Category: BRANDING

Ep 469: How To Cultivate Your Community | Lindsey Schwartz Episode Recap

AJV (00:00):
One thing that we can never talk enough about is the importance of building community, right? And that’s not just in our personal lives, like building community through our church or our gym, or for me, like bar three class but building community as a part of our business. And I just had the coolest conversation with Lindsay Shortz, who’s the founder, how founder of Powerhouse Women. And I thought this conversation was worthy enough to share just a couple of quick highlights around the importance of community and the difference between an audience and community. So I would just like for you to settle in, and I want you to think about this in, I guess really three different formats. One is just community in general, right? That could be in your personal life, in your professional life, in your family life, whatever. It’s just in general, like the importance of how do you establish good, authentic lasting community, right?
AJV (01:04):
The second one, I want you to think about it in terms of client relationships, right? So these are the people who are paying for your products and services. These are your customers, right? And how do we think about community in that realm? And then the third category is I want you to think about community in terms of your team. And these could be full-time employees. These could be part-time contractors, and anywhere between, but community also happens within your company, within your organization. And I want you to think about it and those three different formats, because it doesn’t matter where you are. One of those fits . And that’s my point is we might be talking about community in relation to something specific with building a more engaged community online. But that happens in your personal life. It happens with your customers, and it happens with your team.
AJV (01:56):
So it doesn’t matter. So I just want you to think about this as you head into this conversation of which of those buckets am I gonna filter through with this information, right? And maybe it’s all three but I would encourage you to pick one for this first round lesson of which of these is this most closely apply to me? And where I am right now? Is it my overarching just community in general that would be more personal? Is it my clients, my customers, or is it my team? Right? Whether contractors or employees, doesn’t really matter. So first highlight is knowing the difference between audience and community. And I thought this was so wise. And so right on where Lindsay said that you have to think about your audience is all about connecting with you, but community is about helping your audience members connect with each other. And that really is so powerful because when you, when anyone thinks about how do you grow a scalable business, it’s you have to remove yourself from the center of
AJV (02:58):
It, right? And at some point it’s gotta grow beyond you. And that means that people are now connecting and communing and collaborating with and without you. And that could be, again, personally, professionally, and in terms of your team or your customer base. So that’s the first thing, is just knowing that an audience, you know, in this regard is thinking about your customers, right? This could be online followers, offline customers, doesn’t matter. But an audience is that one-to-one relationship. Whereas a community is how do we take all of our customer or potential customer relationships and start connecting them with each other so it’ll go so much further beyond you. You’re just the conduit of these relationships. You’re the host of the party, right? You’re the person who’s just sending out the invitations. But you’re not expected to entertain or talk to every single person the entire time at a party, right?
AJV (03:53):
You bring people together who are going to talk amongst themselves, who are going to connect and network, interact among themselves. Same thing happens in our personal life. Same thing happens within our team. And the same thing happens in our customer base. That’s the first thing. Second thing, create the culture of people that you actually want to attract. You know, tons of much smarter people than I am talk about culture, but one thing that I believe is that culture should attract or repel people , right? If you have a well-defined culture, people are attracted to it like a magnet, or they are repelled by it, like a horrible odor . So you want to be, in some regard, just enough polarizing where people can go, I didn’t know a group of people like this exact existed. This is what I’ve been looking for. Or it’s like, oh, you are not my people.
AJV (04:49):
But you want people to resonate with that. And the best way you can do that is you have a well established and a firm foundation of the culture of people that you want to attract. And so I, in my conversation with Lindsay Short, she said, so how do you do that? There’s two thi two quick things that I would love to share that she shared. Number one is ask yourself, what do you want to unify people around, right? So when you think about rallying the troops, what is that? You know, mor cry, right? That rallying mission that everyone is coming together because they all believe in the same thing. They all want the same thing. That would be the first thing. Second thing is ask yourself, who is the aspirational person that my community wants to become, right? So is it they’re all trying to become better at wealth management. Maybe you’re a financial advisor. Maybe they’re, they’re trying to become better moms. Maybe you you are very much in the business of helping support moms or working moms or parents or dads, whatever, right? Maybe it’s for the aspiring entrepreneur, maybe it’s for the established entrepreneur, whatever.
AJV (05:57):
Just decide who it is, right? In order for you to attract these people, you have to know who they are and then where to find them, right? And that, that’s a huge part of just establishing like, this is the culture of the people that we wanna attract. It’s like, you know, at Brand Builders Group, we say that we serve mission driven messengers. We want to attract a culture of people who are unified around this idea of mission over money, and that you make money as a byproduct of serving people well, of living out this mission, of having a message that is worth sharing and having the courage to share it, right? That is what we’re trying to unify people around. And the aspirational person that our community wants to become is they want to become that person who is a conduit of good change in the world.
AJV (06:49):
They believe that their message has the power to change someone’s life, right? That is who we want to attract. And if we do a good job at that, then people will come into our community and go, wow, I’m so happy I found you. Or they’ll go, whoa, y’all are whack. I’m outta here. And that’s okay. And we have to be okay with that because we have well defined bound. We have well-defined boundaries of who we are trying to track attract, because we know the culture of who we are. And I can just speak personally, the same thing goes for the people on our team. The people that we are attracting to work at Brand Builders Group also go, man, I wanna, I wanna be about something that’s not just about money in my banking account. I wanna be about something that is bigger than me.
AJV (07:31):
I wanna be a, a play a small part in something huge. That’s who we’re attracting, right? And I can say that part is working great. Our people are amazing. I feel utterly blessed and ignorant of how we are attracting such awesome people other than they are aligned with the same things that we believe, right? So we are attracting them in that sense. I wish I had some great recruiting tactic. I could tell you I don’t. I complete completely dumbfounded by that other than we are culturally aligned. And you can tell it from the first five minute conversation, right? All right, last thing. Find creative and tactically sufficient ways for people to connect with each other. So that’s a tactically sufficient way. So what I mean by that is easy to implement, right? So they had, you’ve got to tell people what to do in order to connect with each other, and they have to be able to do it in the moment, not make a checklist.
AJV (08:27):
And, okay, I’ll go do that on LinkedIn later. It’s like, no. Like right now, what are creative ways, and not even just creative ways, what are ways, , what are ways that you can establish for people to connect with one another within your community? Again, your family, your friends, your customers, your team members. So step one is have a place where people can find their people, right? And so internally, like as a company, we use teams. And something that we’ve integrated this year that has been amazing for connection is, Hey, taco, and hey Taco allows our teams to reward each other for a job well done, and to congratulate them and connect. And we are a virtual team for the most part. And that’s been amazing. The other thing we’ve done is we’ve got, we’ve set up two to three different coworking places around Nashville.
AJV (09:11):
So our people have physical locations since we’re virtual to go and connect and brainstorm and ideate. We’re having quarterly social events. And these are just ideas with our team within our client community, right? Brain Builders Group community. Who is the best community in the whole world? Shout out to all of you. It’s, we spent an entire year building an app in an integrated way, a one place, you know, stop for you to ask questions get on live trainings, network, have chats, have a social feed have topic specific forums, all these different things. And it’s like within this one place, they have tons of ways of connecting. They can hop on virtual training calls, they can hop on networking calls. They can be a part of meetups. They can do forum conversations, which are again, like vertical conversations around certain topics.
AJV (10:00):
They can just chat with each other in the social feed, kind of like a Facebook group. They can have one-on-one chat conversations right in the app. And this was a huge undertaking because we said there’s so many different ways for people to connect If we don’t figure out how to consolidate, and that was the word for us, consolidate these ways, we’re gonna lose people, right? They’re gonna be so confused and so overwhelmed. They’re not gonna do anything. And that’s what I mean by tactically sufficient, right? So it’s one thing to go, you can, you know, hop on this zoom call, you can go to the Facebook group, you can go to, it’s like you can, but most don’t . It’s too much. And so we have found ways to consolidate all of these different options into one platform. That’s not gonna work for everyone. But what we found for us is that the consolidation into many things in one place was a way that we could create ways for our community to connect with each other.
AJV (10:51):
Now that’s all digital. We also do 48 different virtual events. That’s not gonna work for everybody. We do six in person, not gonna work for everyone. So you just have to take some of these ideas and go, how could I implement something that would help my community connect with each other? It could be a free Facebook group, it could be Zoom meetups, it could be client appreciation events. It could be virtual. That could be virtual or in person. You could do a variety of things. You could also just go through your client Rolodex and go, who should meet each other? It could be as free and as manual as that, or have an app, right? So there’s all different things. The point is, is what are you doing to help your community connect with more than just you, but help them to connect with each other? And that’s what turns an audience into a fully alive and engaged community.

Ep 468: 3 Steps To Help Turn Your Audience Into Your Community with Lindsey Schwartz

