Category: BRANDING

Ep 137: Secrets of Self-Publishing Your Way to Becoming a Bestselling Author with Chandler Bolt | Recap Episode

Hey, brand builder. Welcome to the influential personal brand podcast recap. Today, we are looking at self-publishing my old friend Chandler bolt, which was fun to go back on memory lane a little bit and see how far Chandler has come and his team, what they have built such a great operation. And so yeah, let’s dive in right away. We got my three big takeaways as well as ADJs for you. And I think the first thing, which is kind of obvious, but I don’t think it’s pervasive enough, which is the idea that every business owner needs to write a book because you use the book to build your business. And so it’s like, you may not care to be a New York times. Best-Selling author. You may never need a traditional publisher, but the power of a book is, is magical. And there’s just, there’s nothing quite like it in terms of the impact it has on your ability to market your business, your product and service.

Yeah, that’s interesting. That’s, that’s similar to my first one, but a little bit different. And this is something that Chandler said and the very, very beginning of the interview, probably in the first, I don’t know, five to seven minutes. So you’ll, you’ll catch this tidbit right off the bat. And he said, before you start asking yourself the question of, Hey, should I do a traditional book or self published book? He said, really the question to answer is, is a book the next best thing to do for your business. And in his opinion, it is, he said, you know, I love what he said. He said, books, change lives. Like they change lives. They can change your business. They can change your mindset. They can change your relationships. They can change your financial situation. They can change your fitness. Like books have the power to change lives.

Ask yourself is a book, the next best thing for my business, then worry about everything else. And I thought that was really powerful because I agree in so many ways. A book is a calling card. It’s a, it’s a giant size business card. But more than that, it represents what you stand for, what you believe in your way of doing business, your methodology, your principles, your philosophies, if you really want someone to know who you are, and if they’re a good fit for you and vice versa, read the book, right. Or, you know, listen to the keynote, you know, in, in many ways. But I thought it was really interesting. And he said, if you, and if you answered that, no, then move on. But if the answer is yes, then that’s kind of step one.

Yeah. And I think the idea of is it the next right thing is good. Cause like, even at brand builders, we’ve got several books that we are working on writing, but we haven’t, we haven’t said we’re ready to do the first one yet. So there’s timing, timing matters. That, yeah. So my second big takeaway from this was where he said, which I love, because this is a guy who has self-published his own books helps people self-publishers runs a school that teaches people how to self-publish. And he says, yeah, we got, we, we got, we got boxes from when you’re, when you’re, when you’re actually in the program. And here’s what he said. The key to a self published book is to publish to self-publish a book that does not look like it is self-published. And I think that was valuable to hear from him.

And I, I really agree with this because I think, you know, self-publishing has gotten to be so easy, which is a great thing that the downside is, you know, it’s, you can print something really quickly and, and not have it kind of look and hold the cache that you want it to, if it’s going to be a reflection of you and your brand and your business. And, and yet now it’s so sophisticated that you really can self publish a book. If you need to, or if you want to, but either way you can do it and it can look as professional and clean and neat and powerful as a traditionally published book. And I think that’s super important.

Yeah, no, I totally agree with that. And I think that self publishing has come a long way in the last five years. Typically it’s come a really long way. All right. So the, the next biggest takeaway for me is I just, I think this is, you know, kind of like a spoiler alert, like tr you know, to traditional publish, to self publish, and, you know, Chandler’s opinion is very strongly in there. Like self-publishing is the way, is that the only time that a publisher would ever want to do a deal with you is when you don’t need them. Right. and so it’s like, you know, it’s like when a publisher wants you, you don’t really need them. Self publishing is the way. And, but I thought it was really interesting, he said, but if it’s the way here are the things that you need to consider.

And I just, so I don’t mess this up. So I wrote these down and he said, you’ve got, these are the three things to consider time cost and royalties. Those are the things you want to consider. What are the expenses to get it done the time to get it done? And then what would be, what would you be for fitting or gaining and royalties? And then he broke it down. He said, them, there’s two types of costs. There’s costs of creation and then cost of production. And then he breaks it down again. And he says, now creation costs are covered design, editing, and formatting. Right. How does it actually look in the structure of the book and then production our print inventory and shipping, right? And it’s like, those are a lot of things to consider because I mean, it’s like if self publishing is the way you need to be really clear on what means in terms of time, resources, involvement, expenses.

I think, I think it is the way for so many people, but there’s also a lot of work to be done. But that’s why I think answering that question first is, is I book the next right step helps make the rest of this checklist very much a checklist of, okay, well, these are the things I need to do. This is just the next thing. Versus what do I do? What’s better. It’s like, well, these are the things to evaluate. And it’s very clear and it’s very transparent. It gives you a really good, accurate view of, okay, this is what it would look like for me to self publish. It was, it was so clear, transparent and very checklisted, which I love,

No, I loved it. I, in those same notes about, about the cost, like if you’re, if you’re considering this, you’ve got to just kind of think through it, treat it like a business. You know, I remember early in our career with our first books, we waffled back and forth between traditional self published. Like for so long,

Roy will not tell you this. Cause he doesn’t want you to know that it exists, but his very first book

That’s right. Yeah. That’s right. And it’s called no, nah, nah, you can’t share it. They’re going to go find it

Like in Oh two. No, that’s like, Hey, I know w how to be funny to make more back. You have, you have a coffee somewhere hidden. It’s actually really cute book, but we actually

Self publish first. That’s right. That’s right. And we purposely didn’t want a lot of people to know about it, but, but you know, so that question comes up a lot. Should I self publish? And should I traditionally publish? I really am convicted that they both can be great and they both can work. And it’s all about, we’ve done both. And it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s all about the right fit at the right time, which is what I think we help people navigate. But you know, if you wanted me to give you the textbook answer on this question, cause we get it all the time. You know, in one of our events is called bestseller launch plan and we teach how to actually launch the book once you have it. And for me, I say is pretty simple. It’s 10,000 units. If you have a plan to move 10,000 units within the first few weeks of it launching, you should go after traditional publishing.

If you you’ve got like that size of an audience of, of direct reach and indirect reach, you go for it. If not self-publishing is probably the way there’s, there’s enough advantages to self publishing. And so you’re a little formula. Oh yes. So, so here’s the thing you just got to keep in mind that to become an Amazon bestseller takes hundreds of units in a day to hit a bestseller, to become a wall street journal bestseller. You need to have thousands of units within a week and to become a New York times bestseller, you need to have tens of thousands of units sold within a week. And so if you can move thousands of units in a week and you want to go after the wall street journal, you probably to traditionally publish. But if you’re going after, you know, a few hundred copies in, you know, hopefully in a day or within a few weeks self publish and you, you know, if your platform is bigger than that, then you can step up to it later. But there’s, there’s, there’s no shame in either they’re both great. They both have good parts. They both have, you know, more challenging things, but that’s, that’s my textbook answer, 10,000 units.

And I think the last thing for me is really just waffling through the question of, well, what are the pros and cons of both because there are pros and cons in both. And I think a lot of the, you know, pros and cons of self publishing, we kind of talked about my second point and Taylor goes into a lot of that, but then it’s also, well, what are the pros and cons of traditional publishing, right? Cause those third year too. And I think one of the things that he liked, he highlighted, which I think is so true is specifically today is that publishers only want to work with authors who can sell books. Like that’s, that’s the short I have to work with, not to hate on publishing.

No, they, they have to work with that. They don’t sell books,

Marketing houses, right. Publishing houses. And I think that’s a huge wake up call. It’s like, if you think your publisher’s going to market and sell your book, you’re wrong. Like that’s not, that’s not the goal. They help edit books. They help publish books. They help format books, they help distribute books. So if you’re looking for a really big advance and lots of distribution, maybe you should try to go for a big, you know, publishing deal and get yourself an agent and get a big advance. But if that’s not the case, and if you don’t have a huge platform, and if you don’t have a way of selling your own tens of thousands of books, then self publishing is maybe the best way to go. And I love too, is that we’d had him on our podcast before Howe L rod is one of the greatest self publishing of all time.

He has sold more than 2 million copies of his book and, and is making tons of tons of money off of this book and has created this empire and impact around a self-published book. Didn’t need a traditional publisher. And then you’ve got other examples of people who started traditional and then went South because they’re like, well, I don’t need a traditional publisher anymore. And I think that the way that Chandler summed it up, or maybe you said it, I don’t know who said it, but I thought it was really good. He said, sometimes you just have to understand is a traditional publishing a step in the path or is it the path? And I thought that too was really good of just, you know, is this a way to help grow your notoriety and credibility and get your message out there? Or is it like, Nope, I’m just doing it for the advance. Yeah. Is it a money-making thing or is it a step in the path? And I thought that was just really good and clear

And you just, you need to know and remember writers, write editors, edit publishers, publish distributors, distribute retailers, retail, and nobody sells the book. So whether you self publish or you traditional publish, you got to sell it. That falls on you, whether you like it or not, there’s other advantages or disadvantages, but either way you author creator, influencer messenger, your job is to sell and we’re here to help you learn how to do that. So thanks for being here. Come back next time on the influential personal brand podcast

Ep 136: Secrets of Self-Publishing Your Way to Becoming a Bestselling Author with Chandler Bolt

Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for tuning in to listen to this interview. We are so excited to bring you this information and wanted to let you know that, Hey, there’s no sales pitch coming. From anything that we do with this is all our value add to you and the community. However, if you are somebody who is looking for specific strategies on how to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and we offer a free call to everyone that’s interested in getting to know us and is willing to give us a chance to get to know them and share a little bit about what we do. So if you’re interested in taking us up on a free strategy call, you can do that at brand builders, group.com/summit. Call brand builders, group.com/summit. Call. Hope to talk to you soon on with the show.

The more time goes on. The more I start to feel like the old man in this industry, in this space and Chandler bolt is one of the people that makes me feel that way. Because when I met him, it was years ago, maybe like six years ago. And him and his brother, Seth, who is one of the, the, one of the members of my, one of my favorite bands, if not my, the favorite brand need to breathe, they were doing a book together and they were on my old podcast. And I just was like, man, there’s something about this guy. Like he’s, he’s legit, they’re they’re legit. And fast forward to today. Chandler is now the CEO of self publishing school and self publishing.com. So, you know, he’s written six best selling books, but self publishing school is like the premier world’s premier leader in helping people publish and self publish a book and understanding how to do it.

What’s the process, all the nitty gritty details. Where do we go? How does it work? Which is what we’re going to talk about today, but he’s also an investor, an advisor. And as an entrepreneur, this company, you know, they’ve got like 30 plus team members. They’re an Inc 5,000 company, three years in a row. He also hosts a couple podcasts to seven figure principles podcast and then the self-publishing school podcasts. And it’s so weird, cause like, I just am proud of proud of this guy. And and he’s a baller and y’all need to know him and you need to know what they do. A lot of people don’t realize this, but I self published six pieces of six different bodies of work. They weren’t all books before I launched take the stairs. So most people think of that as my first book, which hit the New York times and I was 29, but I had been self publishing since I was 22.

And we don’t hear that story a lot. So this is the guy and we got them here live. So Chandler, welcome to the show, Roy. Great to be here, man. Thanks for having me just proud of you, bro. And I, you know, I have to say at this point, I really have, in some ways been out of the self publishing game, you know, other than our clients do in it and, and, and from a, from a distance like watching it. So I guess, first of all, let’s talk about why self-publish, why, and when because there’s always that like, you know, Hey, I want to be a bestselling author and you know, do I have to have a traditional publisher? Do I need an agent, you know, is self publishing? Does it work? Is it, is it legit? Like, can you just kind of talk about that conceptually

For sure. And I think, and I think probably the first, the most important decision or question for most people here is like, even before then, like is a book, one of the best things I can do to grow my brand or to grow my business. Right. And then you get into the self publishing versus traditional publishing and it’s like, that’s kind of a mechanism or vehicle to take you there. Right? So like I almost look at it as like two independent questions of like is a book, one of the best things I can do to build my brand, to build my business. And we talk about this all the time, like to get, truly get more leads, sales and referrals, which I believe that it is like, you know, I believe that books changed lives. I believe that, you know, they changed the life of the author and also the reader, I believe, you know, they’re one of the best ways to set yourself apart, get your foot in the door.

Like we always joke. It’s kinda like the key that opens this door to Narnia, like this magical world, all these opportunities that only exist for published authors, right? If you have made that decision, then it’s just a matter of which path are you going to take and self publishing versus traditional publishing and like the long and short of it is, and this is not just because I run a company called self publishing school or own self publishing.com is as long as sort of it is that self-publishing makes more sense for most authors, 99.9% of people, unless you can get a big advance. And and, and that’s it, or, and, or you care about distribution like international distribution, especially that’s the only time it really makes sense to, to traditionally publish. Otherwise you’re going to be better off self-publishing and, and, you know, it’s kind of like, maybe you’ve heard the the sayings like banks only loan money to people who don’t need it. Right. It’s like, well, publishers only give posting deals to people who don’t need it and who can sell the books without them. So if you’re Oprah, Seth Godin, Rory Vaden you can get a big advance. Awesome.

Again, I just say, you know, I, I get about the same size advances, both Oprah and Seth Godin. I’m, I’m pretty sure. My, my advances are, are I’m sure they’re the same as what Oprah gets definitely in the Obama

Range, like selling copies on the first day

In all seriousness. I agree with what you’re selling. I think self publishing makes the most sense for the Mo for most authors. And the thing that we tell people is we say, look, if you can’t move 10,000 units on opening week and have a plan to move about 50,000 units within two years, you’re not ready for traditional publishing and you don’t really need it. And the economics of it don’t really make sense. So, you know, I totally, even though I love, I love commercial publishing and I, I love my publisher in that. I think self publishing is like a critical, essential, necessary step in the journey. And then people like Seth Godin, you know, they’re kind of going well, once I’ve done a few commercially published books, they’re going back to self publishing.

Exactly. For some people it’s a step in the journey for other people. It’s the journey, the journey. Yeah. Like how L rod, I mean, obviously that’s one of the most, one of the biggest self-publishing success stories, but he’s sold millions of copies of that. Self-Published and so really, I mean, I think to just like, bring this full circle for people when it comes down to is the time that it’s going to take you the royalty rates that you’re going to make and the cost of published, like those are the three bigger buckets. And so, so it’s traditional publishing is ironically enough, like actually going to take longer. Most people don’t know this is going to take you two plus years. They’re not going to do any marketing of the book. People think that the publishers will market the book they want. And, and then there’s the cost to publish, which, you know, you’ve got to cover that yourself if you’re doing it on your, on your own. So that might be, you know, a couple to a few thousand dollars.

Yeah. Yeah. Talk, give me, give me the details there. Right. Cause if someone’s listening, going okay. If I start looking at self publishing seriously, realistically, I mean, that is one thing that is awesome about commercially publishes. We’re not paying the cost of the editor to the graphic design, the printing, the warehousing, the shipping and those are big costs. Cause there’s a lot more volume, but when you’re self publishing, you also can do a hundred copy print run, right? Like how does that, what are the, how much does that actually cost and, and who does it and how do you do it?

Yeah. Screw all great questions. So there’s the cost of of creation and then cost of production, if you will. So the, so if you get a traditional publishing deal, you’re going to agent then to hopefully get a deal and get in advance. And then they’re going to cover the cost of that for you. Then there’s this middle ground, which is like hybrid or vanity press, which, you know, that might cost five, 10, 15, $20,000 a year paying someone to pay the books. So it’s like part service, part publisher, and then self publishing. Obviously you’re paying for it yourself. And there’s really three main buckets of costs. There’s there’s cover design, editing and formatting. Those are the main three. And if you don’t know what you’re doing, you might, you might spend five, 10 grand. Plus if you do know what you’re doing, you can do it for as cheap as a few hundred bucks, if you’re like really on the cheap and really bootstrapping or you’re typically a couple thousand bucks kind of in that range give or take is, is where we see people land. But that

Was cost of creation. You’re saying

Creation. Yeah. Yeah. So of, of actually creating a book that’s ready to be printed and shipped, and then you have the opportunity to go if you’re self publishing print on demand, so they’ll print it, package, ship it when someone clicks purchase, right? So you don’t have to hold inventory or you can do, like you said, runs of a hundred books or a few hundred books or whatever, but that’s the benefit of print on demand is you don’t have to hold inventory. It’s like, we all know someone who has like 2000 copies of their book in their garage and have had those copies of their book for like years. And so that’s the benefit there from a self publishing perspective is you don’t have to pay to carry that inventory. So that’s, that’s kinda how that works.

All right. So, you know, when you think about cost of creation, I want to, you know, cover design is obvious, right? It’s like you can hire the world’s best graphic designer and it’s 50 grand, or you can hire someone on Fiverr and it’s five bucks. So there’s the whole range there. Editing’s kind of the same way. It’s like reputation and all that sort of stuff. What is formatting? Because that was the thing that has always like, in the times I’ve self published. I was like, Holy crap. Like there is a lot more work here than I realized that there’s so many details of like, what’s the gutter size, which, you know, like between where the book folds, like how far the tech sits in the crease of the book. So when you say formatting, you’re saying you’re paying someone to like lay the book out to be ready for print.

Yeah. Totally. And funny timing, hopefully can you, yeah. Since it’s a big difference, actually. So one thing that we say all the time is your self published book shouldn’t look self-published right. And so we want a traditional quality book that just happens to be self published because the fact is not many people know. But what’s, self-publishing, what’s traditionally published, but what, what you really want to do here is a format, or is someone that takes like, think your word doc, and kind of what you alluded to a second ago. It was just like, there’s the margins, there’s the bleed, there’s the, all that stuff. And then they format it to be a, what, like a good looking book or a well formatted Kindle book. So essentially it’s making like th and, and it can be any variants of just like, Hey, literally just make this a book on the very simple side of things. And then, and then artistically, it could be as complicated as like, Hey, I want images here. And I want this format of this way. And I want, you know, these and graphs and stuff like that. So they’re kind of Jerry’s and complexity, but that’s the basics.

And so is that part of what you guys help people do is like pair them up with those people, like who actually do that, or do you just go on, do you just go on Upwork and grab someone?

Exactly. So our goal, like when we work with someone, our goal is, is, is three things like number one, we want to we’ll save them hundreds of hours in the process. Number two, we’ll say them hundreds, if not thousands of dollars in book production costs. So like stuff that we’re going to spend money on anyway and then number three, it’s, we’re gonna help them make more money by selling more books. And, but then also using a book to drive business. So that’s specific to number two, right. Which is you know, we’ve negotiated exclusive discounts since we have like our book production partners. And so we

Very similar to what brand builders group does. We’ve got, like, these are our copywriters and these are our podcast people. And these are our social media, like vendor partners. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. That’s cool. I mean, it’s worth a tremendous amount of just the pain of finding these people and knowing who’s legit and like, do they actually do what I need them to do? And that’s, that’s half the battle. So, and then, and then when you talk about print it, packet, ship it. Okay. So if I have a word doc, so let’s, let’s say I came to captivating content for brand builders group, and I outlined my deal. And then I joined self publishing school and you’re going to walk me through from that kind of outline and concept all the way to completion. At some point I have a word doc, then I send it to a format. That person lays it out. They probably, the finished products is probably a PDF. Right. Okay,

Exactly. Yeah, yeah. A PDF. And then there’s on the, I mean, this is getting into the minutia, but on the ebook side of things is a dot EPUB or.mobi file. And then on the flip side, it’s, it’s a well formatted PDF. That’s really an InDesign format, so that can be ready to be printed. Exactly.

And so then when you go to print it, so what, what does that mean? Like, do I just like run down to Kinko’s and print it, or you, you find like any printer or there’s people who specialize in printing self-published books or does Amazon print it or do you, or, or is there somebody who will print it, pack it and ship it all in one place? Or like is the answer yes. To all of those things? Yeah.

Yes. I, I, yeah. And so really it’s, it’s like there there’s, you could go down any path and there’s any of those things you can do. We recommend, we recommend Amazon from like a full, full perspective. So like they’re print on demand through KDP print, they’ll print it, pack it and ship it as soon as someone like your eye goes on to Amazon and says, Hey, I want to buy this book. They’ll they’ll handle the rest.

