Author: AJ Vaden

Ep 22: Understanding the Seasons of Business Models and Personal Brands with Michael Hyatt

ANNOUNCER: Welcome to the Influential Personal Brand Podcast. This is the place where you’ll learn cutting edge personal brand strategies from today’s most recognizable influencers. We’re going to teach you how to build a rock-solid reputation and then how to turn that reputation into revenue.

[0:00:27.2] RV: I’m your lead host Rory Vaden. Co-founder of Brand Builders Group, Hall of Fame speaker and New York Times bestselling author of Take the Stairs.

There are certain people in my life that I just feel honored to be associated with, just lucky to know. Michael Hyatt is certainly one of those people. I happened to speak at an event on a cruise ship and he was trapped there with me for six days and he couldn’t get away and I managed to get to know him and build a little relationship several years ago and I certainly consider him a mentor. If you haven’t heard of him, I don’t really know how you could be in the personal branding space and not know who he is.

But he is the former CEO of Thomas Nelson. He is the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today bestselling author of several books, one of which was Platform which made a huge personal impact in me and my direction. He’s written several others, Living Forward, Your Best Year Ever, Free to Focus, most recently.

He is both a tremendous personal brand, but also a real leader. He scaled a company, a 250-million-dollar publishing company with 700 employees, that’s Thomas Nelson. The Michael Hyatt team, like their company, now is on the Inc. 5,000 list. He’s a real leader, real CEO, real businessman, also real family man, he’s been married for over 40 years to Gale who – she’s awesome so it’s understandable.

He’s got five amazing daughters, nine grandchildren and he volunteered to come help me out as a personal favor. It’s not easy to get his time these days, he’s so busy so Michael, thank you for the honor of being here, my friend.

[0:02:09.6] MH: Absolutely Rory, thank you for those kind words, amazing.

[0:02:13.2] RV: You know, if you say publishing, it’s hard to create a list of people that would be more experienced in all different angles than you and I think so many of the people watching, I mean, I think almost every one of our clients like a book enters into the conversation at some point and so my first question for you, I figured was an easy one. Can you just tell us the secret of writing a bestselling book?

[0:02:40.6] MH: Well, take about 80% luck, and you know, have the right idea at the right time. No, seriously, I think part of it can certainly enhance your chances of writing a bestselling book but I think the most important thing on writing a bestselling book or creating a platform or a brand that has significance in the world is having something important and helpful to say.

I think you know, Zig Ziglar said, you know, if you help enough people, then you can get what you want and I think it’s the same thing with writing a book. Just write the most helpful, useful book you can. Be authentic, be transparent, be encouraging and that’s basically all I’ve tried to do and I’ve tried to find a topic that was hot and something that I could with integrity speak out of my experience but that’s pretty much what I’ve done.

[0:03:28.0] RV: Talk to me a little bit about the – you have the platform, like that’s – a part of the factor here is you have like the integrity of the idea but then you have the size of the author’s platform. Which one matters more? Do they matter the same? Can you do it with – do you have to have both, one not the other? What’s the balance there between platform and you know, premise.

[0:03:50.5] MH: Yeah, the way I say it is that content is king but platform is queen. It really takes both of those together, you know, if you want to create a kingdom and rule well. The reason I wrote the book Platform initially was because for years, in the publishing business, I had bene on the publishing side of turning away authors with great ideas, sometimes even fully written manuscripts that were fantastic but because they didn’t have a platform, there was very little for us as a publishing company to leverage.

But, when an author came to us with a great idea, great content, and they had some platform, didn’t have to be best but they had to at least proof of concept that there was an audience that was buying into their content and their framework and to whatever it is that they were selling, that was something we could leverage and kind of take to the next level. I think they’re equally important

[0:04:43.2] RV: Do you think that traditional publishing like, you know, that’s kind of the question today is years ago, was like traditional publishing was the way to go and then self-publishing and now I feel like it kind of teeters kind of back and forth.

A lot of our clients ask this question. How do I know if I should use a traditional publisher, you know? Do I really need one? Should I self-publish? Like what’s your take on that in the current day era?

[0:05:05.3] MH: Well, my opinion has vacillated over the years. In the initial – I mean, I was in the publishing business for 35 years. Initially, there was only traditional publishing, then there was self-publishing or we, you know, call it in those days, vanity publishing, which is kind of pejorative but that’s how we looked at it and it wasn’t very well respected because the books looked terrible. They usually weren’t well written or well edited and you could just tell it’s a self-published book. All that changed, started changing about 10 years ago and so self-publishing got more sophisticated, there were these hybrid publishers that would help you do some of it.

Now you’ve got all kinds of options out there but I’ve kind of come full circle. Here’s my theory right now. If you want to write a book, just the credential yourself and there’s no better way to credential yourself or to get authority in a space than to write a book. I personally think, it’s more important than a PHD, it’s more important than tons of experience. If you have a published book, that, in this culture, that kind of says you’ve arrived and you’re an expert in your category. If that’s all you’re trying to do then I think self-publishing is fine.

It becomes kind of a glorified, very nice business card that could pave the way as you go out and try to do other things whether it’s booking speaking or writing additional books or whatever.

If on the other hand you want to take a run at the bestseller list, and if publishing books is not your primary thing, like let’s just say that you’re primarily a speaker or you’re a consultant or you got some other gig that’s the main thing, your main revenue model, then I would absolutely use a traditional publisher because self-publishing is a ton, and I mean a ton, of work.

Now, Michael Hyatt and Company today, we do one traditional publishing published book every year, so I write one book every year but then we also do a couple of self-published books just for our tribe. I can tell you from looking on the inside in, having to do it on myself, it’s a ton of work.

If I didn’t have the platform I do that I could sell to, man, it would be – I don’t know that it would be worth it.

[0:07:14.6] RV: That’s super insightful. On the business model question, that’s a good one, that’s another thing I wanted to ask you about is, of all my friends and colleagues, I think you’ve tried more business models than anyone. I think, you know, you’ve done live events, you’ve done speaking, you’ve done consulting, you’ve done coaching, you’ve had memberships, you’ve done video courses, you’ve done affiliate launches like you’ve done online summits like this.

Is there a favorite business model that you have or you know, I think a lot of people kind of, it’s like, “Oh masterminds is the thing,” or, “No, a membership is the thing.” Or, “Really, it should be video courses are where it’s at.” Can you just give us just maybe some of the highs and lows of each of those and maybe like the ones you like or maybe what were some of the most surprising things you learned from the various different business models that you’ve tried?

[0:08:06.5] MH: Well, you know, I never really thought of myself as having tried so many but you’re right. Frankly, a lot of them haven’t worked. So I’ve done stuff that’s worked and stuff that hasn’t worked but one of the things I’ve always tried to cultivate is sort of an experimental mindset. Whenever I approach anything, a business launch or whatever. I approach it as an experiment, you know, “Hey, let’s just try it and see if it works.”

One of my colossal failures is that after we launched Best Year Ever, Five Days to Your Best Year Ever, that was a huge success, we had like 35,000 people go through that course over five years and it was a big revenue engine for our company.

We said, “Hey, let’s create Best Year Ever for leaders.” Because we thought, leaders are going to eat this up. I literally recorded all the videos and they were killer, you know? I was even impressed with them. These were amazing. We built a beautiful sales page and so we got all the emails written, everything. We launched it and it was crickets, we literally on the first 24 hours after the launch, we had one order. I was pulling my hair out.

I said to my team, “What’s wrong with the tech? This has got to be a technological failure. There’s no way that we could just get one order. We could have come up with that if we had a strategy.” Sure enough, that was it, nobody wanted the course.

So we try stuff and the stuff that that works you hear about, the stuff that doesn’t work, you know, we don’t typically publicize that. You don’t hear about that, but I would say that one business model that I’ve had that I’ve believed in for a long time is multiple streams of income.

You know, whatever horse you’re on right now, eventually probably is going to – you’re going to reach a saturation point or you’re going to – you’re going to get all the low hanging fruit and then it’s going to get more expensive and more difficult and so we’ve just tried to be in a lot of different things, kind of all in the same vertical space now and the goal setting and productivity space. But part of the reason, I’m kid of rambling here, so stop me.

But one of the things we’ve realized is that kind of when the market’s zigging, we want to zag. We got into online courses I think pretty early, we certainly weren’t the first but we were among the first people that got in to online courses and that was huge. It was ginormous margins. Then all of a sudden, people started doing courses on courses. How to create courses and then everybody and their brother created online courses and the market was very dense, very saturated.

We said, “We think that people are desperate for live experiences that even though they’ve got all this virtual capability, people want to be face to face and have real human encounters.” So we started our live events and that went crazy. Then we created our paper planners, the Full Focus Planner. That thing is –

[0:10:59.1] RV: I forgot about that one, I didn’t mention. There was that one and then also, you had the book, like the box, you were shipping boxes for a while.

[0:11:06.2] MH: Yeah. The planner business is actually our biggest business, that’s like, you know, almost an eight figure business now, all by itself. And the cool thing about that is it doesn’t really depend so much on my brand so it’s kind of got some autonomy and independence but again, you know, everybody was saying – in fact, people still say to me on Facebook, they say “Hey, we’ve got digital cast management, we got digital counters, why do we need a paper planner?”

As it turns out, people are very distracted in the digital environment, the thing that paper planner does is give them focus. Again,just kind of multiple streams of income and how can we best serve our audience? What does our audience need and how can we best serve them?

[0:11:48.2] RV: Year, I love that experimental approach and you certainly have to be like willing to lose some money here and there in the spirit of learning it out, lose some hours.

[0:12:00.5] MH: I’ll tell you the other thing too, you have to be willing to kill stuff when it needs to die. I mean, in my view, everything has a season but I’ll tell you a funny story. We had all these brands, you know, Best Year Ever, Free to Focus, Full Focus Planner, Leaderbox, all this stuff. Last December, we’re all sitting in a strategic planning and we brought in outside consultant.

He asked us this question that ultimately rocked our world. He said, could you explain to me the customer journey? Where do people start with you and then what’s the first step? Where do they go from there and how they go all the way through your product suite?

We kind of all looked at each other and we said, “We don’t know. We don’t have a clue. Here’s some ways you can get into it but we don’t really know.” We went through an unbelievable 24 hour periods where we killed or sunsetted Best Year Ever and Free to Focus and said, “They’re too confusing,” and so we mapped out a customer journey but we had to be willing to – it’s kind of like cleaning your closet. If you want new clothes, sometimes the first thing you have to do is get rid of the old clothes.

We had to clear out the old to make room for the new and that I think as a business owner, a lot of times it takes courage because those were – represented multimillion dollar businesses but we also realized that we couldn’t go to the next level unless we’re willing to kind of retire those and make room for the new things.

[0:13:24.2] RV: Yeah, it’s like killing the sacred cows kind of a thing. That’s not easy, especially like you have so much invested into those to just kind of go, “Okay, we’re done with that, we’re going to move on.” Like, not an easy decision I can imagine.

[0:13:39.0] MH: It’s not and it’s – I think one of the values of having a team is you know having other smart people in the room and people with wisdom that can kind of check and keep me from doing frankly as a business owner, something impulsive, but we can kind of check one another and ask if that’s the course in that kind of scenario play it and make sure it’s going to work.

[0:14:00.7] RV: All right, I apologize for bouncing around on all these different topics, although I’m not really sorry –

[0:14:06.8] MH: Sorry, not sorry.

[0:14:08.3] RV: One of the other things I wanted to ask you about is paid traffic versus organic traffic. You have built a huge platform and your community is so loyal. How much – should it be all organic? Is a real audience won that is built organic, you know? Is it paid, just like, “Hey, you got to pay the money to get in front of eye balls.” What’s the balance of paid versus organic?

[0:14:33.5] MH: If you had asked me about when Platform came out in 2012, if you’d asked me that question then, I would say, “I never pay for traffic.” Everything I had up until that point was organic. I built it from 2004 when I started to blog and I had about 100,000 unique visitors at that time on my blog and I thought, “You know, that’s enough,” you know?

It had a mailing list of about the same size of about 100,000, I thought that’s enough. Frankly, it would have been but in today’s environment, particularly when social media is really restricting the access that you get to for free, I don’t think it could be done without paid. Having said that, I think you got to have a very clear model of what you’re buying when you’re paying for traffic because I ultimately want to get them to the same place that I’m going to get organic traffic to and that is that I want it to be self-perpetuating, ongoing traffic that I can retain because they get exposed to the content and then they’re locked in because they enjoyed the content and feel like it’s helpful.

So, you know, I was telling you before we came on that last year, we spent about a million two on Facebook ads and believe me, we watched the return on investment like that, I wouldn’t be spending that kind of money if I wasn’t getting a huge return on that investment but it’s totally worth it. You just got to be smart about it.

[0:16:02.0] RV: Yeah, I feel like more and more, it’s like – it’s not necessarily the person with the best content that wins, but it’s the one with the most sophisticated systems of knowing what dollars they’re spending, what audiences they’re going after, what’s the lifetime, what are the conversions, the lifetime value of that customer. It’s interesting, one of my favorite interview questions I used to ask people was what is something you’ve changed your mind on recently and it seems like both this and the traditional self-publishing, it seems like you kind of have teetered a little bit so that’s interesting to see that perspective.

[0:16:36.1] MH: Yeah, I really believe in paid advertising now and just you know, to quickly kind of outline our strategy, I’m happy to share it. Typically, we run ads for free opt ins. You know, it’s usually an assessment or an ebook or a summit like this. Assessments have been very good for us because people seem to have unbelievable curiosity to find out more about themselves. It’s their favorite topic, right? We offer a lot of assessments and in those assessments, we typically try to convert them after the assessment to a webinar and a webinar is where I can begin to have a relationship with somebody but they get to kind of sample the brew. So for an hour on my webinars, I typically give them a good solid content and then I pivot. And it depends on the product. We are either pivoting trying to close to a discovery call like our high end coaching programs or actually trying to sell the product.

So we have done both of those very successfully. So that is how we think of paid advertising. We want to slowly escalate it where people get more involved with this after they tried that free thing and had a good experience.

[0:17:39.3] RV: Yeah and what would you consider, like on that kind of a thing, that kind of webinar, if it was a free call, what kind of percentages would somebody roughly estimate to go – if I am doing a good – if I have a great webinar and a good clear process for inviting a free call like 10%, 5%, 20%?

[0:17:59.9] MH: Yeah, I would say for us it usually runs – 10% would be on the low side especially for a free call but up to 35 sometimes 50%, but we usually offer something that we call a discovery call but people are wise to that. You know people don’t want to just call to get sold. So there has to be the promise of something else. So typically for us, I could tell you on our high end program business accelerator, which is like a coaching program, we do a discovery call there. But we invite them to take an assessment there.

We don’t usually use an assessment to get those people into the webinar but we use something called the Business Health Assessment. So we invite them to take the Business Health Assessment, get on the discovery call, and we will identify for them the three top priorities that as a business they need to focus on if they want to scale as rapidly as possible.

[0:18:48.4] RV: Got you, okay and then, you know if you are doing like a course, a thousand, two thousand dollars is more like if you can get five or 10% out of it then that’s pretty fine.

[0:18:56.4] MH: Yeah, totally.

[0:18:56.9] RV: Yeah, so on that note, again, this is like a bunch of pepper questions, automated webinars versus live webinars, is there a dramatic difference always to sometimes one you’d prefer more than the other?

[0:19:11.7] MH: I have done them both. I have to say that live webinars for us are always more effective and you know the biggest challenge today because there has been a proliferation of webinars too is to get for people to show up because the replays don’t convert like the live thing does even if it is on automated webinar. When they show up, they are much more likely to buy than if they’re just going to watch the replay. They have good intentions I mean I do it all the time myself.

You know to get somebody’s information, I sign up and then I get busy and I never go watch them. Yeah, I say you have to do both but I feel strongly about what am I about to say. I think you’ve got to be honest. I don’t think you have to trumpet the fact that it is an automated webinar, that it is not live, but I think you’ve got to be very careful with your language so that you don’t misrepresent it as live

And I remember several years ago, I stumbled upon some webinar software. I can mention the name but I won’t but that basically simulates a live webinar including feeding fake questions into the chat and to me that just lacks integrity and even if people don’t quite know what is going on they know something is off.

[0:20:23.5] RV: Yeah, I appreciate you saying that I agree a 100%. Do you think that a live webinar is going to covert twice as good as a recorded version of it or is it even less than that?

[0:20:35.3] MH: You know I don’t track that data in my role like I used to but all I can say is that I know it records – that it does better but here is the thing, there is no reason why you can’t do both. So do the live webinar and record it. Again, be careful with your language so that you are not implying that it is live. So when it is in the automated format, you don’t want to give the wrong impression but yeah, I mean that is what we do.

And a lot of times what we’ll do is that when we begin – like any kind of launch that we do, we’ll do live webinars for a week and I will typically do five, one day after another and – but we will also, and this is a good dress rehearsal for me, we’ll do the recorded one first and the great thing about that is putting in the recorded one in the can and having it almost perfect is then if there is a technical glitch in one of the live webinars, we’ve got that one that we can just shove in and run in its place and that’s happened to us before.

[0:21:31.9] RV: Oh wow that is interesting. Usually I only hear about the opposite like run it live several times and then take that but that is cool plus you get to have the practice run through with that like all of the live jitters and stuff. Okay, next one: email frequency. Too much versus too little. How much is too much and how little is too little? Is like the people that want to hear from you are going to stay tuned and you send them as much as you can? Do you have a thought on that? Has it changed over the years? I am very, very curious.

[0:22:08.0] MH: Let me just say I have overdone it. You know I have mailed way too much and of course, all the experts and I am not one, but all the experts would tell you that you can’t mail too much and the more you mail, the more people will buy, but I think at some point if you are not adding value I just think you got to listen to your audience and you’re going to get complacent. I mean if you mail it once a week there are going to be some people in your audience are going to think it’s too much, right?

[0:22:36.0] RV: That is a really good perspective. It doesn’t matter how much or how little you send like you are going to get complaints.

[0:22:42.0] MH: That is right but there is a point in which you reach critical mass where you are getting complaints from longtime customers and they saying, “Look, I love your stuff. I bought everything but you are killing me, you know, dial it back.” So I just subscribed to an email list about two weeks ago. The guy was literally mailing twice a day. Twice and sometimes three times a day and I just said, “Look, I love you but I don’t even see my kids three times a day” you know? So I don’t want to hear from you –

[0:23:10.8] RV: I’m sorry about all of those emails Michael. I didn’t realize there were three coming to you every day.

[0:23:18.1] MH: I just think if there is one guy that I never get tired of hearing from and maybe it is just me but it is Jeff Walker. Now Jeff mails a lot but he is so good with his copy that I almost always read them and I have never been tempted to unsubscribe but he is like the one exemption that probably proves the rule. You know unless you are super ninja copywriter, just be very careful

And I think one of the things that we’ve moved to in our business now is that we are sending out an email that has content that only appears in the newsletter but it is content driven not marketing driven and we feel like if we are adding value and I talk about this actually in my book Platform, I call it the 20 to one rule, which is pretty funny in retrospect because what I said is you got to make 20 deposits before you could make a withdrawal. Well today, I would probably say it is more like three to one. If you could make three deposits before you make an ask that is probably a good ratio but the point is you got to make more deposits than withdrawals otherwise, you over draw the account, does that make sense?

[0:24:21.8] RV: Yeah that is like the jab-jab-jab right hook, right? I guess that is like three to one but really it sounds like the rule is just listen to your audience and just respect the audience, listen, take their feedback. I mean that is another good one. That wasn’t on my list here to ask you but just like writing your own copy versus having someone else write your copy. When do you make that transition? How do you do that?

[0:24:48.6] MH: I think as a business owner or as a brand builder, you got to ask yourself what is the best and highest use of you? And so at the very beginning I did everything. You know, I wrote the sales pages, I edited the podcast, I posted it. I created all the content for the courses, everything, but at some point, I say, “Okay, what is the best and highest use of me?”

And in Free to Focus I talk about this being your desires on activities and the things that you are passionate about, things that you are particularly good at. So I don’t write any email copy. In fact this might be shocking but I don’t even review it today. What we have done is we trained a small group of writers to write in my voice, to kind of deconstruct how I speak. We literally have a written style guide on this, how I speak, things that I typically say, things I would never say, just the elements and style with regard to my voice and so yeah, where I spend my time these days is I am writing, every morning creating new content.

That is best and highest use of me. So at least for an hour a day I am writing 500 to 750 words a day and that becomes the pantry from which my team draws for all kinds of stuff, whether it be products or books or whatever.

[0:26:05.0] RV: How much do you read?

[0:26:07.0] MH: Less than I used to but still a fair amount. I read probably two or three books a month. The reason that I read less than I used to is because I listen to so many podcasts today and I find that unfortunately, this is the dirty little secret of publishing is that so many books should have been an essay and in order to give it enough bulk to be able to sell at retail they fill it up with a lot of filler.

And so the thing that I like about podcasts, not all podcasts, like some of the most popular podcast make me crazy because they take forever to get to the point. They just talk and talk and talk and they ramble and there is no takeaway but having said that, I generally can get out of a podcast content that really rocks my world much faster than I can most books. There is definitely some exemptions to that.

[0:27:00.2] RV: Okay, I know we are running up on our time here. I got one more question but before I do that, where should people go if they are not yet following you? If they want to follow you, htey want to catch up with Michael Hyatt and see how you’re doing, what you are doing in like the new era of the Michael Hyatt personal brand?

[0:27:18.6] MH: Yeah, well you can find everything at michaelhyatt.com. If you scroll all the way to the bottom of the page, you will find all of our other brands. So there is everything from our store there to the Full Focus Planner to the Business Accelerator Program, Leader Books which is our monthly book club for leaders. All of this stuff has links there and I would encourage people to listen to the podcast. That is still the thing that I think is the best effort that we make.

And in terms of branding and in terms of reach, I just think there is no return like what you get on the podcast and our podcast I do with my oldest daughter, Megan Hyatt-Miller who is our COO of our company and it is called Lead to Win. That is on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts but you can find the links on michaelhyatt.com.

[0:28:00.4] RV: Okay, so last one for you Michael. As you said, this is maybe going back to some of your earlier days certainly as a publisher, you had to turn down a lot of authors, you turned down a lot of dreamers. In recent years, it’s been more like you have been coaching them. And you have seen people trying to struggle and trying to battle the fight and then you comment to where today, it is like there is so much noise. There is a lot of competition in webinars and podcast and books and everything.

I think that there is a part of this these days that is just dealing with heartbreak and just dealing with some of that setback. What would be your advice is there is somebody out there that is just feeling like, “Oh my gosh, you know I can’t get a publisher. I can’t get an agent. No one is listening to my podcast. No one is reading my articles. No one is opening my emails.” What would you say to that person?

[0:28:50.5] MH: Congratulations, you’re normal. You know, I really think and I think this is important for people to hear. I think that’s in a way, God’s way of testing us to see if we are really committed to this thing that we said we are committed to. So my first book was rejected by 29 publishers before the 30th one said yes. I was ready to throw in the towel by my agent wouldn’t let me. My book Living Forward, which is about four books back was rejected by about the same number of publishers.

I already had a New York Times bestseller. I already had a huge platform and that book, nobody believed in it. Everybody rejected it. And now it’s gone on to sell about almost 200,000 copies. But nobody wanted to touch it for reasons I still don’t understand. I get that that gets discouraging and I almost gave up there too. I thought, “Geez, maybe there is a better use of my time, maybe God, the universe, whatever is trying to say something to me this isn’t the right timing or its the wrong message.”

And I think it is one of the most important books I have ever written, I am glad I persevered it. In fact, if it hadn’t been for Gail cheering me on I think I would have given up but I think that’s normal. And I think – I have bad days every week where I want to quit, you know? And for some reason, I just keep chugging along and trying to believe the best of what is happening but it is just normal. Rejection, the world doesn’t owe me a living and the marketplace doesn’t owe me anything.

And so it is up to me to create enough value that people can see it and want to participate in it. So I think the best advice I’ve ever gotten, the thing that I try to practice when I get discouraged is forget about the platform, forget about trying to write a bestseller, forget about trying to be famous. How can I help my clients? What are their needs? How can I encourage them? How can I be useful to them? And if you do that consistently enough I really think it would come back.