AJV (00:02):
Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Influential Personal Brand podcast, AJ Vaden here, and I’m so excited to introduce a new friend and I say a new friend because although we have dozens and dozens of mutual friends, somehow Lindsey and I have just now gotten to meet. But I believe it was God’s timing and super serendipitous because it’s super in alignment with what we’ve been hearing from the Brand Builders Group community, and all of our listeners on the influential Personal Brand podcast. So, I’m so excited to introduce you to Lindsey Schwartz. I’m going to give her a formal introduction in just a second. But first and foremost, I wanna tell you why you need to stick around for this podcast and how you know if this episode is for you. Number one, if you are in a season of trying to figure out how to build engaged community around your personal brand and your business.
AJV (00:52):
Well, this is, this is a custom designed episode for you. Number two, if you’re figuring out how to get more engagement from your community online and or offline, this would be an episode for you to episode for you. Number three, if you’ve been thinking to yourself, I wanna create live event experiences, and you’re wondering, should I do that? Why would I wanna do that? How would I do that? And are you crazy enough? Do you do that ? And these would all be good things that we’re gonna talk about on today’s episodes. It was really about building engaged community. How does it begin? How do you continue it? How, how does it end? But then also weaving in some conversations around how do we do that on, on offline environment with this idea of events and experiences, but also in the digital ecosystem with social media?
AJV (01:45):
And how do we stay in touch with our community when we don’t live nearby and we don’t see you all the time? So that is what we’re gonna talk about today. And if that sounds appealing to you, then don’t miss a second. Stick around to the very end, and you are going to be glad that you did. Now, with all of that said let me introduce you to Lindsey Schwartz. I will read you an official bio, but I know just even by reading this, there are millions of things that she has left off in this because I know, ’cause I’ve heard so many amazing things about her for so long that she is very much downplaying all of her awesomeness in this bio. But I’ll tell you that she is an author, she is an investor, she is a master community builder, and the founder of Powerhouse Women, which is fiercely committed to supporting other women, which I love. But she also invests her time in mentoring women and girls of all ages. And I think that’s amazing. It doesn’t matter if you’re a high school student or a, you know, powerhouse entrepreneur, the power of just mentorship and leadership is ever present and all things that you’re doing. And I’m so excited to learn from you today and to ask you questions, and most importantly, introduce you to our awesome community. So, Lindsey, welcome to the show.
LS (03:01):
I am so thrilled to be here. I’m a longtime listener of the podcast, so this just feels super fun.
AJV (03:07):
I am so excited. And one of the things that I would love to do before we get into the nitty gritty details, since we are newer friends and you’re new to our audience, I would love for you to just kind of give a high level background of where you started and how you got to where you are and what you’re doing today.
LS (03:26):
Mm. I am so grateful that you asked this part of the story because the further removed I get from it, I think people see what powerhouse women is today. And it’s easy to forget that everybody has that day one. Everybody has that season where you’re figuring it out as you go. And powerhouse women really started when I decided to do something that challenged me, probably for the first time in my adult life. And when I tell you that I had lived a very safe life, I had lived a life that didn’t involve much risk, it didn’t involve getting outta my comfort zone. And it was tricky because I am the person that can give 60, 70% of my full potential, and I can create results that look really shiny on the outside. But I think you get to a point where you realize that personal growth is such a fundamental need.
LS (04:20):
Our own evolution is such a fundamental need that that life starts to feel really small if you’re not stepping into things that really challenge you. For me, this season really came to a head about seven years into building a, a little network marketing business that I built. And, and it was really successful. So I shouldn’t really even call it little, but I was in this season of restlessness, just praying for direction, praying for an answer. And, and, you know, I think we, we often pray prayers that we’re not ready for the answer for Mm-Hmm. , we’re not ready to get the answer. And that, that prayer led me down a journey of saying yes to writing a book, a self-published book. And that was the last thing I really thought I had any business doing. I was not a writer. I always tell my audience at our events, I had this little blog called Love Lindsey.
LS (05:07):
And I published consistently one article per year because I was just so afraid of putting myself out there. You know, they say publish consistent content. So every year I would put out one blog , and then I wondered why I wasn’t being discovered, why my personal brand wasn’t taking off. And I, I just had to really come to terms with the fact that I, I was what was holding myself back. So I, I said yes to writing this book, never, ever in my wildest dreams intending for it to become something more. And that journey of writing for an entire year change changed my life. It had me really face where I was playing small and stopping myself. And the moment that fear would show up, I would do this kind of cute quit where I would, I would just choose comfort and all of that to say, I finished the book, spoiler alert, I named it Powerhouse Woman because I really wanted to, I was speaking to myself just as much as I was speaking to the brilliant women around me, that we don’t, we don’t need to achieve something more to become this powerhouse.
LS (06:05):
It really is already within us. It’s within the seeds of these dreams and visions that are put on our heart for a reason. And the book was released, and my, I had some support in, in the publishing process. My editor and publisher now, good friend, said, you should do a book launch event. That’s, that’s what people do to promote their book. And I said, okay. So the very first Powerhouse Women event was really just a day supposed to be about celebrating this book and this message. And I’ll never forget, you know, and we’re gonna dig into what a big production it’s become. Now. I’ll never forget at the end, women said, okay, well, what’s next? And I was just kinda like, goodbye . You know, I had nothing else. I had not even thought through what this could become, but it all really started with the seed of getting out of my own way, really deciding to challenge the limits of what I knew myself to be capable of.
LS (06:58):
And realizing that there were so many others who were in a similar season. They just knew they were meant for more, but they were stopping themselves because of fear, or self-doubt, or all the things that now we know are so normal. That is actually the price of admission. That’s how, you know you’re pursuing something that’s, that’s worth pursuing. So, fast forward, here we are seven years later. I know we’re gonna get into all of that, but the beginnings of the story are very humble. I had no clue what I was doing. I was really operating on faith and on this, this knowing that I couldn’t keep playing small and hiding my gifts anymore.
AJV (07:37):
Hmm. I love that. One of my favorite quotes that I keep getting fed to by the Instagram algorithm is let this year be a God did a year. And I love stories like yours ’cause it’s like, you can take no credit. And it’s like, it’s like to give him all the glory of, if we just step back and step into faith, it’s amazing what he’ll do without us . As long as, as long as we’re willing participants of going, Hey, I’ll step out and I’ll take that next step. And God, I just show me the way, show me what to do. Yeah. And it’s amazing how, and you have enough courage to just go, I don’t know, but I’m going to move forward in faith what amazingness comes from this. So that was seven years ago. What would you say is like the biggest thing that you’ve learned from, Hey, I’m gonna do this book launch event too. Oh no. This is way more than just a book launch event. This is a whole event series. What would you say is the biggest thing you’ve learned in the last seven years? Yeah.
LS (08:38):
Well, I think on the heels of what you just shared, I thought I was living my life by faith up until that point, but I, I realized that faith doesn’t actually enter the picture until you step beyond what you know yourself to be capable of. So here I was operating within what I could control and what I, I wanted to control the outcome. I wanted to control people’s perception of me. I wanted to control so many variables of it. And I had this tight grip on my story and my purpose and my life. And it wasn’t until I opened that up and I said, okay, I’m gonna step way out, way beyond what I know myself to be capable of. And now the lesson I learned in that is that that was where all the magic lies. That’s where the miracles lie. You don’t actually start to scratch, scratch the surface of what you’re capable of until you step into that feeling of, can I really do this?
LS (09:34):
So even still now, I know that my next miracle, my next breakthrough is waiting for me. Just beyond, like, if you imagine kinda like looking over the horizon, it’s, it’s just over what we can see. Mm-Hmm. And that’s easy to say, and it sounds really cute, and we’ll probably all be fed a quote like that on Instagram this week. But it’s a whole other thing. Let, let’s just be real. It’s a whole other thing when like, your heart is pounding and your palms are sweating and you’re like, am I really about to do this? Which kind of brings us to, I know we’re gonna get into the just the community element today. I think that’s why community is absolutely essential, because I’m not strong enough to do this on my own. And I, I don’t know many people who are, I just think we’re, we’re really designed to create in community.
AJV (10:18):
I love that. So that’s such a good transition to talk about community. And so I would love to know, it’s like, what would you say is the difference? Because people always talk about my audience, my audience, but an audience and a community are really different. Yeah. And so how would you define like, here’s my audience versus here’s my community.
LS (10:39):
It’s, it’s such a important distinction to make, and I’m sure other people would have their own definitions, but I remember when I started to be asked to teach on this, and I really had to sit step back and go, well, I don’t know, we’re just do, I’m just doing what I’m doing. I couldn’t even tell you what it is. But the moment I sat down, it really kind of just downloaded right there in that moment that I think we, we confuse an audience with a community, and both are necessary. And I have strategies for building both in my business, but building our audience is really step one. It’s really it. When I think about building my audience, I’m, I’m answering the question for myself. How can I get more people to connect with me? Whether that’s me as a personal brand or me as a business brand?
LS (11:23):
And that’s important. We want people to know about you and know about how amazing you are and how you can serve them. But most people are stopping there. They think, okay, I’m just gonna get that attention and convert that into sales. And you can do that. That, that’s beautiful. It’s a, you know, that’s a whole strategy. But what I predict and what I know from my own personal experience is when you take it a level deeper and you start to ask a better question, once you have that attention, you have a way to bring new people into your world. It’s asking a question of not how can I get them to connect with me? Now they’ve done that. How can you get more of those people to connect with each other? And that’s where community really starts to form. And it’s, I mean, it is the most valuable thing that you can build for your brand is a connected, engaged community.
LS (12:13):
And even when people hear engaged community, I think they imagine, oh, when I post something on Instagram, they’re talking back to me. No, no, no. What I talk about when I say engaged community is I’ll use, you know, my own story as a, just a mini example. We will launch, you know, event tickets. And I’m actually not really selling that event. It’s the people in our community saying, Hey, five friends, you have to come with me. Yes, buy your ticket. I’m gonna send you the link. But it’s taken a lot of intentional cultivating to get to that point. So when you have an engaged community, you know, because you have these, it’s just like this natural built in almost affiliate marketing channel. You have these referrals coming in, you have this brand loyalty that actually can’t be taken away and it can’t be matched. It’s so deep. Community is just so much deeper. But it really starts with that question, how do I get more of the people who are following me to connect with each other?
AJV (13:13):
I love that. And it’s so true. But I love that distinction of building an audience is helping people connect with you. Building a community is helping them connect to each other. And that’s awesome. So I would love for you to talk about how do you do both of those mm-Hmm. How do you, in all that you’re doing, build your audience, right? Because it’s like, first you kind of have to start there. And then how do you, today between all the different mediums build a truly engaged community? How do you facilitate that?
LS (13:48):
Well, it’s interesting having you ask that question in that way, because what I realize is we, we actually focus primarily on building the community element. And that inherently has helped to also grow our audience. I think audience growth, and you have so many amazing resources even on this podcast to really dive deep into that. You know, it’s as simple as really knowing who is the person you’re speaking to, what, what works in terms of getting them to come, you know, and, and wanna engage with your account to listen to your podcast. So we just pay a lot of it. It’s kind of boring. We pay attention to metrics and numbers and we’re like, oh, wow. When we do a podcast about this topic, we tend to have more downloads. Or when we post quotes on our social media, those are actually what get us new eyeballs, new followers.
LS (14:34):
So there’s, I, I think the strategies for how to build an audience are, you know, there’s so many different resources out there, but for us, just really paying attention to numbers, metrics, what works. I’m most excited to talk a little bit about like, the strategy behind the community. ’cause I think this is kind of where it’s, there’s not many people really teaching this. Hmm. But when we, when I really sat down, like I said, to kind of put it into a formula that I could gift people, that I could help them have the success that we’ve had, I realized that there’s, there’s these three crucial elements. But if you skip the first one, the other two don’t matter. Okay. So the first one is, there’s this culture, there’s an energy and a magnetism. And even if you, you know, go to the powerhouse Women page today, or you, you meet someone, I, I always say that the true test of culture is if you meet someone who’s associated with that brand.
LS (15:26):
So if I were at a party and I meet someone who I know has worked with Rory and aj, because I follow their brand, I love their brand, I immediately assume some things about that person. That’s the culture. Whether you’ve intentionally created that. And if you haven’t, then now is the perfect time to start. Or if you haven’t, it’s, it’s really what do people know about your brand, whether or not you’re telling them that, what are your customers, the people who engage with you, what are they saying about your brand? But it starts with the, the easiest place to start. So if this is kind of like, woo, okay, that sounds deep. And where do I even begin to really cultivate that culture? I think the most important question any of us can ask if we’re really serious about building community is the question of, well, what do I want to unify people around?
LS (16:18):
What’s gonna be the connective tissue that brings people together? Because you can unify people around all sorts of things. You can unify them against, we all dislike this thing, this topic, this person, people unify around that you watch it happen all the time, or you can unify people around a common mission, a common cause. But what I found, I’ll just give you the cheat sheet for what I believe is the most, the most powerful thing to unify people around, especially those of you that are building more personal brands, is who do they wanna become? What’s the aspirational identity that they wanna become? And that, that’s essentially what we’ve done within powerhouse women is, you know, there’s this, people would probably use all different words to define it, but there is this mission-driven, heart-centered, collaborative version of ourselves and, you know, kind of like this future higher self that we’re all on this, this journey to step into. And so defining that culture, what you’re unifying people around is number one. Then there’s a whole strategy around,
AJV (17:30):
Before you go on, ’cause I wanna, okay, , I wanna just stop you for a second because I think this is the part that people so often skip over. Yes.
LS (17:38):
Agreed.
AJV (17:39):
It’s so focused on where do I get the people? Where do I find the people that they forget? It’s like if you don’t know who you’re trying to attract and why you’re trying to attract them and why they would stay, right? It’s like you’re missing the core element of what really builds community. And so Mm-Hmm, , I just wanna reiterate what you say ’cause I think it’s so powerful. It’s number one, what do I want to unify people around? And I think that is such a defining part of a business, a personal brand, but even just a, a life statement of what do I wanna be about? Like when, you know, we always say brand builders group, when people think of you, what do you want them to think of?
LS (18:17):
Yes ex, it’s exactly what you guys teach.
AJV (18:20):
And that is so true. It’s like if you met somebody that was associated with brand builders group, like we know, like hopefully they have this, this, this and this, because that would be an extension of the culture that we’re trying to create. And hopefully they wouldn’t have X, Y, and Z and there’s nothing wrong with X, Y, and Z. It’s just not what we represent. It’s, there’s a, there’s a community for that person. It’s just not here. And I think a huge part of that is knowing you gotta know who you are and who you’re trying to attract, so that when you find them, you’re like, that’s you. And they know that too. So I love that. Yeah. And then the second piece is, who is the aspirational pers the aspirational person they want to become. And if you have a whole bunch of people going after the same thing in the right direction, it will multiply.
AJV (19:08):
Because then it’s like they become your sales force, which is kind of what you said earlier. And I love that. And I don’t wanna skip over that. ’cause I think these are the types of things that people skip over and the plight of urgency to get it done. Mm-Hmm. and to be done. Yeah. And this is the hard work that is worth it. And it is the hard work that no one talks about, but it is the secret sauce. And so I love that you talked about that. Would you mind telling us those two things for you and powerhouse women? Like what is it that you’re unifying people around? I could take my guesses, but and then who is the aspirational person they wanna become? I would love to know what that is for you.
LS (19:47):
Yes. So from the very beginning, the motto within powerhouse women is we’re not meant to do business or life alone. So what we’re unifying people around is this belief that we are better together and not just as like a platitude of women supporting women, which is beautiful. There’s something wrong with that. But I, and, and this is very much the truth today. I want people to feel that when they walk in the room, I want them to feel it when they engage with someone that they meet from the community. It’s, it’s different and people feel it. So it, you know, what you’re unifying people around is, is so much more than words. It, it’s, it’s something that it takes time to, to really cultivate this, but the depth of it should be felt Mm-Hmm. Before you even have to say the words. So really that connection and true collaboration almost just seems like, not a strong enough word, but the belief that we’re better together.
LS (20:45):
And, and the aspirational identity is, is kind of what I described before of this woman who knows she’s meant for more and wants a space that it’s safe to be just as unapologetic about how big her dreams are and whatever size big really means for her. ’cause We all have different, different callings in life. But she, she feels the sense that she’s meant for more. She wants a place that it’s safe to be unapologetic about the big dreams, but equally safe to be really honest about the parts that are challenging and hard. There can be space for both. ’cause I believe when we’re, when we give ourselves the freedom to be just as honest about both and really open and unapologetic sharing both, that’s where our true power lies and where we really see that connection and multiplication of sharing in each other’s gifts really, really comes to life. So that would be my answer today. And there’s, you know, I think that’s important to know too. I’m constantly getting to know my own community. And my community is constantly evolving. So this isn’t something that you write down day one of starting your business. This, this should be something that evolves as your mission and your purpose evolves. And mine has,
AJV (21:58):
I love that so much. And I think too, just knowing that it does evolve and so whatever you said it as today, it’s like, let it organically change and evolve as things grow and progress. And that’s okay. ’cause It makes different, likely will look different, you know, from where you are today, seven years ahead, which I’m positively sure all of the things we’re gonna talk about have gone through an evolution process. Okay. So that’s number one I love. I just thought that was so powerful. I wanted to stop to make sure everyone got that. Yes. Okay. So that’s number two.
LS (22:29):
Well, and I, and I definitely wasn’t trying to steamroll and, and jump into number two because what I, what I said at the beginning is give yourself time to sit with and marinate in this first piece. And, and I think that’s the other thing I just wanna make sure to mention is I wasn’t clear about those things in the first couple of years, but what I was really dedicated to was constantly gathering feedback. And I would, I mean, I, I would set up one-on-one Zoom calls with, with women who would come to our events and, and just for 15 minutes and like really hear their heart. So the way that this started to form was by getting together, like, just communing with the people who, who were in, in some way or another really resonating with, with the message. So it, it took me some time to even get really clear.
LS (23:21):
I would say I remember so vividly it was, it was our third annual event. So first one was in 2017. In 2019, all of a sudden I felt like something clicked in. And that was after two years of building this community, listening to people not even really monetizing it yet, other than the event which was essentially just, you know, paying for itself barely. It was two years of cultivating this. So I want, I wanna make sure to, to state that piece. The, the second part, the second pillar of, of what it really takes to build not just an engaged community, but a profitable one, is that connection piece. And, and that’s the connection where you intentionally create ways for people to connect with each other. And, and this goes like to such a deep human need this. And, and if you look at the, the hierarchy of needs right above food, shelter, and water, like things that are actually necessary for our survival is a feeling of belonging.
LS (24:19):
Mm-Hmm. . So if your brand becomes a place where people know they can find their people, and this is so much of what I feel about Brand Builders Group and what you and a, what you and AJ, you and Rory have done is, is you know that you’re gonna find like-minded people there and then translating that into ways people can connect. And usually the pushback I get here is, but I hate Facebook groups and so do my, so do my people. And I never said anything about a Facebook group because the truth is connection has nothing to do, or community has nothing to do with the container, meaning the place where community happens, it’s the connection. So we build community and connection via our podcast by interacting directly with our listeners. We do have a Facebook group where people can connect, but we have a tech, we use text messaging to allow people to send us their questions and they feel very much engaged.
LS (25:17):
Like it’s a direct conversation between us and them. We do this on our social media channels. And my favorite little tip to give is, you know, do you use your Instagram captions to encourage connection between each other? Or do you use your captions to encourage connection with you? Now we use both, right? So a call to action if I want someone to engage with me is, you know, tell me what you think about this. Or we’ll post about a podcast and say, you know, have you ever experienced this? We’re asking them to talk back to us, but take in another step further and instead create captions maybe once a week that in call people to engage with each other. So we’ll do things like, hey, our motto here is, you’re not meant to do business or life alone. And we believe that the answer to anything you need is just one or two, you know, introductions away, or one or two bold asks away.
LS (26:08):
So in the comments, you know, comment below one need that you have in your business right now, and then go through the comments and see if there’s someone else that you could be the answer to their need. And we get people to engage with each other. A even simpler way to do this, this is like one of my favorite things to do it either in Instagram comments, or you can do this on Zoom calls, is we’ll just say, Hey, we’re gonna have everybody drop, you know, an emoji in the comments below. And all I want you to do is go and follow and DM the person who commented right above you. We’re gonna use this thread for you to make two new friends right away. You just send one message, you’re gonna receive one message. Little things like that, all of a sudden start to position you as sort of this, this place where people know they can come to your brand and they’re gonna meet like-minded people.
LS (26:56):
It’s no longer just about you and connecting with you as the brand. That’s gonna happen anyway. If I know that I’m gonna get a core human need met when I am interacting with your brand, I don’t even need to worry about people falling in love with the brand. That’s just gonna happen by default. So that connection piece, those are just two really easy examples for how you can start to build connection. Now, of course once you’ve gotten really clear, like, well, what do you wanna build connection around? ’cause It’s gonna be a different, different conversation. If I’m building co connection around business and entrepreneurship and, you know, supporting one another than it is if I’m building connection around gluten-free living and, and healthy eating or clean, you know, a clean lifestyle. So I think, again, starting with that most important piece, but connection is an action word. So how are you encouraging people and telling them to take the action that you wanna help them take?
AJV (27:55):
That’s so good. Because the truth is, as much as people say, I want community, they truly do need to be told how to build it. Yes. How to involved, what to do. It’s like, just give me some steps. Right? And so the easier you make it, it’s more likely they are to follow through on it. It’s like whoever’s above you, this is what you do. And it’s like, oh, okay, I can do that. Mm-Hmm. . But it’s like I hear, I hear so many people in my personal life and also in our professional life where it’s like, man, they’re lonely. They’re lonely because they’re doing something that their friends and family don’t agree with or think it’s crazy or they’re alone because this is a new venture and they don’t know anyone else who’s doing this or they’re lonely because they aren’t reaching out, they’re not asking for help, they’re trying to do it on their own.
AJV (28:41):
And it’s like, man, this is hard enough to do with other people. , you don’t, you don’t wanna isolate yourself and try to do it all alone. And I just hear from so many people, I just, I just don’t know where to go. I just don’t know what to do. You know, one of my favorite books is Find Your People by Jenny Allen. And like, the practical, I always tell people to me it’s like how to make friends as an adult. This is what this book is about. And I think it’s the same in business, it’s the same thing you’re doing. It’s like, man, you just need practical steps. It’s like, oh, I can do that. Mm-Hmm. . So I love that of just like telling people what to do, giving them short, easy, actionable steps, but then creating a variety of ways for people to get engaged with whatever fits their vibe.
LS (29:23):
Mm. It’s so, it’s, it’s so simple that it’s easy to overlook
AJV (29:29):
. Yeah. I mean it’s like just, I, I was like literally thinking to myself, I’m gonna have our community team mandatorily watch this interview. Yeah. Because there’s so many things of like, ’cause we do, I think, I don’t know, 48 v virtual events every year and what an easy thing for us to do with everyone. Put something in the comments, whoever was above you now go follow them. It’s like those are super tactical, easy to implement things that could revolutionize our community and the lives of the people in our community. And it’s like, I’m just like, mandatory. So they have to listen to this interview
LS (30:05):
. Well, and that was honestly AJ where I came up with it because I used to host a lot of Zoom calls for our community and you know, there’s like that, that period of time when you’re allowing people to log on and it’s a little bit awkward. Like, well, what do I say? I’m not diving into the content yet. I just, one day I, I just said it and I was like, oh, that was actually brilliant. And it so reinforces what we want people to know, powerhouse women as is. I just said, okay, we’re gonna do a quick little exercise, so no matter what, you’re gonna walk away tonight with two new friends. Yeah. And even just the way that I position it is further reinforcing that, hey, even if you’re brand new here now you kind of know that’s what this community is about. And so it’s, it’s not just doing these, these easy to implement things, it’s also how can you make sure you’re telling people the story of how this relates back to your brand and what you want people to know about your brand. Mm-Hmm. . So yeah, I could nerd out on this all day.
AJV (31:02):
I love that. I think that’s so good. So another question I have, wait, was there anything else? Were you gonna add anything else? So there
LS (31:09):
The third piece, and we won’t even really dive into this because unless you’re doing the first two, the third one doesn’t matter. But because like I said, there’s, there’s this journey. You’re essentially invi inviting people on. You’re inviting them to grow with you. So the third piece, because I love a good alliteration and I needed a C word, is the climb, which is do people see a clear way for them to continue to grow with you? Mm,
AJV (31:32):
That’s good.
LS (31:32):
And that there’s a whole other strategy to that, but I really want people to not, again, ’cause I think people jump to that and they’re like, oh, great, this is where I sell offers. No, not necessarily this, this is such an important piece, but if you aren’t mastering the first two, the third one is gonna fall flat. So we’ll kind of leave that there. We can always do a part two if we need to in the future at some point. But just asking yourself the question, do people see a clear path to grow with you? And I think the self rele reflection question is how are you modeling that as an aspirational leader? Are you constantly growing? Do your people see you evolving? Because that is, that sets the tone, especially if there’s a personal brand element to your business.
AJV (32:13):
Mm. I love this. One of the things that just like registered as you were talking about this is, although we’re talking about, you know, a community centric conversation today, my mind also just went to this is mutually applicable to all things company culture with recruiting, hiring and employee retention. It’s like there’s, that is your community. Yes. So don’t think this is just for, you know, your customers. This is for your so true and so true. This is equally as important for any of you who are maybe I don’t wanna build a huge community per se, but the truth is, is you do have a community, it’s your team, it’s all the people around you. So how are you instilling these things within your community so you have less turnover and better retention and happier employees and because they too are your best, you know, recruiting grounds. So you never have to go out and recruit like they’re doing it for you. So,
LS (33:11):
So well said.
AJV (33:12):
So many of those things are just very much the same. Now, one of the things that I wanna make sure we get to before we do run Outta time is one of the, you know, choices that you have made is to create this experiential component with live events. And I know that is no light undertaking. And so I would love for you to kind of just as much as you’re willing, pull back that dark black curtain and say like, this is what it’s actually like to run big events. And big again, is totally up to you to decide what’s big, but it’s like, I think an any, any size of event can be considered a big event because there is so much planning and orchestration and doesn’t matter if you’re talking about 50 people or 5,000 people. So what would you have to share with us about what it takes to sell out an event? In your case you’re, you know, 500, 600, 700 plus P person events, but what are the mechanics to pull that off? ?
LS (34:16):
Well, this has again been m many years of, I wouldn’t even say trial and error, it’s more dedication to building the community. Just knowing that, because I have always, and we haven’t even really touched on this, but let me just pull back the curtain all the way. We’ve always had a very small audience. We sold a 600 plus person event last year with an email list of under 10,000 or right around 10,000 and our social media falling now we’re starting to grow and get some traction. So anyone who’s coming to the brand now is like, you don’t have that small of an audience, but, but it, it really started very small. I didn’t even start an email list until mid 2018, almost two years into the business. Really wish I would could go back and change that. But so when I say I have always had a small audience, I think there’s so many of us that use that as an excuse.
LS (35:09):
Mm-Hmm. . And I never saw it as something that held me back. I just saw it as a reason why I had to think a little bit differently. And without realizing that this is what I was doing, I started to really focus on the connection and realizing that, okay, my first event, I remember my vision, it was so small, I actually at first thought I was gonna have the very beginning event in someone’s living room. That’s how small my vision was. But if someone could just, you know, re loan us their, their home, we could have, you know, 30 to 50 people. We eventually did expand that had a hundred women in the first event. And I remember having this moment again, just like so humbly in prayer going, God, why did you gimme this vision? If I am so ill-equipped to fulfill on it.
LS (35:51):
And just in something in my spirit kind of just said, okay, Lindsey, you’re thinking about this. Like you’re doing it by yourself. You don’t need to know 50 women, you just need to know 10. Who would all be willing to invite five friends? And so I think that was always the way that I look at, I look at my events that way now, is how can we provide such an incredible experience and make it feel like something that you wouldn’t wanna come to this alone, you wanna invite, like even that, that cool girl that you haven’t really talked to in your Pilates class, but you just sense that like she’s got, she’s into the same things and maybe you two could connect and go to this event together. So it’s just built into our culture that you don’t, yes, you can come to this event if you don’t have a community and you can find your community, but once you’re in, it’s kind of like, okay, who are you bringing with you next year?
LS (36:43):
Because you wouldn’t wanna keep this to yourself. So in the early, early days, you know, we’ve we’ve also never run ads. So it’s all completely organic, small audience. So anyone who wants to come at me and say, Lindsey, here’s my excuse for why this won’t work, , I mean, I would challenge you on that with so much love because it’s, it’s been, it hasn’t been an overnight success. It’s been a slow build, a very intentional build. But because I’ve prioritized the connection, building that culture in big and small ways, and then also just really creating this environment at the events where people want to come back and they want to bring others because they see a continual way to keep growing. We have been able to, you know, now we can post a Black Friday sale. We did this this year in a week and we sold 350 tickets, which, you know, is kind of like unheard of in the event space.
LS (37:43):
But it’s not just because I woke up one day and had this huge email list. It’s seven years of creating the connection, listening. There’s no one who’s more in touch with her community maybe than me. And still to this day, individually answering dms and messages and, and really creating the experience that this isn’t my community, it’s theirs, and I’m just the one who’s gonna throw the party for all of us to come together. So I know that that’s a little, I I can just hear the people who are more left brained, like, but give us a strategy, . So I’ll give you, I’ll give you some actual strategies. Okay. But you had to hear my heart first because this is far more of the conversation we’ve had up until this point than it is send these three emails. Okay. Mm-Hmm. , something tangible that has actually really worked for us is creating urgency through deadlines.
LS (38:34):
So in the past we would do like an early bird ticket sale, and then we would do, you know, just then from however long you have until the event, you’re just trying to get butts in seats, right? We’ve realized, again, data and numbers, which I have the most brilliant business partner, my COO, who is brilliant at this. And she really helps to bring, bring these numbers together. We noticed everyone buys tickets right before a deadline. So if you notice this trend within your own event promotion, just create more deadlines. So we create deadlines that are ticket price increases. That’s kind of like the mower conventional approach. So we’ll do, when we launch tickets in March, there will be a one week flash sale. You have seven days to get the best possible price. So it’s condensed into a really, really short timeframe. And we typically will sell 30% of our tickets in that one week.
LS (39:25):
Then it goes to our early bird, and that’s kind of like the longest stretch of time. It’s kind of like the Sahara Desert where you see a tumbleweed coming in that’s like one ticket sale every couple of days and you can’t freak out in this period time period. There’s just no urgency for people to buy. So until we have another price increase that we can really push toward, we create other deadlines. So one example of this is we host a speaker contest where two women get chosen to do like a five minute head talk, if you will. We call it my powerhouse moment. And you have to be a ticket holder in order to submit. And we, we realized that that was one of the biggest questions we would get asked from our, from our audience, from our community, was how do I become one of the speakers?
LS (40:10):
I would, my dream would be to speak on stage one day. So we, we gave them the opportunity and we built that into a reason why they, they should have their ticket earlier than maybe they were planning to purchase it. So yes, there are strategies, but it all really comes down to building that community and creating something that people can’t miss. It is, we actually now relate to it as our New Year’s Eve. That’s like the start of our year. And then we come back around and we celebrate the growth we’ve had in the previous year, you know, at the next event. That’s, that’s just kind of how we roll now. But,
AJV (40:42):
You know, part of that is, and I love that because I do think it’s like we’re just trained, our human brains are trained to go like, you know, fomo, right? It’s like, I want this good deal, don’t wanna miss this deadline. It’s like our brain thinks in those types of tranches. And, but what I love is that you’ve also incorporated some of the things that your community wants as incentives. Yeah. And you can only do that if you’re in touch with your community. You’re getting feedback from your community, you’re listening to your community, and you’re going, Hey, like let’s weave this in as an incentive to get people to move to action. ’cause We all need that. We all need some reason to get a, to move to action so that we don’t miss out on the things that we said we wanted. So I love that you’re also using the things that you already know about your community as a way of getting them to take action and in a, in a schedule that works for you, right? Because in the event business , there are deadlines that you have to meet too, right? So,
LS (41:42):
Oh my goodness.
AJV (41:43):
You know, I love it.
LS (41:44):
Once you, once you become an event host, you realize, oh, okay, I was the jerk that was always waiting last minute to buy my ticket. And then you’re hosting an event realizing you have to pay all of those deposits months in advance. So if you, if you really wanna get on an event hosts good side, buy your ticket early
AJV (42:04):
. But I have a, a good friend who I was asking her one day, like, what’s your pricing strategy? And she was like, oh, well I have my favorite client pricing and my pain in the butt .
LS (42:17):
That is so
AJV (42:18):
Genius. I was like, yeah, that’s true. And it’s like, yeah, you are gonna pay more if you wait till the last minute because it’s stresses everyone else out. So yeah, you’re gonna pay more if you pay. Yeah. You have less stress, it’s easier. But I think there’s a lot of those just nuances of going, like, I gotta get you to move to action so that we can move to action on the backend. And so how do we dually incentivize that? And I love that deadlines and discounts and speak on stage incentives. That’s like probably like a, a favorite that you mentioned of giving something to people that they’re asking for. And, you know, for so many people, what a cool life changing moment for them to like fulfill a dream that, you know, I love that. I think that’s so cool. I, I love all of this.
AJV (43:02):
And I know that you have your big events coming up and it’s in August and tickets are going to go on sale any day. So as this is being released, as, as you were listening to this right now we are timing the release of this also with your tickets going on sale for your 2024 Powerhouse Women event, which is going to be in Scottsdale on August 9th and 10th. What can you tell us about this event? So, I, I just, I’m an advocate of abundance mentality. Everyone who’s listening, if you wanna just go and watch how it’s done, right, like this would be like a great opportunity to do that. But tell us about this event and what, what should people expect?
LS (43:46):
Oh, you’re so kind. I I’m biased. So I always tell people this upfront. I am very biased. So I will tell you it is, it is the best day of my year. And it’s, it’s truly, it’s a culmination of everything we talked about today. If you are someone, if who is listening and you’re like, yeah, I, I wanna be more unapologetic about how big my dreams are and be in a space where that’s celebrated and where people aren’t intimidated or trying to talk me into a smaller vision, but I also wanna have real conversations about the challenges that come along the way. And I wanna meet my people. I wanna meet people who are on that same journey. Then we’ve brought them all together in a room for you. And it is happening August 9th and 10th. The 10th is the full day event. And then the ninth, we have a kickoff party, which is a pajama. It’s a big pajama party. We call it pajamas and Prosecco. And really, that even that’s intentional. It’s, it’s, it can be intimidating to walk into a room of powerful women, but it’s a little less intimidating if you get to meet them Friday night in fuzzy slippers. So, and they’re pajamas.
AJV (44:49):
We do
LS (44:49):
That in pajamas,
AJV (44:51):
In your pajamas. I love
LS (44:52):
It. It’s a little less intimidating. So it’s, it’s just the most beautiful celebration of ambition and authenticity. And we bring in amazing speakers, some who you’ve probably had on the podcast, Amy Porterfield, Jasmine Star has spoken on stage, Lori Harder, Patrice, Washington. We do have, I guess I can share it here. Jamie Kern Lima is coming this year, which I know you guys are helping That’s
AJV (45:16):
Awesome.
LS (45:16):
With her book launch. So we have a lot in store and I’m, I’m just so excited for it. Yeah. And the tickets will go on sale any day now. But like you said, even if you’re just listening to this and you just wanna take like a masterclass in how we are promoting this event, you know, tap into our email list, watch our social, you’ll see actively how we’re doing this. And I’m just so excited to pay it forward.
AJV (45:40):
I’m so excited for you and for this event and for this episode. So much goodness in this. And I love your heart behind everything and I love too, that you can appeal to the right brain and the left brain . That’s good, good self-awareness of that. I love that. It’s so good. But y’all, just like Lindsey said, if you just wanna just follow the process, worst case scenario, just learning by experiencing, I want you to go to powerhouse women event.com, powerhouse women event.com, and perhaps just by watching the process, you understand why you should be at this event, and then you can go ahead and click and buy your ticket, right, . So again, I’m a super advocate of this. I think this is amazing. I’m actually gonna check my schedule. I think this sounds so awesome to be, again, back to being in a room where you feel like I found my people.
AJV (46:30):
Mm-Hmm. , right? And that’s what we all want. So as you’re listening to this, this is one way, if you’re looking for your people, then again, go to powerhouse women event.com, the events August 9th and 10th, tickets on sale, like we set any day now. But then also if you’re just trying to learn the process of going like, how did, how are we doing this? And just go check it out. Get in the email sequence, follow , all the things they’re doing on social media. We’ll pull all of that on the show notes. So you can just click and go check ’em out on Instagram the different websites. But the primary one is powerhouse women event.com. Lindsey, thank you so much. This was so awesome. Loved every second of it. And for everyone else who is listening, make sure you stick around for the recap episode and we will see you next time on the influential personal brand.