Okay. huh. So, so if you do it through Amazon, then basically you just kind of like upload the files, like for the, and everything and set the dimensions. And then Amazon will, like, they don’t really store it in a warehouse because they just print it when a sale comes through. But so you don’t have like warehousing costs, like you would with a normal book where you got to, like, the publisher has to print a bunch of books and put them in warehouses all over the country. You’re not dealing with any of that. And it’s already do. They automatically like index it in Amazon also. Exactly. Okay. So that’s, so that’s why Katie P is like, just the easiest on the production side, if you have it formatted properly. But then the key is to have, like you said, how do you make sure it doesn’t look like, you know, chintzy, self published book. And I, you know, I use that term respectfully, all of my initial stuff did, I mean, it was like, it was embarrassing. Like my first books, I, you can’t find them anywhere deliberately. You didn’t want anyone to be able to find them.

Yeah. So I mean really good cover and good formatting. Like those are the two things, like if I’m going to spend, I mean, I spend good money on editing too, but like pay for a good cover designer and then pay for a good format. Or that knows what they’re doing. This is not your friend or relative or whoever else people try to do that. Don’t do that. Like play, pay a professional and it doesn’t have to be crazy expensive, but pay a professional. And that’s what helps make the quality really. I mean, it’s, it’s indistinguishable.

And, and so when you were talking about earlier, like you might be in a few thousand bucks, this is really where your cause. Cause when you say you’re in a few thousand bucks, that’s for cover design, editing and formatting. Exactly. You’re not, you’re not having to shell out 20 grand to print inventory because it’s just, there is no inventory unless someone goes to Amazon and buys it.

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And that’s a big benefit.

And then, and then what about buying your own book? Like do you just go to, do you literally just log on to Amazon and go, I want 50 copies and send it to my house. Yeah,

Yeah. You can do the same thing. And actually we’re, we’re exploring some different options right now that are more cost-effective. Cause I think it used to be about $7, 15 cents landed. Like the book landed to someone and I would pay, you know, three, $3 and 25 cents a book and then plus shipping. And that was landed if I shipped them individually. So that was pretty simple. But now we’re just, we’re we’re re-exploring this to say, Hey, where can we save a dollar or two, a book? Can we, can we wholesale print somewhere and then fulfill somewhere else? Or let’s like exploring alternatives of like print, pack, ship kind of thing. But, but yeah, I mean you can the, the most simplistic way to do it, it’s just, I can ship a hundred copies, 200 copies. I do this for speaking gigs all the time directly through KDP print.

Okay. And then if you’re shipping bulk, they don’t charge you the same shipping per book. Exactly.

Yeah. So your discount cost goes down a whole lot more. I mean, you might get, you might be four or five bucks, a book landed maybe a little bit more when you’re shipping in bulk. So it’s like it’s yeah.

So functionally speaking here, you’re like a word document and then some editing and a PDF away from a book, like that’s really a hundred percent gap these days. I mean, there’s the ideas and all that sort of, you know, the content stuff. Of course, but this is doable. I mean it’s doable more today than ever before, ever by far.

Yes. And not only in my opinion, is it doable, but it’s, I truly think, and I know it’s like, Oh cool. The book guys talking about how amazing it is to do books. But it, like, I truly think it’s one of the best things that you can do for your business. It, and I, I mean, I think this is why you guys integrate this as part of your brand building strategy. Cause you’ve seen the impact of this for you personally, but then also for so many other people, I mean, whether it’s Lewis house or it’s like the P S people build entire brands off of books, but not only that, it’s like, it’s, it’s the, it’s kind of this cataclysmic mechanism. If you will, to get your foot in the door to start doing podcasts interviews and start doing speaking gigs to start, like, at least it was for me. And so that’s, and, and we’ve seen that for a lot of people that we work with. It’s like, it’s, it’s one of the first steps and sure. It might not be the first step. For some people it is a, for some people represents like, Hey, I’ve finally consolidated what I believe in, put it in a book. And this is like my first step into this world. And for others, maybe it’s a step along the journey.

Well, like we, we work with like a lot of financial advisors as an example, right? And it’s like, they’re not trying to sell video courses and all that. They need a credibility piece that takes their 25 years of knowledge and they hand it to somebody and go, and somebody goes, Whoa, you’re an author. And like, to what you said, if it doesn’t look chintzy, the average person on the street has no idea if Simon and Schuster made that book, or if you printed it with Amazon, if you, if you do the things you’re talking about, you pay the money to have it nice. They’re going to go, Whoa, like it’s a big deal. So I liked that you raise the bar there on that like production piece of it.

Yeah. And then you plugged that book into your business and you watch how your business grows. I mean, it’s that financial advisor there, their close rate might go from 25 to 37% or their average order value might go up 20% or they’re getting more leads. Now they’re getting more referrals because now all of a sudden, and this is for, especially for businesses like this, or any brick and mortar businesses, we say, Hey, give two copies of your book to every single new customer one for them. And so now the onboarding process is shorter with that customer because if the book is your methodology like that, you’re going to save your team a whole lot of time because they’re being indoctrinated in that methodology. And you give them the second copy so that they can actively refer you business. So you turn customers into active refers, and they’re not going to go around town, handing out your business card, but they will hand a book to someone else and say, Hey, you should read this. Like, why don’t you try to start looking at your retirement, like check out this retirement book. Like I think it would be really helpful for you or insert book that solves whatever problem that you solved. And it just, you make it so much easier to refer business your way.

So, okay. The time is flying by. I knew this was just fly by, but this has been so helpful, I think because there’s, I think there’s still a little bit of a black box and most people there’s a lot of fear going on here. I want to try to spend a couple minutes on the best seller stuff. Okay. So let’s say you go through this, this birthing process of creating this thing, we call a book and then how does the bestseller list work? You know, and, and when we talk self publishing, you know what we tell people and, and, you know, it’s kind of like, you’re really talking about an Amazon bestseller. That’s really the game. That’s really what we’re going after with a self-published book. How does the Amazon bestseller list work? What does it take to hit it? How realistic is it? Is it worth the money? Like how many units are we talking about to, you know, like tell us a little bit about that

Great question. So there’s, there’s really two ends of the spectrum, right? There’s, I’m an Amazon bestseller and underwater basket weaving or some other obscure category,

Which is like a sub category of a sub category kind of.

And that’s where I think the term has really been ruined. And you have so many people just claiming that. And then there’s the other end of the spectrum, which is New York times. Right. And, and I think what’s important and it’s very impressive that you hit the list. It’s very hard to hit. You know, the DOE like you’ve got to sell 10 to 12,000 copies within week one, but it’s also like kind of this breakdown of like, some of them needs to be mom and pops to store some needs to be bulk purchases, some needs to be on Amazon, some of these. And so the fact of the matter is when you look at the landscape of lists, you’ve got kind of four main, you’ve got New York times, you’ve got USA today, wall street, journal bestseller, and then Amazon right now, New York times, most people chase that list.

It is an editorial list, which means it’s, it’s an opinion by the New York times, it’s not an actual bestseller list. Whereas the USA today bestseller lists is the is the most factual, accurate, like number of books sold. So you can make the USA today bestseller list and you can make the wall street journal, bestseller list self publishing, a book. It’s, it’s not likely if, if you don’t sell copies, obviously like the average self-published author, now, you’re not going to make one of those lists if you do it well. And so thousands of copies in week one, you have a great chance to hit one of those lists. But you’re right, functionally, like we look at Amazon bestseller and for most people, like that’s the most likely case scenario. And when we look at that, it’s okay, let’s get number one in a significant category on Amazon. That’s not underwater basket weeding or something

Business, how finance, something like that, those relationships, those are legit. Yeah. Yeah. And they’re, it’s kind of like they’re sub categories. They’re not sub sub sub categories kind of S kind of a thing. Yeah.

They’re meaningful categories with bills,

Books, how many units do you need to move? And is it like within a certain time frame and that kind of stuff,

If you move hundreds within the first day you have a chance depending on the category and then this, and there’s calculators online that, that kinda calculate like, Oh, the number one book in this category probably sells X amount. But definitely if you sell a thousand books within the first few days, you will hit number one and a lot of significant categories,

Kind of like how I said, w if you can move 10,000 units in week one, that’s where you’re like, let’s talk, let’s talk, literary agent let’s talk publisher. Yeah. And then it’s like, if you can figure out a way, how can I move a thousand units in, in, within the first week? That’s like, okay, let’s go, let’s go blow up a number one, Amazon. Like, that’s what it is.

Exactly. Exactly. And what I think is super important is, is we talk about this all the time is like kind of this concept of the the Toyota Camry and the sports car launches. And most people look at book launches like a sports car. It’s fast, it’s sexy. It burns up a lot of fuel AK energy. And it’s gone in a flash, right. It’s like, shoo, okay. That was our launch week. Right. But we really look at like, how do we create a Toyota Camry type book that keeps selling month after month after month? And how do we in our fundamental marketing, yes, we want to have a strong week, a strong launch week, but like, how do we make sure that we’re setting up to where longterm, this thing’s going to keep selling? So there’s a lot of strategic marketing stuff, but building virality into the book, like a lot of just kind of fundamental things there. And so really that’s what I would encourage people is like, make sure that you’re solving a fundamental problem, a painful problem that people have, that you get reviews that you, and then that you focus on marketing strategies beyond week one, because that’s where a lot of, I mean, that’s where the money is from both a book sales perspective. Sure. But also from a using this as something that’s like an, a continually driving drive, lead sales and referrals for your business.

Yeah. So this is, this is part of why we had Chandler on, obviously I’ve known him for years. Yeah. I know his brother like these, these are legit guys in the stuff they’re talking about. We believe in, we we’ve done. We do. And you know, th that’s what brand builders exists is to grow your platform. It’s the, we’re playing the long game and, and that is why Chandler’s here. So here’s one of the things that Chandler and I talked about, his team will do a free call with you if you are seriously considering, okay, what are the next steps look like? If you go to brand builders, group.com/s P S for self-publishing school go there, just like, just like most many of our clients did, you know, they’ll do a first call with you. They’ll figure out where you’re at, what you’re up to. And then they’ll kind of go, here’s some ideas, here’s some pointers. And if, if you’re a fit, then they’ll, they’ll tell you how it works. But brand builders, group.com forward slash S P S as in self publishing school. And, and and so you’re, you’re willing to do a call with people just to help them sort that out. Right. Chandler.

Totally. Yeah. And our goal is, I mean, it’s, I think it’s, it’s, it’s a helpful 45 minutes. It’s get clear on your goals for your book, your challenges with your book and your next steps. So how do we take this from something that you’ve been dreaming about doing, thinking that doing it’s been on the maybe next year list for like five years in a row and, and how do you actually make this happen and make this a reality, but, but in the process of doing that, like save time save money in the process and then, and then create an asset it’s going to build your brand. Which I think is just huge and, and, and a fundamental piece of, of what you guys teach. And I just wholeheartedly believe in the whole process and in this as, as a part of the process. Yeah.

I mean, the book that, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a critical, essential piece and self publishing is this necessary step. And you guys do self publishing better than anybody that, I mean, it’s all you do is why you’re here. Right. It’s why we is like, this is their world. Like they live in self-publishing books all day, every day. So go to brand builders, group.com forward slash SPS. If you’re interested, you know, if not keep hanging around. And then when the time comes, you know, you can take, you can take their team up on it. Chandler man, I’m proud of you, bro. I’m excited. I I’m, I’m, I’m really excited. I think you can help a lot of people in our community with this, you know, important piece, this really important piece of the whole brand building journey. So thanks for being

Here. Absolutely. Absolutely. Really. Thank you so much.

Ep 131: How To Get Rich in a Niche with Clint Salter | Recap Episode

Hey, welcome to the influential personal brand recap edition. We are breaking down the interview with my friend Clint Salter. I am rolling solo on this episode. AJ is momming hard and doing her thing as a CEO. So occasionally I have to step in and just do the debrief myself. But this interview is such a great interview to listen, to listen to. They all are. But specifically, if you have this thought that you say, I don’t want to limit my opportunity by serving a group that is too small and, and this for sure is my first take away from the interview because I’ve had this thought and there’s a good chance that you have had this thought, like, we all think I need a, you know, I need a bigger market. I need, I need, I need more, more, more people to serve. I don’t want to limit myself and really it’s the opposite, right?

You increase your opportunity by serving a smaller community in a deeper way. And I think that is specific and is really specific to personal brands, right? Like it’s different if you watch shark tank, you know, and, and a lot of, a lot of the people that do deals on shark tank, they’re not, they’re not service-based businesses, they’re not educational business. They’re not personal brands, right? The sharks are interested in like widgets and things that can just be produced on mass scale. And so when they talk about like, what’s the market for this, they need a big market because they’re selling a low dollar transactional item and it’s just like one item and that’s it. And that it’s like, how many people need this? And, and how do they need it on a recurring basis, but that’s very different, right? So like you might see that kind of thing or get that kind of counsel in, you know, say watching a show like shark tank or talking to other entrepreneurs.

But when you look at personal brands, it’s, it’s not so much, how can I create a product that has, you know, like an information product that has mass appeal to millions and millions of people? Not that that would be bad. I mean, you see books that sell millions of copies, but you don’t typically see video courses that sell millions of copies. I mean, even tens of thousands would be a lot. I mean, a 10,000 customers buying one video course would be a lot. You know, even, even the really big membership sites and stuff, they often, you know, have a couple thousand you know, members on some type of a re a recurring payment. So for most of us, for, for you, for most of you, Clint is such a great example of you increase your opportunity as a personal brand specifically in a service-based business or an information marketing type business and educational you know, type business offering of some type.

And whether that is, you have a small business service, but like when you’re carving out your niche, it’s who can I serve in the deepest way? So it’s a, it’s a small audience that you serve in a bigger way. I mean, he’s got a multi seven figure business here, dealing with dance studios. If you don’t own a dance studio, there’s a good chance. You’d never heard of Clint Salter before today, but if you do own a dance studio, or if you have a friend that does, they probably know him, he dominates the space, or they know someone who knows him because he’s, he’s owning an occupying and expanding and serving in this space. And you know, I think there’s, there’s always just such a draw to like, I need to have, you know, millions of followers and it’s all about just like volume, like the total number of people.

But, you know, keep in mind that one way to make a million dollars is to, is that you only need a thousand customers to buy a thousand dollar product. Right? Think about that for a second. Like why there’s, there’s multiple ways to get to a million dollars, right? You could have a million people buy something that’s $1, but for most personal brands, you’re probably much more likely to get there by having a thousand people buy something that’s a thousand dollars, right. A thousand. People’s not that many people and a thousand dollars is not that high, a price point, but it’s like, that’s how you get there and you go, I only need a FA I only need a thousand people. I don’t need to market to billions or hundreds of millions, or really even millions of people. Like I only need a couple thousand buyers.

And I’ll, I’ll share this with you transparently, right? So brand builders group are like part of our mission is what we call 1000 messengers. We’re on a mission to, we want to have 1000 messengers in our pro quarterly program, which is our flagship program. It’s our one-on-one coaching program that also includes access to events like four of our events a year supplemental. We only need a thousand customers in that program to like, achieve everything we want and be able to provide the level of income that we want for our team. And, and, you know, just having an extraordinary, extraordinary business, an eight figure business, a lifestyle business and we just need a thousand customers. So it’s like, we’re not trying to be everything to everyone to be all the places all the time. It’s like, we’re looking for a thousand personal that are serious about building monetize their personal brand that want to follow a process and want to have a roadmap and a proven checklist for that thing for, for building a personal brand.

That’s why it’s like, we don’t work with companies. It’s not that we couldn’t, it’s not that our expertise doesn’t apply to companies. It’s just that we we’ve narrowed our focus. Based on a couple things, first of all, we’ve, we’ve narrowed our model to one-on-one coaching and, and here’s, I’m going to give you a little framework. I’ve never shared this before, but if you’re trying to niche down, there’s, there’s kind of three different M’s here, okay. In terms of how you can niche down and, and some, and you can mix and match these combinations. So the first M is your market case. So that’s who you’re selling to. So Clint is a great example of niching down his market based on who, right. That is. He’s going after dance studio owners, very specific brand builders group is, is going after personal brands. You know, we’re going after coaches, trainers, authors, speakers, consultants entrepreneurs, and financial advisors, you know, service-based businesses, network marketers you know, fitness people, but, but they are they’re, it’s a face, right?

We’re helping people who are looking to like promote their own personal message. That is also a decision, a strategic decision to focus on a narrow market. So that’s the first step is market. The second M is model. Your business model is you can actually serve a narrow model. So brand builders is another thing that we do. Our model is unique. We offer one on one coaching, right? There’s a lot of people who teach video courses. There’s a lot of people who have events. There’s a lot of people who do masterminds. There’s a lot of people who do monthly membership sites. And part of when we came into the space is based this part of this based on our experience, also based on our passion to like really work in a deep way with, with people one-on-one is to do one-on-one coaching. One of our strategists talks to our, our clients have a strategist.

They talk to every single month. That’s a unique model. The business model is different, right? If you look at Uber, okay, Uber didn’t target a different market. W well, actually, so Uber, Uber, isn’t, isn’t a great example. There a better example of the next, the next M that I’ll talk about. So what is the model, in other words, what is the mechanism in which, you know, you, you make you make money and is there a different way of charging for something, you know, financial advisors had a big chant transition, or a lot of them are in a big transition of model where it used to be like a, you know, commission-based, or they would get paid per transaction. And now they move over to fee-based. That’s a, that’s a whole market of, of that’s a whole group of people, whole industry that is like migrating their business models.

So if you’re looking to differentiate, it’s could be who you serve. It also could be how you serve them, which is the business model. And then the third M is the method. The method is what you provide to them is actually different, right? So we also a brand builders group liked to think that our curriculum, I mean, our, it is unique. It is proprietary. The vast majority of the things that we teach in our curriculum are our own original frameworks, our proprietary IP, intellectual property, things that we have developed. But, you know, certainly some of it is principles that exist that lots of people talk about related to digital marketing, but again, we’re tailoring it to the personal brand. So, you know, there’s, those are three different FMS that would all help you. So you’re, the market is who you serve. The model is how you serve them making money.

And then the method is what you’re actually doing for those people. So, to me, I guess I would say you know, like Uber disrupted the taxi space, I would call that a different method. It was a different way of doing business. So it was still the same, the same model, which is that you’re charging writers per ride. So it’s the same business model as a taxi. It’s the same market. It’s people who take, you know, short-term transportation, but the model, but the, excuse me, the method was different was instead of taxi drivers of which there are a few, you take the entire, you know, pretty much anybody with a car and you turn them into the providers. So it, it created new providers as a different, a different model, or excuse me, a different method. A different model is like charging for a completely different type of delivery model.

So I would think about this as like all of these homemade meal plans, right? So you know, there’s people who are in the market for home cooked, ready to make meals. Okay. And so historically that would be like, you know, Domino’s pizza delivery and, you know, maybe Chinese food and delivery, but there weren’t like a lot of healthy options. And then nowadays you see all of these, these home delivery, health, healthy food being delivered to your home, you know, so hello, fresh and whatever fresh and fresh and lane is the one that we just tried. Our kids are on, we have our kids, our little kids on little spoon and we’ve used a number of them, but healthy food used to only be restaurant. And now there’s this new emergence of a new model, which is shipped healthy food.

Pre-Made shipped directly to your house. That’s a different model. It’s a, it’s a completely different mechanism, but you’re serving, you’re still serving the same. You’re still serving the same market. But in, in, in that scenario, I would say that the, the method is the same. It’s still health food. The thing you’re buying is still the, is still, you know, this kind of like the same, but it’s different in the, in terms of how you’re receiving, how you’re receiving that service. So anyways, the point here is for you, whether you’re differentiating, differentiating based on your market, based on your method and your message, or based on your business model, there’s a lot of ways to niche down. And we all think I don’t want to restrict myself, right? Like, I, I just, I don’t, I don’t want to, I don’t want to think too small, but, you know, serving a specific audience is not the same as thinking small.

And in many cases like Clint is, is demonstrating. It can be bigger. It’s the people say the riches are in the niches because you’re serving people in a deeper way, right? Like we are able to serve personal brands in a much deeper way than any just normal marketing advertising firm who services companies w just number one, we’re a strategy firm, right? So we’re advising on all the moving parts, digital marketing messaging, your audience like technology copywriting, you know, ads, speaking, books, publishing, launches, you know, funnels the whole, the whole thing just for personal brands. So if somebody just teaches, you know, those same things to everybody, they’ve got a lot more masters, whereas we can just go, man, we only serve personal brands. And if that’s you, we can serve you in a deep way. If it’s not, you, you’re not the fit for brand builders group doesn’t mean you can’t learn from us, right.

