Ep 153: Fear Fighting and Being Bold with Luvvie Ajayi Jones | Recap Episode
Woo Luvvie Ajayi Jones is fire she’s fire professional troublemaker, the fear fighter manual with our good friend and client Luvvie Ajayi Jones, which I’m so proud of Luvvie. I mean, you have a woman right now who is blowing up. She’s a rolling stone, viral Ted talks, explosive speaking fees best-selling books, exponential growth on social media. She’s doing projects with Brene Brown levy. We are so proud of you and honored to just see you doing what you’re doing and to feel like we have a little bit of a front row seat. And for you making us look better than we deserve because you are just awesome. And what a great interview this was. Obviously I’m, I’m so low with you this time. AJ, wasn’t able to join us tonight. But I am just on fire from that interview with Lovie. And I love the thing that she said, in fact, this is, this is my first, this is my first of my three key takeaways is that courage is contagious.
Courage is contagious. Who are you borrowing courage from? And who are you? Loaning courage to what a great, powerful, simple idea on both sides on both sides. There is, is this idea that there are there when you feel scared when you feel weak, when you feel unsure, when you feel uncertain, when you feel like you’re, you’re facing the unknown, when you don’t know what to do, you can borrow courage from the bold. There are people around you that you can borrow courage from. And I think that’s the part of the power of the human experience is this transference of emotion that comes from just being in relationship with others. And, and man, I feel that I draw that from her. I mean, I’m, as she’s talking, I’m literally drawing that from her. And then also equally as powerful, probably more powerful is who are you loaning courage to?
Who are you loading courage to? Who are you being strong enough for? Who are you supporting? How are you emitting, emoting? Transferring power and energy is strength and courage and bravery and bold because you are, you know, you’re transmitting something, you are putting off some type of energy. You are affecting the world around you, right? You’re either bringing them up or you’re bringing them down. You’re either making them stronger or you’re making them weak or you’re, you’re, I we’re either making the world around you more powerful or you’re making the world around. You feel more powerless. And that is a choice that you get to choose and I get to choose in every single moment. And I love that. It’s just such a great, such a great reminder of the human experience, this, this, you know, what it means to be, to be alive.
Courage is contagious, all emotion, all energy is contagious. We are balls of energy. I mean, we, that is what we are. So don’t forget that. And, and don’t forget to summon that, right? So be that for someone and also some in that and draw from it. If you, if you, if you need it, the second big takeaway for me that I really loved. Well, here’s what, here’s what Luvvie said. She said if, if it is perpend, if, if, if it is purpose-driven and it is my obligation to be myself, right? She said, it’s my obligation to be myself, which I really, I really do love, I, I like this idea that it’s, it’s like your responsibility is to live into everything that you were created to be, to be the person that nobody else can be it to be more of who you are.
I love, I love what one of our good friends, Sally Hogshead always says that she says you become more fascinating by becoming more of who you are. And I think Luvvie is a great example of that. She’s a real life example of just living into who she is, but, but I wanted to adapt you know, for me in terms of how I I get, I get, I get the luxury of being able to go back and listen, and then think about how I’m gonna apply this stuff to my life. And I, I, I’m going to adapt it a little bit for me to say my obligation isn’t to myself. I see it as my obligation is to my purpose, right? So, so, you know, I am here for something you are here for, and the longer I’m around, the more that I am convinced that the reason that I am here and I have this hypothesis, that the reason that you are here also is, is not so much for yourself.
It is for yourself in the context of someone else, that the reason we go through the pain that we go through is because of how we are going to transform that and apply that in the future to someone else, that the reason that we have to learn the things that we learn is because one day we’re going to teach it to somebody else. The reason that we have the victories that we have is because one day, those victories are going to become courage, that we lend that as contagion to somebody else that, that the achievement and the title and the awards and the, and the followers and the likes and the, whatever the, the worldly measurements are, are quite insignificant, quite trivial, and quite unsustainable in terms of their ability to bring you joy and satisfaction and, and depth of fulfillment.
And yet, ironically, the thing that brings us deep joy, deep fulfillment, deep satisfaction, it’s not something that takes decades and decades to accomplish. It’s not something that requires us to be a celebrity or to be credible, or to have thousands of followers or big fancy titles, or, or, you know, lots of know, whatever world worldly, victories, or bullet points in our biography to display. The thing that gives us the greatest deepest satisfaction is to serve another life, to have my life matter and make a difference to another, not necessarily to go viral to millions of people, but to, to have it mattered to one. And if you follow me on this, and part of where my hypothesis comes from is that I’ve tried all sorts of worldly, worldly things. I’ve pursued all sorts of worldly things. And, and honestly, I’ve accomplished a lot of those worldly things.
And yet found they fall short, nothing, nothing quite delivers on the feeling and the satisfaction and the joy in the fulfillment of serving another, which is your purpose that is obligation not to yourself. I mean, it is to yourself and the way that you’re living out your purpose. But I think of it more of it is in the context of who I am supposed to be for another. That is where power just comes from. That is where you’re unstoppable, because it’s not about you. Like, you’re not, you’re not looking for any selfish gain. It’s, it’s literally, how can I serve, how can I be of help and, and to elevate my purpose above me and beyond me to surrender to this idea, almost almost that I don’t matter, but my purpose matters. And inside of that incredible sort of surrender is this extraordinary strength, this unshakable conviction, this unending power that can’t be weakened. It can’t be soft. And because it’s not about you, it’s simply about your obligation, you’re living in the obligation of fulfilling your purpose.
Hm that’s good. So that’s, that’s my second takeaway. You know, first takeaway courage is contagious. Second takeaway that my obligation is to my purpose. And then my third takeaway is something, again, sort of a derivative of something that Luvvie said, I guess so much energy from her. And she said, you know, I want my book to, to, to be, to give people permission, to be themselves, what a beautiful premise and an an, a beautiful aspiration and a beautiful intention that she would give us permission to be ourselves. And I agree with this, that the more that you can stand in the center of who you are, the more powerfully and deliberately and quickly, you will be able to move people. What do you have to be able to stand in the center of who you are to, to, to be comfortable allowing yourself, to be yourself, allowing yourself, to be seen for who you are, allowing your, your thoughts and your ideas to be heard for what they are being unashamed of, of hiding anything or adapting anything or tailoring any, anything you know, except to the extent by which it enables you to serve your purpose, but it is to just stand boldly in the center of who you were born to be.
And that’s what lights people up. That’s what cats sets the world on fire. That is what lovey I believe is saying when she’s saying professional troublemaker, because the world seems to favor the bolt. The world seems to favor the clear, the world seems to favor the risk takers. The, the, the people who are, are, are willing to put themselves out there and willing to seek, to say, and to set and to seek some dream or journey or destination. And so I think the confidence to do that and the power to do that comes in your ability to stand in the center of who you are and what your purpose is and who you were born to be. That’s all we got for this recap edition of the influential personal brand podcast. Be bold, be courageous, be purpose-driven be obligated to become the best of what you are meant to be. Thanks for allowing us to encourage you on your journey. We’ll catch you next time on the influential personal brand.
Ep 152: Fear Fighting and Being Bold with Luvvie Ajayi Jones
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.
I love Luvvie Ajayi and you are, this is the second time we’ve had her back on the show.
You left the Jones out Rory!
That’s right. You’re Jones now, too. I can’t believe that I should have said that. Lovey Ajayi Jones. Now she’s a married woman. Yeah, coolest wedding ever, by the way. Pictures on social were awesome. But so Luvvie is a friend she’s a New York times bestselling author. Her first book was called I’m Judging You the Do Better Manual. She has a viral Ted talk that has I think like 5 million, more, more views than mine, which makes me also a little bit jealous.
5.6 million. I just checked today.
She is, co-authoring a book an anthology with Bernay Brown, which is pretty awesome and a whole bunch of awesome people. She has hundreds of thousands of people following her on social and through her blog. She’s, she’s been you know, one of the OG bloggers for like 15 years, she hosts a a fantastic podcast.