Ep 463: 3 Copywriting Secrets | Dr. JJ Peterson Episode Recap

RV (00:03):
I want to share with you the three biggest secrets for writing. Great copy. Not just writing great copy, but writing a copy that converts, that performs. So what do I mean by converts and performs? I mean, coming up with the words that go on a page and that when you use these words, they cause the reader to take action to to actually engage in a certain behavior, which would be like where, where they are where they’re buying something or opting in for something or filling out a form and requesting information or downloading something, right? This is persuasive copy. So these are three of the most important secrets of writing. Great copy. Now, I wanna let you know that one of the things that we teach at Brand Builders Group is part of our formal curriculum is something called the 15 Ps of copywriting.
RV (01:01):
The 15 Ps is our proprietary unique methodology for how to write great sales pages specifically full offer sales pages when you’re trying to collect a credit card and all the elements that, that are needed. So I’m gonna cover two of those Ps here, which I think are two of the most important. And but before I do that, so let me just share with you, here’s the first secret of writing. Great copy. It is learning how to sell the destination, not the vehicle. So what do I mean by that? Well, if you think of going on a journey, right? There’s a starting point. You know, wherever you, wherever you leave from, let’s say San F let’s say San Francisco, you, and then you go, where do you end? That’s the destination. It’s New York. So there’s a starting point and an ending point, and then there’s a vehicle, right?
RV (01:49):
There’s some vehicle that transport you, it’s bike a car, and you know, a, a plane or whatever. Well, when you think about copywriting specifically for the purpose of generating sales, specifically for the purpose of creating conversions, inspiring behavior, you know, as if you’ve been following me for any amount of time, right? I explain it roy vaden.com, the four levels of influence, which is what I consider my actual personal expertise to be about is the stu the study of the psychology of influence. How do I define influence? Influence is the ability to move people to action. That’s it. So when we have to move people to action through the written word, that’s copywriting sometimes sometimes we describe this at Brand Builders Group that copywriting is selling through the written word instead of through the spoken word, okay? So whenever you’re doing copywriting, like for the purpose of influence and for selling, you gotta sell the destination, not the vehicle. And I’ll use a great example with my first book, take the Stairs, right? So my first book, take the Stairs is a book that’s all
RV (02:59):
About self-discipline, okay? And it’s basically teaching people how to use self-discipline to overcome procrastination so that they can achieve success in any part of their life. So therein in that phrase that I just said, are the three elements that matter that you have to like consciously be aware of, that you have to consciously bucket when it comes to marketing, right? Or selling through the written word. My book, take the stairs, or selling it as a speech, right? So I, I often do that program as a speech, right? Companies will hire me to come talk about that message, and I go, okay, how do I, how do I market my speech to meeting planners and companies to get them to book me to come speak at their national sales meeting or their leadership meeting, or their kickoff meeting or their customer service, like whatever, and talk about, you know, this, take the stairs methodology.
RV (03:53):
So what are the three parts that I’m talking about? Okay? Again, there is the starting, you know, there’s the, there’s the starting point then there’s the destination, and then there’s the vehicle. So if you just look at, take the stairs, my, my book and content, okay? Procrastination is the starting point. So the problem is the starting point. The destination is the payoff. So what’s the payoff? Success, right? Like, be be having anything you want in life. I mean, the, the subtitle of Take the Stairs is Seven Steps to Achieving True Success. So then we’ve got the starting point of procrastination. We have the destination, which is success, and then we have the vehicle, which is self-discipline. And if you were to read the My Take the Stairs book, or if you were to hire me to come speak to your group and, and you saw me speak at your event, you would see that I teach the psychology of how self-discipline isn’t as hard as we all think.
RV (04:53):
Once we know how to think about it the right way. And I talk about neuroscience and rewiring your brain so that you can make decisions in the way that ultra performers make. It’s all about self-discipline. But one of the biggest mistakes I ever made when I started my personal brain and when I started my company. So when I very first started my company my very first website was discipline dynamic.com, because I knew that my, my personal brand was gonna be all about, like, my early work I knew was gonna be all about helping people develop discipline. And so it was like discipline dynamic. And then there was this huge lightning crash and it said discipline dynamic. And that was a mistake. What was great about it was that I had clarity about what I knew would transform lives self-discipline, right? And as we later proved with the success of, you know, the Take the Stairs book, you know, becoming an international bestseller, is that it works and it does change lives.
RV (05:53):
And it is super duper powerful. The issue is that early on, nobody would book me and nobody would buy my stuff because nobody wants discipline. And this is a problem that mission-driven messengers make all the time. You have some secret, you have some, you know, discovery, you have transformed your own life through some methodology and, and you’re so passionate about it, right? And, and you’re like, oh my gosh, like I figured out how to lose weight just like walking or, or you know, I have this nutrition secret or something, something. And what you do if you’re like me, and if you’re like many, many of the clients that we work with at Brand Builders Group, when they first come to us, you’re so passionate about the vehicle that you’re marketing, the vehicle, you’re trying to sell people, the vehicle, you’re trying to say discipline will change your life.
RV (06:42):
Discipline is the key. Discipline is the secret. Discipline will transform you. And that’s exactly what I did. And that’s what most mission-driven messengers do because we are like these bleeding hearts. We wanna change the world. And so we were just like telling people like, this will change your life. The problem is nobody wants to buy it because people don’t really buy the vehicle, they buy the destination. And this is the, the, the, the first and perhaps the greatest secret of all copywriting is you have to market and sell the destination, not the vehicle. So what you should not write about, if I, if I were writing a sales page to get people to buy, take the stairs, or if I was writing a program, you know, description to get people to come to my, my speech I should not really mention self-discipline. ’cause Nobody wants that.
RV (07:34):
And it’s not exciting, even though it is the truth, right? That’s why the vehicle is the truth. The, the vehicle is what will actually change lives. But it’s not the thing that people, it’s not the thing that you market to promote. ’cause Nobody wants to buy it, right? What they wanna buy is the destination. So what I really would wanna do is I would wanna talk about what happens in your life if you incorporate discipline without even saying incorporate discipline, just going, if you follow the principles in this book, you will make more money, you will lose weight, you’ll have better relationships, you’ll have more free time, like et cetera, et cetera. That is the destination. Whatever success looks like. We’ll talk about this more in a second. That’s what I should be marketing and writing about and talking about. I should be promoting both the, the, the starting point and the ending point, but not the vehicle, right?
RV (08:24):
So I should be talking about the problem that people currently have and in my marketing and in my copywriting, and then where I can take them, what they can end up with. But I shouldn’t spend that much time marketing the vehicle. Part of the reason why is because in order to get, if that’s the case, in order to get someone to buy, they have to not only sign off and agree that they want the destination that you’re promoting, they have to buy off that they, they agree with and that they like the vehicle of your plan of how to get there. And that’s not really necessary, right? What, what changes lives is saying, here’s the transformation I can provide, I can help you with, and I have a way to do that. And I, you know, it’s a seven step process or whatever. They don’t have to know the nitty gritty of what it is in order, in order to buy it, right?
RV (09:09):
Like when I go to a restaurant and I order a meal, I don’t have to know every ingredient that’s in there. I don’t even have to know the recipe for how they make it. I just want the meal, right? Just bring me, just bring me the meal. And that’s kind of what this is. Okay? So that’s copywriting secret number one. Copywriting secret number two, you have to get great at writing what we call pain copy. What is, what is, what is pain copy. Okay? Pain copy is super simple. Again, this is one of our, so this is one of our 15 Ps of copywriting, one of our proprietary you know trade secrets if you will, of one of the, the, the techniques that we teach. But one of the 15 ps is P two, or excuse me, P three in the 15 Ps is called pain.
RV (10:00):
You have to write great pain copy. How do you write great pain? Copy is so simple to write great pain copy. All you have to do is describe a frustrating day in the life of your prospect as they currently have it now related to the thing you’re selling. So basically you just describe a day in their life as they have it now because of the absence of your solution. So let me go back to my trip metaphor. Remember we said, you know, there’s a starting point. There’s a destination and there’s a vehicle. Great pain copy is all about marketing and talking about and describing the starting point. Ironically, what is more likely to make somebody buy is not the vehicle. Even if you gave someone the secrets for free about how to change their life, that that’s not what’s gonna attract them and entice them to buy.
RV (10:58):
What is going to attract them is to describe the frustrations they’re currently experiencing in their life. How do you do this? This is pain copy. You simply have to describe what their life looks like now. So let’s say there’s somebody again, I’m just, I’m sticking with take the stairs ’cause it’s sort of ubiquitous and it’s simple and applies to me, right? So rather, if I wanted someone to buy the take the stairs book, rather than telling ’em how amazing all of these self discipline secrets are, what I want to do is spend time talking about the issue that they have. And so, for example, I do this in the opening of the book because I want people to actually read the whole book. And that’s part of why the book sells really well, is in the opening of the book, I talk about the three different types of procrastination.
RV (11:42):
There’s classic procrastination, which is consciously delaying the things you know you should be doing. Then I invented two new terms. There’s creative avoidance, which is unconsciously creating busy work for yourself to do as a way of avoiding, as a way of, you know, giving yourself an out where you can do that. And then the neuroscience of your, of the brain, right? The brain releases dopamine. And so you feel good because you accomplish something trivial even though it’s not the thing you needed to do. That’s creative avoidance. And then there’s priority dilution, which is the chronic overachievers procrastination, which is procrastinating, not because you’re lazy, but because of you allow interruptions to happen in your life, right? So if I am trying to get someone to hire me to speak, or I’m trying to get someone to buy the book, I don’t talk about how amazing discipline is.
RV (12:29):
I’m gonna talk about that when I’m there. That’s how I’m gonna change their life. Or that’s what you’re gonna read about in the book. None of you’re gonna buy the book now because I’ve told you, I’ve told you the vehicle and you’re not gonna be attracted to it even though you should. ’cause It will change your life. As you can see from Amazon reviews from Take the Stairs. But what I’m gonna market is procrastination. I’m gonna sell procrastination. I’m gonna be an ambassador of procrastination. I’m gonna say, if you struggle with distraction, if you struggle with interruption, if there’s things you know you should be doing that you don’t, but you don’t feel like doing, you can’t get yourself to do them. If you’ve ever set a goal and not followed through, if you’ve ever made a commitment and not been able to, to keep it longer than, you know, a week if, if you, if you know you’re capable of more things in your life, but you haven’t been able to achieve that potential, right?
RV (13:15):
That’s compelling. And what am I doing there? I’m not describing the vehicle, I’m describing the problem. More specifically, the pain, the way to write great pain copy is to describe a day in their life as it currently exists because of the absence of your solution, right? So if I describe that life, and then I say, but you know, if you, if you buy, take the stairs or if you bring me to speak, if I was gonna try to, you know, sell myself to, for a company to book me to speak, right? I just changed the narrative a little bit. I say, do your, do your employees ever struggle with procrastination? Do you think that people are struggling with a lack of productivity? Do they get discouraged? Do they deal with reject rejection? Do they, do they, do you think they waste time online or they waste too much time in meetings or they, they, they, they spend too much of their time on things that are trivial and insignificant.
RV (14:05):
If so, you should bring me in and I’m gonna be able to help them. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, which we’ll talk about in a second. And that’s why you need to book me and my signature program take the stairs, seven Steps to Achieving True Success, right? So I’m not selling discipline, I’m selling the problem, the starting point. And, you know, talking about the great pain copy, which leads me to the third greatest secret of writing all great copy. I can’t, I can’t even believe I’m giving these away for free. But he, here’s what it is. It’s called payoff copy. You have to be able to write great payoff. Copy. payoff is one of the other 15 Ps, right? So there’s 15 Ps. Two, two of them, I’m, I’m giving you here, pay is P three and then payoff is P six out of the 15 Ps.
RV (14:53):
So how do you write great payoff, copy? Well, simple payoff copy is the inverse of pain. Copy. If pain is describing a day in their life currently, as it exists in the absence of your solution, payoff copy is describing a day in their future life as it will exist once they have the presence of your solution, right? So if you struggle with procrastination, create avoidance, distraction, you know, time management, you’re, you’re busy, you’re burnt out, you’re overwhelmed. I have a, if you, if if you buy the take the stairs book or you bring me into your company to talk about, take the stairs methodology, I will help you be more productive, you’ll have more peace, you’ll, you’ll be more efficient, you’ll have more energy, you’ll have better relationships, you’ll make more money. And that is what this system teaches. So notice how the payoff is the in is the inverse of the pain.
RV (15:47):
Pain is the starting point. Payoffs are the destination, and then the vehicle, which is what we call the uniqueness or the message. But the, the, the, the, the message or the uniqueness is what I don’t wanna talk about or, you know, I might reference to it or talk about it quickly or briefly, but I don’t wanna talk about that in marketing or in my copywriting because that is not the thing that people buy. People buy the fact that you understand where I’m at, which is the pain, and you have a methodology or a vehicle or a system to get me to where I want to go, which is the payoff, which is the destination. If you want a great, if you want to write great copy, write more about the problems and pain of where they’re starting, the payoffs, the destinations and transformations of where you’re gonna go in them, take them where you’re going to take them, and stop talking about the vehicle and the thing that which, which you’re passionate about, right?
RV (16:41):
You’re gonna get to talk about what you’re passionate about once they hire you, once they book you to speak, once they buy your book, once they get into your coaching program. But if you don’t do these three things, you cannot have successful copy without these three things. If you do these three things right, even if you get the other 13 Ps wrong, you’re gonna be in a good spot. Now, hopefully, you’ll, you’ll request a free call with our team. We do free calls with everybody. You can request a free call at some point. We’ll do a free call with everybody, request a call, and hopefully we’ll be able to teach you how to do all 15 Ps. If you do ’em well, you’re gonna see increased conversions. But if you at least get these two right, that’s gonna get you started.