It doesn’t mean you might still not enjoy the podcast, but it means we’re not the best. We’re not the best fit for you. You know, now I’ve got books and stuff on my personal brand that, that people learn from, but, but don’t lose to the, to the idea that, Oh, by niching down too small, I’m limiting myself. It’s, it’s almost always the opposite cause you can serve them in a bigger way. All right. The second big idea, the second you know, takeaway or highlight for me from, from, from Clint was really something he said about the mentality and what he said was he used the word experiment. He said, I told myself, I would just, I would just treat this as a year long experiment. And I love that idea. I love the idea of taking the pressure off of yourself from like having to succeed or meet some expectation of like, this is only successful.

If whatever, and instead just going, let’s just treat this as a fun experiment. You know, it reminds me of one of our, our brand builders group clients. Who’s also a strategist. In fact, we’re going to have her on the show here Hillary, because Hillary experimented with tic tok and she did this little experiment with like, ah, maybe I’ll hop on Tik TOK and see if I can make some fun videos. And she generated over a half a million view, half a million followers, not views it’s, it’s hundreds of millions of views, a half tens of millions of views, but it is half a million followers in less than two months, two months, like 60 days, half a million followers just by an experiment. Clint was kind of like the same thing. It’s like, Oh, I’ll just, you know, I’ll treat this as an experiment. I’ll service this community. This sounds like it could be fun. And then maybe it turns, and then maybe it turns into something

And maybe like, maybe that’s you, maybe you have too

Much pressure on yourself right now.

Maybe you are feeling like

You’re not successful because you’re not achieving some number, some income or whatever. And they be, you should just, maybe you need to hear that and go, you know what, I’m just going to treat this as an experiment. If it works out amazing. If it doesn’t, that’s totally fine, but I’m just going to do it for a year. I’m going to commit to, you know, some period of time, I’m not going to just like have one foot in one foot out, so to speak, but I’m going to just play and see what happens. And that’s so valuable. And I think that’s so important. And, you know, even when you get into, you know, in the brand builders group curriculum in phase phase one, we helped you create your positioning phase two. We help you build the infrastructure to support your personal brand. And phase three is where we really start to blow the brand up and really create exponential growth. And one of the, you know, one of our, one of our events there is called high traffic strategies and that’s paid traffic acquisition. Well, when we do paid ads,

Ads, we experiment it. We expect,

Right. Everything we do is like, we’re going to drop a few ads out there. We’re going to put a few dollars behind them. And I’m talking like it could be 10 bucks could be 50 bucks, like at the most, right. Probably never more than a hundred dollars, but it’s like, it could be 10 or 20 bucks. We just want to see which ads perform the best and then put more and then put more money behind the winners. It’s just an experiment, right? There’s not any pressure at that first phase. It’s just like, let’s see what happens. And you, if you are just kind of like bound by

This, this, this,

This demand for perfection, or if you’re creating the of expectations or someone else is putting expectations on you, maybe just let that release, right. Just like release that and let it go and say, what can I do as an experiment? What am I drawn to? That sounds kind of like, it would be fun and, and go with that and see what happens. In the case of Clint, you know, it became this one business that, that L that was then sold that led to another business that led to another business to now, you know, this multi seven figure recurring membership company. And, and he’s doing what he loves. He’s combined, you know, dance and business, and like pulled this together. And, you know, I just, I think that’s good permission. It was good for me to hear and be reminded like, Oh yeah, you know, I, it doesn’t all have to succeed. Like it’s fine for it to be an experiment. So that was my second thing. My, my third big takeaway which is, which is, you know, kind of related to the idea of, of saying, Hey, I’m going to make a business decision to serve a niche, which was, you know, kind of the very first takeaway is when he said, this is what he said. He said, I was able to deliver massive value

Because I knew them.

So on top of just the strategic kind of logical business decision to niche down there is this like emotional reason to do it, which is that, you know them. And if you’ve never heard me say this before, write this down, this is something that we see a lot at brand builders.

You are always most powerfully positioned to serve

The person you once were, You are

Our most powerfully positioned to serve the person that you once were. Why? Because you know them, it’s exactly what Clint said. You know, the space, you know, the fears, you know, the frustrations, you know, the roadblocks, you, you know, their worries, you know, the challenges. And if you’ve made it through that, you know, the solutions, you know, the shortcuts, you know, the hacks, you know, where there needs to be hard work. And, and if you know their challenges, then you can speak to people in such a profound and succinct and poignant way that they hear you. And you break through the noise because you’re speaking their language. It’s why we say that that calling on your heart is the result of a signal that’s being sent out by someone else is, is when we help you find your uniqueness in phase one, we’re helping you figure out who is the person out there sending that signal, and what are you feeling drawn to?

And when we can match those twos together, it’s like, even though, even though you could be in a room full of noise, right? And there could be just this like chatter at a party that you couldn’t hear, the moment that someone says your name, it’s like this precision, this level of precision of, of poignant clarity that cuts through all of this noise. And that’s what you want your marketing to do, specifically your positioning and your, and your messaging. And the words that you’re using is you want it to send out this, this very succinct, poignant, sharp, clear, precise signal that says, this is what I do. This is who I do it for, because this is who I am, because this is who I have been, because I have been you, I have been in your shoes. I have been in your seat. I have had your fears.

I have had your worries. I have had your concerns. I have overcome the roadblocks that you have overcome. That is the connection of a calling. It’s the, it’s the, it’s the power of a guide. Somebody who says, I know what it’s like to be you, because I have been you, that is transformational. It occurs almost as divine. And, and that is what you want to do. And it’s, and it’s just like that is serving people in a deeper way, both from a, a monetary business, empirical logical strategic standpoint, and from an emotional artistic profound passion standpoint, you are most powerfully positioned to serve the person that you once were. And if you haven’t figured that out, that is why we exist at brand builders group to serve personal brands, because we know what it is like to try to build and monetize your brand, to want, to make impact, to want to make a difference in the world, to want to do good, and to want to make more income, you know, like to make enough income, to like achieve your dreams, be able to give and tie the donate and, and support and invest in new or whatever it is, right?

Like it’s not that we don’t like making money. We do like making money. We believe in making money. It’s just that we know that you’re here because you are a mission-driven messenger that you want to make impact, and that you feel like you have some message inside of you. And because that’s you, that’s why we’re here. We’re here for you because of you to serve you because that is who we are and who we have been. So thanks for being here. Keep coming back. Hopefully you enjoyed the interview with Clint Salter, as well as this recap edition, and just keep tuning in. We’re going to be here to encourage you and educate you and occasionally entertain you. We wish you all the best for now. We’ll catch you next time on the influential personal brand.

Ep 130: How To Get Rich in a Niche with Clint Salter

Clint Salter Interview [Full Edit]
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Hey brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for tuning in to listen to this interview. We are so excited to bring you this information and wanted to let you know that, Hey, there’s no sales pitch coming from anything that we do with this is all our value add to you and the community. However, if you are somebody who is looking for specific strategies on how to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and we offer a free call to everyone that’s interested in getting to know us and is willing to give us a chance to get to know them and share a little bit about what we do. So if you’re interested in taking us up on a free strategy call, you can do that at brand builders, group.com/summit call brand builders, group.com/summit. Call, hope to talk to you soon on with the show.
It’s so fun over the course of my career, to look back at people that I’ve intersected with along the way. And I used to be the young guy like trying to like come up and meet people. And now I’m the old guy looking back. And Clint Salter, who you are about to meet is one of my favorite people I have met on this journey. He is such a cool guy, such a warm spirit. And I think I was interviewed on his podcast like six years ago when he was just kind of like coming into the online space and now he has built this empire. And here’s, here’s, what’s amazing about it. He’s done it in a very, very narrow niche, vertical. So he is the CEO of something called the dance studio owners association. And it is a community of dance studio owners worldwide.
So he, he is from Western Sydney Australia, and that’s where he grew up. He was involved in, you know, he was owning a studio. He owned a studio when he was like 16. He’s sold multiple businesses. He’d sold three companies by the time he was 28. And now the group that he runs, the DSOA dance, suitors dance studio owners association has 32,000. There’s like 32,000 members in this community that reach 800,000 kids every week through dance. And so I just, we, our paths crossed here again recently. I hadn’t seen him in years and I couldn’t believe the success that he was having. So Clint, thanks for being here, buddy.
Rory, it’s such a pleasure to reconnect and I’m so excited for our conversation today.
Yeah, totally mate. It’s going to be great. Okay. So buddy, can you just give us like a super quick history of your journey, you know, because you really are an example of you had a passion, turned it into a business, then turned it into a personal brand. So can you like, just give us the highlights of, of what that looked like? Yeah,
Totally. So as you mentioned, I was 16. I started a dance studio with a friend, cause like, that was my, that was my thing. I love dancing. I come from a family of teachers, I love teaching. And so I put those two things together and said to my friend, like, why don’t we, why don’t we start a dance studio? We were living at home, didn’t have to pay rent, like, like why not do it? There was no risk there and we started it and it just took off. And we actually grew a business. We weren’t making millions of dollars in our dance studio, but for, you know, 16, 17, 18 year old kid, like I was taking home a few hundred dollars every week. And I was really, I was really happy with that. Why was it school? And then sold that business. We both wanted different things in the business and sold that business and went on to do some different things. I was an agent for five years managing TV personalities. I worked in news.
I manage the Jersey boys at one point.
I was. Yeah. So it was touring in company manager for Jersey, boys, the musical managing a team of 56, highly creative people, which was a very interesting part of my journey. And then I started consulting and at the beginning I was consulting to every type of business, whether you were a gym or a lawyer, a graphic designer. I think I had a Gardner at one point I was helping, I was helping every service-based business owner on how to generate new clients into their business. And I had a dance studio come to me, a owner that I’d worked with previously. And they were like, Hey, can you help me? And I was like, yeah, sure. Like I know this space. Like I love this space. And I started helping Sarah and I was like, I love this. Like I get to blend business and my passion, which was dance and working with dance studios.
And I had my own dance studio. And I was having dinner with a friend one night and they were like, you know what? You need to go all in on this dance studio market. And I was so afraid cause I was like, there’s not enough of them. And I don’t know if they have enough money to pay me. And so I was this person that was working with everyone and I didn’t want to limit the opportunity by just working with dance studio owners, but I treated it as an experiment and six years ago, I said, you know what, I’m going to do it for a year, just for a year. If it doesn’t work out, I can go back to helping everyone. But for a year I’m going to become the dance studio owner guide that studios grow their business, get back their lives. And that was six years ago and I haven’t, I haven’t looked back. Wow.
Wow. So I just, I love this story because I think that’s what you know, so we, we, we teach a thing called she hands wall, which is like trying to break through this wall of, of becoming, from being unknown to becoming known. And in our minds we go, I don’t want to limit my opportunity. And so I want to talk to lots of people, but the real way you break through the wall is by becoming known for one thing and being the go-to person on that one thing. And then when you break through the wall, if you want, you have a much better opportunity to expand into various stuff after. So, so what happened? I like to just flat out ask you, did they have enough money? Like, I mean, clearly you’re, you’re living in a high rise, brand new high rise in Miami, like doing, you’re doing your thing. So you, you had enough to survive, but, but did that take a while or was it actually pretty quick? And, and, and did you, did you also have to charge really high prices? Cause when I think of, you know, dance studios and gym owners, they’re not, you know, it’s are people rolling around in Bentleys and living in mansions, they’re doing it for passion. So you probably were, were you charging high dollars or were you doing like lower dollar stuff?
Yeah. So at the great question at the beginning, I was selling a five 99. It was $599 for my 12 week course. And so that’s what I was selling at the very beginning. I was selling a 12 week course it was $599, or you could buy it for $399 plus $47 a month to get support. So I was selling like the subscription model on the back of the course where they could ask me questions, you know, inside a Facebook group. And after about doing that for nearly a year. And I was like doing a webinar every week and I was getting really good at the webinar and for selling the webinar exactly to sell the program, to sell the program. You know, I had one, I had like one funnel, one channel, you know, I had Facebook ads, I had a funnel tool webinar and I was just getting good, getting really, really good at delivering that webinar and enrolling people into the program.
And that’s how I started. And I did that literally for a year of just building, building getting better, better, better. And I’m so glad I did that because now when people come to me or they see what they’re, you know, what we’re achieving and they’re like, Oh, you know, I’m signing up and I want to create five courses and I want to be on Facebook and Instagram and doing all of these things. I’m like, no, have one great course or program Maso, one distribution channel and just stop by getting really good at that before you do too many things and don’t master any of them,
Preach it, brother preach it, preach it loud. That, I mean, that is so, like I said, you’re, you’re such a great example of this. So you not only did you have one product for one audience, you had one vehicle of selling it and one traffic source of getting people there and you just, so you just dominated that thing, like you just mastered it and you were running one webinar every week. Like a live one.
Yes. Sometimes I do too, but mostly it was one, one live one day of the week. Did you do it on, I’m pretty sure it was Wednesdays. And they think it was I think it was around like 10 or 12:00 PM Eastern. And I was in Australia and I was like staying up surface super late and be like 11 or 12:00 AM. I’d be like running these webinars or I’d wake up super early. Or I do something, you know, on a Monday to get them on a Sunday night. You know, I w I was, I was just like doing the work, you know, I was doing the work. I had the background with this audience, with this industry and I knew them. I think that’s the other thing is that I’d been a part of this industry for such a long time, that I, I knew what their challenges were. I knew what they wanted. I knew how to make their business achieve more success. And so my focus was really on delivering value. You know, that $599 program had like 35 videos in it, you know, with worksheets and check. And those videos went for like 30, 30 minutes to an hour, you know, like I wanted to just like give them like everything I knew. And, and that’s a reason I believe…
And you say 30 minutes, 30, like 30 minute 30 videos at like 30, 30 to 60 minutes.
So they were there, there was 35 videos and on average are about 30 minutes. But a lot of them, there was a few that went for an hour and I had the time
Talking about a thousand minutes of, Oh yeah,
It was, it was, it was a lot. And that program though, birth really kind of put our business, our DSOA on the map. And from day I was able to launch share, you know, we launched a $47 a month membership. So that, that piece that I was tacking onto the program actually became a standalone program itself, a standalone membership level. And so from that 47, then we created a, our inner circle, which is our, our main coaching offering that we have now for, you know, for studio owners. So, so,
So do you still have the course, or the course get absolved into the $47 membership?
I actually didn’t get put into the $47 membership. It got put into our inner circle membership is like the foundation, the baseline. So when you join us in the inner circle, the first thing that you do would be to go through our studio success formula program, which is our 12 week foundation covering every piece of the dance studio or our flagship program. Now that we sell, which I created, I think it’s going to be nearly three years ago is our student attraction intensive. And that is a program that is just focused on how to attract enroll and retain students, because that is our audience’s biggest challenge. And if we can get them doing that, we can really help them transform their business. And then we can look after them with their finances, their latest sheep and their operations.
So is that the student attraction intensive? That’s a course.
That’s a course. Yeah. That’s an eight week course that we sell. Okay. How much is that? That’s $2,000.
All right. So that’s kind of like your, you have that and the $47 membership as like the two entry points.
Exactly. Most people will come through the student attraction intensive. So if you’re looking at like the core business model, now it’s focused on the student attraction intensive and then the inner circle program, the coaching experience.
Oh, I got ya. Okay. So the membership isn’t so much like a main thing anymore. Okay.
We still have it. We have we have just over a thousand members in, in DSOA, but you know, for us, our focus is really on, we get the best results when we can work with people in a deeper, in a deeper way. And so yeah,
A thousand members at 47 bucks a month, I mean, that’s 50 grand of 50 grand a month to help.
Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s fantastic. But you know, for me, where we’re at now in the company is where looking at, we know which of our members get results the fastest and how can we continue to accelerate their growth and their progress. And we can do our best work at our inner circle level. You know, those people are paying anywhere from 500 to a thousand dollars a month, depending on which level they’re at in the inner circle whether they’re a launch member or their premier member. And then, you know, we get to do awesome work in our student attraction intensive in our eight week course. And so that’s, that’s where our focus is currently.
I love, I love how you took, you know, like your first course was 600 bucks. You gave away the goods, right. To get yourself out of the, out of the ground. And then as you started to scale, you realized the number one pain point that my audience has is blank, you know, attracting new students and just focused on that. So, and that’s now $2,000. So it’s like, yeah, he took one sliver of this thing, you know, of this whole big thing. And now that one thing is, is, is so focused upon it’s three times over three times the cost of what the whole thing used to be, because you just really honed in on what they need. And then from there you move them up into, so for 500, a thousand dollars a month, then do you guys have other coaches? Or is it,
Yeah, so it’s it’s awesome. So inside of the inner circle, we have studio growth coaches. So these are studio owners who are doing over a million dollars a year in their business. And so they come on board as coaches in the inner circle. So we have a few of those. We have a Facebook ads coach, a profit first coach, and in-classroom coach a website and tech coach. And then we bring guests coaches in every month as well. But yeah,
But the one on is they have one-on-one calls with these people.
So the one-on-one calls happen with the studio guardian.
Yeah. And then you have, so, and then you have like other resident experts that kind of teach like that
Coaching calls. Yeah. So, so our, our kind of like expert, expert coaches, they teach like the Facebook ads and the finance and the legal and that piece. They do a group call every single month. And then our studio growth coaches will take one-on-one calls. And we also provide virtual retreats in person retreats curriculum. We do round tables. We have squads where everyone’s in a group of eight to 12 studio owners. Like we’ve got a lot of, a lot of cool stuff inside of the inner circle for them.
I just, I love, it’s like you’re serving this one niche in such a deep way, because it’s all you’re focused on. It’s what, you know, it’s what you’re passionate about. And I just, I just absolutely love this man. So interesting. So, so, so looking back here now is that basically the essence of the advice you would give to somebody who is starting cause, you know, we’ve got some of our clients are celebrity mega superstars. A lot of our clients are intermediate, but we have a good portion of people probably who listened to the podcast who are not yet clients who are just like early in the journey. And I think it’s kind of like they’re struggling to go, you know, to figure out their positioning in the world and who they should serve. And are you, I mean, would you say like, would you just basically recommend that path that you followed and just figure out what it is for you? I would,
I would. And I think important thing with that is that you stick to something, you know, I see a lot of people who are chopping and changing, they’re chopping and changing their message they’re chopping and changing their audience. They’re chopping and changing the content that they’re teaching because they don’t get a million dollar launch, you know, three months out of the gate. And you know, for me it was persistence, it was resilient. It was making that commitment to an audience, you know, sharing my message with them for a year. And so I would, I would ask everyone and challenge everyone. Who’s he is to pick it, pick a niche, pick an audience, you know, decide on what you’re going to share, what wisdom, what insights, what teachings you’re going to share with that audience, make sure it’s in alignment with what their challenges and their struggles are.
And that what you’re teaching delivers value and gets them results and focus on them deeply for a year, commit to that market and that message for a year. And I think anyone can do extremely well if they’re, if they’re focused and they have clarity and they’re delivering value at the end of the day, why we’ve done well is because delivering value to our customers is absolutely, you know, at the core. And it’s never been more than, than this year with COVID. You know, when our studio owners had shut down, when we had to take them virtual in four days we were doing one or two calls every single day, you know, with our members for like four months you know, to get them through this and, and to support them. And that, that is why we’re still standing and we’re surviving and we’ve had a terrific year, but we’ve also been able to really make a huge impact on our, on our members this year as well.
That is what it’s all about. My friends, Clint Salter where should people go, man, if they wanna, if they wanna like follow you. And I mean, gosh, if you’re a dance studio owner, you, you, you gotta be plugged into this community.
Yes. If you’re a studio or a no, please come and visit [email protected]. If you’re not a studio owner, I still love to hear from you. I’m on Facebook, Clint Salta. You’ll find me there, shoot me through a message. Love to share anything that I, that I can with you, but you’re only in a really good hands with Rory and he’s amazing company. So yeah. I’d love to hear from you.
Well, thanks brother. Clint Salter, ladies and gentlemen send him some love if you can. And we wish you all the best. My friend. Thanks for [inaudible]

Ep 124: How to Write Books from the Heart with Lysa TerKeurst

Hey Builder Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for tuning in to listen to this interview, we are so excited to bring you this information and wanted to let you know that, Hey, there’s no sales pitch coming from anything that we do with this is all our value add to you and the community. However, if you are somebody who is looking for specific strategies on how to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and we offer a free call to everyone that’s interested in getting to know us and is willing to give us a chance to get to know them and share a little bit about what we do. So if you’re interested in taking us up on a free strategy call, you can do that at brand build

ers, group.com/summit. Call brand builders, group.com/summit. Call. Hope to talk to you soon on with the show.