And the reason that we’re talking to her now is she has a new book out called professional troublemaker, the fear fighter manual, which is all about overcoming fear and living audaciously. And so when lovey was here, the first time we talked more about like the technical parts of how she built her audience over years I don’t know what episode number that is, but we’ll put a link to it in the show notes back to that first episode, but we didn’t really talk about, which is what we’re going to talk about today is the emotional side and, and the kind of like mental side of putting yourself out there and overcoming fear when it comes to building your personal brand. So anyways, Luvvie Ajayi Jones, welcome to the stage.
Thank you so much for having me back.
Yeah. Well, all right. So let’s talk about fight and fear, the fear fighter. And I have to say one of the things there’s so many things I love about you, that I admire about you. There’s a thing specifically that I think you have, like one of the things that you have that I think I wish I had more of was boldness. I think that that’s, that’s held me back in terms of, you know, my ability to grow on social to not be as pointy and sharp as I probably could. And, and I think part of the reason why is because I am scared of being judged, right? Like I am scared of what people will think and et cetera. And anyways, I think that anyone building a personal brand has some of that, except you don’t seem to, you just like, have such so much confidence and boldness, like, how do you do that? Where does that come from? Like, were you born with it? Or can I learn it?
I think it can be learned, but I think I was born with some of it. Some of it, I think the boldness of it all that I show up as, like I say, what other people are thinking, but they’re not to say, it’s not that I’m not afraid of being judged is that I realized that being judged is not the worst case scenario. It’s one of those things that is a foregone conclusion. If you aren’t going to be somebody of notes and create, and be somebody of impact, you will either repel people or also loved them like, or, or, or be loved deeply by them. There’s no middle ground to be able to be loved deeply by people means your whole character, how you will show up will also repel some people. Some people will judge you for it. Some people will not connect with you.
And that’s fine. I always think about the people who am deeply loved by the people who, when I write, when I speak, say you just took the thoughts up my head, put it on paper, thoughts. I didn’t even realize I had now. I think a lot of us have the tendency to swallow away what we want to do and how we want to show up because of that fear of judgment. We’re afraid of somebody not liking us or, Oh my gosh, I’m afraid of how somebody else is going to take this thing. And I think for me, growing up, I come from a family and a culture Nigerians are culturally loud and really just boisterous.
I was gonna say, when I introduced you, I was like, you’re my favorite Nigerian friend. But then I was like, unfortunately, I don’t, you might be my only Nigerian friend, And I was like, well, that sucks. That’s not good for you or for me. But anyways, I think you’ve, you definitely hold that title, but I need some more Nigerian friends. But anyways, you are my, you are my favorite.
I’m just the gateway Nigerian for you. Don’t worry.
I’m the gateway. Nigeria, you will find other Nigerians through me. But I think we’re very boisterous as a culture, like growing up, who I was, was never told to be less. I was given permission to be bold. I was a four year four, or five-year-old who, when I got in trouble, I would challenge my mother about it. I’d be like, I don’t think it was fair. I here’s the part that I think was not fair to me. And even though I’m sure I got on her nerves, she never did
I’m not going to let Jasper listen to this episode. Just so you know,
Jasper, let him have it. Let him have it.
He’s not gonna listen to this one.
I used to literally be like, mom, I’ll accept the punishment. I’ll take it. Whatever the punishment was. And then after the fact, I circle back with a note telling her my perspective, telling her why I didn’t think it was fair telling her why I think I was wrong. Okay. And it’s funny, like she never told me not to be that person. So I grew up not doubting that person that I was, I grew up not doubting my voice. And I think the power of that is that the boldness became less of a, I have to push myself to be this. It became my default. And one of the things that we can learn in being more bold is being pragmatic about the, our purpose and our I in, in what we’re doing in this world is you, you create a whole business on helping people solve a problem.
And you, one of the things that you pointed out that I do is I help solve the problem of powerlessness and the way I do it is through my boldness. I show up in a certain way and people get to see and say, if she can do it, maybe I can do something close too. Maybe I can also be myself. So in learning, the boldness honestly comes in just watching other people do it. Rory, like you were on, you were on a thing with the cohort that I had, where we talked about brand building and the last five minutes of you being on. I told my team afterwards, I was like, we have to put this as an episode of the podcast, because in that moment, it’s like, you borrowed boldness from me. How you actually showed up that day was way more bold than I’ve actually typically seen you.
And what that lets me know is, I guess we can borrow other people’s traits or the people that were around will infuse certain things into us, which lets me know that we can actually do it even when they’re not there. So like you came and gave such, it was so pointed. You’re typically very pointed, but on that day, your energy was different. It was so like strong. And so I’m just going to say this thing because I need you guys to understand why it’s important for you to stand in your purpose and you came with full fire and I’m just like, Rory’s typically very chill, very like, Hey, but you came with fire and I was like, okay, it can be done. And you do do it. It just shows up differently.
Yeah. I mean that, that really is true. I mean, I do feel like it is it is contagious and you, when you see someone else doing it, I mean, now let me just ask you this. Like, I’ve just been curious about asking you this and you don’t have to answer if we, if we, if we tread into water that you don’t feel comfortable about, but you are very outspoken about personal beliefs. You know, like you’ve got this X, you got expertise around helping people live audaciously and chase down fear. You also share a good bit of your political viewpoints and whatever socioeconomic or whatever you want to call it. Cultural, cultural beliefs. Do you, do you wrestle with the idea, first of all, I’m curious, do you actually wrestle and go, do you ever wonder, should I post this or does that, do you not even have that filter? Do you just go, Oh hell no. If I’m thinking it it’s coming out and if you do have a filter, how do you kind of determine what passes through the filter of going, like, does this serve my audience somehow? Does it, does it align with my business goals? Or like just how like, yeah. So is there a, is there a filter? And if there is tell us like what, what that is?
Yes. I have been blogging for 18 years at this point, half of my life. Wow. I started blogging in 2003. And when I started, there was no strategy behind it, but I think as I got bigger, as I finally called myself a writer, as my platform got bigger, I started understanding what was happening was kind of like the unfolding of purpose. And as my platform got bigger, I didn’t change my voice. What I did change, what changed was my level of responsibility in how I was showing up, like, right. Like when I had 300 followers, I could say whatever I wanted into the ether, it didn’t matter today. I can’t say whatever I want. Right. I, it has to be, it has to be way more thoughtful. So I do absolutely have a filter in how I say something. What I jump into as a cultural critic, as a side-eye source risk as a writer is shady Nigerian.
I think having the filter is good. Like it’s really good. You have to have a way to figure out when you’re not gonna just be impulsive and saying something just to say something I want to always make sure I’m not just speaking because I want my voice heard because I just feel like talking. So that’s why I have three questions that I ask myself whenever I want to say something. Especially when it feels like I’m going into territory, that could be contentious. And the first question is, do I mean it, like, am I actually saying this thing? Cause this is my belief. So too, can I defend it? If I am challenged on it? Can I actually back it up? Can I stand in it? Cause here’s the thing is the judge will be judged and then three, can I say thoughtfully?
So all of these are important because if I say yes to all three, I decided to say it, the third question of, can I say thoughtfully is really important because then it’s what makes it come out more thoughtful. It’s what makes it come out without, with as little as possible hate. Right? And I, and I, and I hope I never operate with hate, but I always try to figure out what is the way to say this that will land the best, or do I think it’s going to land the best now with my three filters, these three questions quantifying my decisions. It’s not with the guarantee that whatever I say will be like, well received. It’s just a risk mitigator. It is just a way for me to create some criteria to at least anything that doesn’t pass. I don’t say it out loud. If, if it’s not passing the three questions, I’m not saying it, but then if it does pass and I say it here’s the thing.