Ep 462: StoryBrand 7 Step Method with Dr. JJ Peterson

RV (00:02):
I am so excited to interview my, my good friend Dr. JJ Peterson. We’re gonna be talking about StoryBrand and the StoryBrand framework. I take credit for the success of the StoryBrand book because we did the book launch party at our house. Donald Miller, who was the original author, wasn’t gonna do a book launch. And we’re like, Don, are you crazy? We gotta launch this book. We launched it at our house, and I think it’s gone on to sell a million copies, or, you know, close to, if I think it, I think it sold a million copies. So that’s all because of where Don hosted his book, launch party. And that night I got to meet Dr. JJ Peterson, who now is the head of StoryBrand. He’s also the host of the Chart topping Marketing Made Simple podcast. And JJ is an amazing guy.
RV (00:49):
So he has a PhD in communication. He spent the last 20 years studying and teaching communication theory. He’s also an adjunct professor at the Owen School of Business at Vanderbilt University. And I mean, he’s, they, they, they’re, these guys are involved in so much with, you know, helping politicians and filmmakers and business owners and, and academia. I mean, StoryBrand has become mainstream. And it was like, I can’t believe we haven’t actually had you back on the show in such a long time. Never. J’s never been on this show. So we have to do this. Dr. JJ Peterson, welcome to the show, brother.
JP (01:29):
Oh my goodness. Well, thank you so much for having me. And yes, we still to this day absolutely give you 100% credit for that book, selling a Million . So
RV (01:38):
Yeah, we we’re gonna start charging a package. Like, if you just wanna sell a million copies host, you can host your book party at the Vaden Villa.
JP (01:46):
I will give you a testimony right now, , I will give you, we can record a testimony and make it happen. So,
RV (01:52):
I mean, obviously I, I feel like StoryBrand has become mainstream pervasive. It, it, it’s, it’s become a verb that people use. Like you got a story brand it, but if, if someone’s listening and they’ve, they’ve never heard of the book story building a StoryBrand, what is, what is StoryBrand exactly? Like, give us, you know, take us there.
JP (02:12):
Well, the, it kind of all goes back to when Donna Miller, who was a, you know, he was an author and had written a bunch of, you know, bestselling books, and most of them were memoirs. And he ended up putting on this conference where he was inviting people to come and kind of become the hero of their own stories to like, basically create these life plans, find purpose in their life. And, you know, he’d sold millions of books at that point. And so they were like, yeah, the conference is a no brainer. He rented out an auditorium for about 1500 people and sold 700 seats for the first event, and which was great, profitable, wonderful. And got great reviews. And then all of a sudden, the next time the conference came around, they’re like, well, we’ll sell out this time. And sold about 700 seats again, Uhhuh, and then sold about 700 seats again. And through the process began to realize that they weren’t able to actually articulate the value of the conference. Like people were coming. ’cause They knew Don they were coming because they’d heard from friends, just word of mouth. But it wasn’t growing because nobody could actually articulate the value or why people needed it or anything in the conference itself. So Don actually went off to a cabin to try to kind of figure out what his next book was going to be, as he
RV (03:38):
Does
JP (03:38):
He, as he does, as
RV (03:39):
He just disappears to the cabin and comes out with another bestseller. Me off, like,
JP (03:43):
I’m, so, I know it’s a bit annoying. His genius is a bit annoying in that way. But he goes off and he kind of begins to, he gets distracted and starts watching movies and he, he tells the story, you know, and he really, he had been studying story for a while, been he had written a screenplay, and he began to realize that, you know, there really was formula to all movies, formula to all stories. Hmm. And in the moment, what he started realizing is, what if we could apply story frameworks, which really were, you know, the, the, like, they’re powerful mediums. You know, movies are making millions of dollars. Story has been studied for centuries, and there are rules to story. And he thought, well, what if we could take these rules and move it out of the screenwriting space and actually put it into marketing?
JP (04:34):
And through that position, the customer as the hero of the story, instead of what most businesses do is position themselves as the hero. And so he began to change his marketing for the conference and position the customer as the hero was able clearly to articulate how it worked clearly articulate how the conference was gonna benefit them, help them survive and thrive, all these things that you do in marketing. And the next conference did not spend any money on marketing. The very next conference sold out, then went to a bigger venue, sold out, went to a bigger venue, sold out. And he began to realize that when companies or thought leaders or authors were able to actually articulate the value of what they bring to the table in a way that through their marketing positions, their customers, the hero that both people win out.
JP (05:31):
Mm-Hmm. Because if a thought leader actually has something that’s gonna change people’s lives, or a business has something that’s gonna change people’s lives, then it actually, it does not serve the world if nobody under nobody knows why they need it or what they’re supposed to do with it when they get it right. And so he wanted to start helping people clarify their message using story as the foundational framework so that companies and thought leaders could actually communicate more clearly their value proposition. They could position their audience or their customers as the hero, and ultimately they could grow their companies. And so that’s kind of how it started. And since then, we’ve worked with thousands and thousands all over the world.
RV (06:14):
I know you guys do. And, and it’s, it’s funny because it’s like one of the toughest questions for people to answer. And, and I’ll say for mission-driven messengers, like for personal brands, right? Like, the people that we serve are these, like, oftentimes they’re almost like these bleeding heart. I, I wanna change the world, I want to help people. And then someone asks them, what do you do, ? And they just fall apart, right? It’s like, it takes 40 minutes to explain what, because they’re like, well, I have a nonprofit and I have this methodology that I’ve created and I’ve worked over here in this country. And, you know, I work sometimes with educational institutions that sometimes with corporate people and, and you know, like, because, or they just go I don’t know. Like, it’s, it’s so, it’s so much like, how do I communicate that quickly and, and succinctly?
RV (07:02):
And, you know, I remember the first time I read you know, I still have the, one of the galleys, one of the advanced reader copies of StoryBrand and Mark the whole thing up. And I, I, I called Don and I was like, dude, this is gonna be a game changer. Because it’s, I mean, why do you think we have such a hard time JJ communicating? Like when someone asks you, what do you do when you’re on a airplane, or, you know, you’re at you at a dinner party or whatever, a networking event, it was like, what do you do? Like, why do we fumble that up so much?
JP (07:34):
I think some of it, if, if I’m, if I’m really digging in, some of it is trying to be, it’s insecurity and also trying to be humble. Like, there’s two things in that. Like, there’s some insecurity about what you do, so you start fumbling through that, or there’s, you’re trying to be, you don’t wanna come across as cocky. Yeah. And so you’re trying to be humble in that. And what we’ve just found with all of that, and what I would say is that when you try to shrink in what you have to offer the world by not coming, you don’t wanna come across too cocky. You don’t like, you’re insecure about the fact that you can make a difference when you actually shrink in that moment, not only are you not serving yourself, but you’re not serving the world, you’re not serving your potential customers.
JP (08:17):
Because if you actually have experience, if you have things that you figured out along the way that can help pe make people’s lives better and easier, and you don’t know how to, and you lack confidence in your way of communicating that what you’re doing is by shrinking, you’re actually not serving people. And so we teach people how to explain that through through the whole StoryBrand framework really is there are seven talking points really that are essential to every good story. And these, like I said, have been studied for centuries. They go all the way back to Aristotle and Plato who argued that the best way to move people to action, the best way to change culture was through story. If you go back, you know, all the way to poetics it. Like,
RV (09:04):
No, you guys better be careful. I’m just afraid that Aristotle is going to bring a plagiarism lawsuit against Don here. And I, I don’t know if we should be sharing that. Well,
JP (09:13):
We, we cite him. We cite him. So we c him.
RV (09:15):
Him. Okay.
JP (09:15):
We cite him. Okay. So we definitely cite our sources. You
RV (09:18):
Tag him. Do you tag him on Instagram?
JP (09:19):
A hundred percent hash hashtag Aristotle Poetics hashtag Aristotle.
RV (09:22):
Okay.
JP (09:23):
And , you know, and these, the, it’s, the formulas have been refined over the years, but really every good story has seven elements to it. Seven talking points, there’s a formula. And when you follow that formula, what you do is you ensure that your story actually is clear and compelling. That’s really what we’re looking for when we’re trying to create good stories, is it has to be clear and it has to be compelling. And so the seven elements, okay. Do you want me to go into those or
RV (09:53):
I, I, we are gonna, I do want to go into those, but before we do that, you know, you’ve touched on this idea that I think one of the big mantras of StoryBrand, and one of the thing that works really well, and one of the reasons why we believe in it and like we become such emphatic fans about it, is the idea that you as the business owner, as the mission-driven messenger, you as the marketer, you are not the hero. The customer is the hero. And I just wanna connect this back to what you were talking about shrinking. When people shrink themselves, or they wanna be humble, the reason they’re doing that is because they think the conversation is about them, or they’re making the conversation about themselves. And I think a huge, like the big central thing is to go, if, if the conversation’s not about you, if, if the goal of the conversation is not to impress the other person, but to simply help the other person to serve the other person, now all of a sudden there’s no reason to shrink. ’cause It’s like you’re showing up as like, the best helper in the world versus like the most important person in the world. And, and, and so I just wanted you to talk on that part a little bit. ’cause I think, you know, the tactics of StoryBrand are super practical and actionable. I wanna talk about the seven points, but to me, the real heartbeat is this idea that customer’s the hero.
JP (11:20):
Yes. And you know, you would never see, well, let, let me just say this. We all wake up pretty much every day as the main character of our own story, right? That just really is how it is. Like you’re the main character of your movie. I’m the main character of my movie. And so we’re all kind of walking through life that
RV (11:39):
Way. And in my head, I have abs that are more defined than what I actually see. But like, yes, I, I wake up, you know, I think of myself as like Brad Pitt, but you know, it’s not
JP (11:49):
Way Oh, you
RV (11:49):
Are, you’re, but I’m, but I’m, I I, I get what you’re saying. Keep kick your
JP (11:52):
. Yeah. Yeah. In my, in my version, I’m six two and I’m really five three . So you know, but we all are heroes of our own story. And what happens in good movies is that the hero, actually in most, in all movies, is actually one of the weakest characters in the story. And they have a lot of self-doubt. They make a lot of mistakes. They are up and they are down, and they’re insecure through the whole thing. They don’t actually become the strong hero till the end of the movie. That’s what the Hero’s Journey is all about, is becoming the hero. But in the beginning of the movie and the rest of the movie, they’re actually very weak and insecure and scared and Ill-equipped. But at some point in the movie, they meet in a good story. They meet a guide, they meet somebody who has been down the path that they’re trying to go down before they’ve, but they’ve also won the day.
JP (12:48):
So in Star Wars, Luke Skywalker is the hero, but he comes in contact with Obi one Kenobi and Yoda wi in Lord of the Rings. There’s Frodo, but then there’s Gandalf in Hunger Games. There’s Katniss. But then there’s Hamid. There’s always this older, wiser guide who comes along to help the hero win the day. And when thought leaders position themselves as the hero, and what I mean by that is when you start talking, quote unquote about just yourself making the conversation about you, what you’re actually doing is positioning yourself as weak. ’cause You’re positioning yourself as a hero in the story. The best people who are equipped to help other people win are always the guides and guides are confident. They are s strong, they’re actually the strongest character in any movie, right? Obi one, Kenobi, Yoda, Gandalf, strongest characters in the movie who are helping other people win.
JP (13:50):
Now, they’re not out there bragging about themselves. They’re not even talking a lot about their history. In fact, we usually don’t know a ton of their history in a movie. All we know about them is that they are equipped to help the hero win because they’ve been where the hero has been, and they’ve overcome the same obstacles. So when you’re a thought leader, or you’re in business, when you talk about yourself and just make it all about kind of your insecurities, or kind of shrink a little bit, you’re making yourself the hero of the story. And you’re actually positioning yourself as weak, which means you’re actually not able to help other people. But when you talk about yourself in a way that talks about how you’ve overcome the similar problems that the people in your audience or your customers have experienced, right? So if you say, look, say you’re a thought leader on finance, and you stand up in front of an audience, and you don’t have to say, look, I’m really good at finance all this stuff.
JP (14:46):
But if you get up in front of an audience and you say, Hey, I used to be overwhelmed by finances as well, I get it. I was actually depressed, I was really struggling. What you’re doing in that moment is you’re positioning yourself beginning to position yourself as a guide to your audience with empathy. So when you say, I get it, I was like, you, and then you say, but actually, I was able to figure out a system where I was able to budget and invest in a way that actually has made me a millionaire in the past 10 years. And I wanna share that with you. Mm-Hmm. , that’s not bragging. That’s positioning yourself as a guide to your audience or your customers. You are saying, I am like you. I’ve experienced what you’ve experienced, but I’ve also found a way forward, and I wanna bring you along in that journey. Mm-Hmm. that what say power
RV (15:33):
Is one of our, one of our flagship, you know, probably most repeated quotes at Brand Builders Group is your most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were.
JP (15:45):
Yes. I love that.
RV (15:46):
It, it anchors to what you’re, it anchors exactly to what you’re saying here is to go. You, you can be the guide if you actually are teaching people and selling people something that you know something about because you’ve been there, it automatically, like the default is you are the guide, and it it sets, it sets you up, like in that position perfectly.
JP (16:09):
And because everybody’s the hero in their own story, they’re looking for a way to overcome their problems. They’re looking for a way to win the day. They’re looking a way to move forward. And so, again, going back to your initial question when somebody says, what do you do? And you start fumbling and you start kind of trying to shrink a little bit and going, well, it’s really complicated. Immediately in their brain, what they’re doing is, oh, I’m not sure this person has really anything to help me move forward. Not in a, like, not, not in a,
RV (16:39):
In a subconscious
JP (16:39):
Way. Yeah. But it’s very subconscious. They’re going, this person, it is not gonna help me move ahead. And quite frankly, they’re not interesting . And so you might go, oh, great, nice to meet you. All right. Hey, I gotta leave. I gotta go get a drink. You know, like, it’s the conversation’s over because the person being introduced is not making them curious about what they offer, curious about their product, curious about their thought leadership. And so the best way to answer that question, a very simple way to tell what I would argue is a short story, is the way that you wanna always answer the question. What do you do really is three parts. I mentioned that overall stories, when you create good movies and stuff, there are seven parts. But to tell a short story, there are actually three parts to it. It’s very formulaic.
JP (17:28):
All right? In order to position your customer or your audience as the hero, what you wanna do is the very first thing you wanna do. And somebody says, so what do you do? You don’t answer that question. You start with a problem that they or your customers are experiencing. So if you asked me, just like, jj, what do you do? I would start, I wouldn’t say I work at StoryBrand. I would start by saying, so many businesses and thought leaders have a hard time explaining what it is that they do in a way that can actually make them a ton of money. So I just start that like, people have a hard time explaining what they do to grow their business,
RV (18:06):
Articulate the problem,
JP (18:07):
Articulate the problem. What you’re doing in that moment is you’re actually making the story about the person you’re talking to, not about yourself. So you start with the problem, then you come in as the guide and position yourself as a solution. So I’ve said, you know, a lot of thought leaders and businesses have a hard time explaining what they do. So they’re actually missing out on a, on a lot of money. What we do at StoryBrand is come in and help people create a clear message using the elements of story. So now I’ve just positioned myself as a guide to, to you the hero. And then I finish out the story with my customer success. So then I say, when people go through this, they’re able to not only articulate what they do in a really powerful way, but they’re able to actually help more people and grow their business. So it’s what the, the three elements are problem, solution, success. That’s a short story. So I’ll just put it all together. I would say so many thought leaders and businesses out there have a hard time explaining what they do to people in a way that makes them money. We help people clarify their marketing and their message by using a story framework so that then they ultimately have a clear way of explaining their value proposition can help more people and grow their business. Mm-Hmm. .
RV (19:26):
Got it. So yeah, give us the seven points. I wanna make sure that we at least hit, hit high level on ’em. I know you, they go deep in the book and in the course. Yeah, yeah. And the training that you guys do. But like, walk us through the seven parts. ’cause, And I want for you listening, these are the seven parts of a story. But then this is also like a checklist for like how you would write out the copy of describing whatever it is that you do. So all right. Hit us, jj.
JP (19:53):
All right. So the seven elements of any good story are that in the first bit of the story, right at the very beginning, there is a hero. And that hero wants something in a movie within the first nine minutes of a movie for the story to be good. We have to know what that hero wants. And we could probably all think of movies where we just could say, oh yeah, the hero wants this. It should be very clear, it should be very obvious, and it should be really one thing. Jason Bourne wants to know his identity, but he can’t also open a cupcake shop and want to run a marathon. And all these other things has to be one thing, right? How that
RV (20:32):
Someone wants to get married, couple wants to have kids, somebody wants to be rich. Well, someone wants to find their dad. You know, finding Nemo wants to find their parents like Uhhuh.
JP (20:41):
Yep. Very, very clear. How that then applies to marketing is the principle is that companies need to, if you’re positioning your customer as the hero, companies need to be able to clearly articulate what they offer. And it actually has to be one thing. It can’t be 50 things. And that is what enters your customer into the story. So you have to be able to say, not just say like, I help people achieve a great life. No, no, no. What do you actually offer? And it needs to be clear. So you need to create talking points that articulate what you offer. ’cause That is really what your customer’s looking for. The second element of any good story is that once the hero, we know what the hero wants. A problem has to get in the way. The only way a story gets interesting is if the hero encounters a problem, right?
JP (21:32):
It’s like, if Liam Neeson’s daughter gets kidnapped for the eighth time, and he gets that phone call that says, you know, I have your daughter. And then all of a sudden she hops on and goes, just kidding. It’s a joke. Do you want to come over to Europe and we’ll just go shopping and look at colleges? And then the rest of the movie is about that very boring movie, right? We’re not interested in it. The hook of the story that makes the story interesting is the problem. The bigger the problem, the more interesting the story. How that applies to our marketing is the only reason people are paying attention to your marketing or coming to you to buy a product or service is because you solve a problem for them. So you have to clearly articulate what problem your customers are experiencing that is gonna hook them in the marketing.
JP (22:25):
These two pieces are the two biggest pieces when it comes to writing a good story and creating good marketing. If you don’t articulate what you offer and you don’t constantly talk about the problems your customers experience, then people won’t pay attention to you. And if you can get those two things right in a movie and in marketing, you’re gonna do great. But the story keeps going and gets even more interesting. So then the element comes in that we’ve already talked about. The third principle of the StoryBrand framework is that the hero meets a guide. Mm-Hmm. They meet somebody who comes along and helps them win the day. Mr.
RV (23:02):
Miyagi, here you come. Yes, here he comes. Daniel son, Mr.
JP (23:05):
Mgi. Yes, exactly. , yes. And so that say, we’ve already talked about this, but the really, the paradigm, big paradigm shift in the StoryBrand framework is you’re not the hero of the story. You’re the guide. So stop talking about yourself and talk about your customer’s problems and talk about how you understand them. You have empathy for it, and you have authority to fix it. You have, you kind of give evidence that you’ve solved it for other people, testimonies, awards, things like that. Then the fourth element of a good story is that the guide gives the hero a plan. In every movie, I actually wanna do like some dissertation research to see how many times or in how many movies, the phrase what’s the plan, or here’s the plan appears. Hmm, I bet I mean, you, if you think about it, it’s in every movie, and it doesn’t matter how complicated the plot is or how complicated the problem is, they’ll go, but here’s the plan, right?
JP (24:01):
And what that does in a movie is show the audience that there is a clear path forward, easy and clear path forward for the hero to win, right? Even in Oceans 11, they’re gonna rob the Bellagio, it’s never been done before, it’s impossible. And then they go, but here’s the plan, right? . And then they follow the plan. Nice. The principle for that in marketing is you need to show your customers that there’s a clear and easy way to do business with you. What are the three steps that you guide them through to either purchase your product or work with them? So it can be schedule a call, we create a plan, then we meet monthly to make sure that that happens. You know, something in your, you know, we do an intake session, you join a mastermind group, and then we meet one-on-one after that, right?
JP (24:50):
We just have three steps to show them this is how you win the day. Then the fifth element in a good story is that after the hero gets the plan, there’s a moment where they have to be called to action. They have to be either in or out. And so the, in a lot of movies, there is a ticking time bomb that is gonna force the hero to act, right? Like, it’s gonna go off in five minutes and they’ve gotta be in or out, they’ve gotta run towards it. Or runaway a tsunami’s coming to de destroy Los Angeles, and they’ve gotta get their daughter out of the city. You know, there’s all of these kind of this countdown that says you need to act or there may be consequences. The principle for that in the marketing is we actually need to have clear calls to action in our marketing, our heroes.
JP (25:40):
Our customers need to know exactly what they need to do in order to buy our product and service. There is a study that was done recently that said 70% of small businesses in America do not have a clear call to action on their website that people are losing money if they don’t know if, if your customers or your audience doesn’t know what they’re supposed to do next. If you’re a thought leader and you’re up on a stage, you better at the end of your talk have something that they’re supposed to do that will connect them to your products and services. What’s the next step they’re supposed to take in order to work with you?
RV (26:16):
Yeah. And I, you know, it’s interesting. It’s never really dawned on me the, the, the, the, the dynamic of the ticking bomb part of it, right? So there’s a clear action, but then, you know, obviously, like you know, we do a lot of copywriting, like sales copywriting, like to, you know, how do you create page that gets someone to pull out their credit card? And you know, urgency is like a really big part, is people, people always procrastinate. And I’ve never thought about that with the relation, like the connection to StoryBrand in movies, how it’s like, you know, he, he’s about to get on an airplane and leave your life forever, or you know, you better ask her out on a date before she like gets on the train That there, like that kind of a thing. So do you guys advocate kind of like deadlines and countdowns and that kind of stuff?
JP (27:07):
Absolutely. Absolutely. Because if you allow people to delay action, it often becomes inaction. So I, I say that a lot. Delayed action usually is inaction. And so when you, it’s always in a movie, like you said, it’s very clear, there’s a moment, right? It’s, it’s not kind of wishy-washy of what the hero is supposed to do. They have to go get the girl, they have to disarm the bomb, they have to hop in the helicopter. There’s something that they have to do. And all the sports very,
RV (27:35):
Very clear. Every i’ll I have the built in clock, like
JP (27:37):
Exactly. And if, if you’re saying, okay, so let’s say Tom Cruise is running through the airport to disarm a bomb, and all of a sudden he finds out it’s going off in a month, well, there’s no urgency for that action , right? He’s just like, what am I doing? I’m not gonna sprain my ankle doing this. There’s no urgency. So that’s why there’s so often like literally a ticking time bomb. So in calls to action, when you can create a sense of urgency that in, in your emails and on even on your webpage or on your social media, then absolutely. But even almost, I would argue more important than that is most people, their calls to action are often like, well, if you wanna learn more or it, or, you know, or, you know, Hey, let me know if you have any questions. No, no, no.
JP (28:21):
What you’re doing again, in that moment is you’re shrinking. And again, I’ll remind everybody, you shrinking does not serve your customers or the world . And so what you’re saying when you’re just like, well, you know, if you have any questions or blah, blah, blah, what you’re actually doing is saying, I’m not quite sure I believe in my product or what I’m willing to offer you. I don’t believe that it’s actually gonna change your life or make a difference. And our customers subconsciously feel that. So be strong, buy now, schedule a call, sign up. You know, any of those kind of things, you need to be very
RV (28:53):
Clear. And I think of it, you know, so like, as a parent of two toddlers, I go, if my son is about to pick up a marble and put it in his mouth, I don’t kind of politely say, Hey, you should maybe not do that. Or like, I reach over and I smack it out of his hand like now. Right? And so, mm-hmm, , when you have that, when you truly have that service centered mindset, there’s urgency on your part to create urgency on their part. Yes. And, and, and I think, I think a lot of people miss that, especially the mission driven messengers. ’cause It’s like, I just want to help everybody and I just wanna encourage ’em. And it’s like, yeah. And a part of that is giving ’em a freaking deadline. Yes. If you don’t give ’em a freaking deadline, they’re not gonna do your thing, which means they’re not gonna change their life, which means they’re gonna do exactly what they’ve been doing, which means they’re gonna continue to be a mess. So it’s like a part of a creating a service is giving people a deadline. Absolutely. That’s what you’re gonna change their life.
JP (29:54):
Absolutely. Clarity is kindness and showing people where they’re supposed to go, what they’re supposed to do is actually an act of service. So if, if , I would almost say literally, if you hear nothing out of this out of this podcast, make sure that your calls to action are clear on your website and your social media and in all of your marketing, that is actually a gift to the people you serve. The last two elements of the StoryBrand framework are what we call success and failure. These are what are really in a good movie, the stakes in the story, and they’ve kind of been forecast through the whole foreshadowed through the whole movie. We know what a happy ending looks like for a hero, and we’re rooting for that. But we also know what tragedy can look like for them. That, you know, they’re gonna win the day.
JP (30:42):
They’re gonna get the girl they’re gonna hit the home run, or that actually they’re gonna strike out and everybody loses. They’re gonna miss out on the girl and she’s gonna marry his brother. You know, like we know what the tragedy, what we’re pain we’re trying to avoid, and what success we’re cheering for. And it’s the same thing in marketing. You need to create talking points and value proposition around what their, your customer’s life will look like once they do business with you. That’s called success. So what, what are they gonna save time, save money? Are they gonna be more confident? Are they gonna be able to get ahead? What are the things they’re actually gonna be able to benefit from, from your product or service? And we need to write those out and articulate those, but we also need to articulate what they’re going to miss out on, or what pain they’re going to continue to experience if they don’t work with us, that they’re gonna continue to be tired, they’re gonna continue to be overwhelmed.
JP (31:38):
And that might get a little bit worse where they actually struggle with burnout, right? You can kind of forecast what can happen to them if they don’t work with you. And mainly it’s that their problems either are solved if they work with you or are not solved. If they don’t, and they either can get then a little bit better or a little bit worse. And those really are the seven elements of a good story. And a seven, the seven elements of good marketing. So what we actually do is then teach people how to create talking points for all seven of those elements so that you can make sure that on your website emails, when you’re giving keynote addresses, when you’re doing webinars, that everything you’re talking about is very clear. It’s positioning your customers the hero, you as the guide, and showing how you can make their life better if you work with them by giving them a clear call to action. Mm-Hmm,
RV (32:30):
. Yep. Yep. So I mean, on that note, jj, where should people go if they wanna learn more about you guys and all things StoryBrand and Donald Miller and like all, all the stuff you guys got going on?
JP (32:44):
Yeah, we actually have a little a little gif for everybody who’s listening is that you can actually go to storybrand.com/brand script. And when you go to storybrand.com/brand script, you’re actually gonna see what we call an online brand script where it has these different elements that I’ve just been talking about. And there are boxes to be able to create, start working on your own story, your company story, your entrepreneurial story, to try to create talking points around those pieces. So it’s actually like an online version of everything that I just talked about. So you can go there and practice creating your marketing and your messaging, and that’s storybrand.com/brandscript.
RV (33:27):
So Cool. Yeah, so we’ll link up in the show notes. And you know, I guess this last thing, jj, like, if, if someone is starting out, you know, right now and they’re hearing this and they’re going, oh my gosh. Like, you know, I, I I’m, I I I struggle with articulating what I’m doing and y you know, like, I don’t know, you know, I’m not a great writer, et cetera. I mean, you’ve given ’em some really great tools and, and stuff, but just kind of more like on the emotional side, you know, what, what’s kind of the encouragement or the reminder that you would want that person to hear?
JP (34:05):
Yeah, I think, you know, I, for me, for a long time, ’cause I’ve been in marketing and public relations and things for a very long time, and the thing that I struggled most with was I, I never wanted to brag about myself. I never wanted to elevate myself. And it, it meant much of that came from kind of a false humility. Truthfully, , it was like I was a little arrogant, but then I didn’t want people to think I was arrogant, . And so, you know, it was like, almost like a false sense of humility. And so I didn’t know how to talk about myself. And when I discovered the StoryBrand framework and realized that actually I am not the hero, I don’t want to be the hero of my own story. I want to be a guide for other people to help them win this, their story that changed everything for me.
JP (34:54):
And it actually lifted a huge weight off of my shoulders and allowed me to talk about myself and the things that I do in a way that really serves others versus serving myself. And so if you’re in that spot where you’re like, I don’t know how to do this. I’m, I, I feel weird talking about myself getting on podcasts or going, getting up and giving speeches ’cause it feels like, what do I have to say? Well, the first thing I would say is you have amazing things to say, everybody. A lot of times people think they don’t have anything new to offer the world. And I’m telling you, you may not have a new idea, but you have a new way of telling it because you’re the only person who’s ever experienced what you’ve experienced. So stand in that authority that you have that there is only one you.
JP (35:39):
And then the second thing is, stop thinking about what you do and start thinking about the problems that you solve for other people. What pain are people experiencing? What problems are they experiencing? And what wisdom do you have, or tools or tips or tricks do you have in your arsenal that can help them solve their problem? If you start just thinking in that way, the weight will come off your shoulders. You’re gonna get so much more excited about talking about what you do and selling your services because you are going to make the world a better place. People need you. They need your wisdom, they need your experience, and they need what you have in order to make their lives better and the lives of the people they serve. So,
RV (36:25):
Amen.
JP (36:25):
Think about that and solve problems. Don’t talk about yourself. Solve problems.
RV (36:31):
Yeah. Amen, brother. Don’t, don’t be the hero. Be the guide. Dr. JJ Peterson, thank you for coming and for sharing your wisdom, brother. We love you guys. And we, we, you know, we always want the best for you guys, so keep kicking butt.
JP (36:45):
Oh, thanks. It’s such an honor to be here. Love you guys too.

Ep 453: When to Slow Down So You Can Speed Up | Elizabeth Stephens Episode Recap

AJV (00:02):
Hey, everybody, AJ Vaden here. I am continuing the conversation that I got to have with the one and only amazing, wonderful, Elizabeth Stephens, who is our VP of Member Experience at Brand Builders Group. And I invited her on to our podcast to have an hour long discussion on customer journeys. And I wanna follow up that conversation here to talk a little bit more in depth about what is a customer journey. And even if you’re not working with us as a client at Brand Builders Group, but you’re, you know, absorbing our content, which is what you’re doing if you’re listening to this, if you’re listening to our podcast, social media email list, you’ve gotten one of our free resources, or you’re just a friend of the company, I think there’s some things that you can really take away that mean a lot as you’re thinking about your brand building journey and how does that fit in alignment with something that has some structure and some process to it.
AJV (01:03):
And so that’s what I wanna talk about today. And at Brand Builders Group we exist to empower Mission-driven messengers to get their message out into the world. Like that’s why we exist. Like little known fact. We did not have a business plan for this company. We did not intend to start this company. We did not have dreams of starting this company. This, this company was created out of a, what I would say, a God orchestrated divine intervention in our lives. And he used people around us. He used Lewis Howes he used our former business partners. He used a lawsuit. He used all different types of things to call us to this work. This was not work that we set out to do. This is work that we were called to do. And when I say that this is a, a missional job and a missional company, I mean it from the depths of my soul that we exist to give a voice to people who have a desire for their voice to be heard. Because we believe deeply, deeply that someone, you who is, who’s listening right now, you have the power to change one person’s life with your message. And that person has the power to do the same for someone else. And that by sharing your message and by giving hope, inspiration a plan a technique, a process, whatever it is, like you can, you can create pivotal change that can truly be the tip of the spear of changing the world. I don’t say that halfheartedly, I don’t say that as marketing language. I believe
Speaker 2 (02:58):
That to the depths of my soul. And when I say that we have spent 20 years doing this work to figure out how to do it more efficiently, how to do it more productively, how to do it, more passion and heart led, I mean it. And our entire team at Brand Builders Group has spent the last five years of figuring out the order and the sequencing and the cadence and how to streamline this and building the right processes and tools and systems to allow somebody else to do it better, faster, and more impactful than we did. That’s why we exist. That’s why these customer journeys are a really big part of our work at Brand Builders Group. And it doesn’t matter if you work with us as a client or not, I believe that these have the ability to help you, to help impact you, and to help you move forward with your desires with your missional work.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
And so, high level, what is a customer journey? A customer journey is a roadmap. And I know there’s lots of different definitions of customer journey out there. So I’m just telling you ours, it’s a, a roadmap. A roadmap of how you’re going to encounter everything that you encounter at Brand Builders Group, right? So that’s content, that’s community, that’s our team. There are different intersection points that happen in this roadmap, this journey that we believe have critical benchmarks. And the way that we built this journey is that it’s built in 90 day increments. And we believe that our curriculum can be the majority of it can be consumed and completed in 90 day sprints. And so that’s how we built it. Now, our, you know, normal track is a three year journey. And I share that not to frighten you , but to inspire you that it takes a minute to lay a solid foundation and a solid framework and infrastructure for something that’s going to be grand.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
It just takes time. And that’s not a lot of time in the overarching scheme of your life or your business, your work. It’s not it’s really a short amount of time. But if you just relate this to architecture and construction for a second, I think this will give you some basis points, right? Like when, when architects and contractors, commercial contractors, industrial contractors are going to build a high rise most of them, depending on the size of the company, are digging and laying the foundation for years before they ever start building up years, not a year, years. That’s with an s. And I think I was, and don’t
Speaker 3 (05:56):
Hold me to this, but when the Burge Khalifa that that was being built in Dubai, I believe that they were building that foundational infrastructure for five, maybe seven years, and maybe 10 years. I could be way off, but I know it was like multiple, multiple years before they ever started doing anything else. Because big things require a solid foundation and a very clear infrastructure, right? That it requires a plan, it requires a team, it requires communication, it requires time, and some things just shouldn’t be rushed. But if you spend the upfront time to build that foundation and to build that infrastructure, it allows you to grow and scale infinitely once it’s built. And so the way that we built these journeys is like, hey, the first three years, it’s not that you won’t have revenue, and it’s not that you’re not gonna get your message out, that starts happening immediately.
Speaker 3 (07:00):
We believe that as soon as you are doing that, you know, what we call your foundational work, finding your brand, DNA, it’s like you, the clearer you get, the bigger your impact automatically happens in conversations and content and creation in your team, in your beliefs, in your passion. Those things start to happen immediately. So dollars are coming in. That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying though, is that to complete that foundation, to complete that infrastructure with all the things in place that would, that would allow you to have something that goes beyond you, it takes a minute. And for us, we, we have built in a way that’s about three years to get it all complete. And it’s not that we wanna see you leave after three years. We wanna continue to work with you. But we also, we wanna be realistic of going like building your personal brand.
Speaker 3 (07:50):
It’s, it’s more than even building a business. This is a part of building a legacy. It’s a part of building your ministry. It’s a part of living into your mission, your calling. And that is not to be rushed. It’s not to be rushed. But we also know that looking at something in th in a three year scheme, it could be overwhelming. It’s overwhelming to me. So we broke it down into these 90 day sprints that allows you to have a micro focus on a certain topic, a certain curriculum, 90 days at a time. And at the end of each of those 90 days, there are benchmarks. So, you know, at the end of these 90 days, at each topic, at each curriculum, if I have set, if I have hit these set benchmarks, then it’s like pass, go and monopoly, right? Continue to the next square. If not, go back. You don’t keep moving forward if the initial work has not been completed, right? And so the way that we see this for all of you who are listening who don’t know all of our curriculum pieces, which is fine, and it doesn’t matter what journey you’re on, we have four very distinct customer
Speaker 4 (08:54):
Journeys at Brand Builders Group. We believe that we are most and best well positioned to serve the person who wants to become a highly paid professional speaker. We know that world. We are these people. We, we know we can help you. Number two is that we are best and most well positioned to help people who want to be published authors. Doesn’t matter if it’s self-published, hybrid published, or traditional published. We know that world. We know that space. We have a passion for it. We have a desire to help you in that we can help. The third is we believe that we are the best and most well-positioned people to help you generate new leads for your business, your existing business before anything else, we’re salespeople. That’s our biggest, strongest background. We find sales as an honorable profession. It is one that we admire, we respect and is necessary to all business.
Speaker 4 (09:48):
And if the idea of sales makes you cringe when, then that’s where you need to lean in because you’re thinking about it wrong. Sales is a necessary function of mission, ministry, work, money, all things must master the art of sales and lead generation. Nobody wants to be the world’s best kept secret, and you don’t either. You’ve gotta master that. And last but not least we think we are the best and most well positioned person to help you as you’re building your personal brand. Figure out your new revenue stream right now. I will say that’s the smallest amount of people that we work with, because we believe we need to capitalize on what you have currently, which is for most of you, your existing business. We don’t need to start something new just because you want to. Just because you can’t, doesn’t mean you should.
Speaker 4 (10:38):
But sometimes it’s the right necessary place. And we, we know how to do that. We’ve started a lot of businesses, we enjoy doing that. But we also know how much time at work it takes. So we are discerning with helping you decide those. But I think the thing that we have found amongst all of those is that there are, there are critical elements, no matter what your unique journey is of how our curriculum comes into play, right? And so, no matter what journey you’re on, no matter where you are in your business, no matter where you are in your journey, when you come to Brand Builders Group, our foundation, right? What we do, everything based off of is what we call finding your brand DNA, which is determining these four things. What problem do you solve for the world that only you can solve in the way that you can? How do you solve that problem in your own unique way? Who do you solve that problem for your audience? And how do you make money solving that problem? So what is the problem that you solve for the world? What is your unique way in solving that problem? Who do you solve it for? And how do you make money solving that problem? Now, there’s other components
Speaker 5 (11:53):
To it, but that, that’s, that’s the foundation right? Now at the end of that there’s some things that we need to figure out. Like what’s your message? What’s your uniqueness? What are the payoffs? What what business are you trying to be in? But those are the nitty gritty details. But if you don’t know the answer to those four questions, you cannot, should not move forward. But once you do know the answer to those questions, that would take you into what we would call next, your content creation. So now, if you know what problem, your message, who you solve it for and how you wanna make money, now you start creating what we call your body of work, right? And that’s what you have to say about it. That’s what you have to say to the world. It’s what are your stories? What are the points?
Speaker 5 (12:36):
What are the lessons? What are the frameworks? This is building your original thought leadership, and that happens after that foundational work of what problem, what message, who’s the who and how do you make money? Then it’s content creation, right? So it’s what you have to say about it. The next step is what we call world-class presentation craft. But in normal terms, it’s just how you wanna say it. So the first thing is those four things. What problem, what message, who and how you make money. Part two is your content creation is your body of work. It’s your original thought leadership. So it’s what you have to say. Part three is how you want to say it. It’s the art of the spoken word. I just wanna kind of pause right there, because all of those are pretty much the beginnings of the entire first year, right?
Speaker 5 (13:30):
If each one of those takes 90 days you’re at month nine, right? And yet we have not talked about anything, website anything, brand identity. We haven’t talked about funnels, webinars, checkout processes, CRMs, all of that. Why? Because those first nine months are the things that last the test of time. Those are the things that go beyond a funnel or a website or social media. These are the things that are integral to who you are, who you were built to be, why you’re here, and why you have this calling on your life. And to get all of that in nine months is extremely fast, honestly. But that is that core foundational work that it pretty much doesn’t matter what journey you’re in, we know that that is the work that has to happen before you keep moving forward. Because if you start building and growing on a weak foundation, you’re gonna start finding inconsistencies. And when there’s inconsistencies, there’s wasted time, energy, resources, and money. And we’re not trying to waste anyone’s time. It’s a finite, precious commodity that there’s just not a lot of. And so we take it super seriously. So as you’re just walking through this, as someone who is a, a consumer of this content, I would encourage you to just kind of pause for a second and go,
Speaker 6 (14:51):
Am I rushing things? Or better yet, where am I rushing things? Where do I need to slow down and just let the process be the process? What can I do as other things continue to happen? Where can I carve out time that that needs to happen? And maybe you don’t get to do this full-time. It’s not 40 hour week endeavor for you right now. Maybe it’s a two hour week endeavor. That’s okay. There is a path and a pace for everyone. You just have to find yours. My, my message though, my, my plea to you though is don’t rush the foundation. Don’t rush the infrastructure. ’cause That is what is going to allow you to grow faster and scale better once you set it in place. And as we mentioned on the full call, if you’re going, whoa, whoa, whoa, like something clicks, something dinged I would just encourage you to continue listening to these podcast episodes tons of free resources there.
Speaker 6 (15:51):
You can also go to our website, www brand builders group.com, and click on the button at the top that says, free resources. We got you free resources for days. We can keep you very busy with free resources. But as you go through those, or you’re going, man, I, I, I just, I want a little more than that, then I would encourage you to go to free brand call.com and schedule a free call with our team. That’s the first touch point with all of us. We are not a fit to work with everyone, and not everyone is a fit to work with us in that type of way. This call helps you sample what we do. It helps you get to know our team, and it helps our team to get to know you, to decide if we’re a good partnership. And if not, we wanna support you. So we’re gonna keep sending you free resources, until you say, please stop. That’s enough. So please continue listening to the podcast. Check out our free resources. And if you’re looking for more than that, visit free brand call.com and schedule that free call today. I’ll see you later.