[0:30:50.8] RV: Amen. There you have words of wisdom from one of the most experienced people in several different aspects and components of the space. Michael, thank you so much for making time for all of us and for putting out as much amazing content as you do. I mean, your team is amazing, your family. We love you, we believe in you and we are honored to know you.

[0:31:13.4] MH: Thanks Rory, I appreciate you and AJ too.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

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Ep 21: How To Produce A Winning Infomercial with Kevin Harrington | Recap Episode

On today’s recap episode, we break down the core lessons and extract the golden nuggets from our interview with the original “shark,” Kevin Harrington. Kevin is a true American legend in the world of business, investing, marketing and sales. He is the original “shark” on the hit TV show Shark Tank, the creator of the […]

Ep 20: How To Produce A Winning Infomercial with Kevin Harrington

Speaker 1: (00:01)
I am so excited to introduce you to this is one of those people where it’s like if you ever sat next to him on the airplane, you would have hit the Jackpot and the lottery and you, you might not realize you were sitting next to. But Kevin Harrington is a man that people literally try to strategize how they can get close to, um, he has become a celebrity in the world of entrepreneurs and inventors. You probably recognize him. He was one of the original sharks, the original shark, the first shark. Uh, I believe that was selected to shark tank, which has now been super successful. He is also one of the founders of, of infomercials and as seen on TV, like he’s one of the pioneers of that whole movement. He actually is the cofounder of entrepreneurs organization, which my wife and I are members of.

Speaker 1: (00:50)
I’ve spoken at several of their events, um, around the, uh, around the globe, around the country in my case. But it’s an international organization. And, uh, he has seen over 50,000 pitches, um, launched more than 500 products, generating $5 billion in sales. Um, he also is the creator of the secrets of closing the sale masterclass, which is inspired by Zig Ziglar. So He, uh, Zig Ziglar wrote a book, secrets of closing the sale. It’s just been rereleased with him and Kevin Harrington. Um, obviously zig has been passed away for seven, eight years now, but a was a mentor to me personally and also, um, to Kevin. So Kevin, thanks for being here. Uh, thanks for making time, Rory. Thank you. Great. Great to be here and thanks. It was a very nice introduction. I appreciate that. Thank you. What man? Like, you know, it’s one thing to talk about personal branding and brand builders group.

Speaker 1: (01:46)
That’s what we do, right? We help people build and monetize their personal brand. But really what we study is reputation and reputation as is. How do you build a reputation, how do you become trusted? And of all the people that I know that know the most people, I think you’re near the top, like of, of every like super influential person that I know you already know them and I know that your Rolodex goes far, far beyond that. So, and yet, you know, you’ve been in the world of sales and marketing for years and years and years and sometimes reputations go south in those industries. Uh, when you’re an investor and an entrepreneur, you know, those, sometimes those deals go south. There’s a lot of conflict and there’s fallout and you know, when you get to be your level of celebrity and notoriety, I know that, you know, people sue you for no reason and you know, so what is your philosophy on reputation in general? Like if we just start there, like you have been able to keep such a solid reputation over the years, how do you think you’ve been able to do that? I appreciate that. I think, and I’m going to go all the way back to the beginning because

Speaker 2: (02:59)
I think you need a foundation of, um, of, first of all, I think my foundation that I built my business on is, is respect for entrepreneurs, number one. And so, um, when you watch shark tank, there’s Mr. Wonderful. Uh, and, and I, and I always ask people, do you know why he calls himself Mr Wonderful? Because nobody else will. Okay. He calls himself that because nobody else feels that he may be. Mr. Wonderful. And actually I joke this, this is all kind of joking about O’Leary, Kevin O’Leary, but we used to on the show, we’d say he was the bad Kevin. I’m the good Kevin now. Like why, you know, I’ll take that they, you know, I wasn’t the one that came up with that the rest of the sharks were and, and it’s because when somebody would come out and make a pit, I wasn’t there to tear them down and rip them apart and tell them how stupid their idea was.

Speaker 2: (04:02)
I wanted to empower them even if I wasn’t going to invest. Because entrepreneurs are in a delicate situation. They, they’re fighting against coming home to their family, to their wives, to friends and talking about how they’re giving up their job. They’re investing their life savings into their idea. This is not an easy task. This is, this is a tough situation and you know, to, to have a full time job but be spending money on patents and on this and on that and going on shark tank to try to get, you know, an investment from a shark. This is what it’s all about. And I think today there’s more places to go to get funding. You can do crowd funding and yeah, you can go on shark tank, but that’s very difficult to get on. But I think going back to day one, when I got started, I was knocking on doors when I was 15 years old driving a bicycle cause I didn’t even have a drivers license getting the door slammed in my face.

Speaker 2: (05:01)
And, and so I learned the hard way. I learned my father was a bartender, saved up enough money to open up his first bar, Harrington’s Irish pub. And I started working in his bars and restaurants when I was 11 years old, 40 hours a week. So I, I, you know, worked hard, had to prove myself, had to pay my own way through high school, through college. So I looked at entrepreneurs as people like myself. I was in the trenches building and hustling to become successful. So when they come to me now asking for help and advice, I put myself on their level saying, what would I have to do if I were in their shoes pitching me now the investor that is risen above the, the, the ashes sometimes because that’s, you know, in the 500 products plus that I’ve done more than 300 of them bombed and they lost all my money. So, uh, you know, it’s, it’s not so easy every day. And I, and I say Winston Churchill had, it’s a great Chang success is being able to go from failure to failure without the loss of enthusiasm. Okay. So, uh, you know, it took me awhile to figure out, hey, I just failed. I’ve got to learn from that and, and, and go to the next step. But that’s what I do.

Speaker 1: (06:28)
I’ve gotten to know you. Uh, you know, we spent a bit of time together here the last couple of years, which has been awesome. And I think when I look at you as an investor, as a shark, I remember thinking after the first time I spent, you know, like a full day with you, it occurred to me, yet you’re not a, you’re not a shark at all. I remember you saying that you, you don’t even try to negotiate for a good deal. You negotiate for a deal that’s good for you and for your other partner because your, I remember you saying that, you know, your philosophy was not, where can I get the best deal? It’s one where everybody has a fair deal and everyone is motivated, um, you know, to, to, to win. And that spoke a lot to me. It was a very profound thing where I was like, wow, what, what a different way to approach negotiating. And I think, you know, in terms of your reputation and you know, over time, I think that’s what people are probably drawn to because they know that you’re, you’re fair. You, you’re, you’re fair.

Speaker 2: (07:29)
And I think I appreciate that. I think, um, when I go back to the early days, I met a gentleman named Arnold Morris. At the Philadelphia home show and he was slicing through Coca-Cola cans with the Ginsu knife and mufflers and things. And I cut a deal with him and put him on TV. Now Arnold said to me, Kevin, um, and he had his signed contract for the good shoe and the, and the knife sales, but he said, I’ve got other people that this is amazing what we’re doing. If I bring you other deals, can I get compensated? I said, absolutely. We put an addendum to the contract. He brought Billy Mays and he brought Sandy Mason and Wally Nash of some of those you may recognize and some you might not, but we did hundreds of millions and billions in sales that came from these projects that Arnold Morris brought. But he got compensated on all of it.

Speaker 2: (08:23)
And so on his, literally his deathbed, the week that he was passing away, he kind of knew it was coming close and he reached out and his wife said, Arnold needs to talk to you. And I said, oh my God. And she says, Yap, he’s getting very close. She’s, he had a stroke and this and that. And she’s, and I said, well, what does he want to talk to me about? And I’m absolutely, I’d love to talk to him. She said, he’s got a deal. He wants to pitch you. Okay. I’m like, you know, here is, I mean this amazing because he had to get this last feel out of his system before he could pass. I mean it was unbelievable that the, the way it went down, but you know, Arnold was an amazing man, did great things for many people, but these insults, so people say to me, you know, how do you keep getting all these new products?

Speaker 2: (09:18)
I said, I’m getting these products from people I’ve been dealing with for 30 35 years in 2025 years, 10 and 15 years. And people I dealt with two months ago. So it’s, it’s the roll of decks factor. As you mentioned, Rory, this is what creates a lot of magic for all of us. As you know, I call it the Golden Rolodex. And this is part of becoming, you know, it as you’re branding yourself and you know, get back to the concept of personal branding and things. Creating a golden Rolodex is, is, is an important step in that process.

Speaker 1: (09:52)
Yeah. Well, and, and so one of the other things I wanted to ask you about just, you know, as I think about what can I ask Kevin that I can’t ask anyone else is you’ve sold more on TV than anybody. I mean, I don’t know anyone. It would be only a few people in the world that you could even say has been involved with selling as much on TV. So I’m interested

Speaker 2: (10:14)
a couple that are up there in the same ranks, but I, I know, I never want to say I’m the top guy because there’s some pretty successful guys out there, but I’m right there in the top five for sure on a global basis.

Speaker 1: (10:28)
Moved a lot of product on TV. So one, I’m interested in understanding TV, like in terms of, you know, a lot of people that are building a personal brand. TV is like this holy grail of like, oh my gosh, if I could get on TV, it’s like Tony Robbins is on TV and Dean Grasiozi is on TV. You know, like you said, like Billy Mays and, and all of these like people who become these celebrity workout people, they, they do infomercials. So one is how does that business work? Like how does that happen? How does someone get their clothing line on QVC? Or how do they get their, you know, Dean Grasiozi has a book, right? He does an infomart. Like how would a person go about doing that if they said, you know what, I think I’ve got a program I could sell on TV. Like how do you do that?

Speaker 2: (11:17)
So, so let’s, let’s, I’ll step back a second. Cause it, it’s there, there’s a couple of different angles there. You said, how do you get on QVC? How do you get on TV like infomercial? So two different scenarios. But the bottom line is this TV has been very powerful for many, many years. For me. I started back in the early eighties when I was watching a just got cable TV and I’m watching discovery channel. It was actually channel 30 of the 30 channel package. And so I went to all the channels, ESPN and 24 hours sports and movies and HBO and MTV Music. I got to ESPN sports, I think I mentioned. Um, I got to discovery channel and there was nothing on the channel. There was actually just bars on the screen. So I called the cable company and they said, we as a cable company delivered to you what we get from discovery and they only deliver us an 18 hour a day block.

Speaker 2: (12:17)
Six hours a day is nothing cause they’re a startup channel. They can’t program 24 hours a day. So I went down how to deal bought that six hour block from discovery, not only locally, but I did an international deal. And so for a number of years I had exclusive rights to discovery channel a six hours a day. Okay. Now I was putting in my, I was putting Tony Little Jacqueline Lane, George Foreman, you know, all these different types of products, fitness juicers, you know, kitchen gadgets, whatever, right? And so we had an amazing success for many years putting people on TV. But the way it works is this, there’s all this sort of like downtime with all the TV networks and cable networks. There’s only a handful of places that won’t sell infomercial time, CNN, and, and I think, let’s see, CNN and ESPN, those are the two that you will never see a 30 minute infomercial on.

Speaker 2: (13:20)
But Discovery Channel lifetime, all the other channels of Bravo, we buy tons of time from all of them. So what you do is you buy a block, a 30 minutes slot, maybe you pay 5,000 for it, two thousand ten thousand whatever the number is. In the early days I watched it isn’t maybe 2000 to 10,000 is that a reasonable number for, that’s for cable broadcast. You can buy, for example, in Nashville, Tennessee, you could buy 30 minutes on broadcast television. On Saturday morning, we’ll probably gave $100, right? 30 minutes on Nash on, on, uh, that would hit all of Nashville. Okay. I’m in Tampa, Florida. I can buy time here for as little as $500 for 30 minutes slot. And, and you can even go to cable. The cable guys have some of their own local cable options for even less, maybe $200. So, so now you, by that time you produce the video that sells the product and now that when that airs, it’s, it’s got to generate more than the cost of the time in sales to make money, obviously.

Speaker 2: (14:36)
So you mentioned Dean Grasiozi, he goes, he goes into Tampa, Florida and says to his media buyers buy $20,000 worth of ads. And he’s expecting, now he’s selling his book, but he’s also driving people to a seminar. So his is a little bit different. Hey, buy my book, come to the seminar there. You know, his liquidation comes when people show up at the seminar and he sees how much, you know, sales he’s making from there. But that’s, that is his model is buy infomercial time, drive people to a seminar, upsell them into masterminds. But the fitness people that you see, like the Tony Little’s, when we’re selling the gazelle, for example, we spend 10,000 and media, we want to sell 20 to $30,000 worth of puzzles during that slot. That’s, that’s how it works. You look for at least a two time multiple of sales to the cost of the media. So if you spend 10 grand the media, you want to see 20 plus thousand in sales coming from that time. By

Speaker 1: (15:48)
amazing though, I am all over the country. Now. When you say the media, is that like buying the commercials to promote the show or that’s just buying like the 30 minutes?

Speaker 2: (15:57)
That’s just fine. The 30 minute block, you don’t need commercials to promote an infomercial. It’s a standalone sales piece. So yeah. So Saturday morning, let’s say we, we bought that $800 slot in Nashville on a broadcast station on Saturday morning. People are up there just going from channel to channel to channel on their cable box or the TV and they, oh, wait a minute, let me see what this guy, Dean Grasiozi Phil was talking about. Oh yeah. Well that’s pretty interesting. So they tune in, they get hooked, and this is why you need a good pitch or you need a good presentation in that infomercial because you’ve got to be able to hook them, grab them, and now they’re listening and now they’re going to take action. Hopefully. So you bought that time for $800 in Nashville. You’re hoping to get 1600 to $2,400 in credit card orders from that time. Bye.

Speaker 1: (16:53)
That is so amazing. I mean, it’s so interesting to me because it’s like this is the original webinar funnel. It’s just like buy traffic, drive people to a a one hour Webinar, do a presentation, deliver some value, make an offer, get it to buy. It also blows my mind where he’d go, why are infomercials always late at night? The reason infomercials are always late at night is because one night Kevin Harrington was sitting in his hotel looking at the discovery channel and found out that there were six hours in the middle of the night that nobody else bought and you went and bought it and that that became the homicide. That was the downtime. So can you talk about the, the, um, talk about the pitch a little bit for like, because you know what, there’s, there’s a difference between like selling to a person. You know, in our former life that was something that we used to do.

Speaker 1: (17:44)
We used to teach people to, you know, our, the, our former company used to do like one-on-one sales coaching. That’s very different than selling on a Webinar or selling from a stage or selling on an infomercial where you’re selling one to many. Um, so what do you think are some of the key principles there? Because the other thing, particularly with TV is I have to think like people are flipping their coming and going, so they may not be sitting watching the 30 minute block. They may only be there for like two or three or five minutes. I mean so exactly how do you construct that? Like what? Let’s say you went and bought the $800 cause that’s reasonable. Yeah. So now I have $800 how much do I need to spend on producing the show? Like the 30 minutes and, and what, what I put in that 30 minutes that I can use to like, you know, market my, my book or my Info, my video course or my seminar.

Speaker 2: (18:41)
So great question. Now you have to understand that you’re, you’re, when we talk about producing the show, you’re not producing it just for that $800 by you’re producing it to build a media schedule that might be two three, 400,000 a week in media. That’s generating. See that’s if you’re, let’s say you’re spending 200,000 a week on $800 time slots like Nashville time slot, right? So now you’re, you’re running hundreds of spots that each one is monitored and needs to perform at a two to three to one ratio, sales to media costs. Okay. So, so you say upfront, Dean, I talked to Dean about his show that he did with Larry King for example. I said to Dean, how long did it take you to shoot that show? And he said, Kevin, he said, you won’t believe this, but I shot that show live in 30 minutes.

Speaker 2: (19:44)
And I said, what do you mean? He said, well, I sat down, I, you know, I, I, Larry King is a professional, he’s been doing interviews all his life. I’m a professional. We talked a little bit first before we rolled the whole day. I gave him a couple of questions if he wanted to ask, but we just went live and boom, we got it. He said, we did some more footage just to have some more, but I mean that was sort of a live to tape. Turn the cameras on and film it now he had to do editing because he had testimonials. So he had the one day shoot filming with Larry. Then he had testimonials, then he had editing, but then he also had one other big costs. What was it? A fee? The Larry King. Okay. So Larry King, he’s probably, and this isn’t coming from Dean, so I don’t want to make, I don’t want to say, oh, Dean told me this, but if I had to guess, Larry probably gets anywhere from 75,000 to 100 grand to shoot that show.

Speaker 2: (20:44)
Plus he gets a percentage of you show. So what do you note now? What did Dean’s spend? He shot one day at Larry’s office. He shot a dozen testimonials. He shot, he had to do the editing. You have to pay Larry some money. He probably spent all in somewhere between 150 and $200,000 to shoot that infomercial. And that was a pretty easy one to shoot. So, uh, but he, he knows that the credible Biddle credibility of Larry is going to take this thing to a pretty good point. And, and so he’s now crushing it. He’s, I mean, I’ve seen his schedules in my local market where he’s running on three simultaneously at the same time, at two o’clock in the morning. Now let’s see, what am I doing watching it two o’clock in the morning. I as a business, I’m in the business I have to tune in.

Speaker 2: (21:44)
But I get logs from monitoring services of when these are errands. So I don’t have to actually be there live at 2:00 AM. But I get along from a company that says, okay, dean ran his show 122 times last week and here’s where it ran. I can get that information so I know where he’s running about how much he’s spending. Cause I know what those slots are worth. So if I can do a report and say, okay, Dean ran 122 times, he spent 350,000 in media last week. Okay. I mean that tells sophisticated the industry is and, and by the way, this is how people then decide whether they’re going to knock somebody off. Okay. They, they cheat somebody out there running a lot of media. They know what’s working because it’s bringing in, nobody’s running 350,000 in media. If it isn’t bringing back a return on investment, you don’t mean you find out on 10,080 or whether it’s working, you don’t roll it out to three 50 unless you’re getting that return on investment. Uh Huh.

Speaker 1: (22:51)
So, and, and, and this is like, who are you? Oh, you said you’re, you’re either calling a media buyer and you know, at that scale, but if you’re doing local, you’re just going to go to your like local cable channel or like you just,

Speaker 2: (23:04)
yes. Yeah. I mean, so like it, it’s, it’s no problem. Me Or you like I could call my local Tampa TV stations, you can call your local national stations, whatever. Um, you know, we can, we can all make a couple of phone calls. It’s on the rollout when like when I said Dean’s doing three 50 a week. When we did the Gazelle with Tony Little, that was a over a million a week in media span, generating over 2 million in sales a week. But that was hundreds and hundreds of slots. If you’re spending $1 million at 8,000 for some 800 for others, somebody has to monitor that and they have to buy it. Then there’s a traffic department that it goes through because you’ve got to, you buy it, then you send the tape, you’ve got to have an 800 number that’s tagged to that specific station so that when the sales come in, you know what 800 numbers tracked to that station. There’s all kinds of things happening behind the scenes, so there are media agencies that are in the business of buying media to the tune of if it’s 300,000 a week, 500,000 a week, $1 million a week, whatever it may be. Right? So that’s the important thing.

Speaker 1: (24:24)
The essence is really fascinating. I, I’ve never understood like the monetary, but even even going, okay at two to one ad spend, basically on revenue. You could do the same thing with Google ads or Facebook ads and you know, whatever is say, okay if I’m going to, I’m going to put $50 in in terms of Facebook ads, I need to make sure that $100 comes out before I go and spend 10 grand on Facebook ads. And so you’re looking for a two to one to three to one ratio. Um, so what about the content itself? Okay, so what needs to happen in that 30 minutes? Because again, I don’t the medium of that different, I mean it did TV. Yeah, maybe it’s not TV, maybe it’s a Webinar, maybe it’s on stage, but like what goes into the content?

Speaker 2: (25:08)
So, so now in the old days, and I, and I, cause there have been a few changes in the industry for 35 years. Infomercials worked pretty well, but there’s been a little bit of a disruption because there’s a lot of people that have cut the cord from cable and aren’t, you know, aren’t watching TV. There’s been a decline in DVD viewership has been pretty substantial. It’s a 50% decline in TV viewership in the last 10 years. And so the question is, where did these viewers go? Well, you just mentioned it. Facebook, Instagram, they’re, they’d gone to digital outlets, right? Google, youtube, et cetera. So, so now [inaudible] and there’s also another issue. 30 minutes is, is a long time. And let me explain the structure of a 30 minute show. There’s three 10 minute pods in a 30 minute show. Each one of the pods has a three step selling system that I’m going to call the teas, the please and the seeds all within each 10 minutes he’s police sees he’s police sees these please seat you, tease them with an attention getting problem. You please them with solutions to the problem, benefits to the product or service, magical transformations, some kind of demonstration maybe. But magical transformation is a very powerful please. You see a before and an after, right? And then you see like by having a irresistible offer, so t’s with attention getting problem please by solving the problem with magical transformations and cs creating an irresistible offer. And you do that three times in each 10 minute segment of the 30 minute show. So that’s kind of the blueprint for producing an infomercial.

Speaker 1: (27:07)
Wow, I love that. And so it’s really just a 10 minute it really, all you’re doing is creating a 10 minute and then you’re just repeating

Speaker 2: (27:14)
the same. You don’t actually, you, there are some people that actually just do one 10 minute repeated three times. I don’t like to do that because if people sense that, but the formula, yeah, so I mean what we’ll do is you can tease please and seeds, but you just use different testimonials and you know, it might be the, it’s going to be the same seeds, the same irresistible offer in all three closes, but you don’t necessarily have the same content teasing and pleasing along the way.

Speaker 1: (27:49)
Wow. That is so interesting. I mean, that’s such a simple process, but it also very sophisticated in terms of knowing the, knowing the dollars in which markets are producing. And, and it just, it blows my mind though, how like this is, even though people might not say it, this was the genesis of webinar funnels a and video. Any, you know, any, any modality of selling on camera? Like this was where that started.

Speaker 2: (28:16)
I’m going to give you a good example of something that we learned quite a bit on. Uh, a guy came in my office one day to do a, he had a fishing lure and he’d been watching Tony Little and George Foreman and Jacqueline Lane and all these great things we’re doing. And he, he puts this lawyer in front of me. He says, Hey, this is the most amazing lure you’re gonna want to do this. And I said, why is it so amazing? And he said, I have a pad and said, all the words hit the water drop straight down. Mine hits the water and it’s reverse rig to swim away like a wounded fish. And so I said, I’d love to see that in operation. We went out and showed how it was swimming away and fish were attacking this floor. We had this big hog draw, 20 foot long fish paint that we cast the lure in and saw some amazing demonstrations, catching fish that lures, we’re going straight down regular lawyers dish when just watching them drop, the flying lore went in and they’re chasing it around and biting it and catching fish.

Speaker 2: (29:14)
So, um, when we first tested the show, we ran on a lot of cable networks and the media buyers called back and said, the show didn’t work. I don’t think fishing’s going to be a good category. Um, it’s not successful. And I said, let me get some demographics. I want to see where the orders came from. You know, fishing is, you know, may be, it’s not some universal, we found La and New York, it didn’t have any traction, but in Missouri, in Ohio and Michigan and various areas where there was lakes, it was crushing it. So people aren’t in New York City going out and fishing every weekend. But in Kansas City, they would love to go fishing on the weekends, the lakes and places around. So now we stopped running cable. We went back in. So our cable for, you know, 10 grand in media is generating 5,000 in sales.

Speaker 2: (30:09)
But when we went and targeted local markets like Nashville, Cincinnati, Duluth, Minnesota, we were doing five to one on our buys because we were crushing it in these local markets. So we decided we’ve got to stay away from the coastal communities. This is not fishing lore because first of all, this young lords are generally kind of fresh water and, and, and in the, in, in New York and La, they’re on the ocean. We don’t even have a product yet for that. But in the central parts of the United States, we crushed it. This product went on to do 500 million lures at a dollar a piece, 20 to a pack, 20 bucks for 20 lures, $500 million in sales because we tracked it and focused on buying time where it works.

Speaker 1: (31:02)
Wow. Um, Kevin, I could talk to you all day about lots of stuff. Uh, we are out of time. Uh, where did, should people go? I know you have, you know, the secrets of closing the sale book was Zig Ziglar just came out. Uh, you have your secrets of closing the sale master class, which, you know, maybe we’ll put a link to or we’ll, you know, we’ll audience when you open that class up where else, but where should people go to connect with you and you know, if they want to stay in touch.