It can still go weird where somebody is like, Oh, I don’t like this thing you said, or, Oh my gosh, this is what I took away from it. And I think those are the moments where we have to understand that we are not here to appease everybody. It’s not our responsibility to make everybody comfortable or to make everybody feel good, because we were really nice that day. I think our responsibility is to do what we were put here for. And a lot of times that thing is going to run a foul of somebody because if it is purpose-driven, it’s pretty strong in some way, you know, they’re going to be people who are going to be like, I just don’t like what she just said, just because it’s Monday or Tuesday. But I think once my filter runs through, I go, that’s my obligation. My obligation is to myself, have I done my own job of making sure I’m showed up as best as possible if I have. Hey,
And so then how do you balance this? Right? The, so on the, on the one end, it’s like you’re unapologetic, you’re bold, you’re audacious. But then even, even you, you’re saying there is a level of discernment or filtering or you know, might even use the word diluted or like the, that you’re, you’re tempering, you’re tempering it, you’re tempering it some, some somehow. And you know, I guess I’m just trying to, I, I, I’m asking because I’m genuinely interested for me. Like sometimes I feel like I’m too tempered. Like I’m too safe. I’m too, I’m too comfortable. I’m too afraid to like stir up whatever. But then I think, you know, I also see much the danger and the risk of like, ah, yeah, go on too far or whatever. And, and so I, what I hear you saying is that basically, it’s just, you got to just stay centered in your purpose, what you believe that you were put here to say, and then just say that as cleanly and loudly as you can,
That’s it that’s really it. And honestly, it’s not even a case of temporary or sensory myself. It’s that the sermon is actually the right word for it. That is the right word for it. Getting the spirit of discernment because you know, when you’re young and you decide, Oh, I’m just going to just keep it real. Yeah. You’re probably going to be saying a lot of thoughtless things, but I think the older you grow, like again, the bigger the platform gets, you also have to wheel this power responsibility, like responsibility. So I, people who know me in real life and who like have known me since high school, we’ll read a piece I wrote and say, this sounds just like you still. So I always want to make sure that I am present in whatever I put forward. That even in my, as the a platform is getting bigger, nobody can say that doesn’t sound like lovey.
No, no, it’s always going to be me. I’m just being smarter about it. And that doesn’t mean I’m not cussing. That doesn’t mean I’m not showing any anger or strong opinions. I’m sure I’m still doing all of that. But I think I am a better thinker and a better writer and a better leader now than for sure, 10 years ago. And it’s not because I was censoring myself. It’s because this sermon, like the spirit of discernment is even better. I’m sharper about it. And I want you to not think too hard about going the other way. Like I see how you move, Roy, you straight you straight. Like you keep it nice and cool. But I think giving yourself permission to say what you truly believe is necessary, it’s necessary because you also have so many people who are watching you, who are listening to you and how you show up as amazing your words matter in a big way. So if I was to ever see you say something strong, I’ll know you actually meant it. And it would make me pay attention even more. I’d be like, wait a minute. Rory’s out here using caps. What?
Yeah. Well, it’s funny. Cause I saw you, you know, I made a post about my dad on his birthday about this story, about how I found my dad. And I noticed that you left a comment and a lot of people did it, and that was a very emotional, just like a very, a very real thing. So I, so let me ask you this. What are you afraid of right now? Or are you afraid like, like what’s going on right now that you are scared of?
You know, I have a fear of success.
We talked about fear of failure all the time. I think fear of success is just as real. And it’s part of the reason why I self-sabotage sometimes by procrastinating, I figured that out in therapy when my therapist was like, you’re PR, cause it was last year actually, when I was on the hook for finishing my book and I’d go into sessions and she blocked, so where are you with it? How’s it going? I’ll be like, yeah, about that. I didn’t really write anything this week. And one session she asked me, she was like, so why do you think you didn’t write anything this weekend? I was like, I don’t know. I didn’t have time. I was just sitting on the couch and she was like, could this be a form of self-sabotage? And I was like, what do you mean? She was like, what are you afraid of with this book that is making you stall on it? And I think I was afraid of like, what if the book did what I think it will do? Like what if it does somehow help a billion people conquer fear? Like how does that change my life? Do I, how does that level up change? What I what’s around me? Yeah. Fear of fear of success is real.
And so you’re saying that, you know, let’s, let’s say the book sells a million copies that forces you to live a different in a different way because your life at that level looks different than the way it does now. And that is, that is uncertain and that escape, it was scary.
Yeah. I have to hire more people and get it’s just, it’s like, are we, it’s the fear of like, am I equipped for the next level? Yeah.
And so how do you overcome that? Then?
When I say it out loud as a starting point, acknowledge it. I talked to people like you who know what level of look like I basically say and ground myself with some affirmations, that’s like, whatever you need, you got it. And I just ride the wave and I try to figure out the moments when I’m self-sabotaging, when I’m trying to pull myself back I talked to friends and yeah, I do all of that. It’s a, it’s a constant ritual of like, you got this, you got this. If you do have to hire more people, you got this, like, it’ll be fine. And again, like talking to and having, you know, a lot of friends who are really successful also trade war stories and say, Oh, I’ve been there. And because a lot of people who have come before us have already done this, they basically give you the map on how to navigate it. So I’m definitely leaning into my community. And my friends to just tell me what I need to do to get ready for a massive book coming out. Like you’ve been in the immense help. I’ve been talking to Glenn and Doyle, you know, talk to chase Jarvis and it’s just, just getting ready.
Well, I think so who did you write this book for? Okay. So taking it specifically back back to this book and you go, you know, the book’s called professional trouble troublemaker again, but the fear fighter manuals, the subtitle, which I just love. How, like, who is it targeted at? Who’s it, who’s it aimed at?
I wrote this book for me. I feel like this book was, was was something that I created for me because I like to create work that I need, you know, when I was afraid to call myself.
Yeah. See, like, I don’t think of you as being scared. So this is just the person you once were.
This is the person that I once where was, is can sometimes lean into some times. Like, I think, you know, we don’t just become bolded state both 24 seven. Right. We will have moments where we’ll go. Hmm. Should I think that big? Or should I actually say that thing? You will still have your moments of fear here. And their fear is not always about the big time. I think even in the small moments where you are afraid to say something that might feel scary. And I think I honestly wrote this book for me because I think about how 10 years ago, I was afraid to call myself a writer. I think about, you know, turning down my Ted talk twice because I didn’t think I was ready for it. I think about shoot now being afraid of what the level up looks like. You know, it’s a constant reminder.
And I think the best things that we do is when we create something that we need when we fill our own need. Because when we do that, we fill somebody else’s need. And I think for me, this is a book that I wish I had even last year when the pandemic happened and I’m sitting in my house like, Oh my gosh, what’s, what’s the world gonna look like? And I remember feeling convicted to be like finished this book because this book is what you need right now. So I think about people like me, like whether or not you’re bold or not, you know, people who have big dreams and who want to create impact in the world whose lives like their ideal lives, aren’t going to call for them to do or think bigger than they’re currently doing and who are going to need to be loaned courage from time to time.
So that’s why I really wrote this book for it. It’s the dreamers or the people who are still afraid to become the dreamers, the very pragmatic foot on the ground. Folks who were just like, you know what, I’m just going to do this one thing that feels easy, do it just really well. But what happens when people are given permission? Not just told they can be bold, not just told they can dream audaciously or speak the truth, but like told I need you to, I need you to speak the, I need you to dream audaciously. I need you to get a Nigerian friend. Okay. I need you to build the squad. You know? So I want my book to be permissioned for people. The permission they might not ever be given to be themselves to be too much, you know, to be too soft, if that’s who they are to be too hard, if that’s who they are. So it’s the permission.
And, and what about like lightened? You really like, do you, are you afraid of offending people?
Sometimes. Sometimes. And yeah, like there’s a, there’s a whole chapter in my book called failed loudly where I talk about my biggest public fail in how it knocked me off my square for a year, because something, I said offended thousands of people and how I recovered from it. But I realized that, and it actually also taught me the lesson of, it’s less about what you say and it’s more about people also projecting themselves onto you and it’s something you can’t control. That’s the part that’s frustrating, right? That’s the part that scares people. It’s like, how do I control it? How do I make sure nobody ever gets mad at me? And I was like, you can’t, you can say the sky is blue. And somebody, somebody somewhere would disagree and say, I’m offended. That’s actually red. And that’s why we cannot be tied strictly to the landing of everything that we say.
