Author: Nicole Gale

Ep 267: How To Leverage Business Experience to Build Your Personal Brand with Tiffany Taylor & Leon Chen | Recap Episode

AJV (00:02):
All right. Welcome to a recap episode on the influential personal brands. One of your co-host AJ Vaden here, and I’m doing my recap conversation on my conversation with Tiffany and Leon from Tiff’s treats. They are the founders and owners of Tiff’s treats, which is a $5 million business. They started it in college together, have grown it to incredible success, but they are also launching their very first book together which comes out on April 5th. So what did I learn from these two incredible entrepreneurs and now published authors? So he, here are my three key takeaways as we often share on our recap conversation. So number one this was probably the number one thing that I took away and something that I’m absolutely gonna turn around and instill at brand builders group is the idea that as the owner, as the founder and maybe no, not even that, but someone in the company has to be the brand protector.
AJV (01:08):
There has to be someone looking out for the reputation of you and your company’s brand. Most often that probably makes more sense for it to be the founder or owner, but there are people who look out for the finances. There are people who look out for revenues. There needs to be someone who says this is not in line with the brand. So the answer is no. Even if it costs you money, even if it costs you time, there has got to be someone who is the brand protector of going. There are things we say yes to. There are things that we say no to, but at the end of the day my job is to protect the brand and the, of this organization or for yourself. Right. how often do we, as individuals who are building our own personal brands, say yes to everything, then all of a sudden what we stand for and our own business becomes diluted because we talk about everything.
AJV (02:01):
We have different business models, different ideas. We, we could speak on anything. We write about everything and simultaneously we’re not clear on anything. And I thought that was really good. It’s like be willing to say no to protect the brand, loved that. I can think of like three instances in our own company right now where it’s like, no, I just need to put my foot down and go, that’s not in line with who we are. My job is the brand protect protector. So the answer is no, it may cost us money, but it’s worth it. It’s worth it in the long run. So good. So, so, so good. Second thing that I thought was really good and also I have a little insider Intel on this one, cuz I got a gal copy of the book. But I just love the concept of you don’t have to have a lot to get started, but we all think we do.
AJV (02:52):
We think we need all this technology. We think we need huge followings. We think we need investment money. We think we need all these things per perfected. And the truth is we don’t, we just need to get started. Right. I, I loved hearing the story of how they started. They were 19 in college, started with 20 bucks, a cell phone with her skill set that baking cookies and you using his college apartment. That’s not much right. And there’s beauty in the naivety of all of that. So you know, that old saying ignorance is bliss. And as we get older we just become less ignorant to things and simultaneously become a little jaded. But what if we stop doing that? What if we looked for real opportunities to do things that we were passionate about and we opened up our eyes to every single opportunity right around us.
AJV (03:49):
We don’t do that as much anymore. And I so want to bring that back into it’s like, there’s no reason this couldn’t work, except for us believing that it could work. But what if we just said, no, I believe it can work. And so that we will find a way that it will work. Right. I don’t remember who said this. But I’m gonna quote it, even though I can’t give credit to the person that the credit is due to, but there is evidence and whatever you wanna find, right? It’s like, whatever is the truth that you, you will find evidence for. Just that. So why don’t we choose to go? There is, there is a way and then we find ways to support that it’s possible. And this is how we’re gonna get there. Such an inspirational reminder to me of going whatever we believe is true, but if we could just believe that it would work, believe that there’s an opportunity.
AJV (04:43):
That doesn’t mean it’s gonna make it easy or simple. But it does make it possible. It does make it possible. But starting with 20 bucks on a cell phone you can’t really have more bare minimum requirements than that. And I would just say it’s like a great reminder from this conversation is you don’t have to have much to get started. You just have to be willing. I think that’s a really great reminder for all of us who find plenty of opportunities and excuses to not do what that calling is on our heart, what we feel called to do what we’re passionate about, because we think we can’t now the answer is you can, you just, won’t great, great moment in this interview today. For me, it’s like, whatever you believe you’ll find evidence for just that last thing. And I love this, nothing.
AJV (05:33):
This is really important is making time and space to learn why your customers use your brand so wise and also sometimes so overlooked. We look for, how do we find our target audience? How do we grow revenues, grow our client base, retain ’em. How about spending just as much time of going, why do they use us? Like, what is it about us that sticks out to them? So creating those opportunities for conversations and feedback and stories whatever those may be of actually digging in and saying like, here’s a place where you can submit your stories. Here’s where you can give us our feedback. Like we actually wanna talk to you, tell us, what’s go going on. How’d you find us? Why are you using us? And then creating elements every step of the way of going, why do you use us?
AJV (06:24):
Why did you buy from us? Why do you continue to use us? And that creates your own ammunition for how you should market and who your audience is and what your audience wants from you and what you should keep and what maybe doesn’t matter you think does, I love feedback. I love customer feedback. But it’s like, even in this conversation, I’m going so much of the feedback is not asking, why did you pick us? Ugh, like such an aha moment. I’m going, Ugh, geez. Still so much to learn still so much to do. But such a great, just remind from people who have been so successful in business started with an idea and a dream and has grown it to a half billion dollars in revenue launching their first book and just wanna give the behind the scenes, look at what it likes to be married. Be in business, grow a family, grow a company and all the details in between. So again, I said it go check out this book. So excited to support just fellow entrepreneurs and fellow authors. So go to cookie delivery.com/bain, our last name, you’ll get a discount code and a link to pick up the book. So stick around, come back, catch another episode at the influential personal brand.

Ep 266: How To Leverage Business Experience to Build Your Personal Brand with Tiffany Taylor & Leon Chen

AJV (00:02):
Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode on the influential personal brand. This is one of your co-host AJ Vaden here. I am so excited to have two newer friends on the show today that are about to head into a very se, a very busy season of launching their first book together. But I’ll, before I formally introduce these individuals, here’s a couple of things that you need to know and why you need to stick around to the very end of the show today. First thing is that this is a married couple in business, and as we all know, that brings lots of wonderful benefits and lots of challenges. And so we’re gonna get to learn a little bit about that, but this particular couple their business idea started from an accidental nohow on a first date. So we’re gonna talk about how a business opportunity can really come from anywhere.
AJV (00:56):
If your eyes are open to it and then not last, but definitely not least. They are writing their first book. They have been insanely successful well into the nine figures with their business, which started with some warm cookies because of a no-show on a date to a healthy nine figure business. Now they’re building their personal brands, launching their first book. So we’re gonna learn about how do you go from being these incredible entrepreneurs, being married together, raising a together, and now also writing a book and starting this new journey of their lives, sot and Leon, welcome to the show.
TT (01:30):
Thank you. Thanks
LC (01:31):
An intro. Yeah. Thanks for having us. We gotta have you introduce us everywhere.
AJV (01:36):
Well, I we’re so excited and I was such a treat to learn that we had some mutual friends in common behind the scenes, and I love learning your story. And I loved also getting to like peruse through the book. And I think you guys have really done it uniquely well in the way that you’ve like outlined these business practices and cookie recipes and all these things that you’ve intertwined. That’s just really true to who you guys are. But before we get into the book, we wanna talk a little bit of business, right? So for everyone who does not know you, so you guys are the owners and founders of Tiff’s treats, which is now a incredibly successful business. You guys have almost 70 locations across the United States. I was telling Leon right before we started that there’s one right down the street from our house here in Nashville, Tennessee, we get Tiff’s treats deliveries all the time. The cookies are spectacular, highly recommend them. My kids love ’em. My husband loves ’em way too much. But you guys have done all these amazing things, but the way you started is quite unique. And so towel everyone actually, how did this business come about?
LC (02:43):
Yeah, it’s quite simple. She was not super nice and stood me up on a date is how it really started.
TT (02:49):
Well, we were sophomores at the university of Texas in Austin, and I did stand him up on a date. But I did apologize. And the way I did that was to bake him a set of cookies. And I drove him over to his house and they just so happened to be warm when I got there, the cookies and he took one bite and immediately thought, Hey, we should do this as a business. Now keep in mind. We were 19 years old and we were going to college
LC (03:12):
And, and this was
TT (03:15):
19 99, 19 99. And so he said, we should, you know, instead of pizza delivery, it’ll be warm cookie delivery. We’ll bake the cookies when people order them and deliver them to their houses. And so I immediately didn’t wanna do that. And I said, no, thank you. But then we got to talking the rest of that afternoon and he convinced me to at least think about it. And I ended up at the grocery store pricing out. What, what do we, how much does it cost to make cookies? And what other kinds of cookies besides chocolate chip could we offer? And we spent the next couple weeks just researching the basics, you know, what, what would be the basics that we would do? And then two weeks later, we opened right out of his college apartment
LC (03:52):
And, and waited three days and didn’t get a single order for three days too. So right off the bat, I already felt like it was gonna be a failure and maybe even the relationship too.
AJV (04:02):
So I think part of this is so fascinating to me because how many people honestly get stood up on a date and one even have the courage to go and apologize much less, bring some sort of consolation gift. But then more than that, who has the idea after this no-show date to go, you know what? We should go in business together. This is an amazing idea. So I’m really fascinated to go to know, how did you guys go from, sorry, I no-showed you, I I’m really, I feel bad about this. I’ve brought you some cookies to actually, I think there’s a business here and here’s why this is so interesting to me, because to me it proves the point that there is an idea in every single situation, there’s an opportunity to be creative and to do something. And no matter what happens, good, bad or whatever, and think most of us don’t see it, but you guys did. So how did that happen?
LC (05:00):
You, you know, I think the easy answer for that is we were 19 and you need to be a little bit naive. We call our, we call it, we call it young, dumb and naive. You know, you don’t know what you don’t know. And I think as we age that the 25 year old version of ourselves, would’ve said, no, like that’s too insane of an idea, but when you’re that naive, you just have no idea the hardships and the difficulty. And you don’t think in terms of why we shouldn’t do something, you, you, you’re just thinking the world is your oyster. And I think that that was weirdly our biggest advantage is that you, we just were just naive.
AJV (05:41):
I love that. So I’m curious Tiffany, why did you take him cookies? Like why even go back and apologize? Like you could have just easily been like, oh, I’ll probably never run into him again up.
TT (05:54):
So I should clarify. We were dating at the time.
AJV (05:58):
There
TT (05:58):
Wasn’t a random, because that would be bizarre to just nohow and then apologize and then go into business. So we were dating and cookies was my thing. So I used to all through high school, I would, and even junior high before then it was just my hobby to bake cookies. And so when I needed to apologize, it came naturally, this is something nice I can do for him to say, I’m sorry about this. And I certainly always expected to see him after that. I did not think we would be going into business together or
LC (06:27):
Getting married
TT (06:28):
Or that happens way later. So yeah.
AJV (06:32):
Well that does make a lot more sense reading this. Cause it did say an accent, dental nohow in your bio. And I was thinking, I dunno what accidental means, but I do know what nohow means. So I’m curious though, just something that you said now, you guys have two kids. How old are they?
TT (06:50):
Seven
AJV (06:50):
They’re seven. So I have a two and a four year old. Oh
LC (06:53):
Yeah, you’re
AJV (06:54):
In. And so, yeah, we’re in the thick of it. But I’m curious new knowing this about yourselves of going, Hey, when we were 19 thinking that the world is our oyster and it’s more about what we can do, not what we can’t do. And even saying that maybe our 25 year old selves would’ve said, no, I’m curious to know. It’s like hindsight 20/20 with all the success that you guys have had and all that you challenges that you’ve overcome. What would you want to instill in your kids about keeping this kind of, what is possible mentality versus can’t do it mentality?
LC (07:29):
It’s funny cuz when it comes to our kids, we’d probably be like, just be in accountant, just go into something safe. Like we, you know, we, you
TT (07:38):
Can definitely, I see why parents do that. Yeah. Right. Cause the looking back on it, the odds of it going poorly were so much more in favor than the odds of it going the way it did ultimately go. And there’s so many chances along the way, one tiny tweak and it wouldn’t have gone this way at all. And so I think as an older person, you see that you can see the whole playing field for your kids. So it’s scary for you to even want them to have their eyes quite open. Yeah. But you should. I mean, yes you, I think you’re right. You, we should absolutely in, in instill that in them to, to have that dream. And I think that’s that’s to us to knowing better not to crush in anyway.
LC (08:16):
Yeah. And it might even be harder for us to, to say, go ahead, do it because we know what that really means. We know the hard we used to, we used to joke about the things that we had to go through to make this business work. You wouldn’t wish it on your worst enemy, you know, it’s that stressful. It’s that intense. And so it is hard to hard to think that man, our kids might go through this, but again, you definitely want them to realize their dreams that’s for sure.
AJV (08:43):
Yeah. Well I would say it’s being on the entrepreneurial journey in our own business, that’s like, yeah, there’s lots of ups and downs. And I can’t remember who said this, but someone said being an entrepreneur is like jumping off of a cliff and building the parachute as you plummet down to the ground. Right. That’s exactly it. And you guys clearly have figured this out. You guys are 500 million. You’ve got famous people all across, you know, you’ve mark Cuban, you’ve got Brooklyn, Decker, Kendra, Scott, all these people advocating what you guys are doing. You built an incredible brand and for those of you who don’t know, it’s like T streets have cookies. They deliver them warm, they’re cooked and delivered within an hour of them being baked. We get them as appreciation gifts all the time from vendors and clients. And I’m, I’m curious to know, it’s like at what point did you guys go, okay, I think this is gonna work. Like, was there a moment that you’re like, I think we’re gonna make it here.
LC (09:44):
Well, before I answer that, I, I need to clarify. I don’t, I do not believe mark Cuban is an investor. We have Navitzky of the Mavericks. Mark has been gracious to give us some good advice and everything that we have Derek and Kendra and, and rod Brooklyn Decker. But yeah, maybe mark, you shouldn’t invest if you’re listening to this,
AJV (10:02):
Your chance.
LC (10:03):
Yes. but to, to answer your question, I don’t feel like we still feel like we have it, I think, and you know, that maybe part of I’m I’m, maybe we’re afraid to feel that way because for the longest time that kind of is what kept us going. And so you know, we need a, we do need to stop the smell of roses, so to speak more often.
TT (10:26):
Yeah. I mean, when your goals are bigger than where you are, then you never feel like I’ve done it or it’s going to work or certainly never we’ve made it. We’ve never won once for one second, felt that the whole way through, I think there were times when we could see that perhaps one store was viable in the beginning. It took a while, but I would say five years in what we had always said is we were busy in certain chunks of the day. And then we were not busy in other chunks of the day. And we had said, if we can just get this busy during this time period, then we’ll know we’ve done it. And eventually we did that. And I, I think that was the starting point of thinking, well, okay, at least th this would work. I mean, they, but we always had dreams of expansion.
TT (11:12):
And so I think we go into it in the book a little bit that as soon as we got some, our footing under us a little bit, then we would take a next bite, which would then make what we had done now completely at risk. So we never were in a position where, okay, great. We could buy a house and pay those payments and we’d be fine because we always have this, whatever, because whatever next step we did completely could have put out of business already, what we, but that’s kind of the only way to grow.
LC (11:40):
Yeah. The, the, the margin is in the risk. Right. And so that’s the way we look at it. Now we are trying to keep things in perspective on really stressful days. I, I do, I do think back and say like, look, we’re so fortunate to be where we are today. And if, if you know, you told 19 year old me, we’d be at this stage. And I would just say, okay, I take it. You know, but when you’re in the moment, it’s hard to keep things in perspective.
AJV (12:06):
What would you guys tell someone who is wants to venture out and start their own BI business, whatever kind of business it is. Like if there was one entrepreneurial lesson that you would wanna impart on someone else just getting started. Do you guys have any idea of what it would be?
TT (12:24):
My, what comes to mind for me is don’t do it unless it can be your number one priority or your number one focus, because if it’s purely a side gig and there are several other things that are legitimately more important to you, it’s not that you can’t do that, but it’s gonna be very, very difficult to make that a smashing success.
LC (12:44):
Yeah. Now you could start as a side gig, but know that if you want to make that next step, it, it might mean making some really difficult life choices. For me, when it comes to tactical strategic of the business, it’s along the lines of focus to one of the mistakes that we probably were best at not making that it’s harder to make the bigger we grow. And we see a lot of businesses of all different sizes make, is focusing on being absolutely great at a very narrow niche. And especially as you become more successful as a business, there’s more and more opportunities and different opportunities. And I I’ve, we’ve seen businesses really falter by trying to get into doing too much instead of focusing on that niche.
AJV (13:31):
Oh my gosh. I’m so happy that you guys said that, cuz that’s like one of the things that we talk about all the time to our audience here at brand builders group is you know, my husband has this saying the more specific, the more terrific, right. It’s like that is right. But it’s like there’s power and being known for one thing. Yep. And then doing that exceptionally well, which to your point, Tiffany, it takes a lot of focus and intention and you can’t often achieve excellence if you have divided attention. Right. But it’s really focusing in on what is it that we really wanna be known for. And so for you guys, what do you guys wanna be known for when you think about T’s treats and then your own personal as individuals, what do you guys wanna be known for?
TT (14:19):
Well, it started and, and still is being best in the world at, on demand, warm cookie delivery. And we feel that, you know, we have been able to do that. And then we’re sort of opening up now a little bit to being best in the world at, on demand gifting know with, with warm cookie as the base. But what we realized it’s really about that giftable moment, that moment of connection between people more so than it is really just about the cookie, but we started with the cookie.
LC (14:47):
Yeah. Well, we’re what we realized on a, almost on accident that we’re very good at is making sure that there’s this incredible moment, the intended moment, whether it’s you’re at the office and you just need some downtime and you and your coworkers order some cookies. And for that brief 10 minutes of your day, it’s awesome. And you’re talking or across the country and your best friend have a tra has a tragedy or something or they’re sick or something’s going on. And you’re able to go online and send them a box of warm cookies with a message that’s super meaningful. We’re very good at making sure that those moments are, are intact. And that’s what we want to be known for what we call it, connecting people through warm moments.
AJV (15:36):
Yeah. I love that. And I think the, to me, it’s like the ultimate uniqueness in all of that is this on demand component. Right? It’s, it’s so easy to have great intentions with really poor execution cuz you miss this window of opportunity. And you guys provide this real, really unique opportunity to do it in the moment. And it’s, to me, it’s like with the cookies at least, right? It’s like, it really means something to have warm, fresh cookies come and it’s like, oh man, like these are fresh. Right. It’s like, yes. And it makes you wanna eat them right then. Right.
LC (16:10):
And for the like, I’ll give you you an example that we put in the book, just a quick story. We started to realize how powerful these moments could mean when early on we had someone from a downtown office, an admin call to place an order. And she was talking to our manager who was taking the order manager was like, oh, what’s going on? How are you doing today? And she’s like, oh, you know what? We’re ordering these for my boss. And it’s raining today outside. And whenever it rained, my boss always loved to tell us a story about when he was a little kid, his mom would bake him cookies every time it was raining at school. So he knew when he came home from school, there’d be a batch of warm cookies on a rainy day. And she went on to say, well, this is the first day. It’s rained since his mother passed away. And so we’re here in the office, we’re all gonna celebrate and order some cookies. And so we realized right then and there in the, on demand nature, we were able to get cookies to the office while it was still raining and the whole company had a moment together for their boss. And so that’s the kind of power we see in these moments.
AJV (17:11):
Oh, I love that. Y’all and I think some of, of this what I love is like the, the way speaking of the book, right? The way that you’ve outlined this book I think is so interesting. As you look at all the chapters, clearly there’s business principles and there’s all these things, but then also you have incorporated recipes for every chapter. So this has been on my mind ever since I was fortunate enough to get a gal copy of your upcoming book, are the recipes somehow directly connected to all the lessons in each chapter?
TT (17:44):
Not directly, we started with chocolate chip because that’s the base. And that’s, you know, you gotta have chocolate chip. So we knew we had to have that one first. And then we sort of grouped them based on cookie. And then we’ve got kind of a grouping of bars. We’ve got some truffles. And so they’re kind of grouped based on category a little bit more than, than story related.