Speaker 2: (31:28)
Yeah. My, my website’s a great place because we have some free reports and some free books and chapters and things. It’s Kevin Harrington. Dot. TV and Harrington spelled h a. R. R. I. N. G. T. O. N. So Kevin Harrington. Dot. TV is my website and I’m got a lot of good content there and you can see some videos and see some things we’ve done over the years. But we also, I’m actively still looking for great products, great relationships. I sit on several, uh, board of directors of public companies and, um, I love doing that and, and helping, uh, you know, I invest money, I help raise money. Definitely am available for, for entrepreneurs looking to take their business, their idea, their service to the next level. It’s a good place to start. Kevin Harrington. Dot. TV.

Speaker 1: (32:20)
I love it. So last little thing. At some point in your journey, uh, you must’ve bumped up against some walls. I, I know that it’s been several times, right? Uh, and it’s, uh, it’s a long way between the guy who was on shark tank and you know, that kid that was knocking on doors and there were gotta be several setbacks. And, and my guess is there’s somebody listening

Speaker 2: (32:40)
right now who is trying to build a reputation either as an entrepreneur or an influencer, and they’re probably in one of those darker times. What would you, what would you say to that person right now? So it’s a great question. 25 years ago, I was sitting with $100 million business. We’re doing 2 million a week in sales. We had 10 products. And one day I was thought I was on top of the world, walked into my office on a Monday morning and my CFO said, I got terrible news. The bank just grabbed $2 million out of our account to apply as a reserve against future returns and chargebacks. Um, and, and I said they allowed to do that and said in the contract they have every right to increase the reserve and just grabbed the money out of our account. Okay. I’m like, wow, I can’t believe that actually signed that.

Speaker 2: (33:33)
But when you get those big thick documents, when you get a merchant account somewhere in there, it, you know, they basically tell you no more and grab the monies that are coming through for processing. And so we were technically out of business at that point. I went from, you know, being the king of, of infomercials, you know, to potentially being at the bottom of the barrel. And because that 2 million was my working capital, I didn’t have 10 million sitting in the bank. Okay. I was a young entrepreneur. I had, that was my cashflow. That was my payroll. That was my media dollars, my inventory dollars. Basically, we couldn’t make payroll that week then. And the bank, you know, whether they knew what they were doing or not, they didn’t care at the time. Now we figured out a way to get around some of this. We, we, we, we, we, we pulled a lot of great advisors to the table because they technically put us out of business and it was a very demoralizing time of my life and we had to do some massive things, you know, to make that all happen and save the company.

Speaker 2: (34:39)
But we ended up pulling out of it, coming out smelling like a rose. But the only thing I can say is this, is that I all my life, um, have looked to mentors and folks to be part of my team. And because in the early, early days, I tried to do it all myself. I realized I can’t do it all with Michelle. I, I’m not the operations guy, the finance guy, the guru of finance. But I brought in Gurus of finance. So, um, one of my guys went up against the bank and knew how to kind of get them to come to the table. We ended up getting 1.6 million of that 2 million back. So we did give him 400,000 but we saved the day, got some money back. We’re eight, but took 30 days to pull all this off. So, uh, the bottom line is, is that this is kind of what I do now for entrepreneurs.

Speaker 2: (35:37)
I’m a mentor, I’m a coach, I’m a consultant, I’m an advisor, I joined boards, I joined advisory boards that the right kind of opportunities. I’m out there looking for great companies to be an advisor to because sometimes I’ve seen people make the same mistakes with things that I was confronted with in the past. And I can show people, entrepreneurs how to deal with these things without letting it take you down. So bottom line is you, you’re not, you know, Kinda need to know that there’s a good group of people out there that may be available for you to be mentors in your business. And I, you know, just like I started off talking about how Zig Ziglar was a mentor to you, Rory, to me. Um, absolutely. I’ve had Richard Branson helped me with some digital things. At one point, I went to Necker island, hung out with him for a couple of days. My father mentored me. Mark Burnett mentors me. Yes, I’m, I’m a successful entrepreneur. I’m an original shark from shark tank, but I’m a product of many other mentors that have helped me become what I am. And I think that’s, uh, I’m the first to say that I couldn’t have done it all my on my own. And I, and I, I look to outside resources to help me manage my entities and my businesses and hopefully folks that are out there can, can learn from that too.

Speaker 1: (37:03)
I love that. That is so cool. I think, uh, that’s been the big surprise for a j and I with brand builders group. It’s turned into such a community of people supporting each other and getting to learn from people like you. It’s just incredible. So thank you for your inspiration and your story and your friendship and, uh, we wish you the best.

Speaker 2: (37:23)
You Bet. Take care of buddy. Good being here today. Thanks.

Ep 19: Managing the Beast That is Social Media and Making it Work for You with Jon Acuff | Recap Episode

RV: (00:00) Hey, welcome to this special recap edition of the influential personal brand. We’re breaking down the interview today with our longtime friend, Dan Miller, who I absolutely just love. I just love his energy, him and Joanne are awesome. And we met them on a cruise a few years ago and I’ve just been, been friends. So we got your top three takeaways from AJ and from me. So, get us going. AJV: (00:32) Yeah, I think the first thing he said this like really close to the beginning of the interview and I loved it. And he said if somebody or three different people ask me the same question more than three times, I’ll just make a product for it. I think the whole concept of what should I make a product about or where do I find content is really simply answered when you just figure out what do people already come to you for? And so instead of repeating the exact same thing over and over and over again, why not turn it into a product, a course or a video series or a book or a coaching program or certification or all the things that he has done and is doing really, he said most of that comes from just, you know, if I get asked the same question more than three times, then I really consider turning that into a product. RV: (01:24) Yep. I love that. I was one of my takeaways too, is just, you know, the power of listening to your audience. And I think one of the, one of the techniques or strategies that you can use is to ask your audience. So in his case, he’s just listening. But the other thing you can do, like if you need content ideas or you need product ideas, or if you need copy for like your sales page, send a survey to your audience, ask them some questions about what they want and what they’re struggling with, and then take their words that they write back to you and use some of their language in CRE in actually marketing what you’re doing and create a product for them. So that was one of my takeaways too. I just love that. It’s such a simple, a simple, practical, actionable thing that any of us can do, you know, right away. So that was good. So what was your second one AJV: (02:17) Second one was this concept of not doing the new and trendy thing that everyone is doing. And he said, I’ll try to recap it here. He said, but I, I resist the temptation to do every single new and trendy thing that is out there. And he talked about, he said, could I be missing out on lots of money? Maybe do I care? Not really. And I think that’s really just really powerful. It’s like, if what you’re doing is working, why would you derail? What’s working to do just what everyone else is doing. That’s new and trendy. And one of the things that I thought was really insightful and something that you don’t hear a lot about, he said, now I’m not saying anything is wrong with funnels or webinars or with anything he said, but you hear all these people all over social media promoting, I made six figures, seven figures in this launch. AJV: (03:10) He said, what you don’t hear about is how much money they had to give back and refunds. And I thought that was really interesting because you hear a ton of people. You see a ton of ads. It’s like how I made six figures in this funnel, or there’s this one out. And I don’t, I won’t say what it’s called, but it’s how do you have a seven figure funnel? And then he talks about how he came up with this whole thing. And yeah, probably you could do that. I’m sure people are doing that all the time every day. And Dan said, but what you don’t hear about is how much of that they’re actually giving back in refunds because a buyer’s remorse or they didn’t get what they thought it was, or it was a little bit misleading or a little bit of a bait and switch. And I’m not saying everyone is but I do think there’s some accuracy in the fact that you hear a lot of the revenue promoted and that a lot of the backend of what was it even profitable and how much did you actually give back and refunds? And I thought that was just very insightful. RV: (04:09) Yeah. I mean, you got the refunds, you also have affiliate fees and, you know, Facebook ads and paying your graphic designer. And, you know, at the end of the day, it’s like, how, how much do you really keep in? Which is but I think his thing into your point is more about the reputation and like the, AJV: (04:26) Oh yeah, no, I love when he said, he said it, he said, I’m way more about building a consistent audience than having huge infusions of cash said, I’m way more about the consistency time, over time, over time, that will last me 20 years than I am about this one time, big infusion of of cash. And everyone is different. Perhaps you are someone who’s looking for that big infusion of cash and like go for it, do it. But I loved what he said. It’s about playing the long game and making this a, a true, a true business versus this one time push. RV: (05:00) Yeah. So for me, the other thing that I thought was fascinating you know, we teach something to our brand new members that we call the fast cash formula, which is how do you, if you need to make money quickly. And we talk about how coaching a lot of times is the fastest way. If you need to replace an income is to offer coaching. And when he was telling his story, that was how he started. And still to this day, he does one day a month of one-on-one coaching work. And I love that because he was a real life example of what we talk about that, you know, coaching is the fastest path to cash in terms of replacing a large you know, income need, but it’s the least scalable longterm. And, and yet, so he sort of toward the story about how he started with that. RV: (05:51) And then after he had done enough coaching, he created a course for the people who couldn’t afford coaching. And, and so he was teaching this course and then people invited him to come speak because there were people seeing him teach the course. And that, you know, basically out of that coaching work came his content which became also his business model. And I just think that’s a really great way to do it is to do the work, to kind of get your hands in there. And obviously we love coaching. We, we believe in coaching in the power of one-on-one and I just, I just thought that was really encouraging. And, and, you know, he, he does have multiple streams of income, but it’s been developed over years and it’s, it really started from one great body of work, you know, that he flushed out with coaching and real life scenarios then applied it to a course, you know, then applied it to live events and speaking. So I thought that was just a great, a great example. AJV: (06:51) Yeah. There’s a great evolution of evolution. That’s a great one. And I think that’s somewhat similar to my third and final point, which is which I thought is very indicative of what you hear a lot. But yet there’s this mystery around it. He said, but I don’t count on any income from my books. And, you know, in his book is super successful and has been out there, just did a 20 year edition, right? 20Th year, RV: (07:18) 20Th or 25th. AJV: (07:20) Yeah. But a long time, right on. He said, but here’s what I have found. He said, it’s not the book itself that makes all the income, it’s the actual content within the book. So the book is the calling card. It’s the credibility source. Then not to say that you won’t make income. He just doesn’t count on that in his forecast or his budget. But it’s the content of that book that he then takes that and turns it into all these different curriculums. It’s a coaching curriculum. It’s a certification curriculum. It’s a course, it’s a video series, it’s a live event. It’s all these different things that are all circulated around the content of the book. And the book is at the center, but probably isn’t, what’s bringing in the most income for him. However, from that, there is just this entire huge circle of all these things that are moving to make this very successful, a very healthy business, even though most of the income is not from the center of it, which is the book it’s from all these other ancillary income streams that have become his primary revenue. RV: (08:27) Yeah. That’s good, good perspective on the book. For me, my third takeaway, which he talked a little bit about, but it’s more of, of what we know about him and Joanne behind the scenes. And I don’t know that he said this directly, but every time I’m with Dan and Joanne, it always occurs to me how they build their life or, or they build work around their life. They don’t build their life around their work. And so it’s, it’s one of the great possibilities of a personal brand is to be able to like fit work in and around your life. And it’s hard to do cause when you’re an entrepreneur, especially early on, it’s like a lot of times, you know, we’re kind of his life, but you, you want to get out of that and you can get out of that. And AJV: (09:14) I think that goes to a lot of what he talked about, where he resists the temptation to do all of the new and trendy things. Because, well, for what reason, it’s like, are you living to work? Are you working to live? And he talked a lot about his time and his schedule, but I think that is a part of it is resisting the temptation to do. RV: (09:34) Yeah. And I, and I hope for you, like, w w I wonder, I would bet if we could take all the podcast listeners and ask if you’ve heard of Dan Miller, I bet less than half of you have actually heard of him. You’ve probably heard of some of our other guests yet. He has one of the biggest businesses of everyone we’ve ever had on the podcast. And, and his example speaks to the power of steady consistency and just trust and playing the long game and plodding along. He’s the tortoise man. That’s a, that’s such a great that’s a great metaphor. And, and, and we mean that AJV: (10:14) It was his, he said, he said, I’m the tortoise. RV: (10:18) Yeah. That’s. And, and that is, you know, and we say that in the most honoring way, AJV: (10:23) He said it so we can say it. RV: (10:26) But even to that extent, it doesn’t mean you have to be slow. It’s just, it’s the idea of consistency. You don’t have to be the person with a million followers. And, and you know, this, these huge extravagant launches and given away cars, and like, you can do those things like, but, but you don’t have to be that person in order to be successful. Like you can just do the right thing for a really long time, and it will work out like you can’t fail if you just pour back into people’s lives. So I’m as encouraged by that. AJV: (11:01) Yeah. Well, I think it just, in general, there are a million different ways to build your personal brand. And Dan gives a one, one really great perspective of how to do it. And there are many other different perspectives that you will hear from other guests, but to what Roy is saying, it’s like, it’s, it’s all about. And what we talk about a lot, it’s playing the long game and Dan is a great example of the long game. RV: (11:26) Yeah. So there you have it. So hopefully you’re playing the long game and you’ll keep coming back here. We’re going to keep working to provide amazing guests for you and hopefully useful insights. We’re so glad that you’re here. We’ll catch you next time on the influential personal brand.

Ep 18: Managing the Beast That is Social Media and Making it Work for You with Jon Acuff

Speaker 1: (00:00)
So excited to introduce you to I feel like, I mean I’m known for a long time now and I feel like John Acuff and I met kind of when we were both like semi on the rise, just kind of starting out our careers and it’s been amazing to just watch him build a huge platform, a huge following and a fantastic speaking career. He is one of the most dynamic and hilarious presenters that you’ll ever see and I especially feel like in recent years he’s, he’s also, you know, added a level of content that is really, really top notch and it’s just, it shows in every way. And I’m jealous of him because he’s so fricking funny and it’s unfair and there’s not anything he can do about that, but he doesn’t do a lot of this stuff. I called it in a personal favor to him and I said, man, would you come and just sort of like share the story of how John Acuff became Johnny cuffs. So brother, thanks for being here.

Speaker 1: (01:00)
Yeah, thanks for having me Rory. I’m looking forward to it.

Speaker 2: (01:03)
So buddy our new Gig is reputation, right? So we’re, we study reputation, we look at what creates reputation. So just like off, you know, off the top of your head, what is your definition of reputation? What are your philosophies about how to build a rock solid one? Are there, is there anything like just just free flow on that concept for a little bit and what do you think of when you hear that word?

Speaker 1: (01:28)
Yeah, I think I think it was John Morgan who said, your brand, your reputation is a story other people tell about you. It’s not always just the story you tell. And so I think there’s a combination of those two. So I think there’s understanding, okay, where do I fit in a space? You already brought up humor for me. I realized a few years ago that humor was a differentiator for me in our space. Like you and I are in the same space and there’s a lot of people that are amazing at research and there’s a lot of people that are like super intense and they’re gonna swear and like, and there’s a lot of people that do a lot of different things, but I realize there’s not a lot of people that are genuinely funny. They might use humor as like a, you know, like a hammer in a speech, like a tool, but they, they don’t use it.

Speaker 1: (02:16)
They don’t thread it throughout. They’re not studying it. And so I said, okay, I want part of my reputation to include humor. Like, so I think I look at reputation. I go, okay, what are the two to three words you’re going to own? Or the two to three elements you’re going to say when people think of me like, this is going to fit in my reputation. My favorite idea kind of about reputation. When I worked for Home Depot, I was, before I started my own company I spent time in a lot of big corporate brands and brands that had spent years and millions and billions of dollars building their own reputations. I remember somebody at Home Depot said, you’ve gotta do the thumb test. And I said, what’s that? And they said, can you put your thumb on over the logo? And it still feel like it’s something from us.

Speaker 1: (03:03)
So a great example of that is you put your thumb over a Nike swoosh mark on any ad. They do a print piece, digital piece, whatever the rest of it screams Nike. The headline does the runner, like they had a photo of a runner throwing up and the copy and every element speaks to it. So I think a reputation like that, you’ve gotta be able to put your foam over elements and go, it’s still me. It still has my feel and I’ve been deliberate to go, here’s what I care about. Here’s where there’s a hole in space and here’s where I can kind of combine all of that. That’s what I think about with reputation.

Speaker 2: (03:37)
I love that. I’ve never, I’ve never heard that before. The thumb test. I think that’s super, super cool. So, so take us back to the beginning. Okay. So you talked about being corporate and you left.

Speaker 1: (03:49)
How did this all start

Speaker 2: (03:51)
For you? And, and what did that look like, like, and, and how did you make money early on? Cause I think that’s one thing, like if I remember right, you know, you started to build a pretty good following with like stuff Christians like pretty much right away. But there’s a big difference between, you know, like we say a lot of times there’s a lot of people that are Twitter rich and dollar broke. Like you can have a big following and not make money. So like how did you get started with like building the following and then also how did you finance your way there?

Speaker 1: (04:21)
Yes. I mean the following good start. 2008, I had a blog called stuff Christians. Like that was a satire of kind of faith, which again, I saw market and I was like, nobody’s really having that conversation. Like very few people have been like, I’m not a Christian, but Christians are whole areas. Like there’s not a lot of words we assigned to Christians, but like hilarious is not usually one of them. And I’m a pastor’s kid, so I grew up in the church and I was like, well, I think there’s a niche there. So I started this site. I started to get a following and get a following. I mean, the very first way I had money tied to that was I got a book deal. Zondervan published the stuff, Christians like book. And at the time it felt like $1 million. I got paid $30,000 in an advance. Which you go, oh my gosh, it’s amazing. And people would go, are you going to quit your job? And what was funny is after agent after taxes, after everything, I got like 13 grand. And if somebody who worked with one a $13,000 lottery, you wouldn’t be like,

Speaker 2: (05:19)
Yes, you’re moving to Mexico,

Speaker 1: (05:22)
Dan cone. And so like that was the first, and then from there I started out people say, Hey, do you want to come speak at our event? Come speak at our conference. And so that was where this world started opening up of wow, there’s all these opportunities and if I’m willing to invest in them, if I’m willing to be brave, if I’m willing to be creative while maintaining my reputation. Like that’s where it’s key. Like you can’t, like you have to know this is what I’m willing to do, this is what I’m not. For instance, I’m not willing to grow my Instagram account using cheesy quotes that I know that I know they didn’t say like I know that you know what’s an example? Like I know Michelangelo didn’t say that cause it sounds exactly like Pinterest and that’s not how a 14th century Italian painter spoke.

Speaker 1: (06:09)
And so like you have to go, okay, this fits my reputation, this is worth it. But you also have to be brave enough to kind of step out of your comfort zone because you don’t get to grow or expand unless you go, okay, I’m gonna try this. And so for me it’s been this process of going, okay, here’s what I’m doing. Well, how do I get a little uncomfortable and grow it a little bit and say, okay, people are interested in my book recommendations. I’m going to do that as an affiliate, not just do that. Okay, well what does that look like? Or here’s somebody I could partner with. Like I don’t do a lot of these, but I do ones with friends that I think do awesome stuff. So when you’re like, Hey, I’m doing this thing, like that was an easy yes for me because you’ve been incredibly generous to me.

Speaker 1: (06:50)
And so I think a big part of it is going, here’s who I’m aligned with, here’s what I want to do. But really the money started with a publishing deal. I started public speaking. I was never great at doing ads on my blog. Like I just wasn’t good at monetizing that. I wasn’t interested in monetizing it. The money, like there’s other blogs that had a great run at that. It just wasn’t what I was interested in. So I think you have to kind of figure out these are the faucets I care about and I’m going to try this one and I’m going to be patient with it and I’m going to be interested in it and see, you know where it goes from here. Okay.

Speaker 2: (07:25)
Yeah I love that. It’s interesting, you know one of the concepts that we talk about is she hands wall and people you know are more likely to break through the wall by being known for one thing and then once you break through the wall then you can expand and do lots of other stuff. And I’ve never thought about you as an example of that but it occurred to me in this conversation, gosh that really was because stuff Christians like was huge. Like if you were a Christian at that time and you were online like you knew about it and that led to your first book deal. Is Your Business model today still like primarily speaking and books? Is that like primarily and I’ve tried a bunch of different

Speaker 1: (08:02)
Thanks. I tried courses. And I have a lot of friends that they do really well with courses and they’re great at those. But for me I didn’t, I didn’t love doing them as much as I want it to. And I love public speaking. I can’t believe I get to do it for a living. I can’t believe I get to stand on a stage. What I do best is share ideas that inspire action. And so public speaking is so much fun for me on that. So yeah, primarily I’ll do consulting. So there’ll be a client that’ll say, hey, we want to put you on retainer and we’re going to have a one year contract and we want you to come in. Like, what I’m really good at is kind of being an idea swat team. So a company will say, we’re stuck on this thing.

Speaker 1: (08:43)
We want you to, you know, swing through the window, give us 150 ideas and then swing out. Or they’ll say, hey, we want you to talk and go to these nine meetings of groups you might not have met yet and give them ideas. And so like I consider myself kind of a, an idea merchant where I’m able to say, hey, here’s something you should try. And so yeah, I would say consulting as part of it. I’m starting to do coaching single session coaching because you know, if, if you think about my fee for speaking to a thousand people and I can do a portion of that just one-on-one, then I feel like I’ve extended value. And then there’s been times where I’ve paid for a single session coaching. It’s been wildly helpful. Or then just going, hey, I learned something that costs me x amount of dollars over a 10 year period that I can tell you in 10 minutes and it’ll change your whole perspective about your speaking business, your career transition, your publishing.

Speaker 1: (09:36)
So yeah, I think for what we do, and like I’m in the reputation business, you’re always saying, here’s my four main things and here’s another thing I’m adding. Here’s something else I’m adding. And it takes time. It’s people come up to me and go, hey, I want to do what you do. And I have to say, well, it’s taking me like a Levon years on top of a 15 year marketing career. Like it’s taken me a long time to go. And I was, I was trained as a copywriter. I W I majored in advertising. And so when somebody says you’re good at headlines, I go, well it’s just cause I’ve been doing it like I graduated in 98 so I’ve been doing headlines for 21 years and I think of a lot of this as headlines. It’s not that I was I was a farmer and then decided I’m going to. So I think I try to paint a realistic picture of like, I think great stuff takes great time.

Speaker 2: (10:26)
So let’s talk about the time a little bit. Particularly with your social following. That is something that like you just built, I feel like you’ve had a net natural strength for just building a huge social media following and it’s something you’ve done for consistent for a long period of time. What is your, like just again, like your philosophy, your attitude towards social, like you use that example of what you won’t post. How do you, how do you think about social media in general and then do you delineate how you use it? Like between channels? And you know, just like anything you could share of just like the way that you approach it as cause you’re not making money from that. It’s like you’re making money from books and from speaking and then maybe consulting and coaching. But like,

Speaker 1: (11:16)
Well I, I’m still making like you can still do like affiliate stuff like Instagram with swipe up with stories. That’s a whole other or sponsorships. And I’m just, I’m just kind of on the edges of that so I don’t consider myself an expert there. But an example of that, I originally hired a social media intern because I had kind of a convicting moment where I spoke to a company, 1300 people sales team. It was awesome. I loved speaking of sales teams. I mean, cause you get that like they’re already in motion. You don’t have to convince them to get emotion and their emotion. And I stepped off stage and this woman said, I love following you on Instagram. You’re one of our favorite falls. You’re funny. And then she said, I didn’t even know you wrote a book and I’ve written six books.

Speaker 1: (11:57)
So that’s a huge reflection of reputation failure on my part because what it means is she’s been along for the ride for who knows how long and I haven’t been clear enough or obvious enough or consistent enough about doing a book. And then she said, you are our favorite Insta Dad, which is not the reputation I’m trying to build. Like, and so I talked to my 15 year old daughter and I was like, am I good at Instagram? And she was like, you use it like an old man. And so I hired for the summer to help me with some things and now I just hired a social media intern and so we came up with, okay, here’s the categories of photos we’re going to post, we’re going to post funny, we’re going to coast encouraging, we’re going to post like interaction. Okay. So the goal of this is to generate interactions.