We can’t be tied strictly to other people’s thoughts and ideas of us, because it will move us away from our purpose. It’s why you have to know what your compass is. You gotta know what your center is and stand in it because people will want to move you off it. And it’s going to be up to you to kind of drill in and say, okay, I am growing as a person, but this is what I’m supposed to be doing. Like I’m supposed to becoming to help people think critically, I’m supposed to help people feel joy. And I’m supposed to basically compel them to leave the world better than they found it. And in that whole purpose driven life, I will be the villain. In some people’s stories. I will burn some bridges, but if at the end of it all, I actually left this world better than I found it. If I actually stood in my purpose and help people feel more powerful. If somebody somewhere can say, I heard you speak, or I read your book and it changed my life, then I’ve done my job.
I love it. I love it. Loving where she wants people to go. If they want to learn about professional troublemaker and learn about you and more like more of what you’re up to,
Yes, people can go to professional troublemaker, book.com. Pre-Order the book come to my book tour. I’m in conversation with seven people who I think are also living purpose driven lives that are huge and audacious and they can find me all over social media. I am at lovey L U V V I E one word on all platforms. Okay. I got the one screen name.
Okay. The Oprah level, you got lovey lovey.
That’s all you need to know. BBI
E is Luvvie. And I, you know, I really think that that’s interesting, you know, this term earlier that you can, that you loan people courage. And I think that’s what this book does. And I think that’s what you do. And you know, to that point of that last conversation where you had me in front of your audience is that you do give permission to people. And, and I think it is contagious and it’s like you loan you loan people courage. So if you’re listening and you don’t have courage and you need to borrow some courage, get some of Luvvie in a professional troublemaker, the fear fighter manual. Thank you for giving us permission to be more bold and to to be more courageous, lovey it’s, it’s really, it’s really fun and inspiring to watch.
Thank you so much for always sharing space with me, Roy, like you you’ve changed the game a little bit from you, Rory, you chase, the guy said something the other day. And I was like, that feels like a Rory fading quote. I was like, that sounds very Rory Vaden. I like it. Let’s keep it like,
That’s good. I love it. Well, we wish you the best, my friend. And we’ll look forward to staying tuned. Yes, indeed.
Ep 143: How Entrepreneurs Can Use Their Personal Brand to Grow Their Business with Liz Bohannon| Recap Episode
Hey, welcome to this special recap edition of the influential personal brand podcast. I’m Rory Vaden breaking it down so low. Our recap, this is a recap episode of Liz Forkin Bohannon and I am laughing because this episode cracked me up. I thought it was so funny because so, so here is my first, my, my first big takeaway. All right. So my first big takeaway was verbatim what Liz said, which actually has nothing to do with personal branding. Ubut I thought this was just so profound and powerful and relevant and poignant and, and wow. When she said a lot of the problems in the world can be solved with a good job. A lot of the problems in the world can be solved with a good job paying good money, providing good men benefits. And the reason I’m laughing is because this transformation, if you, if you listen to the interview, Liz talks about how she was like this nonprofit, bleeding heart, like change the world.
I’m going to go, you know, serve, serve people to becoming this extreme entreprenuer doing who’s launched now a huge direct sales, a business that she’s turned into a direct sales you know, multilevel marketing thing that, that she thought she invented the business model. And it’s just, it’s just hilarious. And it is in it’s awesome. And it’s profound about the idea that, you know, money, money solves problems, but not just giving people money, teaching people how to make money and creating an opportunity for people to make money. And that to me is just powerful. Again, it has nothing to do with personal branding, which we normally wouldn’t share as a takeaway, but I mean, I was inspired because I know that you probably, in some way, lead to the work that you do create jobs for people. And so often we think about like the audience that we’re impacting or speaking to are the people who are buying our products and services.
And we think about our own income, but I think this is a good reason and a good moment in time to pause and just go, thank you. And congratulations to all the entrepreneurs who create jobs, whether they’re full-time jobs or part-time jobs, whether as employees or contractors, but that the work that you’re doing as a, as an, as an entrepreneur, as an influencer, as an entrepreneur, maybe who works as part of a direct sales company, or even as an executive, a corporate executive at a big, at a big company, but that your personal brand is serving more than just you. And it is even serving more than your audience. Your personal brand is creating jobs and opportunity for a whole world of vendors and partners and contractors. And one day, you know, if you follow our model and we’re teaching it, you know, if you get to phase four where we talk about eight figure entrepreneur and scaling your personal brand, you’re going to be providing lots of jobs.
And that’s just awesome. That is awesome. That is another reason why we love serving you and, and helping people create jobs and businesses and side jobs and side hustles, and you know, work with people in direct sales because you, when you start a business, you create jobs. And as Liz says, a lot of problems in the world can be solved by providing a good job. So that was, that was a huge kind of unusual takeaway and, and rare takeaway from the event and just really profoundly impacted impacted me. And I just you know, I also find it hilarious kind of the transformation of this journey that she went on. And just, just awesome. So that’s great. So my second big takeaway from this, which is just magical is going if you’re an entrepreneur. And when I say we’re not for the purpose of this segment right here, when I say entrepreneur, I’m going to say that you’re a, I’m going to in quotation say a real entrepreneur.
And what I mean by that is going, you’re not just a personal brand, right? Like that you’re building and monetizing your face and your persona. But if you’re truly building a company and a, and a, and a brand name and company equity, and it’s not built around your face, most of what we do is, you know, the core of our target audience is people who are authors and speakers and coaches and trainers and consultants. And then, you know, our secondary, I think audience is more of like professional services and lawyers and accountants and, and doctors and financial advisors and real estate agents, and, and then direct sales. And then I think another big part of our audience is corporate executives. And then entrepreneurs like Liz, where Liz is main income is coming from her business, which is not selling speaking engagements and video courses and membership sites and books is from her job and the profits of her company and the salary that she draws. But if you’re a, if you’re that kind of an entrepreneur, I don’t real entrepreneur, maybe isn’t right, but it just, if you’re a classic entrepreneur or a true entrepreneur separate from being a personal brand,
Take notes of what she said about the power and the impact
And the significance and the
Value of free money
Marketing that personal branding provides to her company, to her corporation, to her brand, to her business, to her, her logo, to her, her, her exit value to her, to her asset that is this business that she has built. It, you know, she said, it’s remarkable if she could, if she could quantify the amount of free marketing opportunity that she has had for her company because of her personal brand. And I think companies and entrepreneurs and big corporations and small businesses are starting to really wake up to this idea, which, you know, a lot of the most successful companies have figured this out long ago, right? Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, Steve jobs, you know, these are personal brands that have built huge enterprises and they leverage their personal brand to get media, to create, you know, influential relationships and connections and not to monetize their personal brand in the, in the classic way that we think of it, which is the paids, you know, the, the paids model that we teach and, and the various things that we talk about, but actually monetizing their personal brand through the profits of their enterprise, like of their actual business, the bottom line profits.
And that is just, you know I’m going to let the cat out of the bag here a little bit. So we haven’t shared this anywhere publicly yet. So you’re getting an insider secret of foreshadowing, a hint at something exciting that has company coming, that we have officially commissioned and commenced something that we are calling the state of personal branding. And we are in the middle right now of conducting a nationwide survey where we are looking at statistically valid sample, a sampling of valid populations to determine the trends and the data, and doing a pure empirical analysis on the trends of, and the state of personal branding. And one of the things that we are measuring and it’s tied to this is do people trust companies more, or do they trust personal brands more? Do they trust, you know, this big giant enterprise and the logo and the history behind all that?
Or are they more likely to listen to a person who is an executive at the company or a founder, or, you know, someone that runs a department or a product line or something that, and we’re fascinated to find out the results. I don’t know the answer yet, you know, from a data perspective, but we’re about to know, and we are going to be releasing this. But if you listen to just what Liz is saying here through kind of her own personal recount, she’s going my personal brand brand, your personal brand as an entrepreneur gets you access to marketing opportunities and connections and relationships and resources and, and money that you would not get if you don’t have the personal brand. And that is reason enough to do it, especially if you are an early stage startup, especially if you’re a small business it’s super duper powerful, but you know, like I said, Richard Branson and Elon Musk, I mean, all these, these people that we talk about, they are the wealthiest people in the world.