AJV (18:05):
Oh my gosh, this is so funny cuz in my mind I’m like, what’s this secret message behind yeah. For each of these chapters. And so OK. Well there’s one chapter in particular that I think is going to be really relevant to our audience as we kind of talk about building a business, building a brand and you guys have a chapter chapter four called building a brand and I would love to know like what, what is your philosophy on building a brand?
TT (18:34):
Yeah, I think gosh, building a brand is so delicate and I think that’s the biggest takeaway for us is that when we started, we were building a service and we weren’t considering building a brand and kind of what that afforded us was the ability for some breath space to let customers tell us what was meaningful to them. And we were able to sort of shape the brand in reverse. Not us saying here’s what we are. I hope you like it. But we sort of started with the service and then shaped along the way. And then some of the things that happened during that were really, you know, the warm was the, was the biggest shaping piece, realizing why people were using us not just what they were buying or when they were buying, but what it was meaning to them. And that’s the piece of the brand puzzle.
TT (19:25):
I think that’s so important to us and we’re the two ambassadors of the brand. We’re the protectors of the brand. And there’s tons of other people here that are as well. But then there’s always gonna be a along your journey, other people that are protectors of the bottom line, other people that are protectors of the expenses, people that are protectors of, you know, are the legal yeah. And some of that can be at odds with what you want for the brand. And so sometimes it can be challenging, especially if you get to, let’s say the board of directors level because they’re not there every day and really that that’s not their role, but it is your role because to us, at least without the brand, you have nothing. And so sometimes you have to really fiercely protect, say, listen, I know by doing whatever this program, if you wanna put in place, we will make more money or we will save more money or we will, whatever it is. But I’m also telling you that that is not right for the brand. It’s either not right for the customer experience. It’s not right for the overall our connection with our customers. It doesn’t speak to us and what we believe in and you have to stand up and say, we’re gonna make choices that sometimes don’t make financial sense, but that do make sense for, for our brand.
LC (20:35):
Yeah. We always think of it opposite from financially, but cash and revenue today is less important than cash and revenue tomorrow next week, next month, next year, that’s not true when it comes to financial world, but when it comes to building a brand, your, the, the more important cash is what is gonna come in later. And so we delay a lot of revenue. We delay a lot of sales. We could, you know, we’re at 75 locations. Now we could be at 200 locations right now, if all we cared about was revenue, but it’s equality experience that we care about. And that makes our brand special is the white glove service. And so for us, that’s delaying a lot of things that a lot of businesses, it takes a lot of what am I trying to say, willpower willpower. Yeah. To, to go at the pace that is best for the brand. And so that’s really something that we have to remind ourselves the, the kind of the bigger we get.
AJV (21:34):
Well, yeah. And I would say that’s quite rare, right? It’s easy to be tempted into grow quickly, right? Double revenues, double locations. Yes. But growth doesn’t always mean scale. But I think that’s good. So I, I have three follow up questions to this. So Tiffany, you mentioned we really let our clients kind of tell us, so for anyone out there, who’s listening to this episode going, well, how do you do that? So how did you get that information from your clients?
TT (22:07):
So in the, the beginning, you know, we were taking all of our orders by phone. So you actually have a phone conversation with people. So, you know, that’s not relevant today, but truly you could hear why they were ordering. And especially, let’s say when we started, we were focusing on the university. And so we had a lot of parents calling in and I’ll tell you, they want to tell you everything about why they’re are ordering. You’ll be on the phone 15 minutes because they’re ordering it for their college age child. And there’s nothing more exciting and, and more fun for them to chat with you about. So a lot of times customers do want to chat, but in a more modern way it’s social media comments and, and people are very free about emailing in. They will email you, they will live chat.
TT (22:47):
You, they will put comments on social media. You just have to read them and listen to them. And, you know, I don’t know if this is surprising or not, but we get so many positive stories coming in out of the blue and just say, Hey, I just wanted to let you know that I, I did an order and this is why. And it was so meaningful me to me because of X, Y, and Z. And we get that a lot. It’s, it’s a fun place to, to see all this neat humanity, right. That’s there. And sometimes you, not, everybody gets to see it,
LC (23:16):
Especially these days. Right. We get to,
AJV (23:19):
I mean, that’s the good stuff, right? It’s like but I love that. And it’s, I think for everyone listening, like the takeaway is create opportunities to actually hear the stories of your customers, right. If thing is, how quick can we do it? How can we get you in and get you out? It’s like, you’re gonna miss the humanity, the actual reasons why you’re doing this. And let those help shape and form how the business grows. And I love that. The second thing that you kind of both alluded to a little bit is this idea of being protectors of the brand. And I love that so much because I like one of the things that we believe in really strongly at our company brand builders group, is that the individuals, right? The owners of the company, it’s like your reputation is the most important thing.
AJV (24:04):
Same thing as a company, it’s like the reputation is the most important thing that you can have. And so to consider yourselves as the brand protectors is a really incredible concept. And so I’m curious, what would you tell other business owners out there when it comes to, Hey, it’s like many people will have different roles, but there needs to be a brand protector, someone who’s going to, you know, create garner, establish, and then protect the reputation that you’ve worked so hard to build and other people’s opinions start to come into play. Any tips, insights, advice you would give to someone on how to do that.
TT (24:44):
Yeah. I’m gonna start really quickly. Then I’ll hand it off to Leon. But one of our values that we have up on the wall is we protect the brand. Hmm. And so I think part of it too, is it doesn’t have to be just the two of us. So we’ve got an army of people that believe in what we’re doing and believe in those values on the wall and know that we protect the brand is one of them and are there to help catch you when you are tempted or you are making, you know, if, if you have an environment where you’ve got people close to you, that can do things like that. We recently, well, a couple of years ago had a big decision to make. And we had people come to us and say, look, the answer is we protect the brand. And there’s only one choice between these choices. There’s only one of these two things that protects the brand. So while it’s gonna cost us $20,000, how are you gonna make any other decision besides that? And so it’s really helpful to have people buy
LC (25:37):
Into it. Yeah. When you set your own, when you set values for your brand, that you truly believe in and your team believes in, they hold you accountable, as much as you hold them accountable. And specifically what she’s talking about is on our milk bottles, we have brand new, beautiful milk packaging. Somehow some way we let it slip. And the word pasteurized was misspelled very small somewhere there. And it was so tempting. We’re like, oh, we could just send it out and let someone call us. And, and, and we, you know, we know, and our team was like adamant, no, I know it’s $20,000, but you know, we protect the brand. We protect the brand and, and, and part of that, you have to get really good at being okay with saying no to a lot of ideas and a lot of thoughts distinguishing, just because an idea is good. Doesn’t mean that it deserves a yes. Oh, that’s good. You say saying no to good ideas all day long. And that’s really hard for a lot of people to, to, to understand because they’ll they’ll think, man, my idea was good. I don’t understand. But if you say no to every good, I there’s millions of good ideas, you gotta really hold out for those monumental great ideas.
AJV (26:50):
Oh man. I think that is such a good reminder and lesson for not just people in business, just humans, it’s a learning what to say yes to and what you need to say. No. Oh, to that’s really good. Y’all, I’m so excited for this book to come out. This is your first book together. What on God’s green earth made you guys decide to write a book and do it together? I’m so curious, like what instigated all of this?
LC (27:19):
Well, what
TT (27:20):
Instigated, I mean, we’ve been part of it is just kind of getting our story down because we’ve been doing this for a long time. Now this is our 23rd year of business. And so we have a lot of stories and at a certain point we wanted to kind of get those on paper. We, yeah,
LC (27:37):
We do. From time to time, we do speaking events, corporate speaking events, and we go speak to some university classes and stuff and we get a lot of interest. So every chapter in the book is based on what do we get asked the most people wanna know? And that’s why it ranges the, you know, from business to building a brand, to working together with your spouse and having kids and raising kids it’s because people are the most curious about that. So we kind of just said, let’s put in one book what everyone is most curious about. And so it’s from our experience in talking to people really what we wanted to write about.
AJV (28:13):
Mm that’s good. How has it been? So so many of the people in our audience are on the journey of publishing a book, want to publish a book, how’s it been?
TT (28:23):
It’s, you know, it’s so interesting because it’s a totally new industry and you’re learning it. And there’s so many facets to it that I feel like if there were a second book, then you kind of know everything. Yes. And there’s just so many small things that I would do differently only because I didn’t understand the process. You know, and I’m like, don’t hard. Well, it’s too late now. I can’t change X, Y, or Z, but if we ever wrote another book, then now I know here, you know, here are the things I, I would’ve, I would tweak. But it’s fun. And, you know, it’s fun to, to do something.
AJV (28:59):
If there was one thing that you could go back and do differently for you, what would it be?
TT (29:05):
You know, the thing that comes to mind to me is understanding the editing process better and sort of curating that initial draft in a different way than, than what we did and what we ended up doing was turning in something more rough than I would’ve. And, and then kind of the editing process got sort of squished to the end and then in a rush because it had to go to print at a certain time. Yeah. So I would maybe almost like do an internal editing, more internal editing before turning a draft.
LC (29:38):
Cause our editor was awesome, but we misunderstood that process, how it would run and,
TT (29:45):
And the timing of it too. Yeah. The timing, you know, so yeah. We misunderstood sort of the timing of when do those edits happen at what cadence do they happen? And so it ended up being more truncated in terms of timeline than I thought it would be, but you know, all came out great. It just wasn’t wasn’t I didn’t realize the, the, the timing.
AJV (30:05):
Oh yeah. I remember when we wrote our first book, which we celebrated 10 years ago in February. So just last month. I remember we turned in, I don’t remember how, like how many thousand words it was like, you know, 80,000 and like they came back and gave us like 50 and we’re like, that’s like a third of the book. Like you read a third of the book and it was like such a aha moment of you just never know. And it’s like, we wrote it as if like this is going to print.
LC (30:36):
Right, right.
AJV (30:37):
Yeah. It’s like, indeed, no, like a third of that is going to print. We will help rewrite the other half. And we did
TT (30:45):
The opposite opposite. Yeah. Where we turned in, what we thought we knew our, our word limit. So we turned in about 10,000 extra words to that, that way we’ve got buffer cuz we knew stuff was gonna get cut. And we thought it was just gonna get torn apart, ripped to shreds, put back together and we were ready for that. And then didn’t and so that’s the thing that we were like, oh shoot, we should have turned in something a little bit more ready to go.
AJV (31:09):
Oh interesting. Yeah. We went through reverse. And it was a very eye opening experience.
TT (31:14):
That would be tough. That what we
AJV (31:17):
Very and very wordy and we needed to
TT (31:23):
Yeah, you gotta yeah. Truncate what your, you don’t need 10 words to say one thing. Yeah.
LC (31:27):
That’s my problem. I, I, I went too crazy with the extra words and comas and run ons and stuff.
AJV (31:34):
So since so many people in our audience are on this path to publishing a book, I’m curious if you guys were to write another book and you could have different answers on this. My husband and I often disagree. It’s a beautiful part of being married. Lots of disagreements. Would you guys self-publish, would you want to traditionally publish again or do something in the middle and why?
LC (31:57):
You know, I, since we don’t know what self-publishing entails, it’s hard to kind of say we liked having are handheld a little bit for sure. Yeah. With, with the publisher I, I really wouldn’t be able to know.
TT (32:12):
Yeah. And also since we haven’t really, yeah. We haven’t gone through the full cycle, but I think I would go publish again to Leon’s point to have somebody to handhold. And, and, you know, especially, even from the printing end and all of
AJV (32:23):
That. Oh yeah. Just a guide through the process. Right. I love that. All right. Well, I know that we are approaching the end of our time here. But I want for you guys to have a chance to tell everyone who’s listening, what this book is all about, who it was really written for and why everyone needs to go grab a copy.
TT (32:44):
Well, the book is all about our story, our journey, and I would say number one, our failures we’re pretty open about the failures that we’ve had along the way, and some of the mishaps and hoping to give other people some not tips, but just inspiration and, and get a little bit out of that of, of maybe what not to do or, or maybe just inspiration that it happens to other people too. And then of course, gosh, the recipes are really fun and they’re very easy. So you don’t need to be a baker to pick this up and get some really great results out of the book. And anybody’s, who’s a also interested in sort of peeking behind the curtain of what a husband and wife team looks like. We tried to be as honest as possible. So
LC (33:25):
I too honest,
TT (33:27):
Too honest,
LC (33:28):
And it’s a beautiful, full color book. It’s a great coffee table book. The pictures are the, the baked goods, pictures are beautiful in there. So it makes a great gift as well. We wanted to have just something that people would be proud to have sitting on their coffee table. But also with substance beyond just pictures.
AJV (33:47):
Ah, I love that. Who do you think is the ideal target for this book?
TT (33:53):
I think anybody who ha I don’t think you have to have a strong interest in business, but anybody who’s a little bit curious about business and really just wants to see sort of the honest side of what goes on behind the curtain.
AJV (34:08):
I love that. Well, I know from even just spending the little bit of time getting to know you both and then even in the interview today, I think one of the reasons that everyone should go and check out this book is the fact that you guys created an entire business off of an apology effort and creating those opportunities in everyday life to go, there is an opportunity in everything that happens if we are just willing to keep an eye out for it. And then I think the best part of all of this is that you guys are so transparent and honest to about, it’s not easy, let’s not kid ourselves. But at the end of the day, it’s worth it. It’s worth it. Yeah. Yeah. We’re so excited. This book comes out. What’s the official launch date,
TT (34:55):
April 5th,
AJV (34:56):
April 5th. So I mean, we’re here. It’s like right now. So I, I would encourage everyone. We’ll put this in the show notes, but go to cookie delivery.com/vaden. That’s our last name? V a D E N. So cookie delivery.com/vaden. They have given us some awesome discount codes. You can get 20% off actually ordering some tips treats. There’s also a link right there to go and buy the a book y’all need to do it. Learn some, learn from people who have been on this journey, who are doing the thing. They’re building their business, growing a family. Now they’re launching a book Tiffany, Leon, thank you guys so much for being on the show. This was awesome.
TT (35:36):
Thank you so much, AJ.
LC (35:37):
Thanks for having us. This is awesome.
AJV (35:39):
All right, everyone, we’ll catch you next time on the influential personal brand.

Ep 263: How To Grow a Million Dollar Membership Site With YouTube with Jonny May

AJV (00:02):
Hey everybody. This is AJ Vaden. One of the co-founders and CEO at brand builders group. Welcome to another episode of the influential personal brand. And today I’m so excited. And also just quite honestly, I’m so honored to have a personal friend on this show. So I’m gonna introduce Jonny in just a second, and really today is kind of one of those episodes that if you are building a digital business of any kind, if you are trying to grow your audience trying to scale your course, create online content. This is an episode you do not want to miss. So do not fast forward. This do not get off or early, make sure you listen to the whole thing. Take notes, listen to the recap episode and then go follow Jonny because this is exactly the episode that was built for you.
AJV (00:54):
So this is very, a very specific invitation of bringing Jonny onto the show to share some really cool expertise. So let me formally introduce you to my good for and Johnny May. So Jonny is an internationally acclaimed pianist. He is a pianist educator, founder of piano with johnny.com, which you should go check out which is an online piano course platform with more than 10,000 active monthly members across the world. He’s also a viral YouTuber and his videos have earned more than 70 million views with hundreds and hundreds of thousands of followers. He’s also one of the youngest or the youngest ever a pianist to perform at the Disneyland main street as a main street pianist. He’s also just an awesome human being with a heart and just all things good. So welcome to the show, Jonny.
JM (01:49):
Wow, AJ, thank you so much. That was an amazing introduction. Thank
AJV (01:52):
You. I should be like a professional introducer one day. You’re good
JM (01:57):
At it. Yeah, you should start
AJV (01:58):
Business, future business. So welcome. I’m so excited to have you on, because I know that so many of listeners are trying to build their digital platform. They’re trying to grow memberships courses increase their recognition online. And that is something that you have done extraordinarily well and really a short amount of time. And so we ask this question to everyone who comes onto this show and what we really wanna is how did you get to where you are? And so personally knowing a little bit of your background, what I really want everyone to hear from you is how did you go from being a professional musician to a membership site that has 10,000 monthly members, and you have grown a multi seven figure your business in a really short amount of time by leveraging your skillset as a musician to teach others how to do the same thing. So we wanna know how’d you do it.
JM (02:57):
Thank you so much. Well, you did a great job again leading into this. And so my story is so I was a professional musician. I still play professionally, but I did basically, I giggled for a living starting at age at age 18. I got, well, actually before that I was gigging at 16, like little like local restaurants and bars. And then I landed the Disneyland main street ragtime gig. I did that for nine years. I was hired at age 18 and love a gig. That’s a long time, long time. Yeah. Nine years. Yeah. Right. It’s like a little career. And I just like hustled as a musician and I, I remember playing seven nights so a week and I was playing restaurants and hotels and weddings and private parties and just bust, you know, really working hard.
JM (03:46):
And, and I, it was a lot of fun. I loved it. And basically around this time, it was 2012. My brother-in-law, who’s also a professional musician. He had just graduated college, graduated college, and we were driving home from a, a date night, a double date with my sister. He was dating my sister and then my, my girlfriend girlfriend at the time who was later become my wife. And he said, Hey, why don’t we record some of your piano lessons and put ’em online and sell them. And it was like, at the time, not a lot of people were doing this right. 2012 to was one guy who was doing it piano with Willie. So we said, well, we’ll call it piano with Johnny. And so we that’s awesome. Yeah. It was like, okay, you know, whatever cool. So he kind of put things together.
JM (04:33):
He arranged the session and we hired a friend of ours. You know, he set up the cameras, we went to my brother-in-law’s old college, his almond modern, and we recorded three courses and we had no idea what we were doing. I had never filmed like that. So I literally, AJ, I could not talk on the camera. Like I could not just talk the way I’m talking to you right now. I was stumbling over my words. I didn’t know what to say. My brother-in-law had to write out cue cards. And I was like reading these cue cards. It’s like super obvious. But it was just fun. It was like this cool idea. And I was teaching a bunch of private lessons at the time and it was like, Hey, why don’t, why don’t we try this? You know, it was just an experiment.
JM (05:14):
And so we made these three courses. We were like, okay, we gotta make a website. So we went on WordPress and like built basically like kind of pieced it together and hired a couple guys, but it looked horrible. Like it was like tons of texts. And we had, we had these three courses and we made a boogie woogie course, a blues course and a rag time course. And we started a YouTube channel called piano with Johnny. And I started putting up like performances of me, just me playing. And then little, we put up like a free version of the courses, like a 10 minute version. And we, some, we sold a course. We’re like, we’re like, oh my gosh, this is amazing. How much was it for 40? I think it was 40. And I was like, woo, woo, big money. You know, being a musician.
JM (05:59):
And, you know, I was all excited cuz it was like passive a little bit passive. And so we just kind of kept selling courses and my brother-in-law would call me and say, Hey, let’s make another course. And we ended up filming in his apartment. He had like a one bedroom apartment with a grand piano in his living room. And I actually have a, a picture. Maybe I can share it with you, but like I’m teaching at this piano. And he’s like, he’s got the two dining room, table chairs with the tripod legs. And he’s like, looking over me, it’s super awkward, but we had so much fun and we just went for it. It was like, let’s do it. And so we just kept making more courses. And I remember there was a big moment for me. It went from, okay, this is just a fun, little hobby to like, oh my gosh, like this could be a real business. And it was in the summer of 2014, we did our summer special and we made $4,000 that month. And I was like, what? This is, this is awesome. You know, that was a big deal for a musician be making that kind of money. And I just, oh,
AJV (07:00):
On that note, I think this is really important. I think you shared this like your best year ever as a full-time professional musician you made how much?
JM (07:09):
Oh my gosh. I think my best year and I, I took every single gig. Every single, I think I made $60,000
AJV (07:18):
Thousand in a month,
JM (07:20):
4,000 a month. Big deal. That was a big deal. I mean, that was like almost what I was making anyway. And it was a big deal and, and I, but I just remember something went off. I was like, oh, this, this could be a business. This isn’t just like another gig, another side thing. And so I started taking it more seriously. And then basically a few things happened that I lost a couple gigs at Disneyland. They like closed a showdown and they like changed the performers and I suddenly didn’t like, didn’t have work. And I had to like go scramble for work. And I kind of realized, you know, I had been at Disneyland for nine years and like, I, I really did not want to be playing piano at a theme park, you know, in 30 years. And so I had a, a lot of deep interest, a lot of prayer, as you know, I’m a believer and really turned to God said, you know, what, what do you want me to do with my life?