Speaker 1: (12:43)
So for instance, somebody did this photo where it showed 15 different styles of like roasted marshmallow and now like at that to me does it like nobody’s going to go, you’re so wise. Thanks for sharing the roasted marshmallow. But they will interact on that and I’ll get to engage with people. So when I say which one are you, it starts conversation and that’s an interaction post where if I show a speaking clip, I know I would say 80% of the clients that booked me to speak will say, I followed you online or we checked out your socials or we look. So if they’re looking there and I haven’t put any clips of speaking, I haven’t done my job like they don’t like, why would you book me? If you come into my Instagram account and all you see are like 50 funny caiso jokes, like that’s fine if I’m just wanted to be my personal account but it’s also my business account and that’s kind of the balance I try to strike.

Speaker 1: (13:35)
So I also realized I hadn’t put up a picture of myself on there in like three months and that wasn’t out of humility. It was out of like the fear of like, I’m like I’m an introvert, extrovert. Like so there’s this tension there. And so I knew like I have to be deliberate to go like, hey here I am or here I am with a friend. Like, cause when people go to your account, they want to see you, they want to know you. And so I’m learning how to be really deliberate with that. Twitter I go, you know what? It doesn’t have like, it’s an Instagram post is a, is something I want to be deliberate about. The story is less off the cuff. It’s, it disappears. Like it’s more casual. Twitter’s more casual too because there’s a thousand tweets going. Facebook, I kind of consider like Instagram a Mulligan a posted.

Speaker 1: (14:20)
They’re deliberately, the thing I’m loving lately is linkedin. Like I think linkedin is amazing. Like it’s always been kind of the one people think about last. But when you’re trying to do something business related, I mean I, my, my last book a fit or the one before my last book do over was a career book. I should be Joe Linkedin. Like why am I not being more deliberate? So I think part of it is going, which of these platforms I don’t do much on Pinterest because it’s not, it doesn’t completely overlap with what I’m doing. But I look at it and go, I think Instagram matters a lot right now. It kind of feels like the king. I think linkedin for a certain verticals is really important. You Go, okay, what am I going to put on Linkedin? And then Twitter. Twitter feels really angry right now.

Speaker 1: (15:03)
Like to me, like a lot of it feels really angry. So I’m kind of trying to be deliberate about, I don’t want to get sucked in too much. I want to create content, but like man, it’s just, especially as we head to an election year, like it’s gonna be crazy town. Right? And so I would say it’s fluid, but the more I can say these are the six buckets I always try to fill, the more deliberate. I think the hard hard part is when you’ve got a passion, you turn into a reputation. It’s hard to then put systems on top of it. And systems, especially if it’s like a passion system sometimes feel like they’re restricting passion. They’re not like they’re expanding it. Like the best systems give such life to, to real passion. And so I’m now going, I’ve been doing this for 10 years, 12 years, whatever.

Speaker 1: (15:50)
What are the systems I need to make sure I’m really creating good content? And not only that, reusing content, 1% of people saw like one of the things that’s kind of a weakness of mine is the minute after an idea has been shared. It’s a thousand years old in my head. Like the minute. And then like, it’s not like there’s so much fear and ego wrapped up in that like narcissism, like everybody saw it and remembers it like, are you kidding me? Like, no, they don’t. They’re doing their own life and like if it’s good, it’s good to bring it back up and say, hey, here’s this thing. Another thing was how are you serving people? I took ’em a look at my top 15 most popular Instagram posts in the last year based on engagement. 12 of the 15 were screenshots of tweets, screenshots of tweets, 12 of my 15 where my most popular on a photo image based site.

Speaker 1: (16:42)
Why I’m a better writer than I am a photographer, so if that’s what the people are responding to, I’m not going to feel shame that I don’t have dope photos. I’m going to use deliberate tweets more often because people have gone, that’s what we come here for. That’s what we really like where some people go, you’re not used an Instagram the right way. It should only be photos like no, like you worry about that on your end. I’m going to crush it on my end. We’ll be fine. Hmm. Yeah, that is, that’s wild. What an interesting statistic in terms of, I mean that’s very, very unexpected. You see people doing that all the time. There’s something, there is something the reason they’re doing it, or at least like the reason I’m doing it because it works like crazy. So like I’m not gonna bend to these fake rules people come up with for Instagram, like we’re all trying to figure out, it’s all new.

Speaker 1: (17:28)
Like we like to act like social media as a hundred years old. It’s not, it’s a toddler. And so when somebody goes, do you want to grow your Instagram account? You got to do these 33 things. These are the rules. No, they’re not like, no, they’re not. And there’s very few rules you have to, with your reputation go, these are the things I’m going to do. Here’s how I’m going to do it and I’m going to be consistent it. The problem with building a reputation is that it’s really boring in the middle, super duper boring and like you have to stay consistent. Consistency is so boring to me. Certain personality types. It’s like, this is amazing. I’ve got my checkbox, great, but for me it’s boring and I have to push through the boredom and go, none of them know. Here’s some, I’m putting, you know, putting a penny into this, but opinions of this and putting a penny into this. And then over time you look up and people go, you’ve been public speaking for x amount of years and your reputation or you’ve built your brand this way. Like that’s what matters.

Speaker 2: (18:21)
Yeah. I, I was reminded of this, we went and saw Michael Bublé concert last week and I was sitting there and I was just like, he played all the songs that I didn’t know. And the only time I got excited was when he played the songs that I knew. Oh yeah. And I was like, that’s so weird. I’ve heard it’s the song I’ve heard and do a thousand times. That’s the one I want to hear. Yet. I feel that same pressure on like Instagram or something or like take the stairs. A book’s been out since 2012 now. I would never think to share a quote that’s from, from that book from 2012 yet a lot of people, it’s like that’s the thing that they want to see. Like that’s what they, they love the musicians play the same songs for 31 days mad at Bono for singing one, right. God, Geez, Joshua tree again. Like nobody, if anything, it’s the reverse. So yeah, and the other thing, and I think

Speaker 1: (19:14)
John Gordon’s really good at that. I know he’s a mutual friend. Like yeah, he’s really good at surfacing books and going, hey, here’s an idea. So one, if they saw it and they liked it, they’ll like it a second time too. They might not have been part of the conversation then. And so you can get the, you know, you get to bring it back up and go, hey, and the problem is we feel, I mean, at least for me, I can’t speak for you. I feel lazy in that moment. I think only new ideas count. And I think that’s something that I have to consciously remind myself. That’s not true. Whoever is the inner critic that’s saying that isn’t being honest and let you know, let’s do it. Like let’s share that. I’m never mad when I hear like, like Gary Goldman, one of my favorite comedians does this bit on the state capitols and how they got abbreviated and I could listen to that for 10 years and 10 years from now if he does it again, I’m going to be like, it’s genius. Like I think it’s, I think it’s awesome. I’m not disappointed. I’m excited.

Speaker 2: (20:07)
Yeah. I think that’s, I think that’s, that is, is interesting that inner critic. So I want to talk about the humor stuff for a little bit cause I think that is, that is one of the book on it. I, I did, you can’t find it anywhere and it’s, it’s been banished from the earth and in the hidden only in certain places. But I did a lot of people don’t know that that was like my very first work was a self published book. I remember. Yeah. You remember like, I forget you that we’ve known each other for that long man. Like we’ve been, we’ve been around a minute. Isn’t that crazy? So, and part of that is because I feel like you’re so naturally funny. I mean, one of the reasons I wrote that buckets cause I was like, I really struggled with humor. And now I’m very, very funny on stage, but it’s, it’s all, you know, I work at it. Do you, do you feel like, like how do you be funny or like, do you study it? Do you work at it or is it just like a gift you feel like you have and, and that’s it. Or you know, like how did you get to,

Speaker 1: (21:09)
I mean, I do study it. I think my dad’s really funny. I’m the, I’m not the funniest person. My family, my youngest brother who’s a lawyer is the funniest by far. And so I think I grew up around it. My Dad used to take me to comedy clubs when I was in high school. Like we’d go see Brian Regan. And so like, I grew up around like that album is such classic. And so like I grew up around it. I really appreciate it. And then I started realizing like, the great comedians are our great social commentators, like the great, you know, like I’m not a big like dark comedy fan where like, Ugh, I feel gross after hearing it. Like I like, I like to be challenged by an idea or see something that I hadn’t seen before and go, wow, that was really smart.

Speaker 1: (21:51)
That’s, that’s, you know, I’ve never looked at it that way. So I studied people, like I mentioned earlier, Gary Gulman, Nate Barr, Gutsy Maria Bamford I think is amazing. And so I study it and then I also like if I’m in situations where I’m riffing with somebody, I’m kind of practicing it, if you will. And then like I do work at it where I write it down and I’m going, okay, that, that was funny, that wasn’t funny. And then I’m, I’m listening to the jokes I find in, in the audience like I’ll, I’ll probably do it a practice like 90%, and then there’s 10% on leaving it open for the moment. And that’s often the best stuff. And so you’re always finding new jokes even in material you feel like you’ve done 20 times, 30 times. But then I wrote, I wrote a 50,000 word essay book that’ll probably never see the light of day that was just comical.

Speaker 1: (22:43)
Looks at things. I did this like six months ago and it was stuff like, I’m like what would be an example? Oh Hey like yeti coolers. Like how, how crazy? Like how just the idea that you had put a sticker on your car to let other people know how you keep things cold. Like, like, like in 1990 nobody had an Igloo sticker and I was like, I love any blue. I want you to feel how I keep ice like that. So like, or the idea that you need a cooler though, keeping meat cold for nine days for your kids, three hours soccer game. Like how much room for error do you need? Like even soccer games, eight days in 24 hours of margin of error in case it goes over time. Like just or like that they sold the handle as an accessory. Like the mud there.

Speaker 1: (23:31)
The handle is an accessory, like the idea of like, oh you want to be able to hold it easily, that’s extra you like, so just like taking a look at your life and going, okay that’s a weird thing. I’m like, why is that? And then I, but I would say my writing process is, I write the idea first. Whether this is an Instagram post, any sort of reputation thing. I create speech book, Instagram posts, I write the idea down. I don’t try and get the words right. I just try to get the idea, what’s the general idea. And then I do a pass where I try to get the words closer to right and then I make it positive cause I sometimes like my inner voice is like the counting crows. Like it sounds like the song round here you’re like, oh that’s kind of mopey.

Speaker 1: (24:14)
And then I get a positive and then I make it funny. And so those are kind of like, I’m constantly kind of trying to layer this and going, okay, here’s a point I want to make. What’s the way to say it? What’s the way to say it where it’s funny and you remember it and what’s the hook like? Okay, well then let’s say like regardless of I’m speaking at a company or a college, I’m going, where’s it funny? And then I did, I finally did like a for a comedy, a comedy set at Xannys last fall. I’m a 60 minute set. Took me like three months to write. Learned a lot about comedy there. So, yeah, I just, I don’t know. I love it. I respect it. I love people who are great at it.

Speaker 2: (24:54)
What does that mean? That, so when you say social commentators, like do it, how do you like the Yeti is a good example. I mean the Yeti thing is a great example like that, but, but what, what do you do to make your brain recognize it and then how do you go from recognizing it to making it funny or is it just pointing it out? That is what’s funny.

Speaker 1: (25:18)
No, I think, I mean, I think there’s a pointing that out. Like I think you’re trying to say stuff that everybody’s thinking, but nobody is saying. And to see it from a different angle. So for me, like this is my, I write down five to 10 ideas every day in this notebook and I’ll, you know, I’ll kind of, and there’s no quality, it’s just like I’m trying to capture, I’m trying to capture and go, okay, so here’s an example. So like I saw a sticker in a parking lot. I did, I’ve seen a million times and it was, it said my, I don’t know, my, my Weimer Reiner is smarter than your honor student. I thought that’s an interesting sticker. And I thought, well, what does that really mean? Like I like, and then I thought like, I’ve never like dogs when like they throw up well eat their own, throw up.

Speaker 1: (26:02)
Like I’ve never known an honor student to do that. So like I’ve never had like somebody go, our honors students are great, but like when it funders, we have to put thunder shirts on them real quick or they freak out. Like at pep rallies they lose it. Or like Kyle is great at calculus, but if he gets a problem you really liked, he urinates everywhere. So excited like for the idea at like, so then I, so then I back up and I go, the funny thing there is when I see that sticker I thing where did you go to high school? Like how bad was your honors program? Like a dog will eat a dead chipmunk on purpose. Like that’s a weight or the sticker that says who rescued who about rescue dogs? And I want to go, well, I mean it’d weird if like a dog just showed up in your cubicle at work.

Speaker 1: (26:46)
And I was like, come on, we’re going home. Like I think you probably went somewhere and got him. Like that’s a weird, like to look at that and go, what does that mean? And so I think you look at that, seeing it from a different, that seeing it from a different way, different angle and going, what does it mean? Why is that funny to me? Is it funnier to more people than just me? Cause there’s some things where I’m like, that’s ridiculous and maybe two people think it’s funny. And then there’s other things where you go, Oh wow, that, you know, like that’s something that I could see a lot of people finding humorous and then you just kind of shape it. And I think a lot of it is the right word is going okay. Like Jerry, you know like Seinfeld talks about that all the time, like the right word.

Speaker 1: (27:27)
Like he has a joke about somebody’s name looked like a periodic, you know, an element from the periodic table. And it said like, and his name was Boron and Boron was the right element there. And he went through like 20 elements. So it’s, you know, you’re kind of trying to find, okay, this is the word that’s going to be interesting. This is the element that’s going to catch them off guard. This is the thing that’s going to kind of stop somebody. How do I, you know, how do I communicate it? And that’s what I mean, that’s what I think is really funny to me is when it’s a situation and it often, it’s where everybody’s thought through it. Like so. So for instance, I did a joke about being on an airplane and how weird it is to be sitting next to somebody in a business suit that’s probably going to fly to negotiate a $10 million deal and they have to beg for the whole Canton Ginger Ale.

Speaker 1: (28:19)
Like they have to ask the flight attendant like can I, can I have the whole kit? And it’s such a power play because the flight attendant can be like, no, you get two inches of soda, three cubes. And then like the guy gets into and he’s like, I can handle my drink. I’m on earth all the time. Like we’ll look at that. Or like when you’re on a plane and you’re talking to a stranger next to you and then you reach that awkward moment where you just decide, yeah, this is over. And you slowly put on your headphones, which is like this, oh we’re, you’re like enjoy the rest of your life. This is over. Like you can’t do that. And on the ground, like if you were in an office somewhere and somebody who is talking to you and you just, all of a sudden we’re like, Yay, that would be weird.

Speaker 1: (28:56)
But we do that on airplanes all the time. And so finding stuff that a bunch of people relate to and then going, what’s the twist? What’s the, you know, what’s the small difference? Like what’s the little bit thing that makes it really, really funny and it’s gonna make people go like, oh, like I get that like Gary Goldman, who I keep mentioning, but I think he’s one of the best comedians out there right now. He’s doing a whole series on how to write great material on Twitter free series. He’s up to 200 points now, but I saw him do a joke. He said, essentially, I’m going to butcher it. But he essentially said in the 70s he realized he wasn’t a real man because he saw star wars. And when Princess Leia said to Han Solo, I love you. He said, I know. And he said, every time a woman’s told me, I love you, I’ve said y.

Speaker 1: (29:46)
Show your work and the phrase show your work is genius because what he’s taken this phrase from a math problem that a little kid would do and applied it to like a deep emotional, relational truth of like, I feel inadequate, but he’s done it in a way that it’s funny, but if you’ve ever felt inadequate, the idea of somebody saying I love you. And you’d saying why like that is there’s so much wrapped up in that and he’s taking you into a place you might not have gone if you weren’t laughing. And that to me is brilliant.

Speaker 2: (30:14)
Yeah. That, I mean it is, it is such an art form, but there is, there’s a certain amount of like systemization

Speaker 1: (30:23)
Oh 100%. But there’s also, I’ve asked you this, do you think you can teach likability?

Speaker 2: (30:31)
I think you can. I know you can teach people, you can teach how to make people laugh. And I think that does help with likability, but like true, authentic likability. I Dunno

Speaker 1: (30:43)
About that. It’s tough, dude. That’s tough because I think that’s a, that’s an intro like for me, when a speaker has good content but they’re not likable and they might not even want to be likable. Like it’s just weird. Like if, if you said like, Hey, the reason they didn’t listen to that example is like, it came from a place of like you are a superstar and were amazing like that. Like it didn’t, I don’t know. Likability is one of those as you explore reputation. I can’t wait to see y’alls thoughts on that.

Speaker 2: (31:13)
Yeah, I mean it’s, it’s, it’s, it really is interesting. I mean you could definitely make people laugh and I think laughing helps a lot with like ability in some of it. Some of it is natural, but even you as funny as naturally funny as you are, it’s like you can, you can still see how you’ve trained your brain to like look for things and then shape them away and then have like a process for it.

Speaker 1: (31:37)
Oh yeah, like my favorite like one of my funniest moments where it was just, I was speaking to 300 people and you have to like, I would say crew like talent is being able to respond to the moment craft is being able to hone it and make it feel like the first time every time. So this like this woman, 300 people really quiet auditorium, I’m almost done and I’m like three minutes from being done. I take one last Q and a question and this lady like in the second row scrunches up a water bottle like so loud it stops the whole room and I’m like, you were so close to being done. Like you waited this entire speech or like I can’t wait a second longer and she’s crushed it and like the crowd lost it. She was laughing and it was just one of those where like themed it.

Speaker 1: (32:20)
Like there is the practice, practice, practice and then there’s the being able to react to it and see if it’s funny like how do you, you know, how do you do this? What is it like I spoke a in Portugal at an EO event that we both done and I followed the world record holder for the tallest ever surfed. This guy from Brazil was like 82 foot wave crazy. And so right after I followed him and I was like, I mean like it’s fun to follow him cause we both done brave things like he surfed the world, saw us wave. I felt like the hotel pool was a little cold, like a cup like degrees too. And like it’s just in the moment but it makes the crowd go, okay, we’re all in this together. So like no, I’m a, I could talk about that for hours. I’m a geek at that.

Speaker 2: (33:04)
I think there’s something, there’s, there’s definitely something magic about that that spartan spontaneity in the crowd is much more forgiving. It doesn’t have to be as genius if it is taught, if that, if it’s that timely and it has an even bigger effect than if it, if it was a genius. Well planned line is sometime not as effective as just a spontaneous like in the moment line. You experienced it

Speaker 1: (33:28)
Together for the first time and that feels genuine and that’s fun like we had. It’s, it’s kind of creating an inside joke moment in the moment.

Speaker 2: (33:36)
Yeah. Yeah, totally. So where do you want people to go to connect with you if they don’t, if they don’t know about you and they want to follow along, where would you direct people?

Speaker 1: (33:46)
Definitely Instagram. I’m just John a cuff. J. O n a. C. U. F. F. I’m on Twitter, same thing. John a cuff. My website is [inaudible] dot me. And then my latest book is called Finish and it’s about finishing the goals you care about because people have a really easy time starting in a really hard time finishing.

Speaker 2: (34:06)
Yeah. Yeah. I remember you said you wrote the wrong book cause you wrote start first and then the brewer came back and wrote, wrote, finish after. That really stuck with me. So the, I guess the last little thing I would just leave you with John was, so let’s say somebody is out there, you know, and they’re, they’re listening to this right now and they’re going, yeah, Gosh, I wanna I want to speak in front of people. I want to, you know, inspire a lot of people on social, I want to write books and, and for whatever reason they’re feeling blocked or they’re feeling trapped, you know, like they have to stay in a certain job or they’re not sure that they can do it. And they’re kind of in that moment of where, you know, they’re deciding about stepping out. What would you say to, to that, to that person that’s kind of like, yeah, I don’t know if it work. I don’t know if I could make money at this. I don’t know if I can, you know, break through all the noise of everybody else. You know, I know, you know what it’s like to be in that moment and not be sure if you’re gonna be able to make it, you know, on your own.

Speaker 1: (35:06)
Yeah, I would say one be really kind to yourself. The super, super kind because if feeling that doubt isn’t failure, like that’s appropriate. Like I feel that anytime a new, you know, I launch a new thing, there’s that feeling. And we always, you know, we always think other people don’t feel it, but I want 100% seal that the stress, the, you know, the comparison, oh that person had this huge moment and blew up. Like I’ve had to mute people I know, cause like it lead me to a good place to just get this steady stream of their amazingness. And I’d love to say like, no, I’m on the sidelines just cheering. Like, but there’s times where I’m, I’m trying to work on something and all that insecurity is loud. So I’d say be kind to yourself. You’re not the only one who thinks that.

Speaker 1: (35:52)
And then just be small with it. Like go, go and build it in small ways. Like, I think sometimes I, you know, I talked to the owner of fleet feet the other day, she’s brilliant and she fleet feet is this running store in Nashville and she was saying how she trains people to kind of chunk up marathons and she says, I never want somebody to run a 26.2 marathon like as their goal because it’s so large. What I say is run the first 10 k okay and get it to 10 k which is 6.2 miles. And then she said, run to a half marathon, which is 13.1 miles. She said then run to 20 miles, which is you’ve already got, you’ve got 20, that’s a huge milestone. And then run to where you only have a five k left, which is you’ve only got 3.1 left.

Speaker 1: (36:37)
And she said, chunk it up so that mentally you can actually do it. So if you were going to say, I want to be a speaker, I want to write a book, I want to have a platform like awesome, but find a really small, where you say, okay, I want to have a hundred subscribers on youtube. Like and that’s it. Like a hundred would be amazing. And then get there and go, okay that’s awesome. And then I want to get to a thousand or then I want to get to 200 like for me, if I set the sites too big, I get discouraged and I missed the good stuff that I’m actually working on. And then my, you know, the, the thing I always say like if you want to do something you love, like the way I kinda think about it, it’s only two things. Find something you love so much, you’d do it for free.

Speaker 1: (37:18)
We’ve all heard that. But the second part we don’t hear often and they can get so good at it that people pay you a lot of money to do it. Like those are the two elements. Like find something you’d like. For me, writing books, sharing ideas. Like, I love that. Like nobody loves a delayed flight, but I’ll, I’ll put up with a thousand delayed flights because I got to be on stage for an hour. Like that hour was crazy fun to me. It’s worth like, oh, I just spent the night in Baltimore unexpectedly. Yeah. It’s not my favorite thing, but I’m willing to pay that tax because what’s on the other side of that is so amazing. So find something you love so much that you do it for free, but then as you think about your reputation, add that second element. It’s so good at it that people pay you a lot of money to do it. That’s to me where it gets really magical.

Speaker 2: (38:02)
I love it. John ACOF my friends, this is someone who has built from scratch, been a huge influence in my life, made a huge impact in the world. Brother, thank you for your inspiration, for your encouragement, and to helping us laugh all along the way. A really good appreciate

Speaker 1: (38:19)
You, man. Yeah, thanks for, I appreciate it.