I mean, literally Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk. So the wealthiest people in the world use your personal brand to build your business. And I thought, you know, what was important tactically for you, you know, real entrepreneur classic entrepreneur, that if you’re listening is to ask the question, how does this serve my main goal right now? Right? So most of you listening are like me, you’re a personal brand. You speak, you write books, you do courses, you do coaching programs, consulting, et cetera, et cetera. And then some of you are more professional services. What I would say is kind of like an intrepreneur where, where it’s, it’s not fully your own business, but you have your own book of business. You have your own clients and you do your own marketing and, and, and sales and service typically. But you’re probably not like dealing with PNLs and stuff like that as much.
But then if, if you’re truly running a company, like if you’re truly an entrepreneur and you’ve, you know, you, you file a 10 K every year and you have articles of incorporation and, and, and you have a tax ID number for your business entity. It’s going, how can I use my personal brand to drive the company profit? And that just like you would make investments into advertising and hiring and infrastructure and CRMs and technology, you should be making the same type of strategic investments into your personal brand because of the exponential returns that it gets you. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs are waking up to this. And for those of you that are more classic personal brands, kind of like, as I view myself in many ways it’s, it’s realizing that not a lot of entrepreneurs start companies because they don’t want to be a face.
They don’t really, they like being sort of behind the scenes and, and they want to build something that is, you know, kind of, of them, but it is powerful. And I think entrepreneurs need to learn from personal brands, how to leverage their personal brand, to throw a tension and gasoline on the fire that is their company, and to grow their business and personal brands need to learn from entrepreneurs about how to scale and in, in, in incorporate infrastructure and systems and processes, and to build things that operate without them. And that’s, I think one of the things that brand builders group does is we sort of sit uniquely at the intersection because of our experience and passion for both entrepreneurship and personal brands. But anyways, that if you’re an entrepreneur, you gotta be lightened up about using personal your personal brand to separate yourself from every other company out there that does what you do.
And now is the time and stay tuned for the data on this. That is coming from the brand builders group, personal the state of personal brand study. I can’t even hardly contain myself. I’m so excited. You’re going to love it. All right. My third takeaway, takeaway number three, here was this term pluck that she uses pluck. Now, you know, it needs, it needs some explaining, which, you know, from that standpoint, you know, it doesn’t pass the clarity test to some of these things that we talk about with titles, but as a concept, the concept that she uses of pluck, I really, really love this because, you know, she, she describes it as a, as a, it’s a, you know, it’s an actual word that means determined, and it’s the determination and the commitment of a beginner. But I also think of it as passion plus luck which is, you know, pluck.
So I’m kind of adapting her, her term here. But the, what she said that was super powerful is that beginners have an advantage. So we typically think of beginners having a disadvantage, right? And there are some disadvantages, like you’ve got to figure things out for, you got to prove, you know, you got to prove that there’s a market for what you’re doing. You have to, you know, find a sales model and, and, and, you know, cashflow a startup and get things off the ground. There’s a lot of challenging things about about being a beginner, but there are also a lot of advantages to being a beginner. She talks about at least 14 in her book, but you know, this reminds me, this is a kin to what Malcolm Gladwell talks about in his book, David and Goliath, which if you, if you’ve never read, of course, everything that Malcolm Gladwell writes is very fascinating and curious, and, you know, not as much practical as it is kind of interesting and philosophical, but somehow still applies to a lot of things in life.
And this is a great example of one, what he talks about it in David and Goliath is basically how, you know, we think basically how the things we perceive as disadvantages are advantages and how we all think David conquered Goliath. And it was like this mighty giant. And David was this little like scrawny kid with no armor and no weaponry who takes down this mighty giant, which is true. But he says, you know, he kind of makes the case and walks you through historically, what’s going on there, you’ve got this big, whatever nine foot man out there in the field moving, you know, covered in heavy, heavy armor. And, you know, David with the little Slingshot kind of darting around here and, and throwing a rock. And, and David had a lot of experience with this as, as you know, basically a sheep herder and a shepherd.
This was a tool that he used on a regular basis. And, and anyways, it’s, you know, the way Malcolm Gladwell kind of presents it, at least causes you to look at us and go, Hey, maybe this wasn’t as unfair as we all think about it. And we like to tell the story is that actually you could say David had the advantage. You know, if it was, if it was a really hot day and he has the advantage of agility, there’s advantages and whether or not that’s true, or you agree with it, or you like it, it’s a powerful perspective. And here’s why this is important because you right now in your own life, think you have disadvantages you right now in your own life. Think there are things about you that you have as weaknesses. And the reality is that every single one of those things could be flipped and turned to an advantage. If you just change the way you look at it, and that changes everything, because whether you’re able to turn it into an advantage or not the fact that you let go of the limiting belief, that your, that your perceived disadvantage is really a disadvantaged. If the fact that you’re willing to let that go, and you’re able to let that go in to say, Oh, this could be an advantage that changes everything.
Ep 142: How Entrepreneurs Can Use Their Personal Brand to Grow Their Business with Liz Bohannon
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.
Now you all know when I bring someone on the show, it’s almost always somebody that is a personal connection. There is one other time when we had Kristen Giesa on to talk about television. And today I’m introducing you to a new friend, Liz Forkin Bohannon, who was a cold media outreach from her PR team to us. But you’ll see, there are lots of great reasons why we have had her on the show. She’s amazing. And we actually, I just realized she spoke at global leadership summit last year, which are some of our best friends. We love the global leadership network. I’m sure some of you listening probably saw me speak there. And some, I, my pal Jason Dorsey speak there last year, but anyways, Liz got a chance to speak there because she’s incredible. So she founded a company called Sseko Designs and it is an ethical fashion brand usethat has gone from literally like three women making sandals together under a mango tree in Uganda to this international fashion brand. That’s been featured in Vogue and O magazine and Marie Claire and in style and red book. And it provides employment and educational opportunities to and just like entrepreneurial training and education to women all in East Africa and across the globe. And you know, so Liz and the Sseko story had been featured on shark tank at good morning America and just lots of other places. And so anyways, we’re realizing we have all these connections and anyways, Liz, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me Rory quite a, quite an honor to be one of two connection. So I’ll look forward to, you know, anytime after this will be considered personal connections from here on out, we ever connect a non-personal connection way. I love it. Yeah.
And I think, you know, you’re, I know that your real business is Sseko designed to, so I want to talk about, but like to that point for everyone listening you’ve done a great job of using your personal brand to build a real business. Like you, I get the sense that you are a true entrepreneur. You, you have your, you have your, you have your book beginner’s pluck, which y’all can check out. We’ll put links to that, but it’s like, what you really have used your personal brand to do is like forward your mission and your work as an entrepreneur. Is that accurate to say
Very correct. Yeah. I consider myself my day job. My, my main kind of mission in life right now is growing Seiko and Sseko is very much so a company that’s bigger than me that that works, that operates without me necessarily at the center, although my role is very much so kind of the face of the company and how my personal brand interacts with that is really important. But yeah, I’m not, I’m not a solo preneur. Like my goal is, is to build a scalable international company.
Yeah. And can you give us, so, so can you tell us a little bit about the story of Sseko? Cause I do want to hear about how you’ve used your personal brand to build it, but just like some reference in context to how this thing got started to it’s become, you know, this very recognized just almost like a social, like movement and the good work, like social conscious, like conscious company. And then when did it start where you at give us like a frame of like what, what the businesses is like,
Why don’t we start the thing long story short and it’s never super short. So I feel like I’m starting to lose credit.