JM (08:06):
And I loved teaching and I had this opportunity and then we had the summer sale and long conversations with my wife and just like, what’s your purpose? And I, I was like, you know, I really, I really think I wanna be an entrepreneur. And it was like, okay, like, wait you’re gig musician. No, no, I I’m still a gig musician, but I wanna do, I wanna be an entrepreneur as well. And so I kind of fused together. These two things that I had always loved as a little side note when I was 16. No, no, no. I was younger. I was 13. I started an eBay business selling pirate at software. And I did that for a couple years. I made like $10,000. So like ripped off soft software. I was like copying these CDRs. I like Napster
AJV (08:52):
The days of Napster.
JM (08:53):
Yeah. It was the days of Napsters downloading music and copying games and making labels. And it was so illegal and this guy emailed me one day and he was like, I’m turning you in. This is like, he, I, he bought one of the products and I was, I emailed him back and I was like, dude, I’m only, I’m only 14 years old, man. I’m so sorry. You know, I’ll never do this again. I was like apologizing and my parents had no idea that I was like running this like illegal eBay business from like my bedroom. But I was always an entrepreneur. I always like liked creating things. And so, you know, as a, you know, I left Disneyland when I was 27 and I had this, like this desire to start a business, this like unfulfilled potential. And I was like, I think this is the time to do it.
JM (09:35):
And so I struck out from Disneyland, we sold our condo. And oh, so this was a big part of my journey as I went back to school to learn business, cuz I was like, I don’t know anything about business, you know? And so I went back to college. This was in 2014 and I got my business degree while running piano with Johnny. And it was really, really hard to do by it. I, I did it. And then we just kept making courses and kept learning from our audience you know, growing, using YouTube. And we launched a membership that was a really big deal for us is we were selling courses up till 2015. And we were like always like running sales and Hey, you know, buy the blues course, whatever. And we were like, Hey, why don’t we just have a membership? And just people can pay for access. That was one of the smartest decisions. And I think when we did that, we had like a hundred members right off the
AJV (10:23):
Bat. Oh my gosh. OK. So I wanna pause right here. Cause I think there’s three things about your story so far that I think are pretty significant to people who are listening to this. Is that one you really built your business leveraging YouTube.
JM (10:37):
Yes, absolutely.
AJV (10:38):
Okay. So, so let’s pause and like talk about that for a few minutes of like, what were some of the keys of building your YouTube following? And like even today, now it’s like YouTube is still like your primary social media platform, right? It’s like, that’s where your go to is. So for those of us who are going, okay, I really want to leverage video and YouTube and I wanna use that to build my business. Like how do you do it? Like, what are some of those insider tips and secrets of growing and utilizing YouTube?
JM (11:07):
Yeah. I mean, you’re so insightful. And this is when people ask me, like, how did you do it? How did you do it? I say YouTube. It is YouTube. Like literally like to your point from 2012 to 2019, we did zero paid ads, zero paid ads. It was all on YouTube. And we, I think we grew in 2019, I mean the business was almost a seven figure business by that point. So YouTube is huge. I don’t think people realize if you get a video that goes viral, it’s the traffic is incredible. So here’s what I’ll first start off by saying is we did not do YouTube very well when we started, when we started well we did some things well, so as a performer that drove a lot of the traffic, but we did not do a good job making content for YouTube.
JM (11:52):
So what we were doing, we had these courses and then we, we would take like 10 minutes from a course and we would do like a demo version and then it would like fade out and say, Hey, you want the full course and the YouTube channel. I would say didn’t grow as quickly as it could have until several years later that we started actually making content for YouTube and making weekly content. So that’s a big, big thing is our YouTube channel did not really take off until we started making weekly content and it was for YouTube. So, okay. I’m gonna make a 10 minute video and it’s gonna feel really good for the rather than give 10 minutes of a larger course, I’m gonna make content for that audience. And I’m gonna get to know that audience really well. That was a big deal. And we started doing that much later in 2019. So
AJV (12:35):
I have a question. You said we created content for YouTube,
JM (12:40):
Correct.
AJV (12:41):
What does that look like?
JM (12:42):
So it’s, it’s knowing the YouTube audience, knowing the content that they wanna see and then creating a short video that they get to the end of the video and feels they, they have this great sense of satisfaction that they learned something. It’s I, I guess the, to me, it’s not as promotional. I think the demos were more like, Hey, it’s a little piece, but you really need to watch the course. This was like the feeling I think for the user was, wow, this is like free like, oh my gosh, this is great instruction. And it was really hard to get to that point because I was like, wait, I’m not gonna just give away my knowledge. Like, no, you have to buy the course. You know, I had that attitude like, no, I’m not gonna give and I cannot tell you how wrong I was about that. As I started giving more, I received more. And that was like so bizarre. Like I would make longer videos for YouTube and like make them really like put everything I had into these videos. And then the, the videos would do really well. And so that’s, I guess that’s what I mean is they weren’t promotional. It was like, it was, I was really actually giving for free and not, it
AJV (13:46):
Was like truly curated content on how to, right. So it wasn’t like here’s a little preview by the course. It was like, no, I’m gonna give it all to you. Here’s a, how to video on X, Y, Z.
JM (13:57):
Exactly. And then of course I would say, Hey, if you want to go deeper check out course. But I, it was like, I think a lot of it was like an attitude thing of mine. And I, I imagine that it came out also in the way I taught in those videos, you know? And then the other thing is a lot of the courses, you know, we weren’t releasing a course every week. We’d really, of course, every two months. So I was only putting out one video every two months. Oh wow. My new strategy was like, oh, I can make a 10 minute video every week. And that’s, I guess the second piece is so not only making content free content with the intention of it being free, but secondly is you have to put yourself on a schedule. And I I’ve talked to so many people who they’re like, yeah, you YouTube, I’m doing this, but you know, I’m not sure what to post and I haven’t posted a month or two. And I always say to them, like, you need to post, this is my opinion. You might disagree with it, but post every week post something. And a lot of the reason people don’t post is they’re nervous on camera, you know? And so you, but you overcome that as you post more, it’s like, well, you need to do the thing that you don’t wanna do to overcome that. And so anyway, I just made a habit of that and that’s when the channel really took off on YouTube. So consistent,
AJV (15:05):
Consistent weekly. It’s like, yeah, I would say daily, weekly, just make it like consistent. So people know when can hear from you. Right. So it’s like consistent but free curated content really to just give like, ultimately give value on how to, for YouTube. I love that. And then every single person we talk about talks about consistency. Right? I think it, I think it was Gary V maybe giving credit to the wrong person here. You said, content may be king, but consistency is queen.
JM (15:37):
Mm. Right. Absolutely.
AJV (15:38):
Content only goes so far. Cause we need to have that expectation of when are you gonna give me more? But then you mentioned something else about when a video goes viral and I know that at this point you’ve posted thousand and thousands of videos. So I’m curious to know, it’s like, do you guys have predictions and indicators of what you think will go viral? Or is it kind of like, who knows? Wait and see,
JM (16:02):
You know, it’s funny, AJ, I’ve not solved the puzzle of YouTube. I’ve been doing YouTube eight years. Right. And just tons of videos. I still, it still blows my mind. I’ll do a video on like, man, this is the video. Oh man. People are gonna love the title and the thumbnail. It’s perfect. And then it’s like, w wa you know, it’s like, and it’s so disheartening too, you know? And then, and then I’ll do a video and I’m like, Hey, like I barely like take any time. And it, it like gets hundreds of thousands of views or millions of views. And so I, you know, there, there are certain things that I do. I mean, yes, absolutely. That I’ve learned that do better, but I wouldn’t say like, well, here’s like the formula I’ve noticed. I mean, I can, I can offer your audience some tips that I’ve
AJV (16:46):
Yes, please. I’ve
JM (16:47):
Realized. So the thumbnail is huge, you know, keeping the thumbnail really simple. And in using images, I’m sure you’ve talked to your audience about this, but try using less text and images to represent whatever you’re trying to say. I try to keep the word, I do put words on my images, but I, I usually try like five words, six words, because it’s that it needs to be that guttural thing, cuz people are St scrolling and it’s the first thing they see. And then actually you shared something that was very profound with me last year and it actually helped my thumbnails. I don’t think I’ve ever shared this with you. Oh,
AJV (17:21):
I’m so in, I’m sorry. I’m trying to hear what this is.
JM (17:23):
Yeah. You, you did, you shared it with me when we were in the Florida retreat, but you said for the thumbnail, it needs to be the, I want to, right. I want to, and I was like, oh, like I never thought of it that way, but that’s true. Right. It’s the, I want, and so I started restructuring the thumbnails that way and I noticed an increase. So it needs to be that, that gut thing, I want to play jazz piano. I want to and so that’s worked well. And then there’s a lot of strategies for like the title, but short titles, not too many emoticons. I like the, the carrot at the end of the stick. Like here’s how to, you know, improvise, you know what, something with this or the top thing I do it like, it’s like, well with that thing. So creating a sense of curiosity. And then I wouldn’t say we’re the best that our thumbnail, our thumbnails don’t look amazing. They’re very simple. But I would say there is definitely a strategy behind the video itself. I can talk about too. I don’t know how deeply you want me to go.
AJV (18:21):
This is so helpful. It’s like titles, thumbnails, the video themselves, like all, whatever you have bring it on.
JM (18:26):
Well, okay. So it’s branded around me, you now with Johnny. So I’m in every video, that’s it doesn’t have to be that way, but that’s a decision we made. There’s always a keyboard because Hey, you know, we’re about the keyboard, but then we don’t do fancy backgrounds. Almost every one of our thumbnails. It’s the same angle. It’s, it’s not like we do a lot of production. One of the advantages of our production is it’s incredibly simple. So we don’t do a lot of product. And you know, we don’t have a lot of camera angles. It’s just me at the camera. I’m usually holding an object pointing to something and just trying to convey a very simple message. Then so, but this is actually in some ways, not what matters the most. Cuz people get to the content. If it’s good, they stay. If it’s bad, they go right.
JM (19:07):
And so really like those are gateways. They’re entry ways to the content. The content has to be excellent. Right. Wow. You know this right? And so we try to make 10 to 15 minute videos. Sometimes they’re 25. We just did a 27 minute video. That’s fine. We’ve done six minute videos. I think the key is teaching. What needs to be taught no more, no less. And then what I found that really works, and this is for me as a pianist is the moment people open the video, you need to show them something they really want. And in my case, it’s like, Hey, I wanna play like that. And you need to show authority. You need to show credibility. And so almost every video, I try to open with me playing something, just like freaking awesome. Right. And I wanna hook them in and then go, ah, I wanna play that.
JM (19:55):
That’s awesome. And I see a lot of YouTube YouTubers start their videos with talking. I think that’s cool. But I just think if you can establish that hook right away, that’s extremely important. And then I structure the inner, I always say, Hey, you know, do you want to learn this thing? Usually it starts with a question to engage them. And then I’ll say, and then rather than give ’em the answer, I’ll say, well, many teachers would say this or a lot of students think this, right. It’s kind of challenging in an assumption. I, again, this is a very like general way of presenting a video and then I’ll go into, but actually this is the case, but no, no can do it this way. And then I’ll say, but you need to learn this thing, right. Again, the, the carrot, right? You gotta keep them engaged and excited about.
JM (20:41):
Right. So, and then I transition to the teaching and then for my staff teaching, I try to get right to the point. I try to, you know, people don’t wanna sit there and listen 15 minutes. So it’s a weird balance of getting to the point, but like having, having more. And so this has taken a lot of time for me to learn, but in the video you always need to be like saying, well, I’m going to, I’m gonna show you this other thing, like in a little bit. Right. Or like, okay, I’ll show to put together a little bit. And so, so it’s a real art I would say to the teaching, but how
AJV (21:10):
Did you learn all of that? I know you’ve been doing it a long time, but for those people who are going what you just said could change my business. How do I learn how to do that better? Like how did you do that? Like, did you watch videos, courses, classes, trial, and error. Watch yourself. Yeah. What’d you guys do
JM (21:27):
Well, I’ve watched a lot of other guys do what I do. Like I’m very aware of the competition. I, I see what works and I try to integrate it. I’m a big Steeler steel so much like, yeah. I mean, I mean, think about it. Like I’m playing the freaking piano, like a sea. I didn’t invent a sea major chord. Like all this stuff I’m teaching like I’m regurgitating, right? Yes. I think what we need to do, this is really relevant for your audience is you need to repackage information, sorry. You know, you’re, you’re not inventing what you do. You learned it somewhere. Another thing that comes to mind is you, is it’s important to coin language. A, a lot of what I’ve done as a pianist and as a teacher is make up my own language around what I do. Because there’s certain chord progressions that there’s not a name for there’s certain scales or techniques.
JM (22:12):
And so there’s real opportunity. I think all of your listeners who, you know, maybe your field is beauty or your field is fashion or your field is, you know weightlifting or whatever. You, there are opportunities to, to sort of own a little space of that field. I mean, I’ve literally made up words for a, I made a, a scale. It was called the major blue scale. Right. It’s kind of a technical name. And I was like, it’s the gospel scale? Right? It’s the gospel scale. And literally it’s now like people search the gospel scale.
AJV (22:43):
That’s awesome.
JM (22:44):
And it was like, you know, I’ve made up, I made up a a technique called pops, Sten. It’s like a pop chord progression and an AA, which is like a boring, kind of a boring classical term. And I was like, it’s, but it’s a pop Sten, like, you know, the sentimental chord progression. Like, so my point is like, I think it’s important if you’re building a brand is to actually build language
AJV (23:05):
Absolutely.
JM (23:07):
In that space that you can kind of own, right. If you’re the first person to coin it. And I certainly wouldn’t go about just doing it, you know, willynilly or just for the sake of it, because you know, there’s a, there’s an advantage to having the language. But I think in every field, there’s what I’m trying to say is an opportunity to kind of use your own language.
AJV (23:23):
Absolutely. I love that so much. I’ve never heard you say anything like that, but I think that’s a whole point of put your uniqueness on what you do. It’s like the, so many of the things that all of us do are commoditized. And the only thing that makes us different is us.
JM (23:40):
Yeah.
AJV (23:40):
Right, right. The, the beauty of what we’re doing and what we’re talking about at brand builder’s group, and what you’re talking about is if you simply be you, what you do is unable. Cause no one else is you. Right. Right. And it’s like, the more that you can infuse you into the language, the culture, the imagery, the feel, the essence of it. No one can copy it. Right.
JM (24:01):
Totally. Totally. Yeah. We call it, you know, barriers to entry in business. Right. I don’t own, I mean, I do have copyrights on my sheet music, but my biggest beer entry to entry is there is no other Johnny Mae. Yeah. And you’re totally right. Like all of your listeners, you know, each one of you guys are watching this, you possess a very incredible and unique skill and you need to own it 100%. Like I’ve never, like, I like, I, I wear this type of shirt, like as a collared shirt. And I’m just, I’m like, you know, the, I just do it. Like, it’s my thing. And, and I think if you can own that and build, as I said, language around it, don’t like, copy’s like the worst thing you could do. And I know I just said how much copying works, but I think in terms of, it’s like a weird balance, I guess. Yeah. You want to copy and you also want to be yourself.
AJV (24:49):
No, I, no. It is a unique balance that it’s like to some degree it’s like, no matter what you do is copying a little bit. It’s like, what is really new today, but it’s how you put your spin on it. Right? Your take your unique perspective and view. And I, I love that those are so many really good little nuggets there. Y’all, it’s like simplicity in the thumbnail. Right? Keeping it about the imagery, the way that you start getting quick to it creating those little cliff hanger moments where it’s like, but stick around because in a minute, we’re gonna talk about and we, we shared this a lot that it’s like, you, you said it and I love that you brought this up and it totally, it was like, ding, ding, ding, ding in my head. Because like, you know, you always hear people say like, save the best for last. Yeah. Our philosophy is you always save the best for first, like lead with your best content lead with whatever you have. That’s going to like grab people’s attention and suck ’em in. And that’s exactly what you said. It’s like, no, it’s like lead with your best stuff. Show ’em what you got. Bring it and bring the heat from the beginning.
JM (25:50):
Oh my gosh, AJ, I need some like organ music right now. Like you’re preaching it girl like that. Like it is so true. And it’s like, it’s like a relationship, right? I mean, when you are courting a customer, you want somebody to post a customer. You, you show off your best, you dress off your best. And then you build a relationship. Like that’s another mistake. I see. So many people ache like in YouTube is they, they ask for a lot before they give, yeah, you need to not only give, but you need to give over a long period of time. Our sales cycle is not based on YouTube. I am not looking for a sale from YouTube. I’m looking actually for their email. That’s the most important thing, cuz email’s a little bit closer to their heart, right? We’re all we will. As consumers, we will subscribe new channel, whatever.
JM (26:32):
Right? It’s not a big deal, but, but who gets my email address? Not many people. Right? You’re a little more protective of that. And so it’s, it’s gradual. And then once I have their email, it’s we drip the content and honestly be people won’t become a customer customer of ours for six months because they’re getting this content weekly and it’s like, okay, you know, you need to build trust with these people. So to your point, give your absolute best. And that should be the first thing they experience. I did have a couple other things I wanted to say about YouTube that I think are really that have helped us. And it, I guess it actually relates to this, but when you’re making a YouTube video, start with the easiest ask, don’t start with a big ask. So, you know, a, a big ask in my case might be by a or sign up for the membership.
JM (27:19):
I will always start usually two minutes in with, Hey, if you like this video hit the like button and subscribe, right? It’s like no big deal. Then the second is generally related to an email address. And then the third is related to a course. And so I follow, if you watch my videos, I almost always follow this structure is very easy. Ask to you know, putting the, the carrot out there. They may or may not wanna get the course, but I think some people ask for a lot early, they’ll start promoting their, like their thousand dollars membership. Two minutes in it’s like, wait a second. I don’t even know you dude. So
AJV (27:51):
It’s building that. Yes. Momentum. So, Hey, if you like this, yes. You’re conditioning their behavior from the get go. It’s like, like this, subscribe to this sign up for this. Oh and Hey, by the way, you can buy this core. So it’s like that gradual conditioning.
JM (28:06):
Exactly. Yeah. You have to be very, very mindful of what you ask from people. And especially if they don’t know you, it’s like, well, you’re just another guy on YouTube making piano videos. You have to build a relationship and there’s so much trust involved. You know, we sell our, our membership is a, you know, 40 bucks a month. It’s not a product, but you you’ll be amazed how long people wait to sign up for a $40 month product or the $300 annual membership. So, you know, I just wanna drill this point to all of your listeners is build a relationship with your customer and don’t ask for the full buy on the front end, defer it, defer it as much as possible. I’d say at least six months. And it depends on your product. If you have a thousand dollars product, like it might take a year, that’s a big, that’s a big chunk of money for people.
AJV (28:53):
Yeah. You know, it’s so funny. There’s been this like ongoing growing conversation and the brand builders group community around. I just thought I would be at a certain place by now. I thought I would have this many followers or this many ERs or this many members. And, and it’s I think this is such a great reminder. And I’ve heard maybe this message is from me today because I heard this from like four people today about the importance of patience.
JM (29:18):
Yeah, totally.
AJV (29:20):
It’s like, it’s like, you gotta win the trust. Then you win a relationship. But that take time. It’s like you wouldn’t ask, you know, your girlfriend to marry you after, you know, six weeks. I don’t know. Maybe you would, but for most people it’s gonna take a little bit of time, but it’s like, why are we asking our customers to buy the moment they show up on our page? Where’s the relationship, where’s the trust. And there’s just some things you can’t expedite so much. And those are such good reminders and a little bit of patience is a good, healthy reminder to all of us, no matter what we’re doing. That’s so good. So, okay. So I have two other quick things for you. Cuz I know that we I literally could continue this conversation. It’s like, I’m gonna have to steal you for coffee and talk more about YouTube.