Oh my gosh. What an honor friends you know, that AJ doesn’t join me for every interview that we do, but for Lisa TerKeurst, she is here. Lisa is a new friend of ours. If you, if you’re not familiar with her, she’s the number one New York times bestselling author of it’s not supposed to be this way, which is a book that sold a million copies within its first two years. But Lisa’s 23 books together have sold over 6 million copies. She’s got 2 million followers on social media. She’s also the president of Proverbs 31 ministry, which has 5 million followers. They have a huge podcast. She’s been on the Oprah Winfrey show. Good morning America, the today show. And we met her because she got stuck on a dock, on a flight with the Vedas to go speak at the global leadership network a few months ago. And we were just, she was forced to be friends with us. There was no escape and we just really love her and art. And she has a new book out that just came out. It’s called forgiving what you can’t forget. And this is going to blow your mind when you hear this story. So anyways, Lisa, thank you. And welcome.

Thank you so much. I knew we were going to be fast friends when I first met you guys and you both had on matching monogrammed, masks. And I was like, that’s so impressive that a, they have their mask B, they actually coordinate with their outfits and c their monograms. I need to know these people.

Yes, that’s a problem we have.

Well, I try to match everyone in the family. I think it’s

An asset. I think that speaks volumes about how organized you are. And so I immediately wanted to lean in and listen to whatever you have to say. So it was an honor and a joy to meet you. And I loved our time together.

Yeah. Lisa didn’t know our, I don’t even know for ordinary, but I met at Bible study and have done several of Lisa’s books and I didn’t know that she was going to be on this airplane. And then I was like, Oh, I’ve got a, she stuck with me for an hour. I’m going to ask her every question I can. Well, it’s been great.

I think it was amazing. I mean, within a few minutes of you, I mean, just spending time together, you shared this story with us about your husband art, which is really what this book is about, or was the basis of this book. It was a, it was a betrayal that, that he made. And I was like, wow, this woman is opening up a very vulnerable part of her life very quickly. Do you mind just kind of catching everyone up on, on a little bit about what happened to you and, and how that kind of led to, you know, this new book

Sure thing. Yeah. And, and I always like to tell people to art is very okay with me sharing the story because we see that this is not only part of my redemption and healing, but it’s part of his as well. And so I don’t go into a lot of details about the story, but we share just enough to let people know that we’ve experienced the depth of pain that comes with the betrayal. And I think when people understand that that we’ve experienced the depth of just this horrific situation, you don’t have to go through the same situation that we did. But if you know that I’ve been through a lot of pain, you can trust that. The words that I write in my book are not going to be too neat, too tidy, too unrealistic for your pain. And I think when people know, I think my reader more, more than wanting to know my story.

I think people pick up my book not to be taught, not to be instructed, although all of that happens in the book as well, but I think they pick up my book to be understood. And I think I’m able to give voice to some very complicated emotions that people feel when they’ve been hurt, betrayed, rejected, wounded, wronged and all of those things certainly played into our story. But the basics of our stories that we’d been married for two and a half decades. And I found out my husband was being unfaithful and I wasn’t just broken hearted. I was completely shattered, shattered beyond what I could even describe because it wasn’t just the implosion of a relationship at the time. I felt like it could potentially be a devastation to our entire legacy. And I also, I was so worried about my kids, but I also felt the weight of the world on me because I was a Christian voice in a very tender space for a lot of women.

And there was honestly for me, a lot of shame around what happened. And I was just having such a hard time reconciling, like, do I continue to help other women? And do I even still have anything to say if, if this happened in my marriage, then what does that say about me? And I remember one of the most painful things that people would sometimes say to me is, well, you know, there’s two sides to every story. And it took me a while to figure out what do I say to that? But I finally just with all respect and kindness said back to them, this isn’t a spectator sport where you pick a side, this is the implosion of a family where you need to jump on the field and just offer to help in any way. But if you can’t be part of the solution, then don’t be part of the conversation.

Oh, that’s really, that’s really good. And I think, I think one of the things that I love most about you, isn’t just your writing because it’s incredible. And I think it’s very moving. But it’s also your natural vulnerability in all aspects. When we first met you on social media and in your books, and even in conversations like these, and, you know, we work with people who were trying to build their personal brand all the time that are really trying to tap into their message and that level of vulnerability that makes them appealing to other people, because then they feel like they know you and they can relate to you. And to know that I’ve got this commonality with you is it makes it so much easier to want to listen to you or to read your books or to follow you on social because you come from a place of not righteousness, but from, Oh, I’ve been in the depths and I know this, I come from a place of being there. So I’m curious, like how do you tap into that vulnerability and the willingness to be so open and bare and then create beautiful pieces of art that are helping people around the world? Like, how do you do that?

That’s a good question. You know, it’s, it’s kind of interesting. I’m a pretty private person which may surprise people. I’m an introvert who’s sort of at times forced to live the life of an extrovert. And but there’s a big difference between privacy and secrecy. So secrecy is when we withhold information for the purpose of hiding privacy is when we withhold details for the purpose of healing. And so I’m not a secret person, but I am a private person. And so when I write in my book, I don’t go into all the gory details of what happened, because that would do nothing but just satisfy people’s curiosity, but that’s like giving them sugar treats, you know, it’s like, it, it feels good going in, but it does nothing to nourish them at all. So instead I just let my story be a little bit of the backbone of a message so that people know what I’ve been through without giving them details. Because my focus isn’t the details of the scandal or the details of the betrayal and the hurt. What what’s a treasure to people is the transferable wisdom. It’s the life lessons. And it’s the experiences where I’ve gleaned insights and how to heal and how to move forward. That’s really, what’s important to get to, and that’s what will nourish a person’s soul.

I love that. I forget who said this, where you can tell me because I have mom brain 95% of the time, but there’s this great quote that we heard from someone at NSA that talks about how you take an eye focus story and turn it into a, you focused message. And

Craig Valentine everybody in 1999 world champion of public speaking, former, former professional speaking coach of Roy Baden.

But so much of that is like, you know, it’s like taking this very intimate story, but yet gleaming the insights and the wisdom that will apply to everyone around you.

So I liked that, that delineation of the privacy part of, of sharing. And yeah, I have to tell you like this, this, the power of this book, I mean, you can flip through and just read some of the lines. I mean, it is so moving and forgiving what you can’t forget again, is what the book is called. But I wanted to translate that also to social media. So I know we’re talking about this vulnerability and writing, and when we were at the global leadership summit, there was an after hours conversation that me, you and AIG had that I really loved, which was about as an author or even just as a person sharing some of my life and my views. How do you delineate what you should share and what you shouldn’t share, where it’s like, I want to be honest, I, I wanna you know, know that I have a voice in the world and that matters, but like, you know, maybe not everyone cares what I think about politics or this or that, or maybe not every wants to know the details of my marriage, but it’s also like people want you to be vulnerable and real, and you just seem to have a, I remember just feeling like this, just very centered place of truth of which you kind of communicate from.

And I personally really struggle with finding that balance. Is there anything you can share about that, but whether in the book books or on social?

Absolutely. So I think sometimes when we pick up a microphone to give a message, I think sometimes we misunderstand what we’re doing with that microphone. Sometimes I think we, we forget, we’re not speaking to a crowd because we see a crowd of people in front of us. We’re speaking to an individual. And that individual that we’re speaking to is really important that we determine who that individual is. So if that individual is the hurting person in that room, who thinks they probably shouldn’t even be there and your desire is to not share the facts of what happened to you as much as just connect with their pain, to say, I know exactly where you’re at different experiences, but the depth of the pain is in me too. And then you, instead of parking on the pain, you then move on to sharing wisdom in your journey that will be transferable to help them.

If that’s who you’re speaking to, then you’ll give the best message of your life. But sometimes people put the individual that they’re speaking to and they, it it’s really that there it’s that third grade teacher who told them that they weren’t good enough. And so the speaker then tries to prove to that teacher, that they have a place on that stage. And the problem is that if you are trying to prove something, that to that teacher, you may impress an audience, but impressing the audience is intimidating. It’s not inspiring. Or you may have that person that hurt you as that one person in the audience. And you may try, try to do some sort of payback, like I’ll show you, you know, and if you do that, though, everybody walks out of that audience, feeling a little more cynical about the world, then a little more hopeful about the world, or it may be that parent that was never there for you.

And if that’s that one person that you picture seated in the audience, that parent who was never there for you, then you may get up there and try to prove how, you know, you, you were worth it and you should have, you know, you should have shown up for me and, and you do so much to elevate yourself that you wind up depressing the rest of the audience. And so I think it’s really important that we remember, we don’t take the stage to prove something, to impress people, to posture ourselves as an expert. You know, sometimes when we try to impress other people, we wind up just depressing ourself. And so if we get up there and we take that stage for that one hurting person in the audience, and our whole perspective is I want to make that hopeless person hope again. And I want to make that person who hasn’t felt understood in a really long time.

I want them to feel like they have a comrade in this world. And I want to make that, that one person seated on the back row, who thinks they don’t belong. I want to tell them, I see you. And I recognize that you have a space in this place. And I want to honor you. If we take the microphone and we are using our voice, our platform, our opportunity to help the hurting person in the room, then it becomes so much less about us and so much more about the wisdom that we can transfer from our hurting places into hope in that person’s heart.

I tell you, that is why you sell millions of books right there. That’s also why you have millions of followers. You could even hear the genuineness. Even when you speak about that is so much of where you come from and for anyone who is trying to build a personal brand, it’s like, if you come from that authentic place like that, just naturally it comes across. Like it really, really does. Now there’s something that you kind of said that reminded me of something that’s in the book that I thought was just really interesting. And it’s this concept of marked moments. And I think that’s just something that regardless if there is a traumatic event or a tragedy or a deep hurt or a, you know, a deep wound, regardless, like we all have marked moments that we can look back and say, that was the moment. That was the comment. That was the person that was the experience that demarcated at change in my life, my attitude, my beliefs. And so like, I’m just really curious, like, share it, share a little bit about this concept of Mark moments and what that really means in the book, but then also just in life. Well, I talk

About in the very beginning of the book that we all have our own personal BC and a D moments. Now, of course, people usually Mark that, you know, that delineation of time using the life of Christ. But I think when we’ve been through something significant, some wounding, some accident, some betrayal, whatever it is, you know, we have our own personal before crisis and after devastation. And it’s almost like that line is drawn so sharply in our lives that we start to define our life well, before this happened. And after that happened, and it’s almost like it starts to define the very nature of our life and, you know, our I-phones don’t help because our I-phones are. So I don’t really understand how it happens, but they just put together these little memory movies. I don’t know if you’ve ever gotten one of these it’s like four years ago on this day.

And you see this picture of all these smiling people. And two of those people in that smiling picture, they were the ones that devastated your life. And you just think, what do I do with this? And it can almost be so stabbing that it takes your breath away and you think to yourself, I was authentic in that moment. I loved those two people. And so what do I do with this memory now, like we went on this trip or we had this birthday party together, or, you know, we took this Christmas card photo together and I really authentically loved this person, but then they went on to hurt me. So what do I do? Do I burn the pictures and throw the memories away? No. In the book for giving what you can’t forget. I say those are your memories. And if you were authentically loving that person in that moment, you get to decide if you want to keep that you weren’t being fake, you weren’t being false. You were authentically loving. And if that was a beautiful memory to you, then call it a beautiful memory and keep it. If it’s a painful memory, guess what? You can toss it away. You can burn it, you can delete it. It’s yours to keep it’s yours to toss away, but you get to decide what you do with your memories.

So good. I think from a a tactical perspective, one of the things that I saw is that you spent over a thousand hours in scripture preparing for this book. And obviously, you know, for those of you listening that know the story of Christ, it’s like the essential message of Christ is forgiveness. And I thought, you know, separate from the spiritual part of it, just the craft of an author saying even after I’ve written 23 books, I’m going to spend a thousand hours diving deep into this one study before, you know, I, I, I come to this book, how important is that? And, and was there anything, I mean, obviously you’ve been very into the Bible for a very long time, but you know, taking a thousand hours on one subject, was there anything that showed up for you specifically that you had never really noticed before, but with that intensity of a focus on, on such a specific concept that, that came out and then ended up making it way its way into forgiving, what you can’t forget.

Yes. I’m so glad you asked me this question. You know, and let me just be, I’m going to have true confession moment. Is that okay if I’ve true confession moment on your show, is that allowed wow. Loud. Okay. True confession. Part of the reason I spent a thousand hours studying forgiveness in the Bible because probably for the first hundred or so, I was looking for the exception I was looking for where God said, okay, everything’s forgivable, but not this because sometimes when something happens to you and it’s unchangeable, like you can’t ever fix what happened, the unchangeable can feel so unforgivable. And so really I don’t shine my halo that I spent a thousand hours studying. I kind of say, it just took me that long to start to really understand what forgiveness is and what it isn’t. And I brought so much resistance to it, and I felt like such a fraud.

You know, when my team would gather up to listen to me, you know, quote, teach on forgiveness. The first five times they showed up, all I could write was all the reasons why I wasn’t qualified to be a person to write this message, because I had so much resistance to forgiveness. And I honestly felt like a forgiveness failure because how many times that I forgiven and then I got triggered in my pain and all that anxiety and frustration and anger just came crashing back on me. And I just thought, what in the world, maybe forgiveness doesn’t work. So I spent a thousand hours because I desperately needed to learn for me, but probably two things that surprised me the most one is that I started to understand forgiveness. Isn’t something I muster up inside of me. It’s not like I boss my feelings around and get enough spiritual maturity that suddenly then forgiveness becomes easy for me.

And that I can like conjure it up. That’s not what forgiveness is. Forgiveness. Doesn’t even start with me. Forgiveness is a gift given to us by God. And so forgiveness is not based on my determination. Forgiveness is based on my cooperation with what God is providing for me. And forgiveness is not an unfair gift I have to give to this person who hurt me. That just sounds cruel, right? Forgiveness is God’s way of providing the hurting inside of the human heart to heal. And so as God’s forgiveness flows to me, I simply must just cooperate with it and let it flow through me. And as it passes through me, it’s like washing out all of that bitterness and anger and resentment. That turns me into someone I don’t want to be. And when we are bitter, because of what something, this thing that this other person has done to me, we’re letting that person hurt us twice.

They heard us when the devastation happened, but if we allowed them to turn us into somebody, that’s not a real representation of who we are. They heard us a second time by making us bitter. And I’m sorry, but I refuse to let that person that hurt me, hijack my healing. So I don’t have to wait for them to say, they’re sorry. I don’t have to wait for them to realize what they did was wrong. I don’t even have to wait for them to learn all the lessons that they should learn. I can detach my ability to heal from those choices that that other person may or may not ever make. And I can stand in the middle of my pain and I can say, I deserve to stop suffering because of what this other person has done to me. And I am participating with God’s gift of forgiveness for my heart, as much as anyone else’s heart.

So that’s a big thing that I learned, but in the scripture, here’s one of the most surprising things that I learned. If you look at the Lord’s prayer, you can find it a couple of places in the gospel, but in Matthew chapter six, starting in verse nine, Jesus says, this is then how you should pray. So imagine this, God has given Jesus, the assignment, teach the people how to pray. And Jesus says, okay, this is how you should pray. Now who thinks that prayer is a pretty stinking, big deal in the Bible, right? Raise your hand. Perfect. Prayer is a huge deal. This is a big assignment. And do you know, over half of the words that Jesus uses in the prayer, the ultimate prayer that we’re supposed to pray every day over half of the words are about confession and forgiveness. I was astounded by this.

Think of all the things that Jesus could have included in the Lord’s prayer, the ultimate prayer, and he uses the bulk of the word to tend to the humans need for forgiveness and confession. Why? Because though he was perfect divinity, also absolute humanity without sin, but he carried hurt. He knew what it was like to be brutalized by other people rejected, spit upon, turned against wounded. And so I think he was like, you know what? You guys need. Most of all in your prayers, you need to know how to heal. The daily hurts how to look at an offense of another person and refuse to pick it up because you already pre forgave that person. And when this world be such a better place, like if we truly woke up every day and said our father in heaven, hallowed, be your name, your kingdom, come your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us today our daily bread and forgive us our debts. As we have also forgiven our debtors, like forgiveness is not just for the heart and horrific in our life. Forgiveness is something we can do. First thing in the morning before we even enter into life. Like we can choose to pre forgive. We can send forgiveness ahead into that meeting into that coffee shop, into that doctor’s office, into that school, into, you know, the Jim that we’re going to go to later to might. And so when we’re walking into that coffee shop three hours later and some rude dude bumps into her happy, we can trade all that drama for an upgrade. And we can just say, Oh no. So actually I already forgave you this morning. So just because you’re laying down, this offense does not mean I’m going to pick it up and carry it with me and affect me all day long.

Like you do, you boo. I have already forgiven you and have a good day and we take our coffee, but we don’t take the offense. And we don’t weaponize the pain that they caused us and unleash it into every other person in this world. Like sometimes I’ll just have this moment where I think devil you have overplayed your freaking hand. You know why? Because you intended to multiply that hurt and pain in my heart so that I would carry it into this world. But that is not who I am. I am an evangelist of the gospel message. So the hurt stops here and you devil are shamed back to hell because I’m not going to pick up that offense. I’m not going to play your game and I’m not going to do the devil’s work for him. I’m going to be a gospel centered woman where I have loved to share, not crosses of a offense to bear.

Oh, we’re still having some church up in here. This is good. I love that. And having one of the things that I love so much about this book and your message and just you it’s that you’re standing as, like, I am not the perfect example. I’m quite, I failed at this quite often. And I set off on this research journey because I was looking for the wrong answers. And I think so, so many people in our audience are probably afraid to step into some of the things that they don’t think they’re an expert in, but instead it’s like actually lean into the fact that like, if, if you’re passionate about it, like lean into that. And even if you don’t start down the path with like the best of intentions, it’s like, no, I’m going to study this. And I’m going to find that exception, share that struggle and share that struggle. Because I think that’s where this authentic nature that draws you in and you come from this place of, I do not have this figured out and I was doing it all wrong. And that’s why I went on this journey to begin with. And I think there’s just, there’s, there’s this misconception that you have to be an expert or how it all figured out to be able to talk about it. And I think this is such a great example of no, like, no you don’t. It’s it’s not that at all.

I agree with that, you know, and I think sometimes authors shy away from people’s skepticism, but I say step into it because when you can speak to the skepticism and you can say me too, it disarms people for putting down a message thinking good for you, but it worked for me. And also we have to remember, we can’t start our books where we want people to be. We have to start our books where people are actually act. And so with forgiving, what you can’t forget, I knew I had to start with the pain and the resistance to forgiveness. I couldn’t come out swinging and say, you have to forgive. That’s not where I was at. When I started the message. I couldn’t expect my reader to be there either. And I think it’s really important that we remember people talk about two things. They talk about their problems and their questions. So the very best thing we can do is acknowledge the felt, need of the book. And it’s always a problem. Someone is having a question that they’re asking. So as an author, if we can acknowledge that felt need lean into it, then we can provide real value for people. When our author’s promise is presented as a question to answer or an answer to their question or a solution to their problem. And that’s where the magic happens.