I wouldn’t even preface it with that,
But, but 10 years ago I graduated from grad school with a degree in journalism and was really interested in issues that were facing women and girls living in extreme poverty and living in conflict and post-conflict zones. The only problem was I had zero experience living, working really actually understanding issues facing billions of women and girls across the globe. And so I graduated from grad school with all of this information and all of this kind of intellectual understanding and no context, no community, no relationships that were actually representative of that kind of more intellectual interests that I had. And so I moved to Uganda. I didn’t have no one would hire me by the way, I looked for a job that would like take me internationally. And it was like, like I said no real life experience or anything to offer. And so that was kind of a dead end. And finally basically just got to a point where I was like, okay, I’ll just go. Like, I’ll just go in the, in, in the goal will just be to learn and kind of to fill that education gap of like actual experience, real people and in relationships and in community. And so, I mean, I showed up in Uganda, I was what, 22, 23, like knew nothing. And just the goal was just like, okay, just go make friends, just like go build community, learn about these issues and what you think, you know? And,
But like he had no plan, no job, no like family connections there. You’re just like let’s
I knew one girl, we weren’t even really friends in college. She was like kind of an acquaintance who had moved to Uganda and about, Oh, about two weeks before I moved to Uganda, I emailed her and was like, Hey, you still in Uganda, like, I’m, I’m coming. I literally don’t have a place to stay. I don’t have a job. I have nothing. And she was like, wow. Okay. Well, I mean, you can like stay with me in my apartment until you like figure things out. And I was like, great, that’s amazing. So I had one connection in the whole country and just showed up and just started like making friends, trying to learn. And yeah.
And did you have a vision like you didn’t have at that point, you didn’t have a vision for the company, but you had a calling to try to do something for these women.
I had a desire to learn is literally all I had. I considered myself still more a journalist at that time then definitely not an entrepreneur. Couldn’t be actually like reacted really strongly against the idea of being an entrepreneur was not interested in business. Really believe that like, you know, I was like a pretty tried and true like bleeding heart humanitarian. I believed that like the solutions lied or, you know, we’re with the journalists and the truth tellers and the nonprofit starters. And so when I went to Uganda business was so far off my radar. I went as a journalist to go learn, live, understand more what I was going to do with that information. No idea. So I’m in Uganda and I’m just, I have my curiosity hat on, right? Like I have my little like, no one’s paying me investigative journalists. Like just being curious literally for my life, just, you know, 14 hours a day, just asking questions and following leads.
And through that process is when my world totally turned upside down. And my perspective on business really turned upside down because I came into the situation being like, no business is mainly part of the problem. It’s like, you know, it’s like greedy in it, oppresses people. And it’s all about like maximizing profits for stakeholders at the cost of, you know, whoever happens to be, you know, in the way. And, and what I realized through a series of events and learning is like, Oh my gosh, it’s such a big part of the solution. In the mechanics of like capitalism and business and building economies and creating employment, like so many of the problems that so many charities and nonprofits to solve wouldn’t exist. If people had access to good jobs where they were treated fairly, where they were paid on time, where they were safe, where they were treated with dignity.
And that’s not to say every single problem can be solved with a job, but a lot of them can. And so in Uganda it’s like, you know, you got to has one of the youngest populations in the entire world. And yet their youth unemployment rate in some parts of the country are 80%. And so just kind of like thinking through my understanding of how development happens completely turned upside down. And I was like, Oh my gosh, if I want to contribute specifically to enabling really high potential young women to kind of further their leadership and educational journey, which was my heart was like, okay, I know if there’s one thing that I can buy into it’s that educating a girl can change everything and that gender equality and that creating access to economic and educational opportunity for girls, specifically girls in the bottom billion. So those living in extreme poverty is one of the fastest, most effective ways of ending global extreme poverty. How we do that became definitely an evolution and using business as a tool to actually use that, to solve the big problem is coming of,
That’s a big shift, like going from like businesses, the enemy to, Oh crap, like businesses, the solution. And then you’re also going, I don’t know much about business. I mean, I’m, yeah. I mean, guessing like you’re in your twenties, like
Journalism, I hadn’t taken a single business class in my entire life so far.
So then, so then I guess you, you have this realization and from that you go, what could we do? Like what resources exist here that we could turn into a company that we could sell something to create income and jobs for people in a service for, for customers? Is that basically it,
So it was all backwards in the sense that I can didn’t start with a customer problem. I started with the problem of like the present issue, which was, I had met a group of girls that were getting ready to graduate from high school, wicked smart, top 5% of students in the country were getting ready to go into like a nine month gap in between high school and university gap year that everybody in the, everybody in the school system, in Uganda experiences and knew that there was a real likelihood that they wouldn’t make it onto university. Not because they weren’t smart enough, but because they wouldn’t be able to find a job during that nine month gap. And so started out with my big, hairy problem was like solve the nine month gap. How we did that, like what we were creating, what we were making. I literally couldn’t have given a flip. Like I w I started a chicken farm and was like, Oh, I don’t know. Let’s do chickens. Like this seems viable. And then I was like, what am I doing? No, no, no, no, no, I don’t want to run a chick.
I’m not going to be the chicken lady. I can’t be the chicken lady. The chicken farm is not the answer.
Oh, it was not the answer. And it wasn’t because I didn’t know, because at the end of the day, I didn’t know anything about what I ended up doing, but I didn’t, I didn’t, it, it, chickens are gross. They freaked me out joy. And that became very clear. And then, so I was like, okay, we can’t do this. We need to do, I need to make something. And ultimately probably sell it in the United States. There’s a real hunger and desire to get us dollars and build up the export markets. And so I was like, okay, there’s probably more of a pathway for that. And I know I’m an American woman. I kind of know that market. It’s not, I don’t have professional experience there, but I have a lot of intuitive experience there. And so ended up designing a pair of sandals. And again, at the time I was kind of like, man, chicken sandals. I don’t, I’m not really passionate about either of those.
You were solving the problem, not for customers, but for the employees.
Yes, exactly. And so ended up making these sandals, which actually were really cool. And I think if I would have started with something more like we sell jewelry now, too, we have, we’re a whole lifestyle brand. So we do footwear and apparel and leather goods and handbags and jewelry as part of our business. And our jewelry business is great. I think if I would have started there, I would have really struggled because the kind of fair trade, ethical jewelry market, there’s a lot of options there. Because just the barrier to entry to jewelry is, is a lot lower. And our product was pretty neat. It was a pair of these. It’s still one of our kind of flagship products. It’s got a leather base and then these five anchor points and these interchangeable straps. So the deal is you buy the base and then you can buy multiple pairs of straps. You can tie them and style them in different ways. So it’s a really unique product. There was nothing like it on the market at the time, and it’s really interactive. So the customer gets the product and she immediately starts playing around with her sandals. And she’s like, Ooh, look at this tie I invented. And the likelihood that she’s like, Oh, so I’m going to take a picture of it. And I’m going to put it on at the time. It would have been Facebook early Blogspot and talk about how she’s styling her sandals and
Myspace profile. I’ve got all my pictures of my best Sseko ties.
It’s a super interactive kind of versatile co-creating product, which is cool. Kind of got the energy that it did. In the beginning,
Lucky, like, did you design it that way? We were like, I’m going to let them,
No, it was, I would say, I would say it was more plucky than lucky.
No
Real thought. I think honestly, because I came from a background where I wasn’t particularly interested in fashion, I was, I’ve always been really drawn to the idea of versatility and fashion. So how can one product serve multiple purposes and solve multiple problems and B be clever. I think I’m really drawn to like clever things, as opposed to just like make a thousand designs that each can be worn one different way, this idea of like, but what if we could make one thing that could be worn a thousand different ways? And so it really, when I got home and started selling the product, I realized that we did kind of have that magic one, two punch of one, the product was, was interesting. It was clever. It was something that people want to talk about. I think, you know, you, you’re onto something when people are like, Oh, I thought about something like that before, you know, or they like say something like that.
And you’re like, Oh yeah, but you didn’t, you didn’t do it. I did, you know, but it’s like almost this sense that it’s like, Oh, I think I, maybe I invented that. Or maybe I had a dream about that, you know, and that combined with the story, which like, Hey, you’re going to go buy a pair of new sandals this year. Anyway, like you’re going to go to target. You’re going to spend 25 bucks on a pair of sandals. The last you may be a year, maybe two years, you have no idea where they came from. You have no idea what the impact is, or you could buy sandals from us. And in addition to getting this really cool product, you can be a part of this really rad story. Like there’s these awesome bad-ass female entrepreneurs, any staff Africa who are going to go on to change the world. And like, by buying sandals from us, you get to be a little part of that.