AJV (30:06):
Cause that is not, I would say our, our wicked skillset, it’s not YouTube, but we want it to be, so I really need to steal some of your brain. But you said two other things I think are really important. You went from a course format to a membership format. Yes. So I’d love for you to talk about how did you make that successful transition because you don’t just have a membership format, you have 10,000 active monthly members and a multi seven figure business. Yeah. And that’s, that is what so many people in this community are trying to do. And it’s like, how do you do it? Like, so what are some of those like simple steps, maybe not easy, but they’re simple.
JM (30:43):
Yeah. It’s a great question, AJ. I would say if you wanna build a a membership business the first, well, the first thing is you gotta have enough content to justify a membership, right? You, you have three courses, you know, it’s like really I’m gonna pay monthly for this. I just wanna buy the course. But for us, the breaking point was about 20 core. Okay. It was about, you know, Hey, you’ve got 20 courses, we’re selling them 40 bucks, a pop that’s $800 of a worth of a catalog and sell to sell someone. A actually, when we launched our membership, we were selling it at $15 a month. It was pretty cheap. So I don’t know if that comes out too, but that’s like, you know like 200, 200 and it was like, well, okay, that makes sense. Right. I’m I’m paying $200 a year for $800 worth of content.
JM (31:27):
Right. That’s like a no-brainer. So I think you have to get to that point, you have enough content. I think you need to be making regular content. A lot of people make their flagship course and then it’s like, they’re done. It’s like, no, if you’re gonna have a membership, people expect, you know, you go on Netflix, you expect new movies. And so we were, we were making about one new course per month. That was, that was a big thing. Let’s see. What are the, what were the big things? I think those, those were key. Just having the content. We didn’t have a lot of people, like a ton of people sign up for it, but we had a hundred and that was kind of pre of concept was like, okay. You know, and then we just kind of grew it from there
AJV (32:08):
Four year membership site. And this is like a pretty technical question. What, what do you guys use in terms of payment processing and a membership access, do you guys use like an LMS or what do you use?
JM (32:21):
We use member mouse.
AJV (32:23):
Okay.
JM (32:24):
We and great. They integrate really well with WordPress. So then there’s a bunch of platforms out there. And there’s ones that make it a lot easier. You know, it’s interesting when we started the business there weren’t teachables and Cajas and all these platforms, you know, we just kind of to do it ourselves. So we have a custom built website, but it was like by necessity, I would say to a lot of people, like don’t spend a ton of money, like just use one of these. You can build a membership site on, on a lot of these platforms and get started there. And then if at some point you need a custom site. Great. But don’t go spend $20,000. Yeah. Don’t do it.
AJV (32:59):
If you use member mouse, then there’s like Meum Thinkific, teachable Cajabi okay. So that’s cool. And so, okay. Another question I have I’m trying to think of all the questions that we get. Yeah. In our community. It’s how did you set your pricing? Like how did you, and then, cause you said it, you started off really cheap and then you’ve increased it. So how did you said it and then how did you decide when to increase it?
JM (33:23):
So a lot of the price setting was just the market. Like what are other people charging? We, our strategy has been not to be at the high side, not to be the low side. We don’t want it cheap and people will, will equate the value to the price. If we put it for a dollar, people go that’s cheap, you know, $60. Right. It’s, it’s somewhere in the middle. I think for a lot of people, you have to be aware of the market. People would disagree with me and say, no, you, you gotta price it to what you think it’s worth, but you’re competing. There’s other places to learn piano. So so $15 just seemed like a reasonable price. If seemed affordable, like it was like a lot of things at the time were 15 bucks like Netflix or Spotify, it was like, yeah. 15 bucks, whatever. What changed for us was it was actually, I was doing a presentation in my college program and I had all these like investors, you know, CRI critiquing it. And several of them were like, you’re undercharging. And I was like, really 15, really? Like, it’s like passive income. Like it’s just so great. They’re like, no, it’s worth 40.
JM (34:22):
And I was like, like really people pay $40 a month. That’s a lot of money. Like, that’s not your like, you know, Spotify music, right. That’s like, that’s like a gym membership or something. And sure enough, I, I couldn’t believe it, but we’re like, let’s try it. And we, you know, if you still business, we talk about, talk about elasticity, right. And the getting the right price points. Like if you raise the price, do your sales go down, our sales didn’t go down. And so it was like, oh my gosh, like we can charge 40 people. We’re still buying our, you know, profits went up and you know, we could have gone up and there’s other people who charge 60 a month or 80, but it’s just, you know, fell it right. It felt like, okay, this is worth 40. And then it gave us some also wiggle room. This is important for your, for your audience is you need to have, if you’re gonna run sales, like you need to, you be able to drop it. And so it’s kind of a sweet spot for us. We can do we can do sales based on that and still feel happy. I will say to your audience, you need a set of a, a base, you know, for us, we never go below 15. We have never offered our membership for $10. That’s where we just say it’s, it’s worth it.
AJV (35:29):
Not worth it. Yeah. So it’s interesting. I have two thoughts here on this. So a part of this is going, how much content curriculum do you have, where people would stay. And then it’s looking at how much are you charging for each piece of content and going, what would be worth it? So I think about like, even like our content and brand builders group, we have 14 full two day curriculums and to come to our two day event it’s a $3,000 ticket, right? We’ve got 14 of those and our flagship program’s a thousand bucks a month. So it’s 12,000. I’m going. Maybe we’re undercharging. Right. It’s like, whoa, there, that was a big light bulb for me of going what we’re literally giving you 50, $60,000 of curated education for 12, right? Yeah. So part of that is like that spectrum. But then another part of it, what I hear you saying is like some, and I, I think this is true for any business owner, for any entrepreneur.
AJV (36:27):
I think most people undercharge, they undervalue what they’re doing, because that’s just the nature of what we do is like we don’t see our own value. So having outside people weigh in to give you perspective, and I can think about this one very particular time and mine and R’s speaking career. And this was like, I don’t know. Our first work came out in 2012. So this month we celebrate 10 years of our first book coming out, which seems impossible. But I remember like three or four years after that, we were meeting with a really good friend and he was sitting down and at this point, like the book had hit like the New York times list and it was doing really well. And he was like, so what are your speaking fees? And we were like $7,500. And he literally said, get up outta your seat, walk out of this room, increase your fiefs to $15,000 and come back, I’m getting a P a cup of coffee. A, we were like double our fees. Are you insane? Yeah. And it was like, the rest of that day was convincing us of how like, no, like $7,500, like that is not 70. That that is not what you should be charging. Totally. We were terrified. We increased our fees to $15,000. Nothing else changed. And we were book solid. Yep.
JM (37:38):
Totally. But
AJV (37:38):
It was some by weighing in and carrying that confidence and seeing the value that we did. And so for everyone listening, it’s like, who are those wise counselors in your life that can give you wise Sage business advice on how you’re doing, what you’re doing and what you’re charging. Right. I think that’s really important for all of us.
JM (37:59):
Well, oftentimes we lack that perspective of ourselves, right? Absolutely. We tend so critical of ourselves, but absolutely. Yeah. You need to build, you need to build like your tribe of people around you. You know, we can, we wouldn’t have gotten to 10,000 members, if not, for all of the support, encouragement, I mean our wives and just a great team. That’s another piece of all of this is you can’t do it alone, like you to, you need the right people. So
AJV (38:22):
I love that. Okay. I have two last questions for you and I promise I’ll keep this on time. So I wanna know, how did you guys grow to 10,000 members? Right. So it’s like you started, I mean, clearly something happened along the way that was like, okay we figured out something, do you know what that, something was like, was there a moment a trigger? Like how did you go from a hundred to a thousand to 10,000?
JM (38:48):
I’m so glad you asked AJ, this was a big piece of it. I think your listeners all should. I mean, I think it’s helpful for them to know this because it was really slow growing. Like I remember we started launched the membership in 2015, in 2018, 2018. I think we had just hit a thousand members. Okay. So we’ve gone from a thousand in 2018 to 10,000, like three years later. So we did three things. Okay.
AJV (39:15):
Everyone write this down.
JM (39:16):
Okay. Write this down. The first is what I already said, which is we started making weekly YouTube content. Our, we, our YouTube channel had about 10,000 subscribers in 2018. And now it has 250,000 subscribers it’s because we started making weekly content make content weekly. And if you think it sucks still it because you’re gonna get better at it. So that was number one second, we launched a funnel. Okay. And I copied this company that all of you guys should be aware of called jump cut. Okay. That’s two guys that were YouTubers and they teach people how to become famous YouTubers. And they had a very successful funnel and I studied it. I analyzed it. I read every email. I watched every video and I took notes and literally copied their format with my words. So that’s what I mean by copy. Look at the people, doing it well and copy them.
JM (40:08):
And so we launched a 10 day blues challenge and we started running ads on Facebook and Instagram. And it was like, Hey, you wanna learn? The blue were free, sign up, you get five free videos, stream, email inbox. And basically we used lead pages for that. It was really easy to set up my business partner. And I literally made the pages ourselves and then connected it to MailChimp. Like we, we did it ourselves. We’re not computer guys. We’re like musicians and then made the email automations. And then at 10 days, Hey, you get 40 per sent off all the sales stuff. And that grew, so our strategy with that, AJ was not to make money. Our strategy with that was to break even and build our email list.
AJV (40:48):
Yeah. Preach.
JM (40:49):
That’s when our email list went from 10,000 to, to like, I mean, we have 150,000 now on our email list because of that. Right. And so the, the funnel was really helpful started doing paid ads. And then the other third thing was we, we needed a new website and we took out a loan for a website at that point. Wow. Yeah. I know, like we didn’t, it was like 20, it, I think it was $30,000, but like we didn’t have the money. And so that was a smart, a decision for us because we had a much better experience. And so those were the three things in 2019 that kicked us up into, I think, 3,400 members. By the end of that year, 2020, we were up to almost 8,000 members. Yes.
AJV (41:33):
Doing the same thing,
JM (41:34):
Doing the same thing we’d always done. But with the paid ads, with the weekly YouTube content, we still have the same website. Of course we’re making improvements on it, but there is a fourth thing. And it’s something that was not in my control, but we were ready for, it was COVID. Yeah. You know, every, everyone stuck at home. And so we did a quarantine offering, like the month of proof, like terrible. It’s like, you’re stuck at home and your life is miserable, but you can learn jazz piano. That’s. And so we gave away a month membership and we had a huge influx of people who came in, it was like, Hey, I get a month for free. And then, you know, people who liked it stayed. And so we were just kind of positioned for that for that event. And so right now the membership’s still growing.
JM (42:16):
It’s not growing as kind of hockey puck as, as we were. But yeah, I would say to your audience is it’s those three things is get the, get the organic traffic right now. We’re actually focusing a ton on SEO. In fact, we just hired a full-time SEO blog writer. But I, I would just really encourage your audience if you’re doing anything, visual people go to YouTube. In fact, if people search on Google for something, Google pushes all the YouTube videos to the top. So you’re not only getting all the traffic from people on YouTube, but you’re getting all the Google traffic. I mean, that is like the world, right? So, so video, I think is key. And then second is the paid is like paid ADSS, you know, funnels all that.
AJV (43:00):
Oh my gosh, this has been so insightful on so many levels. And I love to your humility and all of this goes, and I asked you if you wanted to come on the show, you’re like, I mean, what would I talk about? Like, are you kidding? Like this, this has been so brilliant. So, so awesome. So if people want to connect with you and I’ll put all of this in the show notes for the listeners, so make sure you go to brain builders, group.com/podcast. You can get all the show notes with Johnny Mae but just go to piano with johnny.com and it’s J O N N Y piano with johnny.com. And then if they wanna follow you to see how you’re doing this on YouTube what’s your YouTube channel?
JM (43:45):
Well, we have two, we have the piano with Johnny channel. It is exclusively piano education. So it’s literally me teaching all the, all the time. I have a second channel. That’s Johnny May, it’s just my name. And it’s just me playing the piano and I’m playing on a rooftop somewhere and I’m playing on a hill somewhere and I’m playing a beautiful, like sparkling grand piano. It’s all performances. And I imagine a lot of your audience, you know, if you wanna learn piano, go to piano with Johnny, but if, yeah, if you just like enjoy piano music, then go to just look up Johnny Mae and you’ll have tons of piano videos to your hearts content.
AJV (44:16):
Oh, I love it. All right. So here’s my last question for you. And totally gonna catch you up guard, but where do you see this business going in the next five years?
JM (44:27):
Oh my gosh. That is something I think about every single day. And to be honest with you, it’s something that I, I don’t really know. I, I think right now piano with Johnny has I don’t know if it’s hit, like it’s sweet spot and it’s something to just ride out. I think for me being an entrepreneur and loving the building process, I want to take it to the next level. Something that really, it sites me is taking our model, taking our system and making it accessible to other teachers. It’s like, oh my gosh, I was able to grow this seven figure business. It’s like, why? Like I see so many talented musicians struggling. I’m like, ah, I wish I could help them. It’s like, what if I could like white label what I’m doing for them? And so I, I toy with that idea, but I think minimally getting other teachers involved is quite exciting. We’re actually starting to hire other teachers. So yeah, but it’s like, it’s the journey. It’s the fun part. It’s like, ah, I don’t know. I don’t know. Where do I want take this?
AJV (45:25):
It’s the blessing and the curse of being an entrepreneur. And I think the here’s what I, and here’s why ask this question for all of you. I, I don’t know if you’ve picked this up, but there isn’t a whole huge staff and team. Like you guys are a pretty lean mean operations and production team, and you guys have built a multi seven figure business. You have 10,000 plus members, you have viral videos with millions of use. And you have done that off of being consistent and having exceptional content.
JM (45:55):
Yes, absolutely.
AJV (45:57):
Everyone listening can do that too.
JM (45:59):
Right. And I will say to your audience, you know, you might look at piano with Johnny and go, oh wow, you have this big team. Do you know that we have three full-time employees? That’s it, three full-time employees, our growth, our business has been around great content and doing what I love and sharing it with the world and being authentic and, and being mindful about the business. But I think to your point is your audience has everything it takes right now. It is unbelievable how many resources you have at your fingertips. I didn’t have almost 10 years ago that are plug and play. You just need to do it. You need to take the first step.
AJV (46:32):
Oh my gosh. I need to have be back on the show again, too. This was so good. It was so insightful. Thank you so much for giving us some of your time today. I so greatly appreciate it. This was an incredibly valuable episode and I hope everyone listening comes back, shares this, likes it connect with Johnny and then make sure you come back to listen to another episode of the influential personal brand.
JM (46:58):
Thanks AJ

AJV (00:02):
All right. Y’all AJ Vaden here on your recap episode of the influential personal brand. Here are my key takeaways from my conversation with Johnny May and Johnny and I are really good personal friends. We both live here in Nashville, Tennessee. We are both in EO, which stands for the entrepreneur organization. He’s in my forum, which means I get to spend an entire half a day with this genius every single month. Just learning and sharing best practices in business. And I’ll tell you what, like, this is like one of those conversations that I had and I pinged him after and I was like we’re are gonna need to continue this conversation over coffee or dinner. So how can I bribe you to continue this? There is so much strategy and wisdom and firsthand experience and expertise in this interview.
AJV (00:57):
Y’all if you were trying to do anything on YouTube or you’re trying to grow and scale a membership model, this interview was literally built for you so highly, highly recommend it specifically if you are trying to grow and scale on YouTube. So here’s just a couple of my key takeaways and I’m gonna heavily lean into, please go listen to this entire episode. It is one of my favorite episodes. It’s so tactical and so strategic and so much firsthand experience and wisdom in this Johnny Mae. So, all right, here’s the first thing. I kind of feel like at brand builders group, we are very new beginner novice when it comes to YouTube. That is not probably our strongest, strongest skillset and terms of leveraging that to grow and scale our business. So this is probably why I’m also so inclined to listen and re-listen, and then re-listen to this episode again.
AJV (01:56):
So first thing as talks about the massive importance of thumbnails and titles, and it’s like, in theory, I get that. But it in practice, are we actually doing that? And he goes simple works, right? Keep the titles very short so they can fit and you can read ’em. He says he keeps his, all of his titles, five to seven words, max make sure that the images are something that actually demonstrates what the video is actually about so that people know, make sure the titles lean into what you’re gonna get from this video. So the first thing was just very strategic tips around your thumbnails, titles and images in the thumbnail. So really important, subtle, but significant. They’ve been at this game for over 10 years. They have a eight figure memberships. And what I mean by that is they have more than 10,000 recurring monthly members, a seven figure BI business of people who are subscribing to learn piano lessons from Johnny piano, with Johnny.
AJV (03:02):
And so he goes like, literally, like our full time thing is focusing on what titles work, what thumbnails work, what goes viral and what does, and he goes, that’s our full-time job. So this is what I’m doing all day every day. And I love it, right? He’s doing it, not as a, an agency, but as the actual business owner. So the importance of titles and thumbnails keep ’em simple, keep ’em clear, make sure that they demonstrate what the video is actually about. Make sure that the title is short and is also very indicative of what you’re gonna get in the video. Loved it. That was the first thing. Second thing is the video itself, because you always wanna start the video, not out with some introduction of who you are or what you’re gonna get. He goes, no, you immediately wanna start the video with a sample of what you’re gonna get.
AJV (03:46):
Then pause, explain it, do a little introduction and tease them of why they need to stick around. He goes, but most people you get into their video and you say, Hey, this is AJ Vaden. And here’s what we’re gonna do today. He goes, they don’t want, you want to get right in and go, all right, this is what you’re here for. Let me show you and get to it in his case, it’s a very tangible show cuz he is teaching piano. But for so many of us, it’s like, how can we start with the best stuff that we have, right? That’s a saying that, and we have a brand builder’s group. As you save your best for first leave with lead, with your best content, that’s gonna catch ’em right in the beginning. Then you can introduce yourself. Then you can explain what’s happening, give context, but then tease why you need to stick around to the very end.
AJV (04:32):
So the first part of this, like, you know, successful three tip trio here is titles and thumbnails. The importance of that, the second is actually how you start the video. I think that makes a really big difference. And then the third thing he talks about is you have different types of videos. Some videos need to be just for content, that’s it? No ask, no offer other videos. You wanna make sure that they’re there to build your email list. He goes, that’s the most important thing we do. He goes, we invest all of our paid traffic, not into converting them into calls or converting them into sales. It’s converting that fan, that follower into an email on our list. He goes, that is what we’re doing. They have a hundred more than a hundred thousand people on our email list by just doing this. And so again, it’s how much of your content is strategically just to provide value.
AJV (05:25):
How much of it is to give something away for free, where you can get their email. And then there’s a separate type of video where there’s the ask, right? He goes, but all the content that we’re making for YouTube is YouTube specific content do not repurpose. He goes, we make content for YouTube. We do not make a piece of content and then repurpose it and all the different channels. He goes, no, we make, we make our content for YouTube. So be intentional about that. And he goes, and we create a ton of free content and we’re monitoring what goes viral and what doesn’t that has to do with the value of the content, the titles, the, the images, how they lead with it. But all of those things are this very, you know, somewhat simple, but yet complicated formula of how do you build your business on social in this particular case on YouTube he goes, build your content for the channel.
AJV (06:21):
That’s really uniquely important. He goes, this is content specifically designed for YouTube. And we have three different types of content. We have content that is just for value just to get people interested. Some is to help us collect emails so they can get ’em onto our list. And then some it’s encouraging them to sign up for our membership. But the majority of what they’re making is unique content just for value, add specifically built for YouTube. Again, I cannot tell you how many more ideas and tips and strategies just like this were in this episode. So if you have listened to this and you’re like, huh, that sounds like me. I would you to go listen to this entire episode. It’s extraordinarily good. You can also follow Johnny May on YouTube or on Instagram to learn more, see it firsthand of what they’re doing. And then please always come back, check out another episode on the influential personal brand. We’ll see you next time.