Ep 452: Building Your Personal Brand Journey with Elizabeth Stephens

AJV (00:02):
Hey everybody and welcome to the Influential Personal Brand podcast. Super excited today to have on a fellow BBGA very good close personal friend. But also Elizabeth Stevens is the VP of our member experience here, brand Builders Group. And so there’s so many fun things about this exciting interview. And before I formally introduced her, I just wanted to share why I wanted to have Elizabeth onto the show today. And I think there’s a couple of different things that are really important as we look forward to wherever you are in your journey or wherever you are in your year. But as you just look, look forward to the next 12 months, there should be some things that you are always asking yourself, such as, what should I be working on? And what order should I be working on these things? Where should I be investing my money, my time, my energy, my resources?
AJV (01:01):
And am I doing these things in a way that actually is going to benefit me in the end? So it doesn’t matter what year of what month of the year it is, it doesn’t matter where you’re at in your journey. There’s always things that you should be asking yourselves as you’re looking ahead to those next 12 months. And so I thought having Elizabeth on the show today would be so helpful to talk about how we can do the right things, but in the wrong order, and then we’re confused. And then we, we stale. We kind of, kind of become stale and stagnant. So that’s gonna be the conversation today and a lot of fun things in between. And so as we get into this, I just want you to know that as you’re listening this is one of those conversations that is applicable universally.
AJV (01:47):
Doesn’t matter how beginner you are, how advanced you are, doesn’t matter what you’re working on, why you’re working on it, this is one of those conversations that has a very holistic approach. So if you’re tuning in, this is, this is a conversation for you today. So stick around and don’t leave because it’s going to be well worth it to the very last second. Now, let me introduce you to the one and only Elizabeth Stevens. Elizabeth is a personal brand strategist and an expert at that. She’s also the vice President of Member Experience here at Brand Builders Group. Woo woo. I would say that she has also worked with brands extremely closely on a personal level like a personal brand level, as well as a large corporate level like Charles Schwab in Southwest Airlines. She’s worked with New York Times bestselling authors, eight, nine-figure entrepreneurs top ranked podcast hosts. She has done all these things. Not to mention, she is the founder of a nonprofit. She is helped people craft Ted Talks. She has three amazing kids. So she does all these other things in the midst of being a mom, like all these different things. Plus, she’s a speaker and an all around amazing human being. So, without further ado, Elizabeth, welcome to the show.
ES (03:05):
Oh, thank you so much. I get exhausted hearing that, especially the part about the three kids and all that stuff as we during the time of this podcast. It’s right before the Christmas season. And as any parent knows, it is complete insanity on all fronts. So I can Thank
AJV (03:23):
You, . I can relate. Mm-Hmm, . So I just kind of wanna hit this with a couple questions that I’ve been getting asked a lot here lately. We’ve actually been doing a lot of interviewing for new team members at Brand Builders Group. We’ve actually added 10 new team members to our team this year, which just feels impossible and extraordinary all at the same time. And from almost every single interview that I’ve had, I’ve had one really consistent question. And then being in our events and being a part of all the different things in our client community, I started noticing like, oh, our interview candidates aren’t the only ones asking this question. So here’s the question that I think is important for everyone. Why do some personal brands excel? Why others fall flat, right? If everyone is coming in with this mission and its passion and this message that they feel like is a calling on their heart, and they’re all, and I’m just thinking about in Brand Builders Group where they’re all following a similar curriculum, a similar path, kind of why are some taking off like a rocket? And why do others still still feel stuck in the garage?
ES (04:33):
Hmm. That’s such a great question. And it’s one I think we ask ourselves a lot and finally got to this point where we really realized it’s all about giving them those parameters, right? It’s really understanding, and you said this earlier, you referenced it at the beginning about a, a lot of people decide what they want to do. They make a decision. I want to be this thing. I want to create this piece of work. I want to excel in this area. But the question we often don’t ask ourselves is, when do we do that thing, right? How do we create a timeline that aligns with the, what the big overarching goal that we want? And so we come into these ideas and these businesses saying, and these personal brands saying, this is what I wanna be, this is what I wanna do. But we don’t ask ourselves. The most important question is, when do I do the things that are going to make this happen? And I think that is one of the biggest mistakes personal brands, entrepreneurs, businesses make, is we have a good idea of the what, the passion, the purpose, and deep inside of us, but we have not created a timeline to where that works for us and for the people we serve very effectively.
AJV (05:50):
Hmm. So I know, and for all of you who are listening who don’t know, but Elizabeth also holds a really special place in all of the client’s journey that we work with at Brand Builders Group because she does annual planning calls with every single one of the clients, our members at Brand Builders Group. And so she gets to have these unique conversations of let’s reflect on the last 12 months as we plan the next 12 months. And so I imagine a lot of that feedback, those insights are coming from these calls. And so that kind of leads me to another question that you kind of mentioned. It’s, you know, we know that there’s a timing and a sequence to things. And so what is that timing and sequence of things?
ES (06:32):
Yeah. Yeah. You know, one of the things that we developed and really I think wrapped our minds around very intentionally and specifically even in the past year specifically, are our customer journeys, right? Really identifying the goals that people had. That what, like, this is what I’m running after. And then saying, how do we reverse engineer that goal into a timeline with parameters of knowing when to do the right thing at the right time? And you, you referenced this earlier too, is that so many people do the right thing, but at the wrong time, right? We’re either pushing things too fast when we’re not ready, or we’re maybe moving a little slow when, when we could really aim our sights on something different. And so developing these customer journeys for our members has been, has been really enlightening and eye-opening, and it has allowed them to achieve success so much faster, right? It’s moving towards the what at the right time. And so our customer journeys that we have developed are super specific, right? It’s based on that overarching goal. And like I said, it’s a reverse engineering, right? If this is what you’re running at, what do you need to do in the next 12 months? What do you need to do in the next 24 months, 36 months to reach this objective?
AJV (07:53):
Hmm. So before we talk about what these customer journeys are, I would just like for you to share in your perspective, ’cause you’re so close to the member community. So like Elizabeth, you’re touching hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people every single year who are out there building their personal brands. I would love to know, it’s like as we like, kinda like delve into this customer journey, and as people are reflecting on their 12 months and they’re entering into the next 12 months, what, what would you say are the biggest pain points of like, if we have these journeys and people are supposed to be following , that keyword’s supposed to be like, what, what is happening there? And then on the flip side, what is happening for those people who are breaking through some of those barriers and seeing extreme success? Have you noticed any patterns regardless of journey? And we’re gonna step into that next of what, what is working and what is not working for people building their personal brands?
ES (08:53):
Well, something just super practically speaking is that a lot of our clients and members are feeling still very diluted, right? We have a saying at brand builders group, diluted focus yields, diluted results. It is the biggest pain point by far that our members experience in their brand and business, right? They are wearing too many hats. They’re focused on too many different ideas. They have spread themselves very thin. They’re unable to get traction. And even, and I would say that the people that I talk with that are still struggling, like they are, they’re given the right information. They have an accountability partner, they are still getting really diluted, right? They’re chasing a lot of ideas. They are definitely living in the, the present, but with lots of distraction where we wanna really temper yes, be where you are. ’cause There are ramifications of moving too fast or turning around, but, but living in the present and being distracted by everything, literally enveloping them I see is the biggest detriment to their long-term success.
ES (09:56):
There is still a little bit of diluted focus, right? And, and it’s, it’s shiny objects. It’s running after, oh, I just got this call to potentially run after this big opportunity. And it’s really tempering that back and asking, is this aligned with my overarching goal with that long-term plan that I have created for myself? If it’s not, and it doesn’t follow into my customer journey or trajectory, I need to know when to say no. Right? There are things to say no to and to say yes to. So I think the biggest thing I’m seeing is still that chasing the shiny object that all entrepreneurs struggle with so, so consistently. But that I think is the biggest thing I’m seeing on a consistent basis in my calls.
AJV (10:39):
No, I think that’s so insightful. And it’s interesting because we were on a call yesterday with one of our clients who’s had extreme success this year with her new book Forever Strong. Her name is Dr. Gabrielle Lyon. And I asked her, I said, Hey, if you’ve had an incredible breakthrough year, what would you say is like the number one thing that other people could do to have a breakthrough year next year? And she said, easy become undestructible.
ES (11:09):
Hmm. So
AJV (11:10):
Good. And she was like, that’s the number one thing. She goes, every, like, I encounter this with my clients, with my friends, with business partners. She goes, people are so distracted, right? And she goes, I don’t see shiny objects. I don’t, I don’t see squirrels. She goes, I am undestructible. And I asked her and I said awesome. How do you do that? Right? Mm-Hmm. . So it’s like, how do you do that? Because she also has two young children. I think she has a three-year-old and a four and a half year old. She’s got a three thriving business going through a book launch. She is being booked out to speak. Her husband is a, a surgeon, so it’s not like she’s not susceptible to distraction. And she goes, it’s easy. I filter all my decisions through the message that I feel called to share.
ES (11:56):
Mm.
AJV (11:57):
And I’m like, that’s so good. And she’s, I’ll give you a quick example. And she goes, I am speaking at a healthcare conference this upcoming week. And she goes, personally, I don’t wanna do it. She goes, I don’t wanna be away from home. I don’t wanna travel to this particular location. I, these are not necessarily my target audience for additional revenue. It’s not the speaking engagement fee that I wish I was getting. And she goes, so a lot of people are going, why are you doing it? And she goes, because I’m undestructible and this is a part of my message, getting into the right hands that can to change the world. Hmm. She goes, I filter all of my decisions through what message do I feel called to share in this world. And anything that interferes with that gets a hard no, but anything that fits in that gets a quick yes. Yeah. Even if I don’t feel like doing it.
ES (12:44):
Yeah. Yeah.
AJV (12:45):
That’s, that was really good. Of like, people who are seeing breakthroughs realize it happens because they have removed shiny objects they have removed. And that was the other thing she said that I thought was so good. She goes, I don’t care what anyone else is doing.
ES (13:00):
Mm mm
AJV (13:01):
I don’t, I only care about what I’m doing. Mm. I don’t care what other people are doing. I know there’s other things I could be doing, but what I’m doing is working so I don’t care. And she was like, I’ve learned to not care what the industry says and what other people in my space say, I’m just focused on what I can do, what’s working for me. And I filter all my decisions through the message.
ES (13:24):
Hmm. You know, that’s so good. I, I love hearing stories like that from our clients that understand the, the one thing that they need to focus on. ’cause That truly is, I mean, it’s what we preach. It’s what we teach. It’s, it is what we know works. Right. And it, and it’s needing to be constantly reminded of that. You know, the human brain needs to hear something seven times for it to stick. This is no different. Like, we need to be reminding people that are running at a passion, a purpose, and a calling that they need to stay true to the path. And something else that I have realized in these calls with our members is that it is really hard work. Like it takes a lot from deep within you to stay the course. And I’ve thought about this a lot and, and it comes back to this missional mindset. And I’ve seen this very subtle nuance between people that are successful with the mindset and people that aren’t. And it’s the people that aren’t necessarily as successful as they want to be in their journey to building a personal brand or a business, really treat it like a job or an idea. Mm-Hmm. And a job and an idea you work for and you work at, right. That’s the mentality. But when you are truly viewing it as a mission or a vocation, you make it work.
AJV (14:41):
Mm.
ES (14:42):
And I think that is a big difference, right? You are so called deeply to something that you believe in that purpose, you were just speaking to that you have to make it work. Like it is work and you make it happen. While the, this i this mindset of this is my job, this is the next step for me, it’s an idea I have. You just work at it. Right. You chip away at it and there’s a, there’s a difference there. And it makes a big difference long term in success.
AJV (15:13):
Mm. That’s so good. And I love that. ’cause You know, like one of the questions that I had kind of outlined earlier, which is why do some things feel like work and others don’t? And I think it’s all through the filtering of like, is this missional right? Mm-Hmm. And I love that like, concept of like, is what you’re doing missional or is it just the next step? Is it just another idea of, versus like, is this in your core, what you were put on this earth to do, and are you doing it right? And it’s like one of those things that’s like, you kind of have to get to the level of I can’t not do it. Like, I can’t not put this off anymore. It’s like, it’s just like coming out of me no matter what. And it, it made me think about, you know, so often when, when people come to Brain Builders Group even as, even as podcast listeners for everyone listening, it’s like, there is like this deep down like knowing or calling.
AJV (16:07):
It’s like, man, I, I just feel like I’m, I’m supposed to do something else. Hmm. I, I feel like I I’m called to share something or, or do something more. Or I just feel like there’s something in me that’s not being utilized. Mm-Hmm. Right? It’s like we hear that all the time, which is usually how people come across our path. It’s like, man, I just, I know I’m supposed to be doing something more, something else. And I think a lot of it stems from finding that missional thing of going, like, there is that inkling that calling somewhere within you. But let’s don’t be mistaken. It is work. It is work. It’s not gonna just magically happen because you, you followed your calling. It’s like, no, it’s work a lot. I love that. I think that’s so good. So, all right, so talking about the work, tell us what are these customer journeys that we’ve identified and how do they work?
ES (17:02):
Hmm. Yeah. I, so I’ll talk a little bit about customer journeys, but something really interesting leading up to this idea of, of why did we develop customer journeys? Why were they so important? And I just learned this recently, so it’s really relevant to the conversation today. And there have been studies that have shown that retention, which is what we developed customer journeys for, right? This idea of, we know the journey is a journey, right? It, it’s not a magic pill that you take, or you launched something once and you’re skyrocketed to success. Like anything that’s missional you’re working for Mm-Hmm. Right? You are, you are making it work on this trajectory, but retention actually dips when your culture is really strong, right? And so we have this strong culture at Brain Builders group of all of these members that are, are in it for the same reasons.
ES (17:50):
They’re scrappy. They’re, you know, they’re pulling theirselves up by their bootstraps with this purpose and this mission. So our culture’s strong. And I read this study that says, retention dips the stronger your culture gets if you don’t acclimate people to the mission. And I thought that was so interesting because that is really one of the main reasons we developed these customer journeys was saying, our culture’s really strong. We know people need to stick with us, with brand builders group with what we have created for people for the long haul. Like we believe in it that much. It’s not a get rich quick, it’s not come with us for a couple months and you’re set. We know it’s the long game. We believe in that so much. So when our culture’s that strong, we have to figure out some way to really align and acclimate people to what that looks like for them.
ES (18:37):
Like how are they implicated in that journey? Which is why we developed the customer journeys and we really built them based around what our customers were coming to us for. It’s really pretty simple. Like, not always easy, but very simple of what are the most of our, our clients, our members coming to us to build, right? What is that consistent through line? And so we developed really core four customer journeys. There’s one around authors because Brain Builders Group, we just get a lot of people that wanna put their message into the world in a written word. Like they just, they have this desire to write a book. Sometimes it’s their first, sometimes it’s their second or third. But they really wanna have the alignment. The next is speakers, right? We really work well with people that want to get their message into the world through voice, through the spoken word.
ES (19:27):
So those are kind of two of our really granular customer journeys of people really wanting to reach that elevated status of getting a book into as many hands as possible and getting on big stages to spread their, their word and their mission. And the other two are lead generation, right? And so this, what, what is that? It’s for mostly all of our professional services people, people that are in insurance, real estate. There’s a replicable model with lots of potential buyers, right? It’s how do you separate yourself in the market, right? We don’t build BA businesses based around what you do. We base a a brand around who you are. And that’s the differentiator. And I would say a lot of our clients fall into lead generation. ’cause Everyone needs leads no matter what you’re doing. If you own your business, if you’re working underneath a company at a high level, and then we have new revenue streams, right? This is for the person that comes into Brand Builders group saying, I have an idea and I wanna build it out for the first time. I’m gonna create a new business model, a new revenue stream that I wanna put into the world. So those are the four typical customer journeys we see our clients really align with and fall seamlessly into.
AJV (20:43):
No, I, you know, I think that’s one of the things that you said that’s so insightful is like categorically speaking, like this is roughly like the four main areas of what people come to us for. And as I sit and reflect over the last five years, you know, and, you know, as a part of like this joint venture and creating these, like, one of the things that I was really curious about, like to see in my own brain is well, why, like, why is it those types of people that gravitate towards brand builders group rather through social media or the podcast or as paying clients? And we have this saying at Brand Builders Group, which is, you are always most well positioned to serve the person you once were. I’m gonna pause, let that sink in for all of you listening, that you are always most well positioned to serve the person you once were or currently are.
AJV (21:41):
And as like it was, I don’t think it was coincidence. I don’t think it’s irony that the majority of the people that have found their way to us are actually who we are as people at Brand Builders Group, right? It’s like, we are speakers, we are authors, we are people who at the, at the core, every single person in our company if they know it or not, they are salespeople. Mm-Hmm. , right? It doesn’t matter what you’re doing. If you’re a strategist, you’re in customer care, you’re in member experience, you’re in operations like you’re a salesperson, right? You’re selling ideas, you’re selling employee retention, you’re selling services. But like that is lead generation. And then the new be the new revenue stream. It’s like, well that’s kind of like what we do every day, . It’s like there’s these, these little known fact we’re just like a bunch of little idea factories at Brand Builders group.
AJV (22:34):
We have to learn the discipline of saying no more often than not. But I think it’s like, it’s one of those things that it’s like, I bet if all of you who are listening just paused and said, if I take a really good hard look at the people that I’m serving in my current business, whether it was on purpose or on accident, I bet you would find some really common themes of characteristics of who you once were and who you are. Mm. And if you put a little bit more intentionality into actually going after those people, because you know them inherently because you are them I bet your work would be more enjoyable, more missional a little easier, probably even a little simpler. Mm-Hmm. . And I just think like, in addition to like, this is just naturally who our people wanted, I think there was some bit of reflection of their naturally coming because that is who we all are. And so we just naturally gravitate and understand the nuances, which kind of makes our job, again, simpler. Not always easier, but it makes it simpler.
ES (23:41):
Yeah, for sure. And I think anyone thinking through creating customer journeys for their own brand and business need to take that into account. You never wanna teach someone to do something you’ve never done yourself. I mean that is I think a recipe for disaster long term. Like, you know, we always wanna be learning at, always learning, but always exceeding who we’re teaching, right? In that area. And I think you brought up such a good point that we are naturally attracting these members because we have done what they want to do so exceptionally well.
AJV (24:16):
Now that we’ve talked about the journey, so there’s an author journey, a speaker journey a journey for generating new leads, lead generation, and then a journey for that person who wants to create a brand new revenue stream which is like starting a brand new business. But we really haven’t talked about what is a journey? Like what is this journey like, tell me where am I going? So tell us like what is a customer journey, at least through the lens of Brand builders group. Yes.
ES (24:45):
So in any type of membership and Brand Builders group is a very robust membership. So if you are a brand or a business that has something like this where you have members paying you for information application, you want them to leverage your membership, like you have spent time, effort, and energy creating courses, creating trainings, creating touchpoints in real life time workshops, there’s so many facets of your membership and what leads to retention utilization, right? We want people taking us up on what we have to offer. And I think what we realized was we have so many great things to offer that people were going, what do we do? Where do we start? Should we take this course or not? It’s all so good. And people were spreading themselves thin, even with our incredible content, you know, it was just so good. They wanted to consume it all.
ES (25:36):
And we had to really scale back and say a customer journey really increases, increases utilization in the specific areas of which these members want to grow, right? And so when you identify goals, say you say, I wanna be a paid keynote speaker and get my first paid gig in the next six months, nine months a year, great. That’s a great goal to have. Let’s reverse engineer it. If that is your long-term primary focus to be a paid keynote speaker, then you’re gonna be on the speaker journey. Like that’s a no-brainer. That is your long-term focus. So what does that mean? That means we are gonna create year by year, quarter by quarter exactly what you should be consuming, engaging with people. You should be meeting workshops you need to be attending and exactly what you need to be doing at those workshops to reach that goal.
ES (26:28):
Right? It’s this reverse engineering, but it’s super hyper-specific because we don’t want you in the first three months to go take a podcast course. It’s there, it’s fun, it kind of looks shiny. But do you need that to reach your overarching goal right now? Probably not. It’s going back to doing the right thing at the right time. And so we have created a three year journey for our clients to really look at a, this three years in full of what are the milestones I need to be reaching and attending and using in order to get to where I want to go. So it’s just a real big reverse engineering of a goal.
AJV (27:11):
Yeah, I know. I love that. And I think I think it would be helpful for people to go, ’cause I know that some people are going three years. What? Oh, God’s green Nerf, I’m not gonna be doing for three years. What? So I do think it’s worth talking about that, but also I think it’s worth talking about. It’s like, I think that people often, you know, they underestimate what can be done over the course of say, 10 years, but they severely overestimate what can be done in the course of one year. And I could even say people underestimate what can happen in a year, but they overestimate what can be accomplished in three months. Mm-Hmm. . And so why, why would you say that the quarter, like the 90 day sprints are important when you’re looking at focus, which is what this is, is we’re providing a benchmarked focus every 90 days. So why 90 days or why three years?
ES (28:10):
Yep. So I, when I explain and when I show the entire customer journey for each, you know, area of focus and I showed three years, I always, ’cause I know anyone looking at that goes and it’s mostly, I want that to happen faster. Like, why can’t this happen faster? ? And I think we live in a world where we want really quick wins and quick wins aren’t bad. They just have to be intentionally quick. Right? Like you can acquire a ton of quick wins and get nowhere. You really can. And so we live in this society though that says, do this in 20 days and you’re gonna have a million followers. And I think we understand and we value the long game, right? But when you look at three years, it’s actually so much shorter in retrospect than even what you took to build your personal brand or Rory.
ES (28:58):
And, and it’s again, learning from people who have been there and done that, right? Rory has, and you have built these personal brands and it has taken decades. Decades, right? To break through what we call she hands wall to get on the other side where people are approaching you and, and grabbing from you and wanting to hire you and pay you the highest fees that they can. And we have really shortened that learning curve. I mean, if you look at 10 years or 15 down to three, it’s incredible. But we also tell people, and I’m really quick to do this. Look, you can go as fast as you can or as slow as you have to, which is something that Brand Builders Group teaches our clients. If you want to move faster and you have the capacity and you have a team behind you and you’ve got all of these things that are really aligning, you can potentially do this faster than three years.
ES (29:45):
However, if you’ve got a full-time job and all these different areas of focus, and this is just something on the side that you’re building long-term, you can take five years, you can take eight, really, like we are here to temper that for you. But the most important part in all of that timeline is staying hyper-focused in those 90 day sprints. A lot can be done in a quarter, like we think about quarters really naturally in the business world. And thinking through how can we take our big overarching goal and create subset goals within quarters that makes it digestible and makes it doable. And not only both of those things, it makes it done well. Mm. Which at the end of the day is what we really want for people because well equals longevity.
AJV (30:30):
Mm. I think that is so good. And I think that thing too that you just said, it’s like it also ensures that you do it well. Right? It’s like if you’re not going to do it, well, why are we doing it? Because this is missional work that is like, that’s what we’re here for. And you know, one of the things that I was just thinking to myself as you were talking is it’s like it took us the better part of 20 years to figure out how other people could do it in three we, we might be slower than others, but it took a long time to go. Why is it taking so long? Like, there’s gotta be a better way. There’s got to be a simpler way to learn these things and to figure out these things. And in addition to 20 years of doing it and trying to figure out the path at Brand Builders Group, it has been five years of fine tuning and streamlining to not only go, how do we do it in a more succinct fashion, but how do we ensure that the order is correct? Right. And I think that’s what you said. It’s like, you know, you can go faster, you can do multiple things, but why? Right. Because that’s not gonna ensure that you do it. Well, that’s back to shiny object syndrome. And I do think there is a, a, a giant lesson in patience in all of this, of going, sometimes it’s just not meant to be hurried.
ES (32:01):
Yep.
AJV (32:01):
It’s just not meant to be rushed. Mm-Hmm. . And when you’re doing this level of internal work as well as external work, it needs to sit and it, it needs to settle and you have to have time to process it, not check a box and move on. And I do think there is a, an era and an aura of speed and urgency due to technology and AI and all the other things in life distractions. But I think there is a, an essence of slow down Mm-Hmm. slow down and it’s like slow down to speed up. And it’s like once you get that infrastructure in place, it’s amazing if you spend three years building the infrastructure, how quickly it can grow after three years. And it’s like we’ve seen the fruits of those labors and our clients and in, in our own company as you know. And I think that so many of us, we wanna hurry to the next thing that we forget. We’re learning so much in the process. So don’t rush the learning, don’t rush the process. Let the process be what the process is. ’cause You’re gonna come out on the, on the other end in a much better place. Better
ES (33:12):
End. Yeah.
AJV (33:13):
Yeah. I love that. Okay. So next question I have for you is, I think it, and this would just be like in your opinion, right? In your opinion, what, what do you think people need to know that are listening for them to go, okay, I may not be working with Brand Builders Group as a client, but I listen to the podcast, I’m absorbing free information. So as a non-client, how, how do I know what journey I’m on? Mm-Hmm. Like how would you say that anyone who is listening and ’cause I think a lot of people even in our own community have selected the wrong journey. So it happens even in a, a client relationship, but how do people determine, Hmm, what is the journey that I should be on to pursue this missional work that I feel called to?
ES (34:02):
Hmm. That’s a really good question. And I would echo the fact that yes, a lot of people really gravitate towards one particular journey. And I’ll share which one that is and why that reason is in my own opinion is a lot of people gravitate towards new revenue stream. And I think we look at those clients a majority. I mean, when you look at our number of clients that have said and declared a journey, it’s like declaring a major in college, right? When they’ve declared their journey, I think it’s about 50 50 if not, you know, 60 40. A lot of our clients are picking new revenue stream. And it’s so interesting to me because you, we talked about this earlier, a new revenue stream is like building a brand new business. And I don’t know if any of the listeners out there have ever built a business.
ES (34:48):
It is exceptionally hard. When you look at a three year journey and you’re building a brand new business, it’s gonna take longer than that. I can almost guarantee you there are so many things to think about. It’s a slower, you know, revenue stream that’s coming in. You have to have certain things in place to make that work in an efficient and effective way. But a lot of people think, well, I’m building a personal brand and so that means I’m starting a new revenue stream. And that is usually, typically not the case. And so what we often ask people to do is to step back and we an exercise we walk our members through called the Golden Grid. Even before that, like a revenue streams assessment. Like that’s kind of the first iteration of saying, what are all the things that you’re doing right now that are making money?
ES (35:36):
Could be making $10 a month, could be making a hundred thousand dollars a month. I don’t care. I want you to list them all out, right? And then I want you to tell me how much time you’re spending on all of these things. And then I want you to tell me how stressful they are on a scale of one to five. And then I want you to tell me how much future potential these things have on a scale of one to five. It seems so simple and it is, but looking at that document and saying, oh man, there are things on here that I’m doing that have no future potential and bring me excessive amounts of stress. It really helps you identify opportunities and things that you need to get rid of. And so once you’re starting to look at that, you might think to yourself, huh, like, I’m speaking a lot for free and I really love it and I’ve got like a really great opportunity to grow that piece of my business.
ES (36:23):
You know, I can create courses or I can, you know, start a podcast. I like to think of it as majoring in minoring, like I’m majoring in keynote speaking because it brings me a lot of joy. I don’t have to spend a ton of time on it. It could potentially bring me a lot of money in. And it’s not a high stress for me. Like the I’m already doing it. Like I should, I should continue to roll in that direction. Doesn’t mean I can’t create a course, doesn’t mean I can’t start a podcast. Those are just things that are not taking all of my time, effort, and energy. I don’t need to create something new. And same for lead generation. Like most people should focus on lead gen. They already are driving people to something naturally. I think 90% of our clients either are driving them to something that already exists, something they’ve built, or to their business that currently already exists. Why are we not pumping wind into our biggest billowing sail? Why is it always our natural inclination to hoist another sail up and hope that wind goes in that direction?
AJV (37:21):
So true. So true. Right?
ES (37:23):
Right. And so it’s just thinking through, like taking a big assessment of what we’re already doing, but knowing that things are already working for us. Like there is typically something already in the mix and how can we double down on that and build something then start something totally new from scratch. So I think it’s just this mindset thing and really identifying and taking inventory of, of and level setting of where we are.
AJV (37:48):
No, I think that’s really insightful. And you said something that I kind of wanna like come back to, which is people naturally associate building a personal brand with starting some sort of new revenue stream. And that’s not what a personal brand is. And I think people are associating a personal brand with a business model
ES (38:09):
That’s so good,
AJV (38:10):
Right? Mm-Hmm. and a personal brand is not a business, it’s not what you do, it’s not what makes you money. A personal brand is who you are. It, you know, it’s like, and that extends universally over all things you do. Not a thing you do. And I think that kind of comes back to like one of our core beliefs that brand builders group, which is if you’re asking do I need a personal brand, you’re asking the wrong question because you already have a personal brand, you just may not know it. Right? Mm-Hmm. It’s like we all have a personal brand. ’cause In our world that is just it’s the formalization, digitization and monetization of your reputation. Mm-Hmm. Right? But we all have a reputation. Some of us, like the one we have, some of us don’t even know the one we have , right?
AJV (38:59):
But it’s like we all have a reputation, right? If you just sit, she’s sitting there and ask yourself, what do people think of when they think of me? That’s your reputation. And that in is in the essence is also your public personal brand. The art of personal branding is putting intention behind it of going, I can influence this by what I talk about, my research, where I spend my time, what I, I post about what I do, where I put my money, how I organize my calendar. It’s like I actually can influence how others view me and what they associate with by where I choose to spend my time, energy, money and resources. Mm-Hmm. . Like, you get to do that. But that takes time, effort, energy, resources and attention, which is the art of personal branding. And I think that is where people get confused and they come and they go, okay, I’m ready to build my personal brand.
AJV (39:58):
I’m gonna launch X, Y, and Z. And it’s like, why? Why are you doing that? You don’t have to do that. You don’t actually need to do that. In fact, you should not do that. Instead, it’s like, we need to put fuel and ammunition behind what you already have. Right? Right. How do we help more people learn about what you’re doing? Now if you don’t have anything, well then of course that makes sense. But I think that is a great distinction that you made. It’s like people get caught up with, oh, I’m building my brand so I have to start something new. And that’s just not true.
ES (40:33):
It is not true. And I would say the other thing is that people in that same vein will often say, gosh, I need to put my personal brand on hold ’cause I really need to pay attention to my business. And that blows my mind all the time. I’m like, what do you mean? Like your personal brand is literally your business. Like you are driving people to your business. Because we know at the end of the day, people don’t do business with products, services, marketing companies. People do business with people, right? And so when people always say, gosh, I need to take time to really focus on my business. I’m like, what do you mean? Like, you are doing that right now and you’re doing it more successfully than most everyone around you by building a personal brand that builds trust. And so that, that is a big, like external facet of what you’re talking about. Now.
AJV (41:24):
Oh my gosh, you just reminded me of and I’ve heard this quote a hundred times, but Rory and I just did a weekend long goal planning session for the next 12 months of our life, and it got us thinking of like, how many people actually take two days of every year and plan what the next year’s gonna look like? And he reminded me of this quote that we heard when we were engaged and our, you know, marital counselors that we had leading up to our wedding said, I just want you to remember this and never forget it, is that most people spend more time planning their wedding than they do their marriage . And most people spend more time planning their annual vacation than they do their life. Hmm. So what you’re doing right now is putting intention into your marriage, and I would encourage that your marriage be more important that your and than your wedding and your life be more important than your vacation.
AJV (42:19):
And that stuck with us so clearly. And so ever since then, we’ve done these two days just me and him for a weekend of going, what do we want our family to look like? And what do we want our business to look like? And what do you know? What does my my faith walk look like? And mm-Hmm, as you were talking, it made me think it’s like there’s a great parallel to that with what you just said, is that people spend more time working on their business than they do on what I would call their reputation, which is with you for a lifetime.
AJV (42:50):
It’s with you for a lifetime. And it’s like, do we ever spend time potentially everyone listening on the wrong things? You know, like, do we I do. I know, I do. Sure. And I think it’s one of those things of going, it’s not an either or, it’s an and, but by working on yourself, you’re always working on your business. And by working on your dreams and your goals and finding something that fills your cup it impacts everyone around you. Positively. Generational change comes from I have found my purpose. I am living into my work. Right? My work has become my ministry, and it’s then it doesn’t feel like work anymore. Hmm. And so if you’re gonna working on my business, maybe the question should be, is that what I really should be working on? Right.
ES (43:38):
So good. Really good. I love that.
AJV (43:40):
All right, Elizabeth. If people are asking themselves a question of, okay, okay, well if I do have this personal brand , maybe I should, maybe I should do something about it. Where should people go to learn more about Brain Builders Group? And specifically it’s like, if, if you heard something that resonates today about, man, I do have a calling to speak on stages one day, or I’ll publisher book or, you know, I do wanna figure out how to more organically generate leads for my business based on who I am and who I wanna work with. Or maybe I, I am in this unique stage where it’s like, it’s it’s time to expand my revenue stream and add something. Where should people go to learn about? That’s
ES (44:17):
A great question. If you go to free brand call.com, you can put in a request for what we call a brand strategy call. These are complimentary, they’re about an hour long. And our strategist will really help identify these opportunities for you. They’ll learn a little bit about your goals and what you’re looking to do with a personal brand. They’ll answer some questions around that, and they will do it all through the lens of the customer journeys we talked about. So your customer journey conversation can start on one of these complimentary free brand calls with our team. So it’s free brand call.com.
AJV (44:54):
I love that. And if Elizabeth, if people wanna connect with you your awesome self, where should they go to connect with you?
ES (45:02):
Yes. Well, you can connect with me on LinkedIn, Elizabeth Stevens with a pH. I always have to differentiate that I’m married into a name, which is so easy, but I have to, I have to tell people how it’s spelled. Or you can follow me on Instagram. It’s at EAS 2 8 8 3. You’re gonna see a lot of my, my work life and my home life and all of the fun things that happen there. But I would love for you to follow me both places.
AJV (45:27):
Elizabeth, thank you so much for joining in as today. And for those of you who dunno, Elizabeth actually was a part of our team prior to starting Build Brand Builders group. She’s been a part of the founding team and an integral part of every single move, pivot, shake up, shake down that we’ve had since we launched this. And we’re so honored that you are the face of our community. We love you. We’re so grateful for you. Thank you for being on today. And for everyone else, stay tuned for the recap episode, which will be coming up next. We’ll see you next time

