Ep 243: Building Million Dollar Membership Sites with Alison Lumbatis | Recap Episode
RV (00:01):
Let’s talk about how to build million dollar membership sites. What an interview, Allison Lobas. She was dropping so much bombs, like so many nuggets, so much inspiration, so much tactical information, empirical information about how she has built this seven figure business. And I just feel lucky to have her as a friend and, you know, proud to call her a client. And I just, this lady’s amazing. She’s awesome. And it’s funny, cuz I remember very specifically the first time I met her she impressed me from the moment I saw her. I was like she’s she’s got the gift and uman, just to see what she is doing and uhow she’s growing. She’s awesome. So,uwelcome to the recap edition, influential personal brand podcast. It’s your man, Rory vaden breaking down that interview and you know, normally I share like my top three highlights. UI had to, I couldn’t boil it down to less than four. I had, I had so many,uand I, I got four here for you that are just the things that really stuck out to me that I hope stick out to you. And uthe first one is, man, this is so, so flagship like, so cornerstone, so foundational of what we believe at brand builders. And to hear her say these words verbatim, she said it all started because I created the program that I needed at the time.
RV (01:40):
Bam like that is it. If, if you’ve been around here at all, you’ve heard to say this over and over again, you are most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were. There is no other avatar in the world that you will understand in a more intimate way than the person that you once were. You are equipped, you are designed, you are prepared, you are educated. You, you, you are, are, are mission driven to serve that person. And to hear her just say that like, so clearly she’s just going. I tried to solve this problem in my own life. And then, you know, I realize other people had this problem. And so I look back and I created something for that. That’s it like that’s that is the shortest path to uniqueness. That’s the fastest way to momentum. Like that’s the, the clearest line to the distinction that is available for a personal brand.
RV (02:41):
And just, you know, to see her doing it and, and all the community that has it has become and people around it. And then her recent book launch and all that, that we, you know, we were excited to be a part of. I mean, it’s just awesome. Just awesome. So who, who were you, right? Like when you’re trying to, when you’re creating your plans for the future and for your business and your personal brand and your content, you go, who was I, what was I struggling with? What did I need that didn’t exist? Or I couldn’t find at the time, what do I know now that I wish I knew then and make that available to people that that’s gonna be visceral going to be real. It’s going to be emotional, compelling. It’s gonna have connection and power and it’s gonna be profound because you’ve been there and you have locked a mile in those shoes, speak to that person, right.
RV (03:33):
Speak to that person. And you’ll, you’ll go far. And Allison great example of this number or two. Okay. Number two, takeaway. So simple. She said in between launches, we were working aggressively on capturing leads and building our newsletter list, right? So she was saying our newsletter list converts at about 10%, just from a, a weekly newsletter, the it she sends. And the, she said, we run a lot of Facebook ads to our freebies. It doesn’t get more simple than that. It doesn’t get like easier than that. It more straightforward than that. And if you’ve been through our relationship engine training, tho those of you that are members of ours, when we take you through the relationship engine, we, we teach you the architecture, the, the infrastructure of a funnel, you know, it starts with something free. Like that’s the lead magnet is what can you give value?
RV (04:31):
How can you give value first, save the best for first? What can you give away for free teach the best of what, you know, package it up in something that is small and concise. The, that is a major quick win and, and deliver the goods right up front. Those become your lead magnets. And then she runs ad to those lead magnets and people download them. And to this day, this is what we do go on brand builders, group.com. And look, you’re gonna see that we are pushing our, our trends and personal branding, national re search study. We spent tens of thousands of dollars on that. Like it, it’s, it’s a beautiful lead magnet. It took us a year to develop over a year, all in to like plan it and put the whole thing together. We give it away for free. And it is this incredibly, it’s just this packed.
RV (05:18):
You know, it’s a PDF though. Like it’s a PDF document. People can scroll the thing in five minutes. And, and now we go out and we do media interviews and we drive people to that and we run YouTube Ads and we drive people to that and we do press releases and, and we drive people to that. It’s the same, same thing, right? She’s doing the same thing. Brandon Bouchard does the same thing. Like it mean, go down, pick your list, pick your influencer. This is how it, it works. And it doesn’t have to be new. The part that makes it special is it’s your stuff. And it’s, it’s whatever you would do and who you would, who, who you would provide that for. So you know, it’s that simple, like drive people to down a freebie, get them on your newsletter list, talk to them once a week and then tell them when you have something available to buy, like you’re building trust, build value, build relationships before you need them.
RV (06:12):
Like that is what you have to do, build relationships before you need them. We talk about out this in pressure, free persuasion with your list. It’s the same thing you have to give value first. And then they will trust you. And then when you have something they’re there, they’re sitting there ready to buy what, whatever your thing is number three, and this was really big for me hearing what she was saying. This is, I think an area of learning for my, myself. This is somewhere where I go, Ooh, I’ve, I’ve missed the boat here. AJ is super passionate about, about this. And, and so she’s moving the company in this direction, thankfully, because this is huge. And it was very edifying when Allison was talking about it is she said, build the community around the program. Know it’s more than just the clothes, right?
RV (07:00):
So, you know, she’s selling outfit formulas, and that’s what her, you know, her membership is all about. And she’s like selling clothes and helping people helping women specifically figure out what to wear. Like that’s the problem that she’s solving, but the, the power becomes the community, the community around found the program. And, you know, ultimately the knowledge is replaceable. You know, or at least kind of has like an expiration date just from the standpoint of like, look, if someone’s in your membership, like look at our, our brand builders, right? So if you’re a member, if you sign up for our, our flagship coaching, like, you know, main coaching program pro quarterly, we immediately give you access to everything to the, to the whole curriculum. Like from day one, you can go through everything as fast as you, as fast as you can consume it.
RV (07:49):
Well, once you’ve learned it, you know, it’s kind of like, well, what’s the reason to pay? Well, you know, there’s a couple things there. It’s like another thing that we talk about all the time, people don’t pay for information, they pay for organization and application, people pay for organization and application. So, you know, they need the information and then they need help applying it. And then, but then the thing that like you can, you never break free of is community. You it’s the communities, the people you’re around our brand builders members are freaking amazing. I mean, Allison is one of our clients. She’s one of the members, right? Like she’s the kind of person that comes to our events and you sit next to her. And then, you know, we’ve got lovey Ajai Jones and she comes to the events and she’s a multi New York times bestselling author, and she’s got a viral Ted talk and we have two, we have two billionaires become clients.
RV (08:40):
This last year. We got, you know, people who are time magazine person of the year, we’ve got lots of 10 millionaires and a hundred millionaires. You know, all these people with millions of followers and hundreds of millions of video views. I mean, our community is insane. Actresses actors like major famous like TV actors, musicians. I mean the brand builders group community is just nuts. You know, we’ve had several clients on the podcast, you know, so you’ve gotten to, to learn from some of them, but the point there is going, you know, from my perspective, and we still started brand builders group. And like, you know, here comes RO like thinking about, you know, content and information and my like nerdy brain, I’m going, we gotta create the world’s greatest curriculum. Right. And, and I think that’s what we did or one of the world’s greatest curriculums.
RV (09:29):
I, I definitely feel confident saying that our content is incredible. And yet the content is like,
RV (10:25):
And that’s exactly what Allison was saying. And, you know, she obviously saw the light on that much earlier than I did of for our community. But what for your community? How can you, how you facilitate your community coming together without you? One of the features that we just rolled out in our member portal is is an example, just an example of this. So we created this technology in our portal where every member registers themself and there’s a map. And when it shows a pin on a map for where you live, and then you can click on the other pins that are close to you, or if you’re traveling like wherever you’re going so that you can see who the other brand builders are like, where are the other members of the community? I’m so jacked about it, even for me, because I, you know, at this point we have, we have over 500 clients.
RV (11:15):
So like, you know, I’m, I don’t know all of ’em anymore by by name. I know a lot of ’em, but like when I go traveling, I can like see them and meet them and, and you know, get them together and, and they’ll get together. And I just, I’m excited about that. And that’s what Allison is talking about is going, that’s not like a nice to do long term that like becomes the core, like it, the, the, the, the unbreakable bond. And I think you, you move from that role of being like, okay, I’m a teacher to, to more of just like, you know, I’m the, I’m just hosting a, whatever I’m hosting a Bible study, or I’m hosting an event, or I’m, you know, I’m, I’m just, I’m just the, the, the, the gathering spot for people to come to. So that was huge for me.
RV (12:02):
And again, our team and AJ they’ve been working in that direction, which I’m just, I’m just pumped about, cuz our community is incredible. So how can you do that for your community? How can you bring them together? Was huge. And then the fourth thing, which was just another takeaway, which is another thing that I go, this is just such a good reminder. Here’s what she said. She said, my philosophy has always been about continually investing into myself on entrepreneurship really is personal development. I mean, direct sales really is personal development. Professional services really is personal development. Any type of leadership really is personal development. Like that is the job like, and that’s what you’re supposed to do. And it boggles my mind, like literally blows me away. How you know, yeah. AJ and I are junkies about, I mean, we go to the conferences, we go to the groups, we go to the events and I always kind of would assume that it’s like, the person who’s struggling is the person who should be the person who should be in that room.
RV (13:07):
The most is the person who’s struggling the most, right? Like the person who needs the most help, the person who is not making enough money and they need help. And they need someone to coach them and show them what to do. But ironically, that’s never, who’s in the room. The people who are in the room or people like Allison is the people who are crushing it, they’re killing it. It’s like the last people who really need to be, there are always the ones that are the first to sign and they’re on the front row, you know, at the event, they’re the first in, inside the mastermind. They’re, they’re the, the first to buy the book and read it. And that’s why they are crushing. It is because they’re the person doing that. And it, it just took me years to realize that. And, oh my gosh, like Allison is such a bad mam jam.
RV (13:54):
I mean, like you, you heard her story, like what a bad ma pajama this woman is. And her and her team, you know, like always nobody does it alone, but she’s a bad ma pajama. And yet she’s signing up for coaching from us. And from, you know, I met her at an, I met her at another mastermind, like she’s investing into herself and that is why she’s winning. It’s one of the biggest reasons why she’s winning and, and not just investing in herself, but like FA executing, executing. There were actually two parts in the interview. I really, really love. So I love when she said she said we had cold leads in our email list who suddenly started up again for our stuff because of the 15 PS. Now, if you’re not one of our, our members yet you may not have picked up on that.
RV (14:45):
And what are the 15 PS? The 15 PS is our framework that we teach for how to write, how to write sales copy, like on a sales page. So what she was saying there is she has all these old leads that were cold. And, you know, she always, you know, does a broadcast, sends people to a page to sign up? Well, when she came through the training and ha had her team redo the sales page with the 15 piece, all of these old people started signing up that had never signed up. And that was her saying, I learned something. I executed on it and it worked well, of course it works. That’s why we teach it. It, we teach what we do. We teach what our clients do, like what we have learned. So of course it works. The question is, number one, will you learn it?
RV (15:34):
And number two, will you do it? And, and so you gotta be willing to invest in yourself and then you gotta be willing to execute on the thing that you learn. And so she said that, and then she said another one, right after that, she said I followed every single step of the brand builder’s bestseller launch plan. And it worked right. Like she sold thousands of copies of her book on opening week. And she followed a formula. It’s, it’s a formula that we’ve learned. It’s a formula that we teach. It’s a formula that we do. I mean, go back and listen to the like, you know, so that’s part of our curriculum bestseller launch plan. But if you go if you go watch our influential personal brand summit or if you listen to the interview that I did with Gretchen Rubin, Gretchen Rubin talks about how she built her email list and doing lead magnets, right?
RV (16:23):
Allison talks about that. If you, if you go listen to John Gordon, they interview that I did with John Gordon and he talks about how he built a speaking career, going out and speak for free. Like, I, these are all things that, that we teach a formal part of our curriculum, but it’s like, until you hear one of these legends tell you, that’s how they did it. And that’s how they started you. You kind of think there’s some secret maybe that you’re, that you’re missing or you know, that, that, that it, it is like, there’s gotta be more to it than that. And it it’s like, there’s not, it’s just a matter of knowing it and, and executing it. But part of that is being humble enough to go, gosh, I got something to learn. Like I need some, I need to learn from someone who’s done this.
RV (17:05):
I need to learn from somebody who has already accomplished the thing that I’m trying to do. And and, and even, and go, like, in the case of someone like Allison, she’s already crushing it going, yeah, I wanna keep learning. I wanna keep up level, even though I’m, I’m already doing great. And that inspires me. I, I love that. Like that makes me so fired up. And, and, and so many of, of my friends who I’ve kind of grown up in the industry, I they’re the same way. I mean, John, John ACU reads a bunch of books, Lewis house is interviewing all these people like I mean, there’s I mean, Jason Dorsey does all of this research. I mean, so many of my friends are in a, in a mode where they’re constantly learning, are you right? Are you learning? Are you, are you doing it?
RV (17:54):
Are you humble enough to say, you know what, I wanna get help. I wanna get coaching. I’m, I’m willing to take, take a chance to invest in myself and then I’m gonna execute. And if you think we can help you, man, like if you’re trying to do anything around building your personal brand, your speaking career, podcasting, you know, information products, social media, launching courses, membership sites or just using digital marketing to drive awareness for whatever your, your practice is or your, you know, your service based business. Like we can help you. We know a lot this and, and you should, you should go request a call, go to, go to go to free call dot R vain.com free call dot Roy vain.com. Lemme make sure that’s live.
RV (18:58):
This is what I do. I, I believe in personal development and I practice it. So you should too. And you know, if nothing else keep coming back to the podcast, right? Like we do this for free. I’m learning a ton. I hope you’re learning a ton. We’re, we’re, we’re trying to give you the goods and, and teach you the best of what our, our friends in our community have to offer. And so, you know, I’m preaching to the choir there a little bit since you’re already here tuning in and listening, but if you haven’t yet taking it to the next level, come with us, right. Like go back and listen. I mean, we have had a bunch of brand builders group clients on, on here, go back and listen to Darcy, Ben and Koa about how she sells her courses, listen to lovey Aja E listen to Louis hows.
RV (19:46):
Like, you know, we’ve had a bunch of clients that have come on here and they’re amazing people. And they’re, these are the people that are hanging around. So if you wanna be like those people you know, you become who your friends are. We’d love to hang out with you. We’d love to have you part of the community. So go to go to free call dot Roy vaden.com. You can request a free call with our team. And let’s talk. Other than that, I hope you’re inspired to just invest in your personal development, that you are willing to create a community around the thing that you’re doing and realize that the community is inherently as valuable as anything else. Especially, and at least as much as the content, building your list, building your new, you know, communicating to your list with a newsletter. And then most of all create the program, create the content that you needed back then your most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were. We’re here to
Speaker 2 (20:47):
Serve you. Thank you for that opportunity and privilege. We love you. Leave us a review if you can, on iTunes, if you haven’t done that yet, share this podcast with somebody and just keep coming back. We’ll catch you next time on the influential personal brand podcast.
Ep 242: Building Million Dollar Membership Sites with Alison Lumbatis
RV (00:07):
Hey brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for taking the time to check out this interview as always, it’s our honor to provide it to you for free and wanted to let you, you know, there’s no big sales pitch or anything coming at the end. However, if you are someone who is looking to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and get to know you a little bit and hear about some of your dreams and visions and share with you a little bit about what we’re up to to see if we might be a fit. So if you’re interested in a free strategy call with someone from our team, we would love to hear from you. You can do that at brand builders, group.com/podcast, brand builders, group.com/podcast. We hope to talk to you soon.
RV (00:53):
Well, I am honored to introduce you to a friend of mine and AJ’s Allison. Lumbatis, who we have now known for a few years. And I remember meeting her for the very first time I was actually teaching at Lewis Howes mastermind. And I specifically remember when Allison walked in the room and I could immediately tell, I was like, oh, she’s, she’s got the it factor. She’s got it. She’s sharp. She’s funny. She’s social. She’s just awesome. And the more I’ve gotten to know her, the more that I have continued to like her. And you might know her, you, you, you may have seen her online. She runs a very large blog lifestyle blog around fashion called get your pretty on. Her website is highly trafficked. And she has a membership program that’s built around that too. That has had a, to over 100,000 paying members, which is what we’re gonna talk about is how the heck did she do that? And she also just recently released a book the ultimate book of outfit formulas, the ultimate book of outfit formulas became number one on Amazon. And so we just adore her what she’s up to and felt like you need to hear Allison’s story. Plus she’s awesome. So Allison, welcome to the show.
AL (02:09):
Thanks. Rory. The feeling is mutual
RV (02:12):
AL (02:33):
Yeah, it’s crazy. I mean, how do you get from engineering to stylist and entrepreneur? It’s, it’s a huge leap, but I basically created the program that I needed at the time. And I had been working from home. I was in corporate America for 14 years, got the opportunity to work from home, which was an amazing blessing, but I realized very quickly within about three months of working from home, but I was never getting out of my yoga pants.
AL (03:15):
So I really started blogging from a place of this. Doesn’t feel good. I’m not motivated to get dressed every day. And it’s affecting not just the way I feel about myself, but so many things in my environment, too. Like the house is getting messier. I’m not doing laundry as much. I don’t feel like going on date nights anymore. I mean, it was literally affecting so many things. And when I sat down and thought about it, the first thing that popped in my head was can get dressed again. Like that’s a super easy, really tangible step I can take in the right direction. And sometimes it’s just about that one small thing that makes a huge difference in every other part of your life. So that’s why I started blogging. I wanted to start sharing what I was learning and blogging felt like an accountability partner to me when I did not have one at the time, I didn’t have that office to go into.
AL (04:00):
So even though I was only getting dressed for me and to feel better about myself and to get into a routine, what ended up happening is that a lot of women found me and the blog grew organically to around 50,000 page views within six months, which was crazy. And I was still working in corporate America at the time, blogging on this side, really to just enjoying this creative outlet that I had. And I really didn’t start out thinking this was gonna be a business at all. I had done little things on the side in the past, I’d done some life in business coaching. I had run a personalized gifts business. So I had dipped a toe into some entrepreneurial ventures, but nothing like this, where it was just true, really a passion project and something that I was doing because I was loving sharing what I was learning throughout the process.
AL (04:48):
It didn’t become a business until about two years later, I took a severance package from corporate and I decided to just really go all in on it and, and throw everything I had into just serving and serving and serving the commute. But what happened is I ended up with three months left in my bank account of my severance
AL (05:32):
What would that look like? And there was all of this overlap on those responses that came back to me. My reader said, please just give us a shopping list, tell us what to go out and buy each season and tell me what to friends to add to my closet and then show me ways to pair it up. So I inadvertently created a capsule wardrobe, which I didn’t even know what it was at the time. I’m not a trained stylist. I’ve just learned as I’ve gone on through this process and journey. And I was thinking, I’ll be really excited if 50 women signed up this first time out, the gate 500 women signed up. And I knew right then and there with that first launch that this was going to work and I was going to be able to replace my income. And the rest is history. We’ve, we’ve grown in season over season.
RV (06:13):
Like the first, the first, the first launch, like, you know, because I, I think I mean, obviously you’re familiar with our brand builder community and, you know, personal brands you bump into ’em a lot. And I think, you know, people see whoever Dean Graziosi, Tony Robbins, Jeff Walker, Brandon Behar, they see people launch these huge high dollar offers. Yes. And kind of go, oh, that’s you? That, that’s what it looks like that. But how much was your first, how much were you charging?
AL (06:43):
My very first program was a whopping $10. Bam.
RV (06:47):
10 bucks.
AL (06:48):
RV (06:49):
Uhhuh, but you had 500 people sign up.
AL (06:53):
I did, yes. And then I think I went to $19 shortly thereafter. I, we played around a bit with pricing between 29 and 39. And I’ve ended at $39, which is where we’re at right now and seems to be that sweet spot. But from the beginning I knew I wanted to democratize personal style and I knew I could look at this membership. One of two ways, either we’re doing the high dollar, you know, appealing to a much smaller niche, or I’m doing something at a lower amount that I’m gonna be able to reach, you know, potentially hundreds of thousands of women. And that’s the path and the route that I decided to go with my pricing. So while we’re at 39, now that seems like such a huge difference between, you know, my $10 launch that I did back in 2014
RV (07:35):
Uhhuh
AL (08:31):
In that first launch, I realized a few things, number one, that this was going to be a seasonal launch. So I knew that I was gonna have recurring revenue and I would be able to, you know, basically have new product to sell to the same customers four times per year. Along with that, I also started to play around with creating evergreen programs in the business and, and realizing that, you know, I could upsell them into other programs and have other offerings available to them. And on the back end of that launch, it was actually around a $25,000 launch because the program sales weren’t the only way that we were getting rev or that I was getting revenue at the time. Oh, I was also doing affiliate sales on the back end of that. So every piece of clothing that they purchased through this shopping list in this caps wardrobe, I was earning affiliate commissions from all of the retailers that were on the list too.
AL (09:20):
So that’s always been a really big part of my business model is get, is getting those affiliate sales on the back end. So really just thinking about ways that once you get that customer and you’ve earned their trust, you know, what are some other ways that you can offer, you know, of what they want and be able to continue to bring revenue in, not just from the membership income, although now, you know, nine years down the road that has absolutely overshadowed everything else. But back then I had to get really, really creative when I didn’t have as many customers.
RV (09:52):
Yeah. Well, that’s interesting. So even like a brand builders group, you know, we’re are helping people set their strategy and then they ultimately go, I need execution. I need someone to edit my videos, do my social media posting, like, you know, do my Facebook ads, blah, blah, blah. And we started to step down the path of trying to do it and quickly realize there’s so much here for so many people. And we did the same thing. We said, let’s spend our time curating a vendor list of trusted providers that the whole community can use. And if somebody doesn’t do a good job, like we’ll just stop using them and, and do affiliate fees that way. And that’s been super powerful for us is, is just answering that question. How can I serve my current audience in a deeper way? You know, and it, and it brings business to you. So, all right, so that’s 2014. So today you have a $39. It’s not 39 a month. It’s $39 a season. So it’s really like correct $13 a month, but they pay for a season, a season it’s worth. So like, where are you at? Give us a sense of the scope of where you’re at today?