Ep 17: Creating Your Signature Content and Body of Work with Jay Papasan | Recap Episode

RV: (00:00) Hey, welcome to this special recap edition of the influential personal brand. We’re breaking down the interview today with our longtime friend, Dan Miller, who I absolutely just love. I just love his energy, him and Joanne are awesome. And we met them on a cruise a few years ago and I’ve just been, been friends. So we got your top three takeaways from AJ and from me. So, get us going. AJV: (00:32) Yeah, I think the first thing he said this like really close to the beginning of the interview and I loved it. And he said if somebody or three different people ask me the same question more than three times, I’ll just make a product for it. I think the whole concept of what should I make a product about or where do I find content is really simply answered when you just figure out what do people already come to you for? And so instead of repeating the exact same thing over and over and over again, why not turn it into a product, a course or a video series or a book or a coaching program or certification or all the things that he has done and is doing really, he said most of that comes from just, you know, if I get asked the same question more than three times, then I really consider turning that into a product. RV: (01:24) Yep. I love that. I was one of my takeaways too, is just, you know, the power of listening to your audience. And I think one of the, one of the techniques or strategies that you can use is to ask your audience. So in his case, he’s just listening. But the other thing you can do, like if you need content ideas or you need product ideas, or if you need copy for like your sales page, send a survey to your audience, ask them some questions about what they want and what they’re struggling with, and then take their words that they write back to you and use some of their language in CRE in actually marketing what you’re doing and create a product for them. So that was one of my takeaways too. I just love that. It’s such a simple, a simple, practical, actionable thing that any of us can do, you know, right away. So that was good. So what was your second one AJV: (02:17) Second one was this concept of not doing the new and trendy thing that everyone is doing. And he said, I’ll try to recap it here. He said, but I, I resist the temptation to do every single new and trendy thing that is out there. And he talked about, he said, could I be missing out on lots of money? Maybe do I care? Not really. And I think that’s really just really powerful. It’s like, if what you’re doing is working, why would you derail? What’s working to do just what everyone else is doing. That’s new and trendy. And one of the things that I thought was really insightful and something that you don’t hear a lot about, he said, now I’m not saying anything is wrong with funnels or webinars or with anything he said, but you hear all these people all over social media promoting, I made six figures, seven figures in this launch. AJV: (03:10) He said, what you don’t hear about is how much money they had to give back and refunds. And I thought that was really interesting because you hear a ton of people. You see a ton of ads. It’s like how I made six figures in this funnel, or there’s this one out. And I don’t, I won’t say what it’s called, but it’s how do you have a seven figure funnel? And then he talks about how he came up with this whole thing. And yeah, probably you could do that. I’m sure people are doing that all the time every day. And Dan said, but what you don’t hear about is how much of that they’re actually giving back in refunds because a buyer’s remorse or they didn’t get what they thought it was, or it was a little bit misleading or a little bit of a bait and switch. And I’m not saying everyone is but I do think there’s some accuracy in the fact that you hear a lot of the revenue promoted and that a lot of the backend of what was it even profitable and how much did you actually give back and refunds? And I thought that was just very insightful. RV: (04:09) Yeah. I mean, you got the refunds, you also have affiliate fees and, you know, Facebook ads and paying your graphic designer. And, you know, at the end of the day, it’s like, how, how much do you really keep in? Which is but I think his thing into your point is more about the reputation and like the, AJV: (04:26) Oh yeah, no, I love when he said, he said it, he said, I’m way more about building a consistent audience than having huge infusions of cash said, I’m way more about the consistency time, over time, over time, that will last me 20 years than I am about this one time, big infusion of of cash. And everyone is different. Perhaps you are someone who’s looking for that big infusion of cash and like go for it, do it. But I loved what he said. It’s about playing the long game and making this a, a true, a true business versus this one time push. RV: (05:00) Yeah. So for me, the other thing that I thought was fascinating you know, we teach something to our brand new members that we call the fast cash formula, which is how do you, if you need to make money quickly. And we talk about how coaching a lot of times is the fastest way. If you need to replace an income is to offer coaching. And when he was telling his story, that was how he started. And still to this day, he does one day a month of one-on-one coaching work. And I love that because he was a real life example of what we talk about that, you know, coaching is the fastest path to cash in terms of replacing a large you know, income need, but it’s the least scalable longterm. And, and yet, so he sort of toward the story about how he started with that. RV: (05:51) And then after he had done enough coaching, he created a course for the people who couldn’t afford coaching. And, and so he was teaching this course and then people invited him to come speak because there were people seeing him teach the course. And that, you know, basically out of that coaching work came his content which became also his business model. And I just think that’s a really great way to do it is to do the work, to kind of get your hands in there. And obviously we love coaching. We, we believe in coaching in the power of one-on-one and I just, I just thought that was really encouraging. And, and, you know, he, he does have multiple streams of income, but it’s been developed over years and it’s, it really started from one great body of work, you know, that he flushed out with coaching and real life scenarios then applied it to a course, you know, then applied it to live events and speaking. So I thought that was just a great, a great example. AJV: (06:51) Yeah. There’s a great evolution of evolution. That’s a great one. And I think that’s somewhat similar to my third and final point, which is which I thought is very indicative of what you hear a lot. But yet there’s this mystery around it. He said, but I don’t count on any income from my books. And, you know, in his book is super successful and has been out there, just did a 20 year edition, right? 20Th year, RV: (07:18) 20Th or 25th. AJV: (07:20) Yeah. But a long time, right on. He said, but here’s what I have found. He said, it’s not the book itself that makes all the income, it’s the actual content within the book. So the book is the calling card. It’s the credibility source. Then not to say that you won’t make income. He just doesn’t count on that in his forecast or his budget. But it’s the content of that book that he then takes that and turns it into all these different curriculums. It’s a coaching curriculum. It’s a certification curriculum. It’s a course, it’s a video series, it’s a live event. It’s all these different things that are all circulated around the content of the book. And the book is at the center, but probably isn’t, what’s bringing in the most income for him. However, from that, there is just this entire huge circle of all these things that are moving to make this very successful, a very healthy business, even though most of the income is not from the center of it, which is the book it’s from all these other ancillary income streams that have become his primary revenue. RV: (08:27) Yeah. That’s good, good perspective on the book. For me, my third takeaway, which he talked a little bit about, but it’s more of, of what we know about him and Joanne behind the scenes. And I don’t know that he said this directly, but every time I’m with Dan and Joanne, it always occurs to me how they build their life or, or they build work around their life. They don’t build their life around their work. And so it’s, it’s one of the great possibilities of a personal brand is to be able to like fit work in and around your life. And it’s hard to do cause when you’re an entrepreneur, especially early on, it’s like a lot of times, you know, we’re kind of his life, but you, you want to get out of that and you can get out of that. And AJV: (09:14) I think that goes to a lot of what he talked about, where he resists the temptation to do all of the new and trendy things. Because, well, for what reason, it’s like, are you living to work? Are you working to live? And he talked a lot about his time and his schedule, but I think that is a part of it is resisting the temptation to do. RV: (09:34) Yeah. And I, and I hope for you, like, w w I wonder, I would bet if we could take all the podcast listeners and ask if you’ve heard of Dan Miller, I bet less than half of you have actually heard of him. You’ve probably heard of some of our other guests yet. He has one of the biggest businesses of everyone we’ve ever had on the podcast. And, and his example speaks to the power of steady consistency and just trust and playing the long game and plodding along. He’s the tortoise man. That’s a, that’s such a great that’s a great metaphor. And, and, and we mean that AJV: (10:14) It was his, he said, he said, I’m the tortoise. RV: (10:18) Yeah. That’s. And, and that is, you know, and we say that in the most honoring way, AJV: (10:23) He said it so we can say it. RV: (10:26) But even to that extent, it doesn’t mean you have to be slow. It’s just, it’s the idea of consistency. You don’t have to be the person with a million followers. And, and you know, this, these huge extravagant launches and given away cars, and like, you can do those things like, but, but you don’t have to be that person in order to be successful. Like you can just do the right thing for a really long time, and it will work out like you can’t fail if you just pour back into people’s lives. So I’m as encouraged by that. AJV: (11:01) Yeah. Well, I think it just, in general, there are a million different ways to build your personal brand. And Dan gives a one, one really great perspective of how to do it. And there are many other different perspectives that you will hear from other guests, but to what Roy is saying, it’s like, it’s, it’s all about. And what we talk about a lot, it’s playing the long game and Dan is a great example of the long game. RV: (11:26) Yeah. So there you have it. So hopefully you’re playing the long game and you’ll keep coming back here. We’re going to keep working to provide amazing guests for you and hopefully useful insights. We’re so glad that you’re here. We’ll catch you next time on the influential personal brand.

Ep 16: Creating Your Signature Content and Body of Work with Jay Papasan

Throughout the course of my life, I just had been in my career. I get so inspired by the fact that I get to be friends with people that I admire, that I look up to people that I learned from the people whose books that I read. And Jay Papasan is one of these people and he is truly multidimensional. Him and his wife as you’re about to learn. And I think he just has an extraordinary curiosity and an extraordinary drive for helping people and wanting to serve people. So him and Gary Keller coauthored a book called the one thing which you probably avert, have you seen it everywhere? Which has sold 1.3 million copies worldwide. Now this isn’t like a book that was like published 25 years ago. Like this isn’t a couple of years and it’s every single week. 2000 units, 2000 units, 2000 units. Like, you know, I see it.

It was actually number one on the Wall Street Journal Bestseller list. It’s been translated to 30 different languages already. And Jay’s wife, Wendy, they do some nonprofit stuff with a group called heroes for children. They also have a large team at Keller Williams. So they sold about 300 homes last year and then j was managing like the whole, he’s in charge of learning now for all of Keller Williams. And it used to just be kind of like publishing and doing their books. Now he’s over all their learning. And they have, I don’t even know how many, but last I heard it was like 125,000 agents. So it’s, it’s a monster thing and we were able to peel off some of this time today. So Jay, buddy, thanks for making time for a year old pal, Rory.

Oh, I’m so happy to get to chat with you, man. It’s just, I just woke up today excited.

So I, I, I appreciate that. And I, and I had to tell you like there are certain levels of bestseller, right? There’s like, okay, I was an Amazon bestseller for a couple hours in the subcategory. Then there’s like, you know, I was on the USA today or something and national bestseller list and there’s New York Times for like a week or two. Then there’s, then there are the books, like the one thing that sell 1.3 million copies, like in a few years. How do you sell a million copies of a book? Like what are just in your head, I know you’ve been in publishing a long time, like what are all the different components that you kind of think of to create something at that scale?

Well, I’ve been really fortunate when I was still a, an editorial assistant at Harper Collins back in the 90s. One of the first books I got to work on was a book called body for life by Bill Phillips. And that was a multimillion copy of bestseller in the fitness category. And at the time, like I wasn’t into weight lifting. I mean, so I just thought it was a chore. I had no appreciation at the time. But you learned some things. The first book I wrote with Gary Keller, the millionaire real estate agent and sold over a million copies and I think we’ll actually be cracking. We’re actually at 1.7 million copies for the, we’re heading towards two and it’s 1.7. So that’s the, that so yeah, like as fast as we’re able to get your bio off the internet, you’re selling hundreds of thousands of copies, you just tell it.

You just told me, hey, I need to update my bio on the Internet. So that was, but we the book has done three books, you know, that have sold a million copies that I’ve gotten to be a partner on as an editor and then a coauthor twice. So I think one, there is a measure of luck. I think there’s also a lot of those, if they’re not driven by personality, and I’ll tell you, you look at someone like Rachel Hollis, she is got a, one of those personalities and her husband, they have mass appeal and that, and they’re generating good content. And that’s a massive accelerator. That’s not the game. Gary and I have played big and nor was it bill Phillips, they were brand based so I can talk to the brand, not the personality driven. Is that cool? I like that. So you get a little luck in terms of the timing.

All three of those books showed up at a time where there was a massive people who needed something, a solution and there was not a solution for it. You know, weight loss has always been their fat burning. What Bill Phillips did is he said, you don’t have to do cardio to burn fat. Actually weight lifting is better. And so he changed the way people thought about that exercise group. And so he introduced a new idea at the right time that proved to be true with Maine. Our real estate agent, Gary gets all the credit right? I showed up right about the time we were riding, not conceiving, but he looked up and he said, here is an industry of over a million real estate agents. They don’t want to be seen as salespeople. They want to become business people. And so that book was about the journey and it showed up at the right time.

And all of our competitors use it. They teach it, they just call it the red book. It’s got its own brand now. And then the one thing showed up at a time, I think we’re a technology, we’ve seen the delta technology is, is actually changing faster than we humans can adapt. And so when we look at all the opportunities and all the things we have to do and all the things we could do, everybody was kind of in a state of overwhelm. And I think the one thing is kind of like a laser that helps people cut through that and get clear about what they need to be doing with all the noise. So I think all three books benefited from timing and a simple new approach. And I think those are the key ingredients. If you don’t have them, you’re not, you’re not building on the right foundation. Interesting. So timing, all that last controllable and a new approach. And, and you know, the other book that came out, so procrastinate on purpose came out around the same time. Which has sold like 1.7 total copies itself. And then really well,

Well it’s interesting, the Ted talk did really well. The Ted talk has millions of views. The book, the book hasn’t sold as well as take the stairs dead. But essential ism also came out about that time and it has sold very well. And so like the theme in terms of that, that approach of just like really like narrowing it down. How do you, like I really, I love that that’s a really keen insight that I’ve never quite heard someone share.

How do you do that? Like

Is it, is it more of just like stepping back and going, okay, what’s happening in the world? What are, what are, what do people currently, like what’s their current modus operandi? And then what, what is it really that they’re missing? And then just kinda like zeroing in on that. Is that, is that kind of the, you know, cause like it’s Kinda hard to men, a manufacturer, a new approach. Like the key, as you said, it proved to be true. Bill Phillips introduced a new idea that proved to be true.

So have you been able to do that intentionally? You’re actually guiding me here. So I’m going to say let’s, let’s edit ourselves instead of a new idea. Let’s say a new approach because I actually think if you looked at all of those books, everything that was in them was already in the world. It was just packaged in a new way that people could digest. And actually sometimes the truth has been there in front of us all the time until someone shows it to us in a new way and we’re able then to do it. So all three of those books presented an approach to doing something that people wanted to do that they could actually do. It was simple enough that they could follow and the results actually showed up after. So when we designed books and we’ve been lucky, we’ve written 10, 11, depending on if you want to count one that was self-published and two of them are then million copy best sellers.

So I think if we get a third one then I’ll say that we’re really firmly onto something. We might just be still in the lucky category. I think that there’s two kinds of books in this business. Self-Help. there is kind of the aspirational, they’re books that people I want what those people have and those personality driven books that that can create a high need. I remember we came out at the same time that when its Paltrow came out with her book on beauty and Diet and it’s like we’re competing on the same list with her. I mean a lot of people want what she has in those categories, right? And so personality driven, also outcome driven. I look up and say, what’s a problem we can solve? I’ve believed that people, we all know this. People are more likely to take action to remove pain right then to pursue pleasure on the grand scale.

I think reed Hastings has a quote that I always butcher. But basically as a business person, you always want to be selling aspirin, not violence. So that’s kind of a mantra that we use. What problem are we solving and is there a strong felt need? Like when you look at Diet Dave Ramsey debt, those are like people have a bad body self-image. If they are in debt, they have a strong desire to fix that problem. So how much depth is there in that felt need? And so if we identify a problem that we think we know, the idea for our approach has been to go and say, all right, let’s go personal branding. Who are the 20, 30 people who know more about this topic than anyone else? So we interview you, we interview your wife, we interview all these people, and then our job is to ask what do they all have in common?

And in my experience, this is if there’s a name for this kind of research, right? It always escapes me cause I’m a writer first researcher second. But we’re looking for the pattern of commonality with all of those people have in common often is kind of the secret sauce and it because 30 people have it in common. It’s probably something the average person could choose to do. If I just interview you about personal branding, there may be stuff about your, your amazing delivery or your amazing ability to do presentations that I will never be able to do. But if I find 30 of you, there may be a pattern that I now can do. And so we’re looking for that pattern. We call it a model. Some people would call it a best as a collection of best practices and if you can then convey that to people in a package they can digest, I think that’s a really good recipe for how to business books.

Yeah. Well I love that. I, I think you know, brand builders and in our, when we, when we start working with somebody from ground one and they say, what’s the first step in a personal brand? Like where do you start? We say all the time, the genesis of a personal brand is identifying what problem you solved in one word. Like what is the problem? And even as you said that, I’ll just reflect like that coming back to me it was like, yeah, that is step one is noticing the problem, which is like every entrepreneurial adventure, right? Like you noticed like you know, there’s this problem that women have in terms of how they feel and then you create spanx and like boom, you know, are you, you, you, you notice something. And then, and then you kind of start to go ri what, what do people have in common who do this well that maybe everyone’s not seeing? And I think that’s really cool too about you said all of those books, all of these ideas already existed in the world, but packaging, packaging them up and presenting them in a way that like resonates like with the world at that time. I love that. I’ve really loved that.

I think back to the last time you saw the dead poets society, you know where he makes them most stand on their desk and look around the room. It’s that you’re giving people a new perspective on something they probably already know, but because you’ve now served it to them and a new way, it’s actually digestible. And I’ll go back to that word approach that I edited myself. I believe really firmly their idea books, right? I think that Malcolm Gladwell has written the best idea books in the world. I mean some of them changed the way I viewed the world. That’s a category of book for sure. We’re trying to write books that people go do something based on. So when I use the word approach, like if you give someone a really complicated plan, I’m sorry, they might be able to do it for a little while.

In my experience, it falls apart and sometimes the more complex it looks, the sexier it is to sell that people can actually live in simplicity, not complexity. So your approach, how you tell them to do it, how you coach them through it. Can they remember the steps on their own? And it needs to be kind of stupid simple. When I looked at pretty much about, I guess I want to say about eight months into our, the one thing journey maybe it was, maybe it was 18, I can’t remember the, it’s probably more likely 18 who does anything at eight months. Okay. So there we go. We did an analysis of all the Amazon reviews. We were trying to get a sense of what did we solve the right problem and what is it that people actually love about the book. And what was really funny when we did it, he works like we did like a Web, you know, word clouds, the one star reviews and the five star reviews. The biggest word was simple. So the thing that we really strove to do was make it simple. Was it what appealed to the vast majority of people? But then it was also the thing that turned the one-star people off. Oh, it’s just one idea. And they knocked the book, but you’re not going to make everybody happy. But that 80%, that’s the five star reviews. That’s the overriding theme. It was a simple approach. And for overwhelm, it really makes sense to give people a simple approach.

Yeah, that’s fascinating. So it’s almost like mission accomplished. Even though the one star reviews in like it, they all got it. Like they all had the same experience.

No, this don’t spend too much time on the ones who are reviews. They should be, they should be educational, but you’re not going to make everybody happy. So I think this part of it sort of

Like the ideation of a book is really, really fascinating of, of just kind of going, okay, so it doesn’t have to be totally like groundbreaking original per se. It just has to solve a problem and it has to be a new perspective on something they probably already know of which the answer can be both, you know, known by a lot of people, which is where you might find it, but also very, very simple and presented simply. So I, I, I, I, I’ll, I love that. Is there anything else on the writing process, both because of your experience as a writer but also as an editor and managing a team? If somebody is sitting down you know, like a lot of our clients are sort of working on their first book and they’re trying to get noticed by a literary agent or a publisher. And it’s Kinda like that, oh my gosh, how do I take my entire life and like write this first book. Anything else that you think is helpful for people in like, you know, filtering down which ideas they should put into their book and, and you know, the, the creative part of the process.

I’ve shared this, I don’t know if it works for everyone. But when you’re working with a business, people that want to be authors, I’ve found a helpful technique is cause a lot of them are not actually authors, right? They have the ideas, they’re going to have to work with someone. But most of them can go do a presentation. So my advice is why don’t you build your ideas and stories into basically a PowerPoint format and then go teach that every single month teaching every week if you can. And basically you’re rehearsing, you know, your future keynote for the book again and again and again. And if you could teach a half day class, go teach a half day class, cause that allows you to go deeper and deeper and deeper. And it’s not all about the exercises, right? Cause it’s hard to replicate an exercise in a book, but you start to see that story that you thought was so kick ass.

Like people are still on their phones in the room. That story that you didn’t, I think it was so strong. Everybody’s like paying attention. It’s Kinda like some people use blogs to test material. I actually like the immediacy of being in the room with people. As an author, if you’re gonna be successful, you’ve got to master that skill anyway. And you teach the book and you find out really quickly what people do and don’t respond to. You get to test things really quickly without all the headache of writing it and unwrapping it. And what’s really beautiful is some, he’s going to come out of the audience and go, this reminded me of my grandfather, or this reminds me of So-and-so. And you get stories that you would’ve never found in a Google search or any bibliography or library that immediately becomes that thing. That’s actually quite a unique story that you get to bring to your book. So I tell people, go teach it for five or six months and then come back and talk to me.

I love that one. One of the most memorable parts of procrastinating on purpose. It’s this 30 x rule and that’s my favorite thing all the time. So dude, yeah, on an airplane, like I don’t even, I wish I knew the guy’s name, like I can’t even give the guy credit. But like some dudes sit next to me on the airplane, he’s like, yeah, my college professor one time explained it this way and I was just like, that is, that is gold. And it’s exactly what you’re talking about is, is that, you know, a lot of that stuff, it’s like, I think, I think there’s a big pressure on authors to feel like they have to be the creators of great ideas and it’s like really we can just be the conduit of great ideas.

Exhibit is curation. I think that we have to give credit. I think if you’re in the business of taking credit for other people’s ideas, that will bite you eventually. Right? Especially the bigger you get faster it happens. So you can curate ideas. Just give people credit. Like I’ve had those stories like the guy next to me on the airport that I can’t credit, but I can at least say, this isn’t, this isn’t my original idea, but I heard it, I knew it was valuable and therefore I’m sharing it. Yeah. The whole idea of like a new idea versus a new approach. I mean there’s some Shakespeare quote like there’s nothing new under the sun. Right? I mean there is some truth to that that almost everything that we read, the number one bestseller charts right. There is something there that is being regurgitated and served up for today’s audience that we, we were familiar with before.

Yeah. So I guess that that’s like the, that’s the essence of the theme of what you’re talking about. It’s not new ideas. It’s a new approach. It’s like a new reorg. It’s like a new organization of the ideas that are out there. I love that

Done David Allen. Right? People have been talking about organizing ourselves to be more effective for ever. I mean, what I took away from that book was a new way to manage thoughts in my head. The new way to file things in a fund. Oh drawer. It was a new approach to things I was already doing that was just a lot better and it was also kind of simple.

Gosh, that’s really, really good. So, okay, I want to shift now to the promotional part. So you know, like it’s that whole thing. It’s like, it’s not called a, I think Robert Kiyosaki was the one who said, it’s not called New York Times best writing author. It’s New York Times bestselling author, which I do. I do agree with, but I, I really love that we spent our time so far talking about the integrity of the ideas and I, and I think that is often overlooked. I think unfortunately because there is such an opportunity to have a big platform for social media, whatever, you know, you can create a bestseller with a lot of platform and not a lot of great sort of content. But the promotion part, like is it 50, 50 or like w w if you had to go like the, the content or the principles in the book versus the promotion of it, like what would you, how would you do that balance?

Okay. You just made me think of a really weird, there’s a short story by Amy Balloon called love is not a pie and it’s like literally about a polyamorous relationship that a child discovers and the mother says love is not a pie. If I give you a slice, it’s not like I have less to give to the other person. Hopefully you know where I’m going. I think you’re all in on creating great content and you have to be, it’s like it’s a hundred to a hundred. Right? I think when people just send a great idea out in the world and are not fully prepared to make it their full time job to support that baby they’re fooling themselves. They’re also, they’re not getting that, that, that idea child every opportunity it has to flourish. So it doesn’t have to be like a full time, 40 hour a week job, but it needs to be a preoccupation that you are regularly attacking it.

So we designed a launch program. We have at the time, I think we had about a hundred and we had maybe even less than a hundred thousand agents when we launched the book. We have 170,000 now, but we knew we had a platform, a very big platform, but we thought it would take about 40,000 sales in the first month to make number one. And I remember I got a plan it was going to sell 40,000. Right. what do people get when they buy one copy? What do they get when they buy 10? What do they get when they buy 500 and my publisher, Ray Bard, brilliant guy said, and what are they going to say by 5,000? What do they get it? They buy 10,000. I wasn’t thinking big enough. We’ve made a couple of those sales. They’re very rare. But if we hadn’t thought the problem through, we would’ve never made them.

So you look up and you have a plan for how we market to all of these segments. We had a plan for how we would market the book to the bookstores. Like this is why you want to put it face out. And we had a budget for help and then did that. I remember Gary saying, well, you’ve shown me a plan to sell 40,000 bucks, don’t you? The whole book is about aim high, right? So we got to overshoot the mark. So he made me get back in January before April launch and create a plan to sell 100,000 copies. And so we implemented that plan and 44,000. Wow. So if we had implemented the 40,000 plan, at that same percentage, we might have sold 18 or something. Right. So first lesson is you make a plan much bigger than your goal. Because a lot of things are not going to work.

Sometimes I’m distributors, they shipments get lost, there’s snow storms and books don’t show up in bookstores. And I’ve had every manner of collect catastrophe happen. So we had that initial period where we went on the road, I think look 36 times that year. Which was a lot for a guy with two kids. I tried to space them out, I’ll do like two back to back here to back to back here and never be gone on a weekend. And the next year I did 24. The next year I did 18. The next year I said Yes to 12. And that’s kind of where I’ve been staying at. I’ll say yes about 12 times. Cause I do have kids as to when I hang out with me. So I did not want to also become a professional speaker. But I remember we launched the book we were selling in that, you know, 2000 a week and then it was April when we launched in about April the next year.