Ep 451: 5 Keys to Using Customer Experience as a Differentiator | Will Guidara Episode Recap

RV (00:03):
Well, I have done hundreds of podcast interviews over the years, and without a doubt, this is one of my all time favorite podcast interviews. Maybe, maybe my number one all time favorite was this interview I did with Will Guidara on his book and the concept of Unreasonable Hospitality. I love it so much. I agree with it. I believe in it. I underscore it. I, I I, I would add exclamation points to everything he said and say, this is what we want to be. This is what I want to be a student of. This is not only how I want people to think of Brand Builders Group when they do business with us and they talk about us. This is what I want people to think about us as people. And so we’re gonna talk about, I’m gonna share with you here in my, my own little recap of five keys to using customer experience as a differentiator and as a competitive advantage.
RV (01:05):
So this is important, right? Because if you, if you go back, go listen to this interview. If, I mean, if there’s one that you go back and listen to, go back and listen to this interview with Will, it is so good. But if you, if you go, okay, what do we do at Brand Builders Group? Part of what we do is we help people find their uniqueness so that they can exploit it in the service of others, right? That’s a huge part of what we do. That’s based on a quote that I learned from a gentleman named Larry Wingett. Well, finding your uniqueness, one of the benefits of that, one of the byproducts of it is that you separate yourself from all the other people who do something similar to what you do. And here, this, this story Will’s story and his content and his expertise is so relevant because he’s talking about what we typically teach in terms of how to differentiate yourself from the market is basically through your content and through your delivery and through your own stories.
RV (02:06):
But what he’s talking about is separating yourself from everyone through customer experience, meaning by changing the way that your customers interact with you, and more specifically the way that you interact with them, you can make them feel a certain way. And by doing that, that is going to separate you from everybody else that they could refer or do business with, or, you know, come back and, and be a repeat customer of. And so here’s five keys to doing this, and these mostly come directly from Will. So the first thing that he said that really hit me as I went back and reviewed this interview was again, if you, if you haven’t listened to it, go listen to it. But he was the co-owner of 11 Madison Park. So this is this very high end restaurant in New York, but he wanted to be the best restaurant in the world. And what he said was,
RV (02:58):
I decided that we weren’t going to compete by trying to be the best product in the world, meaning we weren’t gonna try to have the best food in the world necessarily. They knew they needed to have world-class food, but he picked a different area of the business customer experience. And he said, I wanted to compete on experience. The way that Will said it was, he didn’t wanna be unreasonable in the product, but he wanted to be unreasonable in how they treated people. And he defined it as unreasonable hospitality is targeting and zeroing in on the human desire for people to feel seen, cared for, and welcome. What a brilliant observation and what an intelligent insight to go. You can compete not only on, on what you do, but how you do it. That’s what customer experience is all about. It’s not just what you do.
RV (04:01):
It’s one thing to be innovative in what you do, which is its own separate conversation and also worth aspiring to. But there’s this whole other conversation, which I think is so often ignored, which is how you do it, how you do what you do, not just the expertise in, in the case of personal brands. This isn’t just about you becoming well known. And it’s not just about you producing insights that are better or more powerful or more poignant, or more sharp or more clear or more actionable than the other people who are in your space. It’s about your customers being made to feel a certain way as they encounter you, as they interact with you, as they exchange commerce with you, as they engage with your, your content or your events, or your products or your services. How do you make your customers feel? And that, to me is amazing to go.
RV (04:58):
I mean, there’s perhaps no more commoditized you know, space in the world than restaurants, right? People who serve food. There’s lots and lots of competition people who do that. So to be the number one restaurant in the world by choosing to not compete on the food now, now, amazing food was like the price of admission, right? So that had to be there. But to find this other point I thought was, was extremely, extremely powerful from a tactical standpoint. So that’s point number one, right? Is, is to be exceptional at making people feel seen, cared, and welcome. That’s how you, that’s the first key to using customer experience as a different, as a differentiator, be exceptional at making people feel seen, cared for. And welcome. Number two is to isolate all of the customer touchpoints, to audit all of your customer touchpoint.
RV (05:55):
So this is the tactical component of how to do this is go through you, your team and audit, and we’re gonna have our team do this at Brand Builders Group like this for us. This is where we’re at. This is perfect for where we’re at is going, how do we get to the next level, right? So part of it is being brilliant at the basics, mastering the fundamentals. Those have to be in place. Once you have those things, you go, okay, how do we go next level? This is, it is go, we need to audit. We need to, meaning, we need to think about, we need to document, we need to transcribe every touchpoint our customers have with us. And this isn’t that. You could do this in your marketing as well, but what I took from this interview from Will specifically is it’s actually once they become a customer, too often personal brands are overly consumed and worried about just getting new customers, attracting new customers, growing their reach, they’re following, signing up new people, and then they work so hard to bring this person in.
RV (06:51):
They make the sale, and then it’s like they basically forget about ’em. And it, they just kinda like, you know, the, it’s just fumes when it comes to delivering to their customers. And so they’re always having to constantly chase new customers and new business because they do such a crappy job of taking care of their past customers and their existing customers. And instead of over-delivering with their existing customers and letting their customers become their sales force to bring them new customers, they’re just focused on new business, then they, they make the sale and they kind of like deliver C minus work with their existing customers. And so they have to do the hard work of finding new customers versus letting their past customers become their sales force. Well, so how do you do that? You have to audit every touchpoint that you have with your past customers.
RV (07:39):
And the way that Will said it was, he said, you want to isolate them and then elevate them. Meaning, okay, let’s look at the list of every single interaction, communication touchpoint we have with a customer, and let’s figure out some of the ones that are, you know, routinely mundane and add creativity to them. So this is really a two-part process, right? It’s audit the steps, and then it is figure out how do we, how do you add creativity to certain ones? And you maybe can’t do all of them, but maybe you can do one or two or three. But to go, where can we take the routine, boring, monotonous experience that customers are used to having in their onboarding or in receiving their, you know, their invoice or in their welcome or, or maybe in their cancellation, or maybe it, it’s in their, their their you know, the first email they get or whatever, whatever it is, and going, how can we add creativity to this moment to make this moment magical? Creativity is what makes the moment magical. And thoughtfulness is what makes this magical. So that is
RV (08:55):
The second key to using customer experience as a differentiate differentiator, is to audit each touchpoint you have with your customers and add creativity where you can. Number three is to be audacious in your ambition, but patient in your pursuit. I loved that quote right from Will Gera in our interview together. And by the way, if you can’t tell, like, I’m so convicted on this, we are, we are sending this interview out to our entire, all of our employees at Brand Builders Group, right? We have dozens employees. This will be a mandatory listen for employees. They will be required to carve time out of their daily work schedule to listen to this interview as a condition of their employment here, because this is a place where we can do a better job. And what Will says is to be add audacious in your ambition, which is to basically, you know, set a high bar, but be patient in your pursuit.
RV (09:56):
And I think that is a key, a key here is to go, okay, I wanna have high goals and I wanna reach for, you know, something that feels maybe impossible or something that’s gonna stretch us, something that’s gonna push us, push us to our limits, and yet I’m gonna allow myself the grace of getting there slowly. I’m gonna, I’m gonna, I’m gonna focus more on consistency than intensity. That’s one of my mantras from Take the Stairs, that consistency is greater than intensity. And so he’s just applying that same principle to the idea of customer experience to go, okay, one day we wanna be 11 Madison Park, right? Like, one day we wanna be Nordstrom, one day we wanna be, you know, whoever pick your, pick your, your brand that has incredible customer experience right? Now, we might not be able to get there, but let’s choose one touch point with our customers where we can really, really exceed their expectations, where we can surprise them, where we can knock their socks off, right?
RV (10:55):
Where we can really blow it outta the water by simply over-delivering in a very unexpected way on something that is normally trivial and mundane. So be audacious in your ambition, but be patient in your pursuit. Be slow and, and forgiving if it takes time to achieve this, right? You don’t do this overnight. It takes years and, and, and to transform your culture, right? Whether it’s your own personal mentality of service and hospitality, or if it’s, especially if you have a small team or a big team or a huge company, right? It’s gonna take time to transform the culture. And, and, and so you can’t do this overnight. You have to be patient in your pursuit. So I love that. The fourth thing is another principle that I believe in and share a value here with Will. Now, the way that Will said it is one size fits one, one size fits one rather than one size fits all.
RV (11:58):
So this is a key. This is, this is the next key. This is the fourth key to using customer experience as a differentiator. One size fits one. What does he mean by that? He means do something for your customer that is unique to them. Go out of your way to do something for them that is so hyper customized that they know it was only for them. It had to be just for them. It, it’s not something that you can standardize. Although you could maybe standardize the practice. It’s, it’s got to be something specific to them. And I’ll give you an example of this is a place where our team did a great job of this one of our early clients, that Brand Builders group was a gentleman named Kiir Weer, and Kiir was a client of ours for a couple years.
RV (12:47):
And we love Kiir and we, we, we loved working with him. And, and his story was, you know, he has this amazing story a heartbreaking in some ways that, you know, he had a boating accident, he was driving and he went to prison after one of his friends died in a boating accident when, when he was driving. And so when he got out of prison, he couldn’t get a job and he couldn’t get into any you know, like graduate schools. And so then you know, it goes on and years later, he becomes very, very successful and very wealthy. And he got into the graduate school of his dreams, and then he happened to graduate while he was a brand builders group client. And that was a big dream for him that he had sent many years in advance.
RV (13:33):
And our team noticed that. And we sent him a sweatshirt from that university, right? And it was just a special moment for him. He was super grateful because what, because why? He felt seen, he felt heard, he felt cared about. He felt like more than a customer, because he is that he, he he is that to us. He, he’s someone that we, he was one of our very first customers, right? Brand builder. He was one of the very first people who ever took a chance on brand builders group. And so he meant means a lot to us, meant a lot to us. And so we took a, a moment and some budget and some time to pay attention, notice this opportunity, and then to invest those dollars, a few dollars to do something for one of our original clients to make them feel special. That was transformational. We can’t operationalize that for everybody. Not all of our clients are, you know, have that story. Not all of them are graduating, you know, from, from the college of their dreams or the University of their dreams while they’re an active client of ours. So we can’t just operationalize that. And, and that’s the point, right? That’s the point that Will is making, is that one size fits one. The way that that we say it around here is the more specific,
RV (14:50):
The more terrific. If you wanna fe make somebody feel cared about, the more specific, the more terrific. It’s gotta be specific to their circumstance, specific to their timing, specific to, to their unique tastes and preferences. It’s not wrong to send everyone a gift on Christmas. But what’s more powerful is, like in this example of Keir or in the Dirty Water dog , you, you’ve gotta listen to Will Guerra’s dirty water dog story in the, in the interview, right? That dirty water dog story is a perfect example. I, if he served a, a hotdog, a New York City Street hotdog to every one of his customers, it would be a waste of time and it wouldn’t be impactful. But in, in that moment to that one person, it was so powerful, even though it literally cost like $2, it was so powerful. So the more specific, the more terrific one size fits one.
RV (15:46):
John de Julius is another past interview that we had here on this show. And, and he has a, his, his concept here is called Secret Service, and he’s been someone that’s been transformational in our career. Go, that’s another interview you should go back and listen to on this same topic, but the more specific, the more terrific Do something unique to that person is gonna be more powerful than doing the same thing for everybody at the same time. Really, really powerful. But the last thing, okay, so the fifth key to using customer experience as a differentiator is my favorite thing that Will said in the entire interview. And this was about creating an unreasonable hospitality culture. And he said this about his team. He said, our goal wasn’t just to inspire our people to be better at their job. Our goal was to inspire our people to be better human beings.
RV (16:50):
Our goal wasn’t just to inspire our people to be better at their job. Our goal was to inspire our people to be better human beings. Meaning to be better at seeing others, caring for others, making others feel welcome. That’s what hospitality is about. That requires you to be a better human. It requires you to be less self-centered and more service centered, less focused on you, and more, more focused on them. In order to have this moment of unreasonable hospitality, and, and in order to create this magical moment, you first have to be outside of yourself enough to be paying attention and listening. Not not just hearing what they’re saying, but listening for an opportunity to go there it is. Here is a, in this little moment, this, this little opportunity that has shown up that I can go a little bit out my way to make this person feel so special.
RV (17:47):
That’s what Unreasonable Hospitality is all about. And you can do that with a small budget. You can do that with a small team. You can do it with a, with a big budget and a big team. You, you know, will, I asked him that question and he said, well, you know, just the level of hospitality should probably match in some way the size of the bill. Right? And otherwise it’s not gonna be totally sustainable, but go over the top to do it. It’s not the price of the gift that matters, it’s the level of thoughtfulness. It’s the level of customization. It’s the hyper-specific nature of what you’re doing. That’s what makes people feel special. And this is how you do amazing customer experience. This is how you do amazing employee experience. And as a, as a husband and a family man, I can tell you guys, listen up.
RV (18:40):
This is, this is what, this is something I think a AJ does. An amazing job of this for me and for our boys, is she does things like that to make us feel special all the time. Men, we probably need to work a little harder at doing that for our kids and for our spouses, right? And, and for our, you know, the people who are important to us in our life is recognize these moments, these opportunities to do something magical for somebody else. It’s, it’s really, really transformational for them. So that’s what Unreasonable Hospitality is all about. Those are five keys to using customer experience as a different, a differentiator. Be excellent at making people feel seen, cared for, and welcome. Audit the touch points, and then add cre, add creativity. Be audacious in your ambition, but pa patient in your pursuit. Remember the more specific, the more terrific and inspire your people, not just to be better at their job, but to be better at being human beings. I loved it. I’m so inspired. Get the book on Reasonable hospitality. Go listen to the interview, share this recap. Share the interview with somebody who you know, who will appreciate it, and show some love to Will Guera online. If you get a chance, let him know that you heard him right here on the Influential Personal Brand Podcast. We’ll catch you next time.