AL (11:02):
Well, it’s,
RV (11:43):
Every day for a whole season.
AL (11:44):
Yes, yes. Every day for a whole season.
RV (11:46):
And it’s for three months, you tell ’em what to wear.
AL (11:49):
Yes. And it’s created from pieces on that shopping list and they’re able to shop their closets and, and find items that are on there, check them off and then go out to the stores to fill in the blanks. And the beauty of that is they can either shop my links, which they’re more than welcome to do, or they can shop in their favorite stores. Some women shop exclusively in thrift stores and find everything that they need for the list. Others are going to Neiman’s and finding the things that they need for the list. And as is, they’re able to follow the formula, which is really just a framework of bottoms. Anything you wear on your lower half tops, topper, shoes, and accessories. Those are the five variables. And we mix and match them in different ways to create different looks every single day. That is
RV (12:27):
So cool. And you just had a, so you had a hundred thousand, you’ve recently crossed us a hundred thousand people who have purchased at least one season and they’re all women, right? Yes.
AL (12:38):
Well, we have a men’s wear program as well, but
RV (12:49):
That’s definitely true in the Vaden household. Yeah, that’s so cool. I, I mean to go in, in basically a five year, I mean, five years from zero to a hundred thousand customers, and I just think it’s cool because you, you, you know, you hear always about, oh, the million dollar launch and a multimillion dollar launch, da da, but like to say a hundred thousand customers. Now you have a hundred thousand people that trust you, which will be whatever, you know, that number grows and grows and rose. I think we don’t, we, we underestimate the importance of a customer and we often overestimate the value of just revenue by itself and be like, mm. Having a lot of people buy from you is, is super valuable. So, so let’s talk about the membership model for a second. So you do a I think memberships are one of those things that I, I kind of feel like, especially for personal brands, like so many things, it’s almost like this holy grail of, you know, it’s like this facade of going well, gosh, if, if I had a thousand members that were paying me a thousand dollars a month, that’d be a million dollars, a like, that’d be 12 million a year, but I don’t think people realize how hard it it is for the membership program and like just what it takes.
RV (14:06):
And, and, and that now, do you, do people pay monthly or they only do a, they buy a season at a time.
AL (14:15):
So we have two you different ways that they can sign up. They can either subscribe seasonally by purchasing, purchasing them one off, or we have an annual membership. So at the end of the year, I open up memberships from November through March of the following year for the next year’s membership. And with the annual membership, we offer a lot of perks, bonuses, early access because I really wanna front load the year and get as many people as possible to sign up for that annual membership so that they are locked in that they’re with us for the entire year. We have around an 85% customer retention rate, which is insane and amazing, but I also involve my customers in the process every single season. I allow them to give their input on what I’m creating. What pieces would you like to see repeated in this capsule?
AL (15:01):
What trends are exciting you the most? What did you like the most about the pieces that we had in our capsules this past year? What stores would you like to see? All of, of that data comes back in my team, boils it down, and then we incorporate as much as we possibly can into the next season. And when you’re launching four times a year, you have that ability to just course correct and easily add things in, especially if it’s not gonna be a huge investment, but just really make the program more valuable and keep your customers excited about it. When they’re involved in that process, you better believe when that cart opens. They are the first ones there, ready to sign up. They literally wait up until midnight the night before the people that aren’t annual members and even our annual members, when we open the memberships up, they wait until midnight and they are right there signing up and ready to go. It’s I love
RV (15:50):
It. Like black, black, Friday, Walmart, like knocking people, knocking each other over to say, like, get into your membership. And I’m glad it’s
AL (15:59):
Virtual.
RV (16:00):
I mean, the outfit formula,
AL (16:02):
I want my shopping list.
RV (16:04):
So so you mentioned that you launch, okay, so you, you have the annual, so they don’t really pay monthly. You have, you can basically buy a season at a time or you just pay for the pay for the year. Correct. But you,
AL (16:19):
We do a payment plan option too, for the annual membership. So if they do wanna break it out into payments, they can do that.
RV (16:24):
I gotcha. Okay. And then the four times a year, when you go through a launch, what do you do? Like how do you, you launch this thing and, and, and maybe talk a little bit about how you, how you used to do it. Like when you were first starting and you didn’t, you know, I mean, now you’ve got a hundred thousand of people in your database that are, are buyers. You gotta, you must have way more than that in your, in, you know, just in the, the database. But like, if you have, what are all the steps you would do to, of like sell a season or launch a season? Sure.
AL (16:57):
So our launch cycle is about six weeks. From beginning to our cart opening in the beginning, R it was, it was me
AL (17:42):
And then, you know, we work in as sauna. Everything is in a seasonal launch project. So every season, my business manager and I sit down and we look through all of the tasks that are in that project and everything that gets assigned out from tech support to customer support and graphic design, to marketing. And we take a look at it to make sure that everything still makes sense, and we wanna continue doing all of these steps, or if we need to add something else in or, or take something out again, because we’re launching so frequently, we are able to just really course correct and, and fix things as they come up or add things in so that we can be super nimble and, and, and change at the drop of a dime, which we had to do last year. We had, we had to shift and pivot in all those good things.
AL (18:26):
But it takes about six weeks. From the time I start gathering the Intel from our existing customers of what they would like to see included in the capsule to me, really just heading out and doing trend spotting. I go into the malls, I go into stores, I look at items. I go online, I do tons of, you know, online shopping window, shopping to choose items that I feel would work well in the capsule. Then I do my creative part, which is actually creating the capsule. Once that’s done. I hand that off to my team and then everything from that point forward, I’m not necessarily involved in it’s all the downstream stuff from creating the PDFs and the graphic design to loading everything into the membership site, to, you know, really going out and sourcing links from forever, everyone from petites to plus sizes and, and everything in between from budget friendly to higher ends. It’s like everything. We, we try to cover it all just to truly make this as easy of a process for our customers as possible. And then, you know, once all of that is done loaded into the membership site, then the very last thing we do is launch our sales pages, open our cart and, and they sign up
RV (19:35):
AL (20:01):
Yes. It’s a little bit of all of the above, but I’ll tell you what works the best. So between launches, we’re really working on capturing as many leads as possible and growing our list because our newsletter list can it’s at about 10%, which is crazy, but that’s the place where I really am able to nurture any of our new leads that come in to really explain the program to them, to give them value. I send them a newsletter on a weekly basis with tons of freestyle resources and advice. And I think that that’s really the key to that really high conversion numbers. So we work really hard on the list. I do, you know, podcasts perform extremely well. So it’s, it’s a lot of different things that are going on in between those launches to really ensure the success whenever we do launch and, and really focusing on those repeat customers too, and getting them into the seasonal programs and then ultimately selling them into the annual memberships at the end of the year as well.
RV (20:55):
So it’s really building the list and sort of building the trust. And then when the launch happens, you basically have just emailing and saying, Hey, it’s, it’s live, it’s open sign up for yes. You know, the, the new season. Exactly. And, and then in terms of, you’re just using whatever lead magnets, PDF downloads, maybe a video training, like whatever you’re using, just normal stuff to get people onto your email list. And then it’s the value every week through the newsletter building the trust in advance. And then just letting ’em know the cart is open.
AL (21:24):
Yes, definitely. We run a lot of Facebook ads to our or freebies too. So that shows us right away, like what’s performing well. And we actually make money on our lead gen, which is crazy, but how, for the most part, they sign up for freebies and then they end up purchasing something from me either, you know, an evergreen program or they end up enrolling into the seasonal program. So although it is really done as a lead magnet, we’re converting on all of those leads that are coming in and making,
RV (21:56):
AL (22:08):
So the 85% customer retention is really our customers that end up continuing to purchase from us and coming back year after year, I have some women who have been with me since 2014 and have done every single season, every single annual membership. I would say the majority of our customers have been here for at least four years. And the beauty of the program is at while some people don’t, they don’t technically graduate out. Sometimes they’ll take a break and take a year off or take a season off or whatever, if they feel like they have enough clothes or, you know, they’re in a good place right now, and they don’t need as much guidance or advice, but then they can jump back in at any time. So that’s why I decided I did want to offer the option that people can sign up on a seasonal basis instead of just getting locked in for the full year.
AL (22:51):
So again, I think that a lot of this has to do with involving the customer in the process, but also building the community around the program. We have an extremely active community. Our Facebook group has hundreds of posts per day. It’s a little bit overwhelming sometimes for the members, but it’s really a space for women into explore style where they feel supported. They don’t feel like they’re intimidated by anything. There are a lot of women in there on this journey that have never felt stylish in their lives that have never just gotten a compliment from a stranger on an outfit that are experiencing this for the first time, or that have a particular body shape. And they’re able to come into the group with thousands of other members and say, I’m struggling to find, you know, a pair of HighEd jeans, that’s flattering for my body type.
AL (23:34):
What are you finding? And, and then there’s tons of immediate feedback that’s coming in through that group. Or they snap selfies in the fitting room and say, which one would you choose this one or this one? And they’re getting that immediate response from people in the community. We’ve had women from Germany and Finland that have flown to the us, like we’ve built up this huge community. They have girls nights out in certain cities around the us. And, and it’s about so much more than the clothes it’s about really just supporting one another and the beauty of female friendships and support and the way that it can be done in the right way. We see so much, you know, so much negativity online and it’s just a space that is so opposite of that. That is truly special, especially in this day and age. And I think that that’s really the secret sauce, something that I never expected to happen. Did you create
RV (24:23):
That on purpose or did that, like, did, did, did it happen just sort of organically or like, how did that happen?
AL (24:30):
I think, you know, I was really intentional about this from day one. I wanted it to be a place where it was kind of a mean girls free zone, where women were giving their opinions, but delivering them with love where honesty was appreciated, but in a way that, you know, it wasn’t critical or hurt anybody’s feelings. And it was really about setting the tone. You know, I was very involved in the Facebook group early on and was in there, you know, trying to get people to engage in setting the tone in so many different ways of this is how we treat each other. This is how we’re kind of supportive to one another. And then it just took off on its own. And kindness spreads just as quickly as negativity does. And we really, in the past, you know, however many years of doing this, I can count on one hand the amount of members that we’ve even had to go to and say, Hey, we can’t, you can’t say that, or that’s not appropriate for this group or whatever, like moderation in this group of thousands of women is not a big deal simply because we do set that tone.
AL (25:29):
And we do have them agree to guidelines for behavior in the group. And I think we just kind of attract that more of that coming in, that when people get in that group and they’re like, oh, wait, this operates differently. This is either a good fit for me or this isn’t a good fit for me, then they stay or they leave
RV (25:46):
Is the only, the only the active members are in the, in the Facebook group.
AL (25:51):
Yes. So we start a new Facebook group every season, which is another reason why we feed them into this new group and everybody wants to be in that group with their friends. So I think that this is another key to success for the program is, is closing down the previous seasons group and then starting fresh and new each time we launch a program.
RV (26:09):
Interesting, fascinating. Is there anything that you’ve learned about a membership that like now that you’ve been doing this, you know, cuz cuz you know, like at brand builders group, you know how we talk about the, the paids P I D S and the five ways to make money and there’s, there are information pro is one of ’em and inside of that eye is there’s video courses, assessments, certification programs, membership sites. And I feel like membership sites were really hot for a while. People got to, they, they caught a taste of wow, recurring revenue is a really amazing thing and the community like you’re talking about. But you know, then sometimes it’s like back to the video course because it’s like, well, if I could sell a video course for $500 versus offered as a membership site for 40 bucks a month and they only stay for four months, then I’m not, you I’m losing money. Like what have you learned about membership sites and making them successful that you kind of go, if you’re thinking about starting a membership site, now this is what you should know. Or like, this is what I didn’t know then that I do now.
AL (27:18):
Yeah. So I think, you know, one of the keys to this is really creating something that’s sticky me, meaning you keep them coming back for more. Right. So with a seasonal program, you’re automatically, you’ve got that stickiness built in that keeps them coming back because there are new trends. Every season, there are new ways to wear things, you know, where our wardrobes change seasonally. So that is sort of built into my program and, you know, back early on when I was evaluating this, do I wanna evergreen programs to where I’m just selling people into figuring out, you know, your closet staples or building your wardrobe, or do I wanna do something that I’m going to be launching four times a year because it is a lot, it is a lot of work. It’s a lot for me, it’s a lot for my team. I’ve kept coming back to the stickiness of doing the seasonal model.
AL (28:02):
So if you have something where you can keep people coming back, then absolutely. You’re not, you know, I do have to keep the funnel full. I do have to do all the lead gen. I have to do things between our launches, but I think that this worked out really, really well. You know, stickiness works out well for a membership type model. You also have to generate a little bit of scarcity and that’s sometimes difficult to do when you are working in a membership model. Like how do you create scarcity of something that, you know, people have the opportunity to pay for on a monthly basis? And so I had to look at ways that we could build that into. So, you know, some of the things that I do is we release our shopping list, you know, on the day that it opens to the public, our annual members get the shopping list early.
AL (28:45):
What happens is that we sell out
AL (29:27):
But you know, really just kind of thinking through ways that we can create that little bit of FOMO for, for our customer base has been important. And then again, you know, I always go back to the surveys and the feedback and you know, collecting that information. If you have an audience now, if you have followers, if you’re, if you are out there anywhere on social media or you’re blogging or, or doing whatever, you’d be amazed at how much you, how much you can get from that feedback. If you’re thinking about launching a membership model, you know, it’s great for passive income and a lot of ways, if there’s something that you teach or a course that you do, that you could put into that you can do in a video series or something that you can make sticky or release new content on a regular basis. That’s really what it’s all about. Like how often are you willing to release new content, then you might wanna look at a membership model
RV (30:21):
Mm-Hmm
AL (31:26):
Honestly, it’s been the thing that’s moved the needle more than anything else, you know, just really continually investing in myself. My, my second year of doing this, I joined my first mastermind, which was on course development. And that’s when I learned about that technology, you know, that I would need for this membership. I, I didn’t know what I was doing and I wanted to get involved in something that would shortcut that process for me. So that was really my first experience in a mastermind. And I’ve enrolled in something every single year since then. And honestly like whenever I feel stuck, that’s when I know I need personal development. I need to be investing in myself. I need to get involved in something and just being a member of brand builders, you know, I’ve, I shared this not too long ago with a friend of mine.
AL (32:08):
I feel almost like everything that I learn in brand builders. It’s about a six month lead time until I’m applying it in my business in some way. Like, I feel like I’m already equipped and I have that knowledge. And even though at the moment, maybe I’m not implementing it immediately, but I’ll be go through the trainings and I’ll, I’ll learn something that’s just completely eye opening in six months down the road, low and behold, I’m implementing it. And just the 15 PS last year in our annual memberships for the first time ever, we had cold leads that had no idea what the program was that were signing up immediately without knowing much about outfit formulas at all. Because we used the 15 piece to do our annual membership sales page, my team, and I sat down and we hammered it out and it was so incredibly effective that we suddenly had a problem we hadn’t prepared for before. And that was when cold leads come in and they don’t really truly understand the program and the education process that we needed to do on the backend of that, cuz they didn’t have that nurture that was happening, that other people were having. So I just am totally a proponent for investing in yourself and continuing entrepreneurship is really a personal development journey, honestly. Like that’s what it is. And that’s what I’ve learned more than anything. And honestly it’s what I enjoy more than anything too.
RV (33:25):
I love that. That’s so cool. Yeah. You know I know Hillary is your strategy. She mentioned that to me about the 15 piece, but I had forgotten about I had totally forgotten about that that I copywriting for those of you just listening, it’s we’re using that we’re using, we’re using jargon 15 pieces, our little like copywriting formula. Well I, I think so one of the things that happened was to that point, you went through our bestseller launch plan. So I re I very much remember like, okay, like here comes Allison through through best on our launch plan. And then you did it like you did this launch and you hit number one on Amazon. Like, so tell us about the book and the book launch and like what worked for you there since it’s just like fresh. I think, you know, for, for that piece of it specifically so if those of you, if you miss said early on, we said, it’s the ultimate book of outfit formulas, the ultimate book of outfit formulas. So get your pretty on is the membership community and, and the kind of like brand, but the ultimate book of outfit formulas was the book. So can you take, tell us about like the launch and like what did, what happened? What did you learn? How did it go? Like what worked, what didn’t work?
AL (34:42):
Honestly, Roy, I just followed every single step of be seller launch plan. And I think, I
AL (35:32):
I brought on somebody who handled my street team for me, which was a huge weight off my shoulders and it just worked. It, it, it was, it was amazing. I mean, I was not entirely surprised that everything just came together the way that it did, but, you know, just taking those strategies. And I, I think that instantly what we wanna do is push it for our audience first and that’s not necessarily the best thing to do. So I learned like that there is a particular order that we need to do this in and following all of those steps was really key to it hitting that, that bestseller status. And that’s something that we’re always gonna have. So yeah, I’m, I’m really pleased with the way that this book launch went. It was traditionally published book. So I learned a ton this time around that I’m gonna take into, you know, I’m almost done with my second manuscript and I’m already, you know, I’ve got pages of debrief notes and I’m ready to go. I’m I just feel like it’s gonna be even that much more successful this time around.
RV (36:32):
I love that. And you’ve got the, the, you’ve got an asada project already built for it. Like you, yes. Run this
AL (36:39):
Rinse and repeat right. Make it easy, work smarter, not harder.
RV (36:44):
I, I, I love, I, I love this so much. Alison, like you mentioned the your street launch team. Yeah. So this is one of the things that we talk about, you know, a lot of people do this. It’s, it’s basically getting a team of why didn’t you tell us, so what is a street launch team? And then what did you have, how did you find those people? And then what did you have them do?
AL (37:09):
So a street launch team is essentially the people on the street, the word of mouth that are out there sharing about your book, but they’re doing this in a very coordinated and organized way. So you’re providing them with the graph ethics, with the quotes, with all of the assets, to be able to easily share on social media and to talk about your book and generate buzz about it so that when the time comes and, and you’re, I’m sure that anybody who’s kind of observed a launch from the outside has seen all of these big influencers doing this, where it seems like, oh my gosh, everybody’s talking about this book right now. Like what’s going on? Like, I’m excited. I wanna know about this book, right? So this is what your street team is doing for you. They’re creating that buzz in a way. That’s not necessarily these huge influencers that are doing this for you.
AL (37:49):
So so that’s exactly what it is. And I hired somebody to come in and do that for me, who managed my street team for me, who, you know, we had a Facebook group or we were doing contests and having them, you know, submit their, their reviews. I mean, they got early access to the book. They got, you know, a digital preprint of it. So they were able to read the book and really give honest reviews on multiple outlets for it. So it really just creates all of that prework before the book even comes out so that when it does launch, people are able to read reviews on good reads and target and Amazon and all the places and see what this book is all about in the words of people who have actually read it. So I highly recommend it. And if you’re able to have somebody else handle that for you, it takes a lot off the shoulders of the author because you are gonna be involved in so many other things. I did a podcast tour leading up to my launch as well. And that was, you know, that was taking so much of my bandwidth, that I was just really happy that I could turn this over to someone else to handle.
RV (38:52):
I love it. I mean, just so cool. I mean, you execute all this stuff. I mean, you, you execute and that’s what it’s like. So much of it is simple. I mean, people don’t realize it’s like on the one hand, it’s really freaking hard. On the other hand, it’s a pretty straight line. It’s like, okay, you have a lead magnet, you give somebody something of value, add ’em to your email list, give them value every week. You, you know, let ’em know something’s available, have a, have a sales page with the 15, P’s have, have a few bonuses on there. Like, and I just, I just, I love this story so much and it makes me so happy to, to, to see when people like you are, are winning Allison. And if y’all, you know, check out the book, so it’s the ultimate book fit formulas and you know, get your pretty on, obviously is the community and everything. So Alice, Allison, where do you want people to go to learn about you or stay, stay plugged in connected to what you’re doing?
AL (39:49):
Yes, definitely. So you can check me out at Allison Loba on Instagram. If you wanna see all the personal life stuff, my horses in my little mini farm, I live on
RV (40:03):
So cool. We’ll put a link to that in the show notes, as they say. And Allison, thank you for being here. Thank you for just sharing your story. It’s such a great journey. It’s it’s just beautiful, I think, to, to see where it’s gone and you’re just your heart for serving people and helping people with something that you once struggled with. I mean, it, it, it just captures the essence of, you know, we, how we always are talking about your most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were. Yes. And that’s what you start doing. And then you go, how can I serve my audience in a deeper way? How can I add more value? How can I make this easier? How can I make it easier for them to buy and and then just continue investing in yourself and just, I mean, we feel so lucky to know you and just be your friend and just excited and honored to like see you winning and knowing that you’re like, just getting started. I mean, I it’s, it’s hard to imagine where way you’re gonna be in five or 10 years. So thank you for, for all of this and we wish you all the best. Thank
AL (41:04):
You, Roy. I totally appreciate the influence that you’ve had on my business and, and personal life. I appreciate it.
Ep 241: Beating Your Inner Critic with Dr. Margie Warrell | Recap Episode
RV (00:01):
We tend to fail more from fear and humidity than we do from over daring. That was one of my favorite lines from the interview that I did recently with Dr. Margie today I’m breaking down doing the podcast recap of that episode, sharing with you my top three highlights, um, for on that interview, which was powerful and it affected me. And so I’m excited to share that with you. And, uh, before I dive into that, I wanna let you know of a little bit of a, of a forthcoming change, a little modification that we’re making here with, um, the podcast. It, it’s gonna roll out here over a few weeks, but, um, I’m gonna be doing, uh, this recap by myself and then the next couple by myself, and then starting here in like four or five episodes what’s gonna happen is we’re still gonna do the podcast twice a week, but I will do an interview.