I remember around Christmas the sales started declining and we’re like, we’re watching it, we’re watching it, we’re watching it, I’m doing as many podcasts and all these things as I can. And the sales keep going down. One point they dropped all the way down to 400 a week and then a year after they started picking up and then kept picking up for almost three straight years. And now we’re back in that 1200 a week kind of range. And it’s kind of, that seems to be 800 to 1600 depending on the week. And what happened and how shipments turned out seems to be where that book is landing. And that’s what a gift. I’ll just say that I’m not, I’m not at all taking it for granted. We did a lot of work though. I think it was two things. Every single week. I set a goal and I have a coach.

He tracks me every single week. I had to do something to promote the book. So I was on a podcast, I did a radio, I did a TV, I did a speaking appearance. So I love things that don’t take me like this. I don’t have to leave my office and my family to talk about my book with you. And you’ve been shared with your network. So podcast is highly leveraged. Every single week I did at least one activity, sometimes more. And I’ve been doing that for six and a half years. So Gary who runs a huge company and he stopped doing any public appearances, I think by August of that year. And he’s only done two interviews since he did Tai Lopez. And last week you did Tim Ferris. That cause that if I put him with a job with salesperson, that’s a poor use of his time. We’re a partnership, but someone’s gotta do it.

So I tried to make sure I managed my time and we were building our email list. We were always interacting with our customers. We have a Hashtag. This is a great tip. Create a unique Hashtag that’s in your book cause people Instagram, they post their favorite books, right? And then follow that and interact with all of those customers. So a lot of my promotional opportunities were kind of ad hoc. I’d see that somebody posted a picture and said, oh, this is our book club book. And it was in some small company in Florida. And that would DM that person say, Hey, would you like me to zoom in or Skype in? And you can do a Q and a. Like, I don’t want to do a speech, but they can ply say you want to play stump the author? I’ll make you look good to your boss.

So you’re winning an advocate inside that company now. And then all those people are like, wow, we actually got to talk to a bestselling author today. Like that’s a, most people will get that. So using that, most authors would never do that. Most authors would never be like, oh yeah, some small company in Florida. Like what? They’re not worth the time to engage with. Well, I did that by the way, and we signed a six figure contract with a fortune five company, which I’m not legally allowed to name like two weeks ago. It all started with me doing an internal only for a very small group said, would you come in and do a book talk? And I went in and I just did a Q and a around time blocking, which is one of our concepts in that it took three and a half years.

Right. But that relationship state, that advocate became a champion, that champion got a promotion and then they started to get to make decisions and then you just see how those dominoes line up. But pretty much I’ll only say yes when someone says, will you come speak or talk? I got invited to Google. They wanted me to talk about investing. I’ll say, I’ll talk about investing if we can talk about it through the framework or the one thing, I’m not a paid speaker. I’m not going just to go to Google. I’m going to promote being single minded about it. So anyway, I just do a bunch of stuff at you, so I’ll shut up. So you can actually make this an interview and not a diet and not a mile. This is great. This is what we want. I mean, just like your, your mindset on this step.

So in terms of the tactical like, okay, if I just had to create a checklist, like okay, let’s say my book is launching whatever sometime this year, what are the things like, okay, so we know speaking, right? Like we know speaking, we know podcasts, we know like going on other people’s podcasts. What else can we do? Like people do columns, right? They get their Forbes column. They do that. I think that actually it can lead to sales. I think it helps them in terms of visibility. It helps him in terms of branding. I think that helps convert sales more than make them. But if you’re strategic in who you’re interviewing having a podcast, having a a blog, having a column and one of those magazines, right? Online magazines, it gives you a platform to reach out to influencers. So I could be, hey Rory I’m trying to write an article.

I don’t do this cause I, I want to write books. I don’t want to write columns that’d be like, Hey, I’ve got a Forbes column this month. I’m talking about personal branding. Can I interview you one? So that’s a win for you, right? You have a business that you’d love to have free promotion, but now I get to talk to you and I’m talking to you and we’re sharing frameworks for books. And this is how like a lot of our partnership, right? Yeah. Frameworks work really well together. Procrastinate on purpose is a great companion book for the one thing. So if it went from my audience and vice versa, and you end up in this collaborative environment where one in 50 right? One in 20 become someone that opens doors for you or makes introduction. So everything, I mean I go to breakfast every, I’m an introvert.

Every Wednesday I have coffee with a stranger. I’ve been doing that for six years. I started doing it when the one thing launched cause I knew if I didn’t do some networking activity I would get burned and my goal was just to add 50 cool people to my network every year that has blossomed into its own platform. How many of them are actually cool? Is it 50 I think because of the way it works. So the first year was the hardest. I just went through my linkedin and started inviting people in Austin and I ended up in front of sales people trying to sell me stuff or whatever. But I showed up with no agenda and I just, Hey, I’m just, I hear that you’re awesome at x each me and if I had something I could share with them I would. And I never had an agenda.

And what happened is I did 50 the first year and quit because it was exhausting from a to meet strangers and the next year or so many of those people referred me talent that I did 79 the next year was 129 wow, that’s a lot of meetings. Yeah, it’s breakfast. I can go up, show up for 30 minutes, get to know someone. And then my coach about three years into it said, how are you staying in touch with them? And I said, well, they’re all extroverts. They call and text and email me. And he asked me like, the tough questions is that are you want to work it? And I said, okay. I came up with a plan and I created a newsletter. And right now I think I’ve got about 450 people on it, but it’s a pretty select group. I filled about eight positions in our various businesses from that network, we have an opportunity I’ve been able to populate some of our events through referrals through that.

But I have an open rate, I think of 45% and I just say, Hey, this is what I’m up to. And that, that actually goes out today. And it’s just a real short half page, three or four bullet points. But it allows me to be in their inbox once a month in a way that I’m bringing value to them. So coming up, just have a plan. Right? It’s not so much what you do, it’s that you do and that you do it strategically in terms of like the airport bookstores and stuff. Yeah. Like the money that you spend there. I mean, can you just like talk a little bit about how that works? Because lots of people want to be in there. I mean that was like my initial dream was walking through the airport and there’s like, oh my gosh, one day. You know, can you just give us a, just like a little high level on how the airport bookstores work?

Yep. Every year that the one thing has been out, we spent on the low end 109,000 on the high end. 195. Wow. So that is all paid placement and the game you’re playing. I made most, there’s very little tracking Hudson’s reports to the bestseller list, so they charge a lot. It’s very rarely makes you money. And I’ve actually, I was just corresponding with James Clear, another bestselling author and cause I coached him a little bit on this and his book sells great. But it didn’t sell well in those bookstores, but he still, what I found that he found is when it was in those bookstores, we got a lot more high paying speaking gigs because the kinds of people who book those and think about those are the people buying books in airport bookstores. So the first year I measured it out, I didn’t do any.

I think I did one paying speaking gig the first year because I was mostly going to our network. I did Cutco knives or something, right? For like $3,000. And you look at that, but I still think we got 50 cents on the dollar back and we asked the question, do we keep doing it? So I kept doing it. That’s a lot of dope. It is a lot of dough. But most people are losing money a lot more than that. Cause you paid to be in the bookstore. You only make money when they sell them. So your book has to sell or they won’t stock it or take your money. And if it sells enough, the virtuous cycle was for about three years. We spent substantial time on the Hudson’s bestseller list. And when you get on the Hudson speced seller list, you get free face out placement on their top 10.

And that goes the paid 200 stores where you can buy space on a table. Now you’re in 720 and it’s free. And that flips the whole cycle. And that alone, Barnes and noble actually is a, always been a moneymaking and books a million. So books-a-million Barnes and noble, I get a return. And when you’re a bestseller at Hudson’s, it paid for the entire spent. So for about three and a half years, we actually made money when you net it all out. And then other times we’ve almost broken even or just been a little bit one way or the other. Just on Hudson, you’re talking about Hudson’s is a big difference maker. Which is it reports to the best seller list. And if you get on their bestseller list, you get tons of free placement. Yeah. OK. So that so, so, so then it’s Kinda like, you’re not making money on the book, but you are from speaking.

And then if you can make their best seller list than that, they give you a lot more exposure, additional exposure. You said 700 stores, if you said 770 or 720 stores, I don’t know the exact figure. I’m crazy. But for people being pro like my deal, the deal Gary and I have with Ray Bard is we’re almost a coke publishing agreement. So he, it’s a very different model, right? And there are a few other companies that do it. But you can always negotiate this. You, we had the ability to set the co-op marketing budget because we were going to pay for it and my conditions on that where I want to know what my rate of return us. So I had to get regular reporting and sometimes they literally had to call the stores and say, how many did you sell? Because a lot of them don’t report electronically.

It’s blind. And we got a sense of what our cost per sale was and we were able to back out our margin. So I wanted to do it like a business person. I didn’t want to do it like someone just buying brand, which is what most of them are doing. They’re just trying to get brand exposure and it’s very valuable that perception of those books. Wow, I saw your book in an airport. They assume you’re selling millions. Right? Most people aren’t inside knowing how few books most books sell, but that creates massive brand recognition and they don’t realize that you’re not settling though, yet you’re millions

On the inside.

No, those, those accounts can be very valuable. And so I would just say work it out with your publisher. Say, especially for the first year when I’m really trying to build my platform, I would like the ability to have consultation and the ability to increase your co-op spend. There’s no one that can determine whether a Hudson’s will take your money or any of those parodies or those stores. Right. But then you at least have the ability to invest in that brand building. But as a business person, you also want to see the results if possible. Because like I said, it’s, you have to monitor it.

Yeah. And so usually that that return on that investment. So, so when you talk about the investing money, like not the free stuff with the investing, it’s like Facebook ads, bookstores, those are like some of the big ones. Then basically the return on that is usually the more like paid speaking or consulting, you know, and then any royalties of course, but that’s not going to really make the dent. Probably

The, the big money in books unless you sell many, many, many copies is always, and that book helps you convert more customers to your high margin business. I have yet to see anyone who spends money on Facebook advertising for a book that actually nets money from that. Yup. Well margins are too small.

Yeah. Yeah. It’s, it’s, it’s a, it’s a really, really interesting, interesting game. Well Jay, this has been so helpful and so insightful and just like, I think informative and a lot of people don’t even understand how bookstores work in the airports and stuff. And I, we appreciate you so much. Where do you want people to go to follow? You learn about the one thing, like staying connected with what you guys are up to.

I would love it if they’d go to the one thing.com and that’s what the number one everything about our business, our training is there, and they can find my Instagram and stuff and they can always DM me. I’m always, I try to monitor those accounts personally. Because I do the one thing, I don’t do that daily, but I do it very regularly so they won’t sit in my Twitter, you know, Twitter DM thing for a month, but it might take me a week or so to get back. But I’m happy to interact and I’d love to find out that people are living the book.

Yeah, that is awesome. Well you guys, you guys have been amazing and this is so cool to just get a little bit of a, you know, insight into what goes on in the mind of real mega best sellers. So thank you for sharing so generously and for just being accessible for an introvert. You’re, you’re actually an exceptionally accessible guy and you know, I just, I really appreciate you and appreciate all that you’ve done for us, my friend.

Thank you so much.

Ep 15: Different is Better Than Better with Sally Hogshead | Recap Episode

RV: (00:00) Hey, welcome to this special recap edition of the influential personal brand. We’re breaking down the interview today with our longtime friend, Dan Miller, who I absolutely just love. I just love his energy, him and Joanne are awesome. And we met them on a cruise a few years ago and I’ve just been, been friends. So we got your top three takeaways from AJ and from me. So, get us going. AJV: (00:32) Yeah, I think the first thing he said this like really close to the beginning of the interview and I loved it. And he said if somebody or three different people ask me the same question more than three times, I’ll just make a product for it. I think the whole concept of what should I make a product about or where do I find content is really simply answered when you just figure out what do people already come to you for? And so instead of repeating the exact same thing over and over and over again, why not turn it into a product, a course or a video series or a book or a coaching program or certification or all the things that he has done and is doing really, he said most of that comes from just, you know, if I get asked the same question more than three times, then I really consider turning that into a product. RV: (01:24) Yep. I love that. I was one of my takeaways too, is just, you know, the power of listening to your audience. And I think one of the, one of the techniques or strategies that you can use is to ask your audience. So in his case, he’s just listening. But the other thing you can do, like if you need content ideas or you need product ideas, or if you need copy for like your sales page, send a survey to your audience, ask them some questions about what they want and what they’re struggling with, and then take their words that they write back to you and use some of their language in CRE in actually marketing what you’re doing and create a product for them. So that was one of my takeaways too. I just love that. It’s such a simple, a simple, practical, actionable thing that any of us can do, you know, right away. So that was good. So what was your second one AJV: (02:17) Second one was this concept of not doing the new and trendy thing that everyone is doing. And he said, I’ll try to recap it here. He said, but I, I resist the temptation to do every single new and trendy thing that is out there. And he talked about, he said, could I be missing out on lots of money? Maybe do I care? Not really. And I think that’s really just really powerful. It’s like, if what you’re doing is working, why would you derail? What’s working to do just what everyone else is doing. That’s new and trendy. And one of the things that I thought was really insightful and something that you don’t hear a lot about, he said, now I’m not saying anything is wrong with funnels or webinars or with anything he said, but you hear all these people all over social media promoting, I made six figures, seven figures in this launch. AJV: (03:10) He said, what you don’t hear about is how much money they had to give back and refunds. And I thought that was really interesting because you hear a ton of people. You see a ton of ads. It’s like how I made six figures in this funnel, or there’s this one out. And I don’t, I won’t say what it’s called, but it’s how do you have a seven figure funnel? And then he talks about how he came up with this whole thing. And yeah, probably you could do that. I’m sure people are doing that all the time every day. And Dan said, but what you don’t hear about is how much of that they’re actually giving back in refunds because a buyer’s remorse or they didn’t get what they thought it was, or it was a little bit misleading or a little bit of a bait and switch. And I’m not saying everyone is but I do think there’s some accuracy in the fact that you hear a lot of the revenue promoted and that a lot of the backend of what was it even profitable and how much did you actually give back and refunds? And I thought that was just very insightful. RV: (04:09) Yeah. I mean, you got the refunds, you also have affiliate fees and, you know, Facebook ads and paying your graphic designer. And, you know, at the end of the day, it’s like, how, how much do you really keep in? Which is but I think his thing into your point is more about the reputation and like the, AJV: (04:26) Oh yeah, no, I love when he said, he said it, he said, I’m way more about building a consistent audience than having huge infusions of cash said, I’m way more about the consistency time, over time, over time, that will last me 20 years than I am about this one time, big infusion of of cash. And everyone is different. Perhaps you are someone who’s looking for that big infusion of cash and like go for it, do it. But I loved what he said. It’s about playing the long game and making this a, a true, a true business versus this one time push. RV: (05:00) Yeah. So for me, the other thing that I thought was fascinating you know, we teach something to our brand new members that we call the fast cash formula, which is how do you, if you need to make money quickly. And we talk about how coaching a lot of times is the fastest way. If you need to replace an income is to offer coaching. And when he was telling his story, that was how he started. And still to this day, he does one day a month of one-on-one coaching work. And I love that because he was a real life example of what we talk about that, you know, coaching is the fastest path to cash in terms of replacing a large you know, income need, but it’s the least scalable longterm. And, and yet, so he sort of toward the story about how he started with that. RV: (05:51) And then after he had done enough coaching, he created a course for the people who couldn’t afford coaching. And, and so he was teaching this course and then people invited him to come speak because there were people seeing him teach the course. And that, you know, basically out of that coaching work came his content which became also his business model. And I just think that’s a really great way to do it is to do the work, to kind of get your hands in there. And obviously we love coaching. We, we believe in coaching in the power of one-on-one and I just, I just thought that was really encouraging. And, and, you know, he, he does have multiple streams of income, but it’s been developed over years and it’s, it really started from one great body of work, you know, that he flushed out with coaching and real life scenarios then applied it to a course, you know, then applied it to live events and speaking. So I thought that was just a great, a great example. AJV: (06:51) Yeah. There’s a great evolution of evolution. That’s a great one. And I think that’s somewhat similar to my third and final point, which is which I thought is very indicative of what you hear a lot. But yet there’s this mystery around it. He said, but I don’t count on any income from my books. And, you know, in his book is super successful and has been out there, just did a 20 year edition, right? 20Th year, RV: (07:18) 20Th or 25th. AJV: (07:20) Yeah. But a long time, right on. He said, but here’s what I have found. He said, it’s not the book itself that makes all the income, it’s the actual content within the book. So the book is the calling card. It’s the credibility source. Then not to say that you won’t make income. He just doesn’t count on that in his forecast or his budget. But it’s the content of that book that he then takes that and turns it into all these different curriculums. It’s a coaching curriculum. It’s a certification curriculum. It’s a course, it’s a video series, it’s a live event. It’s all these different things that are all circulated around the content of the book. And the book is at the center, but probably isn’t, what’s bringing in the most income for him. However, from that, there is just this entire huge circle of all these things that are moving to make this very successful, a very healthy business, even though most of the income is not from the center of it, which is the book it’s from all these other ancillary income streams that have become his primary revenue. RV: (08:27) Yeah. That’s good, good perspective on the book. For me, my third takeaway, which he talked a little bit about, but it’s more of, of what we know about him and Joanne behind the scenes. And I don’t know that he said this directly, but every time I’m with Dan and Joanne, it always occurs to me how they build their life or, or they build work around their life. They don’t build their life around their work. And so it’s, it’s one of the great possibilities of a personal brand is to be able to like fit work in and around your life. And it’s hard to do cause when you’re an entrepreneur, especially early on, it’s like a lot of times, you know, we’re kind of his life, but you, you want to get out of that and you can get out of that. And AJV: (09:14) I think that goes to a lot of what he talked about, where he resists the temptation to do all of the new and trendy things. Because, well, for what reason, it’s like, are you living to work? Are you working to live? And he talked a lot about his time and his schedule, but I think that is a part of it is resisting the temptation to do. RV: (09:34) Yeah. And I, and I hope for you, like, w w I wonder, I would bet if we could take all the podcast listeners and ask if you’ve heard of Dan Miller, I bet less than half of you have actually heard of him. You’ve probably heard of some of our other guests yet. He has one of the biggest businesses of everyone we’ve ever had on the podcast. And, and his example speaks to the power of steady consistency and just trust and playing the long game and plodding along. He’s the tortoise man. That’s a, that’s such a great that’s a great metaphor. And, and, and we mean that AJV: (10:14) It was his, he said, he said, I’m the tortoise. RV: (10:18) Yeah. That’s. And, and that is, you know, and we say that in the most honoring way, AJV: (10:23) He said it so we can say it. RV: (10:26) But even to that extent, it doesn’t mean you have to be slow. It’s just, it’s the idea of consistency. You don’t have to be the person with a million followers. And, and you know, this, these huge extravagant launches and given away cars, and like, you can do those things like, but, but you don’t have to be that person in order to be successful. Like you can just do the right thing for a really long time, and it will work out like you can’t fail if you just pour back into people’s lives. So I’m as encouraged by that. AJV: (11:01) Yeah. Well, I think it just, in general, there are a million different ways to build your personal brand. And Dan gives a one, one really great perspective of how to do it. And there are many other different perspectives that you will hear from other guests, but to what Roy is saying, it’s like, it’s, it’s all about. And what we talk about a lot, it’s playing the long game and Dan is a great example of the long game. RV: (11:26) Yeah. So there you have it. So hopefully you’re playing the long game and you’ll keep coming back here. We’re going to keep working to provide amazing guests for you and hopefully useful insights. We’re so glad that you’re here. We’ll catch you next time on the influential personal brand.

Ep 14: Different is Better Than Better with Sally Hogshead

Speaker 1: (00:01)
I am about to introduce you to, if you don’t already know her, maybe the smartest woman in the world other than my wife, like and Sally is just one of my dearest friends and colleagues in this space. You know, on the surface, Sally is a New York Times best selling author. She’s a hall of fame speaker. I mean, she literally speaks on the biggest and most prolific stages in the world. She has been on the today show, right? She’s done campaigns for mini Cooper and Nike and get dive in Coca-Cola. And you know, she is somebody that’s been in branding and marketing her entire career. She has built a monstrous personal brand and Sally is just someone who does it the right way and she’s a true thought leader. She has carved out,ua very unique expertise and just shifted the way that the world thinks about,uyou know, her, you know, her first book,ufascinate on recent book, how to make brand your brand impossible to resist. Uso she’s the creator of the fascination advantage assessment, which you all are gonna get for free. Just spoil spoiler, but you got to stick around code. Ubut she’s going to give it to y’all for free. And,ubut more than that, she’s just a dear friend and somebody that I go to when I Bison and learn from. So Sally, thank you.

Speaker 2: (01:27)
And, and likewise, I mean the conversations that you and I have, it seems like every three to six months we have an opportunity to sit down and really get into a meeting, have so much trust between us that we don’t have to sit there and do it. The caveats and the preamble. So I really appreciate that too.

Speaker 1: (01:40)
Yeah, well it’s, it’s an honor. So I want to picture you from the outside. I feel like had a very meteoric rise to success in the speaking world. Like you kind of came in a lot of speakers, you know, it’s like, you know, they’d say, Oh, I spent 2025 years before I was in the hall of that. But there’s, you know, you were working at this for a long time and I just want you to sort of think about, you know, that person that’s out there that wants to be where you are. Like can you just give us the, the, a story, tell us like how did it happen? Like how did you become the speaker, you know, creator of the assessment, New York Times best selling author. Like what was the journey like at a high level?

Speaker 2: (02:24)
It was it, it, it, you know, it looks from the outside, like it’s meteoric only took 10 years in the making. Just cause I was totally not on the radar. No, cause I didn’t want to be, but because I just didn’t really know how to crack into it. And you’re a couple of things that were massively formative for me is as a very dark times that turned into Epiphanes. One of them was when when, when I really wanted it to be a speaker and I actually had tried to make that shift from, Hey, I’m good in presentations to let me share a message with your audience for a fee. I I didn’t have a bestselling book yet and I didn’t have any context. I had no reputation in the, in the speaking world. And I I didn’t have a lot of the things that make it easy to take for granted.

Speaker 2: (03:08)
And so I took a step back and and I realized that, first of all, I was trying so hard to take other speakers and mimic them. I want to be as polished. This speaker, I want to have everything memorized that I had kind of out of fear become locked up. And I think that’s an easy trap to fall in is if we don’t know who we are, we can’t expect anyone else to know who we are. And so I was trying to outdo people at their own game. So I took a step back in 2012 and I thought, w what is it that I can bring to the party that other speakers can’t? And I realized there’s only one time that you have complete control of how other people are going to perceive you. There’s only one time when your brand is is in control.

Speaker 2: (03:53)
And that’s the first few seconds when somebody interacts with you or with your materials for the first time. And so so I created the most fascinating possible mailer that I, that I could, that showed up on people’s doorsteps. And the cool thing about the mailer, it was a, here’s what, so I mailed it out and blue suitcases that look like this. They were grew to be little suitcases. And then I had inside of the case I did an exploration of not me, but this, the recipient. Hey Roy, here’s is what makes you fascinating. You are consistently respected, you are classically admired, you are best in class. And then if you’d like to talk more about how I might be able to bring this in a speech, feel free to reach out to me. Here’s my private cell. So that, so, so that takes looking at that what I was doing was taking a little expertise that I have, which was branding and understanding that you need to instantly differentiate yourself. But applying it in a fresh way and this is something anybody can do. Whatever your background is, find find something in your history, a skillset, an aspect of your network and then find a way to apply it. Not to everything. You don’t have to have great website, great hold music, great team, great office space. You just have to have one highly different,

Speaker 1: (05:16)
I have to disagree with you. I have found that hold music is the single greatest key to get fees is good. Hold music while you’re on the phone. If you don’t have good hold music, you are going to epically fail.

Speaker 2: (05:29)
Well my favorite was my old client Buka devito where it was Italian opera playing in the bathrooms. So so another thing that I did was when I, when I created my business card, since the name of the company is fascinate, I had to do something fascinating. And so when I similarly to the blue suitcase idea, telling them about them, I created a business card that shows them it’s all about them. Hey, how do you fascinate? So then when I meet somebody, I can say, here’s what makes you fascinating worry. I happened to know yours. You, you build loyalty and you set the standard. So if I were to give this to you and I will, I’m just say if I were to give this to you, you fascinate with prestige and trust. Your archetype is the blue chip. What we found was a business card costs $2, but on average we made $64 in returns from every business card I gave out because people kept it. And it was a treasure. I didn’t have the money to pay for everything else extravagantly. But you don’t have to have the most business cards. You have to have the best one. And so I’m applying things from my own background. That was one way that I realized I don’t have to be better, but I do have to be different.