Ep 450: Unreasonable Hospitality with Will Guidara

RV (00:01):
Well, I’m honored to introduce you to someone who I love to hate because I am so jealous of this man and so inspired by him. Will Guera is the author of a book called Unreasonable Hospitality, which is an incredible book, and it’s doing something that we all aspire to do, which is to sell thousands and thousands of units every single week without knowing how , and whenever I ask, whenever I ask an author, I go, how are you selling books week in and week out? The one answer I hate to hear is, I don’t know. I have no idea. and will, will came to this private bestselling author meetup that Donald Miller and I and a couple other buddies hosted this summer. And when the Will’s name got thrown out about being invited to this, I was like, absolutely. ’cause I’ve been tracking this book Unreasonable Hospitality for years over, you know, a couple years now.
RV (01:02):
But before he was an author, will was the co-owner of 11 Madison Park. And if you are a foodie, you know exactly what I’m talking about. So this is a restaurant one of was actually named in 2017, number one on the list of the world’s 50 best restaurants. It earned three Michelin stars while it was under, his leadership had four stars from the New York Times. And that was why Will was, you know, handling and managing the hospitality there. The co-owner of that restaurant. So not an easy place to get a reservation at, from what I understand. I had to research it. I’m not even hoity-toity enough to have been invited to this restaurant or even know about it. So that shows you like the, the level of people that get in there. But he also hosts a conference called the Welcome Conference, which is also something that just has so much street cred.
RV (01:57):
It’s so much legit, like so many legit people I know talk about this conference. So it’s an, it’s an annual hospitality symposium. It brings together, you know, just amazing people from all different kind of walks of life who are interested in hospitality to sort of share ideas and, and, and best practices. But will also is a graduate of the Hospitality School at Cornell University. He has co-authored four cookbooks, was named one of Crane’s Business 40 under 40. He’s the recipient of the Wall Street Journal magazine’s Innovator Award. And turns out, even though I don’t like him, it turns out he’s hard to not, like he’s an amazing guy. We’ve gotten to know each other a little bit. And my team, here’s the other thing, true story. My team was talking about this book before I ever met Will, and that’s how I know an author is really making dent a dent in the world. So, bro, welcome to the show, man. It’s so great to have you .
WG (02:55):
Well, I, I just wanna say that while you may love to hate me, I just love to love you, my friend , and, and I’m happy that we met however many months ago that was. And you know, what, what I think is so cool is when, when a couple people gather together other people, and in that gathering, like with intention and creativity, create the connection or the conditions for connection, it’s pretty remarkable the relationships that can come out of it. I mean, we were together for, I don’t know, 36 hours total, including when everyone was sleeping. And, and the relationships that came outta that for me are, are nothing short of extraordinary because you guys were so good at leading with vulnerability which begot vulnerability in return. And, and I think it was a lot of people that were excited to be there, but invariably when new people show up in a room, their walls are up to some extent. And you all did such a good job of getting people to lower their guards quickly enough that real relationships could be built. And that’s the only time we’ve seen each other in person. We’ve seen each other on the screen a bunch of times since. But I, I feel much closer to you than the number of hours I’ve known you should normally merit. And so it’s a pleasure to be here. I’m excited to spend some time together.
RV (04:28):
Well, thanks brother. And I, and I feel that’s like, I mean, that’s kind of the, in many ways the message of your book, you know, unreasonable Hospitality is like you create these bonds so quickly with people. So just explain, start at the beginning. Explain what’s the premise of Unreasonable Hospitality? What is it? How did you come up with it? And like, before we get to how to apply it, just define it for me.
WG (04:56):
Yeah. So how it kind of came to pass was I was at that restaurant 11 medicine park, and in 2006 I got there and the restaurant was, was fine. It was a mediocre restaurant served delicious food, but it was not all that significant in its technique or its ingredients and all that. The service was very friendly, but not all that precise. But the dining room, man, anyone listening to this who has never seen a picture of the dining room at the Madison Park, you should look it up. It’s truly one of the most beautiful in the world. And so I was brought in as a part of a team that was charged with elevating the restaurant experience to live up to the room itself. And we initially did that, at least we started out doing that by focusing on excellence, right? I think anyone who’s ever sold anything, whether it’s a product or an experience, when you want to make it better, you focus relentlessly on the product itself, on how to make it as good as it can possibly be focused on training and sourcing and techniques and education and discipline and all that stuff.
WG (06:06):
Got fancier plates and silverware and glassware and, you know and it started working pretty quickly. I mean, listen, like anytime you’re trying to do anything of consequence, you need to be pretty audacious and your ambition, but patient in your pursuit. And we were, we were pushing hard over a number of years, but in the grand scheme of life, it wasn’t that long before we went from two stars in the New York Times to three Stars and then to four stars and zero Michelin stars to three Michelin stars. And both of those rating systems, those represent the most stars you can get. But there was this one list that we really wanted to be on, and just my nature, I’m a competitive person. I wanted to be at the top of which was the 50 best we set out to create one of the best restaurants in New York and then in America.
WG (06:55):
And once we had done that, I wanted to create one of the best restaurants, not only one of the best restaurant in the world. The thing about that list though, and even as you hear me say it, perhaps it sounds as ridiculous as it is, I mean, how can one restaurant be the best restaurant in the world, right? It’s too subjective, there’s too many restaurants. But that list acknowledges when you, when you reach that top spot, is you’ve become the restaurant that’s having the greatest impact on the re on the world of restaurants at any given time. And so in order to do that, I needed to figure out what our impact was gonna be. You know, I looked at the people that had topped the list before me. They were chefs, chefs who were unreasonable in pursuit of the food that were serving, relentless in pursuit of innovating the kind of techniques that would evolve the craft of cooking forward into the next generation.
WG (07:54):
But I’m not a chef. I’m a dining room guy. I’m the guy that likes to be out there throwing the party, welcoming people, making them feel at home. And I decided that if we were gonna become their number one, number one, it was not going to come by being unreasonable in pursuit of the product we were serving. It was going to come by making the choice to be unreasonable in pursuit of people and relentless in pursuit of the one thing that will never change, which is well, our human desire to feel seen, to feel cared for, to feel a sense of belonging, to feel welcome. And so that first year when we were put on that list, we came in last place, we were number 50. And that night on a cocktail napkin, I wrote, we will be number one one of the world.
WG (08:39):
And then I also wrote those two words, unreasonable hospitality. And that became my mission statement going forward. I mean, simply put, what does it mean? Listen, I believe if you’re trying to be extraordinary in your field, excellence is required. But at the end of the day, excellence is table stakes When you get to the top tier unreasonable hospitality means that you are making the choice to be just as focused, just as creative, just as relentless, just as intentional in pursuit of how you make people feel, as you very likely already are in pursuit of the thing you’re selling. That you don’t reserve your best efforts only for the thing, but for all the feelings and emotions that surround that thing.
RV (09:30):
So is it, and so at its essence, is it that, is it, if somebody feels special and somebody feels seen, then mission accomplished?
WG (09:46):
I mean, Yeah, basically, right? Like, listen, we’re in the midst of so many transitions just globally right now, whether it’s the digital transformation which is being supercharged by artificial intelligence, whether it’s the post covid hangover with either our collective remembering of our need for connection or our coming into this new reality where we’re either working remotely or in a hybrid world. I think now more than ever, people are craving human connection. And so yeah, if you can make the people around you, you, not just those you’re serving, but all those that you work alongside in order to serve those people, feel valued, feel seen, feel cared for, feel that genuine sense of belonging, if you can accomplish that, not by accident, not organically, but with intention, if you can give people memories, if you can make them feel a genuine part of what you’re doing and who you’re trying to become. And I know I’m speaking very philosophically, and we’ll impact this and get the weeds on it in a moment, but yes, a hundred percent mission accomplished.
RV (11:13):
Yes, it’s ironic. I mean, you, you even see like the explosion of social media over the years, and it’s like, what is that? More than people just wanting to be seen, recognized, valued, appreciated for who they are, what they know, what they could do in the world. So yeah, I wanted, I wanna know how to apply it, right? And so I, I told you a lot, most of the people listening are small business owners, but in this one we’re gonna be, I’m gonna be super selfish and I want you to consult Brand Builders group because you know, we’re, we’re starting to scale. We’re gonna hit right around eight figures this year. It’s our fifth year in business. We got about 40 people on our team. And you know, so we’re, so we’re growing and we’ve been, we’ve been on the excellence journey, right?
RV (12:00):
I mean, really we’ve been on the survival journey. Like startup is like mm-hmm. You move from survival, and then we try to streamline and then we, you know, excellent. But like, where we really want to get to is making people feel special, right? Every person, the, the, the podcast listener, the person who reads a book, the person who subscribes to the blog, all the way down to the people who become customers and affiliates, and then ultimately team members. But if you’re a small business, and my guess is most of the people listening to this are even smaller than us, and you don’t have unlimited budgets and things like that. How do you do this tactically? And, and what I’m really curious about is how to operationalize it, right? Like the founder of the company can make people feel special a lot of times through their words, or they just have this passion, but like, how do you create a culture of it? How do you, how do you systematize it to where every person who walks in the dining room has this amazing experience that they all, they all feel that way? How do we create that in our small businesses?
WG (13:09):
So the first thing I did when I got home from those first awards and I had that cocktail nap napkin with the big ambitious goal and the strategy through which we were gonna achieve it, I sat down with my team at our daily premium meeting. If anyone out there has worked in a restaurant, you may know what premium is. That’s the 30 minute meeting. Most restaurants have together in a circle right before we unlock the doors and welcome people in for dinner. Most restaurants do that meeting, although many of them waste it by talking about something that’s so like, clearly could have been accomplished via an email, a new menu item, or a new glass of wine or whatever. I think that 30 minute meeting, a daily huddle within any organization is one of the most transformational things any company can do. And it’s an opportunity not to talk about the what, but about the why and the how.
WG (14:02):
It’s an opportunity for a leader to share moments of inspiration, invite the team to do so in return. It’s an opportunity not just to talk to your team about what they need to learn to be better at their jobs, but about all the things they can think about or learn from or be inspired by to be better human beings. I think that meeting is when the people you work with cease being a collection of individuals and come together as a trusting team. And only when everyone on the team like, you know, falls into that beautiful pocket, can you unleash their most fully realized collective creativity and capacity. And so I go deep into that because any single business out there that serves other people, if you don’t have some version of a daily huddle, I think you’re leaving so much opportunity on the table. Think of it like a daily locker room speech, like Al Pacino and any given Sunday, there’s a beautiful opportunity to fire pet, make sure.
RV (15:04):
Fight for that. You gotta fight for that in
WG (15:07):
. And so I got to together with the team and I said, Hey, we’re gonna be the number one restaurant in the world, and we’re gonna do it by focusing unreasonably on hospitality. And so the first thing we did is we started going through like the main touch points in the guest experience to try to figure out how to make each of them more awesome. How we were welcoming people at the door, how we were taking their order, how we were delivering the food, whatever. But then one day I had this, this moment where I kind of realized we were focusing only on the most obvious touch points and the guest experience, which were invariably the ones that are competitors were focusing on. What I’ve come to realize is most people in the service industry don’t understand every touchpoint in the experience because they’ve never paused for long enough to interrogate it.
WG (16:01):
And so what we did is we closed the restaurant for lunch one day, brought every single person on the team in. By the way, I think brainstorming as a group is always a beautiful opportunity to balance the gap between information and authority if you engage every single person on the team. And we did an exercise that I now call interrogating the guest experience, where for four hours this team broken up into a bunch of groups, tried to identify every little touch point everything from picking up the phone to call and make the reservation, to walking through the door to going to the bar to have a drink. If your table wasn’t ready to getting up and using the restroom in the middle of the dinner, you get the gist, every little touch point. And then once we’d isolated every single one of ’em, then we got to do the fun part.
WG (16:53):
We got to figure out how to make every single one of them, or at least as many of them as humanly possible, a little more awesome. What I came to realize is the smallest enhancements, the least likely touch points in the guest journey can have the greatest possible impact. Because if you focus on creativity into a part of the experience that no one else has ever paused for long enough to consider the impact can be significant. I’ll give you an example, A story I tell in the book. The check was close to the end of the list, right? That is a touchpoint when you’re serving someone the moment you drop the bill on their table. And yet it’s one that very few people have ever invested any creativity into, right? A because it’s transactional, and we generally tend to believe that if something feels transactional, it can’t feel hospitable.
WG (17:45):
But b, because it’s just a hard moment to get right at a restaurant when you ask for the check. If it takes us too long to get it to you, people get really impatient when they’re ready to leave. We can undo all the goodwill that we’ve built. We can’t drop the check on your table before you’ve asked for it, otherwise you feel like we’re trying to rush you out. That’s also the moment at a fine dining restaurant where you realize how much that meal cost, which makes it a lot harder to appreciate how much you loved it moments earlier. Uhhuh ,
RV (18:12):
You open it and you go, okay, brace for impact. Oh God, brace for impact.
WG (18:17):
I mean to the point where no one’s really ever done anything creative with the check. I mean, you know, I actually read in John Lin’s book, another one of our buddies from that, from that day Giftology. Yeah. He talked about Cornell University did a study where they studied a bunch of restaurants that gave a mint with the check versus a bunch of restaurants that didn’t. Yeah. And the restaurants that gave out mints got on average 18% more in tips than those that didn’t. This beautiful display, that generosity begets generosity in an asymmetrical way. But anyway, we identified that touchpoint. So then as a group, we figured out how to make it more awesome. And this is what we came up with when I knew you were done. You didn’t ask for the check yet, but you were done. I went over to your table with a bottle of cognac and a glass for each purse, and I poured a splash of cognac into each glass.
WG (19:08):
Then I put the bottle on the table and said, Hey, this is what their compliments help yourself to as much as you’d like. And then I put the check down and said, and your check is right here. Whenever you’re ready for it, what do we do? Well, no one ever had to ask for the check again. No one could ever feel like we were trying to rush them out. We’d just given them an entire bottle of free booze. At the moment when they realized how much the meal cost, we’d matched that moment with a gesture of crazy generosity, which maintained the value proposition we were trying to offer. And at the end of a very long meal where we had been serving people immaculately, we gave them the gift of being able to serve one another, which is the very essence of hospitality. I’ve met so many people over the years who, in spite of the fact that we were serving some of the best food in the world, don’t remember a single thing they ate that night, but they remember the cognac and the way it made them feel. So the first answer to that question, and I have a few different answers, is look at the entire experience, interrogate it and find a couple of those really unlikely touchpoints and make them profoundly best in class. Because if you focus on something that no one else has, it gives you an unfair competitive advantage. By definition, you win because you’re doing something somewhere where no one else has done anything before.
WG (20:36):
Does that make sense? Uhhuh
RV (20:37):
, I love, I I I love that. I mean, even, even just the exercise of identifying every touchpoint in your entire customer experience is super enlightening. And you go, oh, when was the last time we updated that voicemail? Or when was the last time we updated that email responder? Does anyone even check that inbox? Like, does what, what does, what is the first message that somebody gets when they sign up for our program? What, what is, what happens when their credit card payment declines? Like even just identifying those is super
WG (21:12):
Well, yeah. And what you’re gonna find is you probably do a bunch of stuff really badly. You probably don’t do anything in a bunch of areas. Yeah. And you’re probably really proud of the way you do some things. I did this exercise with an automotive with an auto sales group. It’s like a group out in California that has a ton of dealerships. And when you’re interrogating all the touch points after about an hour, you think you’re done, I urge you to keep going for another two hours because it’s when you finish picking the low hanging fruit and you have to climb a little bit higher up in the tree, that’s when you find the real stuff that gives you the real opportunities with them. It was like a bunch of like big, you know, manly car dealers. About 45 minutes in, they were bored with the exercise and I kept on pushing ’em and they were annoyed with me.
WG (21:57):
But by the end, well, we realized that the first time you get a flat tire three months after you buy the car, maybe that’s a step, that’s a touch point in the journey. The first time you opened your glove compartment, maybe a week after you buy the car. That’s a touch point in the customer journey. Once you isolate those things, now you can elevate them. Like everyone talks about extending and experiences as far into the future as they possibly can. And so, and if a week later you reach into the gove compartment for the first time and you see a beautiful little note and just a nice, thoughtful, not overly expensive gift waiting there for you, the way that you’ll feel about the people that sold you, that car jumps so dramatically because their thoughtfulness and their care becomes so much more evident.
WG (22:50):
So, okay, that’s one. I think another practical which this came, I’m going to go chronologically way out of order, but for the cadence of the conversation is a similar exercise, but instead of interrogating the touch points in the customer journey, I call this one pattern recognition of recurring moments. So, okay if you and your team sit down and you say, okay, I don’t wanna think about the touchpoints, the things that happen as a part of the guest journey for everyone we serve, instead, I want to spend the next couple weeks identifying the five things that just happen often. So in a restaurant that could mean that oftentimes people are on their way to the airport right after their meal. It could mean that man, you know, like twice a week a party of four shows up as a party of three because one of the people’s spouses got sick and is at home in bed with, with the flu.
WG (24:01):
Or it could mean man, like once every week, someone is getting engaged here. Okay, now you’ve identified recurring moments. These are things that just happen often. Every single business has recurring moments. If you identify them in advance, then along with your team, you can determine how you’re gonna react to those moments and even develop the stuff you might need to make those reactions more awesome. In my world we had a graphic designer design and we had these beautiful boxes, made 11 Madison Park airplane food for every single person that was gonna the airport after their meal. We had this amazing thing packaged, prepared and ready to deploy easily for our team. So every time someone mentioned that, we hit them with this beautiful gesture of hospitality. We had an amazing chicken soup recipe ready on the dessert screen of our micross terminal. So when a server was entering desserts for a table that showed up one person short, ’cause they were homesick in bed, chicken soup ready to go.
WG (25:07):
So that person, even though they missed the meal, could still quote, eat at 11 Madison Park, or, man, my favorite one, I tell this story all the time because I just think it embodies the idea so well, is that a lot of people get engaged at a restaurant. Yeah. And if you go to a decent restaurant, you propose to your person and they say, yes, there, they better pour you a free glass to champagne like we did. But that’s just reasonable. Once he’d identified that as a recurring moment, we could figure out how to make it unreasonable. Tiffany and co had their offices across the park. I started knocking on doors until I found the chief marketing officer convinced her to give me 1000 of those baby blue boxes each with the two champagne flutes in them, put ’em in a closet in the back that we emptied out and called the Hospitality Toolkit closet, which is where we put all the stuff we needed for these gestures.
WG (26:02):
Next time someone got engaged, we poured in free champagne just like we always would have. But what they wouldn’t notice was that their champagne glasses looked a little different from everyone else’s. And when they were done with their champagne, we brought the glasses back, washed them, dry them, put them back in the box, and gave them to them on their way out the door. Again, I’ve met so many people who got engaged at our restaurant and years later don’t remember a single thing they ate, but they’ll never forget how we made them feel with those glasses. Maya Angelou has a quote. She says, people will forget what you say, they’ll forget what you do, but they’ll never forget how you made them feel. That is the essence of hospitality. And so the second piece of advice is to get together with your team people all the way at the bottom of the hierarchy, very much on the frontline, as well as all the way at the top of the hierarchy, not quite as close to the frontline. And come up with five, just five recurring moments and with creativity and intention and a little bit of investment. Figure out how to make your reactions to those moments fricking bonkers. Awesome. And watch what happens.
RV (27:13):
I mean, that’s so good. You used this term earlier, and I wanna come back to this. You said we’d match that moment with crazy generosity, which is like what you just described, right? I mean, leaving a bottle of cognac on the table for every single person, that’s a lot of dough. You added up now and you know, certainly Tiffany’s champagne glasses. Now if they donate ’em that sure, that sure helps. But like how crazy is the crazy generosity and how do you, how do you justify it and not be scared that like, I’m gonna go bankrupt, just like doing all this stuff.
WG (28:01):
Well, so it’s a good question. I mean, listen, the chicken soup, the impact of that was just as significant as anything else. And that cost us maybe a buck 50. I
RV (28:12):
Know that’s brilliant. Mm-Hmm,
WG (28:14):
The bottle of cognac actually didn’t cost us that much because at that point in the meal, people had had so much wine, they weren’t having more than the sip or two of cognac.
RV (28:21):
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. They’re not gonna sit and chuck a whole bottle. They’re probably drunk already by the time he gets there.
WG (28:27):
I mean, like with most of these things, and yes, the Tiffany glasses were free, but I’d say a couple things. I mean, the story that I’m most known for because it was such a turning point, is the hotdog story, which I, I’ll, I’ll tell in a moment ’cause I think it helps answer the third way to deal with this all. And that’s one of the most impactful gestures and it cost two bucks. We’ve done a bunch of gestures of unreasonable hospitality for people that have been totally free. It’s not the cost of the gesture that counts, but the thoughtfulness. And obviously you need to look at your average check whatever your average bill size is, and tailor the moments of systemized hospitality accordingly. We are a very expensive restaurant. We could afford to put down a bottle of cognac. You look at five guys what do you think of when I, when I say five guys? Well
RV (29:22):
The burger, but I’ve never been there, but just the ,
WG (29:25):
You’ve never been to a five guys. I’ve
RV (29:26):
Never been to a five guys, but should
WG (29:28):
I go? Okay. So anyone listening who’s ever been to a five guys? I would say half of you just probably thought peanuts because five guys. Okay. You think about the customer journey interrogation is the only fast food place I’ve ever imagined that has the wherewithal to recognize that the time wait spent waiting for your burger to be cooked is a touchpoint in the guest journey. They’re the only ones that have ever done anything for you during that wait. And what do they do? They put out a big, big box of peanuts and it’s still in the shells. And you just help yourself to some and eat them while you wait. That doesn’t cost them anything. At the end of the day, it’s so inexpensive that because they gave you something during a part of the experience where no one else has ever given you anything, it gives them an unfair competitive advantage.
WG (30:15):
I’ll give you another example. I went to speak at the Sundance Film Festival this year, and like many travelers over the past year, I’ve been consistently plagued with flight delays. I ended up getting to my hotel the night before my talk at like two in the morning after delay, after delay and got outta the car in front of the hotel ready to go through the whole normal rigmarole, which feels like it’s gotten even more insane recently. Driver’s license, credit card, phone number, email. And this guy named Oscar was in there overnight manager. He said, Mr. Guera, welcome. You must be exhausted. Here’s your room key. Go get some sleep. We’ll check you in in the morning. Found the hotel GM the next day, said, Oscar deserves a raise. That was amazing. He goes, yes, Oscar is amazing. That had nothing to do with him.
WG (31:08):
We had a meeting a couple months ago. There had been so many delays. We just decided to try to figure out how to systemize a bit of hospitality. And anytime anyone checks in after 1230, we would just give ’em their room key to tell ’em they could check in in the morning cost zero. It just required a bit of thoughtfulness. They did some simple pattern recognition and decided to try to figure out how to be more warm, hospitable, gracious, and welcoming to people who are checking in really late at night. That’s a recurring moment. They identified it and then they figured out how to treat it more responsibly and more hospitably.
RV (31:46):
Yeah, I think, I think so much of this, it’s like the, the enemy of hospitality is almost just like speed and rhythm and convenience of just being in the motions and not, not stopping long enough to go, how can I, what could I, what could I do for this person in this, in this moment to make them feel special? ’cause We’re so busy just like cranking the machine, running the process, getting the people, getting the people through. So I love that. I love it so much. So yeah. So tell us, tell us the hotdog story. ’cause I wanna make sure that we, I wanna make sure that we hear the hotdog story before we let you go. So
WG (32:29):
My big breakthrough in all of this, and again, we’re, we’re chronologically all outta whack here ’cause I discovered some of these exercises later. But I was in the dining room helping out the servers on a busier than normal lunch service. So they were getting just crushed. And I went out there and was just busing tables. I think sometimes the best thing a leader can do to support their team is the most menial task. And so I love busing tables and I was clearing ta appetizers from a table of four foodies people who were on vacation to New York just to eat at great restaurants. And while I was at their table, I ever heard them talking about the restaurants that’d eaten at all the fanciest restaurants in New York. They had a blast and this was their last meal. They were gonna the airport to head home right after their lunch.
WG (33:19):
But in the midst of their conversation, a woman at the table jumped in and said, yeah, but you know what? We never had, we never had a hot dog from one of those street carts. And man, it was like one of those light bulb moments in a cartoon where, you know, the character has had a good idea how we ding like light bulb. Yeah, exactly. So, ran back into the kitchen, dropped off the plates, ran outside, got a hot dog, ran back inside, somehow convinced my fancy chef to serve it. And we cut the hot dog up into four perfect pieces, added a little s swish of ketchup, a little s swish of mustard and a canal of sauerkraut and relished to each plate. And before their final savory course, which at the time was a honey lavender glazed muscovy duck that had been dry age for two weeks, utilizing a technique that had taken us years to perfect.
WG (34:03):
I brought out what we in New York called a dirty water dog . And I explained it. I said, Hey, I just wanted to make sure you didn’t go home with any culinary regrets. And Rory, they freaked out. I mean, it was one of those breakthrough moments for me because I realized in spite of the fact that I’d served every fancy ingredient under the sun, I’d never seen anyone react to any of them like they did to that $2 hot dog. Athletes always go to the tapes and they’ve had a bad game to see what they did wrong, to see what they could have done better. But what they, what honestly none of us do often enough is go to the tapes and we’ve had a good game to see what we did well to make sure we keep on doing that thing. So I went to the tapes and the hotdog.
WG (34:47):
What it, what like, what happened so that that could happen? Well, the first, it just required me being present, not being so focused on what I needed to do next that I couldn’t fully focus on the thing and the people I was with. Then if I wasn’t present, I wouldn’t have heard the line about the hotdog. Two, listen, if you wanna be the best, you better take what you do seriously. And also we need to all stop taking ourselves so seriously. Way too often in customer service, we try to build these like beautifully articulated brands and then we let those brands stand in the way of us giving the people around us the things that will bring them the most joy when a hotdog in a four star restaurant is sacrilegious until you look at how it made them feel. And third, hospitality is about making people feel seen.
WG (35:38):
And if that’s the case, the best way to do it is not to treat them like a commodity, but a unique individual. I could have given them a fancy bottle of champagne. It would not have had the same impact as the hotdog because it would not have been specific to them. And unreasonable hospitality, one size fits one. Okay, the hotdog was the true north in those three things. We now had a roadmap. This is where it gets good. Now I turn to my team and gave them the permission and the resources to start doing this stuff themselves. We gave ’em a little budget, brought a person onto the team called the Dreamweaver, who is just there to help them bring their ideas to life and encouraged them to go out into the dining room and be present with their guests, not to take themselves too seriously and find one size fits, one gestures to deliver to their customers.
WG (36:30):
And with that, we were on fire. I mean, we did the craziest stuff. We sent people who were there with kids who were seeing snow for the first time to Central Park with sleds in the back of an Uber to go sledding. We turned our private dining room into a beach complete with 500 pounds of sand for a couple who was in our restaurant because their beach honeymoon got canceled. We bought people teddy bears for their kids ’cause they forgot to do it. We set up train sets on tables, all this stuff. All of which made the guests happy, all of which was amazing for our bottom line because yes, we did spend money on this stuff, although not all the gestures cost that much money. In fact, the one that started at all cost 50 cents a person. But every dollar we spent on Unreasonable hospitality had the point of John Bruin’s mint reference on that check and asymmetrical return.
WG (37:26):
Because the moment you give the people you’re serving stories like that, they want to go out and tell them over and over and over again. And suddenly you look up one day and you have the legions of ambassadors out there preaching your dharma. And it also made us happy. ’cause For the first time, the people in our team were no longer just serving plates of food that someone else had created. We were imbuing the experience with our own creativity. We felt agency, we felt empowerment. We are no longer salespeople. We were product designers. And I have yet to meet an individual who won’t give more of themselves to help something succeed than once they feel they have a genuine hand in determining what that thing is. So that is the third way to systemize this into your culture is one, tie space. Give your team, well, yeah, no, but give your team the permission and the resources to color outside of the lines. Empower them to do the things that are right. Allocate whatever budget you can afford. It doesn’t need to be that dramatic. In fact, sometimes smaller budgets lead
WG (38:34):
To, to more creativity. But you can systemize this stuff through touchpoints. You can systemize it through determining in advance how you’re gonna react to recurring moments. But the most powerful and profound and transformative way is to look at your team, choose to trust them that become more trustworthy, give them more responsibility, they’ll become more responsible, and make it zone defense. Get everyone in the game and let everyone have fun starting to play.
RV (39:07):
Man. So good. I know why your book sells a lot and it’s the, it’s the answer that I hate. It’s a really good book. . It’s, it’s it’s the, it’s the, the answer that is the hard, hardest to replicate. And man will I just, I I love this. I just love it so much, brother. And what a magical thing to be remembered for helping other people feel special versus trying to be remembered yourself. And I think that’s why people are so drawn to you. It’s such a magnetic and it’s such an unusual, it’s an abnormal trait that you carry to go in a world full of people who walk around going, look at me, look at me. You’re literally an ambassador walking around going, how can we help? Say, look at them, look at them. And I just, I think that’s magic about you, bro. And it’s, it’s lightning in a bottle and it’s fun to, it’s fun to be a part of,
WG (40:12):
Hey, lemme say one more thing. And by the way, I feel the same way about you. The amount of time you spend, I mean, you’re, I think it’s super important to identify the importance of your work and the nobility of it. The capacity you and your team have to impact others. You guys are literally working your butts off to help other people’s dreams come true. And if I’m on your team and there’s ever a day that just feeling grumpy or I woke up on the wrong side of the bed and I’m having a hard time bringing my most fully realized self to the table, that is what I’m tapping back into. There are a few things more powerful you can do with your time than unreasonably supporting other people’s dreams coming true. And I think that’s pretty powerful. But the one thing I wanna say, we talked about budgets and just for people who are still not convinced listening to this, who are like, yeah, I can’t afford to do this.
WG (41:13):
I wanna see two things. Well, if you can’t afford to do it, you’re probably the person that actually needs to start doing it because this does drive revenue and business and will put you in a position where you can afford to do more of it. So if that’s your first reaction, just check yourself a little bit because that’s not the attitude that’s gonna get you to the top. A like, there’s that old adage, it takes money to make money, I hate it, but you know what, there’s some truth in it. But the other thing is that most people already spend money on this stuff. And so as a starting point, just take the money you were already spending and spend it better. If you send out some nonsense Christmas gift to everyone in your list, and it includes some dumb water bottle with your company’s logo on it, or a hat or a shirt, take the same budget and just be more thoughtful, be more connective, be more human.
WG (42:08):
Be more unreasonable. Instead of spending three hours picking the right water bottle, spend an entire week picking a different gift, using the same budget for every single person on that list. Or if you don’t wanna go that far, pick out three gifts and then just categorize the people you’re sending the gifts to into three groups and give the proper gift to each group. You don’t need to jump into the deep end on this stuff, but I guarantee you, if you’re a little creative, you can find a way to wade into the shallow end and then see for yourself whether or not it works.
RV (42:45):
Yeah, I love it. Well, the book is called Unreasonable Hospitality. Clearly that’s what it’s about. It’s a, it’s a game changer. We’re, we’re in on this and this is something that we see as a, as a way to take ourselves up to the next level. Where do you want people to go? Will, if they want to connect up more with you and stay, stay tied into what you’re doing?
WG (43:10):
I’m on Instagram at w Guera. Most of our stuff [email protected], including our newsletter that you can sign up for there which is called Premium based on that meeting that I hold so near and dear. And then yeah, hopefully I’ll, I’ll see you at, at Rory’s place one day in the not too distant future.
RV (43:32):
I love it, bro. We wish you all the best.
WG (43:34):
Thanks brother.