RV (00:54):
And then the, the recap of that interview will be on the same episode as that interview. And then our second episode, every we’ll be AJ doing an interview by herself, uh, with the guest and doing her own recap of her own interviews. So just wanted to let you know about that kind of exciting slight modification just to the way that the episodes are gonna be happening. And so for the next few weeks, you’re gonna see me, um, just by myself or be here in for me just by myself. So, um, on with the recap for this, uh, episode, this interview with Dr. Margie, um, I loved this. This was something that I personally needed and I, I had lots and lots of, of, of great takeaways. And the first takeaway is to what I was just talking about is you have to think of things as an experiment there, like your business is something that you have to view as an experiment instead of like it’s a success or a failure.
RV (01:55):
If you view it as an experiment, it, it puts you in this, this mindset kind of more of the right mindset that it takes to be successful because you go, oh, I’m gonna try things, knowing that some of the things aren’t gonna work and the reason, and knowing that that’s part, that’s part of the plan, like, you know, ahead of time, that it is by design, that you’re doing trial and error, and you’re figuring things out as you go versus this mindset, this mentality of living in this world of like, I have to be successful and everything I do has to work all the time. Otherwise it’s not gonna work. And it’s, it’s kind of this, this, this ultimatum like this, this very ultimate destination that we place ourselves in and this pressure that we put on onto ourselves and, and onto the people around us, like the people that work with us and the vendors and the contractors of like this must work or else, right?
RV (02:51):
Like, or else it’s over or else it’s done or else, you know, I’m gonna, I’m gonna, I’m gonna be lost. I’m gonna fail. I’m going, I’m gonna let everybody down. And instead of kind of operating with, I, I guess that sort of definitive, it’s saying, Hey, let me view this as an experiment, I’m gonna constantly be iterating. I’m gonna constantly be adapting. I’m gonna be evolving. I’m gonna be trying things and seeing what works and then modifying from there. And that really hit me hard because especially if you’re a, if you’re a perfectionist, like, like I am and I’ll go ahead and claim AJS one too. Um, even though she’s not here, I, I, I feel pretty confident at this point, um, that I could say that comfortably with her and she wouldn’t take issue with it. So that if you’re a, if you’re a perfectionist, you are, are likely to be overly cautious because everything needs to be perfect.
RV (03:48):
Everything needs to be planned, everything. Um, you, you operate from this, this, this very calculated standpoint of like, I want all these things to work the, but, but to what Dr Margie’s point was in that interview, which really hit me, was most of us are, are overly cautious, right? Like the fear being an entrepreneur is, is even like, oh gosh, you know, I don’t know, like that seems like a big risk. And, and, and to some extent it is, uh, certainly riskier than maybe that you a more risk than the average, just the average citizen might take on. But the, that is what holds us back is is that just that kind of fear and that, that need for certainty and precision and accuracy, and for knowing what’s gonna happen before it happens. That is what holds a us back from being able to take the chances, take the risks, make the changes that are really going to, to unlock exponential growth.
RV (04:52):
And, you know, as, as she, she said, we fail far more from timid than we do from over daring. I think that line will stick with me personally from Dr. Margie and, you know, so treat it as an experiment, treat your business, your brand as, as an experiment, rather than like a test that you have to get, you have to get, right. And that there’s like a right or wrong answer. So I thought that was really good. Um, my second takeaway was something that we talked a lot about at brand builders, and it was edifying to me to hear her say the same thing. And this was what she said, you know, verbatim. I had to demonstrate my value before people would pay me. And so we were talking specif about how do you, how do you start your career as a speaker, right. Um, and we tell people all the time, whether you wanna be a professional speaker, like a paid speaker or not, it, it doesn’t matter.
RV (05:54):
Giving free presentations is a huge piece of marketing. It is the, it is the fastest way to take someone from a complete stranger to a lifelong fan is like this, this, you know, a presentation, a, a, a training class. And there’s different things that you call it. You could call it a, a podcast interview. You could call it a webinar. You could call it a video funnel of, you know, three short videos. You could call it a, a, a seven day challenge funnel and have, you know, 10, seven minute videos. Like there’s all these things that you could call it. But the fact of the matter is, is that that people have to have a chance to sample you. They have to have a chance to try you before they buy. They have to, they have to get exposed to you before they can feel comfortable purchasing from you.
RV (06:44):
If they don’t know you, if they don’t recognize you, if they’ve never heard of you. And the fact of, of the matters that most personal brands, like most of us, aren’t that well known. We’re, we’re not, you know, we’re not celebrities we’re, we don’t have millions. And, and the followers, like that’s rare that we’re working with somebody who is in that category. We do have a few clients that are that way, but, but for the vast majority of us, and, you know, perhaps for you is going, how do I give people a chance to sample me before they buy? I internally with all of our, our brand builders, monthly members, we talk about this, this concept that I call chicken on a stick, you know, it’s basically like, it’s exactly when you go to the food court. And you know, when you walk around the food quarter, if you go to whole foods or the grocery store or whatever, and there’s people sampling new food, and it’s always new food.
RV (07:35):
Why? Because you’ve because you don’t yet trust that you haven’t had friends tell you about it. You’ve never bought it. It’s new. And so what do they do? They give you a sample, a piece of chicken on a stick. They say, here, taste this. And, and they know that that is the, the most powerful mechanism that they can, they can leverage to take you from. I’ve never heard of you. I don’t know what this for brand is. I don’t know what this flavor is. I don’t know what this, what this style or this taste is, or, or this product at all to go, oh yeah. Okay. I’ll buy that because you have this meat experience. It is the exact same. It is the exact same thing with your personal brand. People have to have a chance to see ample you, they have to, they have to hear you talk, right?
RV (08:24):
The number one white people always go, well, how do I become a paid speaker, R hall of fame speaker? Like, how do you become a hall of fame speaker? Like, how do you get paid to speak? And the answer is you go speak for free until somebody walks up to you and says that wasn’t credible. I have an event coming up. What’s your fee. I would like you to have. I’d like to have you come speak at my event because they’re sampling you. They’re seeing you. They’re they’re. Um, and, and it’s the whole concept of content marketing in general, but this applies to speaking and it applies to whatever you’re selling. Like, you might be a doctor selling surgeries. You might, you, you might be a, a chiropractor. You, you might be a health food coach. You might be, you know, a consultant of any type, the whole value of social media and podcasting.
RV (09:10):
And all this digital marketing is for people to have a chance to sample you. How, how can you incorporate sample into your business? How can people sample you? And social media is, you know, that’s basically our entire social media strategy and it works right. Is you, you save the best for first. Like we say so often because I’m demonstrating my value so that people can have confidence, but four, they pay me and that’s a switch you have to flip, and you have to constantly remind yourself of as you’re, as you’re building your personal brand, and you’re building your business, uh, going how I have to give value. First, I have to give first, before they give to me, it, it’s not a chicken or the egg. It might feel like a chicken or the egg, but it’s not. It’s very clear people. You need to think of your customers as people who pay you in rears, right?
RV (10:02):
So there’s it. When it comes to paying your bills, you can, you can pay in forwards, or you can pay in rears. So you, you, you know, you pay to pay in forwards means you pay before the service comes to you and you pay ahead of time to pay in res is to say, you’re, you’re paying for a service that you have, you have already experienced. So when it comes to selling yourself, your business, your personal brand, however, you’re monetizing. The thing that you’re doing, you have to realize that people are always paying in res meaning you’re, they’re experiencing you first. And then they’re paying you after. Even if they’re technically paying you for a service that you haven’t yet delivered. It’s kinda like, even though people are hiring me for a, they’re hiring me to give a speech at a future event, they’re really paying after they’ve had some experience with me.
RV (10:59):
They’ve either read my book or they’ve seen my Ted talk, or they watch me most often. I mean, the number one way that people hire me is because they saw me speak at an event. They said that was incredible. That was, you know, worth the money. I’ll pay you to come. I want you to come do the things. So they’re, they’re paying in res demonstrate your value before you ask people to pay, how do you, how do you do this? And here’s the thing. Every company in the world, you know, right now is dealing with virtual and remote work. They need to train their people and motivate them and manage them. And they’re all like virtual or at least part Artley virtual. So they they’re all open to this idea of going, how can I inject training and wisdom and inspiration into my audience? Like, there’s never been a more ripe opportunity or ripe time for you to come infuse your inspiration, your education, your entertainment, your, your encouragement into companies in a way that they would, they will sample you for free.
RV (12:04):
And then from there, that is how they hire you. So just, you can never hear that enough. And, and you years, so many times, so many of our different guests have talked about it, but for Dr. Margie to just like nail that, you know, right between the eyes, as in terms of how she built her speaking career, I just thought was super relevant. And it applies to whether you’re a coach consultant or your professional service provider, or, you know, whatever. Even if you’re trying to just get yourself a raise at work, you have to go, let me volunteer for a project. Let me show you what I can do and earn my way into a promotion or earn my way into a raise, demonstrate the value the money comes after. And most people have that kind of, that totally flipped. Um, and then the third, the third big takeaway for me, which is another kind of fundamental reminder.
RV (12:54):
And it’s another thing you can just never hear enough, which is don’t lose to that little voice inside of your head. Don’t lose to that little voice that tells you you’re not good enough. You’re not smart enough. You, you’re not capable. You have to realize that little voice exists in all of us. And most people who lose in life, they don’t lose to the fact that they, they actually weren’t those things. They lose to the little voice who said they were those things before they ever even tried before they ever even gave it a shot before they ever even had in that bat or took the swing or took a shot. And they lost to the little voice. Most of us don’t lose to what happens in our life. We lose to the idea of what might happen before it ever even happens before it ever has a chance to succeed.
RV (13:52):
That little voice is holding people. Hostage. It is, is it is keeping them from shining their light as Dr. Margie said. And, and that that voice is, is just the voice of fear that, that, that voice was planted in you for protection to keep you safe from danger. But there’s a big difference between danger in fear. Danger is something that could actually threaten your livelihood, but the brain doesn’t delineate really so much that from fear, which is something that is new and uncertain and being successful is about stepping into things that are new and uncertain and outside of comfort. And so if you ever wanna to be successful at anything, you have to learn to conquer that little voice until you conquer that voice, you can’t do anything. You’ll be held hostage and captive to your imagination, working in the wrong direction, which is how I describe fear.
RV (14:54):
I say that fear is your creativity working in the wrong direction. And it doesn’t mean your, your, it doesn’t mean that your something is wrong with you. It means that you are perfectly functioning human, that your brain is trying to protect you from something that could be dangerous. But, but very few of the things that we are pursuing in terms of goal are, are dangerous. They’re just unknown. That’s mostly what fear is. It is, it is the unknown. It is the uncertain. And yet you have to learn to conquer that step. And if you can’t defeat that voice, you don’t have a cheat ants. You’re losing the battle before you, before you even step on the, on the field, right? Like, so we, we treat that, uh, I love what Dr. Margie said when she said, we treat that little voice as if it’s the truth, but it’s not the truth. It’s just your creativity working in the wrong direction. It’s just your brain’s defense mechanism to, you know, that is there appropriately to prevent you from danger, which is inappropriately preventing you from doing something new, and that is standing in your way, but to become successful in life, to achieve your goals, to change the world, to do the impossible, to have the thing you have never done will require you to decide and defeat that little voice over and over and over again.
RV (16:27):
Our hope is that one of the reasons that you come to this podcast every single week is to, to get that encouragement, to help you overcome that little voice, to get you that encouragement that says, Hey, you’ve got permission around here to experiment and to get that encouragement to go, Hey, you’ve you, you’ve got permission to go give value into the world before you ask people to pay. These are three of, of probably the most timeless tenants and, and most, most important principles of the, of all the kind of concepts that we talk around at brand builders captured right here in this interview with Dr. Margie, as a living example of someone who embodies these things. And, um, we’re honored to call her a friend and a client and to hold her up and say, you know, look, look what this woman has done. Like look at the career that she has built for herself all by, by treating it as an experiment, being willing to demonstrate her value first and learning to conquer that little voice of fear. Our invitation is for you to do the same. Hey, if you would share this podcast with somebody who you think needs to hear it and keep coming back week after week, we’re so excited that you’re here. We’ll catch you next time on the influential old, personal brand.
Ep 240: Beating Your Inner Critic with Dr. Margie Warrell
RV (00:07):
Hey brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for taking the time to check out this interview as always, it’s our honor to provide it to you for free and wanted to let you know there’s no big sales pitch or anything coming at the end. However, if you are someone who is looking to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and get to know you a little bit and hear about some of your dreams and visions and share with you a little bit about what we’re up to to see if we might be a fit. So if you’re interested in a free strategy call with someone from our team, we would love to hear from you. You can do that at brand builders, group.com/pod call brand builders, group.com/pod call. We hope to talk to you soon.
RV (00:53):
I am always amazed at the people that we get a chance to meet at brand builders. And every once in a while, we just meet somebody who just kind of captures us and goes, wow, how do we not know each other? And how do we not know each other yet? And that is how I feel about Dr. Margie war, who you’re about to meet. So she is a five times bestselling author. She is a Forbes columnist. She’s a world renowned advisor on leadership and human potential. And she works with companies like NASA and Google and Deloitte and Berkshire Hathaway. And she’s a speaker. She does consulting and really has just spent 25 years doing research and kind of just working in the field to help people boost their, their courage and elevate performance and accelerate their growth. So she also lectures at Columbia and Georgetown, and she’s been on, you know, the New York times and several other success magazine today show and is, is just awesome. And we got a chance to meet here, not that long ago, visa brand builders group. And as I got to learn more about her, I felt like you needed to hear her story. So Dr. Margie to the show.
MW (02:03):
Rory it is awesome to be with you always
RV (02:08):
So tell us your story about how you got started in, in this space. You know, I, I, and, and correct me if I’m wrong. So the way that we understand now is like a, a big part of your business model is from speaking and you know, driving revenue in the last several years from speaking, but you also traveled a bunch internationally. You were a mom, like you had a lot of things going on that I think people often would go if I had those things going on, I probably couldn’t build the kind of career that you’ve been able to build. So give us a little bit of that background.
MW (02:46):
Yeah, well, I, I, I think I, as you can probably tell from my accent, I’m from the deep, deep, deep, deep, deep south
MW (03:44):
You’ve, you’ve worked in business. You, you should think about coaching. And I, I remember laughing and saying, oh my gosh, do you know how uncoordinated I am? It’s just, I’m so not athletic. I don’t know why you think I would be a good coach.
MW (04:31):
And so it was really, I was, everyone knew me as the stay at home mom with four kids. And for me, it was, how do I, how do I do what I really wanna do when no one knows who I am? And so that’s where actually I started speaking for free anywhere and everywhere that would have me, ah, to try and get some coaching clients. And and so I was just super excited if people would sign up for a free coaching session at the end of me giving a talk at like, you know, it could have been a club or it was American business women’s association, or companies would do free brown bag lunches, and I would speak anywhere and everywhere. And really over time, I, I came to realize the thread that was running through so much of what I would talk about.
MW (05:17):
And part of it was about balance and having difficult conversations and pursuing what lights you up and saying no to what doesn’t. And I realized the thread that was running through it all was, was having more courage and daring to be braver and take a risk and risk rejection and put ourselves out there. And so that led to my first book, which was called find your courage. And it was very much an act of courage for me at the time to write it. I had four kids, seven and under, and I, I wrote it in nap times in the afternoons. And and I had a huge voice in my head that was very loud often saying, who the hell do you think you are to write a book? You know, you’re just, you didn’t get a great education in rural Australia, et cetera. But it was really me, I guess, staring to make a bet on myself and, and, and thinking, you know, I don’t wanna look back one day and think I wished I’d been braver. So that’s kind of the, that was the start of the journey that love, that led me to where I am now.
RV (06:22):
I mean, with, I mean, and I think there’s lots of, I mean, lots of people have those kinds of things. And I mean, four kids is no joke. I mean, keeping, keeping track of four kids and be like, I’m gonna write a book in my spare time, which is nap time. Which, you know, if you have four kids getting a, all four of ’em asleep at the same time might last, you like 17 minutes, if you’re lucky. Oh,
MW (06:41):
No. I mean, it was threats and bribes. Can I just be clear, you stay in your room for one hour until the bell goes, you know, like
RV (06:49):
Yeah. But so you started that now. I, I, I rarely wanted to highlight cuz this is, you know, part of what we teach at at brand builders, you know, is you gotta go speak for free. I mean, that like, that’s how it starts. You just gotta go speak for free and get people a chance to sample you. So that’s interesting to hear that part of your story. I mean, everybody, I know that is a successful speaker. Like that’s how they started, like you just out there speaking. So I wanna talk about, so you started as coaching business us then became an author and then leveraged off that to get your, your speaking gigs. Is that how you got your first speaking gigs too, was just speaking for free until someone asked you to, if you can
MW (07:27):
Hire you. Yeah. I mean the book, the book came later, honestly, I couldn’t even have con I mean, I think I, I really lack confidence. I had a lot of self-doubt. It’s probably why I spoken so much about self-doubt because I, I doubted myself so much. So the speaking was how I got coaching clients. The book definitely came afterward. But yeah, the speaking was really crucial part of that all. And I hear, sometimes people say, oh, never speak for free. And you know, if you’ve come from being in some big role, you’ve already got some stellar reputation and you are well, you’re already an established brand and entity. Okay. Maybe that will work for you and great, but I would never have got anywhere. Had I been waiting on someone to pay me from the beginning? Cuz no one was gonna pay me cuz no one knew the value that I had.
MW (08:18):
I had to demonstrate at value. And that came from speaking for free. One was demonstrating the insight I had as a coach. People could go, oh, you know what? She’s got some, she’s got some wisdom and some expertise and some ideas that will be valuable to me. And I, and I like her, you know, it’s like kind of establishing that like this is someone that I would trust. And then over time, obviously the more I spoke, I started to actually develop a skill in speaking and kind of tapped into a latent talent that I honestly a gift. I didn’t know I had to be to be truthful. And so
RV (08:53):
How did you get the first, like when you first got paid to speak, was that basically referrals from people who had seen you
MW (09:00):
Speak at that was so, I mean the first time I ever spoke was at my kids’ preschool and then, you know, I, I had a coach, I had a coach. Yeah. And like two people showed up. But the woman who ran the preschool and the cleaning lady, so it was it was very humble or beginning, but the first paid speaking engagement one of my early clients, very early clients and I, I didn’t charge a lot of money. She worked for a big consulting firm and she had said, would you come in and speak there as part of a brown bag lunch, which was free. So I went in there and I spoke to working moms on work, life balance, and someone there was from HR and they said, we’ve got an international women’s day event coming up. We’re looking for a speaker. We would love you to come. We’ve got a, you know, how much do you charge? And I had no idea about fees and I remember saying R how’s $200. Nice. And she was so quick to say, yeah, that sounds great. And I remember thinking, I think, I, I think I went too low
RV (10:03):
MW (10:07):
But then someone was there and then, you know, I mean, and, and I, all of the paid speaking came from all of the unpaid speaking and then us the book amplified it. And then a lot of media when my first book came out and then, you know, it’s a ripple effect. Right. And you can’t, it’s easy to go. Well, it was one thing I did, but it was, I wrote for a women’s magazine for free. And then someone there connected me into Forbes and I got my own and I started writing for Forbes. And then I ended up with my own column and then, you know, so, you know, it was, and then I landed on the today show and then it was one thing after another, but there wasn’t one clear recipe. I couldn’t say, do this, then do this. It was just continually doing things that I hoped would, you know, make an impact and over time sure enough, you know, all of those little things, those daily strokes of effort, bam, you know, you get to another level
RV (11:02):
Mm-Hmm
MW (12:00):
I think you’ve gotta give yourself permission not to get it perfectly right. And to take risks and to try things and not have them land brilliantly. You know, you, you don’t know where everything and you are going to iterate and you’re gonna learn and you’re gonna evolve as you go along. And I think a mistake I see people making is thinking that they have to have the perfect plan and the perfectly the perfect clarity even. And yes, it’s great having a lot of clarity and it’s great having some one like you and the brand builders group to provide a roadmap, but still what works for one person isn’t gonna work exa you can’t copy and paste everything. We we’re all different. We, we have different things that we are good at and that we like to do. And I think give yourself permission to experiment and to iterate and to evolve as you move forward, because you’re gonna learn, well, this works for me, but this doesn’t work and that might work for the Margie, but it’s, it’s just not me.
MW (13:02):
Not everyone. I started out coaching, as I said. And I I’ve got friends that have been coaching for 25 years and they’re like, Margie, I couldn’t think of anything worse than speaking. It’s just not my thing.
RV (13:46):
And just kind of the, I hear you saying kind of like the mindset of approaching it as like yeah. Who cares? What happens? Just an experiment, like just kind of like, let’s see, let’s just see what happens and kind of go from there versus all of the pressure of like, it has to be perfect and dialed in and, and if it doesn’t cuz then it’s like, if it doesn’t work, it’s never gonna work. Like I, I, I’m not gonna work cuz we’ve had so much pressure.
MW (14:08):
Yeah. It’s like pressure, you know what? I tried that and you know what, it didn’t land brilliantly, but what did you learn from it? You know, I always looking for, what is the learning? How do I take that learning? And you know, I remember early on Roy, I was living in, in Dallas, Texas and I met someone and she said, oh Margie, you should be the expatriate wife coach, cuz I was a foreigner living in the us and I could coach other women who are wives. And, and I remember thinking, she’s like, you need to find your niche. And I was like, it just didn’t feel right. So sometimes people are gonna tell you what you need to do. And you know, I say get lots of advice and get it from people who know their stuff. Like honestly you are, you’re a great example of that, but not all advice is gonna be the right advice for you. And and I think that’s important, but wait, wait,
RV (14:58):
You mean not all advice for me is gonna be the right advice for you. I I’m just kidding. I’m just kidding guys.
