not just enough for them to be like, oh, I saw you, this, this one post from you over here.
RV (10:42):
Like that’s not really when they buy it’s when it’s like, oh, I heard you on this podcast. And now, you know, I just saw your book on a shelf and Hey, here you are. Here’s an ad for your webinar funnel in my feed. And oh, look, you’re speaking at my company’s event next month. Right. And it’s like, that kind of triangulation needs to happen to where you really start, I think, breaking through the wall and creating massive gravity. So, you know, it’s, it’s kind of like figuring out what, where you can, you can dominate well, but also when you do this, you kind of start to surround people. And just, just knowing that if people buy from you, they typically aren’t going to just buy the ferry first time they see you. It’s going to be more of like millennium, multiple impressions. I know. Talk about
AJV (11:28):
That. No, it’s, it’s kind of like it’s like you intentionally kick in not reticular activation. Right. You know, it’s like, it’s an intentional effort to spark an individual’s particular activation where, you know, and it’s a real fancy word that I don’t use very often activating
RV (11:50):
System. It’s like a, yeah, it’s a neurological, like a, once you become
AJV (11:55):
Intrigued with something, like if I was shopping for a new car and I’m shopping for, you know, and in a new Infiniti SUV and I’m looking at white infinities, the next thing I know, I’ll see white infinities everywhere I go. And it’s like, it’s like now your, your mind has like tuned into like, oh, I’m noticing something that I didn’t notice before. And I do, I do agree that being in so many places really helps nurture that. And and it’s like, y’all all go all in, in one place. But that doesn’t mean you ignore all the others. So the third thing that I wrote down was two parts. And he said, the most important thing is consistency. And we have heard that from every single person who has ever been on this show
Speaker 3 (12:33):
Or ever in the history of life and
AJV (12:36):
Conversation. So that is not new, but such an important reminder across the board where like, if you’re posting once a month on LinkedIn, or once a week on Instagram, like that’s probably not going to do it for
Speaker 3 (12:49):
You to get you there. Don’t be frustrated
AJV (12:52):
When it’s not working. Right. It’s like, you know what? I’ve had clients before. It’s like, well, you know, we built it and no one came well, that’s not really how it works. It’s like build it and then market it, then promote it and then put paid ads to it and then talk about it everywhere you go. And then maybe people will come. But I also love what he said is that so much of it is trial and error. So allow yourself the grace to try and fail and then try again. And then sometimes when, but it’s trial and error for each of us and that’s okay. Don’t think you have to have it all mapped out and have it perfect. The first time some of this just is figuring out what resonates, where do people go? What is your preferred medium? And it’s like, but you got to do it consistently enough to even have an opportunity to have some trial and
Speaker 3 (13:39):
Error. It was just a little bit of grace and have a little bit of patience.
RV (13:44):
Yeah. I mean, amen to that. The consistency from a lot of it is just sticking around. I mean, tester spin at this a while as, as have, as have we as have most of our friends, really good
AJV (13:56):
Content and being super charismatic
Speaker 3 (13:58):
And like all the things that Chester is. So yeah.
RV (14:03):
Well so that’s it, you know, you’re, you’re hearing it and I think it’s great when you hear some of the same things, cause you go, oh, it’s not just one person. This is really the truth. And that’s one of the things that I love about this show as a listener is, is just hearing the real truth from people who are really out there with top, top personal brands. And they share most of the interviews we do on this show are not what they talk about on other shows like these they’re the content they share with us is it’s not what they write about in their books. They’re kind of giving us the behind the scenes journey. So I love that. We’re trying to do that. Hopefully you love that. And if you do, you know, put a shout out for us on social that we can, we can connect with you personally, leave, leave a review. And most of all, just keep coming back. We’re so grateful for you. We’ll catch you next time on the influential personal brand podcast.