Speaker 1: (06:41)
Yeah, and you have a great quote. We might as well get it out there cause I say it all the time and I do cite you, but it’s, this is like a game changing paradigm. Shifting quote on this. Can you just like go ahead and drop the mic for us with your, your different and better your your asa fee on that.

Speaker 2: (06:58)
It’s good to be better, but it’s better to be different. Different is better than better. And this dates back to when I worked with challenge or underdog brands like mini Cooper trying to compete against VW. If you try to outdo somebody else at their own gate by being better than you, you will always win because somebody else can out outcompete you. But if you try to differentiate yourself, it makes it much easier for you to build a brand, build a company and empire around who you already are so that your personality isn’t a Bolt-on. Your personality is the main driver of your business. That’s how we, especially as entrepreneurs, we can show up and be focused and in the flow and competent and enlivened because we’re understanding the different is better than better.

Speaker 1: (07:42)
Yeah. And I think that that is such a powerful idea again of just like if you, if you become like you say this, the key to becoming fascinating is to, is to become more of who you already are.

Speaker 2: (07:56)
Yeah. Don’t change who you are, become more of who you are. Dan Kennedy also said it another way. He said the higher the income, the the more the person is paid for who they are and the less the person has paid for what they do. Who you are is highly differentiated. What you do is a commodity. So a dentist you do fillings, I do fillings, but what’s the value that you’re bringing there? That is the differentiator for your personal brand. And that’s always been helpful because if you focus on just trying to do what you do better then you’ll never really be able to scale and achieve the massive growth that I know anybody who’s listening to this wants. Even if it’s just having a message that makes a bigger difference in the world, don’t focus on what you do. Focus on who you are.

Speaker 1: (08:43)
Yeah. And do you think that this applies, you know, like obviously a lot of our audience are people who want to monetize their personal brand so they want to be speakers and authors and that, but it’s, it’s interesting to me that you, you go out and you speak in corporations about how to be more fascinating and why it matters. So this, this applies to corporate executives and people like climbing the ladder and like even if you’re working inside of a big company, you, you still feel like cause cause I think there’s, there is a, there is a strong overlap between reputation that we talk about and making it more fascinating. I think it’s like there’s a lot of overlap there. You feel like this applies in the corporate world even if someone’s not gonna build a social media following or whatever.

Speaker 2: (09:27)
Yeah. Well, here’s what I see is that the venn diagram overlap between reputation and what makes you fascinating. Reputation is a clearly established set of principles and beliefs and attributes that are clearly linked to you. So if somebody in the office says, you know what, we really need somebody with a specialty for details. If you have a reputation for being exceptional in the area of details, then that is your ideal project. If you’re a salesperson and you have a competitive advantage in being passionately, emotionally connective, your ideal client is going to be somebody who needs a salesperson who is passionately emotionally connected. So what, what the fascination advantage does is that it helps you pinpoint exactly what your differentiator is. Why should an ideal client work with you and not somebody else? How do you define a personal what we know we need a personal brand, but what is your personal brand and your personal brand? It’s as, as I know, you know, it’s not just the meetings you go into the presentations you go in, it’s who you are and how you move through life so that you can have the best connections you can because you’re making a bigger difference based on how you are different.

Speaker 1: (10:44)
Hmm. Yeah. I absolutely, I absolutely, I love that. And we’re going to talk about the fascination advantage here so that y’all can get this because Sally’s going to give you this assessment that you go through and it actually tells you, you know, like the, the, the phrase that we use is find your uniqueness, which is something I learned from Larry Winget years ago to find your uniqueness and explored the service of others. And so we do the work at brand owners group of just like all day, everyday trying to like dive in and figure out what is the uniqueness of each client. And your assessment really cuts to the heart of that and gives people some language. Yeah. Right up, right up front. So let me ask you that. So before, before we come back to that, when you, what do you feel like was your big breakthrough in terms of a personal brand? So like you mentioned before, you weren’t on off the radar for awhile and then all of a sudden you, you were, you were everywhere and do you feel like there was, you know, what was that big, what was that big moment like for you and how did that kind of happen?

Speaker 2: (11:52)
And in February of 2010, it was a really crappy time to release a high concept business book, which is exactly when my book fascinate came out. So I was sweating bullets cause it was the recession, nobody was spending money on this high concept Malcolm Gladwell type book. And so there were, you know how this goes, there’s, there’s about three months from the time that you’ve turned in the manuscript and you cannot touch it because it is being printed somewhere in a warehouse and then ships or large trucks are taking it out to the world. So I was, you know, just like gouging my eyeballs out with mechanical pencils. So I said, well, if the book is about fascinating, I know what makes brand fascinating. What if we created a way to measure what makes an individual fascinating? So I Kinda, I started, I took the research and I started looking at it and I realized that personality tests are based on psychology and psychology is great, but it shows you how you see the world.

Speaker 2: (12:51)
What it lacks is the ability to show you how does the world see you? In other words, how do people perceive you at your most valuable, your most exceptional? So I went back into my, my, my branding mindset. And brands have focus groups. Coke doesn’t care how coke sees the company. Coke only cares consumer coke only cares. How does the consumer see coke? So if you take the principles of a focus group and you apply it to a personal brand, you can actually measure that. And so I thought, well, when the book comes out in February, we’re where like there were, you know, crickets out there. When the book comes out, what if I had this assessment simply as a social media tool to get people to talk about this and sort of as like a launch buzz vehicle. So the assessment came out and within about three months we had like 30,000 people do it.

Speaker 2: (13:44)
I mean, this is before Facebook advertising. This was just organically, it was getting shared and it continued to live as there was no opt in, there was it, there was no click, we weren’t collecting any email addresses because we had no idea what an email list was. And then finally when we decided that this is really something that needs to have a bigger place in the world. So we started charging for it and turned it into an actual full report. And it was, it was, it was nerve racking that the first, the first couple of days I would get an email. Every time we made a sale and it was the first 12 hours, there was no sale and then a lonely ding. And the next day it was ding Ding until pretty soon my kids called it the dinner bell and a dignity naming thing. And so that, that was kind of a trajectory of realizing that the little weird experiments that you do are the most valuable part of your personal brand. Because if all you do is have one plodding strategy but you haven’t gotten feedback of how other people are going to respond to you that it, it’s crucial to have these little flares of of testing something. And that’s, that’s, I think that’s a great also part of what a brand builders group is doing that you’re actually giving people, not just the why, but the how.

Speaker 1: (14:59)
So can we talk about the assessment for a second? Like it’s, it’s amazing. And I know now it’s like extremely scientific and so many people, how many takes, how many people have taken this assessment

Speaker 2: (15:10)
Over a million. We stopped counting at a million. But yeah,

Speaker 1: (15:14)
That’s incredible. So I think, you know, assessments are really powerful because I just, people just like assessments in general and I think you know, the way that you did yours and positioned it also was powerful versus like Meyers brakes or strength finders or something where it’s like, you know, how you see the world versus how the world sees you. Yeah. Really Genius and, and, and, and very cool. How if somebody is out there and they have an idea for an assessment like they go, Gosh, there, there is something I would want to measure it. How do you go from the idea for an assessment to lay like this is a thing that people can take and how do you know if it’s like validated or you know, it’s legitimate or you know, like talk about that a little bit.

Speaker 2: (16:01)
Sure. Well the first thing that in creating an assessment is what do you want to measure? And I think this is a mistake that I see people make a lot is they’re like, I want an assessment, but they don’t really have anything they don’t have. They’re not, they don’t know what to measure. So they don’t have an outcome because they can’t help people move forward in an area. The second thing that I, that I see people make is once they figure out what they want to measure, like how likely are you to be successful in opening a small business or how likable are you with your team? Then they, they, it’s not just about measuring something, it’s about there has to be an experience that your personal brand is adding to why somebody should do this assessment. Let me say that another way.

Speaker 2: (16:40)
If somebody could take the assessment that you’re thinking about doing, take your name off, put their name on. You don’t have a branded assessment. So it’s, it has nothing to do with you, your business. It, it has to be that if you, if you took my name off the fascination advantage, it’s not like somebody else can put it on. And that was done very much on purpose that the experience of going through it. We had, we had a very clear creative brief and it was super geeky design experts who are voracious about helping you decide, helping you see who you are at your best. So everything we did was kind of like, like everything feels kind of Geeky and highly branded and scientific in making sure that we were using all the research that we had all the iconography and this is what I mean by the experience like having, if you, if you can provide an analytics of some kind, then it makes your assessment much more valuable because it’s not just going on your say so you can actually prove something.

Speaker 2: (17:46)
If you, if you describe, don’t just describe who they are, describe who they are not. So if you’re, if you’re giving somebody feedback, you are likely to be really exceptional in this area. Like in this case, somebody who’s massively forward thinking you are not going to be great in this area. Another thing that I did to differentiate the fascination advantage is I at no point I, I, I positioned it against other competing assessments. And this is a, this is a great key. As your assessment grows, you can’t say, I’m like Myers Briggs, just not as famous. We took the opposite stance and say, great, you have Myers Briggs, you have strengths finder. You don’t need to know any more about that. You don’t need to know how you see the world. You don’t need to know your strengths. You need to know your differences. And then that gives you a foil.

Speaker 2: (18:32)
And this is true for anything in your personal brand, just it’s just as important, just as it’s important to know who you are. It’s almost even more important to know who you’re not and why that matters for your ideal client. So our messaging, our positioning is if you want to know your strengths, there are a lot of other assessments out there. If you want to know your differences and not evaluate people on the basis of strengths and weaknesses and competition then then we’re the only assessment that can offer that. And so, so that can map onto anybody’s personal brand. If you are very much not this kind of thought leader you don’t have to dis them. It’s just you have this, but now let’s into why is what you have to say needed right now for the person that’s gonna buy you, hire you, sign up for you.

Speaker 1: (19:19)
Yeah. And I think this, this concept is something that is one of your superpowers. You have many, but I think one of your superpowers is like differential positioning, but it’s kind of like, I think you described it to me is one time, I think we were talking about maybe speaker fees or, or speaker and you, you’re like, you need to clean this up cause I probably not going to say it right. But it was, it was like you said, you need to be able to put yourself inside of a box that people understand, but then you need to be able to differentiate yourself from everyone else in that box.

Speaker 2: (19:55)
Yes. Yeah. That, that was an interesting interpretation. Where that came from was when I, I did a lot of research trying to understand why was I not getting hired and other people were making 20,000, $30,000 a speech. And so I started looking at what the most successful speakers were doing and I went on to all the speaker bureau websites and I started correlating those dropdown menu of topics. So education’s a topic, politics, economics, psychology, those are all topics. And I, and I measured that against the fee they could charge. I mean, the higher the fee, not just the more demand but more specialized they are. And I saw that people who were using the word innovation on average to describe their topic, made $5,000 more per speech than the people who are using the word creativity. Even though creativity and innovation are essentially the same topic, is just simply how you position it.

Speaker 2: (20:47)
Marketing, totally overused, branding, less used, but still really used fascination. Why are we fascinated by some brands and people? So, so I was still operating in the marketing box, but drilling down more deeply so that it can be very clear. I am not this, but I, I am this another thing, Roy, that you and I talked about one time that I think that was a really interesting conversation we had is that every time you’re putting yourself out there, especially if you’re, if you want a certain job or project or client there four people you’re competing against. Oh yeah. The first one, the first one is, is more of an expert. So they have that they’re more specialized than you. The next one is more famous. The third one is cheaper than you. Definitely don’t want to compete against that person. And the fourth one is the pet who’s, you know, we love Bob, we always work with Bob, the person who’s entrenched in some way.

Speaker 2: (21:44)
So the the specialists, the one is more famous, the one who is cheaper and the one is the pet. So when we think about our personal brand, we have to, we have to be able to buffer all of those. By you definitely don’t want to be the cheapest, but people will only pay you as much as they perceive you’re adding value. And ultimately you have to get somebody to sit their butt down and write a check for you and not for all of your competition. So the more that you can articulate and make it easy for people to know, why should they hire you right now versus hiring the cast of thousands that are out there the, the easier it is for you to attract your ideal client and your ideal client leads to more of the exact work that you want.

Speaker 1: (22:27)
Yeah. So there’s, yeah, I remember that there’s always someone smarter than you, more famous than you, cheaper than you, and more favorite than you. Hopefully not better looking than you. And that’s a good thing. But so, so where do you look for that differentiation then? Is it just in the words you use? Like how do you, how do you figure out, you go, okay, I’m a motivational speaker but I am not this, or I’m a sales speaker but I’m not this or I’m a business author. But I’m not this or I’m a spiritual author, but I’m not this, right. Is that just kind of like, is that kind of like take the assessment, start from where you are, like figure out, you know, what is really unique about you and, and, and build from there.

Speaker 2: (23:14)
A key lesson from worldclass brands, especially ones that are feistier that don’t have the biggest marketing budgets, is they don’t try to compete with the bigger budget or being better. It’s that you have to know how you’re different. But, and that’s how I, when I created the fascination advantage assessment that the key to the whole system is you have to be able to have one word that sums up exactly how you are different and why they should care. So when you took, when you took the fascination advantage assessment, we learned here you’re, you’re a blue chip, you are classic, established and best in class. So the light, this is the language that you had in your report. So where are you might say if you want to work with a brand builder who is classic, established and best in class, then I’m the best option for you.

Speaker 2: (24:00)
If you want to work with a brand builder who is bold, artistic and unorthodox, there are plenty of people that you could work with. But if you want somebody classic, established and best in class, then let’s talk. You could also say you don’t need, you don’t need a brand builder that is bold, artistic and unorthodox. The world is changing too quickly. Branding hasn’t evolved that much. We have to make sure that you can be classic, established and best in class. So think of it like that. Those are words that you plug into your marketing or you simply have it as a positioning. I am this, make a list, I am not this, make a list. A, and then your job is to be as much not this as possible.

Speaker 1: (24:48)
Yeah, that’s, that’s interesting. One of the things that we do. So when we do our strategy days or when people come come through you know, like one of our events is we take up your brand characteristics less than we say come up with a list of adjectives you want people to use to describe your brand. But what we haven’t done is say come up with a list of adjectives you never want people to use when describing your brand, which is what I’m hearing you say is like equally as powerful

Speaker 2: (25:13)
Is there. So I would say there’s a third category. Cause what you said is what you said is great. You, you would never want them to use this to describe your brand. What I was saying was slightly different, but I think as a third category, which is other people are this and that’s fine, but that’s not me. And I’ll never be this. And if a client hires me to be perfectionistic, meticulous on target, a redundant, practical, they shouldn’t work with me, but I can refer them to somebody else. On the other hand, what I would never be. So there’s your second column. What I would never be is the double trouble is like, I’d never want to be dominant, overbearing, dogmatic, startling, chaotic, arrogant, called superior. So here’s who you are, here’s who you would never want to be, but it’s kind of like the shadow of this [inaudible]. And then here’s what other people are other competitors that you can counterpoint yourself again.

Speaker 1: (26:10)
Yeah. Casa. So it’s so, it’s so good. Like it’s, and it’s crazy how much of this I’d say you and then one of my minor, my best buddies, Jason Dorsey.

Speaker 2: (26:21)
Yeah.

Speaker 1: (26:22)
I have both made such an impact on my speaking career just by helping me understand the value of positioning, where it’s like, oh yeah, innovation is worth twice what creativity is worth. Yeah. Same exact content, same space, same bios, everything. And that is about positioning, which is his, what is his so another thing I want to ask you, I don’t want to like, we’re running out of time. I’m trying to think of like, it’s crazy. I’ve got, I don’t even realize this until this interview. I have like a list of like the 25 top lessons I’ve learned from Sally Hogshead like I could write a book on these are like the key, like things that have helped me. There’s another phrase that you say and I think people need to hear this. And I don’t think you teach this formally, but this was like an a side conversation. You said raise the stakes or you have to learn how to raise the stakes that mean and how does that apply to like our personal brand? Yeah.

Speaker 2: (27:23)
Your personal brand is not valuable unless it solves a problem. Fascination. Everybody thought it was a frivolous term. Nobody saw, why do I need to be fascinating if I’m not at a cocktail party? And the answer is in a crowded, distracted, commoditized world, if you don’t fascinate, you will fail. You’ll lose clients, you’ll lose money, you’ll die cold in a lot. And really making the problem as painful as possible. So if you don’t know the problem that you’re solving that people, then you’re not worth the bigger check. The bigger the problem you can solve, the more, the more deeply scary. The problem is the better. I learned this from my original speaking coach, Nick Morgan of public words, and he back in like 2006 when I was trying to be a speaker in the old days. And he said, you’re trying to be liked. The more that you can make somebody uncomfortable about a problem, that they’re already nervous about something that’s already keeping them up at night, the more urgently they’ll want to work with you and the more they will pay you to alleviate that problem.

Speaker 2: (28:24)
So at the beginning of a book or at the beginning of a speech, at the beginning of the presentation, you know, you can greet everybody, but say here’s, here are the threats. These are the threats that you’ve faced. The three threats that I solve are distraction, competition, and commoditization. People aren’t listening to you. Your competition is getting better and nobody knows how you’re different than everybody else. So I recommend that you have three, what do I call them? Deadly threats. What are the three deadly threats that if they don’t have a solution to that problem, then like things are going to hit the fan and then, and then when you explain how you solve that problem, they already have an appetite. The way that the phrase Nick Morgan used was what is their problem for which you are the perfect solution? And when you define that, to me that was, that was, that was hugely transformational because I was doing fascination. Like what kinds of things are fascinating? Why do we pay more for this bottled water than that bottled water? And that’s a $5,000 speech. But when you say your company will go out of business, if you don’t understand how each person on your team has a unique competitive advantage that allows them to be hyper over achievers because they have a specialty that they can double down on one specific area that where they are very likely to over deliver. That’s a different, yeah, same topic.

Speaker 1: (29:43)
All right. Same topic. Yeah. You, CJ effectively you’re teaching the same content but the, the wrapper that you’re doing, it will change the context of which you’re presenting. And also like the awareness of which the audience is receiving that messages

Speaker 2: (29:59)
Much more heightened because they made it, you’ve made it more relevant. You’ve made it uncomfortable, you want people to be itchy, you want people to almost put the book down or walk out of the speech because they’re like, holy crap. One last phase of research of this ties into that I think is relevant to what we’re talking about is of the million people that we’ve measured, we looked at the high performers in every industry at every level, both genders, all geographies. And we said, what are the high performers doing differently about it was going to be linked to skills or network or education. And it wasn’t, it was not what the high performers did differently was two things. A, they delivered a very specific benefit. They did not try to be all things to all people. So first was specific benefit. In my case, a specific benefit would be different, different than yours.

Speaker 2: (30:46)
But is there a specific benefit that you’re meticulous or is it that you’re entrepreneurial and so on? The second thing that high performers did differently is they did it on purpose. They purposely tried to do step away from projects where they couldn’t over deliver. So the detail person wasn’t trying to be the cheerleader for projects. So so that’s that’s kind of the overlap with reputation is that you have to have a reputation for one specific area of specialty and you get to choose it because it’s a personal brand. But make sure it’s something that you want to live into for the rest of your career. Otherwise you won’t be confident and authentic and you’ll be wearing a very expensive masquerade [inaudible].

Speaker 1: (31:31)
Yeah, I think about brand builders group, right? Like we, we made a decided, you know, several decisions early on, like one of them was we do exclusive personal branding. We do not work with companies. We only work with people. That was a very deliberate decision to go, we know that we can do this well for a person. We could probably do it for companies. A lot of our methodologies would apply to companies, but it’s like, that’s just not, you know who we’re going to be. I think

Speaker 2: (31:59)
So that a, so you’re doing with a company that’s highly specialized and you have your word, which is reputation. Yeah, yeah. The word is in the positioning. That repeat, if reputation is your business, then that informs who your clients are and even what your hold music is.

Speaker 1: (32:14)
Yes, it does. Well, and then you know, so like the way, the way we’re positioned right now, although it’s more of like internal moniker, so to speak, is that a obscurity is the problem we solve, which is to be unclear on trusted or unknown. So we say look, like if you don’t have the reputation, it’s either because you’re unclear. You’re, yeah, you can’t, when someone says, what do you do? You fumble like a, you’re untrusted. So they know you, but they don’t trust you or they just don’t know you. You’re flat out and visible. And so when I was thinking about your, your three, three deadly threats was sort of thinking about this. So, yeah, for all of you watching, this is really just a free coaching call for me. I’m glad that you’re all here, but this was just really a way to hook Sally and to be like, okay, what can I do to like get a free coaching for Sally? I know, I’m so seriously Sally, where, where do you want people to go to connect with you? And I know we’ve been teasing the fascination advantage they have to take it. Cause this is what we do. We help them find their uniqueness and it’s like they all should come to us with their word in hand, directly from you. So do you want to tell them where to go or do you want me,

Speaker 2: (33:25)
Yeah, I can tell it’s how to fascinate.com forward slash u y o u how to fascinate.com forward slash you. And then you put in your special code and your special code is BBG 19. All it does, it’s not case sensitive, but BBG 19 all one word. And then when I encourage you to do is after you take the assessment, have people around you take the assessments and you can start having the conversation of understanding, having a word to understand who somebody else is at their best, and then come back to BBG and, and up post in the comments what your result is so that so that we can start to learn more about you and you can start to learn more about other people in your world.

Speaker 1: (34:12)
Yeah, I absolutely, absolutely love it. I think the last thing I want you to just leave, leave people with Sally is you know, this thought about it, you are the way you become fascinating is that more of yourself? Why do you believe that and, and why do you think that matters? Eh, you know, and, and, and does it matter? I mean, there’s like a bazillion people on the planet. Why should anyone care to listen to me or my message or follow my social media when they can follow a bazillion other people?

Speaker 2: (34:47)
Well, growing up with the last name Hogshead, as you can imagine, that’s like a competitive disadvantage on the playground. And and I, I literally remember going in and crying to my mom, Mrs Hogshead saying, why can’t we have a name like Smith or Jones? And My mother said to me, it’s the thing about our name that makes it different, that will one day make you love it. Thing about you that makes you different is what makes people love you. And if we, you know, now my family, we have hogger fest twice a year to celebrate the birthdays of the grandkids and October is Homme Tober fest. But using that as an example, you don’t have to change who you are. You have to become more of who you are, specifically at your best. And that when you do that, it allows you to not not be beaten down by the mediocrity of trying to pretend that you’re something that you’re not, the world isn’t changed by people who sort of care the world.

Speaker 2: (35:47)
The world isn’t changed by people who aren’t passionate and who aren’t almost irrationally dedicated. The world is changed by people who understand who they are so they can help the world exist at its best. And that’s why I’m excited that you have maybe BBG on their eyes and I’m so proud of you. Like we talked about this over a year ago and it was a, it was this concept that you and Aja had had really thought through but really spent time thinking about what, not just what’s the positioning but the purpose, what’s the meaning of your brand? So I am, I’m psyched. Feel like Kinda like a, like a, like a little grandmother coming in and seeing how you’re doing.

Speaker 1: (36:30)
Well that is awesome Sally. Like thank you so much for your encouragement and your wisdom. There’s about 75 tweetable moments in this little interview that we are going to have to boil down to five, but we’ll put links so people can follow you. We’re certainly going to put a direct link for the fascination assessment and the code and everything so people can take it. And thank you for being fascinating, seeing the teaching all of us, how to be more fascinating by being more of ourself. We appreciate you so much.

Speaker 2: (36:59)
Thank you. Wonderful. Thanks Rory

Ep 12: Change the World by Finding Your Voice with Les Brown and Dr. Ona Brown

RV: (00:00)
Well my friends, you are witnessing probably one of the greatest moments in my professional career right now because most of the people that we are bringing to you as part of this summit are people that I’ve known for years. Some of them, you know, several of them are clients or they’re people that I’ve helped with their launch or they’ve helped me with one of my book launches or something. But right now you are witnessing a chance for me for the first time ever to meet Les Brown and his daughter, Dr Ohno Brown. I’ve never talked with them before and through a connection, a friend of ours, a mutual friend named Judd, we set this up and so you have a chance to learn here at the feet along side of me too. One of the legends in this business Les Brown, if you’re not familiar, he has inspired millions of people around the world.