MW (15:05):
I’m arguing your advice. Rory is about as good as it gets, but I, and, and of course you, you do it with in a way that obviously allows people to make it feel congruent, but I tell you what, there are a lot of experts out there. I mean, when I, I, I do experts in that can kind of give you their five point plan and it might not be congruent for you. And I think I think just being authentic is really important. And I think today, I mean, you guys talk about trust a lot. We want to deal with people that we can trust and who are real and authentic and not some overly curated version veneer that you go, well, who is it? Who is that really that person? And I think being congruent is super important and just being real and
RV (15:59):
Mm-Hmm
MW (16:36):
Well, all of us can be timid at times. Of course, all of us can be everything at times we can all be bold and brave and we can all be timid and overly cautious. And I believe that humidity is, is very prevalent in a, in the world in which we live because we live in a, in a, in a climate of fear, in a culture that actually sort of feeds and, and feeds on fear and fuels a lot of it and fuels a lot of self doubt and fuels a lot of timid and humidity drives people to hold back for our taking actions that would actually serve them that would help them to learn and to grow and to open new doors of opportunity and build new connections. And so we tend to fail far more from timidity than we do from over daring.
MW (17:33):
And timid in a sense is very much, much over caution. We’re being overly cautious, we’re holding back and you could say, oh, well, it’s a personality trait, but ultimately it is. It’s a decision that we make often unconsciously to, to not take an action because we are worried about the consequences of it. And often we discount the cost of timid. There’s a steep, hidden tax that comes with timid that we’re often not present to because it’s not immediate, it’s really dramatic or obvious, but we pay that tax over time in our lives because we don’t try things. We don’t experiment. We don’t put ourselves out there. We don’t try and write the book or approach someone and, or give the talk or, or whatever it is. And that really, we don’t know what doors didn’t open, but I, I really, the reason I have a passion for helping people overcome the bias toward timidity is because I see it holding potential hostage and keeping people from really, I mean, you could say shining their light, you know, really living the biggest lives, they’re capable of living. And, and ultimately a lot of people end up languishing. They kind of get stuck procrastinating. They get stuck making excuses and settling and selling themselves short. And not only do they miss out, but everyone misses out
RV (19:00):
Mm-Hmm
MW (19:28):
A AB couldn’t. Yes, that is right. And it is funny. And I, and I shared with you how, for me even starting out, it was a little voice in my head saying, who do you think you are, was like to give a talk to start honestly, a coaching business. I was like, who am I to even have my own business? And who am I to write a book? Who am I to, you know, do television or know in the more recent years do my PhD, et cetera. And I’ve just learned to identify that voice as a voice. It’s not who I am. It’s just fear. And timidity is just one expression of fear and not to give it power. Cuz too often we give that voice of Tim power call the shots it’s it’s in the driver’s seat and it doesn’t have to be that way.
MW (20:16):
I mean, that’s where courage comes into it. Courage is the decision to take action in the presence of perceived or real risks. You might fail. You mightn’t write the most brilliant book that’s ever been written. You might give a spare each and it mightn’t be brilliant. You might try something and it mightn’t be the best investment, but how will you ever know if you don’t try and how will you ever get better at it? If you don’t give yourself permission to not be brilliant starting out. And I think to your point, Rory, it’s not the barriers, the external obstacles around us that hold us back. It is the belief systems that we are buying into and the ones that fuel that timidity. And so, you know, at the end of the day, there comes a moment of choice and go, who is it I choose to be and where am I letting, where am I letting my fear of not having what it takes, keep me from taking action. And that’s, that’s having the courage to take action despite our innate, you know, timid
RV (21:19):
Mm-Hmm
MW (21:46):
Yeah. You know, I often think give it a name, you know, and you know, you’re, you’re in a chicken little, right. You know, and in, in my book, you’ve got this, I, chapter two is doubt your doubts and, and doubt your doubts is really doubting that, that, that voice, that, that, that shows up and, and fuels that ity. And we treat those little negative noises and those doubting voices that in a chicken little as though it’s the truth and it’s not the truth, but we treat it as though it’s, it’s the truth. And I think learning to challenge what you’re telling yourself and there’s a real physical element to it too, like really stepping in and holding ourselves powerfully. Like how would, how do you, where do you need to connect to your own inner, a brave heart, hold yourself that way and embrace the discomfort that is a prerequisite for overcoming humidity and for being brave and for taking those actions.
MW (22:38):
And the more we embrace discomfort as part and parcel of what it takes to do, what it is we really need to do and want to do, like in our heart of hearts, then actually the better, more comfortable we, we become with doing uncomfortable things. And I think it was Tony Robbins that said years ago, you know, you know, our success is proportionate to how willing we are to be uncomfortable. And I, and I kind of absolutely couldn’t agree more with that. It is uncomfortable work, but I think being successful, however, you define success, that’s never gonna happen if you stay comfortable and, and humidity just drives us to stay in our comfort zone, but of course, comfort doesn’t stay comfortable forever. And our comfort zone shrinks. And over time we become more timid and less confident, you know, more scared, more doubtful, less brave and, and courageous.
MW (23:36):
So it really the co over the course of our lives, I think we have to continually be challenging ourselves. And so to anyone who’s listening, I know that you’ve got an, an incredible audience of people doing great things and who want to do more great things, but perhaps sometimes get in their own way because they’re afraid of falling short. And I would say, give yourself permission to fall short. And, and when that little voice of timid pipes up. So thank you very much. I know you’re trying to keep me safe now, shut up and, and step forward anyway.
RV (24:11):
Yeah. I mean, that, that is powerful. And so tactical, I think, and so, so useful where, where Dr. Margie, should people go to connect with you? I know obviously you’ve written for a long time for Forbes. So some of them are to be already reading your Forbes column, but like where where do you want people to go? If they wanna like, learn more about what Dr. Margie is doing?
MW (24:33):
Yeah. Look, I am on, I’m pretty much all social media to Insta Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Please connect with me. I’d love you to connect with me there, but you can also go to my website, Margie war.com. And if you type in slash live bravely, you can sign up for my free course on how you can be braver. It’s a four part video course that I created that is share some of my, some stories and some, and some really practical ways that you can step it up in your own life to overcome whatever fear is and is getting in your way.
RV (25:11):
I love it. Well, we’ll put links to that over in the show notes and Dr. Margie, thank you for this. I mean, this, I think just strikes right at the core of that, like that courage and, and winning that battle with that little voice. I mean, if you can, if you can beat that little voice every day than you, like pretty much can do just about anything.
MW (25:31):
Amen. Very true. Well, thank you so much for having me RO great to talk to you. All
RV (25:36):
Right. We wish you the best. We’ll follow your journey. Everyone. Go check out Dr. Margie and keep coming back. We’ll catch you next time. Bye-Bye
Ep 238: 400k TikTok Followers in 40 Days with Hilary Billings and Marshall Seese Jr.
RV (00:07):
Hey brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for taking the time to check out this interview as always, it’s our honor to provide it to you for free and wanted to let you know there’s no big sales pitch or anything coming at the end. However, if you are someone who is looking to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and get to know you a little bit and hear about some of your dreams and visions and share with you a little bit about what we’re up to to see if we might be a fit. So if you’re interested in a free strategy call with someone from our team, we would love to hear from you. You can do that at brand builders, group.com/pod call brand builders, group.com/podcast. We hope to talk to you soon.
RV (00:54):
RV (02:06):
And so this was like, wait, what, what, what the, wait, what, so anyways, here to talk to us about that, Hillary and Marshall.
HB (02:15):
Woo. Hey Rory,
MS (02:16):
thanks for having us Rory excited to be on it.
RV (02:18):
You guys, I mean, you’re killing it. You are freaking killing it and I love you and I am so jealous and mad at you.
HB (02:59):
It’s so funny, Rory, because I go back to attending like the revenue engine and the high traffic strategies events, where we talk a lot about the power of being first to market. Right. And we have a really unique situation right now in the world with platforms like TikTok, like clubhouse, where personal brands have the ability to actually create a foundation and grow upon that in ways that you just can’t do nowadays on YouTube or Facebook or even Instagram. And I was probably the most vocal person in as, as a strategist and as an attendee that didn’t wanna do TikTok. Mm I was tired and I was doing all this other content and building my brand in other ways. And it just seemed like, well, one more thing I gotta do that I didn’t wanna focus on. And I think that this really came down to a divine intervention
HB (03:50):
So what happened, you know, our, our primary platforms are on Facebook and the week that I decided to get on TikTok, the only reason I did that is because was a glitch on the Facebook platform. Mm. Which essentially demonetize my page because of something on Facebook’s backend. So we were not able to make any money on it for an undetermined amount of time, potentially. They didn’t know how long it would take to fix this issue. And we had just posted a video that was viral and I was sitting there and I was watching us lose millions and millions of views in revenue and it was making me batty. So I needed to do something to take my mind off of what was this mess that was happening over here and just decided, well, I guess now’s the time let’s make some TikTok videos. And I just started posting and repurposing content much like we do with the content diamond old videos that I liked that I thought would work for the audience based upon what I was seeing on TikTok. And it just took off from there. It was, it was crazy and unexpected. And we did 400,000 followers in 40 days and then half 1,000,0 60 days. And now we’re own pace to hit a million followers by next month.
RV (05:04):
Wow. And do you think, so what, what I hear you saying there is, it’s not so much, oh, we had this am. I mean, we had, we, we, we came up with this amazing content exclusively for TikTok you’re repurposing content that you had other places. When I hear you say that in the, especially the reference to clubhouse, you’re saying that there’s basically an optimal window that you can get inside these platforms and have this accelerated growth. I mean, is that true? Is that a big part of it or not? What, what
MS (05:38):
It’s part of it? I think there is definitely when a, when a platform first gets going, they’re trying to get creators excited. And the best way to do that is to get things, you know, going viral. You reach a point of saturation to where that doesn’t become as optimal anymore. And now you have to, you know, make the way for revenue streams like advertising TikTok. However, I will caveat saying is an interesting use case because they came out even recently in the past couple months and specifically said, we want, we are giving people content. They, we think they want to watch. It’s the only platform that defaults you to a feed based upon what they think you wanna see, not who you follow. You actually have to scroll to a different area to see the only the people that you follow. Mm. So they are trying to keep themselves more open to, you know, profiles exploding if it deems that that’s content that people want to see. So I would say the ability to grow a following on TikTok is, is good. It’s still very good right now and probably will be for a little while. Interesting.
HB (06:42):
And I would also add to that again, this goes back to one of the tenants that we talk about all the time in brand builders group, which we got ourselves into this predicament where, you know, we had put all of our eggs into a piece of rented real estate, right? Mm-Hmm
RV (07:22):
That glitch that you’re talking about was not the worldwide glitch where Facebook went down for four hours. This was another one that was only on the back end for people like you that were like creators that have monetized. Cause you have to, you have to have what like 10,000 followers on your watch page to be able to monetize it. Some like that.
MS (07:40):
Yeah. There’s a whole getting monetize on Facebook is a very difficult process that requires it’s. It’s not just objective there, there are a lot of subjective qualifications with it as well.
RV (07:49):
Gotcha. So what about, let’s talk about revenue on TikTok. So I I’m curious about, I mean, other than the broad awareness kind of thing, how do you actually make money on TikTok and, and, you know, so I, I guess I understand a couple components. I understand the idea of like, Hey, a lot of people are hearing about me the same way they, they, they might hear about anybody. And from that there’s some, some runoff in terms of like recognition that you can parlay into other things. And then I also understand brand deal. Like I have a large platform. And so somebody pays me some money to talk about their product or company or service to my audience. Is that, is that how you make revenue on TikTok or is there there’s, there’s something else
MS (08:41):
There’s also a creator fund. Yeah. That is very small right now that if you have over 10,000 followers, you can apply to became a, become a part of, and that will ebb and flow and grow as they figure out what their advertising model looks like. Yeah.
HB (08:55):
So if you’re running through like the basic paids acronym, right? So you’ve got products where you can be advocating doing brand deals, doing product placements within your videos, you could be doing ads and affiliates. So ads is essentially the creator fund, right? Because they’re putting a basic ad on the front that you see when you log in, it’s not on a specific piece of content that shift in the future. We don’t know where that’s going. We highly recommend that anybody that meets the criteria for video hours watched in the followings should apply because it’s just additional monthly revenue that’s coming in that you don’t have to worry about. And you can withdraw. I think it’s every 30 or 60 days. Then you have affiliates, right? So a lot of products give you an affiliate link. You can put that in your profile. You can say, Hey, I love this type of makeup.
HB (09:41):
Go to my link in my profile for my 20% off code. And then you get an affiliate check, right? For everyone of your followers that can go there. You can drive information to courses. I know we have some clients Ram builders that do that, that they’ll utilize the content that they’re doing on TikTok to push back to their websites, back to their courses, back to their one-on-one coaching. So their, their services, then you’ve got deals right for the D which could be, you’re endorsing a product you are saying, Hey, this is the best makeup I’ve ever had. And let me do a creative TikTok to show you you that. So there’s a lot of different ways over time that you can monetize that outside of just building a following. I will also say, and I think we’re gonna talk about this a little bit, but going into the future of, of how influencers, I, I really dislike that term, but how influencers are able to monetize, we’re seeing already that the big content creators, right?
HB (10:39):
Like the Logan Pauls of the world, the top talkers, they are getting acting deals. They are getting huge spokes model deals and they are able to take and monetize off of that platform because they have such large followings. But back when I was an on-camera host, it used to be, I’d submit my resume to, to a network or an agency or a company in the hopes that they would pick me based upon my talent. Well, now talent is table stakes and your content and your personal brand is table stakes. And now it’s a matter of what else can you bring to these opportunities to show that you can add a value and make something take off. And I think that long term we’re gonna see that out more and more into monetization strategies for content creators.
RV (11:22):
Yeah. I mean, I, I, I noticed that too, that it’s like, it’s not just about, who’s talented. It’s about who can bring an audience. And yeah, there’s a huge part of that. And now that we all have our opportunities to bring our audiences to things that has real value, and you’re seeing people at cast Y you know, the, the thing that AJ and I noticed recently was on the voice that Ariana Grande has like she has hundreds of millions of followers and she was the new coach. Meanwhile, Blake Shelton and Kelly, and John legend, who are in my eyes much more well known to majority of the generations have only four or five, like, you know, a few million followers. And I, I can’t help, but think that’s no a us not an accident that she got herself cast for that fourth coaching spot.
MS (12:18):
I mean, another great example is only murders in the building, which is our, our, our current, or I guess we just finished it TV obsession with Steve Martin and Martin short, I mean, two of my all time, favorite actor comedians. And, but the third party is Celina Gomez, the second largest following on all of Instagram. And there’s so many people, especially younger generations watching this show because of Selena who had no idea who Steve Martin and Martin short were. And so it’s, it’s, it’s a really great, and the chemistry is great. It’s a really beautiful example of what that can look like when done. Well, I
HB (12:53):
Think it also speaks to, and we talk about this a lot R and brand builders, whether it’s with a book, right? Whether you’re speaking career, whatever you’re trying to do, we want to show that you have a profitable business model, right. And if you’re able to bring a following to that book proposal, if you’re able to bring a following to as a, as a keynote speaker, you know, whether it’s through YouTube or whatever, that, that particular revenue stream is that you’re trying to build through your primary business model that is attractive to whomever you’re trying to work with. So this applies across a across industries, I believe.
RV (13:28):
Yeah, well it, so the, on the topic of building an audience, one of the things that I know has been a little bit of a pain point for y’all and, and, and for, and for a lot of people is the intellectual property discussion about TikTok. And you know, there, there are some strategies that people use to grow a following that kind of go in the face as you know, of some of this copyright stuff. And I think that’s one of the things creators were worried initially about TikTok was like, oh my gosh, like anyone can take my video and post it on TikTok and now belongs to them. So what are some of the, what are some of the things that you’ve learned there in that kind of like I P intellectual property, right. Sort of world, as it relates to TikTok specifically,
HB (14:19):
Do you wanna start with that one former? I,
RV (14:21):
Why don’t we take a former as a former lawyer Marshall, former IP attorney who like to officially comment
MS (14:29):
So copyright, and there’s a big misconception around this. A lot of people have with copyright, as soon as you publish a work you have copyright protection. Now you can also go a further step and register that with the copyright office, with the government, you don’t have to, to have protection. So once you publish something, say on YouTube or TikTok or Facebook, you know, you have a date and a timestamp that has been released to the general public. You have copyright protection in that now enforcing that is an entirely other bag. And, you know, some of the platforms, Facebook has a really great rights manager where they will track and look for similar videos and show them to you. So you can say, Hey, yes, this was approved or no, this was not approved. Not every platform is developed and sophisticated enough to have that. Interesting yet it will go there. It’s coming. Yeah. And so, you know, we are very active about takedowns and, and Hillary can probably speak to, to the takedown side of things, but that’s, that’s an important part. And also a large reason why we put our content on multiple different platforms to, to kind of, you know, put our stake in the ground and make sure there is no, I don’t have to show YouTube that we put on Instagram first. You know, if you’re putting it everywhere at the same time,
HB (15:41):
I think there’s a couple of misconceptions that we get push back on, which I would like to, to clarify for people right now to help them and, and to help us too. One just because things out in the public does not mean that it’s in public domain.
MS (15:54):
Yeah. That is not what public domain means.
HB (15:56):
And that is something that we get pushed back on a lot is what do you mean? I found this on TikTok it’s in the public domain. No, it was publicly shared. That does not mean that you get to put it out on your own platform. So, Marshall, what is the definition of being in public domain? Just so we can all get, yeah,
RV (16:10):
That’s a good question.
MS (16:12):
Copyrighted piece of work goes into the public domain, which is a legal term 100 years after the author’s death.
HB (16:23):
So we can all safely assume that anything that has been created for a video on YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram radio. It’s not going
MS (16:30):
Public domain anytime soon.
HB (16:34):
And then the second piece is
RV (16:36):
I think a lot of people misunderstand that I really, I mean, totally like that, that, that, so, so you’re welcome to quote the Bible freely, but yes, nothing on social media ever. So, so, but you have,
MS (16:50):
But that’s where the van go. Exhibit is so popular. You’ve seen van goes that is popping up everywhere because Vango works just went into the public domain. Oh,
RV (16:58):
Interesting. Yeah, we’re going, we’re going next week. There you go. We’re going to a Vango exhibit in Nashville next week.
MS (17:05):
That’s because we hit the a hundred year mark after his death. Yay. So, and you’re
HB (17:08):
Welcome.
RV (17:20):
Pretty safe to say Hillary, I don’t see anybody reading the community guidelines. Like, let me scroll down 73 pages here and figure out what all this Gar says pretty safe. Absolutely.
HB (17:33):
That’s and that’s a, okay. But with that, there is a very, a very specific community standard on every single platform. Mm-Hmm
MS (18:09):
And the law and
HB (18:10):
The law, throwing that out there and the law, which means that if you were to somehow make money off of that video, we can come after you for damages. So that’s like worst case scenario for you. Best case scenario for you is we get that video taken down. We can also, because platforms are now trying to prioritize and protect creators and work with their creators to protect their IP. We have taken down accounts with millions of followers because they really continually, again and again, posted videos of ours without our explicit written permission. So you need to license that content from another creator, if you’re going to do that. And that needs to come with written permission and possibly even payment of some sort, if that’s what they want. So it’s just safer to create your own everybody, cuz we, we have, and we will take down accounts for stealing our stuff.
RV (19:00):
Well, it’s not, I mean, I mean, I see that all the time, a lot of times it’s like puppy dog videos or military videos or like these really heartwarming videos. And you’re saying that, that I think it’s tricky. So a share button like hitting the share button is okay, but, but not downloading the video and then reposting it to your account. Like technically that’s,
MS (19:23):
Let’s it this way. If you’re utilizing the tools within the platform to share and or create with something, then they have built that into the terms and conditions that we as creators have signed and agreed to when putting our copyright content onto their platform. If you are doing something that requires a plugin or some sort of external third party website, or you’re having to rip something or download something, I can pretty much tell you right now, that will not be okay because
HB (19:51):
What’s happening is when you use the share button, when you’re using the retweet button, when you’re using duet features on TikTok, you are still giving, I haven’t heard of that one
RV (20:00):
Yet. Duet features on TikTok. I need you to explain that, but I kind of get the gist anyways, keep going.
HB (20:06):
So you’re, whenever you use a feature that’s built into a platform you’re still giving credit to the original creator. When you take something from somebody else’s page and re-upload it organically on your own, you are saying that that is your video and that you own that video. So you have the ability to post that video, which is untrue. And that is a violation of our IP. Does that make
RV (20:27):
Sense? I mean, everybody does this. I mean, everybody does. I mean, I like major, major are celebrities and huge accounts and, and
HB (20:36):
We don’t take downs on celebrity accounts
MS (20:38):
Too.
RV (21:28):
But you guys had, you actually had if I remember, right, not major, always talker, but you guys had a video about parallel parking. Wasn’t there a parallel parking video that you posted on Facebook that went viral and then somebody else posted it on TikTok. Like how
HB (21:44):
Many didn’t even do well on Facebook, which was the very, a frustrating part for me. Oh, that’s interesting. And I, I had written it off as a bad video mm-hmm
RV (22:29):
That’s crazy. So, so, so 30,000 people like used whatever plugin or did a whatever tool they used to rip the video and then, and then put it up. You have to go through through that, that that’s, what’s so hard about it, right. Is like who’s gonna sit there and do this for 30,000 videos. But, but the other concept that jumps out about that to me was how a video video that didn’t perform well on Facebook, the exact same video got 40 million, 40 million views. Like that’s interest. That’s a fascinating concept to me to go, what we think is going, oh, well, you know, I guess it wasn’t that good. It’s like how there’s more to the story here about the algorithms and how’s stuff gets picked up and you just don’t. I mean, what’s the explanation for that?