Yeah. Forgiving, what you can’t forget is the book. Obviously you can hear directly the power coming through Lisa in what she talks about, what she believes in, just how she writes open, honest, authentic, vulnerable transparent, which is no doubt, a huge part of the reason for her extraordinary success. Lisa, thank you so much just for the honor of being here and opening up and sharing your story. And gosh, we just, we pray for you and art and we just wish you guys the very, very best,

Thank you so much. It’s such an honor to be with you and let’s do it again sometime

Ep 117: Dynamic Speaking and Scaling Joy with Dan Thurmon | Recap Episode

Hey, welcome to the recap edition of the influential personal brand podcasts, Rory Vaden, coming to you. So low, a recap in this Epic interview with Dan Thurman and I’m covered for AIG to on this one just by myself. But you know, I’ve known Dan for so long. It’s, it’s fun to get to go back and listen to this and kind of analyze and break it down and give you my top three highlights. And there was so much going on in this interview. You know, we released these, these podcasts also on our YouTube channel. It’s actually not on the Rory Vaden YouTube channel. It’s on the brand builders group, YouTube channel and,

And you know, usually some people like to watch cause you see the facial expressions, but this one was, was crazy because there were a lot of visual components of it, which, you know, we tried to talk out for you for you visually, but anyways, so to dive in to the top three takeaways. So first of all, I thought the mindset to pivot and, and these were three mindsets that were my big takeaways from Dan and from that interview. And, and the first mindset is the mindset that it takes to pivot. And I loved the actual content that he was sharing, which is from his, his actual content that he, he teaches in his virtual keynotes, this idea that when things become uncertain, we can falsely feel uncertain about everything. And it’s like, when there’s change, not everything is changing. There’s a couple of things that are changing, but, but we sort of have this, if we’re not careful, we have this mental mushroom that we allow ourselves to do, right?

It’s if you’re not dissed, if you don’t have a disciplined mind, if you allow your mind to just run, it’ll run towards the negative it’ll it’ll, it will become just over-exaggerated and, and consumed with all of the, the, the negative possible outcomes. And I remember talking about this with Lewis Howes one time when I was interviewed on his podcast, actually the most recent time I was, I was on there and we were talking about how with successful people, there’s still always like this fear, no matter how successful you get, there’s like this fear that you’ll not just that you’ll fail, but that somehow you’ll fail so much that you’ll just become like homeless living on the street is like this, this deep rooted insecurity that drives someone to be so successful is always there. And it can get so out of control that like you just, when something goes wrong or doesn’t work out or you don’t get number one, or you’re not perfect your mind immediately freaked out and was like, Oh my gosh, I’m going to end up homeless.

Right? And it’s like, you’re so far away from that. Even though, even though things might be changing and you, you might not be winning or you’re just dealing with uncertainty. And, and I thought that was super powerful that, you know, Dan was reminding us that even though you’re uncertain about some things, you don’t have to be uncertain about everything and you can have faith in your, in yourself. And, and you can have faith in your ability that your entire life you’ve had to learn how to operate a new environment, your entire life. You’d ha you’ve had to learn new ideas and new skills and, you know, maybe work in new jobs or a new markets or verticals or industries, and you’ve been able to figure it out. So why do we become so scared and overwhelmed and frightened and stressed and anxious. When we face a little bit of change in our life, knowing that our entire life up to this point, it has been embracing change and learning new things.

We have the ability and the knowledge to figure it out. And if you can just embrace that, you’ll be able to pivot faster. And that’s going to put you in a, a much better position. So that I think was the first thing for me, was the mindset to pivot and, and what that looks like. The second mindset was, is really the mindset to up-level. And this one was more watching. It wasn’t so much what Dan said, like it wasn’t in the content. It wasn’t when he was like teaching his content, it was just kind of watching and processing his demeanor and looking at how quickly, you know, this is someone who’s made a career speaking in front of live audiences, and that’s like been the primary way that he’s made money. And that business model of the live keynote speaker has been disrupted. I mean, it’s been more than disrupted.

It’s been killed. It has evaporated. It has vanished. It, it went from, this is what I knew in my whole life to it disappeared overnight. So as much as like any business model the, the model of live keynote speaking in the physical sense in, in front of live audiences disappeared overnight. There’s no events, there’s no gatherings worldwide. It has shut down. Travel has virtually shut down. And so here you have somebody Dan, that that’s been his primary business, which, you know, we understand, we appreciate it. It’s, it’s always been a huge part of our business. But it’s actually, it’s become less and less over the years. It’s just been fewer engagements at higher fees, but still a smaller total of our proportionate revenue, because we’ve moved into more of building, you know, building a real business kind of outside of, of just being on stage speaking.

But that’s a, that’s a real scary thing. And what did he do? What has he done? He immediately turned to going, all right, I’m going to go virtual, but I’m not just going to do virtual presentations. I’m going to figure out a way to Uplevel the virtual experience. And he’s got a five camera shoot, three sets going on in his house with this ability to create this variation of, you know, the types of just kind of the type of energy in which he’s presenting with. And of course, if you watch, if you actually watch this video of the interview on our YouTube channel, you’ll get to just see. I mean, it’s, it’s worth going to look, even if you don’t watch the whole thing, but just kind of fast forward and see how this set changes. And it’s amazing. He just like walks out of the screen and into another, another screen, it looks like he was walking into a new room, different camera angles.

And it’s, it’s a simple bit of technology, but instead of being paralyzed and terrified and, and, you know, just scared, which would have been understandable, it is understandable. A lot of, a lot of speakers are still reeling with trying to figure out what the heck they’re going to do. He just said, how can I, how can I go virtual? And how can I, up-level the experience? How can I take this performance and this production to another level which people haven’t seen. And so we quickly did that. And, and so the mindset there, which he also did talk about is to go respond to uncertainty with new education, with new personal development, with new growth of, of, you know, he didn’t, he didn’t have all that technology before. He didn’t know how to do all that. He figured it out because he was leaning into the change and going great.

I’m going to, I’m going to use this opportunity for change and challenge and uncertainty to learn something new and, and to, and to prove that I have faith and confidence in myself, that I’ll be able to figure it out by investing and, and, and growing and learning and saying, you know what, there’s a way to learn how to do this and that. I mean, gosh, that is why I think brand builders, part of why we’re growing so much is because people are realizing that online. I have to be able to do business online. There’s, there’s, there’s no other way right now to really be steadily growing your business. And if you don’t have those skills, if you don’t have that knowledge, if you don’t know how to write copy, if you don’t know how to build funnels, if you don’t know what a words should be on a webpage, if you don’t know how to run a or to run Facebook ads, or if you don’t know how to do webinars, if you don’t know how to create content, if you don’t know how to manage social media, if you don’t have systems for training a staff to like, keep up with all this content production, you need to get going and you need to get going fast, sweetheart, like you’re, you need to get on it.

And I think, you know, God just had his hand on us in terms of guiding our life to be sitting in a place to provide this education to people in such a systematic way. And maybe that’s, you know, if that’s you, then, Hey, you should check out brand builders. We do it as good. If not better than anyone in the world, I really believe leave that. But maybe it’s not your personal brand. Maybe it’s some other part of your business that you need to learn. The point is is, and what I took away from Dan, both in what he said, and what he meant is that you respond to uncertainty with personal growth, with personal development, with education, with learning, with knowledge to go, all right, I’m going to adapt. I’m going to grow. And that’s not what most people do. I mean, let’s be honest.

Most of us want to hang onto the old days, rather sit around and commiserate about how things used to be and about how I wish it was the way it was and how, how hard it is been on me versus going, I’m going to educate, I’m going to indoctrinate. I’m going to learn. I’m going to develop. I am going to grow. And knowing that as I do that, as I push myself to, to develop and to grow and to learn out of that will come confidence and ability in the face of uncertainty, which of course is true because there’s always opportunity. Every problem creates new opportunity. And anyways, I just thought Dan modeled it. And you know, he talked about it and totally up-leveled his game to the point where, when I put on my virtual keynote speaker had I’m going crap. Like, you know, he, he sat in a new bar for what that looks like and, and going, man, we need it.

We need to figure it out. We got to find ways to up our production and, and up the exp up the virtual experience for our virtual keynotes. And so anyways, what are you doing, doing to learn? How are you growing your knowledge? How are you leaning in to change and uncertainty and instability with more education and more relevant education? And that was my, my second takeaway is, is the mindset to, to Uplevel. So that’s different from the mindset to pivot and just be safe is then adding onto it. Another layer, which is, which is the mindset to, and then for my third takeaway, I’m actually, you know, I wrote this down, it’s the mindset to serve the mind set, to serve. And this was the money line. Like this was the, this was the, the, the focal point point for me of the entire interview. And he said, yes, I can scale giving and helping on a global level. That is the type of success. I don’t even have to monetize.

Think about that for a second. If I could make worldwide impact, that is enough significance and value in my life that I wouldn’t even have to monetize it. And so that’s why he’s doing it. You got this 50 year old guy on Tik TOK going viral because he’s not, he’s not trying to figure out how do I suck the most money out of my audience. He’s figuring out what can I do that would give value to them? What would entertain them? What would educate them? What would encourage them? What would inspire them? What would teach them? What would, what would bring them a bright spot in their day, in a difficult time? And we say it, we talk about it. We say things like, you never feel fear when the mission to serve is clear. But, but when you look at people like Dan, they’re living it, they’re doing it.

And it’s, I think it’s like how many ultra performers do you have to hear? Talk about that extreme level of commitment to service before you really believe and adapt and buy into the idea that I’m going to serve my audience. Like that is what I’m trying to do. I will let the money follow. I will trust that the money will follow. I’ll have faith that the money will follow. But what I’m going to focus on is not the money. I’m going to focus on the impact. I’m going to focus on the service. I’m going to focus on making a difference. I’m going to focus on delivering value to people that I’m not even paid for. And, and once that, once that switch flips, you can’t be stopped, right? Like once, once that heart change really happens, like once that, that, that, that, that flip, that, that evolution wants that maturity.

Once, once that commitment happens, you can’t be stopped because you’re saying it’s not about the money. It’s not about the followers. It’s about making a difference and you can turn on your camera and reach across the globe in one button, right? Like it’s never been easier. So if you really want to make an impact, prove it, turn on the microphone, turn on the camera, pull up Canva and make a post type of caption. But like, if that’s what it’s about, do it make an impact and, and trust and know that the money’s going to follow and look, you know, Dan’s one of the highest paid speakers in the world. And, and he doesn’t know what life is going to look like in a post COVID area. That’s all still like sorting itself out. But you see him living that, that commitment to service in the midst of uncertainty and, you know, and you watch it from outside and you go, of course, he’s gonna win.

He’s focused on how can he, up-level the experience for his customers? How can he pivot quickly? How can he make a difference? Eventually the money’s going to follow that. And that is why we say we serve mission-driven messengers. It’s not that we don’t care about money. We do care about money. We, we we’re good at making money. We’re we, we, we consider it important, but it’s about the impact in the mission first. And, and trusting that if I serve enough people for a long enough time, I will eventually make money. If I serve enough people for a long enough time, there’s no way I don’t end up making money. But when all I focus on is money, it’s hard to, I’m not focused on service. And so when the money’s not there right away, I give up because it’s not fair today. And tomorrow and next week, and next month and six months, and maybe in a year, maybe even two years, and you go, I’ve been doing this for two years.

I’m not making money. Yeah. Eventually your going to burn out your going to give up, compare that to the person going I’m just here to serve. I’m just here to give value. I’m here to Uplevel the contribution I’m making to the world. And I can’t be stopped because there’s no measurement. That’s going to slow me down. Like I’m only going to make more impact. I’m only going to reach more people, whether it’s one or 1 million or 100 million, I know I’m going to, I’m going to naturally reach more and more people. And I I’m, I know the money is going to show up in some form or fashion, and that’s a switch that you need to flip. And, and it’s, it’s something that you have to flip regularly. It’s, it’s kinda, you know, it’s like what we talk about in the take the stairs book, success is never owned.

Success is rented and the rent is due every day. And the commitment to serve is never owned. It is rented and the rent is due every day. You have to wake up every single day and make that conscious decision that I’m putting impact first. And I’m all in, on making impact. And I’m going to trust that somehow some way, if I’m all in, on providing the best level of service and making the biggest difference, I can, I’m all in on that. And I’m all in on having the faith and the trust and the confidence of knowing it will eventually work out.

And that is how it is. That is always how it is. You just got to wake up and remind yourself of that every day, whether there’s one person watching or 1 million or 100 million, but if you can be making an impact, that’s something that it’s like, you don’t even have to monetize, but you can, and you will. And we’re going to show you how so thank you for hanging around here. Hope you enjoyed the interview with Dan. I loved it. You had listened to it yet. Go back and listen to it and just see if you can catch the mindset of what it takes to pivot to up level and to surf. We’ll catch you next time. [inaudible].

Ep 116: Dynamic Speaking and Scaling Joy with Dan Thurmon

Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for tuning in to listen to this interview. We are so excited to bring you this information and wanted to let you know that, Hey, there’s no sales pitch coming. From anything that we do with this is all our value add to you and the community. However, if you are somebody who is looking for specific strategies on how to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and we offer a free call to everyone that’s interested in getting to know us and is willing to give us a chance to get to know them and share a little bit about what we do. So if you’re interested in taking us up on a free strategy call, you can do that at brand builders, group.com/summit. Call brand builders, group.com/summit. Call, hope to talk to you soon on with the show. Dan Thurman is one of the reasons why I almost gave up my career as a keynote speaker. He is extraordinary.

I mean he provides amazing content you know, just kind of like real, true thought leadership, but in the most acrobatic and entertaining way. And I use the word acrobatic because he does backflips. He juggles, he throws knives. He can do handstands on podiums, like and I know that most of you are listening to this, but if you don’t know this, we record all of these episodes as videos and we put them also on our YouTube channel. And you know, I don’t know for sure, but like, there’s probably going to be some elements because Dan is so visual that you, you may hear us reference and usual bit too to the visual and you might go check out our YouTube channel and you know, we’ll post we’ll post a link to that. But so Dan is incredible. I mean, he is a hall of fame speaker.

He’s also a former president of the national speakers association. I’ve known him for years. Although I wouldn’t say we’ve been like super close friends. We have the same friends that we’re super close to, and it’s not for any other reason than we just both been out there running a gun. And, but I mean, listen to his client list. Okay. So when I talk about the kind of work that he’s doing and the, the kind of companies that, that he is speaking to it’s extraordinary. So you’re talking about the Coca-Cola’s of the world bank of America, Proctor and gamble, Marriott Johnson and Johnson, Walmart crafts, state farm Honeywell. I mean, these are some of the world’s biggest and brightest companies that have brought him in to speak. The reason, not the only reason, but one of the reasons that I invited Dan to be here is because he has been around in the speaking world as a very successful speaker for a long time.

I mean, he was inducted into the hall of fame almost 10 years ago. So and he has also, you know, he spoke on the front lines in Iraq and Afghanistan. So he’s been around a long time, but he’s doing some incredibly innovative things. So he’s checks like all the kind of like classic marks, you know, he’s got a great book called off balance on purpose, but he’s doing some things. So first of all, on Tik talk, him and his teenage daughter, Maggie are like tick tock celebrities. They have multiple videos that have been viewed more than 30 million times. Their Tik TOK channel has over a million subscribers. And so it’s so innovative. And then one of the other things that he’s doing is the way that he has pivoted to his virtual live stream events is just extraordinary. And so we’re going to, we’re going to just talk about how to stay relevant in a kind of like COVID world as a speaker and all, all things. How do you get to be Dan Thurman except, you know, we’re not going to do pushup and handstand tutorials, I don’t think, but anyways, welcome to the show, Dan, glad to have you,

What an intro of Rory that is so amazing for your compliments. One quick update because things change quick, you know, that Maggie’s following on Tik TOK is now over 3 million. And so yeah, so things just keep growing and growing, man. It’s, it’s a lot of fun though.

I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s really crazy. Like, you know, and I’m serious about that. Like the first time I saw you keynote, I was like, why would someone hire me when they could hire this guy? It was like you know, I have that thought every week, not very often, but every once in a while I have that thought and I was just like, you know, that was it. And then, and then just seeing you guys crush it on social media is kind of the same thing. And I mean, you’re an entertainer. I think there’s a, there’s a big part of your background, right? Like you just been in entertainment, but so let’s talk about tech talk for a second. Since we can kind of dive in, what the heck, like, how do you get 3 million followers? Like why, what are you doing? Like, what is your strategy? Because most speakers, I think, a what a waste of time, and you guys are just crushing it. So like, what’s your mindset there a little over a year,

Year ago, like most people never heard of Tik TOK, but Maggie had. And so she got involved on the platform. She had a good background and foundation because for a year she had been in high school, a brand influencer and advocate for Hollister. She was hired on a team and a project to promote endorse, launched new products and things. They, they really educated her in many ways about social media and Instagram. It was really Instagram based on that platform in terms of how to work for for Hollister that ran its course and the program ended, but she already was quite marketing savvy, had grown her Instagram following a good bit and heard about Tik TOK got involved in, tic-tac had a couple of her videos that did well. And then she had a, she asked me, dad, do you want to do a dance together?

We did this dance that to a Fergie song that just went completely bonkers. We went to the gym to play racquetball. And by the time we got out of that session, it had over 300,000 likes or something stupid like that. And then it just kept going and going and going that elevated Maggie’s platform. And, and she continued to do her own thing, but the things that we did together, what was interesting is it became very much about our relationship. We have a very genuine, loving natural relationship which filled this need in Tik TOK. A lot of people responded saying, I wish I had that in my family. I wish my dad would do these kinds of things with me. And so in a very careful way, we’ve, we’ve managed her brand to she’s now in college, a freshman in college and envisions this as her career. Obviously I’m not going to be a part of that journey for her whole life. And so we we’ve grown the dad daughter stuff in dance and comedy. And of course the variety of skills that we do with juggling and acrobatics and unicycling and silks, and, and kind of found different ways to introduce all these skills.

And very quickly, I just have to say, like, you know, it’s a little bit frustrating that you like God was dishing out talents. And I think there was like a glitch in the system and just like dumped. I mean, you guys are incredible, like the dancing, the acrobatics, the juggling, I mean, that’s really, it’s really, it’s entertaining. It’s really entertainment, entertainment in the most pure sense.

It’s, it’s so fun. And it’s a part of who I am. It’s just by my language of my love languages, kinesthetic movement. I love to just do things, learn things, develop skills, always have. That’s kind of how I channeled my hyperactive energy. And now you and I are a lot, a lot the same. But as she got closer to college, what we began to do is, you know, obviously she’s branching out more with her own videos and her own skills. And, and now it’s probably like 90 10, like where she’s doing Mo mostly her content I’m involved in our channel here and there. We had a trip to LA last week to see some other influencers. And so we did some more together during that. I have my own tech talk where I only have like a half a million followers on mine, but but, but it’s, but I’m still thinking about Tik TOK relative to my brand, because this is gen Z. This is that next level audience. And what I’ve sort of learned is that they, they are very receptive to what I have to teach and to the way that I can teach it, it’s just a different vibe and a different connection. So I’ve been very careful and very fascinated by how I could develop that relationship, that relationship with a new, a new generation all over the world. And it’s extraordinary to wrap your mind around.

Yeah. So like talking about, thinking about the generations for a second, you know, we had Jason Dorsey on here just a few, a few episodes ago, talking about generation Z and all of their research and stuff, you know, on the one hand people kind of go, you know, how do you make money from tech talk other than like brand deals and stuff. But if you’re going to be like a speaker or an author or a, or a personal brand, and do you have some type of a monetization strategy or is it more of like, this is street credibility? Or is it more of like, these people one day will be the book buyers and the decision makers. And so I want to connect with them or do you just, or is it just like, I’m just there because it’s fun. And I think it’s fun to do, like, how do you approach that?

So I’m not trying to monetize it in any direct way. Although I have had speaking engagements that came in through Tik TOK or coaching relationships that started because people found me on Tik TOK, people who find me on Tik TOK, find me, go to my LinkedIn and see my business side. So, so it’s definitely feeding that pipeline. But so much of it, Rory is I know that something great is happening as a result because it’s pure and it’s, and it’s real. And, but my intention is only to give and to help. And if I can scale giving and helping and filling a need on this level, you know, that’s a type of success. I don’t even have to monetize. I would be, it would be so satisfying and wonderful to know that I, that I could contribute, especially now to a world where so many kids are facing depression and bullying and, and all this frustration.