RV: (00:51)
He is won the CPE award from the National Speakers Association. That’s the hall of fame. He also won the golden gavel. It was also called one of the top five speakers in the world by toastmasters international. He’s spoken for audiences as large as 80,000 people, as hundreds of thousands of social media followers. And there’s just one of the most inspiring people on the planet. And then sitting next to him here is his wonderful and amazing daughter, Dr Ono Brown, who is also an expert in personal and professional transformation. She has been in the business for decades. She spoken throughout the world, Australia, England Stockholm and South Africa. Her client roster is very impressive in her own right American Airlines, British Petroleum, Federal Reserve Deloitte United way. And she worked with her father started out in his organization, climbed the ranks, you know, started as a sales professional. The customer service was a top negotiator.

RV: (01:53)
Eventually it was the CEO of Les Brown Unlimited and now as an entrepreneur herself. And so they’ve lent us here about 30 minutes of their time to just get to know them. So les and Dr Oana, thank you. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Thank you so much for the work that you’re doing and giving us the opportunity to share your audience and be able to give them some insight on this area that we love and has been a passion years. And I know it’s, it’s it, it really is amazing. And I, I, you know, I was trying to think about, okay, you get this one chance in your life to sit down with you two and what are you going to say? And I think my first question is just so simple is, and I would, I would, I would love for both of you to give me your opinions on this, especially since, you know, the people watching and myself, we’re, we’re playing the role of student and your teacher and Oana is both a teacher and also has been, you know, I would think one of your number one students side by side.

RV: (02:49)
But I guess to start with you less, if you had to say, what do you think is the difference between the kind of speaker that changes the world and just another and just another speaker? I don’t think there is such a thing as a bad speaker. I think everyone who steps on stage has this desire to serve and help. But I was personally mentored by somebody I know, you know, Zig Ziglar was a personal mentor of mine for about five years and you know, there’s, there’s people like that that changed the world is, is there anything that you’ve learned that you could say, this is what you should put your mind to if you want to kind of have that type of impact?

LB: (03:33)
Absolutely. Well, that’s a very good question. I’m glad you asked that question. Very few people asked that question. And Zig, I love Zig. He was a phenomenal life. I’ve seen him so many times. We’ve shared the stage. That was one of the goals and dreams I had to open for his day. And it was just a great experience. You’ve just an incredible human being. The, the, the major key to becoming successful in the speaking industry. And my daughter and I, we trained speakers and we share with them what we see as the major key, the, the, the difference between people who change the world and people who just speak, people who change the world use stories. When I came into the industry, the majority of speakers, they were speaking from the book think and grow rich by Napoleon Hill as the Bible providing information from that book. I listened to me. If inflammation could change people, everybody would be skinny. Richard had B.

LB: (04:39)
So what we do, my daughter as a, as a coach as a speaker and what I do, we come without story. You know why? Because a story has a human face. And so when I came into the industry and, and, and this is something else for people who are coaches, entrepreneurs and business people. The Mike Williams, who’s the author of the book called the road to your best stuff. I hired him as my coach and the reason I did, you can’t see the picture when you in the frame. I saw him speaking and I enjoy his style of sweeping man, how he had me on the edge of this, my scene along with the the other audience members. And I asked him to be my coach and mentor because I wanted to do what he did. I wanted to impact the audience the way that he did. And so the three things that’s important. One, getting a coach, somebody who speak on the level of [inaudible]

RV: (05:42)
I like that as a coach. The second thing is having a message that I’m known for. You gotta be hungry. You go on Youtube and put restaurants speaking

LB: (05:58)
In the Georgia Dome, you’ll see that story. So having a signature message, and that’s what Mike helped me to come up with. So everybody has a story, is my Angelo said there’s nothing as painful as an untold story buried in your soul. And the third thing is, which is major using your story to orchestrate an experience to transform the audience individually and collectively. Oliver Wendell Holmes, that that wants a man, a woman’s mind and has been expanded with an idea or concept or experience. It can never be satisfied that going back to where it was, the speaking industry had been hijacked by speakers who speak to sell. We speak and I train speakers to change lives. Impact drives, requests and income. You transform people’s lives and transform how they see themselves that’s going to impact the kind of results that they’re able to produce in their lives. And they will want your products. You don’t have to sham it down. The thoughts that come up with neuro linguistic programming or group hypnotics and other techniques or use all kinds of profanity, f bombs, all that. You know, you, if you provide value for people, they will want to develop a relationship with you. Does that make sense?

RV: (07:32)
Yeah, I love that. I, I, you know, so, so you know Dr Oana, you got a chance to kind of watch your father do this. You, you, you teach other people to do it is, is there anything you would kind of add to this idea? I mean, get a coach, super big believer, but what about that like the message part specifically? I think that’s one of the things I’m, a lot of the people that come to brand builders group, they’re struggling to figure out what their messages.

LB: (08:00)
Is there anything that helps with that? Well, let me just say that’s a good question because we call her the message midwife. Yes, go ahead.

OB: (08:12)
The method midwife and I help people to actually give birth to their unique message that they want

LB: (08:17)
[Inaudible]

OB: (08:18)
And that’s what I’ve been doing since 1995 and it is one of, it is my magnificent obsession. I’m so grateful and honored every time we are able to help a voice to come forth that’s been waiting and trying to figure out where is my voice, what does my voice have to share with the world? And one of the things that I would like to add to what dad just said is the fact that he genuinely cares about people. My father genuinely loves people and wants to see people be able to have their greatest life, to live their dreams and to become the greatest version of themselves. And so when I think about someone that’s able to actually impact the world, it’s important that we look at the foundation, the actual base intention of why you are speaking. Is it because you want to impress people and show people how successful is it?

OB: (09:16)
Because you want to be able to, are you feeling for the Mike or attention or is it because you genuinely are here to want to make this world a better place before you take your last breath? And that is the space that we have always come from and we enjoy working with and coaching because we don’t coach everyone. We, we believe there are certain people that are cut from the same cloth and branches up the same tree. And if you are coming from the space of wanting the world to be better and wanting to do your part to make it happen, that’s when you’re able to actually impact the world, which is the name of my company, world impacts now.

RV: (09:54)
Hey Man, I, I love that. That’s such a simple thing, but it’s like people can tell, right? Like they can tell when you’re there to serve them and support them and then they can also tell when you’re trying to steal attention or you’re trying to like, you know, satisfy your own self worth or, or sell something, you know, as you say. And I, I think that’s, that’s really good. One of the things, and I’m cheating here a little bit because you know, you coach Judd is one of your clients and that he’s also one of our clients on the strategy side. You know, as he shared with me that, cause I asked him, I was like, well, Gosh, like what are you learning? Like what are, what are the things they’re telling you? And he said, you, you know, that you guys really focus on teaching, kind of reaching the heart and moving people emotionally. And not just like Kinda like what you said with the story. And not just information, but is there anything that you think from a technical standpoint that people can do to move people on more of the heart level? And I think, you know, when people think of Les Brown, I think they think of this, you know, straight from the heart, like right to the gut, like honest, you know, catch you in the core. Is that something that can be taught or or yes. Let me jump in.

OB: (11:28)
We emphasize the importance of speaking from your heart and not your head. Most people are coming from their head, right? So we say get out of your head and get into your heart. Because when you speak heart from your heart is going to connect with the hearts of the audience members. Okay, go ahead. Yet. Well,

RV: (11:46)
How people live their lives as a result of the story. They believe about themselves, training people to

LB: (11:53)
Do three dimensional storytelling where you expand their mind and vision of themselves beyond their mental conditioning and circumstances where you touch their heart. Because the heart we’re in basically emotional people and you ignite their spirit, distract them from their thinking presently. Interrupt that mindset. Touch their hearts and ignite the spirit your lives. No saying who take a horse to the water. You can’t make them drink of it. You know how to effectively communicate and you create the thirst where they want to. Drake. And so when you look at how to get people to go there, I want to ask you a question please. When you look at your life and go back when you were like four or five years old, you look around, who’s the first person that you looked at that you admire, that you loved and that had a great impact on? Who was that person

RV: (12:51)
You asking me directly? Yes. Gosh, there’s so many people. But the person I usually talk about, well it’s really my mom. I was raised by a single mother and you know, she sold Mary Kay and like was trying to make money on this side and raise two kids and she was 22 years old and had no college degree and had been divorced twice and so, you know, but, and she wasn’t educated like, but she always, I remember her saying, she’s like Roy, one day you’re going to go to college and you’re going to get a full ride scholarship cause I’m not going to be able to afford to send to you. But she would, she was the first person that I remember saying you can do anything. Whatever. Whatever you dream of is available to you. So that was my mom.

LB: (13:40)
Good. What now? What’s your mother’s name? Tessy. Tessy. Good. Alright, good. Ladies and gentlemen, what did you announce you first day morning, Rory?

RV: (13:50)
Ori. Rory is how you say it? Yep.

LB: (13:52)
Hello, my name is Roy Ladies and gentleman. I want you to write something down. You can do anything. I want you to just, just that one statement and I want you to think about your goals and your dreams and your personal life, your professional life, and something you want to do in terms of your social contribution to make a difference. And when you think about that, here’s what I want you to do is look back at that statement. You can do anything. Let me share something with you. My mother, my mother was a single mother. She sold Mary Kay. She was an entrepreneur. She was a person that not only was she driven to make things happen, to create a great life for us, but she also, she inspired me and she taught me and it was constantly an affirmation. You can do anything that you want to do.

LB: (14:48)
And as you think about yourself and think about your dreams, most people go to their graves with their dreams still in them because they suffer from possibility blindness. What have they been in our household? They would be living their dream. Yes, like I’m living by and I’m saying to you, as my mother said to me, you could do anything. The other thing is that I learned from my mother. As you think about your goals and dreams, take responsibility for what you want. My mother was a take charge person. She was a person that took responsibility for raising us and she thought, like George Bernard Shaw said, the people that make in this life, they look around for the circumstances that they want and if they can’t find them, they create them. You take responsibility for your life as my mother did in raising us the possibilities of what can come out of that. I has not seen ear has not heard those in the heart of mankind. What God has in store for you. So do you see where I’m going with that?

RV: (15:49)
Yeah, so so and so you just, you, you kind of will like just have someone tell the story and then you kind of reconstruct it with the message, apply it to the audience and then kind of where did you learn it from? Your mother.

LB: (16:03)
Your mother impacted you between the ages of zero and five according to DACA Mod and seal, the man who wrote the book learned optimism the most exhaustive 26 years study on self esteem. He said between zero and five we form a word in our heart. That word is yes or that word is no. And so as you watched your mother and how she conducted herself, the values that she had, you pick those values. Some things are taught, some that caught. So there was an imprint that was made on you and that’s why you are who you are. Now. You were molding then who you were going to become in the future with your observation and unconsciously taking on that mindset, embracing those values that you witnessed and then began to incorporate them in your life to create a different kind of story for yourself.

RV: (17:00)
[Inaudible] I love, I love that. So it’s almost like it’s, it’s, it sounds like you could almost take, take the stories that moved you and those are the stories you tell to other people. It’s like if it moved you, it’s gonna move, it’s gonna move somebody else. It’s

LB: (17:16)
Also the end, the lessons that you learned from the story. You learned a lot from her just watching her as a kid. And so as as you, you know, Abraham Lincoln said all that I am and all that ever hope to be, I owed to my mother. And so when you, when you started talking about her, you immediately picked up inside talking about all the things that she did in a very short time that gave us a picture of who she was selling. Mary Kay being a driven woman, a mother who was single, found a way to raise us and was the kind of person that can make a way out of no way. All of those qualities are required today in this era. What the late Peter Drucker call that era, the three C’s, accelerated change, overwhelming complexity, and tremendous competition. So you have in you and we were working about [inaudible] and Ana and I spend time with you.

LB: (18:14)
We will extract the UN title out of your heart that resonates with you as a person. And out of that title of book, a title for your book in that keynote message, why we know about Dr. Model of the game, because I have a dream. The Kennedy’s ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you could do for your country, Les Brown, you gotta be hungry. So there is a story in you that will distract, dispute and inspire that will distract people from their current story. That through the execution of your story and the things you learned from your mother and your own life experiences, you dismantled their current belief system and you inspire them to become, as Mother Teresa would say, a pencil in the hand of God and started writing a new chapter in their lives.

RV: (19:08)
So I, I love this and I’ve got a question for you Dr Ono. Okay. So you know, it’s interesting cause you’re, you’ve complete a lot of his sentences cause it’s like you guys had a speaking from the same, you know, the same place. But if I, and I agree with this very much, you know, you said this earlier that that people beat people become I think you said we, we are the basically the stories that we tell ourselves about who we are. We live into that. So Dr Ana, my question would be from your opinion or your perspective, what is the story that your dad has told himself about himself over the years that you think has positioned him to do what he has done? Right. So there’s some story that we’re all telling ourselves in our head. Yes. From your firsthand like growing up in the house and being there with the man. What do you think is the story he tells himself about himself that has, has helped him become who he is?

LB: (20:15)
Good question.

OB: (20:16)
The question, the story that I believe my father’s told himself about himself is that he has greatness within him and he tells his audience members that. And I, I, we also say that when you are doing this type of work, whatever you put out, it comes back to you a hundred fold. And so I am sharpens iron and as he’s telling the audience, you have greatness within you. I believe that needs also repeating what he is told to himself. Time and time again, having rise above and against all of the different things that happened during his childhood and being adopted and being raised by my grandmother made me Brown and not really having any formal education and even build, I’m sure the negative inner conversation with kick in and say, I don’t have what it takes. I’m not qualified. I’m not worthy of this. To be able to stand in front of thousands and demand and command the stage so that people can can actually have your lives be impacted. However, if you would say to himself, I have greatness within me and I’m going to show them that they have greatness within them now within itself, now you’re coming from a different space because he is positioning himself to be utilized as an instrument in that moment. And so I watched my father be in times when he was battling the big C that we call it the little seat, that’s what we call cancer. And he would be in pain

RV: (21:47)
Twice, right?

OB: (21:49)
Yes. Several times throughout the years where he would take the microphone and actually be in pain. However, once he would start to speak because the message was coming through him and not from him, all of a sudden go away. And he would be able to empower people and uplift people and watch them go through what we call a transformational experience. So that is what I think is one of the greatest things that my father’s ever said to himself and to audiences around the world. And that is you have greatness within you.

RV: (22:27)
Nobody’s ever asked you that question before because that was pretty awesome answer that sounded like you’ve given that. That was really, really awesome. I love that. So the story, you know, if, if I, and I think this is really interesting, I think it’s ironic that the people who are speakers and authors, right? They’re sort of like, they’re supposed to be the experts teaching personal development yet they struggle on a day to day basis with the same things that everybody else struggles with. And I think there is a story that speakers, you know, have to overcome, right? They, they say, well, Gosh, there’s a million speakers out there and you know, I don’t have 5 million views on youtube and I don’t have a podcast. It’s 100 million downloads and I’m not a best selling author. And there’s already, there’s already a les Brown and there’s already a Tony Robbins and there’s already whatever. Is there anything that you would say, you know, to, to somebody that maybe has some of those doubts that either they’re too late or they’re too old or they’re not enough because the reality is there is a lot of noise. There is a lot of competition, you know, to what Peter Drucker said you know, talk to us about it.

OB: (23:46)
I would like to speak to this first because I know a little bit more about this and the reason why, because I had to find a way to find my voice in the shadow of this giant light, this gigantic. Did you do that? Yes, and so in my mind I was constantly saying to myself, it was no way on earth. 81 is going to find value in what you have to share and there’s no way you will ever be able to measure up and feel these huge, gigantic shoes. And that was my biggest challenge that I had to overcome and realize that it wasn’t about me becoming a a les brown jr or B becoming this person that was exactly like my father, but finding my own style, my own unique voice, my own way of expressing what I had to express in order to help the people that I would be able to help.

OB: (24:48)
Because what we teach our actual speakers that we work with and we have been grooming and cultivating throughout the years, is that there’s someone that has your name on them. There’s someone that will resonate with your voice and your voice alone and they won’t be able to hear it from Anthony Robbins or Brian Tracy or Jim rural or nor or Les Brown. They will only be able to hear it from you. And we sincerely believe that because it will have something to do with the makeup of who you are, your, your ethnicity, your, your, where you were raised and the beliefs that you have in some of these experiences that you had to grow through and not just go through. And so this was what I had to hold on to was to realize that I had something special in me. I had greatness in me. It was not just exempt for just dad. He was not the only person that had greatness in him and that I was going to be able to reach people. Once I was able to celebrate and embrace who I was in my own unique way, that’s what a speaker has to do for themselves. Celebrate and embrace who they are and get out of the comparison game. This is not a comparison. You don’t need to compete with anything except for the greatest vision of who you can become.

LB: (26:10)
And then he is, we start off first focus on the Messenger and then the message.

Speaker 4: (26:19)
Okay.

LB: (26:20)
Because to me the,

Speaker 4: (26:30)
Yeah.

LB: (26:32)
Live an achievement driven life so that you’re speaking not just from some theory or something you read from a book, but just speaking from that, you are still reaching higher. You know, when you think about something that cyber, he says that a man’s reaches to supersede his grasp war. What are the heavens? And so we must, until you get to the region, I’m just, I’m 75 years old and I still have goals and dreams that I’m working on. I used to think people in their forties, we’re all, now that I’m 75, I feel like I’m a waiter.

RV: (27:14)
Oh my gosh. Yeah, that’s incredible

LB: (27:19)
Ball. That is incredible. So I ha let’s talk about that

RV: (27:26)
Just a little bit less. You know, I, it was when zig zig, I met Zytiga NSA. I was in a contest called the world championship of public speaking for toastmasters and almost 23. And he actually came and sat next to me randomly and we became buddies. And then you know, I was, I was with him and I would go see him, I’d be backstage with him and stuff and right up to where he had his fall and he started to lose her short term memory. So it was, I knew him towards the very end of like his career.

LB: (27:58)
What, what do you [inaudible]

RV: (28:00)
What do you think about now? Like did you think about, you know, succession planning in terms of, you know, transferring things over to Dr own a or, or you know, like what are some of your goals? Like what, what, what is the thing that has your attention

LB: (28:17)
Now? Hmm, that’s a good question. I’m focusing now. Yes, he does. Yeah. You learn, you earn and you pass it on. And so what I’m doing now, and I’m very excited to being able to partner with my daughter to do that, is to train speakers on how to begin to tell their story in a way that they can make a difference. Oliver Wendell Holmes set that, that we should be ashamed to die until we’ve made some major contributions with human chi. We all have an energy signature. So my goal is to train people around the world and train others how to train them because it’s driven by system, not a personality. And so I’m excited. I’ve got speakers now who can go toe to toe with me now. My daughter thinks that she can. Yeah, I just want her to know, know a thing that too, because I’ve seen a Beta too.

RV: (29:25)
Echo c knows all your lines though. Yours. He, this is, here’s why she has an advantage. She knows exactly what she knows exactly what she’s going to say and she knows exactly what you’re gonna say. You’re the one that should be scared. You might not know what either one

LB: (29:42)
Of you are going to say, but she does. I like it. I lie. I like it so much. Well I guess so. So let me ask you this. You know, you’ve mentioned that you guys used to do some a speaker training and all of that and we’ll, we’ll put links, but where do you, where do you want people to go if they want to tune in and learn more about this or you know, follow on your journeys?

OB: (30:06)
Yeah, they can definitely go to own a brown.com that’s o n a B r o w n.com and they can go to Les brown.com. They can go to our social media and follow us there and dms and we’re going to be doing so much more. We just came back from Singapore. It was an amazing trip, 20 hours there, 20 hours back. We trained and did a work with an audience that they was around four or 500. And we really, truly, sincerely believe there are quite a few people that are going through the motions of training people. But here’s what we really, truly believe, Rory. And that is that the more voices that we’re able to uplift and to empower the more voices that come forward and start to speak from their truth and show people ways to get to their greatness and to make it through these seemingly dark times and to shine their light, the better the world will be.

OB: (31:09)
And so it is not about being afraid of someone becoming competition. There is no competition for who my father is. I believe that he is a walking, living, breathing legend, and he is a legend that is being, he’s doing the work of empowering others so then his message will live on and I’m so honored to be a part of that in carrying the torch and not allowing his message to ever die. You will always live on in the hearts of those whose lives he’s touched and he will definitely be a part of those who have taken on their boys and will spread the message that we are here to spread. I love the same evil prevails when good men and women do nothing. And so me as good men and women are doing our work to make the world better and that’s why worry. We’re so honored to be able to collaborate with you because you setting an intention to do this work and make this available to people in a time like this when it’s important to have something that can feed your faith. We love the same feed your faith and your fears will start today

LB: (32:26)
When you ask them, what am I doing? One of the things I did not mention, I want to, I’m looking for seven people that are hungry, hungry to make a difference to to be able to establish a company that they can feel good about it and pass it on to their children and to their grandchildren and so they can email me at Les Brown’s [email protected] that’s Les Brown, [email protected] this is not everybody. I work with seven people our whole year, one on one. This is my one on one training for high end clients and trust me at the end of that year. Well, even during that time, I don’t make a tremendous impact that unsurprised themselves. I will hand them back a different purse.

OB: (33:16)
That’s beautiful. Right. Do you ever, do you, have you ever heard of parent abuse?

RV: (33:21)
Don’t I heard of what? Parents Abuse? Yeah. well I’ve heard of

OB: (33:29)
My dad was female on major or right in the middle of the interview. What does he do? He gives out his email.

RV: (33:39)
Well, you may get a few [inaudible] you may get an email here and there. We’ll, we’ll, we’ll see. So last, here’s my last one, last little thing. So is there one, if there was one lesson that you wished you would have learned earlier, so you know, as a messenger, you know, is whether that’s on the platform speaker or just within your personal life or professional life, is there, is there a lesson that you learned? You eventually learned it, but you thought, man, I wish I would have learned this sooner. If I would’ve learned this sooner, it would’ve made a big difference.

LB: (34:19)
Absolutely. There’s one area that is glaring for me.

OB: (34:24)
I would have done been, no.

RV: (34:29)
Yeah.

LB: (34:35)
Creating collaborative achievement, driven, supported relationships with people who you can learn from, people that will inspire you to grow mentally and spiritually and all the various areas of real life. That to me is major. Oh, QP only quality people.

RV: (34:58)
Oh yeah. Yeah.

OB: (35:00)
I know. It looks like just to piggyback and add to what Dad said, when you’re having planes and time zones and stages and pull kids, often times you can have your blinders on, right? Because we’re taught to focus and to not be distracted and to do what we are actually born to do and to live out our purpose. However, in the midst of that, we were so busy doing what we were doing around the world and getting the standing ovations and and making these clients tickled peak and please beyond measure that we kind of lost. We kind of missed some of this technology shift that was going on and I remember I said, oh, Facebook, what sense does that make? Like if people want me, they can either call me or they can easily send me, you know, an email, but why would I need to go to Facebook? Then doesn’t make sense. And so I remember watching something and it said, Macy’s has a Facebook page. I said, Whoa, okay, maybe this isn’t going anywhere.

OB: (36:08)
So I would say this, being able to tap in to technology if it was something that I would do differently. And I tell all of the speakers that we work with, plug into the technology, build relationships with people like Rory, know how to actually utilize that to have your message be amplified and to reach people in different and various ways because we’re all schools. So we’re used to being able to do everything offline. But the younger generation, they’re doing everything online. Like this is, this is a summit and we are in our home. Yeah, that’s a perfect example of how times have shifted and being able to move and flow with the, with the shift of time.

RV: (36:53)
Yeah. Well I love that. And I think this, this has been some timeless wisdom, some timeless truths and just an absolute privilege and honor to get to see you too in your element, in your home, just chairing, like, you know, the secrets of what you do. And exposing people to everything that you have available. So thank you for everything that you’ve done for what you have yet to do. And, and thank you especially for being here. We are. We’re honored to have you. Thank you. Honored to have you Royce. Thank you so much for who you are and the light that you bring to the world. God bless you. I appreciate you. [inaudible].