And so, so what’s the scope. What’s the scale of the company today.
So we now operate, we have a manufacturing facility in Uganda, Sseko Uganda, we’ve got about 75 full-time employees there. And then we have now artists and partners in Kenya, in Ethiopia, in India, in Peru. And so we’ve got now global partners, basically almost on every continent. And we actually just welcomed a Southeast Asian production partner. So we’re employing at this point are partnering with thousands of artisans across the globe to make our, our catalog of goods. And then those products are all sold in the United States by Seiko fellows. And so Seiko fellows are our stylist consultants. These are primarily women that sell the product in their community, using social media, using their personal brands, hosting trunk shows, and then they earn a commission off of everything that they sell. And then our, our entrepreneurial fellows are the ones who are actually building teams. So not only are they selling the product, but they’re recruiting other people to sell the product and building and mentoring a team. And then earning a really scalable income off of that.
What did you say the stylists are called? We call those fellows say co-fellows, and then you have entrepreneurial fellows.
Yeah, well, they’re, they’re all called Sseko fellows, but like in every, you know, kind of network marketing, we have different levels. So we’ve got women that are like, I love this. I love the mission I love being in. And it makes me feel so good. And I like earning really beautiful product for my wardrobe that maybe I wouldn’t spend on myself otherwise. And so I’m going to host three shows a season and earn a couple hundred bucks and get free or discounted product. And then we have women who are like, no, I’m, I’m an entrepreneur. And I want to build a business. I just want to outsource all the crappy parts of building a business, you know, like totally development and logistics. And so they’re really focusing on leadership development and really building up a marketing and sales organ and leadership organization whilst they could go corporate takes on ticks on all the dirty work behind the scenes.
Yeah. We, we love direct sales. We have lots of direct sales and clients, you know, network marketing and obviously most people that listen, know my background, a very in depth background with, with it. So let’s talk about that part, the personal branding more for you specifically because you, so it’s one thing to do personal branding for direct sales. But what, what I’m really curious about is you took this mission and you made it a brand as a company. You started a business and you’re not monetizing your personal brand through selling like advice or anything like that. And also you’re not selling a service really. I mean, you, the direct sales is kind of an opportunity, but but the brand itself, like you took your personal brand and how so, like how do you, how do you think about the relationship of your personal brand with your business and, and like the, some of the practical questions we get.
So like, we have a group of people who are personal brands, they’re just, you know, like Rory vaden.com and, you know, they got their speaker and they got books, et cetera. And then we’ve got entrepreneurs and they’re going, one of the first questions is what should the domain of my company be? Should it be Rory vaden.com or should it be brand builders, group.com? You know, like we have that for our actual company. So how do you balance that relationship? How do you think about your personal brand as an entity in, in relationship to this business that you’re building and to this corporate brand, like you’ve got your personal brand, but you’ve built this, this amazing corporate brand, which also is socially conscious brand that has a lot of equity. So what are your, some of your thoughts and philosophies there,
But yeah, so for me personally, the company is its own entity sseko designs is not Liz Bohannon. They’re very related obviously because I’m the founder, I’m the spokesperson, I’m the chief, you know, like, you know, I speak on behalf of the company and I’m really the chief storyteller. The chief inspire the chief connector, whether that is for our customers, whether that is for our fellows. But I would say actually since the very beginning was very clear about this is going to be a business and this is going to be a business that is going to be bigger than me. And I actually don’t want to be the center of it. I want to build an organization. I want to build a brand that exists, maybe not even necessarily outside of me, but it’s bigger than me. And so my perspective on growing my personal brand, at least up until now, you know, for the last 10 years has always been like my personal brand is in service to this larger organization.
I’m much more much more at this point, interested in using the opportunities that I get as a human person to build this larger organization than I am in building up my personal brand. Now I say that, and what’s amazing about having a person. I still do very distinctly have a personal brand, right? Like I wrote a book that launched last year, it’s called beginner’s pluck. I have a podcast called plucking up. Like I use social media. I have all of the like elements of a personal brand. I think my framework for the question of building
The website, I mean like a whole whole thing. Yeah.
I just asked myself as like, does this go to actually serve my main goal right now, which is growing and scaling Sseko, but what’s awesome is that when you have a personal brand that is compelling, that is, and I hold, you know, they’re not one in the same in the sense that I really use my personal brand to talk about things that I care about on a personal level, that aren’t necessarily like Sseko’s core values or brands. So there is separation between the two, like if you follow Seiko designs on Instagram and you follow Liz Bohannan, you’re going to have two pretty different experiences, but what’s so amazing is like the access that I get, because I’m a person who cares about a cause and has expertise in that area to share about my company. It’s remarkable. Like if I could quantify the amount of free marketing and advertising that Sseko has gotten over the last 10 years, because of the opportunities that Liz Bohannen has actually gotten, like people aren’t inviting the CEO of Sseko, they’re not looking for a representative from Seiko to come talk at this event. They want Liz Bohannan to come share her experience, her story, her expertise. But because what I care about and because my mission and my philosophy on life is so tied up in the values of my brand. I get the opportunity to share the brand story.
Well like global leadership summit is, I mean, that event is the biggest speaking event in the world. That’s amazing. Cause you get, you get, not only do you get free marketing, you get paid and you get the marketing, like you get paid to, to, to, to, to share your story with people around the globe. That’s incredible.
Yeah, it is. It is a really remarkable when, when you can make it work, the value that that can provide to the entity, to the organization that you’re building is I really do believe it’s unquantifiable. And I think that there is a real legitimacy play there as well. Like I know for us being a direct sales, you know, a multi-level marketing company when I’m recruiting or when someone else is recruiting to come be a part of our company leadership development, it’s a big part of our industry. Like people are joining a company one because they want to sell a product. They want to earn an income. They want to be a part of a community. They also want to better themselves, right? Like they want to push themselves. They want to, you know, they want to learn how to grow their own businesses and grow as a person.
And so when the leader of that company has all of this external validation in the leadership realm of like, Oh, our CEO is like really highly sought after and valued in all of these other spheres to come teach her leadership knowledge. And like, we get that here at our company just by like, you know, I go live on Facebook all the time with my fellows. I’m way more active with our internal community that I am even with our external community. Cause I’m like, I’m going to give you my best. Like those followers on Instagram, those people that go to my website, like I love them. And I, I really want to create content that serves them. But heck if I’m going to, we only have so much time and energy in a day. Right. It’s like I would rather pour my resources my time, my best into those people that are then going to go out. Cause they’re like, they’re the magnifying voice for the brand for the impact. And so it’s like, that’s how we create and really scale impact. I don’t think I do it through me and through growing my personal brand. I think I do it by equipping using my brand to then go equip and inspire thousands and thousands and tens of thousands of women to then go do that in their community.
Yeah. So since you brought this up, so this is interesting. I didn’t realize that you guys were direct sales company before the, for the interview, right? Because I’m putting together pieces of the Liz fork and Bohannan story here as we go along. But you know, now knowing that, and, and, you know, I mentioned to you that I speak at direct sales companies. It’s like the number one financial services and then, you know, direct sales companies. And so I love this, but to the topic of using your personal brand for the business, a lot of direct sales, there’s a lot of old roots of direct sales. It’s been around a long time. Social media is a very new and I would call it a disruptive, I would call, I would just say personal branding is I think occurring as a very disruptive force in network marketing.