And I’ve been challenged at early early ages to feel like they’ve got to have it all together when really they could, they don’t and they shouldn’t, and they can just be themselves and find themselves and they need joy. They need, they need, as Maggie’s tagline to her whole brand is go make someone smile, literally just go make someone smile. So there’s a lot of ways that you can make someone smile. And the best smile that we can have is when we appreciate ourselves and who we are. And so that’s really my intention with it is that yes, these will be perhaps future clients. It’s nice to have that brand elevated. It’s good to get recognized in Starbucks and in, by Jenny’s eaters, which, which happens regularly now. And, and it’s pretty bizarre cause it, it doesn’t matter where you are, right. It’s not geographic, it’s, it’s a, it’s a bigger type of celebrity, which I’m obviously not accustomed to, as a keynote speaker, I’m accustomed to going into the room. Nobody knows who you are. Right. Right. And then, and then when you’re done, you, everybody knows who you are and you get that like temporary celebrity. And then you can go back to the airport and blend in again and be completely anonymous. So it’s not that I’m super famous. I’m really not, but it’s, but it’s been fun to, to, you know, get recognized here and there.

Yeah. That’s amazing. I mean, I think I don’t want to skip over what you said there about, if you could just scale giving and helping at this kind of a magnitude, this sort of a level, that’s a success that you don’t have to monetize. And I feel like that mindset alone is the thing that ultimately is the cause and the source of the people who break through the wall, what we call breaking through the wall and sustain longterm, regardless of its Tik TOK or Instagram or email marketing or speaking or writing books. And just to like, hear you say that, you know, I want to ask you about some other stuff, but I don’t want to skip over that because that, that is such a big, a big moment. And that’ll probably be one of the biggest things that I take away from this, which I, I love,

It’s easy to say it’s, and we’ve always said that, that we’re in the business of giving and helping and serving, but, but, but really a huge part of our brain is always trying to work the revenue and work the business and grow the business and, and measure ourselves and compare ourselves to our competition by what we’re doing and how busy we are and how much we’re making. And so for me, the challenge of COVID was, you know, obviously the dates fell off the calendar and when you identify yourself as a speaker, who’s out there doing live engagements and there certainly are no, there’s no events, there’s no engagements, there’s no stages. There’s no audiences. Now we’re faced with the question, well, who are you now at? Or who are you really? And so very, very early on the shift became, I’m not sure how much money we’re going to make this year.

Yes, we’re going to, we’re going to pivot. We’re going to do our thing. We’re going to serve our clients. We’re going to grow our business, but let’s change that measurement to how many people can we help this year, because one, thing’s for sure in the supply and demand world point that the demand for our help and our services has never been higher. People need it more than ever. So if, even if it’s just giving it away, that’s what I want to do because I think it’d be interesting if we got hall of fame awards for the biggest impact that we made in the world. I pray, I certainly wouldn’t get one of those. But I I’d love to.

Yeah. And that’s, that’s such a great perspective. And social media gives you that ability to like, if you really want to change lives, like if it really has nothing to do with money, like turn on your camera and talk to the camera and change lives. Like there’s never been an easier way to, to, to access people. So I want to come back to the technical a little bit. What are you doing with reels? So now Instagram has released the reels functionality, which is basically like their answer or competitor of Tik talk, you know? Are you reposting the same videos to reels? Are you not yet paying attention to reels or like what’s yeah. What’s, what’s going on there.

Yeah. It’s not something on my radar right now. I I’m aware that it’s happening, but, but Maggie has I think it kind of told me that her generation kind of thinks it’s it’s not there yet in terms of what it could do and the capabilities you know, so, so that’s not something we’re doing. We are posting on Instagram and we’re posting on, IETV sort of my weekly coaching videos, which get a very modest impression. I think it’s, it’s nothing like the scalability of tick-tock for me. But I’d be very curious to know more.

What is your just for the purpose, what’s your Tik TOK handle and Maggie’s, do you mind throwing that out so that people,

So Maggie’s is Maggie Thurman, T H U R M O N. So just at M a G, G I E T H U R M O N. And and my, my ticket Tik TOK handle is actually Maggie’s dad one, two, three. So, so this, and this was a very early decision because I didn’t. So for me, what was happening with tick-tock was so special as a father and in our relationship. And I didn’t want to, in any way feel like I was trying to, you know, chase her clout and, and trade off of that in my own business. So I’m just, Maggie’s dad one, two, three, which is kind of funny. And it sticks because even though now I’m doing more of my own content on my channel, that origin story is still really special to both of us. But you know, all along, I really saw that as more our thing than my thing.

I love that that is really, really, really cool. So yeah. Okay, great. So we’ll put links to that. Maggie, Maggie Thurman at Maggie’s dad, one, two, three. So I love that. So you mentioned COVID here a while ago and the pivots, and I think most people are pretty aware of this. I mean, if for those of us that earned a large percentage of our ordinary income from getting on an airplane, flying to an event, being in front of hundreds of thousands of people coming in as a stranger, as you say, you know, delivering this whatever 60 or 90 minute performance slash teaching, and then COVID happens. And all of those events disappear. I mean, like literally all of them disappeared and almost literally overnight, they were gone. What so separate of this tick talk, social media thing, you also have done some amazing pivots with your, you know, what let’s call it, your corporate brand or your classic brand, or your classic message even down to the technology and the studio that you’re using. And again for you listening, you’re not going to have the benefit of this, but can I ask you to do a virtual tour for, so the people watching the video can literally see what you’re about to change rooms. Like, like just give us the, the tumor, if you, because when we jumped on here, you like stood up and walked to a different room and like the whole thing changed. So can you just give us like a virtual tour of your studio so people that can watch the video can see what’s happening here?

Absolutely. Okay. So the first thing to understand is my brand, which is that elevated experience. People hire me because they want more than just a speaker. They want mind, body, and spirit kind of all in connection. And my method of teaching is very physical, very, very visual. And so we realized early, we wanted a space where we could do that very well. So we have three different sets I’m currently sitting in the library, which is where we really get into that heart connection. More that spiritual connection, driving stories, home, closing points, that type of thing. But then we needed a physical space, which is right over here. So stepping just to my right, this is the stage, this is our action room.

Okay. And for those of you that aren’t seeing this, I have just, he stood up out of his chair, walked, I don’t know, three feet to the right. And the entire screen changed. And we went from looking at a library to now we’re still on a zoom meeting, but now I’m seeing a completely different backdrop with a podium and a teaching screen.

Right. So, so for example, you see the podium and you see my, my teaching screen. And you mentioned the book off balance on purpose. So in many ways I’ve been preparing for this moment this year and teaching in my contents, very, very congruent because we’re more off-balance than ever before. Moving through these changes with uncertainty, just kind of unfolding and forth in front of us for the foreseeable future. And so one of the ways I teach that here, I’m moving to the lectern is you know, this is like our foundations, which all of our foundations, how we work, we teach how we parent, how we eat, how we shop, all of it’s been rocked. And so the question is, how do you position yourself on top of uncertainty? Okay, here we go.

Going for it. This is crazy. He is vertical, complete handstand on top of a podium. This is so corroborate.

You got to see us. I’m not, I’m not balanced. I’m balancing, I’m making constant adjustments and corrections. And after all that effort, I’m still right here. So we just cut to a second camera, but here’s the message balance. Isn’t what you get balance is what you do this year is about developing the skills to make those adjustments in real time, even though your foundations are rocked and unstable, which you can do, if you bring a greater sense of purpose to the moment that you’re in and manage and use these skills, which we teach to help you leverage the positive aspects of uncertainty in order to, in order to change and in order to grow. So that’s,

That’s awesome. So, so this is where, okay, so hold on. I want you to, I gotta interrupt you because I want everyone to know what just happened. So he just, first of all, the last angle we were looking at, you were doing a handstand on a podium and there was two camps. There were two different camera angles on that shot. So it was the second setup, like a second stage with two different camera angles. And now you’re just walked another, like, I don’t know, three feet to a different direction. And now you’re in a different, what, what do you call this set? Okay.

This is our classroom. This is really where our we teach and break down ideas. So if you think of mind, body, and spirit, so this is where we would really focus on your mind and how we teach you ideas, but then break them down into strategies. Like for example, on this Flipboard here we talk about this is actually a different work for a client that we we’ve been working on right now. But let me move to one of our recent phases. We can interact with this and we can artfully go through different content in different phases. One of the things we talk about quite frequently is this spectrum of certainty. Like I talk about, you know, managing the positive aspects of uncertainty, which you can do because really all you ever get is some certainty. You know,

Just again for everyone that’s listening. So now he’s in his teaching classroom set and there’s another camera angle. So it just shifted. So you’ve got two camera angles here going,

And, and what, what I want you to know is that even with the, the other set, you had the low angle where I went into the handstand, we switched to a different camera here, we have this forward camera, and then we have the second camera, which is how you, where you see me, right. And it’s also a closer shot, a more personal shot. The point is, it’s not extraneous, everything’s intentional. And if you have different cameras, but they’re not for specific reasons, then it’s really the same as pacing a stage without any purpose. And so everything has to be well thought out and used in a strategic way. And so, okay.

So one other, sorry, real quick, before you go into the spectrum of certainty, because I think both your content is relevant to us, as well as how you’re delivering the content is super relevant. So I apologize for the interruptions, but like, are you looking at, do you have tally lights, like a camera lights that come on to tell you where to look or does the camera switch when you look to the camera?

No, I have Stephanie and Shan. Right? So, and that’s been another incredible thing this year. Rory is that so often we’ve, we’ve been on our own on the road doing our deal, and it’s been very much a solo effort. This brought our whole team together. My wife Shea is incredible and is a visionary and a video producer and developer in her own, right? So she brought a lot of understanding in terms of how to do this and was able to source the equipment. We leveraged fellow NSA, friends, like [inaudible] and others who, who helped us understand what they were doing and really cut our learning curve in terms of making this happen. So Shay’s here and she’s operating a camera and and kind of running some things in the background producing Stephanie is the, is doing the camera switching. And so we’ve, we’ve practiced enough and she’s watching me attentively. So when I, when I look from this camera, I do it very abruptly and she sees that and then she’ll, she’ll make that change. So it’s, it’s really a matter of me being clear with where I’m looking and, and then she knows how to read that. But you know,

And direct, you’re directing the camera shots basically by a definitive gesture to move where normally in a TV studio, somebody, the director is moving the tally light, the little red light, and then you follow that. You follow it, but you have it in reverse.

And what I’ve learned is I just have to be very clear because if I’m kind of like wandering around, she’s got no idea where to go. Right. And so it’s just, we’ve, we’ve, we’ve developed that skill over time,

But I love what you’re saying. That’s a, that’s a very SIM, that’s a similar parallel to just wandering eyes in an audience versus deliberate eye contact to like different people in the room. Right.

And, Oh my goodness. I can really go into that. We could do a whole tutorial on how to, how to teach to a camera which is maybe we should

Have you come back and do another one of those.

Yeah, exactly. But but the point is, we’ve learned a lot and we’ve really used this period of time to our advantage. And so this concept of a spectrum of certainty really is about three steps, three strategies that we teach to claim your certainty. So we got to claim what is certain, everything that we know already, still counts. We just have to use it differently. We have to redeploy what we’ve gained all these years and say, how does it still serve us? Or how does it serve us now in maybe even a better way than it did before? And so, instead of when you feel uncertain about some things, you can feel like you’re uncertain about everything, and it’s not true. There’s a lot that, you know, and it all counts and serves you. So you really have to claim it. You have to embrace what’s unknown because you, and I’ve seen a lot of speakers, authors companies, clients, who who’ve just spent enormous amounts of energy saying, well, when will this be over and how are we coming out of it?

And when will we be back on stages? And it just, all this mental exercise on really what is right now, not only unknown, but on knowable, right? We can’t control that. But what we can do think about your future as if it’s not just uncertain, but it’s unfolding, it’s unfolding and you have this role you’re playing in terms of how to shape it. But there’s just some things we’re not going to know until we get to the next chapter, like reading a great book or watching a great movie. You don’t have to know the ending to enjoy the movie to be engaged. And, and, and along the way we can create more certainty than the way you create more certainty is by testing yourself and improving yourself and saying, regardless of how everything else is working out, I know for sure we’re going to be better on the other side of this because of what we’re choosing to do now. And this studio is really our response to putting that into action. Right.

Right. Yeah. I, I mean, I love this. So can you walk back to the library? Is that, is that doable? Yeah. Amazing. And so then you just move over. So these are three, literally three different physical setups you have in the space. Then the room that you’re in this, isn’t like a virtual background shift at all. This is

Three physical spaces, five cameras. So there’s only one camera in here, which is all I really need, because again, this is about pouring into your heart, you know, and, and just really connecting eyeball to eyeball.

Yeah. So, so it’s a five camera shoot. And then the, in terms of the other technology, you got two people to run the room. You said Shay and Stephanie are both there to like help you operate things when you’re doing it. And then so you obviously have a switcher. So this is just like an alive event. You have to have a switcher to switch camera feeds. So you have a switcher. And then is there any other big pieces of technology that’s going on? I mean, must be some program that you’re running to like S or is it just different camera feeds into a school?

The beauty of keeping it with the physical switcher and we’re using an ATM system, a black magic ATM, which has a total of eight different camera inputs. We’re only, we’re using five for cameras, we’re using one for media. So in other words, we could start our show by taking a video and intro video that brings it in or cut to a video. I have, I have a scene where I’m in the action room and I finished something and I’m talking about, you never know where your next challenge is going to come from. And literally at that moment, a rope drops from the ceiling and I’m like, okay, well, I’m going to, I’m going to go for it. And meanwhile, watch this video. And I literally climbed the rope out of the camera lens, and then we cut to video. And so it’s, it’s really like producing a TV show, but the equipment of the cameras, bid cameras, a good switcher, a good computer to drive it, the S the software, because it’s hardware, you don’t need a sophisticated software program.

Usually there’s another device that flows out of the switcher for the interface to whatever platform you’re using. And what we found is depending on the platform, whether it’s zoom or go to meeting or black or whatever, it could be a Microsoft teams this afternoon, we’re doing one for a platform we’ve never done before. It’s a proprietary thing with each of those setups. And also with each of the updates, because there’s always new security settings and things like this, you really have to always, re-examine how your equipment’s working and make that happen. So it’s not a one and done set it and forget it. This is something you have to keep learning as you go.

Wow. but more or less you, you got, you got, you got a switcher, you got some camera and you got inputs from the from the cameras. And it’s not, you know, it’s not impossible. I mean, you guys are pulling it off. This is incredible.

Well, thank you. But I, and I also want to point out because I know that that a lot of people starting out are thinking, well, sure, like if I had a studio and a set, then, then everything would be easier and I’d be much more engaging and whatnot course. And the point is, you know, that’s the trap of this business is that comparison to what others are doing or what they, what you think will be necessary. And it’s not, it’s not necessary. There are so many of our speaker friends who are, who are doing something so much more simple and are still having incredible success because they know how to connect with an audience. And they’re bringing relevant content, which is the whole key. I mean, if you think about like an X, Y axis, this whole business and success and brand is about relevant content and then your engagement and your experience, and, and not just, not just what, you know, how, what, you know, really fixes the problem, applies to your audience and are you delivering it in a way that they can really absorb it, learn from it, remember it for a long time to come.

And so you can do that in any number of ways. This is just one of the answers. This is the answer that works for me.

Yeah. Well, this is so extraordinary. And, and I would, I would just, you know, I echo that point and emphasize that it’s not about the technology or any, it’s like, it’s your mindset to go? How can we serve? How can we adapt? How can we pivot? How can we be off balance on purpose as you say, and make the most out of this. And and it’s fun, you know, like I just, I really love it. You’re, you’re what a great way to showcase you, living out your message and your whole team coming together, and, you know, the family business of your wife and your daughter, like it’s just really, really cool. So Dan, where do you want people to go if they want to connect with you and like find out more, and man, if you’re booking virtual keynotes, like don’t bother calling Rory Vaden, just call Dan Thurman, just like skip past us contact Dan. And w H how do people connect with you?

Sure. Just it’s super simple. Just go to my website, Dan thurman.com Dan Thurman, T H U R M O n.com. It actually loads at the moment to our virtual page, but there’s a lot of content and resources there too, as well as our weekly coaching series. So maybe you’re running a team and you’re really looking for something that you can use to help them recalibrate their mindset. There are some videos on my website that can serve you and conserve them. And by all means, please help yourself and use those and spread those as you will.

So we’ll put links there to Dan thurman.com as well as to Maggie and Dan’s Tik TOK profile. So you can see this as lots and lots of fun. My friend, we just appreciate you and your mission and your heart to serve people. And just make the most of the talents you have to make the world a better place. And that totally shines through. And, and we wish you the best.

Ep 115: Top Secrets to Effective Speaking with Vanessa Van Edwards | Recap Episode

[Inaudible]

And we are back with another recap edition of the influential personal brand podcast. Today, we are breaking down the interview with our new friend, Vanessa van Edwards, who we shared the stage with at the global leadership summit, which was awesome. And I’m actually really curious to hear AJ’s top three takeaways because this was, you know, really into the science of delivery. I feel like in presentation mechanics. So why don’t, why don’t you kick us off?

Oh, my honest, my first feedback was literally like the first part of the interview. She talks about her research and her book, captivate sales, which she said that hand gestures show trust. I was like, wow, Rory Vaden is the most trustworthy person on the planet. This is great for you. There is, there’s a future for you

As a speaker, I can do it. I could do it.

I was literally laughing out loud because just about after every podcast recap, I’m like, what is with you and the hand gestures. And then I realized I do the same thing monitor. I’ll just like blow for where you guys can see. But Rory is like literally hands coming, all the places all the time. And I’m like, wow, you’ve got a lot of trust going for you.

Apparently, other than you always, you always make fun of me for my facial expressions.

Those, those are different because no, it’s not the exaggerated ones. Those are entertaining. It’s the ones, his facial expressions are very expressive, very negative.

My neutral looks very Negative.

True. It’s true. So anyways, I just thought that was really fascinating and the fact that they actually watched every single Ted talk that was released in 2010 and compared all these things. And I really appreciate the data that goes into some of these findings, because if you just listen to them without, you know, the data driven back on her, like but I thought it was really fascinating and really interesting in terms of just like the fact that you use your hands shows like the passion and emotional involvement, but then the cues that it relates back to the audience of, you know, simply saying, Hey, there are three things that we’re going to discuss in this recap today, you make this visual connection with the verbal conversation, that there are three things. And I thought that was really fascinating. And just really a great reminder of like, people don’t just listen with their ears. Right. They listen with their eyes and I love that whole concept. So that was my first takeaway. But mostly you hear so many I’m sure Rory was sitting there going.

Yep. Yep. I, I, yeah. I thought that the whole way that she said that your gestures are basically a second talk.

Yeah. There, what did she say? You’ve got to, she said you have two different like content delivery.

Yeah. Two scripts. It’s like the words out of your mouth. And then, and then your gestures are like a whole second one. So I love that. And then the other thing is I was so excited and Vanessa and I nerded out after the interview was over because y’all, I did this, this was how I got started with in the world championship of public speaking for Toastmasters, I took 20 years of championships speeches, which was 200 speeches, analyzed them, graphed them, dissected them, and fact on what was the, we, I don’t know if we’ve shared this story. This is what, yeah.

We weren’t even dating a year. So it was like six months in maybe

So on my birthday the first year that AJ and I were dating you, what did you tell me? We could do anything. I wanted anything you wanted. She told me we could do anything I wanted, honestly,

Because we were also living long distance. And so I was with you on your birthday. I’m like, whatever you want to do I’m game.

And so I said, we’re going to spend the whole day watching world championships speeches from all the Toastmaster competitions. And you were such a trooper, babe.

I was, but I will tell you that’s the last time that I’ve ever said whatever you want, but no, it was actually, it was mostly pretty good, but you know, I was like, we were like watching videos from like the late seventies and early eighties at the time. And I’m like, do we really have to go 20 years,

Mark Brown. That was the day you fell in love with Mark Brown as a physical person from his speech. But so anyways, just for you, like the takeaway for me was this reminder that there is a science to this and, and all the things that we teach at world-class presentation craft are based on a science, a study, the research of, of these kinds of things. And if you’ve either been to that event or you, you know, you’re like me and you sort of nerd out about those things, I was just excited. Cause Vanessa seems like another great resource for people that really love the science part of, I don’t know, here I am using my hands. I can’t, I can’t stop it. I can’t stop it. The hands they just go. They just, they just go. So, yeah. So that was gestures. What was your second?