Ep 261: Learn How To Leverage Awards To Scale Your Business from Microsoft Partner of the Year Denis O’Shea

AJV (00:07):
Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode on the influential personal brand. This is AJ Vaden, one of your cohos here. And I’m so delighted to have our guest on the show today, Dennis, she Dennis happens to be a very close personal friend. And also I think one of the coolest entrepreneurs that I’ve ever met. I’ll give you just a little background about Dennis. That’s not super professional because I know Dennis so well. But here are some cool facts that I think any of you who are listening need to know as a reminder of why you need to stick around. So I’ll give you some of the professional accolades. That’s gonna give you some of the interesting facts on one of the most interesting humans in the world. I’m pretty sure, but Dennis is a multi seven figure entrepreneur.
AJV (00:59):
He originally started his business mobile tour in New Zealand. Over 15 years ago, he opened up his us operations here in Nashville, Tennessee, which is where we both get to call home almost five years ago. But I would say one of the coolest things about watching his business grow is the way that they have integrated different business models to fit what the market end was asking for. And cause of those really cool shifts over the last two years last year in 2021, Dennis and his company were actually named Microsoft partner of the year globally. And so a huge part of what we’re gonna talk about today is how to leverage awards and recognition such a, is that to help you grow your business because he’s done it and he’s fresh out of it only like two months out of doing really an amazing accomplishment.
AJV (01:52):
But there’s so many cool things that we’re gonna talk about with what they’re doing in their business and growing and scaling as an entrepreneur. But then also on the personal side Dennis is a fascinating human being. And I have been in the entrepreneur’s organization, EO with him for the last three years. And every single time I talk to him, I learned about a new near death experience. At least every single time. That’s like he has been like almost eaten by a bear. He goes, fly fishing all around the world. I think you’ve lived in like 15 different countries. You have just the most fascinating, I think, vigor for living and excitement and adventure. And I know that you bring that into your business. And so I would help further. I do welcome to the show.
DO (02:39):
Thank you a, I dunno how I’m ever gonna keep up with that. The reputation you have just put out in front of me, but thank you. I’m, I’m absolutely flattered and delighted to be on your show. And I’ve been inspired by you as you know, many of the things I’ve been doing in my business. Our ideas I’ve learned from you and through all the work we’ve done together at EO. So I’m immensely grateful to you for some of the inspirations you’ve given me and Rory as well and watching your journey and your great pivot. And honestly, you guys have inspired me.
AJV (03:10):
That’s so kind. Thank you. That’s so, so kind. Well, one of the reasons I wanted to have you on the show is because I think what doing in your particular field is quite extraordinary. And then also knowing that you, we moved here from another country, started this business, launched this seven figure business, one Microsoft partner of the year. And that all happened really rapidly. So one of the things that we like to start with for every single guest who’s on the show is give our all audience just a little bit of background on how you got to where you are.
DO (03:44):
Ooh, how far back do you want me to go? The second, I, I are a bit more recent than that.
AJV (03:49):
I would say like, like I would think you take, if you take the last 10 years and you go, man, this is where we were, and this is how I got to where I am. Like, what would you say are some of the things that you think budding business builders, entrepreneurs, aspiring entrepreneurs should know?
DO (04:06):
Let me go back a step further. If I may, I used to work for Nokia Nokia, the big cell phone company, and I could see an amazing thing happen where I could see technology getting ahead of people. So as a company, we were inventing this amazing technology that people were not using. Yeah. And one of my customers challenged me pretty hard. One time he said, why should I buy this next generation of technology from you when our customers are not using what we bought from you last year? And that was like a smack in the nose. And it, it really knocked me back and I lost the big sale. And it was one of those learning moments started really thinking about how do we get people to actually use the technology they’re buying. So I left NOIA and I found a mobile mentor to solve that one problem, which was how do we help someone like you make sense of their first smartphone?
DO (04:56):
How do we help you set it up, get email, working, get your calendars syncing, enable you to do web we’re and get your music on it, change all your numbers of the plus format. So you can do international enrolling all that. And we figured out how to do that for one person and make that one person super productive with their personal technology. And then we repeated that a million times for different people around the world, that one on one service for a million people. And so the problem, what we’re trying to address was how to do, we enable people to get more value from the tech they’re buying and how do we enable them to be more productive in business and be more efficient with their time fast forward many, many years later, if you think about a day in the life of a knowledge worker today, people are using laptops and tablets and smartphones.
DO (05:40):
Some of them are owned by their companies, some personal devices, they all need to have work applications. Everybody wants email everywhere all the time and they’re messaging applications like zoom and teams and all of that. So how do you make sense of all that and how do you secure all of that and how do you enable people to work in their home offices? Like you are right now on a consumer grade wifi connection. That’s probably being shared with the TikTok generation and the YouTube generation and the fortnight generation. How do we make sense of this? And in particular in industries that are supposed to be very secure, how, how do you balance this security paradigm with enabling people to be really productive and efficient with their time?
AJV (06:23):
Oh, this is so good. And I love that cuz any of you who listen to our podcasts or follow us at brand builders group, you know, were really big on making sure you know, what problem you solve and to hear you so succinctly say, it’s like, we want to know, like we wanted to make sure people were using the technology they had. How do I get the most value out of the technology I’ve already purchased? Would you say that’s still the problem you solve today or has it shifted?
DO (06:48):
It has shifted. Okay. For sure. It has shifted. And the problem today is more about helping organizations find the right balance between off security to not get hacked, not get ransom and then providing a great employee experience. So you’re not part of the great resignation. So you’re able to hire great people and attract great talent and retain them because you give them a great experience at work wherever they work. And that balance between not going too far with security, because if you go too far, people are just going to push back and resist your security measures and policies and work around you and, and still having a great experience for people. So getting that balance right, and doing that for highly regulated industries like healthcare, finance education government, that’s the problem we solve today.
AJV (07:39):
Oh, that’s so good. And especially, I feel like the, probably the pandemic and people working at home has only heightened this already present issue, but even more so it’s like how many people are doing all of their business on really unsecured network? I would say I probably am. I know that this is
DO (07:59):
Very few people.
AJV (08:00):
Yeah. So it’s, it’s interesting. So I’m curious I’ve two, you just like totally spurred two questions up that what’s not even on my radar for this conversation today, but I think they’re really important is one give people a high level. Like what does mobile mentor do? Like what do you actually do?
DO (08:19):
Sure. So we’re a service company, an it service company, but we’re super narrow and we’re super focused on helping people who work remotely. So companies who have remote workers, people who might be in their home or holiday home, or some days they might be in the office and they’re using a wide variety of devices, some of which are owned by the company. Some are personal. We help them solve that equation and make sure people can be productive and secure on all their devices. Mm. So the end result we try and get to is that our clients don’t get hacked. They don’t get ransom and their employees, hopefully don’t walk out the door in frustration because they, you know, frustrations around their technology.
AJV (08:59):
This is really relevant. Cause I feel like every single person who probably listens to this podcast works remotely at some point. And whether you own the company or you work for an organization, it’s like, we all work remote as like, like the majority of our audience are to be remote ish type of individuals who also have virtual employees or virtual staff members. And so the other question that populated in my mind now is splintering into like a hundred questions. This is gonna like turn into be like a mini consulting session for brand builders group gonna happen.
AJV (09:32):
But so here’s, so here’s two things that I have seen have in our client base, which is really interesting is over the last six months or so there has been an increase of these imposter accounts on social media, right? So their lookalike accounts and people are like my husband, Roy Baden, who’s my business partner. Someone has managed to create a lookalike account that looks just like hit and they have garnered more followers than he has on his actual account. So we’ve seen a lot of those things starting to happen. And then here recently we’ve had a series of, I’m gonna think at least two, but maybe three different clients that we work with. The brand builders group where people have hacked, their Instagram accounts have changed the password and now our manding ransom for them to give them back their password. And so you’re starting to see security breaches in new criminal creative ways. Right. And so I’m curious any thoughts on the way that security breaches are growing in the way that you know, cyber criminal activity is ranging for not even a business anymore, but like an individual who’s just like trying to like grow their personal brand and grow their influence online. They’re now getting their accounts hacked and ransoming to get under yeah. Sticking Instagram.
DO (10:53):
Yeah. You’re absolutely right. There’s been a 500% increase in cyber crime through the pandemic, which is really tragic, you know, tragic for the individuals who get hacked. And then when you look at which organizations are being hacked at schools, it’s hospitals, it’s governments who are government organizations are trying to help people get through the pandemic. It’s really, really tragic. And what, what we know now is that the primary way that people hack us is to our passwords. We know that, and as a society, we’re coming to grips with the fact that we need to get away from passwords. We just need to get away from them because passwords were actually a great invention back in 1961, you know, when somebody invented the combination of a username and a password to get, that was essentially the key Sierra Casa. It was a great invention in 61, but what became really clear in 2021 was passwords to the reason why we were getting hacked by schools, getting ransom, why government departments are getting compromised by healthcare organizations are having all the patient records leaked. So passwords are really a big problem, really, really big problem. And as a society, we need to get away from them and we need to go password less.
AJV (12:06):
How did, what, how does that even work?
DO (12:08):
So password less, you’re probably already doing it without realizing it. So got an you’ve got an iPhone, right?
AJV (12:14):
Yeah.
DO (12:15):
So you look at your iPhone as the camera and it scans your face. Yeah. Takes about 300,000 data points from your face and it recognizes you, ah, it’s H J and it unlocks the phone and allows you to access the operating system, iOS the apple system. And then you’ve got single sign on to some of the applications. So you’re automatically able to sign into your applications. So that’s biometrics. So it could be facial recognition could be, your thumbprint could be your voice in the future. It could be a retina scan. Now that’s a lot more secure than a pastor. That’s, you know, your dog’s name, plus some numbers and, and Ary characters. And you,
AJV (12:53):
That was my password.
DO (12:55):
I know because we’ve done the research and we know that about 15% of the population still use a variation of their pet’s name as their primary password,
AJV (13:05):
Or don’t do that.
DO (13:07):
Don’t do that. But it’s better than the 6% who use the word password.
AJV (13:12):
Oh my gosh. People
DO (13:13):
Not kidding, not kidding. And so passwords are a huge vulnerability, whether it’s for your Instagram account or your work accounts. And so our advice of all industry and all organizations is get on that journey to go password less. So you’re doing it with your iPhone. You can do it with your iPad. If you buy the right laptops, you can do it as well.
AJV (13:33):
Yeah. They have the new, your pass on, like, I got a new MacBook last year. There you go. And it’s like, yeah, but then, so, but then still on all these other programs, I still have to log in and use a password
DO (13:45):
You do for the ones that don’t have single sign on, but the ones that are single sign on you’re signed in automatically when you’re on the device and you’re recognized as a J B. And so that’s the key is biometrics to get to the device and then signal sign on to get into all the apps you use right now. But then you need to have two factor, two factor authentication. So you get the code. So now you put all that together. You can effectively get down to one or two passwords, which are strong passwords. And so it could be IM a J and I live in blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It could be a sentence, right. And only, you know that, and it’s very hard for anyone to hack that. And that becomes the, your effectively, your master password, but you hardly ever need to use it. Like I haven’t typed the password for about a year because my laptop scans my face and I signed into my applications and my phone goes Bing. And I type in the code and I don’t type passwords. And so if we can get schools and hospitals and individuals and government organizations to go there, then it makes the bad actors, it makes their job so much more difficult to ransom our accounts and ransom our businesses.
AJV (14:54):
Oh, geez. So I have a lot of action items to do because it’s, I literally, like I use one pass, right. To like, keep all like, that
DO (15:02):
Is great.
AJV (15:03):
So I, but it’s, but I literally it’s like I was looking at it the other day and I log on cuz you know, it does like the facial scan to log into that. And I have like 150 different accounts with passwords and it’s like every single one of them is like some variation of something. And it’s, I can’t remember any of ’em. So I’m constantly like changing ’em cause I can’t, I get locked out all the time, but this whole concept of having one way to log in and having a super secure, initial way with the two factor authentication, it’s like, I don’t know how I’ve missed this. Like how did I miss this?
DO (15:38):
Well, I would say you didn’t and you are already ahead of the majority of people if you’re using a password tweet. So the research we’ve done tells us that and you won’t believe this 31% of people right there work passwords in a personal, a journal. And 24% of people write their work passwords on a notes file on their personal phone. So you can see the problem. This creates for highly regulated organizations like hospitals, where you’ve got your work. No,
AJV (16:09):
We’re getting our identity stolen all the time.
DO (16:12):
No wonder. And only, only about 30% of people actually use a password management tool like you’re doing, oh, only about 30% of the population. So, you know, my guidance is always go password less. That’s a better future for all of us. But if you can’t quite get there or you think it’s gonna take you one or two years for God sake, get a password management tool. Okay. And do like you’re the, you’ve done one really strong password and inside the vault, then you have all your other passwords.
AJV (16:41):
Yeah. That’s
DO (16:42):
So you don’t have to remember them.
AJV (16:44):
So it’s interesting cuz you’re, you’re bringing up some data points. And I just happened to know that you recently conducted a international research study around security and quite honestly how unsecure we are as a, as a population. And so I’m so fascinated as one, I wanna know two things about this research study because now you have all of this fascinating original data around cybersecurity and what’s working and what not. And what, how is this different and different generat, which I think is just fascinating. I’m a total data nerd, as you know. But I, I wanna know two things for this audience. One, why did you go the research route? Right? Cause it’s not cheap and it’s not quick. So why did you go that route? And then two, what are some of the most interesting findings that you guys uncovered?
DO (17:34):
Great question. The reason we did it is we wanted to define our space. So you think back, you probably use a vacuum cleaner in your home and it’s probably not called Hoover, but you probably refer to the action of vacuum cleaning as hoovering, right? Hoover owned the category. My wife still talks about Hoover in the house. It’s not a Hoover, it’s a dent or something else, but, but Hoover owns the category. What we are looking to do is we want to own our category and we’ve called our category. The endpoint ecosystem endpoint is just a technical word for devices, laptops, desktops, tablet, smartphones, and the endpoint ecosystem. As we see it is the devices you use and all the software on them and your login experience. And then the supporting processes. When you’re setting up a new device or you need new software, you want to install something or get an update, all that mess.
DO (18:24):
We call that the endpoint ecosystem. And that’s where all the pain happens for employees and companies. And that’s where the insecurities happen. But when it all works well, you have a fantastic experience. Your employees can be secure and productive and happy. And so we wanted to really understand what’s going on in that space and that endpoint ecosystem. How do we get some original data? How do we provide some for leadership and how do we inform and educate our industries around what’s happening in that endpoint ecosystem? Because cybersecurity is too big. It’s too broad and everyone’s jaded with that subject. So we wanted to go really narrow and say, what’s actually happening in the home office of AJ and all the other people like you that are in their home office with a bunch of personal devices on a, on a consumer grade wifi connection. What’s going on? How are you working? What’s it like how many passwords are you typing every day? Who’s helping you? How long did it take you to set up your last device? Who do you call for help? How long do you wait to get a meaningful response? So we wanted to drill into all of that and find out what an earth is going on and all those remote offices where people are now working.
AJV (19:37):
Yeah. I think this is really important if you guys didn’t pick this up, but what Dennis is saying is that they really wanted to create this original data to own their space, right? It’s like, you know, it’s like play, plant that stake in the ground and go like, this is a space that we’re gonna own. And we wanna be the thought leaders in this space. We wanna be the ones telling you what’s happening, not reporting what other people are saying. And it’s like for any of us, whatever your space is, whatever your industry is, whatever your expertise or your niche is only one of two things are happening. You’re telling people what happening or you’re telling them what other people say is happening. So if you really wanna own that space and you wanna be the thought leader and you wanna be the expert, then you’ve gotta have real data and research as a way to do that.
AJV (20:23):
So you can own that space and come with a original research of going well, this is what our studies show. And I think that’s a really big trend. That’s on the rise and you know we have so many different friends who really hang their hat on this, including us, like as, you know, look, we’re huge believers in research, but I think one of the best things that I heard in 2021 is that original data is the new competitive advantage. Like that is the new competitive advantage. And so, okay. So tell us as the thought leader in this space with all this new data, what are some of the most fascinating things that you guys discovered that you were not expecting?
DO (21:09):
We didn’t expect shadow it to be as big a problem as it is and shadow. It means people taking it into their own hands out of sheer frustration with their company’s it. And so what we found is that people are using their personal, their personal devices way that companies didn’t know, they’re blurring the lines, they’re using personal devices for work and they’re using work devices for personal use. Wow. And then you won’t believe this 46% of people allow their family members to play with their work device. So these blurred lines are crazy. And then we, about half of the population in regulated industries, they find their security policies to be so restrictive that they’re working around them. And about 45% of the people have found ways to work around their security policies. So this is really indicating a failure on the part of it to provide the tools that truly empower people. People are not empowered. So they’re finding ways to work around there, the tools given to them. And then almost half of people told us they actually prefer to work with Gmail and Dropbox. Now you think about this is healthcare and education, and these people are dealing with patient records. Yeah. And,
DO (22:30):
And government organizations are dealing with citizen records and financial organizations are dealing with accounting records and, and client details. And they’ve admitted they’re working around their own security policies. So we were quite shocked at the enormity of this, this trend that shadow it as we call it using personal devices and unsanctioned unapproved cloud apps and cloud services. So that, that was huge. The other big thing that we kind of expected was gen Z. Now they’re a fascinating bunch. They’re a really fascinating bunch. And if you think about it this way, gen Z joined the workforce during the pandemic they’re in their early. Yeah. And many of them joined and had to work remotely over the last couple of years. They never knew an office based work culture. Like we all knew what it was like to go to work and meet your colleagues in the office and go for lunch and the coffee breaks and all of that gen Z don’t, they were onboarded remotely and my any cases fascinating.
DO (23:37):
And they bring their own attitudes. So they are leaning a lot more towards shadow it and bring your own device. And some of these trends than older people who actually do have some semblance of conformity to what it leadership would want them to do. But gen Z comes along and goes, oh no, no, no, no. This is how we do it. And so as we come out of the pandemic and gen Z starts to float back to the office and the next generation of gen Z joins summertime, when everybody graduates, the workforce is quickly gonna get flooded by gen Z and they’re gonna bring their attitudes and their behaviors. And the big challenge for employers is how do we deal with this? Cause no leadership team and no, it leaders can change gen Z, right? Yeah. You can’t change their attitudes and behaviors. But what we found through the data is that we can learn from them.
DO (24:32):
We can learn a huge amount and we’re gonna repeat our study every year for five years. So that we build, you know, as you said, thought leadership, truly understanding the trends, the mega trends that are happening in this space, how people work, work remotely in their home office and work and all that. And we’re really gonna follow gen Z, cuz we think gen Z is the predictor of the future. The more we understand gen Z’s perceptions, attitudes, behaviors, the better we can predict what the world will look like in the workplace will look like five years from now. Cuz they’ll get promoted. They and bigger jobs they’ll eventually be in charged. Their attitudes will prevail. Ooh, their behaviors will prevail. So if you’re an it leader watching gen Z be very, very scared, be very afraid because there’s a tsunami of them coming and they bring a totally different mindset.
AJV (25:24):
Yeah. So, and I think that even is interesting because I would say that it’s even more, I’m gonna use the word interesting about terrifying for like small business owners. Like I would say like myself at grain builders group where we are intentionally building this virtual workforce and don’t have a ton of like it infrastructure in place and kind of of this like yeah, bring your own technology. That’s what we do here. We’ll even pay you to bring your own technology because it’s easier and we know that you’re gonna use yours anyway. So what would you say to the hypothetical employer like that? Who’s like, I’d actually rather just pay you to bring your own technology because I don’t think that you would use ours anyway. It’s like you’re gonna use what you’re used to and what you’re comfortable with. And so I I’m so curious because I think it’s fascinating. And I do think where goes gen Z goes the trend, right? That’s with any like emerging workforce. And it’s specifically in this predominantly, still even today virtual environment where people really don’t wanna go back to the office full time and companies aren’t making you come back full time. Like how do all of those shifts specifically with small businesses, hypothetically speaking, what would you say to those people of here’s what you need to do? So you don’t get yourself or your customers in trouble.