HB (23:14):
I think there’s a number of things. And, and what was interesting is even looking at the data on the back end of all of those stolen videos is that only a few of them had major views. Right. But I, I think part of it is, you know, depending upon the platform, right, because TikTok to face book to Instagram, to YouTube, they’re all serving different demographics. And and then depending upon your audience, right on your profile, who, who are you serving, what audience is watching your stuff. So maybe we post it and it doesn’t do well, but somebody else’s audience is a better fit for it. There there’s just so many variables that can go into something like this. And I do see often that videos that do well for us on TikTok are not the same videos that are doing well for us and other platforms and vice versa. And I think part of that is just age group and what they want to watch. So what I learned for this experience is not to judge the quality of a video just because it’s not taking off in one place. But to see how I can utilize it across multiple platforms and leverage that piece of content.
RV (24:18):
What if you have videos that all consistently underperform on all platforms should I be worried about that? Does that mean that I might have a crappy video? We should probably talk about how to make your videos
HB (24:30):
More consumable
RV (25:43):
Yes. Yeah. Is there, so on that note, like in terms of a video on TikTok, like I think about a video that I maybe post on YouTube, I mean, other than kind of knowing like, Hey, maybe the audience skews younger, although I feel like that’s probably changing or destined to change here before too long people are jumping over. Is there anything I need to know about how, how I should edit my videos on TikTok? Or and then I, I would say the other thing is kind of like the, the features, like, what are, are there, are there certain key features? Like, you know, you mentioned a few of these duets and trending sounds and trending hashtags. What are those?
HB (26:29):
Do you want us to take this one to start? No, you can. So I think for starters, like a great thing for you to do is just go to the, for anybody is to go to their four you page, which is what your TikTok is going to send you to anyway, when, as your landing page, when you open up the app and just start scrolling and seeing what’s working. Right. And I think you’ll find when I first got Onik TikTok and I showed Marshall, his response was, oh, it’s human cartoons.
RV (26:59):
What this is nice.
HB (27:00):
Yep.
MS (27:01):
And so yeah, Sunday
HB (27:01):
Comics. Got it. Yeah. So, so our question became, how do we make even, you know, these, these difficult or deep co you know, topics, how do we make ’em cartoonish? How do we make ’em more over the top? You know, there’s, there’s a couple of clients with brand builders that have very serious topics that they’re dealing with, whether that’s death or divorce, or, you know, in these really traumatic events. And they’re able to take those topics and find ways to poke fun at them, or find ways to poke fun at themselves as moms. And just making it more of that lighthearted, I think also on TikTok, at least because the platform was built on under a minute, initially, you’re gonna have much quicker edits than you would have on another platform. I’m gonna
MS (27:41):
Pull a pandemic moment and go let our dog in because we all live in this world. Now I’ll be right
RV (27:46):
Back. Nice.
HB (27:48):
He says, I dunno if y’all can hear him, but he is just downstairs and making a ruckus. And we had a conversation before we started this of okay. Let’s just hope he makes it through without, without
RV (27:57):
Working at us. It’s all good. Hear it faintly. But talk, tell me about those features. Yeah. So the light, the
HB (28:04):
Them up for you right now. Yeah.
RV (28:05):
The quick cuts make sense. The lightheartedness, I mean, that, that makes sense.
HB (28:11):
So when we come to one of the other things that’s interesting about TikTok is that you have this discover tab, which is you have your home tab, and then you have a little discover tab. And what the discover tab will do for you, which I think is so fast in comparison to most other platforms, is it will tell you now Twitter does this too, as far as like here’s the trending hashtags, but what TikTok does for you as far as how we understand it as these are the, the hashtags that it wants you to create content around, because that’s what it’s pushing out right now. Oh, so you can go through and, and look at, okay, we got hashtag arts and crafts, hashtag relationships, hashtag productivity, and you can go and see what’s trending within those and make content that fits within those topics. So that’s a really interesting feature that talk’s actually encouraging you to utilize that
MS (29:02):
There’s also, and again, something pass is that people
RV (29:06):
You’re just saying, you click on the discover button on the bottom and all those hashtags that like, if you’re gonna use a hashtag or if you’re gonna create a video natively for the platform, it’s like, use one of those.
HB (29:19):
If you don’t know what to create, I would go to the discover tab and it’ll give you 30 to how I’m probably in unlimited now of hashtags to utilize that it’s currently trending and pushing content for
MS (29:32):
Tiktok also has some really great creator resources online that give again, nobody reads just like terms and conditions, community guidelines, but they tell you how to succeed on the platform. Like do this immediately make this, your first shot, do this, and then this, and then they’ll tell you how to create and construct a good video that will work well on their platform. It’s, you know, beautiful kind of PDF and other types of, you
RV (29:57):
Know, they’re saying on just on TikTok website, mm-hmm
HB (30:00):
RV (30:54):
Frequently were you publishing?
HB (30:57):
I think when we first started, I was doing a video a day. It was not that frequent.
MS (31:01):
It, it was, it was a a day. And then you reached a certain point, I think, two weeks in. And you started to do every other day mm-hmm
HB (31:11):
Yeah. And I think what’s also interesting about TikTok is that maybe unlike other platforms, although I don’t know, I feel like it’s all changing with TikTok. I think there’s a, a understanding that if a video doesn’t perform right away, then that means that the videos are dead. But the truth of the matter is, is that it can take a few days to a few weeks for a TikTok to take off. And, and then when that happens, the ones around it that you’ve put out will get a boost. Right. And so I would encourage people, never to judge the performance of a TikTok based upon
RV (32:31):
Can deter something fascinating. I mean, even as you guys talk, like you can tell, like you mentioned earlier, you don’t like the word influencer and it’s like, the word creator is a much better term. I mean, you’re reading these stuff, you’re familiar with all the policies. Like it, it also strikes me as it’s very professional. It’s a job. Like you’re tracking things, you’re doing it consistently. Like this is not a, oh, I just like make some funny videos, like in my spare time and throw ’em up there. Like you’re, you’re working, you’re working at this. And I think it’s important for people to see that just like working at anything. And and, and right when you start anything, you have to work hard and fast and consistently, and there’s this like some natural velocity that you gotta create early on. I do have one more question in terms of advice for new Tuckers, but before we do that, where do you want people to go? If they wanna link up with you guys and get connected to, to, to you and maybe watch some of your viral videos?
HB (33:26):
I think the best place to go is probably just my website. Cuz you can find all the links there. Hillary billings.com, H I L a R Y B I L L I N gs.com. That’ll have all the links to everything and you can also get my free confidence load book as well. If you’re interested in that. And we we’ll take you on a journey from there.
RV (33:45):
I like it. I like it, but we’ll put links to that. So first if you have someone that’s new to TikTok, I mean, you mentioned like the ha the discovery trick is pretty cool. I actually was just noticed that for the first time, the other day, you mentioned duets, which I have never heard about. I’m gonna have to figure out that, but like what else, what else in terms of like practical advice or things that we should be doing, if we’re, if we’re new or if we like, okay, I need to get, I need to get serious about this.
HB (34:14):
I think for anybody that wants to be a content creator across any platform, or just in general, especially if you’re new, you and you’re starting off to this, it’s really important to take an experimental mentality. I think especially early on in my content creation, I held every piece of content, so precious and so close to me and was basing my success off the result of that video versus the system that I was putting into place to make the video. And we don’t have control over what something does, but when you take an experimental approach and say, okay, I’m gonna make 30 videos and I’m gonna throw ’em all up there and we’ll see what happens. And that’s exactly the approach that I took when I started TikTok was, well, I’m gonna post a video a day. Let’s try a different genre every day. Let’s try this one, let’s try that one and see what’s working.
HB (34:59):
And then at that point, you’ll have a data set to then work off of and say, oh, interesting. These ones worked for me. Let me do more of those. Let’s see what happens if I do more of those, oh, those aren’t working. What if I do this type of video in this genre, or try this trend or try this TikTok dance all of that can come into play, but it’s, I think that the art of mastery and we were talking about this, I think it was last month, come without holding that content so close to you. You have to be able to let it go and move on and let it go and move on in order to continue to become better.
RV (35:31):
Ah, I love it. I love it guys. Well, thank you so much for this. I mean, I learned a ton here. It’s just crazy how the world is changing and looking at this. And I mean, TikTok is powerful. It it’s honestly like it’s really good at at least mine is it’s serving up things that I’m actually interested in and funny and inspiring. And like, it, it I’ll tell you it’s a whole lot better than TV. It does a better if a job than TV does at like putting stuff in front of me that I wanna see. So keep going. I mean, this is cool. I wanna make sure we’ve got good people out there leading the world of TikTok creators and you guys are awesome. We appreciate your wisdom. We’re, we’re always cheering for you. And you know, we’ll be, we’ll be following your journey. We love you guys. Thanks Rory.
Ep 237: How to Build a Legendary Speaking Career in 5 Years with Michelle Poler | Recap Episode
RV (00:02):
I love Michelle Poler. Oh my gosh. That was an awesome interview. And I am doing the recap for you solo today on the interview that I just completed with Michelle poler and I have become a quick fan of this woman. I just think she’s cool. I think she’s fun. I think she is funny. I think she’s got a great story and what an awesome, I mean, so many lessons came out of that conversation. I mean, we’re, we’re titling it around how to build a legendary speaking career in five years because her story is amazing. Like she has gone from, I’m terrified to be on stage two. I’m one of the busiest, highest paid speakers in the world in five years. And that’s a pretty, you know, rapid transformation. And hopefully that gives hope to you. Like if you have that dream of saying, Hey, I want to be a speaker.
RV (00:56):
Then, you know, it shows you that it’s like it can be done. There’s, there’s a system to all of this. There’s a process. And that’s my first takeaway actually was very much in that vein of how she built this, this very legendary speaking career in five short years, because if you’ve spent any, any time at all around brand builders group, either as one of our members or gone through any of our free trainings or, you know, watched any of our, our, our, our free online summits, et cetera, et cetera, that we do, you know, that we are big believers, big believers, that if you have diluted focus, you get diluted results. So what do we teach people? Well, the very first thing we do in finding your brand DNA, which is our phase one course, one curriculum is we help them figure out what problem do they solve in one word, we then help them figure out what is their one business model.
RV (01:47):
The one way they should focus on making money. And then we have them focus on what is there. One message. Michelle is a great example of that, right? Like she has one problem, fear, one business model speaking. She has this, this one message about doing what is uncomfortable. And then she did exactly what we tell people to do, which is show videos of you doing what you do. Use video marketing as a way to just showcase and demonstrate what you do so people can sample you and they can see you doing it. And that’s what she did. I mean, in her case, she was actually overcoming fear. So it was entertaining as well, but that’s all you’re doing on social media. And video is just giving people a chance to sample you, like sample your expertise, teach them like, if you want to change lives, start changing lives, like push the button and let’s go hit record and let people see you do what you do.
RV (02:52):
Give them a 62nd sample, teach them, inspire them, educate them, you know, help them. And, and that is what she did. And she did it consistently. And she did it for a few years. And at first it was small and a few years later it was big. And that’s the nature of this. Most people just won’t stick with it for a few years, but if you start now, I mean, think about it in five years, you could be a legend doing something that you haven’t even started yet five years. Like that’s super powerful. So I, I just love that part of the professional story of, you know, what Michelle has been able to do in her husband. Her husband’s awesome. We of course, got to meet with them backstage at the global leadership summit last year, as we had one of our friends Jamie Kern, Lima was speaking there and I had spoke there the year before.
RV (03:42):
And one of our other friends, several of our friends have spoken there and you know, Michelle was there. And so that’s how we met and just absolutely love it. So that was my first takeaway. One, one problem that you solve one business model do one thing at a time and use video to show people a sample of what you do. Couldn’t be more textbook brand builder type speak. So that’s it. The second takeaway was hit me powerfully personally. So here’s what she said. She said, every decision that you make is either comfort based or growth based, which are you choosing like any decision or choice that you faced there is going to be a comfortable option or a growth option. There’s going to be a safe, familiar thing, or there’s going to be a new, scary, risky thing. Which one are you doing most of us by the default.
RV (04:44):
And you need to understand this. This is the default design of the human brain. This is neuroscience. The default of your brain is not designed for success. The human brain is designed for survival. The number one function of the human brain is to keep you alive. And so what happens is you will automatically always default to safety, to comfort, to familiar, which means you’re not growing. You’re not changing. You’re not evolving. You’re not adapting. You’re not learning. You’re not pushing, you’re not stretching. You’re not accomplishing something new. All of that requires deliberate, intentional focus to say, yeah, this is scary and I’m going to do it anyways. It is what we talk about and take the stairs. The story about be the Buffalo, or if you’ve ever read my story about do it scared. And this idea that you’re, you are scared and you do it anyways.
RV (05:44):
That is the essence. And so I, one of the things that I did is just like a little practical challenge because I was inspired by the interview with Michelle was I made an Instagram real where I did live singing, which I’d never done. I don’t, you know, I don’t do much dancing. Most of what I’m doing is content like teaching, right? That’s most of what my social strategy is and what I’m doing. And so I thought I’m going to do something fun that I’ve never done. And this is a secret skill that many of you probably don’t even know that I have, but I’m, I’m quite handy at rap lyrics. I can hear the lyrics really well and I memorize them. And so what I did was I took the song from the sound Disney soundtrack, marijuana, the song that, that the rock Dwayne Johnson sings called your welcome.
RV (06:34):
And I wrapped it and I put it on social media, which was way outside of my comfort zone zones. I think I would never, ever do, but I did it just for fun. And just in honor of Michelle. So Michelle, there you go. That, that is my, my homage to you. My, my Dwayne Johnson lip singing rap Instagram real but it was, it’s such a simple thing because it’s like, there are so many other ways just since my conversation with her, that I have realized, wow, what’s the safe decision. What’s the risky decision. And we are deliberately more and more starting to choose risk, you know, calculated risk, calculated risk. I would say to use a term from Adam Grant’s book, originals calculated risk. I really love that concept calculated risks cause I I’m risk adverse. Because I’m, you know, I’m really logical.
RV (07:27):
And also like you, I have a human brain that’s designed to keep me safe, but being an entrepreneur, being successful, being an influencer, like being a mission-driven messenger, changing the world, all of those things, making more money, making more impact making like all of those things require comfort based decisions. They require stepping out of your comfort zone, doing things new. And that leads me to my third takeaway that I walked. I walked away with, out of that conversation from her, from, with Michelle. And this was also so practical was, you know, I was, I’d asked her the question, obviously go listen to the interview if you haven’t. But when I asked her directly like, you know, give me one tip for overcoming fear, like give me one practical tip for overcoming fear. This is so simple. Here’s what she said. Just ask yourself, what do I need to learn in order to be able to do that thing?
RV (08:23):
What do I need to learn? Right. So the fear is in doing something that you’ve never done, a huge part of that fear is just not knowing what does it take to do it? It’s the uncertainty. It’s, it’s the incompleteness of the story in your head, right? It’s it’s like, there’s a, you can see a finish line, but you have no idea what the journey is. It takes to get there. So you kind of know like, well, I don’t know if I could get there. It’s kind of scary the thought, but when you go, what do I need to learn in order to be able to do that thing? It’s now very controllable. It’s very concrete, right? It becomes more pragmatic. It’s like, you can get your hands wrapped around. It is. Oh, well sure. It would be scary to, you know, write a book.
RV (09:11):
But if I learned the writing process that authors use that wouldn’t be a scary, right? So that’s like what we teach in captivating content or in our bestseller launch plan. The one of, so in that, in that curriculum, we talk about how to become a bestseller, not the writing part, but the marketing part. And one of the things that was huge for me was just learning how the bestseller list worked. Right? So the very first time I ever thought about, I want to be a New York times bestselling author one day, it was terrifying. It was, it was, it was impossible. Like I might as well have been saying I was going to be LeBron James or the president of the United States or Warren Buffett. Like it couldn’t have been something any further away from my reality at that time. But I started moving in the direction.
RV (10:01):
I started learning about it. And one of the things that I learned was, oh, each of these bestseller lists obviously have some function that they use to determine what makes something a bestseller and they’re all different. That’s one of the things we had to learn. One of the things that we teach now and going, oh, if, if I can sell this many units over this period of time, that is what makes someone a bestselling author. And just learning that changed everything. Just like learning that one piece of information, because it went from this very obscure kind of like, oh, I can never do that to, oh, how could I do that? And in take the stairs in the buy-in principle of commitment, we talk about how most people allow their, their creativity to move in the direction of the, the neutral, which is, can I do this?
RV (10:58):
Is this possible? Should I try? Do I like it? Do I agree with it? And neutral always becomes negative. Neutral, always eventually becomes negative. But to the person who in what ultra performers do is just one degree different. They don’t say, can I do it? Should I do it? They say, how can I do it? And the moment you ask the question, how everything changes, because now you’re, you’re just going, oh, well, what would it take to pull that off? How could I meet that deadline? How could I hit that target? How could this become real? How could this become true? And that changes everything. It moves it out of this, this fear-based uncertainty and to this very like pragmatic, practical process. So whatever it is that you’re wanting to do with your personal brand or just in your life and your business in general, just first of all, kind of go, all right, well, what’s the comfort based thing.
RV (12:02):
In other words, what’s the word? What’s the thing. What’s the decision that scares me and then immediately follow up with, well, what’s, what’s the one thing I need to learn in order to be able to do that. And if you can answer that question, the fear will go away. And the likelihood that you will achieve that thing will go up exponentially. What do I need to learn in order to be able to do that thing? Hopefully you’re learning here every single week, how to build and monetize your personal brand, how to extend your reach, how to grow your impact, how to grow your influence and how to grow your income. That is why we are here. If you’re learning stuff from us, would you do me a favor and just share this podcast out with someone who you think needs it specifically this episode and maybe the episode the interview of course, with Michelle so that they can listen in and just go, who in your life is over, you know, struggling with something right now. And they’re, they’re facing fear. Just send them these two, these two, these two episodes say, Hey, I thought you might like this. That would be a super helpful to us. Make sure we can keep providing awesome content and great yet. Keep getting great guests for you so that you can keep learning so that you can keep conquering your fears. Thanks for being here. We’ll catch you next time on the influential personal brand.
Ep 236: How to Build a Legendary Speaking Career in 5 Years with Michelle Poler
RV (00:07):
Hey brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for taking the time to check out this interview as always, it’s our honor to provide it to you for free and wanted to let you know there’s no big sales pitch or anything coming at the end. However, if you are someone who is looking to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and get to know you a little bit and hear about some of your dreams and visions and share with you a little bit about what we’re up to see if we might be a fit. So if you’re interested in a free strategy call with someone from our team, we would love to hear from you. You can do that at brand builders, group.com/pod call brand builders, group.com/pod call. We hope to talk to you soon.
RV (00:54):
So a couple of years ago, I got a chance to speak at the global leadership summit, which is the large, one of the largest, if not the largest speaking events in the world. And then last year I was part of helping my friend, Jamie Kern, Lima, get to speak there. And she shared the stage with Michelle Poler, who you’re about to meet. And I have I’ve known of Michelle because she’s a very, very successful speaker. She is very loved and respected in our industry. Several of my friends like Jason Dorsey have met her and talked so highly about her and then shared the stage together a lot. And as I got to speak, I got to see her speak at GLS and we kind of became friends a little bit. And I just think she’s darling and has the coolest story. If you haven’t heard of her.
RV (01:39):
So she is kind of a, she’s the founder of a movement that’s called hello fears. She’s reached 70 million people with this movement. There’s, you know, she did a TEDx talk. She wrote a book called hello fears. She has spoken for huge companies, ESPN, Netflix, Microsoft. She’s been on the today show and featured in pretty much every major national media, but and he was, I just wanted to hear a little bit, I wanted you to get, to hear a little bit of her story of how she got started, and then maybe we’ll sneak a few tips from her about overcoming some of our fears and building our brands. So Michelle, welcome to the welcome to the show.
MP (02:20):
I was expecting some applause or something like
RV (02:25):
Dancing. We’re alive of it. You’d be dancing.
MP (02:28):
Yeah, exactly. I would be dancing, but I get the one.
RV (02:31):
Yeah, I love it. So you know, you’re from Venezuela, which I love that is wonderful. And, and I like have have a couple of friends from Venezuela is a, you are another one. Tell us how did this all get started? Because you were a little bit of a, I mean, this all started out of reluctance from you for, for you is how I interpreted it’s. Most people go, I want to become a speaker or be an author, and I’m going to write a book, but your whole story and start of your personal brand is like came from a completely different place.
MP (03:04):
Yeah, totally. I never in my life would have expected to be where I am today. Not even in my wildest dreams, because I had no idea that what I’m doing today was a thing was a possibility. So I didn’t grow up. Like you said, I’m from Venezuela. I didn’t grow up with speakers. Like never a speaker came to my school just to motivate us, you know, if there was a speaker, maybe it was like a mathematician or something like, you know, professionally in their area. And so I would, I had no, and then I didn’t, then I went to college for arts and there were no speakers also in my school that was in the United States when I moved here. I was 19 years old. I did my career here as an art director, graphic designer. And then I, you know, I, I worked at an agency, an advertising agency and they don’t invest that much.
MP (03:57):
I don’t want to you know, just, I guess, I don’t know every agency, but from what I’ve seen in advertising, they don’t invest normally that much in the personal growth of their employees. So there were no speakers in my agency when I was working there at YNR young and Rubicam. And so I was never exposed to this speakers. And when I moved to New York to do a master’s in branding at the school of visual arts, I, I was asked to do this 100 day project where we could choose anything we want to do for 100 days in a row. And it was like a series of exercises that we did that led me to understand that it was time for me to face my fears. That I’ve been a very fearful person, but mostly comfortable person my entire life, like I was achieving a lot of things. So I never really thought I need to get uncomfortable in order to
RV (04:52):
Cool assignment. It was a school assignment to do and do something for a hundred straight days.