You know, multi-level marketing, direct sales, whatever you want, whatever term you want to use. And I feel like I’m seeing a split in philosophy that some direct sales companies are going, Nope, no personal brand promote the company focus only on the, only on the company. Like this is what we do and others are going, you know, like I think of like Rhodan and fields is a good example. They’re just going, it’s all about the personal brand, all in, on the personal brand, all in, on social media. And, and I really understand the dilemma because from a, from a brand perspective, it’s like, you want to make sure people are representing the brand accurately and ethically and saying, you know, consistent things in trying to like reinforce some scalable systems that make them successful, but then it’s like to ignore the power of the personal brand and the power of social. So now knowing that you are, you actually happen to be a founder of one of those companies, clearly you’re on the side of the value of the personal brand. Like how have you reconciled that and how do you reconcile that with the fellows in terms of what you promote in terms of how, how they should use their personal brand to build their direct sales company? I E in this case, Seiko.
Yeah, definitely. I mean, one of the, we were kind of chatting a little bit before the show and I, I confess that I am a founder and CEO of a, you know, an MLM, a direct sales company that has literally never had any experience battling for buying from like day one of my exposure. I kind of thought here here’s, here’s the real truth. I kind of thought I made it up. I was so unfamiliar with the industry that I like had this whole thing. And I was like, we did these party in a boxes and I would send a box of product. It was usually at the time it was like college students. And they would, you know, like host an event on their college campus and literally like send back an envelope of cash. And I would let them keep some product and exchange. And I was like, this is good. Like the energy, the connection, like the experience they’re able to create. They walk away from, you know, a Seiko campus show with a totally different experience with the brand and connection with the brand than they do. If they bought that at the boutique down the road that also sells the product because at the time we were a traditional retail company
Can I just, I have to just interrupt. Cause I, in my mind, I, I, I can’t help, but laugh because you’re like this bleeding heart journalist chicken farmer level marketing, like direct sales, like the pendulum swung pretty far in terms of what most, how most people view it, but all based on this realization to solve this problem of giving women opportunity in these developing countries, both economic and educational. And I just, I just think it’s so ironic and radical and fun to see this, how your life has gone in this way, where you’re like, I invented this awesome model of party planning and, and then you can recruit somebody and get a percentage sauce. It’s, it’s awesome.
Even with the recruiting and stuff, like at this point I was running a traditional retail organization. So it’s like, you got your VP of sales and then they earn a commission off of your sales reps. And the sales reps actually go in the field and they sell to the stores. And I was like, what if we just did that? What if it was the same, but it was just like with, instead of with stores, right. So you’re totally right. And I honestly, this is where, you know, my book beginners plaque is kind of all about how you’re in competency, your unknowing of how the industry works of how it’s always been done of the rules can, is actually, could be your superpower. If you understand how to be really intentional about harnessing it and using it to your advantage. And this would be a really good example of had I known I wouldn’t have done it in the sense that I think I would have had all of these preconceived notions about what MLMs are and who I am and like, you know, and my goal in the world.
And I think I would have probably been too, there would have been too many reasons for me to talk myself out of it. I was so ignorant that I was like, I’m inventing this, I’m just making this up as I go along and it’s this incredible model it’s going to be really scalable and we’re going to have this exponential growth. And then what that enabled me to do is to take the roots of the model to take the structure, to take the skeleton, which is brilliant. It’s just amazing and build it out and layer on top of it, a different way of thinking about it. A different reason, like 80% of the people who are in our community selling have never been a part of an MLM or direct sales company before, which obviously has challenges. It also has an incredible advantage because we’re just doing things in a way that’s a little bit different and there’s, we’re able to access specifically a younger market, younger market.
It’s really comfortable with social media. That’s really familiar and passionate about kind of more of a cause marketing values-based like consumer relationship that frankly would never sign up to sell a product that didn’t have something that touched them on a deeper level, on a values level. And we’ve created that we’ve created a space where it’s like, Hey, come earn an income. But also you get to be a part of this community where you wake up every day and you know, like the work that you were doing, it matters so much. And you know, like when you become a Seiko fellow, you have the opportunity to get matched with a Seiko sister. So this is one of our team members, one of our colleagues in Uganda, you take a quiz. So you each kind of put in your like preferences and life and we match you up with somebody.
It’s like, Hey, you actually have a lot in common. You, you know, like Susan from Minnesota, you’ve got a lot in common with Sharon. Who’s our head seamstress and Uganda, we connect them, they learn about each other. They can actually write letters back and forth our top incentive trip. So, you know, every MLM sends their people, you know, incentive trip is an all expenses paid trip to Uganda, right? Like that’s normal necessarily. That’s not like we’re going to go, we’re going to have the experience of a lifetime. You’re going to meet your Ugandan colleagues. You’re going to learn how the products are made. We hang out in the factory, we do dinner and one another’s homes. Like there’s a real, it’s a different flavor, but the model and the structure of it is still the same.
Yeah. Is that, is, is there, are there fellows
In Uganda or just the manufacturing and like the production happens
Right now. It’s just manufacturing and production. So all of the sales is us and the partners are on the production side. You’re in Oregon. I’m in Oregon. Yeah. And we’re is headquartered in Portland.
Yeah. wow. Well, that’s just, it it’s, it’s fascinating. I’m glad you mentioned that because I wanted to come back to the, to the concept of pluck. The book is called, you know, your book’s called beginner’s pluck. It reminds me almost of the a little bit of the Malcolm Gladwell, David and Goliath, where, you know, that book talks about how everyone assumes that David was the underdog. But in reality, you know, he was much faster. He didn’t have a lot of the weight, you know, it was a sunny day. He was nimble, et cetera, et cetera. And how the underdog, isn’t always the underdog you think. And that as an entrepreneur, I mean, it seems like that’s kind of the premise that you’re saying is that there’s a brilliance in that unknowing that you don’t talk yourself out of something. That’s basically what you’re, what, what you’re talking about. Right.
Totally. Yeah. So the book has, there’s, there’s 14 things, 14 principles of beginner’s pluck things that I believe that natural beginners do naturally it comes more easy to them. They do it more quickly. They’re more familiar with it. And as we gain expertise and mastery, we actually lose those things. And I believe that over time, when we lose those kinds of that ability to channel our inner beginner, we actually become less effective. We become less curious. We become less innovative over the long haul. And so it’s all about like this concept of, if you actually are a beginner, here’s what you just need to know that this is your advantage. This is your secret weapon. So lean into it. Don’t be afraid of it. Don’t deny it actually lean into it. And if you are an expert or master, if you’re 10, 20, 30 years into your career, here are the things that you should be intentionally trying to get back to and to channel in a way that you probably did without knowing it more when you were a beginner that you’ve probably naturally lost along the way. And that’s totally fine, but being really intentionally about kind of getting back there for the purposes of becoming more creative, more innovative. Okay.
So cool. So cool. Well, we’ll put links to the book. Liz, Bohannan everybody, Seikos the name of the company? Liz? Where do you want people to go? If they want to learn more about the stuff that you’re up to?
Yeah, well, you can go to Seikos website, it’s S S E K O designs.com. You can shop Seiko, you can host a trunk show. You can become a Seiko fellow and you’ll hear me run my mouth a lot more. I’m on Instagram at Liz Bo Hannen. I have a podcast called plucking up, which is one of my newest, recent loves where I interview amazing people like Liz, Gilbert and Arianna Huffington, like wildly successful people. And it’s all about their pluck ups. So the whole concept is basically like, Hey you’re going make mistakes along the way. And really kind of like pulling the curtain back on, like those really challenging seasons, the rejections, the embarrassments, the seasons where you felt totally lost and upside down and underwater. And it’s been a really, really fun space and really fun community for people to come together and go, Oh, when I’m messing up it.
And you know, when I got rejected, when I did that thing, and it was a total embarrassment or flopper failure, it’s actually not because I’m broken or I’m stupid, or I shouldn’t be trying this in the first place. It’s because you’re probably trying something that’s pretty challenging. And you’re in really good company of a lot of us who were doing awesome stuff and plucking up all along the way. Usually sometimes a little bit of both at the same time. And so you can subscribe to plucking up and find me there as well. So, cool.
Well, keep providing jobs and education turns out business is part of the solution. One of the best parts of the solution, a lot of problems can be solved with a good job. That’s going to be one of my big takeaways. I think so, Liz, thanks for being here. We wish you, we wish you all the best. Thank
You so much, Ray. I really appreciate it.
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].