DO (26:54):
I would say there’s a couple of things. And the way I think about it is people process technology like any, any major change. I think list thing to gen Z and involving them is going to be super important. So gen Z just sees the word differently. They, they are hyper aware to anything to do with privacy. The personal privacy is their castle. They don’t give a rats about corporate security. And we know that from the data. Yeah. It’s like four to one. When we say to them, what’s more important to you, personal privacy or security for your company, they all go personal privacy and to help about company security. It’s unbelievable. And other generations have a bit of that going on, but gen Z is so extreme in their bias. It it’s unbelievable. So what companies need to do is that actually bring them into the tent and get them to help figure out how do we craft our policies?
DO (27:50):
How do we do our messaging? How do we say to people? We, we absolutely want to protect your privacy and the privacy of all our employees and the privacy of our customers and protect everyone’s data. So we’re taking the following initiatives. That’s the first involving them listening to them. And then when you’re selecting products and tools that you want to use or applications you want to use, we think it makes a ton of sense to involve the remote workers in that decision making process, not trying to do with the people who work in the, in the office, right? But the remote workers, cuz they would be the most critical and they will do the, the most thorough testing effectively. So that’s the first thing involving remote workers involving gen Z, cuz they were pressure tests, the future paradigm the best. And then secondly, when you are thinking about how you secure this hypothetical small business, that’s encouraging, bring your own device.
DO (28:45):
It’s all about picking applications that have some embedded security, like some of the Microsoft 365, the office 365 applications have some security controls you can turn on or turn off depending on okay, what you want to do. And then when it comes to devices, you really need to set some minimum specifications. Okay. You know, for example saying, if you’re bringing a, we expect you to be on at least the second, most recent version of Macs or if it’s a windows device you gotta be on again, might be the second, most recent. So making sure people are updating their devices, updating their software and applications that will give you some, some control and so will reduce your risk profile. Okay. And then, and then go on the journey to get rid of passwords. Yeah.
AJV (29:32):
Right.
DO (29:32):
At least minimize your
AJV (29:33):
Passwords. That’s huge. And it’s like, I’m literally going to, after this call be like, it is now mandated at brain builders group, you must have some sort of biometric screen in and at the very least you have to start using like a one pass or something. Yeah. that those are, those are like very tangible takeaways that no matter
DO (29:53):
What, they’re very, and they’re very affordable aging. Yeah. So like a pastor manager too will cost a few dollars per person per month. But if it saves you Bitcoin and a ransom, it’s a no-brainer
AJV (30:04):
Seriously. And I like this is only gonna be getting more intense. And so we better figure this out. Now
DO (30:11):
We have to figure it out because you know, they are literally coming after us. And if you work in education, for example, this is a great example. There’s a spreadsheet floating around right now showing the money that the federal government is pumping into the schools. And it’s updated every few months with the, the latest round of funding that’s coming out. So if that’s available to us in the public domain, it’s available to the hackers, that’s right. They won’t follow the money. So they could look at any local school and figure out how many millions of dollars are being injected and what dates is the money arrive. And so therefore they’ll set their ransom at the level of what they know the school can afford to pay
AJV (30:49):
It’s. And I think, say, say if it’s like, I would liken that to like in the world of social media, which is, you know, we talk a lot about is the more followers you, a mass, the higher a target you are for someone to hack in, change your password and then request a ransom for you to have your own account. Back to me, it comes back to this like whole concept of first party data. Right? You gotta own your data. You gotta have a CRM. The days of every single person having a CRM are coming and they’re coming quickly. And this just kind of like counteracts with that in terms of like there’s all these things on the horizon and what are you gonna do right now to be prepared before it happens to you? And it’s like, go passwordless at least have some sort of app storage management.
AJV (31:36):
And to me it’s like own your data. Like don’t, don’t think that your followers online are going to be what build your business as like that’s your email list. So do you have your own data, like, or do you have your own contact management system? Those are all security measurements. So such a fascinating conversation. I could literally geek out on this kind of stuff all day. But in the, in this, in the event up, we even have all day we have just a little bit more time. I also wanna talk about, and I mentioned this in your introduc that you and your company, mobile mentor recently won Microsoft partner of the year. So one, congratulations.
DO (32:13):
Thank you.
AJV (32:14):
Accomplishment globally. Like you guys won and I know the power of leveraging huge global awards like that. And so I’m curious for everyone who is listening to this, like one, how do you even go about doing something like that? And then two, why did you do it? And three, how do you think it’s gonna help you?
DO (32:37):
Ooh. So the first question was how was the first, was that the first, how
AJV (32:41):
Do you do something like that? Like, I mean, there’s so many different types of accolades and recognition and awards locally, regionally, nationally, and even globally. It’s like, how do you even prepare to go about trying to win something like that?
DO (32:57):
We started the preparation about a year before the set admission. So we were very, we were very intentional about this.
AJV (33:03):
This was not an accident. OK. This
DO (33:06):
Was not an accident and you won’t believe this, but we didn’t expect to win it. Last year, we thought last year was gonna be our practice run. And we thought we would learn a lot from the sub submission process. We thought we might become one of the finalists, but our plan, our goal was to win it in 2022, not 2021. Now we worked so hard on the application and we did such a good job in finding a great customer story, which was based here in Nashville, a live hospice, how we helped them save many lives through COVID using some Microsoft technology. And we told their story with a very emotional video and a really powerful story. And Microsoft just loved it. They loved the, the human interest side of it, not the technology application, but, but more how it was used to save lives through COVID and we won the award.
DO (33:55):
So we were just, we were so delighted, but it caught us a little bit by surprise because we, we just weren’t the expecting it. So we had to do a big scramble to figure out, oh my God, what do we do now? What’s the next step? And how do we leverage this? And how do we take advantage of it? And my wife reminded, and she said, this will be old news before you blink. So we knew we’re gonna have to move super fast. And so we sat down with our board and had a, had couple of big sessions on this figure out, how do we leverage this? This may be a one and a lifetime opportunity for our business and our company. And we decided to invest like crazy and try and double the business in one year. So it’s taken us 17 years to get to where we are now.
DO (34:38):
And we thought let’s go for broke. Let’s try and double this company in, in one year. And so we’ve just been pouring resources in hiring like crazy building marketing content. We’ve done this research study. We’ve just got a whole bunch of work happening, hiring people all across the country from Seattle to south Florida. It’s just been amazing watching the growth of the company. And, and I was hoping, you know, that this would help us win some new clients. And I was hoping it might really lift our credibility inside Microsoft and help us attract some, some good new people. And all of those three things have been exceeded beyond my expectations. So it’s amazing. Microsoft have seven, I think, 7 million partners or something like that around. So how do you stand out when you’re a small company from Zealand, how do you get their attention? How do you get Microsoft to walk you into some of their biggest healthcare education government clients or winning partner of the year helps enormously? It really does. And
AJV (35:40):
I wanna pause for a second. There are 7 million Microsoft partners and you guys want something
DO (35:46):
Like that, something like that. Now there are different categories of the awards as well. So we won in our space in this endpoint ecosystem space. So we won our categor. There are other categories
AJV (35:58):
But still like, it’s
DO (36:00):
Amazing. Yeah. It’s incredible. It’s difficult. Yeah. But one of the, one of the wonderfully energizing benefits of this has been the ability to attract great talent. Ah, it’s a battle out there trying to get talent. It’s a real battle. Everyone’s struggling to get good engineers and good architects. And we found the last year because we won the award because top talent see us as a market leader. Now they want to come and work for us. We didn’t expect the effect or the impact to be as, as, as, as positive as it has been. So I’m truly energized by the all the great people we’ve got coming in. We had three yesterday in one today. So four new people this week, these are all high level, really, really good people who choose to work here when they had many, many other offers.
AJV (36:47):
I think that is such a important reminder for every single person who is listening to this. I don’t care if you are aspiring to do your own business or build your in one day or you’re already at the top. And it’s like, if you can that leverage something that other people hold is credible. It does three really important things like to Dennis just mentioned one. It helps you stand out. It helps you just get a foot ahead of the rest of the crowd and the foot race. Right. I think that’s really important. And I love hear you say, it’s like, we know that in a, you know, somewhat commoditized market. It’s like, how do we stand out? Right. We gotta do something. That’s going to put attention on us. Yeah. The second thing is that when you do that, not only do you get more customers, more recognition, more credibility, but it’s a talent acquisition tool.
AJV (37:38):
Yeah. And I’ve never heard you talk about that. A, of going well, of course it is the more trustworthy you are, the more credible you are. The more prevalent you are, the more people also want to be a part of that. So that is so amazing. And so I’m, I’m curious too. It’s like you won it last year. So how like to what Lisa, your wife said, thanks for, you know, giving us one minute celebration. So how do you plan to extend this out? So do you think that you will continue to apply for this year after year and or how does, like, how do you wanna, how do you plan to continue this vantage point?
DO (38:17):
We have a plan to win it again this year, and I’m not kidding. I believe if we have a winning strategy again this year, and it’s because we’ve done the original research, we have unique insights. We have unique data in, in a way that nobody else has. And we’re sharing that with the industry. You know, anyone can go to, to the new website, endpoint ecosystem.com, download the reports, the research data, all of that. So we’re making this bigger than us. So that’s a really, really big deal. Cuz Microsoft really likes to see partners, sharing, learning, and sharing. It’s a big deal in their ecosystem. And then we’re producing so much thought leadership content around how organizations can stay secure, be safe, empower people to work remotely. We believe that’s, that’s really strong. And then we’ve just done so much work in the last year, helping big healthcare clients become more secure schools, universities, government departments. We think the combination of the research, the thought leadership content and executing at scale and doing really good, solid work. We’re genuinely hoping we can win that award again.
AJV (39:24):
I
DO (39:24):
Have no doubt that will extend.
AJV (39:27):
I have no doubt. Honestly. I think one of the best things that any single person has going for them is their own belief to, they can do it. And it’s like, if you don’t believe it, why would anyone else believe it? But I think this is so cool. It’s so fascinating. And you guys are doing some really amazing things in your industry and your space. I mean, and then, so I just, again, one of the reasons I wanted to have you on is just that great reminder to all of us. It’s like, we all have opportunities to create a vantage point. It’s just, do we believe in ourselves enough to go after them? And do we have the patience to do it? And I think that’s something I wrote down as you were talking, it’s like, you guys prepared for this a year in advance. Yep. Like let that sink in to whomever is listening. Yeah. A year in advance, a year of prep, a year of planning a year of execution. And they’re like, and we still were considering it a practice round. I think we live in this world of instant gratification. And if we don’t have a million followers, a million dollars sell a thousand courses overnight, somehow we’re not successful. And it’s like, you guys were preparing and planning for an entire year as a practice.
AJV (40:38):
Yeah. I think that’s a really good lesson for all of us.
DO (40:42):
And we see this as a long, a long journey, like building a partnership with Microsoft, the biggest it company in the world that doesn’t happen quickly. We’ve been on this journey for five years and we had a really simple strategy. I called it one plus one, which is we would meet one person, impressed that person and get introduction to one other. And that’s how we built our network inside Microsoft. And we’ve now got 833 people in our CRM system, you know, context inside Microsoft, but it’s one plus one, one person at a time build the credibility in the trust, get the next connection. And then the same with clients. They walk us into our client organization. We do it stunning job for that client. So they got your guys are great. I’m going to introduce you to the next school or the next hospital or the next, you know, government department. It’s that one plus one strategy and takes time. Right. It really takes time for that to build. And some people will be too impatient to wait that out, but I’m patient. And I know that all those one plus ones add up becomes a big number over time.
AJV (41:43):
I mean, that is an entire business strategy, right there. Y’all if you are not taking notes and paying attention to this shame on you, it’s like just even that whole concept, like that’s like an entire, your business strategy. It’s like impress one person and get that person to introduce you to one new person repeat right. And press one person. Get that person to introduce you to a new person that is brilliant. Let’s the whole conversation has been so insightful. I literally have like a half a page of notes. I’m not either in your industry, I’m not in your space. I’m like, here’s so much to do actions. Here’s all my takeaway. This was brilliant. This was fantastic. And I want to leave with two things before I do my very last thing. I wanna remind everyone of where to go to learn more about this awesome study that they just released about the endpoint ecosystem. But how to make sure that you are not vulnerable to all those cyber criminals doesn’t matter what level business, personal brand solopreneur nine figure business, this pertains to you. And you can just go to mobile, M O B I L E mentor.com. That will also be in the show notes. If you wanna connect with Dennis personally, Dennis, where should they go?
DO (42:52):
Linkedin easies, if I may LinkedIn and it’s Dennis with one in
AJV (42:56):
One in, and I’ll put off list in the, at the show notes, it’s Dennis Oche on LinkedIn or go to mobile mentor.com. Get that study, check out what they’re doing. They’re doing revolutionary stuff. It’s so cool to watch this firsthand, such a ed, such a gift. Okay. So before you go, I mentioned this, like you are truly one of the most interesting humans in the world, so I want you to share just what do you think is the most interesting adventure that you’ve ever been on?
DO (43:28):
Oh, it’s gotta be my crazy Alaska trip where I took 15 weeks off work and I went to Alaska and just a immersed myself in the wilderness and the outdoor life. And I was camping in beer country for 13 of the 15 weeks. I spent a week on a kayak following whales around glacier bay. I saw a lot of Alaska. I was victory there for three months. And so three seasons because it was like the end of spring, somewhere in the big getting a fall. And it was the most incredible immersion in wildlife, which I love and, and the outdoors. So that for me was a trip of a lifetime.
AJV (44:04):
So 15 weeks 13 of which you were camping in bear country. Yeah. And then you canoe watching the whales,
DO (44:13):
Kayak. Yeah. Fall of the whales. Yeah.
AJV (44:15):
Yeah. But then this is also where you almost got eaten by a bear
DO (44:20):
Twice.
AJV (44:21):
Twice.
DO (44:22):
Yeah. Survive two bear attacks.
AJV (44:24):
I mean, y’all,
DO (44:25):
I tell the story,
AJV (44:27):
One of the things that I love about you so much, and one of my personal goals for this year is to have more fun. But I think this is also, I know Dennis has a hundred stories like this, and I think one of the things that we forget to do in business in life is have fun. And Dennis is I think you’re such a, an example, but also such an inspiration to me and my family, a of how do we create awesome memories? And we don’t live to work, but we work to live. And I think that there’s this concept of hustle culture out there where it’s like, if you’re not working 80 hours a week and working to your eyes bleed, then you’re not, you’re not successful and you’re going, no, it’s like you work to enjoy the fruits of your labor.
AJV (45:10):
And it’s like of adventures, make memories, do unique things. And I tell you what you are definitely the person that everyone wants to talk to at the party, because you got stories for days. Which to me, it’s like this one plus one works, not just because of what you’re doing, but because of who you are. And I think that’s a good reminder for everyone. It’s like, how do you incorporate a little bit more fun and enjoy all the fruits of your labor, Dennis, thank you so much for being on the show today. Such a privilege to have you on
DO (45:41):
AJ. Thank you for all the inspiration you’ve given me because I wouldn’t have done that research study if I hadn’t been for you and what I’ve learned from you. So thank you and thanks to you and Rory for all, all the, all the guidance and inspiration I’ve been able to take from you guys and learn from you.
AJV (45:55):
Thank you, such a pleasure. I love having you on to everyone else stays tuned for the recap episode and we’ll catch you next time on the influential personal brand.
Speaker 3 (46:06):
Hey, brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for taking the time to 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/podcall brand builders, group.com/podcall. We hope to talk to you soon.
AJV (46:53):
All right. Y well welcome to the recap episode of my conversation, what the one and only Dennis Oche, who is the founder and CEO of mobile mentor who my Southern accent calls it mobile he’s. So kindly correct me off time. Mobile mentor, AJ, not mobile. You read that. But that’s okay. I, I love my heritage and I don’t mind it whatsoever. Y’all here are three huge things that I learned from this episode that I was really not expecting. I thought we were gonna talk about how to leverage rewards and become more well known and so much more wisdom came from this call than I had planned and plotted for. And I’m so grateful for that. Here’s the first thing is a super, super tactical takeaway is the concept of going passwordless, which he talks about often to me and our personal friendship and had never Dawn on me today.
AJV (47:51):
What that really was so shame on me for not asking more questions, but this is a big deal right now. And specifically for you, if you have a personal brand, there is a, an increase in cybersecurity with different social media accounts and people are being targeted and people are breaking in there are hacking your passwords, logging into your account, changing your password, and then asking for a ransom to give it back to you. This is bizarre. Like if criminals will just channel that creativity and just sort of send you something productive, imagine what we could be doing here. But I think this was fascinating. It’s make sure that you have biome logins on your phone and on your computer, and then you have single sign on with all of your different applications that you’re using. So that you’re not using an actual password that like that Dennis mentioned in the interview, that’s a combination of your pets name and some numbers fascinating.
AJV (48:47):
It’s like, duh, like those things sound simple until someone breaks it down and go, and here’s why, right. Someone cannot take, you know, 3,600 points on your facial screen and duplicate that, but run a few algorithms. They could probably figure out that, you know, it’s Dotty 1, 2, 3, 19 40, right? It’s like, like just some of that is common sense that it’s not. So I think that was really important. And if you’re not gonna go to the biometric route and if you’re not gonna do single sign on all the things at least take that first step and use an application like one pass, right? One password where it stores all of your passwords in a secure location where it is using facial screening or your fingerprint in order to do those things. And so I think that hacking cyber hacking, personal brand individual information that’s on the rise.
AJV (49:40):
It’s already been on the rise and it’s only growing, right? This is, this is the era of that. And so we’ve gotta take proactive steps to become more secure in our personal space, as well as in our business. So, so many awesome takeaways from that and good reminders and aha moments from the research study. But those were like very tactical. It’s like, yes, single sign on, get my facial screen fingerprints set up for all the things double down on my one pass and get myself secured Pronto ASAP. So my to-do item set. Second thing is Dennis’s company, mobile mentor recently won Microsoft partner of the year, woot so exciting for them, but I loved what he said. He said we did not win because of all of our technology successes and accolades. We won because we told a human story of people saving lives by using our services.
AJV (50:36):
It is a testimonial, right? It is a story. People remember stories, emotions matter. It’s like, and it’s, I love what he said. He goes, you have to make it bigger than you. It cannot be about all the successes that you did and all these things you’ve accomplished. It’s like, what are you doing to make your business bigger than you? How are you making, how are you making it about them? How are you making it about your customer and their wins and their successes? And then how are you making it about the people around you and the lives being and touched, you know, two and three people removed from you. But I love that he goes, and we didn’t, we did not win because of what we do. We won because we showcase the people that we serve. I loved that telling a story.
AJV (51:21):
We know that, but are we doing that? And then simple, just like, make it bigger than you. So what are you doing to make it bigger than you in your business, with your products, with your services, with your marketing, how are you making bit bigger than you? Then my third takeaway was prepare to win. And this goes back to how they won the award. And I love this. He said we were preparing and planning one year in advance of our application for Microsoft partner of the year. And we knew it was gonna take a year of plotting planning, preparing, and we did not expect to win. We totally went into this as a practice round and they still started planning a year in advance. Now they won probably because they did it a year in advance. But how many of us have this feeling of if like it’s not working in three months or six months?
AJV (52:11):
Well, it’s just not gonna work. Y’all, that’s not how business works. That’s not how building a brand works. That’s not how building a reputation works. You can’t meet someone one time and expect them to expect them to trust you. There has to be exchange, right? There has to be repetition. There does have to be time involved and that requires patience. And that’s not something a lot of people have today, but you have to have patience, right? It’s so important, such a great business and just life reminder of you have to prepare to win. And if, and if you don’t consider it a practice, but don’t give up, right. There’s a difference between quitting and failing. I say as quickly, and as often as you can, but don’t quit. Don’t give up, just fail more so you can get better and keep learning but prepare to win, love that.