MP (04:59):
Yeah, you can do anything. And you had to also share your project online day after day. Like it couldn’t be just something that you keep to yourself. It had to be somewhere on social media, you could decide where. And so I decided to use YouTube and face my fears. I decided to face one for your day, for 100 days, create a video for that and post that to YouTube. So it was such a big endeavor that even my professor was concerned. She’s like, I don’t think you should go this route. This is a lot of work and this is not even your thesis. And I was working full-time in advertising while I was doing my master’s. So I had too much in my hand and I still decided to go for it because I had a hunch. This project could change my life. I had no idea where this was going to lead, but in my mind, my goal at that point was to create a project where I could not only become of course, a braver person. Cause that was my main goal, but also where I could show all of my skills, my creativity, my design, my video editing my community building all of those skills. I wanted to put them into one big project. So then I could apply to jobs in branding showing this project that was like my goal, like the best that could happen for me was to get an amazing job maybe at Instagram or Google or YouTube, like a really cool brand. That was my, my intention.
RV (06:23):
I love that. So I didn’t piece that together that it was the college project and that you were you. Cause I noted. I mean, one of the things that I noticed, I was like, well, yeah, this is an amazing story, but the videos are amazing. And that’s because you were studying that one of the reasons, cause you were studying storytelling and visual design and editing. So that
MP (06:47):
I started editing videos for my honeymoon. Like when I got married, we bought a GoPro and I was like, I have to make the best video with this GoPro. So I learned from my brother who actually is a filmmaker. And he taught me everything. I know. So I was like, this is the perfect excuse for me to create one video a day. Cause I love video-making. And storytelling and branding and design and all of that. I just put it together and created this project called 100 days without fear that ended up leading me into speaking.
RV (07:22):
So you, you, how did it work? Like functionally, did you, did you live the hundred days and film it and then go back and edit it or did you live a day? Film it, edit it that night and post it.
MP (07:38):
Let me tell you what my schedule looked like. So I would go to work from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM at my agency. Okay. In New York. And then from there I would go to my class from 6:00 PM to like 10:00 PM. Right. And so I would have a few times during the day to face a fear, it would be either very early in the morning. Like for example, one day I cooked something very outside of my comfort zone with a lot of boiling oil that I was, it was scary for me. And then, or I could do the lunchtime. That was the most popular time for me to go face a fear. So I was in my agency working alongside with all my peers, like my teammates. And then I’m like, be right back. I’m going to touch a snake or something. And so I would like go really quick to like central park, hold a snake, okay.
MP (08:26):
Pay the guy $2, go back to my work, keep working. And then I would go back home. I Reverend 10, 11:00 PM. And I would have to edit a video of what I, or, or I would use the nighttime. For example, I went by myself to a bar at night. So I would, or comedy show that I ended up doing standup comedy. So I would use one of those three times during the day. And then I would go back home, edit the video. Then I would do homework for my next day or whatever. I have left for my job and I was not sleeping, but I was on a high courage and excitement and living life to the fullest.
RV (09:03):
Wow. So how long did it, how long does it take you to edit one of these videos?
MP (09:08):
It was around maybe an hour and a half. It was like three minute videos. But yeah, it takes, takes a long time just to put re choose to write music. I started all my videos doing stop motion. So the, so it would say like fear number one. And it would be things that move by that by itself. And then I’m like, okay, I’m done doing stop motion. It only lasted three days. I’m like, I need to, to be able to do this in a quicker way.
RV (09:34):
All right. And so, so you, you would shoot these experiences. Most of them were pretty short, like a few minutes and then you would just come and spend like a couple of hours every night editing it and then you would post it and then you’d just go back to work the next day for a hundred.
MP (09:48):
Yes. For a hundred days. And whenever I could impose, for example, like it was a really busy day or I ended up facing a few really late or when people started to worry, they’re like, are you okay? Did you die facing your fears? Cause I’m doing scary things every day and I’m like, I’m fine. I’m fine. I just went to like to get hypnotized. And I had no time to go, sorry. So one day I would post two videos or during the weekend I would try to face more than two fears. So I have a little bit more so during the week I have more time, it was insane, but it was the best time of our lives. And I say our lives because I did it with my husband. He supported me since the beginning. We didn’t have kids at the time. And so he was like, let’s do it. I want you to become a braver person. I want you to be a braver mom one day for my kids. So he fully supported me and he faced my fears with me.
RV (10:37):
That is so crazy. So then you just made a list. Did you make a list of a hundred first and said, okay, these are the a hundred I’m going to do. And then cause like, did you have to travel for some of them or were they all in New York?
MP (10:51):
I tried to keep all of them in New York and some of them were upstate. So I would have to rent a car, maybe spend a night, something like that. But that’s, and then if I had any trips along the way, for example, I went to the how conference, you know, the branding conference. It was part of the school that I was like the school trip. So I face a lot of fears there. I was like, oh, this is a networking event. Like what can I do that is outside of my comfort zone? And so the way that I did it is I built a list of 20 things and then I couldn’t come up with any ideas. I was like, what, how am I going to start a 100 day project if I can’t come up with more than 20 ideas.
MP (11:31):
So I put this on Facebook, this was in 2015. So Facebook was like my biggest social media at that time. And I had no following. I mean, I was no one. I just had family and friends like there as my friends on Facebook. And so I posted there saying, Hey, I’m going to start a project where I’m going to face 100 fears. Can you suggest some ideas? And I think that’s the best thing that I could have done just because I started building community without realizing it, basically all the people that commented there. I had like around 60 something comments or more, I don’t remember. Everybody that commented felt like they’re part of this project since the beginning. So every time I would go out and face a fear that they suggested, for example, somebody said, you should go crush your wedding. You should go post nude in front of a drawing class. I mean, things that I know that never crossed my mind, I was like, yeah, it’s insane. So I was like, Hey, I did what you suggested. Here’s the video. So they felt like, oh, that’s so cool. I suggested something. She actually did it. And now I’m part of this. So they were the first ones to share my project and rude for me. And it was a really good feeling cause I was not alone doing this.
RV (12:45):
And when did you get the sense that this was taking off or like blowing up or cause there’s, there’s also a Ted talk that happens in here. But is that after?
MP (12:55):
Yeah, so it was, you know, it was one comment from a friend from college that she never reached out to me. And while I was doing the project, one time she reached out and said, you know, your fears, like your videos are making me a braver person. I’m daring to do more things at work. After I see you face your fears. And she knew me from college. So she was like, I remember how fearful you are. So I’m very proud of you. Thank you for inspiring me. And that comment made me realize that this project had a lot of potential. So I was like, this should be out there more people should know about this. And then one day out of the blue day, 40 of the project, it was picked up by daily mail in the UK. And they reached out and they asked for permission to publish my videos on their website.
MP (13:42):
And I was like, heck yeah, you can publish my videos, whatever you want, do whatever you want with my videos. That will be amazing. And so they published that and minutes later it was all over. It was every single website was sharing this and then contacted me like Huffington post CNN, Fox, all of them were like, we want to face fears with you. So, because I was in New York, it was really easy to just you know, get together with them some place and then go face fierce together. And that was pretty cool. Cause then it was all over the media and a lot of people started following the project. So I went from like 150 followers to 30,000. Wow.
RV (14:23):
Wow. That is so cool. So at the start of a, at the end of a hundred days, how many followers did you have? Like 30,000.
MP (14:30):
Yeah. Around that people that were like so eager to see what was the next year. And they were all really worried. Like what’s going to happen after it. Cause they’re like, we’re loving this project. We don’t want it to end. And I was so exhausted. I was like, I need this project to end, but I can’t continue facing one fear a day is taking over my life. Of course, one of my fears was quitting my job. So I didn’t have a job for the last, maybe 35 years, which was really helpful because I have more time to do this. I also graduated from my program, so I had more time to do this. And then the last fear was to speak at Ted TEDx. And so I had more time to prepare for that. It was not on the day 100. It was like a few weeks later. Cause that’s the date that the, you know, the event was taking place. And then I had a lot of people that they expecting to see what happened next.
RV (15:21):
So did you reach out to Ted? Did they find you? What, how that happened?
MP (15:26):
So when I started this project, I put TEDx as my last fear. And then I got so like the imposter syndrome selling me. Who do you think you are? Of course, you’re not going to go get into Ted who, you know, they’re not going to accept whatever. And so I removed it and I was like, yeah, I’ll forget about that. And when the project went viral, I was like, maybe I should consider reaching out. Maybe they will listen because I am all over now. And I know the impact that this project is having on so many people. So my husband found out who the organizer was for TEDx Houston and he reached out and through LinkedIn and this guy responded and then he was like, I love your project. Yes. I want you on our stage, but are you from Texas or related to Texas in any way?
MP (16:16):
Cause we won local speakers and I was like, I’m not I would love to, but now I’m not. And then he’s like, I’m sorry. And then I wrote a huge email listing, all the reasons why I should be on his stage, even though I’m not from Texas. And two weeks later he wrote back saying, okay, Michelle you’re in. And I was not only in, I was one of the highlights of the day. And it was like a really amazing experience to see that you can get the things that you want if you dare to really go after them and ask for it and you know, be persistent. Huh?
RV (16:51):
I love the smell. And so I think, but in your, your Ted talk has several hundred thousand views
MP (16:57):
Almost like half a million.
RV (16:59):
Yeah. So, which is awesome. But I think one of the, one of the things is I think people go, oh, Michelle went viral and that’s how she started her career. Which in which in some ways is true based on what you’re saying, but it’s in some ways also not true. It wasn’t like you had millions of followers or 10 million views on a Ted talk or something. So how did you then kind of parlay it? Like as we kind of go, okay, now we move this at some point, the light bulb goes on in your head like, Hey, this could be my business. I should do this. And you, you leveraged off of that and you turned it into what is now a really phenomenal business.
MP (17:41):
Yeah. Yeah. So exactly. It’s what you’re saying. It’s not like I blew up and suddenly brands all over are me. It’s not like it was just a virality wave that I was able to like capitalize for like know how to really take advantage of that for my next stage. So the question I made myself is what exactly resonated with people about this project and how can I turn that into something bigger? And so we met Jason Dorsey, as you mentioned at the beginning of the podcast that day, he was speaking also at TEDx and he saw me and he’s like, Michelle, you should be gone a speaker at call me. And so we call him and he gave us the tips on how to start, basically build a website, build a demo reel, what’s your audience? What are your, your talking points, develop a 45 minute talk, things like that.
MP (18:35):
And so we started to work so hard on that. And then we started to pitch this talk to company. So I listed all of the friends that I have that work in different companies like corporations. For example, I have my, one of my best friends working at Google. One of my friends, someone that I know of actually works at Facebook at Netflix. So I started calling people, do you know anybody that works here or there? I wanted my resume to have like this amazing companies and logos that I admire so much. And we started pitching this, showing them my TEDx and then showing them what I recorded myself, presenting at Google and all of these different companies. And that’s how we started building the speaking business from the ground up.
RV (19:16):
And that, what year was that? What year was that?
MP (19:18):
2016.
RV (19:20):
I mean, that’s pretty crazy that from in the year 2016, you built like your first demo video. And then by the year 2021, you were speaking on the biggest, the biggest speaking stage in the world. I mean, five years, that’s pretty incredible.
MP (19:36):
It really exceeded our expectations. Like we never imagined this would go this far, this fast. And also for example, my husband was still working in finance when we started and he was helping me develop my presentation. He would practice, reach out to clients and bureaus and all of that, but he was still with his full-time job because I was not working. Like I was not making any money. And then one day he called an amazing person that represented or actually still represent brunette brown in the speaking industry. And he was like, Hey, I I’m trying to help out. My wife here develop a speaking business. This is her demo reel. This is her TEDx. What do you think it was at his job in his office having this phone call with this person called Michelle and she saw this and she was like, you should leave your job and represent your wife. And you both should work full time on this because Michelle has an amazing potential. I actually I’d love to help. So she started helping me also. And she’s still representing me today and that’s been one of the best things that happened in our lives. So my husband quit his job in finance and worked full time with me doing
RV (20:48):
This. And when you guys started, so you start this as like a little social project and you do a Ted talk, then you basically create a website, some program descriptions, you had a video editing, which is a huge, that’s a huge asset to have had it. And but then you basically just make a list of all these companies you want to speak at. And then you start calling friends and family and saying, Hey, do you know anyone who works at this company? And then you just said, they, you find out who books the meeting, and then you say, Hey, I’d like to come talk. Here’s my bio, here’s my program. And here’s my demo video. And that, and then, then that’s how you started.
MP (21:26):
Yeah, yeah. They would say, okay, I’m not in charge of this, but I know the person that organized an event last year, let me reach out. And then it would go from person to person until we find the right one. And then of course I started doing events for free for this companies. I wanted to build my resume and then they started hiring me back and paying my fee to, you know, to bring me back to all their different offices. That’s what I did with Google and all of the other companies. And I think it was just a lot of self-confidence that got me there. Like when you know that what you have has so much value and that is so unique and authentic and original, and that you’re the right person to be delivering this message and, and talking about this things and inspiring people, then I think, you know, you have half the battle won because you believe in yourself. And I actually have this sticker right here that I love that I created says, when you believe in yourself so much, you make others believe in you as well.
RV (22:24):
I love that. I love that. That w and, and so basically you just start calling on these companies, you start speaking for free, then they say, Hey, we’d love to have you come back and do something. And so then it’s like, what’s your fee. And then you have a fee and then you do that more. And people see you and they say, will you come speak at my thing? And I have a friend, and then you raise your fee and you just basically been in that cycle for like five years until you end up getting a call from the global leadership summit and say, Hey, will you come, will you come speak on, speak on our stage? And, and, and so you still book gigs and in primarily, you’ve also been very, very focused on keynotes, right? Like your core businesses. You’re a speaker.
MP (23:07):
Yeah. Actually when I started, I had so many ideas. I was like, I want to do merch. I want to do YouTube. I wanted to speak. And I also want to create a company. I want to do all these things. And then my husband is very strategic and that’s really good for me cause I’m all over the place. And I have so many ideas and I want to do them all, you know, typically like the creative personality. And I’m like, yeah, I could do this. I can do that. I could do that. But then he’s like, Michelle, let’s focus on the one thing that can help us leave our jobs and actually, you know, make a living out of this. So it’s not YouTube, it’s not merged. It’s not any of those things is speaking. So let’s do this, let’s focus on one thing. And then that’s lesson that I keep you know, putting into practice until today, every time that I’m going to commit to one project, it’s just one project at a time. And so by doing that, we were able to really get this beam to the next level. And once we were very comfortable with our new career as speakers, then I started also doing social media. I started, I wrote my book, hello fears and, and doing all the other things I did merge. And now I have a baby.
RV (24:18):
That’s the, I
MP (24:19):
Did the baby.
RV (24:21):
Yep. Once you have a baby that you, you won’t do much for five years. You’ll. You’ll, you’ll take care of that, that baby. That is so great. Well, so this has been awesome, Michelle. I, I, I, it’s so cool to just hear, hear your story about how this all happened. And you probably don’t realize this, but you’re reinforcing like every single thing that we teach to our clients and members in terms of how, how to go about doing this and on that, can we talk about fear for a second? Can we do like more of like a little coaching coaching session just for a minute. And by the way, the book is called, hello fears. If you, you didn’t pick that up, that’s the name of Michelle’s book? So on the topic of overcoming fear, this is something that I think personal brands have to face a lot because it’s like, oh yeah, I want to go speak for Google, but I’m scared.
RV (25:16):
They might not like me. I might not get ahold of them. They might reject me, or I might want to reach out to speakers, bureaus or literary agents, or I might want to get on television or even just get written up in some article and there’s fear there, or for a lot of our clients, it’s even just scary to get on camera and say, you know, I want to post a, a 62nd video, which sounds really simple, but, but you go, man, I can find a hundred reasons not to press record on my phone. So why do you think we have some of those fears? And, and obviously you had a little bit of the benefit of doing a hundred days of facing fears. And so you kind of rolled off of that momentum in this, but do you have any tips for people that are struggling with that kind of thing?
MP (26:01):
I think it’s so sad that the main reason why we don’t achieve our goals and our dreams is ourselves. Like it’s ourselves telling us for some reason, like we’re not worth it or it is not worth pursuing. So fear stops us for so many reasons, for example, and I, I talk about this also in my program. I’m like the first thing I tell people is fear stops us. Why? And so I give the example of when I wanted to lunch my online program, all the different reasons, for example, what if somebody else is already doing a program about branding and you know, why would they choose me? What if people think that I only want their money? What if I, all those what ifs, right? What if it’s not as good as people think? And then we listen to that and we stop ourselves from doing the things that we actually want to do. And if you ask me, what’s the main fear people have, what will you say? What do you think is the main fear people have
RV (26:55):
That they won’t be good enough?
MP (26:57):
I think the main fear people have is disappointing. Other people that’s one of the main things. And so we stopped doing so many things because we don’t want to be perceived as something we don’t want to disappoint other people. So and it’s such a shame because we need people’s value. We need their value. And for that, we need them to have the courage, to put their valley out there, to shut up like their imposter syndrome and all those ideas. And I can tell you a couple of things that are helpful, for example if your message can help three people, can you think of three people in your life that have asked for help in what, in the area that you teach? You can also help 3000 people. And what I mean by this is that if you know, more than other people, about a certain topic, you are qualified to do that.
MP (27:49):
That’s one of the main things that we tell ourselves, I am not qualified because for example, you want to talk about any topic like even parenting? No, there are some people with PhDs that talk about parenting. If you are a parent, you can talk about parenting to anybody that is not a parent because you know, more than people that are not parents do. Now I have a nine month old baby. I know more about babies then Michelle, a year ago. And I would’ve loved to hear this. Michelle talk about babies, you know, like, so if you do, if you know more than a group of people, you are qualified, that’s it, that’s the main thing. Yeah. You don’t need to be the best one, but it’s enough. And let me think and just try to think, well, the, the thing I teach everybody in my, in my talks that you heard is what’s the best that can happen seriously. If you dare, if you choose to go out and record that 60 minutes, 62nd video, what’s the best that can happen. What if that can lead you to accomplish those things that you’ve been wanting for so long, but you keep listening to all your excuses out there. And that is still focusing on the rewards is the main thing that will help us take action when we’re in that spot.
RV (29:02):
And, and, and it’s just that shifting it from what’s the worst thing that can happen, which is what most of us think about to, what’s the best thing that can happen. And in that moment, when you’re kind of like, Ooh, I want to do it, but I’m scared. This just like that, that one little shift is a catalyst for doing, for, for actually doing the thing that you want to do.
MP (29:24):
In my case, I promised myself that I was never going to allow my fears get in the way of my treats. That’s the simple, not as not so simple premise, I guess, or line thing that I promised myself. And so every time I want to accomplish something and I see, and I realize that my fear is the one thing getting in the way. That’s when I have to go out and do it and forget about my fear and think what’s the best that can happen and hope for the best. And most of the times, the only things you regret are the ones that you didn’t do.
RV (29:58):
And so the moment you, so you just kind of have like this mental alarm in your head that says, I want to do something, but I’m scared. And so whenever you feel that it’s like, okay, I have to do it now.
MP (30:10):
Oh yeah. Yeah. Because I see the world in two different, like in this context, every decision that you choose is either a comfort based decision or a growth based decision. So whenever we’re in front of any situation, you have two options. Are you choosing growth or are you choosing comfort? And it doesn’t look the same for everybody. So very personal thing. So you have to think which one is the scariest thing to do right now that most of the times is the growth option.
RV (30:44):
And then you just go for it.
MP (30:47):
You work on it, you work on yourself first. I think that’s the most important thing, working on yourself, working on your confidence and when you’re ready, then you go for it. But it is important to work on ourselves. People, sometimes they don’t want to go to therapy. They don’t want to learn new skills. They don’t want to work on themselves. And then they pray. They want to achieve certain things. I think it all works. It all starts with you.
RV (31:11):
Hmm. That’s interesting though. So you’re saying that like, Hey, okay, do you feel this fear? You want to do it? And then it’s, it’s not necessarily just go out, just jump in and do it. It’s like, okay, what, why do I need to learn in order to feel equipped to, to then go do that thing.
MP (31:28):
The imposter syndrome to be real, you don’t want to be an imposter. And so in order to delete, like raise the imposter syndrome from the equation, you actually need to become the person that you would admire, right? You can’t teach about finance and B being broke. You, you can teach about achieving your dreams. If you have not achieved your dreams. I think that first you have to become the person that you would admire. And then you can teach others about that. But also there’s part of ourselves, like our fear telling us that we’re never there and it’s never enough. You know, and that, yeah. So it always telling you, you need to read one more book. You need to do one more course. No, you have to stop. And also think, okay, I think I am at this point where I can teach people what I know. And you can’t just stay on the loop of doing another course, another book, because then you will never put everything you’ve learned into action.
RV (32:24):
Is there any, you have any tips for identifying the difference there between where you go, when am I just, when am I actually going? Okay, I’m equipping myself so that it’s not imposter syndrome versus I’m using it as something that we call creative avoidance. That’s a term for my first book where you’re like, you’re using it as a really a procrastination mechanism.
MP (32:49):
I think that I don’t like to compare myself with other people, but it’s okay to compare yourself with yourself. So maybe think about yourself a year ago. Where are you? Are you still kind of in the same or you, you say, whoa, I wish I could tell this things that I know now to my year ago, self, if there are some things that, you know, you’re like my, my one year ago, self would love to know this things. It would have made his life easier. Then I think Europe one where you can share what you know with other people is yes, you can always know more and you know read more and all that, but then you have to understand what and any it’s okay to start when you’re not ready. Right. That’s one of the things that, that people say, I love this quote from, I think Reed Hoffman that says if your first product doesn’t embarrass you, you launch too late.