My second one was really, I, this was so thoroughly fascinated around this whole concept of how do you make a Ted talk go viral. And again, what I love so much about all of this is that it’s not just ideas, right? This is like there it’s very, data-driven it’s data specific it’s research research. I love that. And I think that, to me, it goes back to one of the recent interviews we had with Jason Dorsey around like information and data is your new competitive advantage. And same thing. We had another interview with Aja Yeager and Megan canal. I’m just like data matters, right? Those insights that you gather really matter. And talking about the titles. And so she was very specific and how she really wanted to create a title that was like a command statement that you are something right. So her title of her Ted talk is your contagious.

She talks a lot about how this a little bit different right now during COVID, but again, it’s just like really putting thought and intention into what would people search? What would people be attracted to? How are people gonna find me? And then I thought this was just so fascinating and I’ve really never heard anyone talk about it. The way that she did is the intentionality put behind getting on people’s playlists on YouTube. So just very definitive focus and intention on making sure that her YouTube strategy was intact, which will lead to my third point in a second. But just the whole concept of, you know, there’s a formula for making a Ted talk go viral that really has not as much to do with your Ted talk itself and what you do to make sure people see it.

Yeah. Th that thing about the YouTube playlist was cool because everyone wants to like reach out to the speaker, but she is like, I’m much more interested in reaching out to the person who has a playlist that nobody ever reaches out to, but they have like these really popular playlist. Yeah, that was super cool. Another tactical thing for me, that was just a good reminder, which I actually never realized the brilliance of what Ted did with the red circle. You know, if they do this red circle, the speaking, the dot and you have to stay within the dot. And normally when you take like presentation skills classes, they teach you to use the stage. We talk about that at presentation, craft of different sections of the stage. I mean different things, but one of the big risks is that especially non-professional speakers or early speakers, they have this shifty stance where they’re just always sort of like waffling back and forth and just wandering the stage like meandering aimlessly.

And it really takes away from the power of stand and deliver, which was like classic sort of like 1970s 1960s, I think of like more Utley or Cavett, Robert just standing there with a microphone and just like delivering. And that is, that is one of the most tactical things you can do to enhance the power of your presentations is to plant your feet solid, look, people directly in the eye and deliver a message, right. Not just wandering around because you heard, Oh, you should use the stage, but locking your feet on those key moments in those key points. And that was just a good reminder for me to get back to the basics of like, yeah, I need a lock. I need a lock in place every once in a while. So that was super

Tactical. Same time she talked about the importance of intentional gestures. Yeah. Not just, you know, using hands for the sake of using hands, not knocking the microphone, but for the sake of like, where are you going to place these and what impact does that have? Same thing. Same thing goes for using the stage,

Go to a location plant deliver, go to another location, plant deliver. Don’t just take it back and forth. Yeah. So that was, that was really good reminder. Yeah.

I love that. So then my third and final point was just a great reminder again, which I just keep hearing more and more about this from so many people that we interview on the podcast is like, get Joe self on YouTube. And I just feel like this has been this recurring theme that you don’t hear all the places, but we have heard it repeatedly. Over the last 12 months from all of our guests coming on of, you know, YouTube is still a little bit the wild wild West, right? You’ve got affordable advertising still on YouTube. You’ve got amazing search abilities on YouTube. You’ve got the ability to emotionally connect. It’s all video driven. We already know the data around video and how that’s going specifically with the emerging generations with gen Z. And I can’t even imagine the one after that where video is the most intimate aspect.

And I loved what she said. It’s like, if you’re selling a video course, then you should be on video selling your video course and no better way to be on video than on YouTube. And just like just little things that you’re like, you know, innately, but you’re like, Oh yes. The so those were just really great, but I think, I mean, everyone who is listening, if you listen to this podcast on a recurring basis, then you have heard multiple people talk about the importance of YouTube and the growing importance of YouTube if for a personal brand or for anyone. So I think this was just another, you know, kind of like,

Yeah, we’ve never, I’ve never placed, I think I’ve missed the boat on YouTube, which I talked about. Yeah, there’s still time. But, but I, like, I just have never realized just the power, the magnitude of everything that YouTube is. And there were two things about YouTube, cause this was my third takeaway too, that like YouTube is King. It’s like King of the social media is other than podcasting. But I, I think number one is that YouTube, unlike the other social media platforms, the longer the video has been around, the more valuable,

Right, totally opposite opposite, totally

Instagram and Twitter and Facebook, which is constantly pushing stuff down in the feed. Which is true about a blog and a website also because it’s, it’s like everything, Google, that’s the case. It’s like a fine wine with age. It gets better with all the other social platforms older is, is gone. And then the other thing, remind me, I can’t actually, I can’t, if this was recorded, did we talk about the power of being in the living room and watching the video because you and I are watching the mic, Todd.

Yeah. And also we talked about the TV series, the chosen chosen. So we’ve got this emerging kind of like thing happening with it is to, yeah. I mean, we link it to our TV and that’s what we want,

Literally sitting down to watch church to watch sermons, to watch.

But that is where we watch our, most of our church sermons specifically this year. That is yeah.

And, and sometimes, and sometimes in your bedroom, right. Like

We don’t, but people do. And I just think that’s really a great reminder of like this isn’t like this literally is where people are watching TV series, they’re watching sermon series. So why wouldn’t they also be getting all their content there? And the fact is they are, but you just don’t hear a ton of people talking about it, but you’re going,

Yeah. And we’re doing it. We’re, we’re ramping up. We’ve been, we, we recorded our first set of YouTube ads. Last week. They’re not live yet, but we’re going to be running those. And you know, we’ll report back to you on how those work. But anyways, Vanessa van Edwards, my fellow speaking research nerd. I’m so glad to have met.

Yeah. What you have created right here.

Yes. And now I am empowered.

I am empowered for full head gestures

Meaning, but so anyways, check out the interview. Thank you for being here. We hope you get in practical takeaways. That’s what we’re aspiring to do. We’re grateful for you. Have a great one. We’ll catch you next time on the influential personal brand.

Ep 114: Top Secrets to Effective Speaking with Vanessa Van Edwards

RV: (00:06) Hey, brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for tuning in to listen to this interview, we are so excited to bring you this information and wanted to let you know that, Hey, there’s no sales pitch coming. From anything that we do with this is all our value add to you and the community. However, if you are somebody who is looking for specific strategies on how to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and we offer a free call to everyone that’s interested in getting to know us and is willing to give us a chance to get to know them and share a little bit about what we do. So if you’re interested in taking us up on a free strategy call, you can do that at brand builders, group.com/summit. Call brand builders, group.com/summit. Call. Hope to talk to you soon on with the show. RV: (01:03) I am so excited for you to meet Vanessa van Edwards. We shared the stage at what I believe is the largest speaking event in the world is the, it’s the biggest one that I know of. It’s called the global leadership summit, and we got to share the stage. And you know, most of you know, I’m, I’m a nerd for technical speaking and built my career coming out of Toastmasters. And she got up and talked about her book captivate and some of the concepts that she studies as the she’s the founder of a company called the science of people. And her book is called captivate, the science of succeeding with people and she analyzes and studies body language and interpersonal communication and human behavior and relationships. And it was just so practical and applicable to everybody. The audience went nuts. I was, I was also tracking book sales. RV: (02:02) So I haven’t shared this with everybody. I was watching book sales with there’s three different tools that we’re using to monitor that. And I was watching Vanessa’s book, which was selling apparently from what we could tell was the top selling book from all the speakers who were there, which is exciting and also a little bit nerve wracking since our book was also for sale. But pretty sales. You got presales. Yeah. I’m I’m I’m sure. I’m sure. So anyways, the other thing to know about her in addition to being this bestselling author she’s very much into data, which I love and, and research and science and analyzing you know, her craft, but she’s also spoken obviously at the global leadership summit. She’s spoken at South by Southwest Google, Facebook, and she has a Ted talk as well. That is called, you are contagious. That also is gone viral. So she’s got over a couple million views on that within just a few years. So anyways, you’re, you’re talking to a pro and I was like, gotta have her, you guys are gonna love her. So welcome to the show, Vanessa. VV: (03:14) Thanks for having me. I’m so excited to talk and dive in. RV: (03:17) So I want to start with your actual work, like what you actually teach, because it’s super relevant to our audience. And you know, we’ll put a link to your Ted talk. You are contagious in the show notes. But can you give us, you know, a little bit? So, so a lot of our audience speaks all of our clients speak. We teach them that the spoken word is the number one marketing tool. There is. So whether it’s free webinars or free speaking, like I spoke for free 304 times, that was how I started my career. In that we eventually turned that into an eight figure business all by speaking for free. But you study a lot of, you know, a lot of your craft relates to speaking and you analyzed Ted talks. What are some of the things that you learned from the viral Ted talks, the successful Ted talks and then the not so viral ones? VV: (04:16) Yeah. You know, I was really intrigued as a speaker on why some Ted talks go viral and others don’t. And what I, when I was searching on the Ted website, I typically watch a Ted talk every day at lunch. I found that there were Ted talks, you know, like Simon Sinek, Tedtalk has millions of views. And I noticed, and I noticed when I was on the website, that there was a very similar talk that came out the same month of the same year. It was released the same on the same year on ted.com, a very similar topic, both 80 minutes, long excepted. Simon’s had millions and millions and millions of views. And this other top had less than 40,000. And I wondered why these were both experts, relatively unknown experts before their Ted talks, by the way. Sure. But something about Simon’s talk, it made it explode. It went viral. And so we decided to analyze thousands of hours of Ted talks. We looked at every Ted talk in 2010 and we split them up based on view count. So the most popular Ted talks versus the least popular Ted talks, RV: (05:19) You looked at weight, you looked at every Ted talk since 2010 in 2010. Oh, in 2010. Wow. Okay. VV: (05:30) I’d still be doing that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And also by the way, this was maybe four or five years ago now. So we looked at every, to every Ted talk that was released in 2010, where there’s a limited number that go on ted.com and we didn’t know what we would find. Right. We were looking at all the variables. I was looking at color of clothing. I was looking at entrance. I was looking at smiles. We actually clocked the number of seconds that they smiled. And we found that the biggest difference, the biggest you could actually see it when you put these talks side by side, was that the most popular Ted talkers used an average of 470 gestures, 465 gestures to be precise in 18 minutes, whereas the least popular Ted talkers by view count, use an average of 272 gestures in 18 minutes, almost half. VV: (06:21) And when I looked at this, I realized there were sort of two things happening. One is hands show trust. They show intention. We like to see hands, right? The moment we can see someone’s hands. We feel like we understand them a little bit more, but the second thing was even more important, which was when we know our content exceptionally well. We can actually explain it on two tracks. We can explain it with our words, but we can also explain it with our gestures. And so the very best Ted talkers, it was like they had a two track talk, they had the verbal talk and they had the gesture talk. And what was amazing about it was that it allowed you to have sort of these memory hooks when someone said they had three ideas and they held up the number three, the brain would actually wait, you’d wait to hear all three. And that would also help you remember those three. So I think what was happening is that the really memorable, amazing Ted talks just make it easy to be understood. RV: (07:22) Interesting. And so would you say that Bernay Brown and Simon Sinek and you know, Jan pink? Yeah, sir. Ken Robinson, do they all pass that test or are some of ’em outliers? VV: (07:38) No. Everyone passed the test. The only kind of odd outlier in our data that we looked at was Jamie Oliver. So there is no, yeah. The chef. Yeah. Yeah. So what’s really interesting is most really charismatic speakers. They use hand gestures in a purposeful way. So if they’re talking about something big, they show you how big it is, beach ball big, or is it, you know what ball would this be like? RV: (08:06) Like a Sumo, a Sumo, VV: (08:10) How big is it? Or is it really small and little and just between the two fingers. Whereas Jamie Oliver, his talk is so passionate that he’s actually just making gestures for no reason. He’s just shaking. So that one, I found a little distracting. Now he had a lot of gestures cause he was literally just, he would walk off, he was pacing the stage and just kind of move in his hands. That was the one exception where I thought, Hmm, I think that we, we like the purposeful gesture, the distracted gesture, make someone look out of control. So whenever I teach hand gestures, I like to teach on a spectrum that purposeful is what we’re going for. Jazz hands is not what we’re going for, or even I created some hand monsters in my career and I feel very bad about this. So I taught this research and a couple of students in one of my classes, they thought that I meant like modern dance. So I saw their speeches after my class. And then they came on like this today. I want to talk to you about a big idea. And the sun is going to come out. I mean, it was like, it’s bitsy spider, you know, RV: (09:21) Dan just like interpretive dance, like full VV: (09:24) And so purposeful is good, but like we’re not talking modern dance. I think that with Ken Robinson and Bernay Brown and Simon Sinek, they probably didn’t script out their hand gestures. And I don’t think that we should necessarily either, but we should be so comfortable with our work that we’re able to understand it and explain it visually. RV: (09:43) So gestures. So that’s really interesting. Cause it’s like, what you, where you saw the pattern, wasn’t the type of gesture or like, yeah, it wasn’t like the type of gesture. It was the volume of gestures. And basically twice as many. So that, that, that tells us that that humans are, are nonverbal, which we kind of, we know instinctually, right? It’s like, of course we’re nonverbal. So for an audience of people who are speakers or aspiring speakers or potentially speakers in addition to gestures, are there any other big kind of salient discoveries that you would point to and say, Oh my gosh, if you are speaking a lot, here’s another thing that you really need to know. Like you can’t miss this. And I know, you know, in captivate you talk about voice and you talk about facial expressions. Like in the book, you go through a bunch of different ones, but w VV: (10:43) For many speakers, the book I’m going to give it to you. RV: (10:46) Yeah, yeah, yeah. Give us one. That’s not in the book VV: (10:48) Book. Is there, if you want to read it, that’s great. But I want to give one, that’s just for speakers. Cause I love talking to audience and speakers. So one thing that I noticed not only in the Ted speeches, but also in working with students is the really, really powerful speakers use the stage as a content aid. And this is a really advanced technique, but once you get it, I think it’s, it’s like you can immediately apply it, which is you want to know where you’re going to plant. And that’s really important. Where are you going to deliver your first line or your first impression? So your first impression happens either the moment the lights turn on at the moment you walk on stage, the more purposeful you all are with that plant. Like I’m going to walk right to the center of the stage that makes your walk more purposeful. I noticed that speakers who don’t have a plant, they kind of wander onto stage. They kind of wander and they’re a little awkward and they, then they don’t quite plant. They kind of, they kind of pivot back and forth. Whereas Vickers who walk out to that plant, that’s one of the reasons why that Ted talk red circle carpet is so brilliant is it just gives speakers. A piece of confidence is this is where you stand. RV: (12:00) Can you explain that? Not everybody knows about what the red dot mean, like what it is. VV: (12:04) Yeah. So in Ted talks, one of the secret ways, I think that they’ve had so much power with their videos is they have a small red circle. And I think that every franchise of Ted talk, they have to have a red carpet on stage or the requirement. And they even have a measurement that they like it to be. And it’s actually a brilliant Lee measured carpet. I think of the red, that circle carpet when I speak without it, like when I just do regular speeches because it’s a plant. So you have someone who walks right out on the stage, they plant in that red circle and then you’re not supposed to leave that red circle. So they really don’t like you to leave it for the cameras, for the lights. I think that Mel Robbins and her Ted talk, she not only left her circles, she actually walked out into the audience was very fair. VV: (12:51) It was a very, you know, avant-garde move and she wasn’t supposed to do it, but I think it worked for her. So the first thing is to know where you’re going to plant have an imaginary red carpet for yourself. And then you want to use the stage as a transition for your content. So for example, okay, I tend to deliver right in the middle. I typically go right to the middle when I speak. And then when I’m talking science or background, I typically go to the left side of the stage and I plant and I deliver the stuff. RV: (13:21) When you say the left side of the stage, are you saying stage left or the audiences left stage left? So to the right, the audience is right stage left. Okay. VV: (13:33) So I, I stand there and then when I’m pivoting or transitioning topics, I literally show the audience. I’m doing it with a physical movement. And then by the end, they know when I’m on the right side of stage, I’m usually telling a story, I’m doing something fun. I’m leading an interaction when I’m in the center of the stage, I’m delivering something super important. And I usually save my super important takeaway challenges. Remember this for the center of the stage and my science and background the other side. And I’ve noticed that it helps people as they take notes. I’ve noticed that helps with attention. I’ve also noticed you have certain people, you know, very warm people who like the stories better. And so everyone needs moments where they’re going to tune out and audience is going to tune out. I would rather it be based on their learning style, but not based on their learning style, I’d rather choose it. So what I’ve noticed is very warm people who love stories and examples, they perk up when I get to the right side of the stage and my science heavy, my high competent folks, my data heads, they perk up when I get to the left hand side. And usually everyone perks up for the middle. So it’s a, I, that’s one of the really big things that I think excellent speakers do to help their audience. RV: (14:48) Yeah. That’s, what’s interesting about, you know, using the stage, but in Ted talks, you can’t because of the red dot, but they force you to plant and be powerful by having that confined space. I think yeah, that’s super interesting. Is there, is there anything you did on the marketing front related to your Ted talk that made it go viral? Like VV: (15:10) Oh yes. So I, I really, you know, it’s a little, it’s a lot of pressure when you study Ted talks that go viral, then you give a Ted talk pressure. You have to then give a viral Ted talks. I was very nervous about it. And the first thing was the title and I argued with them about this, by the way, like we went back and forth on this a lot. Now it’s kind of funny because it’s your contagious, which right now in our current state of the world, it’s getting a lot of use for a different reason. So that ended up working in a different way. And you’ll notice that there’s a lot of comments, recent comments where people are like, I really felt this talk was about something else, but I really liked it. So anyway, in the beginning I wanted a command. I wanted a title that was a command. RV: (16:00) I have a bunch of people worried about contracting COVID that are buying the captivate book and just sitting at home, reading it. VV: (16:08) It’s okay. It’s perfect. Actually, captivate sales have been up a lot in COVID. And so I want, I wanted a command. I wanted to have like a you or like a personal pronoun. So I really wanted to have like a, you are contagious or you are confident or you can do it or you are powerful. I wanted something that was a command because I noticed that a lot of the Ted talks that were out there weren’t, they were very intellectual. They were very much like the future of leadership or how thinking will change the future of humanity. Like, there are a lot of like, talks like that, which is fine, but I just wanted to be a different rant. I wanted to have a different thing. So I wanted to use the word you, I knew that. And I wanted RV: (16:54) I analyze titles by the way or only the gestures and like the actual presentation. VV: (16:59) I didn’t, I did, we didn’t formally analyze titles. No, I should. I, that would be fun. That would be a really easy one to do actually with like just put them all in a big spreadsheet, look at them. That’d be super interesting. So yeah, so that, and then once it came out, not only did I share it, of course, across socials you know, YouTube has been a big driver of our business. I’ve been on YouTube since 2007 when people thought it was like, you know, a joke. And one thing that we’ve learned is playlists are really important. So we did a huge campaign on the backend to get my Ted talk, not embedded in websites that I didn’t care about as much, but to get it on people’s playlists. And so we reach out to influencers, but also just friends who watch a lot of YouTube videos and ask them to put it on a relevant playlist with other videos that we thought people would like along with our sock, with the right search engine title. VV: (17:52) So for example, I reached out to a friend of mine who has a podcast, and I asked him if he would add my video to his playlist called human behavior hacks. And he was like, sure. And then it was immediately placed contextually. So I know on YouTube, your best, you have two options for your, for your game. One is search and YouTube search is very different than Google search. We use a tool called H refs. And so when I’m titling my blogs, I use H refs for Google when I’m titling my YouTube videos and my keywords, I use H reps for YouTube because they have very, very different search. And so I knew what kind of YouTube search that I wanted for the video, but I also knew what I wanted it to be related to. So the second thing that you really like for you to, to elevate your game is watch this next or when your video is listed alongside another video. And so it’s critical to have YouTube algorithm know what other videos people would like. And so I had a list of a hundred or more videos that I thought were the perfect audience for my Ted talk. And so very quickly we were able to scale and we got thousands and thousands of views and then millions of views based on, I think, the placement of relevant videos. RV: (19:12) So when you found a hundred, a hundred videos, a list of a hundred videos that you thought were like your perfect audience, did you just reach out to those people? Did you reach out to those people at all? VV: (19:23) Not typically. Actually a lot of them were other Ted talks, but I wanted to be on the same playlists as those videos. So for example, like if I really liked Allan Pease LMPs is a wonderful author about body language and he has a great Ted talk. He also some great stage talks that have millions of views. I didn’t need to reach out to Allen because his videos are living out other people’s playlists, but I did want to get on to people who listed Allen’s video in their playlists. Does that make sense? So how did you, RV: (19:55) How do you know who, which people have Allen pees on their playlist? VV: (20:00) You can see it. So when you watch his video, you can see, it’ll say like, this is recommended for you. And then you can see that it’s actually within someone else’s playlist. RV: (20:09) Interesting. So just on the video itself, which is like a video you’re probably watching, cause you’re interested in it anyways, you would just go, Oh, okay. I see like other this other recommended video lives on, so, and so’s channel. And so that person is featuring this kind of content. And then you, so it was more like you didn’t contact Alan, you contacted the person that had Allen’s video on his channel VV: (20:33) And they never get contacted. Allen gets contacted all the time. Plus Allen doesn’t own his YouTube, his Ted talk. So it’s not even on, he couldn’t even control if he wanted to. So I don’t need to bother Alan with that. He’s a busy guy, but some of the people who created these amazing playlists who love looking for relevant videos on body language or human behavior or psychology, those are my people. And I love reaching out to them. And they’re also thrilled when I reach out to them. So that’s how we’ve grown our YouTube channel quite a bit since from the beginning. RV: (21:04) That is fascinating. What a super awesome tip. Well, and this is kind of what I wanted to get into as well was a little bit about how, how you’ve built such a great business, because it’s like once you, you know, have a bestselling book and you’re speaking at GLS and you have a viral Ted talk, like you’re checking off a lot of the marks of like pretty big time personal brands, which is, which is super exciting. Clearly the Ted talk has been huge. Is that how GLS found you? Do you know, did you ask him? VV: (21:36) I didn’t ask them. I think that they just knew about me from YouTube. I think they found me from YouTube. So I dunno if that was my Ted talk or other YouTube videos that I had. But that’s where they came to me from seeing those videos. RV: (21:49) Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting to me, to this day, the number one cold way that we book high paid speaking engagements is someone will say, I saw your video on YouTube VV: (22:00) A hundred percent, same as in here, RV: (22:03) Which is crazy. Cause you, you, you know, it’s almost like people put YouTube and Twitter in the same category in terms, and it’s like, they’re completely different, like completely different purposes, completely different audiences. Yeah. VV: (22:14) Yeah. And the way I like to think about it, and this is what I, what I try to talk to my students about is Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, and even LinkedIn, our social media platforms, YouTube is a search engine. And that’s how you have to think about it. It’s yes, it’s relatively social, but it is a search engine. So you need to think about it just like you think of Google, you just study your keyword, just like you do for Google. You need to think about your content, like little mini blogs. RV: (22:44) Yeah. I mean, and that’s the other thing like literally is that content on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, the older it is the less valuable it is on YouTube and Google, the older it is the more valuable it is. Like it’s, it’s a complete inverse. That is such a, it’s such a key distinction. I, YouTube is something I’m loving you talking about this. Cause I feel like I’ve ignored you tube, like my entire career. And then, you know, we had a few thousand subscribers and then when we exit our last company that was gone. So, you know, like we had, we’re starting all over and YouTube is the one that I’m going, this is the one that we have missed the boat on. This is the one that drives like real big time revenue, big time credibility. And it sounds like you agree with that. VV: (23:36) Yeah. I completely agree with it. And the good news is you got time, you know, it’s still the wild West on YouTube. I think. I actually think it’s less tapped even than online courses. You know, I got into YouTube in 2007. It’s older. I got into my first online course in 2011, 2012. And even now I feel like online courses, a little bit tapped. I mean, there’s just a lot of opportunity there, but RV: (23:59) Launching an online course, VV: (24:01) Launching teaching, hosting. Yeah. Online courses, you know, like some of the boat has sailed, but like it’s, it’s an, it’s an existing ecosystem, right? Like it exists. You can tap into it, but you really got to work. It YouTube, I think is a lot of low hanging fruit. I think you have time, even though it’s an older, it’s an older beast, the way that people, the amount of video that people are consuming. And the, the bond that you build with people when they watch a video is incredible. And as a speaker and as a, as an influencer, someone who wants to change behavior or change minds, it’s like, you’re getting permission to go into someone’s bedroom, email box, you get to their desk, not as intimate, a YouTube video, you get into their bedrooms, even a podcast, you maybe get to their kitchen or their gym, but a bed is usually YouTube. I don’t mean that in a, in a weird way, but like, it’s so intimate when you’re with someone and you’re sharing a story that they really feel like, wow, I know her. I cannot tell you how many times I’m walking down the street and people are like, I love your YouTube. I feel like you’re my friend. No. And that’s, that’s a very special thing. RV: (25:08) Yeah. I mean, that’s interesting. So Mike, Todd was one of the other speakers with us. Did you get to see his speech and tell us, yeah, I loved it. I thought it was so great. And so AIG and I are watching his sermon series on relationship goals and we either watch it in bed or the living room couch. But to what you’re saying, both of those are that’s where you, that’s very intimate, that’s intimate a space and at different locations. And I’ve never really thought about that. I’ve always thought about the podcast being right in someone’s ear, which is very intimate. But you know, you, you don’t make a date to listen to a podcast, but you will sit down and like, alright. Or have you ever seen the show? The chosen on YouTube? Oh my gosh. It’s incredible. It’s a, it’s a TV series. That’s only available on YouTube and it’s free, but it’s like, we make a date to sit down and watch something on YouTube. VV: (26:02) Yeah. I think that that’s the difference, right? Like when I am listening to my podcasts, I am always doing something else. And even if I wasn’t doing smells, I begin to sweat. I fold clothes. I do laundry. I clean up the toys in the living room. Like I’m always, I’m like, it’s a thing where my hands are free. Not with YouTube. I’m going to watch a video. It’s my ears and my eyes. And there’s not much else I can do. I have to be locked in with you. And so it’s just a much more intimate and fulfilling experience. There’s a reason I haven’t done a podcast yet. I mean, maybe I will one day, but it’s because I also know that I, the biggest, so in our business, our revenue is sort of split between speaking online courses and then a little bit like ad revenue. And we don’t do any paid search. We only have organic search. And I know that the best way for me to sell courses is to get organic YouTube search that turns into an online email subscriber. It then turns into a, a buyer of our video course. And so if I want to sell a video course, the best way for me to do that is being on video. RV: (27:03) Yeah. So let me ask you that. This is so awesome. Okay. So when you say organic YouTube search, most of that is just basically like optimizing your video as a blog post on YouTube. So you’re showing up in search and then in the description, you’re driving people to a lead, a lead capture, which is gonna then nurture like a lead magnet. And then that will nurture them for the course. When you do, when you sell courses, do you do mostly like a video? Do you do mostly like video sales letters, like a video funnel, like yeah. Three videos and then buy on the fourth video or do you more like a one long webinar kind of thing. VV: (27:44) So we’ve tested all of them feels like all of them we’ve tested the three videos to a purchase. We’ve tested a webinar to a 60 minute webinar to a purchase, which so 20 minute webinars, no purchase. We’ve tested a six email written series. We’ve tested, sneak previews, we’ve tested an audio training. The one that doesn’t work very well is three videos. We have too much dripping in the funnel too much, too much loss when we find that when people want it, they want it. So we don’t want to make them wait. So the best thing that we found is either an audio training for 60 minutes right away, or like a webinar for 45 to 60 minutes right away video. RV: (28:23) Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. well, where should people go if they want to connect with you and like learn more, obviously they can get the book captivate, which is awesome. We’ll put, we’ll put a link to your contagious. You are contagious, Ted talk, where else Vanessa, if they want to learn more about all the stuff you do. VV: (28:41) Yeah. If you want to see our funnel and action I recommend going to science of people.com/join. That will be whatever our latest in is. And so you’ll be able to see if he, you go to that, like sometimes it’s our likability training, which is the audio training, which also eventually converts into our big course or you’ll get our one of our webinars. And so that’s a really good way to get kind of acquainted with some of our materials and our free courses. But also if you are interested in sort of the funnel of the backend of how we build rapport and build relationships and teach to sell, you can all see it that way as well. Love it. RV: (29:17) Science of people.com/join. You can go there. We’ll link that up in the show notes, Vanessa, thank you so much. You’ve been so generous and like tactical and just is such, such actionable stuff particularly for personal brands. So we wish you very much the very best VV: (29:34) Gosh, I’m so grateful. Thanks for featuring my story and thanks everyone for listening. [inaudible].