AJV (52:59):
And then last but not least, this is a bonus takeaway. His he said this at the end of like, we just have a really simple model. Like, no, this is an entire business plan is one plus one, right? In order to scale, a very successful business, all you have to do is focus on impressing one person and then get that one person to introduce you to one more person and press that person and get them to introduce you to one more person, repeat over and over and over. And after a little while that one plus one plus one, plus one becomes many, many, many, right. But focus on doing a good job for the one and get that one person to introduce you to that next, love it so much brilliant. So many insights. Not just because he’s a personal Brent generally he’s one of the smartest people I know. He is so fascinating. So if you haven’t gone back, go back, listen to this episode. But then also go download this study. You can visit mobile mentor.com and get a free download of this new endpoint ecosystem study. How do you secure your company and your personal brand until next time? We’ll see you later at the influential personal brand.

Ep 258: How to Execute a Book Launch with Chandler Bolt

RV (00:07):
You know, it’s, it’s not all that often that we’ll bring somebody on the show who services an audience that’s closely connected to ours, but we do it for Chandler bolt. And the reason is cuz I, I love Chandler, I believe in Chandler and I’ve known Chandler for a really, really long time. And we’ve heard great things about everything that he does at self-publishing school. So he’s the CEO of a company called self-publishing school and he’s the author of several books and his most recent book is called published the proven page from blank page to 10,000 copies sold. And that’s what we’re gonna talk about today. You, I was showing Chandler before we kicked off, like I’ve gone through like the whole back half of this book especially like, and just earmarked stuff and underlined stuff. And I love how practical it is.
RV (01:02):
I love that, you know, what Chandler does is like a very, you don’t have to be famous to do this. It’s like, these are things that anybody with a book can do. This is actually the second time that we have had ’em on the show. We did another episode a while back where we talked about basically how to construct a cell published book. And then now we’re gonna talk about what do you do once you have the book in your hand and how do you launch it? You can go to brand builders, group.com/sps. Okay. So brand builders, group.com/sps which is self-publishing school. That’s our affiliate link that if you wanna check out a free training beyond what we talk about with Chandler, I’ll mention that again. But the book again, published the proven path from blank page to 10,000 copies sold Chandler bolt, brother.
RV (01:52):
Welcome back to the show.
CB (01:54):
Great to be here. Thank you for having me.
RV (01:57):
I’m so proud of you, dude. Like you are serving your audience, you, you serve such a, a specific in, in such a deep way. You’ve made a great business out of it. Your ink 5,000 business, you guys are booming and you just really, you know, in the world of self-publishing, it’s just like, you just know this, this space inside and out. So my first question for you is, is there anything that has changed about self-publishing in like the last two years specifically? So obviously there’s been a lot of talk about how traditional publishing is changing and why you might self-publish by the way, one other little disclaimer for everybody, if you’re a traditionally published author or you want to be, I promise that this episode be extremely relevant to you, like sure. So it, even though self-publishing is sort of Chandler like bread and butter, these principles, I mean, that’s why I took notes cuz I’m like, I’m gonna some of these things I’d never heard before. I’m gonna do ’em but what what’s changed recently.
CB (02:59):
Yeah. There’s a lot of changes and, and you’re right, Rory, everything we teach, well, I’d say probably 80% of what we teach you can do, whether you’re self-published or traditionally published. And there’s a lot of good crossover, but you know, kind of over the last, you know, over the last couple decades self-publishing has become the preferred option. For most authors people who wanna make more royalties key, keep creative control, have flexibility, move faster through the process, you know, used to be that the only way you sold books is to get into bookstores will now 70% of all books sold or, or are sold on Amazon. So that’s been a massive shift. It continues to shift. And then the shift over the last couple of years is that it’s just gotten more competitive, just writing and publishing a great book isn’t enough anymore. And, and you know, it used to be in the early days of self-publishing it was like, oh, if you just put it on Amazon, it’s gonna sell.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
And there’s so many buyers, there’s not a ton of competition, but the market has gotten more sophisticated. You know, kind of like the levels of market market sophistication. So it’s gotten more, it’s gotten more competitive. And there’s a bunch of things that have progressed. And I think it’s a really exciting time to publish a book and to self-publish, but the big thing, and I think what we’ll be talking about today on, on this interview is you’ve got to learn sales and marketing. I mean, obviously we are, we, and then both of our companies are very aligned on this is like, Hey, you’ve got to learn and invest time, money and energy and, and become friends with Sam sales and marketing. And, and if you build it, they will not come. You have to tell them about it. And so, I mean, that’s with your book, that’s with your business, it’s, there’s their synergy across the board.
RV (04:32):
Yeah. I, I’m excited about that. Part of the conversation. One of the things that we were talking about recently with some of our members is that, you know, I Pete there’s, this people are pure artists, right? They go, ah, you know, I just wanna create my art. I wanna create my art. And what we realize is that marketing is art. Like marketing is part of your artistry. Like what good is the greatest painting that nobody ever sees or the greatest book that no one reads or the greatest music. Of course your brother is in my all time, favorite re band need to breathe. So any of you need to breathe fans out there, Chandler’s brother, it plays and they like if no one hears the music, like what good is it? And so marketing has to be part of your artistry.
RV (05:17):
You know, the, the other thing that, you know, when I look at what you’ve done, what is happening in the marketplace, you know, there’s always been these things that, that traditionally published authors do like book launches and media tours and, and book tours and bookstore signings and all that stuff. But in the self-published world, there’s been this whole immersion of, or, or immersion of like tactical things that anybody can do if they’re not famous and they don’t have a huge email list and they don’t have millions of social media followers. So talk us through that. Like, how do you even start? How do you even start to think about your launch if you’re, you know, if you’re not Insta famous, like what do, if you can’t get on good morning America? Like, what do you do?
Speaker 2 (06:03):
Yeah. And, and so I, I look at this in a few different ways, so you’ve got the, what are the, what are the fundamentals of a bestseller? So how do I make sure I structure the book in a way that it’s gonna sell well, long term, then you’ve got kind of what I call the envy P launch, which minimum viable product launch, or you’ve got the traditional launch. And so a, a lot of, a lot, if you’ve ever seen a book launch, I mean, it’s the traditional book launch. I mean, like a traditional published book, it follows what I would call the traditional launch and that’s chapter 19 in, in the new book. And then chapter chapter 18 is MVP launch, but really it comes to down to, and I don’t know if anyone will see the video version of this, but it comes down to a, what I call the launch triangle.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
Right? And so it’s these three core elements you’ve got first off creating a launch team, second off, getting reviews and then third off its promotions. And so the, the first two, I mean, it doesn’t matter what type of launch you’re doing create a launch team, which is a small group of people that support you or the topic of your book, right. Could be 15 people, 50 people could be more, they get a free digital copy ahead of launch. And then they leave a review on day one. So now all of a sudden you’ve got 1550 reviews, right. Outta the gates. And this is kind of an army of people who support your book, right. Or the topic of that book. And so these could be family members, friends, customers, all that. So you’ve got launch team that helps with reviews. And then you’ve got the, the third component is promotions and that’s kind of the accordion is how I look at it.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
And so that’s based on the time that you have the money that you have, the resources and energy that you wanna put behind this and is on also somewhat correlated to whether you’re self-publishing or traditional traditionally publishing, right. Is how much are you you putting into this, the success of this launch, and that’s where you can kind of accordion based on that. And so these, those are kind of the three fundamentals of, of the launch. And then I think there’s an important distinction, which is I, I talk about the the Lamber launch versus the Toyota Camry launch. Okay. Or the Toyota Camry approach. And just, most people look at book launches like a Lamborghini and, and, and, you know, Lamborghini, they’re fast, they’re sexy. They use up a lot of fuel, so they’re gone. Right. And so, so they use up all this energy on week one and launch week, and they don’t realize that it’s not, yes, launch week is important, but it’s more about I call the Toyota Camry approach.
Speaker 2 (08:26):
It’s like, how do I just create a book that sells for years and for decades? And that is the mindset of what I call the one year launch. And so launch your launch. It’s not a week, it’s a year. And I forget, this is a quote that I, I was reading this book the other day and I, and I, and I, I saw that and I was like, yes, that’s the one year launch. It’s a mindset to keep marketing your book after the launch. So I think all those things kind of combined to set up the book for success. And then that book goes out and brings back more, leads, more sales, more referrals for your business, builds your personal brand, all that good stuff.
RV (09:06):
Yeah. I think of one of my good friends is Phil M Jones. He wrote exactly what to say which is a self-published book that sold a million copy and he sells them because it’s the only book he has and he sells it constantly. And he creates custom versions, like for Remax and for like, and he’ll sell 200 at a time, a thousand at a time, like, and it’s just, you know, it it’s, he built his whole career on, on this. He has some other books too, but really that’s, that’s the one yeah, so that’s so great. So let’s talk about the launch team real quick, because there are different ways to get on the launch team, right? So a lot of our clients that we’ve worked with that are, you know, maybe have a larger following online, they make people buy the book to get on the launch team. But then if you’re a newer author, maybe you’re like a, you’re a younger author, or you just don’t have as big of a platform for whatever reason. Usually you just kind of make the ask for people to join. So how do you, what, what do you do there in terms of getting people onto the team?
Speaker 2 (10:14):
That’s a great question. That’s the thing about having new concepts as you gotta look ’em up I’m like, look, I’m, I’m flipping up in the book. I’m like, right. What are so when I think about team, so you’re right. I love the, if you’ve got an experience or if you’ve got an existing audience, either having them apply or having them buy a book as a, as a, as a prerequisite to join, I think that’s super smart. Because at the end of the it’s quality, not quantity. Mm. You don’t want a bajillion, half committed people on, on your launch team. You want less but better. Right. And so I look at team as an acronym. So T a M so the T stands for tell everyone, you know, about the launch team and just in a clear, concise way a or, sorry, the E stands for enroll. The people who say, Hey, I’m interested in that, right. Who’d be interested in a free digital copy of the book. And to C the behind the scenes of the launch, people raise their hand and supporting the launch. Okay. E is in enroll, instead of expectations, a is ask for review, which is like, dove, of course you would do that. A lot of people, I mean, very specifically, I wanna
RV (11:20):
Talk about reviews in a second, cuz it’s not as much of a does you would think, so. Keep going. All right. Ask for, review
Speaker 2 (11:27):
It really. Yeah. And so ask for a review and then M stands for a message everyone individually and follow up because you don’t just send out one mass email and say, Hey, everyone, leave a review. It’s launched day, but the, the powers in the follow up. So that’s how I look at a launch team. And then you’ve kind of got the two ways to recruit your launch team, which is kind of what you talked about, which is, Hey, either mass outreach, like, Hey, I’ve already got a big audience. And I could just blast out an email and say, who wants to be on the launch team or for a lot of people who are getting started. It’s one to one and sure. I might have a small social media following or family and friends, that sort of thing. But it’s in one to one conversations about the book leading up to the launch, that’s where you really build, build a healthy launch team. And then, then you’re launching with reviews and with momentum.
RV (12:11):
So
RV (12:14):
You get the people on. Okay. And you can do, I mean, one of the things that’s, I mean, there are some amazing things about a lot of amazing things about self-publishing one of which is that you can do things like get a free audio copy of the book or get a free PE book version of it. I mean, it is really things like that, especially if you’re are just beginning and you’re just starting out, like you can really use it as a list builder and credibility booster and lead magnet and all the things that a book really should be. You, if you, you are traditionally publishing, you can’t do some of that, but you can give away, sometimes your publisher will say, give away the first three chapters or the first chapter, or, you know, there’s other, and you can use to get people to join. We go through a bunch of ’em in, in our training, but once the people are there, okay. What do you do with them? And also, is it, is it typically a Facebook group? Is that typically the mechanism you’re using to manage the launch team?
Speaker 2 (13:13):
Yeah, that’s what I like to do. I I’d say go where your audience is. Right. And so is your audience on Facebook? Awesome. Do that is your audience somewhere else do that and you, I, I would do dual, so Facebook and email, so, so that it’s, you’re getting in front of people and, but then it’s pretty simple. I mean, you form the launch team a few weeks before launch, and then I like to give them one assignment per week for the two to three weeks leading up to the launch and starting with reading the book ahead of time. And then the most important thing is that they leave a review on day one. I mean, that’s kind of like, you can very clearly communicate expectations. That’s the E and team right. Is expectations setting. And so just saying, Hey, if you do nothing else, I need you to leave a review on day one as part of this. And so mark this on your calendar, set a reminder on your phone, whatever you need to do, like that is the most important thing. Anything else is a bonus above that, right? Because that’s, what’s gonna help drive the book long term is the social proof. It boosts your discoverability on Amazon and all other PLA like that is what kind of feeds the flywheel for long term book sales.
RV (14:21):
Yeah. So, so you’re gonna say, read the book, leave a review. And then other than that, it might just be like, you know, make this post on social media. Yeah. Or, you know, send this email to your friends and family like that. It’s just all that kind of, it’s not rocket science. It’s just like following up with them. And it, it really hit me hard when you were like in, so in, in the book again, the book is published, it’s called published the proven path from blank page to 10,000 copies. So we’ll link to it in Amazon on our, on our site in a show notes following up with people one on one and like, yeah, going, Hey, I, yeah, I run, I need your help. Would you be willing to help me?
Speaker 2 (15:00):
Yes. Yes. And, and being very specific, which that’s the piece about reviews, right? Is, is give them an exact link on where to leave a review. Right. And this is one thing that, that might help with your, your clients and, and with book launches that you do as well is just a quick link. That’s easy to remember. And so for me, it’s published book.com/review brand builders.com/like what, whatever the URL is for that person, or then forward
RV (15:29):
The
Speaker 2 (15:29):
URL slash review, and then us forwards to the exact place on Amazon, where they can select the stars and fill out the form. And then anytime you’re asking for a review, I mean, I do it in the book, but then obviously within this context is specifically to your launch team. You say, Hey, go directly to this page and leave a review, take two minutes to do it today. Okay. Our goal is ex by the end, like just very specific. And then anytime someone says something positive about the book, it’s like, Hey, thank you so much. Would you mind copying pacing that into our review link?
RV (16:02):
So I have a confession to make, and I want you to slap me and tell me what I should do. So we have completely ignored reviews, never, never driven people there. Take the stairs still sells very, very well. My second book doesn’t sell as well. But my, my very first book still sells, you know, pretty consistently. And you know, we have, we had, we had 300, we had 300 units last week. Like we get these, we get pops of like big 300, 600 unit weeks. Of course, if I’m speaking, it’s more. And one of the things that we did is we had a, we have like you talk about inside your manuscript, you have to offer lead magnets, right? So you put a link to go download a lead magnet. So we, we did that. We created a test called the focus 40 to test. We’ve been so busy building brand builders group. The last three years, we have completely ignored. All of those people haven’t even looked at it. We just looked at it and we found that 1000 people last year, apparently bought, take the stairs, read it, saw the link, went to the link, filled out the assessment, and then they’ve just sat there and I’m going, we don’t even have a thousand reviews on the book.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
Yeah.
RV (17:24):
We have like 700 reviews. And so I’m just like, I have just missed the boat on the reviews. So why do reviews matter and what we do to, to really drive them? I mean, we’re clear on the launch team. That’s a great one. Yeah. And I hear you saying they can’t leave a review until the pub date. Of course. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:44):
Yeah.
RV (17:45):
But what do you do after the fact and like, what
Speaker 2 (17:48):
Should I do? Yeah. Oh, that’s a great question. Or I I’d say I mean they matter cuz they highly impact Amazon’s ranking, right? So there’s two ways you discover, well there’s two or three ways that people discover books. Right. They’re searching for something on Amazon. So they’re actively searching for a book or someone refers it to them and maybe there’s which you’re looking in like a category that they like and saying, Hey, what are the top sellers here? But really it’s the first two. And so how do you show up in search? Well, keywords categories and then reviews because obviously it’s like Amazon is a search engine of buyers. Google is a search engine of browsers. So when people go to Amazon, they got a reason to buy stuff, right. They one click purchase, their credit card is on file. So I wanna bring them into my ecosystem and then show up when they search topics that are what I would call high buyer intent for my business.
Speaker 2 (18:40):
Right. So for us, if they’re searching how to write a book, how to publish a book, like those things we know through all of our content marketing, I mean, that’s someone, who’s a buyer for self public. And so reviews help fulfill that for Amazon. Right. Because they wanna say let’s recommend stuff that they’re most likely to like, well, how do we know that as Amazon? Well, other people said they like it. How do they say they like it through reviews? Right? This is not anything that you don’t know. But what I would do like one or two very practical things that I would task to your this week or next week is I would send a follow up email to anyone who’s ever opted in to that challenge or anything related to take the stairs, the book specifically. Yes. And I would do the book specifically and I would do some sort of giveaway.
Speaker 2 (19:28):
And it’s you know, Hey, if you’re getting this emails because you, you checked out, take the stairs. I’d love to hear what you think. Take two minutes to go here and leave a review on the book. I’m gonna read everyone. So, and I’m gonna randomly pick 10 people who click this link and send you a signed copy of take the stairs. You don’t have to, you know, you don’t have to you don’t have to leave a review to enter to win, but you can click this link and I’d love for you to leave a review and hear what you think. I did that one time got 188 reviews in 48 hours. So that works unbelievably well, second piece that I would do, and this is most important for long term. I’d do this with every book that you have is I called a us the review sweeper.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
It’s just a simple automated email sequence, three email sequence. And anytime anyone opts into anything related to the book, they get dropped into this follow up sequence. 21 days later, they get an email from you that says, Hey, looks like you grabbed a copy of my book. A few weeks ago. I’d love to hear what you think hit reply on this email. What do you think about the book so far? And then your team, you got kind of a customer support macro that just says, Hey, oh, Hey, if it’s positive, obviously is, oh, Hey, thank you so much. Like this is really helpful. Would you mind copying pacing that into an Amazon review? Here’s the link? So you’re kind of doing a two step into leaving the review and then, you know, maybe you have a, a, a, if they don’t reply to that, you’ve got one or two other emails. That’s like, Hey I’m not gonna bother you about this anymore, but I’d love for you to take two minutes today and leave a review with what you think about the book. So I love it.
RV (21:05):
I
Speaker 2 (21:05):
Love that. I mean that I call it the review sweeper, cuz it just sweeps in reviews month after month, year after year, I’ve
RV (21:11):
Heard that you can’t incentivize an Amazon review. Is that, have you heard that?
Speaker 2 (21:17):
Correct? You cannot pay for a review and you cannot in like, I will give you X, Y, Z, if you leave a review. Correct.
RV (21:25):
Okay. But you, you could say leave a review to be entered in a drawing and that’s different.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
I’m going all the way up to the line. So I’m saying click this link. I’m gonna click, I’m gonna select 10 random people who click this link. This Link’s gonna take you to where you can leave a review. I’d love for you to leave a review. You don’t have to leave a review.
RV (21:46):
Oh. But basically if click the link, you, the click, the link is the entry
Speaker 2 (21:50):
Point. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And I’m not doing what Amazon doesn’t wanna do is, Hey, I’ll give you a $10 Amazon gift card or I’ll give you blah, blah, blah. If you leave a review, because then that’s compromising the integrity of the review system. But kind of going up to that line while still staying within Amazon’s guidelines and hooking people up and saying, Hey, I’d love for you to leave a review kind of in the process.
RV (22:13):
Yeah. And I’ve also heard people say, just send them a free gift, you know, kind of like a, a law reciprocity. Just send them a free gift. Hey, thank you. I love hope you love the book. Here’s another free gift. You know, by the way, if you ever get a chance, I’d love a review and that’s totally fair game to do. Cause it’s not a quid pro quo. Exactly. Type of type of thing. So so that’s, I, I love that. It’s so as many
Speaker 2 (22:36):
Readers you got, I bet you do that on take the stairs. You’ll be over a thousand reviews within the next three months.
RV (22:42):
Do you think I would get flagged for sending a blast to like whatever that list is?
Speaker 2 (22:47):
No, I, I,
RV (22:48):
I mean it shouldn’t, it’s just a bunch of people, but it, they would probably see the pretty big spike. That’s amazing. You got 188 reviews in 48 hours. That’s like a third of the total reviews I’ve gotten in 10 years.