MP (33:42):
I love it. I’m very much like I have an idea. I, if I feel I have what it takes, I started and I started trying it and then people will give you feedback. That’s also really valuable. So just maybe try it with a small group of people and see the result there, see the impact. And then you will see, yeah, definitely this is ready for a larger group. Or maybe I should work on it first because for example, my talk, my keynote presentation w the one that I started six years ago is very different from the one that I am giving today. But if I would have waited six years to make it perfect to launch it, you know, I would be nowhere. Cause I just needed all the feedback, all the things that went wrong, all those things to just build the perfect talk that I feel right now is at an amazing level where I’m so confident about this, but it took me six years to get here.
RV (34:34):
I love it. Well, the book is called, hello fears. This is Michelle Poler. You’ve been listening to Michelle. Where do you want people to go? If they want to like sync up with all the stuff you have going on,
MP (34:43):
I would love for them to join me on my community on Instagram. So hello fears on Instagram. That’s where you’ll find everything about me and we’ll just keep in touch. So just let me know that you listened to this podcast so we can connect there.
RV (34:57):
I love it. Well, we’ll link up. We’ll link up to that. As well as your website and the book and everything thanks for helping us overcome our fears. Thanks for modeling. It. It is inspiring and super helpful to actually like get inside your, your mind a little bit about how you push yourself past cause you had so much, so much experience doing it. So keep inspiring, keep doing what you do and we’re, we’re we’re pulling for you. We’re we’re fans. We believe in you. Thank you
MP (35:24):
So much. My pleasure to be here.
Ep 235: Selling with a Servant Heart with Jim Doyle | Recap Episode
RV (00:02):
Selling selling, selling, selling is something we have to learn how to do it is such a critical skill and it is becoming a bigger part of what we’re focusing on. Teaching people, teaching our brand builders members. And so this was an apropos timing of the interview with my good friend, Jim Doyle welcome to the influential personal brand podcast. It’s Rory Vaden. I’m breaking down that interview and my top three takeaways from it because it was powerful and I’ll say this, you know, AJ and I, and our team have very specific I would say unusual philosophies about selling. I say unusual because they’re different from the, you know, there’s thousands of sales traders, thousands of sales trainers out there in the world. And I would say there are very few people who align philosophically with what AIJ and I, and our team believe about Holly, how selling should be done.
RV (01:02):
We’ve we’ve had a few of those people on Phil M Jones. We had him on. And and then Jim Doyle, what we, we haven’t had a ton. We haven’t had a ton though, but this was one of them. And I absolutely loved it. I mean, I’ve known Jim for so long and just some great reminders. And so this obviously comes from his, his new book selling with a servant heart. Here’s my top three, my top three takeaways. Number one, the customer is not buying your business. They are buying what your business can do for them. That is such an important, it’s such a subtle but distinct and important shift that you have to realize when you’re selling people, aren’t buying you. They’re not buying even what you do. They’re not even buying. Do they like you? Like, that’s a small part of it.
RV (01:57):
What they’re buying is what you can do for them. What benefit can you provide in their life? What result can you manifest for them? What, like what transformation do you have to offer them that makes their life or their business better? That’s what they’re buying. They’re not buying you what you do. I mean, as much as they’re buying what you can do for them. And this is one of the greatest mistakes that, I mean, it’s the most common mistakes that you see in marketing and selling is talking all about you, your product, your expertise, your knowledge, like how much H how, how much time you spent in your industry. And it’s like the only thing that matters is what you can do for people talk about them, their needs, their desires, their, their wants their goals, their dreams, their future, like talk about their, their plans and see if you can help them.
RV (02:59):
Like what, what you do should only be talked about in the context of that. Can you help them achieve those things? That is how you want to talk in a way, if you want to have great marketing, you want to have great sales. That’s all it is. It’s that simple. But the mistake that happens like 99.9% of the time is we talk about me, my us, our w like we, instead of you, your dreams, your goals, your hopes, your future, your plans, and how might I assist you, or how might we assist you in getting there, or how do we work alongside of you to make that come true? And that’s just such a subtle distinction, but a sharp one and a necessary one, and a critical one. If you want to be able to make some money in, in what you’re doing with your business.
RV (03:53):
Second thing, great. One, a great takeaway is he said, listening has a partner, and that is good questions. I love that. Being a great Brene greatest sales means being a great listener and being a great listener has this partner, which is being great at asking questions that is in our sales training that we teach at brand builders. So our events called pressure-free persuasion and in the closing section, which is all about helping someone make a decision, we talk about how being great at sales is being a master question. Asker. It is not being a smooth talker. It’s not having the gift of gab. It’s not being overly persuasive. It’s, it’s not being convincing or compelling, or even, even persuading. It’s certainly not pressuring. It’s just being a master question. Asker. It’s asking questions in a way that help people see for themselves that either what you have to offer will help them achieve their goal, or it will not.
RV (05:03):
And they will realize for themselves if you facilitate. And that is a key word here is that we believe in service centered selling is about facilitating a decision, not making a decision, not convincing people, not pressuring people, not pushing people. It is helping people make their own decisions about whether or not what they’re buying is good for them. So all you have to do is ask a bunch of questions that help them get clear on what they want. Ask them a bunch of questions that help them get clear about the fact that they’re not achieving it yet. And then ask them a bunch of questions about what they think would help get them there, and then show them how, what you’re doing fits that need like, aligns with that purpose. And you will create a sale, but it’s, it’s like your just drawing information out of them.
RV (05:58):
And then kind of showing up in this one specific area and tying what you do to what they need. You’re not pressuring people, convincing them, lying to them, manipulating like doing all the things that most salespeople do, at least not. If you do it, the brand builder way, right. Service centered selling is what we teach. And so obviously the title of Jim’s book selling with a servant heart was very, very much in line and we know him. So B com when, if, when you think about becoming great at sales, think about becoming great at asking questions. That’s what I want you to think of not being a master negotiator, not being a smooth talker, not having all the confidence in the world, not having the gift of gab, not, not being likable, not being you know, the, the hard, closer, just think of like, when you think of, I want to be better at sales.
RV (06:53):
What I want you to think is I’m going to become a master at asking questions. That’s what you should, you should think about. And if you want to know exactly what questions to ask, that you should probably talk to us about the concepts and information that we teach in pressure-free persuasion. Maybe you should pick up a copy of Jim’s book. And but you know, it’s, it’s the, all the stuff that I’m talking about right here. Like it, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out. It just takes a little bit of intention. And I think a focus on service rather than on just selling which ties takes me to my third big takeaway from this interview, which I loved. And I just, I love the way that Jim phrased this, as he said, I have to turn off my ego. I have to turn off my desire to be the star.
RV (07:42):
Ah, that’s so good, right? Like we have to be able to do that in lots of areas of our life. If we, if we really want to be serving people, if we really want to be a mission-driven messenger is we have to move out of that window. Out of that stage of going, I want to be the star. I want the eyes on me. I want the attention. I want the fame, the influence, blah, blah, blah, whatever. And just going, I’m turning off my ego. I’m here to help you achieve your goal. And I’m going to ask some questions and listen acutely to what your goals are and see if I can help to see if what I have is an actual fit for you. And if it is I’ll help you buy it. If it is not, I will help you move on and not waste energy debating about whether or not you should buy what I have.
RV (08:36):
And I’ll help you move confidently in another direction. That is what this is about you. All it is, it is genuinely legitimately, authentically putting their needs before yours and trusting that your needs will be met. If you do it. It’s like what? My, my mentor, the legendary, his executor is the most famous quote of all. If, if you help enough other people get what they want, you will get what you want. So help them focus on asking questions and seeing how you can help. And if you can have them buy your stuff, if you can’t help them in some other way. But that’s all, this is, that’s all this is about. And that’s all, we’re about the brand builders group. We’re just trying to help you. Hopefully this podcast is helping you. If it is, we do me a favor and share this with somebody who you think needs to listen to this, a recap and needs to listen to this interview, an episode that we did with Jim and and just keep coming back. We want to keep pouring into you. We love you. We appreciate you. We’ll catch you next time on the influential personal brand.
Ep 234: Selling with a Servant Heart with Jim Doyle
RV (00:07):
Hey brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for taking the time to check out this interview as always, it’s our honor to provide it to you for free and wanted to let you know there’s no big sales pitch or anything coming at the end. However, if you are someone who is looking to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and get to know you a little bit and hear about some of your dreams and visions and share with you a little bit about what we’re up to see if we might be a fit. So if you’re interested in a free strategy call with someone from our team, we would love to hear from you. You can do that at brand builders, group.com/pod call brand builders, group.com/pod call. We hope to talk to you soon
RV (00:54):
If you’ve been listening to this show for any amount of time, you know, that the national speakers association has been a huge part of my journey was a huge part of my journey, especially early on as a speaker. And so I met Zig Ziglar and Brian Tracy, and so many you know, of my personal mentors and mark Sanborn, Eric Chester, David Avin. Well, there’s a group that NSA has called the million dollar speakers group that started a handful of years ago. And through that group, I got a chance, a we got a chance, AJ and I to meet a lot of the, the, the really sustainable businesses that have been run by speakers. So they were speakers that they turned their expertise into a business, and that’s the man you’re about to meet Jim Doyle. I met Jim through that group. We’ve been friends for a lot of years now at this point he’s run a multi-million dollar training company for years, and we’ve just known each other through that.
RV (01:47):
And I’ve always admired him and looked up to him. One of the things that he did recently is he did an Aesop with some of his team and sold some of the ownership of his company back to his own team members, which is really, really a wonderful way to leave a legacy and something that you just don’t hear that much about. But anyways Jim has a book that just came out, it’s called selling with a servant heart the 10 lessons on the path to joy and increased income. And another thing, if you’ve been listening for a while, you know, we almost never have people on here to talk about sales because we have a hard time finding people who we agree with and how they teach. And we’ve got some really, really specific philosophies around selling that are pretty rare, but Jim is one of the guys that over time we’ve really come to a door and endorsed and we, we endorse this book. And so anyways, I wanted you to get a chance to meet him and learn from him along alongside of me as I learned from him. So Jim, welcome to the show.
JD (02:54):
Thank you. I, I have to laugh, but you know, Brian, Tracy Zig Ziglar Jimbo, Like I’ve arrived at to be even in the same sentence with those guys who were just legends and impacted and thought so many people I’ll take it, but I don’t I don’t think by any stretch of the imagination, what those guys have done is amazing.
RV (03:20):
Well, and I tell you, but in all, in all, like just objectivity, it’s a rare, it is a rare speaker who builds a multi-million dollar enterprise that scales beyond themselves that lasts, you know, over a decade that that actually has a wealth building, a true wealth building component. That’s a transferable asset. That’s really incredible. And so Jim, I want you started really, you, you tell us, tell us what you do. Like tell us what the company is. Obviously the book is about selling out. I want to hear that, but kind of talk to us about like how you started your career and grew the training company. So,
JD (04:03):
So I was always in the media business and the radio and TV business and like many entrepreneurs. I went broke into a deal in the early nineties and I was like, okay, what the hell do I do now? But I had always loved training and speaking. So I started a company in 1992 called Jim Dolan associates, our 30th year, it’s now called jda.media. So this is our 30th year and over a period of time and over, and I really should have been cited over a period of time. You know, it became, I think the largest training company in the TV space, for sure. And I think one of the lessons I’ve learned in that process that maybe is helpful to folks that are trying to do that and try to build a business is the line there’s riches in niches.
JD (04:54):
I think if you look at many of the members of that billion dollar group who have built big sustainable businesses, I think about our friend Roxanne Emmerich, who’s done that in the banking space, who is the guy that we knew, who, who was the guru of nursing homes and senior living centers and somebody, those people you know, people who done it in financial services, bill gates on a subject of referrals who built big businesses by being more niched focused. And I think what that allows you to do is to provide more services than just a training experience. And then you move to the next company in the next marketplace, down the road. Now you can do coaching programs, online programs build more sustainable product businesses that give you more opportunities. So I think that’s one of the lessons that we learned there’s riches in niches.
RV (05:46):
Yeah, that that’s really true. I mean and, and, and some of those folks you get, it’s like, they’re not necessarily names you would recognize, like you might somebody who, you know, speaks in marinas full of people. But in terms of the, the equity value of an, of an asset in a company that’s, you know, survive without them, they are there they’re huge and valuable and provide extraordinary wealth to the founder. And then also, you know, that the people who come after them. So one of the things that I really think is cool about what you guys do. So, so you’re, you’re saying, when you say media and TV business, you’re in media sales, you’re, you’re training you, your niche is training like advertising sales reps at like a local TV station to call on local businesses to sell air like ad ad ad time. Yeah,
JD (06:37):
Yeah, absolutely. So they’re using the, the, the TV stations platform. And then now, today, increasingly using all of the digital platforms that are available that, that television station might’ve created or represents.
RV (06:50):
Interesting. And so these are these like, like, you know, whatever, like your local news for kind of a thing, or,
JD (06:58):
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we’ve, we’ve had clients in Nashville with clients and I think right now, 75 markets around the country. So you know, we’re able to go out and actually make sales calls side-by-side with their team members with just a whole file cabinet of ideas that we’ve learned from traveling all over the country. So we’re the, we’re the king of stolen ideas. We steal an idea, we steal an idea natural and sell it in Austin for a profit. And hopefully for the benefit of the business owner, that it gets some expertise that they might not have been able to get under normal circumstances.
RV (07:34):
And I think, and I said like tongue and cheek, but the, that is really rare. What you guys do is you not, I love this. You don’t only just teach people how to do it. You kind of do it alongside them. Like your, your team actually goes on sales calls with them, shows them in real time, like how to apply the concepts and the techniques you’re teaching. Yeah.
JD (07:55):
Yeah. So correct. And I’ll give you an example. I mean, you were kind enough to allow me to interview you for the book and, and ha as well. And you talked about something that was a big takeaway for me because it crystallized, you said it in a way that I didn’t, you know, made it clear when you talked about acute listening. So we teach as most, I think effective sales trainers teach as most business owners should probably embrace on a technique of, of doing a lot of diagnosis before you present ideas. And so when we go out on a sales call with a salesperson in a market their idea of listening, maybe three questions before they start talking about advertising, how’s your business? How’s the market right now? Oh, what are you doing for advertising? So the behavior that they model with our people is, you know, a 30, 40 minute conversation, that’s all about them, about the customer’s business, their challenges, their issues. Nobody wants to buy advertising, you know, almost they want to buy the things that advertising can do for them. You know, whether it’s solving a problem, dealing with a competitive threat, taking advantage of an opportunity in the marketplace. So, you know, that, that whole idea of understanding what the customer really wants is foundational to anybody who wants to be effective in sales, whether that’s a consultant, a business owner, or a salesperson at a TV station.
RV (09:20):
Yeah. And so the, I think that that’s super cool that you actually do the sales calls with them, to your point about the niches. That’s also like if you’re serving a vertical, you can do it. Like if you worked in that vertical for years, you know, it, you know, the game, you know, the people, you know, the lingo, the like all, all the, you know, the normal objections, et cetera, you can do that kind of depth of service that someone that just says, I teach sales training for everybody. It doesn’t mean it’s bad, but they can’t, they can’t do it to that level of detail.
JD (09:51):
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, th the more you know about the category, the know you, the more you also understand what the needs are in that category. So you can adapt, we’re create new products based upon what an opportunity is. That may be a new opportunity just in the last year caused by the pandemic. So I’m a big believer in going deep rather than wide you know, deeper rather than why that has at least served us. Well, of course, now I’m ready to book to go and go wider, but violating all my own advice. But but I think that, I think it’s served me well for a long time.
RV (10:24):
Well, and, and I, I would say, you know, so the way that we teach it, we call it, she hands wall. And I don’t know if you’ve ever heard us talk about this. We named this after Peter she hand who you probably know
JD (10:33):
Of course. Yeah.
RV (10:34):
W you know, we kind of took a, one of she hands models that he, he created for sort of like the corporate space. And we applied to personal branding saying that the way you break through the wall is by becoming known for one thing in one space. But then once you break through the wall, then you can expand into other things. After, after you have a team and you have money and you have resources and experience. And I think you’re, you’re a great example of that. So let’s talk about selling with a servant heart. There’s, there’s no shortage of books written about sales. Certainly not at this point. So why the need to write this? And what do you think is distinct or different about this philosophy compared to, you know, what other stuff people may have read or heard about sales?
JD (11:24):
So if you Google sales books and you look at the titles, it’s things like closing, winning, winning, winning you know, I, I gotta tell ya, I don’t think that great salespeople think about winning in the same way that maybe that’s the literature. And so I, I quite honestly get offended by a lot of what I read and, and one of them that I get, because we have a lot of great sales people, people who could be great, who are being taught, that this is the way to do it. And if you sell in that way, you know, maybe you’ll have some success, but I don’t believe that you’re going to find the joy that you can have in a long-term career in sales that you get, when you put your primary focus on serving people. You know, when I interviewed AIJ who, by the way you told me was the best sales person in your family. And one of the best you’ve ever seen,
RV (12:26):
She is to hand hands down. And I would, I’d say this, you know, separate of being my wife, like we work together, you know, for years, he is the best sales person hands down that I’ve ever seen.
JD (12:39):
And I would agree after having spent an hour on the phone interviewing her, but she said, you know, when you make your customer’s needs more important than your own needs. Well, in order to do that, you’ve got to believe that if it’s good for the customer, it’s ultimately going to be good for you, even though that might not be the case immediately, but if it’s good for the customer, it will ultimately be good for you. And so, and good. I mean, the first word of this book title is selling. This is not a relationship, or this is not a book to help you feel, you know, kinder in general. This is a book about being more effective in selling more effective at getting growing your business. But how do you grow your business? The more you serve, the more you get back and where you give the more you get back.
JD (13:26):
There’s a guy that I interviewed in the book Dave wall Dave if he was a, if he was an RV dealership, he’d probably be the biggest in the country. He sells these $2 million coaches, these beautiful motor home coaches, $2 million, $2 million. One of his customers who was an old client of mine said, you got to talk to this guy. And he S his customer said, this guy took a phone call from me. I didn’t, I had an issue with my coach. He took a phone call for me in the course of the conversation. I said, where are you? And he said, well, I’m on a family vacation in Argentina. And he was on a satellite phone somewhere in Argentina. And my friend said I was astounded. He took that call. So I asked Dave about it. And he said, I took you know, five minutes out of my time to help a customer.
JD (14:21):
Well, how has Dave one 60% of Dave wall’s business is repeat 60%. 30% of his business is referral. If you build relationships like Dave has you start every year at such a high level of productivity that you’re going to be an award winner. You’re going to be a high performance salesperson, all because you’ve got a commitment to customers. So you know, the idea that, you know, we’re going to win where they were going to close. You know, what I think selling is a lot more about the way you are as a person and a lot less about the words you use. And so that’s hopefully a focus of what I hope to accomplish by doing this book.
RV (15:06):
And that’s, that’s a really cool way to think about it. You know, like if you’re, if you’re just cold calling randomly every year, you start on zero with a whole bunch of people, you’ve got to cold call. If you’re, if you’re building relationships, then you come into that year, basically with an army of people that are helping generate leads for you, because they’ve all had this wonderful experience. That’s cool way of thinking about it.
JD (15:30):
I think it’s building relationships, but it’s also building trust, you know, the currency of relationships. I have a lot of salespeople that I like. I have a lot fewer that I trust and being trusted is the, is, is the pathway to really having deep, honest business conversations. But I was thinking about one of the biggest takeaways I had from doing this whole book. So I interviewed 35 people in all different industries. And so UNH we’re part of that group. And but I, I, I talked to the guy who had oversight ticket sales for the NBA and a mortgage broker who did probably 10 times the volume of a top performing mortgage broker. And as I reflected on all these conversations, one of the things I realized is man, there was a scary, real important it’s like to be trusted, has a lot of responsibility. I mean, you know, one of the guys that I interviewed said, you know, you can’t try with people’s money. You can’t try, you’ve got to do. And so there’s a responsibility of trust that. So it’s, it’s getting the relationship with trust, but then, you know, honoring that by being so good at the solutions you bring, that you continue to just build on that foundation.
RV (16:56):
Mm Hmm. Yeah. So, so what do you think to move, to move this tab to the tactical? Right. So if you buy into this sort of philosophically going, okay, you know, I’m building relationships, I’m earning trust, I’m doing what’s in my customer’s interest beyond, ultimately than what is just in my own. What are some of the things that should show up tactically? Or what are the things that we can do or say inside of, you know, how we prospect or how we qualify or ask questions? I mean, does it, what, what comes to mind in terms of the, the actual expression of how to do this in terms of selling with a servant’s heart?
JD (17:42):
That’s a, that’s a great question. I think that there are differences, but servant, heart sellers have in every part of the sales process I’ll give you Justin gurney was the guy that I talked about who oversaw ticket sales. He worked for the NBA national basketball association. So his job was to work with all 30 basketball teams to bring best practices on tickets and suite sales and, you know, the expensive sponsorship kinds of things. He said, the model has historically been a model of, you know, make a bunch of phone calls, you know, sit on the phone all day and call business owners where you probably gotten those calls from, you know, one of the international teams I’ve gotten them from the teams down at Sarasota. The Tampa teams are now that now they’ll make the phone calls slightly more sophisticated because the wait for the open, the email before you, then they then call you.
JD (18:37):
But it’s the a hundred calls a day kind of situation. He said, he found on every single team that there were outliers one or two people on a team, all of these 30 teams that did it differently, they focused on building a relationship. They spent a lot of time. If you want the specifics of tactics, we spent a lot of time, more time than any of their colleagues on, on learning about why you might use those tickets. What are the business issues that you’re trying to solve? What can an entertainment experience do to enhance your customer relationships and guess who were the top performers in every one of those teams? So fast forward a few years, Justin joins the New Jersey devils hockey team running their efforts and he tries to hire a team of outliers and he tries to hire a team and teach a culture that is very focused on diagnosis to your word and into acute listening, acute listening, really paying attention to what the answers are listening longer and in more focused than 95% of all the sellers do. That’s probably the number one skill that I think sets apart of servant heart sellers. Is that
RV (19:51):
Like the volume, the quantity of time for how long they’re listening?