Ep 113: The Miracle Morning with Hal Elrod | Recap Episode

Hey, welcome to the recap edition of the influential personal brand podcast. We are here breaking down the episode with Hal Elrod. AJ was just making fun of me before we started. And so that’s why I see he’s chuckling, but we’re going to give you our top three and three takeaways, and I’m going to go first this time. You know, I have so much respect for how I think you probably hear that in the interview, but from a technical perspective, in addition to his personal story of dying and coming back to life, which is incredible. He also is an eight self publishing success story, probably my favorite self published success story. And everyone thinks you have to traditionally publish. And there’s a lot of advances. There’s a lot of advantages to traditionally publishing, but you know, he tells the story about for three years, he tried to ride it and he thought he had to traditionally publish.

And then finally just realized that actually the publisher doesn’t do that much to promote your book. And so you have to do the promotion anyway. So why not self publish? And he does it and boom, 2 million copies tell, I don’t know of anyone that sold 2 million copies, self published, and it’s just incredible. And to me inspiring that it’s not just traditional publisher. Self-Publish it’s what is your dream? And what belief are you allowing to hold you back? What, what wall are you allowing to be there that you’re, you’re acquiescing to? When in reality, there’s not even a wall there and you can just blow through it and figure it out yourself. You don’t need to get a TV show. You can launch your own show. You don’t need to get a traditionally book published deal. You can self publish, like you don’t need to be on national radio. You can launch a podcast. So many limits just exist in our own mind. And I just, I loved that. It was inspiring to me it a long rant. That was not that long. Hold on, pause the recording. Let’s go look. I don’t think it was though.

It’s felt long, been a long day, but I think is really pertinent to this particular interview. And as you can tell, this is a, not a shower day for me. This is my mommy day. And Rory, actually,

For those of you watching this on YouTube, those of you listening to the podcast,

I sound just as like normal

In full makeup and full hair and her nicest outfit.

Oh, well, yes, but I will tell you it’s, it’s kind of interesting because we, we came in through, from a weekend trip yesterday and didn’t have time to record our recap when we typically do. And Tuesdays are always my mommy day where I’m just full time mom, all day long with my two toddlers. Which means I don’t usually get a shower or hair or makeup or do anything for myself. Maybe I get to eat. But Rory was like, Hey, I really want you to listen to this. And I’m like, Oh, you can just record this one. And then I listened to it and I’m like, Oh, now I know why he insisted that I listen to it. Cause I had a really couple of negative moments of like, I’m so overwhelmed. There’s not enough. There’s not enough time to go around.

No one’s looking out for me. Kind of had some of those moments and he was like, Hey, are you going to listen to that podcast? And I’m like, okay, well now it’s all clicking and I’ll putting together. And I think that was one of the things that was really important to me listening to this and why all of you should listen to this as much as you’re going to learn about your personal brand and self publishing and traditional publishing for that matter and building a community. I think the first half of the interview is worth listening to whatever you, you gleam from the rest of it is awesome. But the first half is just such a great reminder, no matter where you are in your personal brand journey, you control how you feel, right. You control. If you think you’re succeeding or not.

That has a hundred percent to do with your perspective and your perception of what is impact to you. Is it one person? Is it a million persons? Like why does that matter? It’s like, why do you have to have a hundred thousand followers versus a hundred followers? If you truly believe in what you’re doing and what you’re called to do. And that, I just feel like that more than anything else is why you should listen to this interview and follow Hal and read the book and do all the things and why I really needed to listen to this myself right now is that great reminder of, I have nothing to complain about. I have everything to be grateful for and so do you, right? If you have the opportunity to share your message to even one person that is worth it, it is not about your follower count.

It’s not about six, seven, eight figure advances, even though those are awesome, right? Those are amazing byproducts of just doing what you believe in and what you’re called to do. And I just think if you just focus in on what are you called to do and what are you passionate about and what are you grateful for and how does that just exude from every part of your being, this will work out for you at some point at some time in some way, this will work out for you. And how is a great example of, I’m not gonna wait around for anyone else to do this for me, I can just go do it myself, because I feel that called to the message to the mission and to getting this out there and I’ll do what I gotta do. And sometimes that’s what we gotta do. So that’s why I really think this is awesome.

Yeah. And that, as I would, I would count that as my, I was actually going to save it for my third takeaway. But since you brought it up the first half of the interview, if you haven’t listened to it yet is his personal story about how he died. Came back to life, died again, came back to life, made it through this whole bout and then had cancer and just this inspiring outlook on what it means to be alive. And and how you are in control of what’s going on inside. Like there’s a lot of thing, a lot of things externally that we don’t have control over, but everything that’s going on inside, you are in control of your thoughts, your emotions, your feelings, what you choose to be grateful for, what you decide to spend your time on and to hear it in the context of someone that has gone through so much challenge is just inspiring.

And I, I agree with you it’s that his personal story is just so moving that it is it’s beyond all the wonderful technical details that he shared, you know, things about how self publishing works and how do you do it and how did the advances work and how does the money work? He was super transparent. But you’re in charge of what’s going on inside of your head. And I think as influencers or personal brands we are, so we’re so used to being the teachers or the messengers, it’s easy to forget how we also have to be the students and getting to learn from other people like how and go, wow. Like I’ve got a lot of personal development work to do myself, in addition to all the business work I need to do on my, on my brand. So it was, that was awesome. That was my second takeaway.

Yeah. And I think one of the, I think one of the more technical components of this as it relates to building your personal brand and, you know, writing and speaking and publishing and all the things that he talks about. But I just really love this, this whole concept of people talk about this a lot in the space of you can’t really make a ton of money selling books anymore. A book is more of like a business card. We’ve even said that well he proves that very, very, very wrong, and I think that’s awesome. Like you need some people to step up and go, no, you can. It’s just, you’re not. And I, that was like a really good like, Oh yeah. Like you really can make a lot of money. I mean, you’ve got plenty of people. Who’ve, you know, you know, you’ve got, you know, the Twilight and Harry potters and all of those ends of the world.

But then, but then like when you come to like the real personal development and business space, it’s like, you’ve got those two, you’ve got, you know, like Dave Ramsey and how L rod on the self publishing route like that, that is worth noting. And I just want you guys to like, pay attention. It’s like he has sold 2 million copies self-published and average retail price is around $20. And let’s just say he even gets to keep half of that, which I think he said it averages a little bit higher than 50%. I’m on print version. Y’all at $9. And I just low balled. It like is $10 would be 50%, but at $9 at 2 million copies, you don’t have to be a mathematician to do this. It’s $18 million. You can make plenty of dough selling your books that you self published. And there is all kinds of talk in the industry about, well, if your book won’t just won’t be seen as credible, or it won’t have the same distribution. Well, that just ain’t the case here. And that just proves all of that wrong of, well, no, you can write, you can do that, but you gotta hustle and you gotta do it and you gotta be committed to it. And I, I think that was a great reminder of, you know, you can just, most people aren’t,

Right. Yeah. If you sell a million of any set and you’re going to make money, right. Like matter what it is. And that’s really good. And, and yeah, I think it’s, you know, John Gordon and John Maxwell are people who traditionally published, who I have sold a lot. They have make plenty of money from just book sales. And the Andrews makes plenty of money from just book sales through traditional route. And then you have hell rod. And then, you know, of course, Dave Ramsey’s self-published stuff and then traditionally published and gone back to self publishing. So yeah, I, I love that. And to your point about the hustle, I was just looking up the notes the first year, he said he did 140 interviews, 30 podcasts interviews did 36 speeches and sold like 13,000 copies. He’s strong, which is super strong, but it’s also not the one where you go, Oh, they sold 50,000 units on opening week. And you know, this is, this is the next book that’s going to sell a million. It was 13,000 copies over the first like year and a half, but then he did it consistent and it grew

Not consistent. It totally multiplied because it went from 13,000 in year, one to six years later, 2 million or a million,

Six years, six years to reach a million,

18,000 to a million in six years is like pretty aggressive.

That’s amazing. Well, and so that was my third point is this Facebook group that, you know, and here’s what I think the point is is that if you build a community around your message, then book sales naturally flow out of that, right? Like most people think, how can I build a community around my book when I have a book launch in order to sell my book. And it’s like this one time thing, how wasn’t doing it out of marketing, he was doing it out of impact. He’s like, I want to create a place for people to support one another in cheer each other on and get them to meet me and I can meet them and to answer their questions. And, and it’s the, the Facebook community that he built that, yeah. You know, when you have 250,000 people in your Facebook group every day, talking to each other, of course, they’re going to like the topic of conversation is around this thing.

That is your book. Of course, those people are going to buy, and they’re not just going to read it and forget about it. They’re in there all the time. It’s like having 250,000 salespeople for your book. And that flew flow out of flown out of it, grew out of it. It came out of a mission to serve and build a community around a message, not build a community around a book. And we actually use house book in our bestseller launch plan, which is one of our phase three events. There’s a, there’s a window of that event that we talk about the long tail sales plan, like the perennial bestseller. And we talk about building a community around you know, a movement, not just around a book and how is this great, an example of that? And you can do that today. Even if you don’t have a book, you can build that community now and pour into people and then it will sell books.

Well, you can tell Roy is very passionate about this particular topic. And now there’s a lot of hand movements, a lot of hands movement,

Youtube. You’re seeing my hand movements come aggressively at the camera.

There’s a lot, there’s a lot of hands moving over here. My third point is somewhat similar to that, but I think that I’m not going to say it’s easy, but how really deep details out the plan of, it’s not that difficult to get your book self published and get it distributed. Right. And he really lays out like, well, here’s the company that does this, and this is how you do this. And this is how you get an audio and here’s on Kindle. And it’s like, I’m not going to say it’s easy because that’s still work. But it is simple. It’s not rocket science. And we just have so many people in our network. And if people who are clients that are just baffled and stuck about what do I do, and it’s like, just do something right. If you’re waiting around to decide if you should get traditionally published, it’s like, I think he made a great point.

It’s like, ask yourself how big is your platform? And if it’s not going to sell itself for you, then you should go ahead and self publish. And here’s what you do, right? Here’s how you set up your distribution with Amazon. This is how you set up your Kindle. These are the percentages, and then you do the deal and then you go out and you sell it. You get on podcast interviews, you go speak and you the pants off of it. But if you really are trying to go for that traditional route, it’s just a great reminder of publishers. Aren’t trying to sell your book. It’s your job to sell your book. So do you want to sell it via a publisher and their distribution or sell it via yourself and use all the other distribution channels that have developed over the last 10, 15 years. That really weren’t there back in 2010, like these are all things that have exponentially made this process easier for people to get their messages out there, which is you. And you don’t have to be traditionally published to make tons of money and to be a super credible author these days, you’ve got tons of examples of that. It’s just how bad do you want to do it?

Absolutely. Amen. And you can find a way you can figure it out, by the way, if you’re looking for tactical strategies on how to actually market your book. I mentioned this already. We have an event called bestseller launch plan, which specifically teaches you tactics to market the books. And we use, like I said, how as a case study, another thing that we address in there is when to self publish versus when to traditionally publish you know, a quick tip on that just to rough, a rough guide is we usually say, if you have a platform where you think you can move 10,000 units in the first four to six weeks, that’s a good signal that you’re ready for traditional publishing. And that it probably makes sense. And if you’re not there, or even if you are there, you still need to take a good look at self publishing because of all the reasons that he was talking about the cool 18 million of them, if you got a calculator so anyways, go listen to the interview. Thanks for being here, knocked down the walls, let us know how we can help you. We’re here to support you along the way. We’ll catch you next time on the influential personal brands.