Speaker 2 (22:59):
Like it’s crazy. That’s amazing,
RV (23:00):
Dude.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
It’s well, cuz that’s the big thing. Right? The overarching thing that I think maybe is major takeaway for listeners is ask like so many people to, they want to help and they enjoyed the book, but all you have to do is just say, Hey, could you take two minutes today to leave a review exactly here. Right? Like here’s the link. So I’m making it as easy as possible and just asking and then doing so you’ve probably got hundreds, if not thousands of people on the sidelines that are like, oh yeah, I love that book. You, but I never left a review. Right. When’s the last time you left a review on a book, unless it was audible at the very end, like, Hey right now, like please click the start. I mean, you know, you got a physical book, you set it down. You’re like, oh, that was good. And I’m not gonna log into Amazon. So it’s like leave review and all that. But, but if someone asks, I’m like, oh, I like that book. Sure. I I’d take two seconds, two minutes to leave review. So,
RV (23:53):
So I love it, man. This, this is the kind of stuff that I’m talking about. Y’all so again Chandler has a, a training brand builders, group.com/s P S. That is where you can go watch the, the free training. That’s our affiliate link. You can check it out, you know you can tell like he he’s giving the goods, right? Like he’s not holding stuff back cuz he’s got a lot of stuff to offer. One of the reasons why we, we love him. It’s not like he can teach you everything. He knows in one 30 minute podcast interview coming back to the search thing in Amazon. Yeah. So the keywords and all of that, that you know, it makes sense just like YouTube is a search engine, just like, you know, Google is a search engine. Amazon is a search engine. Where do you actually go to optimize the profile? Like where do you go to say, I want this book to show up for these terms.
Speaker 2 (24:47):
Yeah. there’s well, there’s a bunch of stuff and, and Amazon doesn’t publicly give information about the, their algorithm, just like Google doesn’t, but we know, I mean you just know what their major influences on that. Right? And so the first they give you seven keywords. So Amazon does, when you publish the book. Now, if you’re traditionally publishing, you can recommend to your publisher. But at the end of the day they’re gonna have kind of the final call and final hands on keys for that. That’s another benefit of self-publishing, but they give you seven keywords that you can target. Those are helpful, but really more so than that, I mean, Amazon’s gotten a lot more sophisticated. It used to be that you could just put that in your keywords and in your title or subtitling, your description is like, cool, no on ranking for this, but like all algorithms they learn and get better.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
And so what they’re trying to say is they’re kind of aggregating a lot of search and when people search these things, they end up on this book and they purchase it. Right. And, and they’re going into the me metadata of the book and, and there’s a bunch of different things like that. So for me, strategic, like if you even look at the table of contents for my book, I’m thinking like I’m thinking in SEO and also in helpful content. Right. So if you see like we’ve got let’s see self-publishing versus traditional and publishing that’s chapter three, we’ve got how to hire and work with an editor that’s chapter nine designing your best selling book cover that’s chapter 11, chapter 12. How to format your book. Right. I, I mean, I could go on and on how to build, how to using a team to sell more books.
RV (26:21):
You’re choosing titles, like chapter titles that people would search for answer a question, same way you would construct a YouTube bid or something like that. Is this reverse, reverse engineer. What would someone be searching for? Are you saying that you, your hypothesis is that Amazon reads the book and can under no doubt the con yeah,
Speaker 2 (26:42):
Really. And, and I think it’s probably a tree, right? That we’re the top things are the keywords, your title and subtitle, your book description. And then I would guess like your back cover your editorial reviews and like maybe some reviews and stuff like that. But I think it pretty summer along that path that goes inside the actual book, because previously people were just gaming it and they were just keyword, stuffing, all the other stuff. So it’s like, Amazon’s gotta go in and say, right, what is this actually? And they’ve got a text file of the whole book, right. It’s if it’s
RV (27:14):
Self publish
Speaker 2 (27:16):
Kindle. Well, no I’m saying like the version, like, yeah, they’ve got a text file. And so it’s very easy for, to aggregate that and improve their search quality. And then that combined with all the other machine learning around what people are searching, what they’re clicking on.
RV (27:31):
Yeah. So, but title, I mean, it’s just the things you would think title subtitle, but there’s not, it’s not like on a webpage where you can go in the back and change your H one tags and your H two tags and update your image, tags and stuff like that. You can’t do that on Amazon book.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
Not quite. I look at that as selecting my keywords. I look at that as like the actual, the structure of the blog post. Okay. The structure of the book. And then I look also look at that as you know, some of the things that you do on the page itself. Cause that’s another thing. I mean, my we’re getting the, I weigh into the weeds, but I mean, when I, your Amazon page, that’s the sales page for your book and people are either gonna come on there for a, a, you know, 15 seconds and leave or a minute and a half and buy. And so on this note I look at, and if you look at my my book page for publish, we’ve been testing and, but we’ve got they call it a plus content. So there’s extra pictures. There’s from the back cover, there’s video reviews.
Speaker 2 (28:30):
There’s a bunch of stuff that’s designed to keep people on the page because the longer that they’re on that page, the more likely they are to buy. And then there’s something like within that. Sure. That there’s a, an image. That’s how to write a book. There’s an image. That’s how to publish a, there’s an image that sell more books and I’m titling those images. I don’t know if that has anything, like, I don’t know if that does anything for my Amazon SEO or not. They won’t tell me, but but that keeps them on the actual page. And then makes it, makes the book stand out and makes them more likely to actually purchase the book.
RV (29:04):
I’m looking at your, I looking at your Amazon page. Yeah. From the publisher. You have pictures in there. Yeah. And that, again, those are things you can’t do when you’re tr you can, you can do them. If you traditionally publish, the problem is you’re not in control of it. You have to convince them to take the time to stop and go update your Amazon page. Meanwhile, they’ve got other authors who are selling, you know, bazillion books every week.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
Yeah.
RV (29:30):
That’s you
Speaker 2 (29:31):
Can tinker with that. Well, I’ll tell you R one of the things I’m trying to figure out right now Michael Bunge, senior wrote a book called the coaching habit. Great book had him on the self publishing school podcast. One thing he did his book page is really good. And I’m, I’m, I’ve got one of the guys on my team trying to figure out how we can do this right now. But is he uploaded a video? It’s a video from the merchant and he’s his, self-published that, I mean, that book sold million, if not millions of copies as well, but he’s got a video that’s from the author which I think is really clever. It’s right. Bef as you get to the reviews, cuz again, I’m trying to figure out how do I get this to jump off the page to where people say, oh, I I’m interested.
Speaker 2 (30:11):
Like this stands out from the other books or other things that I’ve looked at and increasing that final mile kind of that conversion. So we haven’t figured it out yet, but I also encourage people to lead video reviews. And you’ll notice that when you’re on my book page, as well as there’s at least a few of them and th those and I, that’s a, that’s a hack, I think as well is leaving video reviews on other people’s books that are similar authors or SIM it’s. Hey, my name Chandler bowl. I wrote a book called published. I’d love to give this review, take the stairs. Right. And then that’s just a way where those videos are getting a lot of traffic because they’re prominent. And if I’m, if I’m someone scanning this, you don’t see it too often. So I think that’s kind of a hidden gem within the
RV (30:55):
It’s like a, yeah. A pattern like a pattern interrupt kind of a thing. Yeah,
Speaker 2 (30:59):
Exactly, exactly.
RV (31:00):
I was just, I was just looking at my Michael’s thing. That’s awesome. The yeah, I mean, I just, I think I just totally missed the boat on, on the review scenario. So when you,
RV (31:14):
Yeah, so, so, so when you get into, so you have your launch team, you put this together you gotta drive reviews. You have a simple my for doing that when it comes to promotion. Yeah, I believe that was, that’s the other part of this of course time and money. Yeah. You know, costs a lot relationships count for a lot. Right. A lot, a lot. Like even, I mean, that’s almost all we’re doing with our clients is we’re just constantly trying to introduce them to people that are sort of like, you know, in their same ballpark, you know, if you had to, if you had to do three things, when it comes to promotion and you were like, these are three things that I would do that, you know, maybe you don’t hear about that often. What, what comes to mind?
Speaker 2 (31:59):
Yeah. I would say the launch team, if you, if you do nothing else to do that I would say the second piece
RV (32:06):
Would be, I’ve never done that by the way. I’ve never done that for one, not for one of mine. We’ve done ’em for our, our clients, but yeah. Yeah. So that’s a good, good one. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:13):
That’s unbelievably powerful. That’s that’s the highest and, and best. Then I would say, and this, I don’t know that this is gonna fulfill the intent of, of, of stuff that doesn’t get taught, but it’s tried, I mean, a virtual book tour, AKA, a bunch of podcast interviews. I mean, that is far and away, the biggest needle mover. And then the third piece is is building a pre-release list or building an email list. I mean, like, again, this is not earth shattering information, but those things tried and true work well. And then if you’re going big one thing I’ve had some success with and we had success with is I sent, you know, I sent you one of these influencer boxes. And so it’s just a fun little box. It has a copy of the book in it. And then you’ll probably notice if you remember from that letter, it was very much no obligation, cuz I hate when people send me a book and then they just like relentlessly follow up and it’s like, it’s like, oh this is a quid pro quo type deal where you just, so it was very much like, Hey, I’m sending this because I think you’ll love it.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
If you’re in this camp, go to this chapter. If you’re in, if you wanna use a book to grow your business, go to chapter 24, if you’re blah, blah, blah. So showing how it could be relevant to them and then saying, if you want to help, here’s two or three ways to do it. Right. Bring me on your podcast, take a picture with the book and post about it. Or, you know, I’m happy to give a, do a book giveaway to your audience or something like that. Right. So making it very clear how people can support similar to the, the, the, how they can leave a review, like very specifically saying, Hey, here’s how you can help. That’s worked well for me. And then, I mean, and then if we’re zooming out 30,000 foot is how do you strategically use the book to grow your business? Right? Because that’s, I mean, all that stuff is good to sell copies, but at the end of the day, most people who are listening to this probably wanna use a book to get more leads, sales, and referrals. And so structuring the book to do that and structuring the launch with that end in mind.
RV (34:14):
Well brand builders, group.com/sps for self-publishing school is the free training that Chandler put together. The book is called published, proven path from link page to 10,000 copies sold. You know, I think a lot of this stuff is simple, but what makes it hard is remembering all of it and doing it in the right order. And you’ve done a great job of checklisting some stuff out here I think to apply to anybody. And there’s not that many books. I mean, we, we created our bestseller launch plan course because it was like, nobody actually knows how to do this stuff. So there’s not that many resources. And this is, this is a great one. So check it out, y’all check out Chandler and so grateful for you, man. You’ve been so generous. Like this is super tactical stuff. You’re helping me like figure out things that we, we, we missed the boat on of completely. I mean, two thirds of everything you’re talking about, we’ve never been done. We’ve never done launch team. We’ve never done reviews. So we got, we got things that we could be doing and yeah. I just wish you, you and your team and your family all the best.
Speaker 2 (35:15):
Thank you, Roy. Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 3 (35:18):
Hey, brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much are 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 dot slash podcall brand builders, group.com/podcall. We hope to talk to you soon.
RV (36:05):
Executing book launches. One of my favorite things to talk about one of my favorite things to do, although it’s a lot of work you know, we’ve been through this so many times we’ve helped so many clients launch books. I mean, we had three clients at the New York times bestseller list last year. We have at least two clients that are gonna make a real run at it this year. And I, I mean, actually at least at least three, I can think of off the top of four. I can think of four off the top of my head brand builders, clients that are gonna make a run at the New York times list. But I, I, I love this conversation with Chandler because you know, it, it shows how there’s something you can, it shows you, it’s like, there’s something we can all do and you need to do it when, when you launch a book.
RV (36:51):
And I, and I’ll tell you this even though this conversation with Chandler was much more focused on people who have like, you know, a small all our platform, just like not as many followers and maybe not as, not as many like assets in terms of their direct reach and the number of people they can access. A executing a New York times bestselling launch is a lot of these same things, just at a bigger scale. Like we still do. We still do launch teams. And you know, launch teams are a big part of that, you know, reviews. The promotion is a huge part. You layer in a lot more, you, you have, you know, speaking as a component that we talk about and then you’ve got doing public seminars is a huge part of it. And so that, that enters into it.
RV (37:36):
And then you have like press and media, like tradit channel media is, is a huge part of it. And then, and then you have like podcasts then you have social media, then you have street launch team. And then you have like the whole mechanism of like, actually, you know, how do you get all the orders placed doing bulk sales and like, how do you get people to, to, you know, anyways, those are the things that we help, like some of our very high profile clients that you see on our website and stuff. A lot of them we’ve, we’ve helped do that, but you know, even though that’s a lot like, and there’s a lot there there is the, again, it’s just a greater, it’s just a greater magnitude of the simple things. A lot of the simple things talking about here with, with Chandler.
RV (38:23):
So, you know, my three takeaways, first of all, is just the launch team because th this, even though I’ve never had one, we’d never used one for our books. We ha it’s been a, it’s been a crucial part of like every launch that we have run for people. And that several of our friends who have, you know, move a lot of books that they have done. It’s just one of the things that you do and, and you gotta recruit people in. So you’re gonna give them some incentive to join, right? But it’s not rocket science. You do have to have a mechanism to do this, whether it’s a website or you’re just using like a Facebook group or whatever, but, you know, you give some incentive to join the launch team. And then the key to managing that launch team is to give them specific action items of exactly what to do every single week and in our a traffic strategies training, which is our phase two course phase two course, two training of our 12 part brand builder journey curriculum.
RV (39:26):
We, we teach affiliate launches and how to do affiliate launches and why affiliate launches matter. One of the reasons why that matters is because all, a lot of the mechanisms and the, the process and the protocol of running an affiliate launch is going to be very much emulated when you get to bestseller launch plan, which is our phase three course two and you know, much of what we’re talking about here. And so you need to, you need to, to know how to create assets for other people and how to keep them excited and how to hold them accountable and how to ask them to share things. And, and so that’s a huge part of the launch team, but you gotta, you gotta have that launch team and bring them in early and let them see behind the scenes and spend time building relationships with them.
RV (40:08):
And they’ll help you promote your book. They, they, they will. So that’s really huge. The second thing that that Chandler said, which this was newer to me, I, I mean, I’ve never heard it said like this, I thought this was so sharp the way he said it. Amazon is a search engine of buyers, whereas Google is a search engine of browsers. And that’s really true, right? I mean I mean, there is when you’re searching for something on Amazon, like you are searching to buy, you are not spending free time, like just searching around for no reason you go to Amazon to buy something. And that’s, yeah, I think YouTube specifically is a search engine of browsers. Like those are people just like searching for information. The there’s certainly a level of buying intent. You know, when you search on Google often too which is different from like you know, paper, click ads where you’re trying to, to shove an advertisement in front of somebody versus showing up when they, they do a search.
RV (41:18):
Amazon is, is definitely a next level of that. And so, you know, very similarly because of that, you have to think of your Amazon page is your sales page. So just like we would teach you to construct a sales page for your funnels. Of course, you know, our method for that is what we call the 15 P the 15 P of copywriting, which we teach inside of revenue engine. But like, those are the, you know, the words that you put on the page to get somebody to, to buy. And we talk about all the things that need to be on there. You know, the promised the, the, the, the promised the problem, the pain et cetera, cetera, as you work your way down and the order, well, your Amazon page is a sales page. And like for whatever reason, that never sunk in with me quite in the way it did in the moment that Chandler said that, and going, man, you need to optimize that page.
RV (42:10):
You know, you just gotta like pay 10 to it and, and think about what can I do to make this page more engaging? What can I do to keep, make it more valuable? What can I make it to, you know, what can I put on there to make it, you know, more user friendly and, and to encourage them making a decision, which leads to the third big takeaway for me, which was obviously a huge part of that conversation is which is review. You gotta get reviews. And I think, I mean, here’s the part that, like, I haven’t just missed the boat on reviews. I’ve missed the boat on Amazon altogether. Like, I haven’t even thought about optimizing anything related to my profile or the book itself or reviews, or even, you know, looking at my Amazon page, like other than popping in there once in a while, because we’re buying a copy and it’s just easier to send it to somebody through Amazon versus shipping it ourself, or, you know, something like that.
RV (43:05):
Or occasionally we’ll check like best seller rankings and stuff to see how, how the book is doing long tail, but to go, oh my gosh, like you gotta get reviews and all you have to do is ask for. And so my action item that I gave myself was to do, you know, Chandler calls it, this, the review sweep. I’m just calling, you know, I’m just calling this like the review sequence. And so we already have mechanisms built inside of both of our books that, that have people on opt in. And so I actually did the search between when I finished the interview with Chandler. And we have 2,102 people in our database, 2000 people in our database that we know bought the book, read the book, clicked on the assessment and completed the assessment. The meanwhile I have 723 reviews on Amazon that is crazy like 2100 people in the database that we know bought and only 700 reviews on Amazon.
RV (44:09):
And these are just the ones we know, like we have a huge database. I’m, I’m sure that we’ve got many more, many more people inside of the database who have bought the book. And I just, I’ve just totally missed the boat. So I you know, first wanted to identify the list. So I had to go like, you know, fortunately we’re very organized with how we keep our database and all of our tagging structure and all this, all this kind of stuff. So I was able to pull that up quickly, then I’m writing an email to all of these people. That is the subject line. Super duper quick question for you. And then I wrote this, this copy, Hey, you know, Hey, you know, name, thank you so much for buying a copy of my first book, take stairs and for completing our, our focused 40 self-assessment.
RV (44:51):
I have a quick question for you. 20, 22 actually marks the 10 year anniversary of the book, yada, yada, what were some of your biggest highlights from the take the stairs book? And we’re gonna send this out and then everyone that replies, we are going to reply back with a, a message. Oh, that’s so wonderful. Thank you for sharing that with me. Any chance you would leave a review, so we’re gonna do this because it needs to happen and it’s time it’s long overdue and yeah. So stay tuned. You know, I’ll probably by the time that this episode goes live, we will have done this and we will have data to report back to you, but, you know, that’s simple, like it’s, it’s simple things I think launching a book is it, it’s kind of like, you know, people say there’s death by a thousand paper cuts.
RV (45:42):
Well, launching a book is like success by a thousand micro steps. It’s it is doing all of these little things and they all add up to be a big thing, but it’s, it’s a lot of just little minute details like this that you, you have to, you have to build into your process. And of course, if you wanna learn more about that, we, one of our courses is called bestseller launch plan. We teach the full system, how do the bestseller list work? How do you get the book deal? What needs to be the book proposal, you know, how to negotiate advances how to write the book so that it sells what needs to be inside. How do you create the pre-sales? How do you do the pre-launch? How do you run, you know, all the orders through, how do you you know, what do you do on launch week?
RV (46:26):
What do you do with the media? What do you do, you know, for, for weeks two through eight, I mean, it’s, it’s just a monster. And it’s, it’s incredible. And of course, you know, if you’re a brand builders group, client, you already have access to that and we’ll walk you through it, or we’ve got, you can come to our live events. So you could check that out or just hit me up with questions. I’m happy to answer your questions on social media. If you’ve got questions about it, I’m, I’m happy to answer ’em, but yeah, so that what we’re doing, practical things, actionable things to learning them here. Watch, watch these launches y’all and, and, and pay attention. If you’re following me on social, we have some pretty massive book launches. We’re a part of, and I can’t, you know, release publicly who, who they are for, but they are huge.
RV (47:15):
And if you’re following me on social, once we get closer to the actual launch date, you’ll start to see us promoting these things. And you’ll, you’ll see who the people are that we’re working with, and you can follow ’em and, and watch it happen in real time. And those are big ones, but for yours, you, you, you start with what, you can get five people in your launch group, your launch team have ’em support, so you can do it. It’s, it’s all simple steps. They’re not easy, but they’re simple. And most of these ones actually are pretty quick. So you can make it happen and keep coming back every single week we’re sharing the goods, right? Like we got guests coming in, sharing you some of the best secrets for building your personal brand, helping you get your expertise out to the world. So you can become more well known and you can make more impact that’s it for this episode, we’ll catch you next time on the influential personal brand podcast.