JD (19:55):
Exactly. I think that most salespeople spend about 20% of their time listening and 70, 80% of their time pitching serve at heart sellers spend 70 to 80% of their time listening. And 20 to 30% of their time presenting, they can present for a lot less time because when they present a solution, they mail it. You know, it’s done really understanding what the customer’s issues are.
RV (20:22):
What are they listening for? I mean, yeah, like that’s, I guess that’s my biggest, like, so what w what are they listening for? Is it a, is it a standard set of questions they’re asking or
JD (20:35):
Well, I think that there’s going to be questions that an insurance salesperson might ask that a realtor wouldn’t or that a manufacturer, somebody selling manufacturing ask, but somebody else would, but the general principle to think about is I want to ask questions that have deep business conversations to try to uncover what is the customer potentially need, or how could they use the product that you sell in a way that solves their problems, not yours. You want to make a sale? That’s no problem. They want to, you know, solve a particular issue within, within their, their business. So, in, in Justin’s case, by having those kinds of conversations now they get to the pandemic where you think, you know, if you’re listening to this thing and you think your business had trouble, how’d you like to be a professional hockey team shut down.
JD (21:32):
Your building’s not even open. Nobody can come. At one point, I talked to him and they had no idea when they were going to even reopen. And yet they were still making sales and renewing deals because they were having the kind of conversations about how you could use that suite. They could use those tickets after the season started again. Other teams were laying off their people, the New Jersey devils kept theirs on and continued to find some impact. Now, come out the other side, who do you think is going to do the best? Who’s going to have the greatest impact. There are other specifics. I mean, one of the other specific things that I really took away from this is the idea that in your presentations, the servant heart sellers tend to teach and not sell.
JD (22:19):
So rather than here’s the greatest thing that you can do. They’ll spend a lot of time talking about what this product is going to do for your business. What is it going to, what is the problem it’s going to solve? I interviewed the only guy that I interviewed who had ever called on me. I interviewed him because he just impressed me so much, 25, 30 years ago. And he, he went on to oversee sales for arbitrage, which is a big radio company that did ratings for all radio stations in America. He said their most successful salespeople were people who started as trainers and then moved into sales. So customer would buy a product and they would train them how to use it. So when they moved into sales, that was their default. Here’s this new thing. Let me show you how this could make your station look good. And they had the highest performance across a whole sales staff from a bunch of people than people who were just coming in and trying to sell, teach, not sell, became something I really took away from the interviews that I thought was significant.
RV (23:27):
Yeah. That’s, that’s interesting. I mean, the other thing about the, I mean, yeah, that’s a powerful idea that you also kind of get the benefit of seeing what you do, being applied to people in real life, and then going to talk to a prospect. Like I was thinking about our, of strategists, how their, their conviction goes up when they actually come through the training or work with our clients and see how they apply it. And then they get to get, they get a sense of it. It helps them go out and have more conviction and clarity about what they’re selling to. And then to what you’re saying, it’s like, it’s more of a teacher’s heart than a commission breaths, salesperson kind of, kind of a thing.
JD (24:11):
Well, also also those stories not only help their own belief, but they conveyed correctly can also help their customers, their prospects.
RV (24:20):
So what are the things that you’ve you find? I mean, how do you think this applies specifically to personal brands? There’s, you know, we have, we have a one of our, one of our members only events is called pressure-free persuasion. And so there’s a time where we start talking about this sort of tactical one-on-one selling. But like, where do you think, like, even as you just look at your own career, you think back of going, here’s where I had to sell and learn how to sell in order to build the business that I have. You’ve got how do you think that this, like today, a lot of times when people think personal brands, it’s almost more like they think marketing, right? You’ve got, you’re doing videos and social media and funnels and writing books and, you know, even speaking from stage, but I would, those, those skillsets, I think, are pretty markedly different from the ability to have a one-on-one conversation with somebody and, you know, discuss their needs and eventually move them to make a decision and give you a credit card or send you a check. W so, so how do you think this applies, you know, sales still applies to personal brands?
JD (25:31):
Well, ultimately no matter how strong a brand I’ve built, I have to sit on a zoom call, be in front of a prospect or a potential client and have a one-on-one conversation. You know, if you, as you asked the question, I was thinking about you and I probably both had the experience of being with a lot of very successful speakers, very effective speakers guys who have built great personal brands, but when you spend time with them, one-on-one, they have a very, very hard time losing the spotlight. They have a very hard time not being onstage. So as a consequence, they tend to want to dominate the conversation. And, you know, I understand that probably guilty of that more than a few times myself, but it’s the opposite when you take your marketing. So my marketing is I’m out there, you know, here’s my content.
JD (26:33):
Here’s what I’ve tried to do. Here’s the messages that I’m sending out to the marketplace. Well, now somebody engages with me. I’ve got to just say, what are the issues that you’re trying accomplish? And I’ve got to, I’ve got to turn off my ego. That’s the hardest thing is turning off my ego, that desire to be special, that desire to be a star and really listen, listen acutely to what somebody is trying to accomplish. And then I can try to figure out, all right, what is it that I do that can best serve them?
RV (27:06):
You know, the part about this listening thing, which is crazy is you know, like the way I was taught on sales was just when you’re talking about it’s all a numbers game and you just like kiss, keep going no matter what. And you’re just burning through people and you know, kind of this, when they say this, you say this and, and you got to gear yourself up and you know, kind of like be, be persistent until they buy kind of a, kind of a conversation.
JD (27:36):
And they have, they have my money, got my money. I’m gonna get my money.
RV (27:40):
Yeah. Right. Yeah. They’re holding my money. I have to get my money out of their pockets. Yeah. The and that’s so hard, like it free for the sales person, like emotionally. It’s like, that’s a lot of pressure. What’s so crazy to me about asking questions is like, it’s so much easier. Like people tell you, rather than having to like gear yourself up and say, okay, I’m going to go spew a bunch of stuff at somebody and not shut up until they acquiesce. It’s like, I can sit back and do nothing while they tell me exactly what it is that they need. And they like lay out this roadmap for exactly what they need to hear and, and, and, and tell you how to like, make a sale.
JD (28:31):
Right. And if you, if you spend just 15 or 20 minutes on Google before you make that call looking at the business issues in that category tried to find out some of the competitive issues that are going on. So I did a few minutes on their website so that you can, so your questions are not just how’s business or what’s going on in your business, but rather lead to more in-depth business conversations. They’ll tell you everything. And they tell you everything because such few people do that. And that’s, that becomes a competitive advantage. You know, it’s interesting if we have this conversation that you know, I am more focused on listening or I’ve talked a lot about listening, but listening also has a, a partner. And that’s a good question. It’s you, you can’t just listen, you know, how, you know, did you watch the game?
JD (29:23):
What do you think about the Titans? You know, how’s your business? I mean, blahblahblahblahblah now I want to be able to engage in a business conversation. So w I, and when an organization does it, I know you have a ton of entrepreneurs who follow the podcast, follow your work. And I had a banker, you know, this is a banker who took this into his entire bank’s culture. Rather than call his people commercial lenders, they call them commercial bankers and they were instructed to have business conversations, train taught drilled to have business conversations with, with every prospect. Where do you see the future of your business? Do you have anybody identified who might be a buyer for this company down the road? They’re trying to look at the longer term business issues so that they can help this this business owner oriented business to that, and provide perhaps the capital to do all of those things. Unbelievable loyalty, less pressure on rates for, you know, borrowings, because I’ll pay a little bit more for that degree of service, if I’m trying to borrow money for something. And when the pandemic hit and this bank, landmark bank in Kansas could fulfill PPP loans in a hurry. When the big banks couldn’t do anything, they got hundreds of customers. We’re now extraordinarily loyal to the bank. So this is, these are, you know, this whole idea of, of asking good questions is a partner with listening, has to be.
RV (30:57):
And you’re the questions you’re trying to ask there are, how do you, how do you know what questions to ask? I mean, one is to do the research. It’s funny, you mentioned this. So one of the recent interviews we did with Sam Richter about, I don’t know if you know, Sam, all the customer intelligence and the online research stuff that he uses, which has been really
JD (31:15):
Good stuff. So,
RV (31:17):
So once that, you know, it’s kind of educating yourself on some of the industry dynamics, maybe the company dynamics, et cetera, what are the other triggers or, or things that we’re paying attention to, or how do we reverse engineer and come up with the right kind of questions.
JD (31:38):
I’m listening in every business conversation, obviously for opportunity for problems. So I’ll give you one specific technique. I learned this from a guy who was a producer on a 60 minutes type of interview show. And he said and this is, this goes to your comment in our interview about acute listen. He said, when they would do an interview, they would train reporters that after the person answered the question to not immediately jump in with another question, you said, pause, don’t fill up the space, nature, abhors, a vacuum. And most people will start speaking. And he said, we would get the most compelling soundbite, the most interesting piece, the less rehearsed idea after the pause. So people would have the rehearsed, but then they give you maybe something really honest. And if I hear that really honest bit of pain or problem, then you keep asking a few more questions to see, is this going to be something that might create an opportunity on it’s the understanding that whatever business you’re in the customer is not buying that they’re buying what that can do for their business, how they can solve a problem and, and, or take advantage of an opportunity.
JD (33:08):
So that’s the kind of listening that I have to be able to do to understand what are their needs.
RV (33:14):
I love it. I love it. Well, Jim Doyle is the author selling with a servant heart is the book long time friend. Check this out, Jim, where else do you want people to go? If they want to connect with you and learn, learn more about what you’re doing, and heck if you’re trying to sell some media stuff, you’re the guy for sure.
JD (33:34):
So LinkedIn Facebook, for sure. Love to connect with folks on LinkedIn. And the there was a specific website for the book which is servant selling book.com. Love to see people there. And I can’t tell you how grateful I am for the opportunity to do this. I have such admiration and respect for you and what you built. And so this is an honor for me. I I had the privilege of interviewing you when you brought out, take the stairs. And so I was thinking today, what an honor to get the to do the reverse, thank you for doing, for, for doing this.
RV (34:10):
Yeah, of course, man. It’s, it’s our pleasure. And you want over AIG AIG’s heart with your interview and then the, all, all the information about Maine and the lobsters and everything is just really, really, really, really wonderful.
JD (34:26):
So we still have to have lobsters on the coast of Maine
RV (34:29):
Sometimes. That’s right. Well, she is, she’s convinced that we are going there at some point soon, so I’m sure. We’ll see. I’m sure you’ll be, he’ll be the first, the first call would make
JD (34:40):
Thank you
RV (34:42):
All the best, my friend. Thanks
Ep 233: Sales Intelligence and Advanced Online Research Strategies with Sam Richter | Recap Episode
RV (00:07):
Hey brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for taking the time to check out this interview as always, it’s our honor to provide it to you for free and wanted to let you know there’s no big sales pitch or anything coming at the end. However, if you are someone who is looking to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and get to know you a little bit and hear about some of your dreams and visions and share with you a little bit about what we’re up to see if we might be a fit. So if you’re interested in a free strategy call with someone from our team, we would love to hear from you. You can do that at brand builders, group.com/pod call brand builders, group.com/pod call. We hope to talk to you soon,
RV (00:54):
Accessing the full power of Google search. Hey, everyone, welcome to the influential personal brand podcast recap. It’s Rory Vaden standing in for myself and AJ today. She’s not going to be with me because I am breaking down this interview about all of this data and this research and this whole conversation that we just had with Sam Richter. I’ve known Sam for a really long time. He’s one of the most well-respected speakers in our profession and around the national speakers association. And man, I just, this, this whole concept blows me away. On the one hand, it’s tremendously frightening how much data is available out there online, on the other hand, it’s this, this tr tremendously powerful tool that you can use to build your business and, and to build your personal brand and, and the, if you haven’t listened to the interview yet, obviously go back and listen to it.
RV (01:59):
What happens is we have this whole conversation around Boolean logic and all of these very simple search term modifications that you can make to tools like Google or LinkedIn, or even Facebook to be able to pull up very targeted information to serve a lot of various needs. And so, you know, it was really about Boolean logic and most mostly about, I would say Google and LinkedIn and you know, Sam has this tool. I mean, he, he, he basically takes these he creates these custom interfaces and he overlays them right on top of all of these search tools. And we’re actually buying it. We’re going to buy it for all of our brand builder members. And so we worked out an arrangement to buy this. This is so powerful because I’ve sat and watched Sam do this. Now it’s a little bit tricky to listen to him on the podcast.
RV (02:55):
You know, it’s, it’s harder to follow because you can’t see as he’s like in terms, but I’ve sat in a room and watched him do this live where he will pull up basically like every single association meeting in an entire industry. And then, you know, be able to pull up the contact information of all the people who are involved with these associations and having it right at your fingertips at, at like the click of a button so that, you know, if you’re wanting to speak, whether you’re wanting to be paid or whether you just want to go out and speak and add value to build your brand and build awareness for your business and drive free calls and, and, you know, do do that kind of prospecting using, speaking as prospecting, a lot of what we teach. It’s just like, boom, right here in front of you, this tremendously powerful free tool with Google, along with this custom interface that he has built overlaid on top of it.
RV (03:54):
And so, you know, I’ve been so impressed by that. And just over the years, seeing what he’s been able to do with his career that we’re, we’re going to buy this, we’re buying, we’re buying it, we’re buying it for all of our brand builders members. Not just for us internally, we’re going to, we’re going to put a custom version of this inside of our portal so that our members can like do this. And I’m, I’m pumped about it because this is what we believe in this, like such a huge part of you know, the conversation is not limited to speaking, but that’s sort of the lens that I’ve seen Sam do this, and I use it and know, know him and how he uses it and, and how our brand builders members will use it. But, you know, just as that, as one example to go, how can I instantly build a list of, of contact information of all the people I want to reach out to, or at least know who the people are that I want to reach out to.
RV (04:46):
So incredibly powerful and such a, such a key step that a lot of people struggle with, right? And you go, oh, I’ll have my assistant do it, or I’ll hire a VA to do it, but then they gotta be trained to know how to do it. And then they got to spend hours digging around and try to find stuff and knowing exactly what to look for. And so anyways, I’m just super excited about this and if you haven’t listened to the interview here are, or even if you have listened to the interview, here are some direct applications. And, and for my, you know, first takeaway that I wanted to share, I wanted to just kind of share with you, what are some of the key applications that I see of how you would use this or how I would use it, or how we would use use this power, this ability to go onto Google, understand Boolean logic, add more advanced search features, or obviously use Sam’s custom tools that he makes.
RV (05:42):
So first of all, you, you could use it for speaking engagements, right? To go. I want to secure speaking engagements for free or for money, you know, to prospect and reach out to also media opportunities, right? Like blogs and podcasts and things like that. Also, you would use it for research on, let’s say your prospects. So let’s say that you have a key meeting set up with either a VIP relationship or maybe it’s a vendor that you want to vet, or maybe it’s somebody that you’re looking to hire for your team, or maybe it is something like the you know, a sales meeting that you have that you just want to know a little bit of information about that company, right? You can use these kinds of tools to do that, that type of research. The other use case, the other type of research that I think is huge, especially for personal brands, is, is doing your own academic research, like for your own thought leadership, being able to pull statistics and data and reports.
RV (06:48):
And these are some of the major use cases for how you can use these free tools to bolster up your personal brands, authority, credibility, and trust just by taking some minutes to do the research. So that was the first thing I just wanted to share with you as a takeaway. Whereas here are some of the applications there’s, there’s probably a hundred or thousand applications for how you could use this, but those are some of the key applications that I think are going to be relevant for us and for our brand builders members and, you know, potentially for you related to that. The second big takeaway, which I had not seen specifically, was this URL that he shared called you got research.com, you got research.com. And I actually went to the URL and I did a search for personal branding trends, reports, and sure enough, the first one that popped up was the brand builders group trends in personal branding, national research study that we just released.
RV (07:54):
And so one, I was encouraged that, you know, it’s indexing on Google and like people are going to start finding it. We just released this a couple of weeks ago. And to, to see it work in action to go, the report that we put out is exactly the kind of report that we would want to read from other places, from other sources to be able to site in trainings that we have and in books and in articles, because it’s statistically valid, PhD led, you know, academically sound research, the kind of statistics that you, you would want to cite and be able to cite properly and, and have trust that they’re accurate and so forth and so on. And so that one tool alone, you’ve got research.com, which is a free tool. That is, that’s an example of one of the interfaces that Sam has built that already overlays that he gives away for free with powerful, right?
RV (08:46):
Like you need to, you need to have statistics to quote in your, your social media captions and your podcasts in your articles, in, in your sales conversations, in your keynote presentations, in your marketing collateral on your website, like think of all the places you can use this statistic to the, you know, in your talk to like open a presentation and go, where do I get this data? Where, where do I find this? Well, you’ve got research.com and it’s free. And all this stuff is just out there on the web, which was amazing. So that was my second takeaway is, is check that out. You got research.com and, and start supplementing and supporting that, the ideas that you’re presenting in the world with statistically validated, you know, empirically kind of accurate data. And, and it allows you to be data-driven and not, you know, have to like spend as much time as you might have to do to do the original data.
RV (09:44):
I mean, the, we S we spent tens tens of thousands of dollars putting together the study that we are now giving away to you all for free. Of course you can go get a version of that at brand builders, group.com forward slash study. You can download our study if you want to see it, or just go to UGA research.com type in personal branding, a hit trend reports that at least when I did this, it was the first one that popped up. But B this is how you become a real thought leader, right? Like this is how you become a real expert is you’re actually reading data. And, and you’re, you’re doing academic research in your space. And this is a great tool I think, to do that quickly. So that was super powerful. The other thing that really blows my mind this was my third takeaway is just searching for file types and, and for directories.
RV (10:35):
So I had no idea that you could search by file type on Google and pull up, you know, let’s say like, let’s say you want an annual reports, right? You could pull up annual reports, which companies releases PDFs all the time, and you can go find them on this invisible web. And this whole concept of the invisible web was kind of weird too, is you go well, there’s, there’s the websites that we see all the time, because they’re URLs and there’s buttons that you can click to get to. And then there’s this whole other world, which you can’t really like navigate to. But people are uploading things, you know, to the public domain on the web. They just don’t make it easy for you to get to and find stuff. And you can find PowerPoint presentations, you can find you know, like these annual reports, you can, you can find Excel files that have databases and directories, which is pretty crazy, right.
RV (11:34):
You can find word documents. I mean, I have to think, like if I was in school having access to all this information, like what I might do with this to be able to, I mean, you know, don’t plagiarize stuff. And I guess, you know, you, you, there’s an ethical dilemma here with how much, how much information, I guess you feel accessing and using. Now I would say, don’t just go get a database and add it to your email list just because you can, right. That’s that is going to violate all sorts of, of you know, the, the email, like GDPR compliance and, and it’s also kind of an ethical dilemma, not kind of, it’s, it’s an ethical dilemma, I think, to just steal someone’s contact information and just start marketing to them in unsolicited, like fashion. But you know, if you’re wanting to, to, to make personal customized, you know, reach out to people and let them know what you’re doing, I mean, nothing can stop you from doing doing that.
RV (12:29):
So I think that’s a fair thing you can do. There’s lots of, lots of ways you could do that. So doing that in, in this kind of method, doesn’t, doesn’t seem unfair as long as you’re not just like barring them with emails, but saying, Hey, I want to call somebody and, you know, try and build a relationship with them and to do this or that, or whatever. One-On-One on a one by one basis. I think that’s fair game. Cause you could go knock on a door, you could call it, you know, look out, look at the phone number and call it. You could do go to an office park and do that. Like, there’s lots of ways to use this information, but you know, it’s, there’s Excel databases, PDFs, word docs. That’s just interesting to me and see like what other presentations are out there.
RV (13:15):
I think you just need to be careful of you don’t want to plagiarize stuff and you don’t want us, you definitely don’t want to do violations of, of you know, GDPR compliance and things like that. But I mean, I don’t know, I it’s, it’s powerful. So use it, use it, use your discernment in your judgment wisely, but pretty wild to know that you can search for file types. And I would also pay attention to what which of your own files are find-able in that way. Right. And making sure that you’re aware of where are you storing things and is it actually publicly accessible through these you know, search engines like Google, for example? So lots of different use cases here. The one that we’re predominantly focused on is, is I would say as a, as a targeted outreach tool to identify, you know, legitimate prospects that might be interested in what you’re doing and reaching out to them.
RV (14:11):
And also you know, probably even more than that is doing the research also customization for your presentations, right? To go, all right. I want to customize my presentation to whatever audience I’m in front of them. And that’s huge to be able to do that right, to say, okay, maybe you talk on leadership, but you’re gonna go speak to the automotive industry, or you’re going to go speak to the financial services industry and go, how can I spend a few minutes, grab some, some key data points of that industry specific and then tailor what I’m saying directly to them. That’s next level. That’s next level. I mean that customization in our world-class presentation craft event, one of the lessons we teach customization and we talk about doing this. And so these tools, you got the news.com, you got research.com and those are the free ones that Sam gave out.
RV (15:01):
And then also the Intel engine, which we’re going to, like I said, build into the brand builders, membership community. Amazing, amazing. So just really eyeopening, fascinating stuff. I’ve, you know, a totally like nerdy conversation that was not really on my radar of like, oh my gosh, what a, what a tactical practical, pragmatic kind of thing that you can be doing. And that’s what we want to do here. We want to be sharing with you principles, inspiration, and then also like tactics and make you think and go, Sam is a hall of fame speaker. He’s one of the top speakers in the world. He’s built this whole business by learning how to use Google. I mean, and teaching other people how to do this. One simple, one simple skill, which is tremendously, tremendously powerful. So I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you enjoy all the episodes. If you did make sure that you share this with somebody who you think would find it interesting or fascinating and keep coming back next week and next week, we’ll catch you on the influential personal brand podcast.