Ep 441: Is this the Golden Age of Publishing | Allison Trowbridge Episode Recap

AJV (00:02):
All right, so I have a question for you. Are we in the golden age of publishing, like right now? Is this the golden age of publishing? And this is a question that came up in a recent conversation that I had with Ali Trowbridge of, if you think about it, we as authors or aspiring authors are in one of the most opportunistic times in history when it comes to getting your message out into the world. As few as 20 years ago, there was an absolute gate, right? There were gatekeepers that prevented authors from just publishing books and getting them out into the world. But with the emergence of self-publishing and hybrid publish publishing, almost anyone who really, really wants to can write and publish a book. And I said, almost. But if you can’t write your book, there are more mediums, more formats, more opportunities to get your message out into the world than ever before.
AJV (01:05):
You can be blogging. You can post blog like messages on medium. You can do LinkedIn. You can have, you know, micro posts happening on a social media. You could have your own YouTube channel. There’s free ways to do it, but then there’s ways that you can pay to get it out there with the self-publishing and hybrid publishing. That’s not to say traditional publishing is not an option. It is. But if you really think about it, this is the golden age of publishing. There are more opportunities, more ways to get your message into the hands of your audience than ever before you have more access to your readers or potential readers. We’ll just call ’em your audience than ever before. You can actually build relationships with the people who read your books. 20 years ago, that wasn’t a thing. You didn’t know who was reading your book, you didn’t know what they had to say about it per se.
AJV (01:58):
But now, on a, on a daily basis between podcast reviews and comments to blog comments to comments on social media, to Amazon reviews and Yelp reviews, it’s like you actually know what’s resonating. You know what people are thinking, and you can create a real relationship with your reader. That is amazing. And just the idea that there is not this, you know, ivory tower of publishing anymore that’s being broken down with the emergence of self-publishing and hybrid publishing. And so, as we think about this idea for the author and the aspiring author that we live in this opportunity ti this opportune time, this golden age of publishing, what does that mean for authors? And so here’s a couple of things that I wanted to share that I thought were really awesome takeaways from my conversation with my ally. Number one, you have to remember that if you’re an author, you are simultaneously an,
AJV (02:59):
A book is a product. And that means that it has to come with the same intention of what a business would do to sell a product and a service. As an author, you are creating a product, IEA business, which means that to do it well, right? There’s research and development, right? That’s your writing time. There’s the publishing time, right? That’s the production. But then you need a marketing plan. You need a sales plan, probably someone who is going to sell it and someone who is going to market it. There needs to be an operations component of like, how are we gonna get this distributed and fulfilled? How are we a finance person? Like, how are we gonna pay for all of this? How are we gonna collect money? How are we gonna pay money? Like, those are all entrepreneurial things that are required when you start a business, IE right?
AJV (03:53):
And publish a book. So as an author, you are simultaneously starting a small business with a product. That’s your book. That’s the first thing. Second thing is that, and knowing that, knowing that it’s not just you on your laptop and coffee shops writing words on pages, it’s so much more than that. You have to remember that writing a book is not a career move. It’s a calling. And it is not about the end result of having, you know, a giant business card or something that’s going to make you tons of money. It’s like, no, you have to go, I have to share this message.
AJV (04:34):
I have to get this out into the world. It is compelled from within me. It is a calling, it is a passion. This is not just something I’m doing to make money or to get a promotion or to raise my speaker fees. It’s like, no, I’m, I’m doing this because I have to. And that’s gonna make the rest of us a little bit more tolerable because there’s a lot of work. And writing the book is step one of a mini step process. Writing is just one small part of actually getting a book out into the world. And so you’ve got to love the process. You have to fall in love with all the parts of it. And mostly you can only love it if you know that it’s going to make a difference. It has the potential to make a difference. It can change a life, which means it could change the world. Those are things that you have to remember as you step into this. And if you’re not there yet, it’s just not time. And that’s okay. There is a time and a cadence for all things. But when you think about writing this book and launching this book, you need to think about also is do I have the time, energy, and resources to also build a business? Because a book is a business, right? Third thing, I think this is really important, and Allie talks a lot about this in
AJV (05:56):
Our, our podcast interview that’s called the ent the author entrepreneur podcast episode on the influential personal brand podcast. But how you get that book out into the world makes a difference. And she shares the three different ways you can publish a book today, self-publishing the hybrid publishing model, or a traditional publisher. And I love the way that she likened these to business. And she said, think about it like this. Self-Publishing is like bootstrapping. This is your self-funded startup. You’re bootstrapping and you’re scrappy. And it’s the entrepreneurial startup that’s self-funded. That’s how you need to think about self-publishing. Hybrid publishing is like going after an equity partner, right? You retain the ip, you have more creative rights, you make more money but you’re also paying for it, right? So like, somebody else is coming in to help with this, but you’re paying for it.
AJV (06:50):
So you’re putting together an equity partnership with this hybrid publisher, right? I love that example. And then a traditional publisher, publisher is like going after venture capital, which means you have to prove to them that you are a worthy investment because they’re taking a risk. They’re going one outta 10 of these, maybe one out of a hundred of these are actually going to make us any money. So you need to prove that not only is the content awesome, that’s a given. That’s the, you know, you know, that’s just required for entry, right? But they gotta know that you have the platform, the reach, the marketing, the sales, the operations, and the finance team behind it to pull this off. ’cause They’re looking at you going, is this a good investment? Which is why a book proposal is such a necessity. And I believe that a book proposal is helpful if it’s a self hybrid or a traditional publisher, because it, it’s the discipline of putting together your business plan for your book.
AJV (07:52):
And if you really want people to read your book, then you gotta have a sales marketing and distribution plan of how are people gonna hear about it and what’s gonna cause them to want to read it, right? What’s gonna make it a spread? Why would people recommend it? And that’s all marketing, positioning and sales. So I book proposals important in all three of those levels. But just thinking about self as the entrepreneurial, bootstrap, startup hybrid is you’re looking for an equity partner, and then a traditional publisher is a, a venture capital, right? I, I’ve loved those examples, and I think one of the things that came out of all of this conversation is that you just have to fall in love with the process of writing and the business part, right? This is something that you’re gonna have to learn. You figure it out, it’s trial and error.
AJV (08:40):
And that’s why it takes time. So give yourself some grace and patience in this. And as a part of loving the process, it’s a great reminder that those mountaintop moments are far and few between, right? Getting that book in your hand and that feeling when you’re like, it’s here, that’s somewhat fleeting a little bit, right? And if you’re gonna do all of this work and all of this preparation just for that moment to hold that book and go, it’s here that, that feeling’s gonna be pretty short, right? Because the next thing you’re gonna have to do is like the next step of the plan, and you gotta fall in love with the process. Not just those mountaintop moments of, oh, I wrote a book, or, oh, I hit this amount of revenue, or, oh, I did this thing, or, oh, I got this award. It’s like those are short, finite moments. And if you’re living for those moments, you’re missing the best parts of your life and the process and the journey. So you have to fall in love with the whole thing. If you wanna check out the entire conversation about this concept of the golden age of publishing and being an author, entrepreneur, head over to the influential Personal Brand podcast and check out my full interview with Allison Trowbridge. We’ll see you next time.

Ep 440: Be An Author Entrepreneur with Allison Trowbridge

AJV (00:03):
Hey everybody, and welcome to the Influential Personal Brand podcast. This is AJ Vaden here, and I’m so excited to introduce everyone to a new friend of mine, Allison Trowbridge, who also goes by Allie. Ubut if you’re gonna look her up online, you’re probably gonna find her by Allison. Now, before I do a formal introduction of Allison, I wanna make sure you guys know who this episode is for and why you wanna stick around. First and foremost, if you have a dream, a passion, a goal, or you’re even on the road to being an author, this is an episode that is curated for that person who wants to write a book and get it out into the world. So that’s who this is for. It is for the established, the aspiring, or the one day, maybe that might be a thing I wanna do. This is who this is for .
AJV (01:07):
You’re an author of any sort. This is an episode for you. Second, it’s for everyone who considers themselves an entrepreneur or a solopreneur, and they’re going, well, how does this personal brand thing and content and writing, like, how does this fit into my entrepreneurial journey? That is also something that we’re gonna talk about. And then third and definitely not last, we’re gonna talk about how authors are entrepreneurs. And I think that’s really important. Being an author is like starting a business, and so it needs to be treated like one. And we’re gonna talk about everything that it means to be an author and an entrepreneur in this world of marketing and personal branding. Now, let me introduce you to the one and the only Allison Trowbridge, .
AT (01:59):
Aj, I’m so thrilled to be here with you. Oh my gosh. I just have to say, I have to say, AJ and Rory are officially hands down my new favorite people, favorite people in Nashville, probably favorite people in the world. I adore the two of you, and I’m obsessed with your content. I, I met AJ and Rory recently, and I started just going down the rabbit hole on everything you guys do online. And I have learned and gained so much from everything that you, you share so generously. So thank you for being you and everything you do for authors.
AJV (02:35):
You know what I love connections like this because Allie and I were connected by a mutual friend. And you know, it’s kind of one of those things too, when you get a random email, even though it’s from someone that like know and trust Jason totally. It’s like, he’s like, oh, I have this friend. She’s moving to Nashville, y’all should meet. And I’m like, everyone’s moving to Nashville. There’s lots of people I should meet, but for whatever reason, I was like, why
AT (03:02):
This one
AJV (03:02):
? Yeah. But you know, it’s like one of those things. Sometimes it’s just like a God prompting of like, take the meeting woman, take the meeting, make the comment. Wow. And so when we met for coffee that first day, I didn’t tell you this, but I went home and Rory was like, so who is the coffee meeting with? And I’m like, oh, it’s a new friend. And he was like, well, who is it? And I’m like, actually, I think she could be like a really good friend. Oh, and then when Rory got to spend time with you, he goes, I really think I want you to be friends with Ally . Well,
AT (03:32):
The biggest the biggest thing is I, I just learned before we started recording that their son, Liam actually asked after me at church on Sunday. And so that for me, I’m like, I’m in
AJV (03:45):
. Got love all around. Well, I’m so excited to have this conversation and for everyone listening, I want you guys to get to know a little bit about Ali and her journey and why I invited her on the podcast. But I think there’s a few things that are really important for you guys to know, contextually speaking as we start this interview. Number one, Ali is an author. She has a book called 22. That was her first book. Honestly, one, this is a conversation coming from someone who has been through this journey. Number two, she’s an entrepreneur. She’s the CEO and founder of Copper Books. So even before you were an author, you have like this love and passion of books. Yes. And I love that there’s been like this intertwined journey between being an author and an entrepreneur from really the very beginning. Number three, she’s a podcast host. And so this is also a part of that journey. So y’all, y’all cannot just meet her here, but you can follow her online and check her out in all the different places. But then also she’s wicked smart. She has her MBA from Oxford, which is like, just puts you in a whole nother level of, oh,
AT (04:52):
It was just Harry Potter mode, .
AJV (04:55):
So there’s all these different things that really kind of led to like, why are you such a well positioned person to talk about this author entrepreneur concept? So let’s hear it from you. Like, tell us a little bit about your journey.
AT (05:10):
Oh my goodness. Well, aj I got started actually in the nonprofit world. So I spent my, I mean, I grew up with a deep love of books and I always had this dream of writing a book someday, but I got my start in my twenties working in nonprofits, working in anti-trafficking, anti-human trafficking. And when I was 22, I was graduating from college and I pulled in all-nighter with one of my best friends. And I said, there has never been a book, like there needs to be a book called 22 that speaks to all of these existential questions that we’re wrestling with right now. There needs to be, we need a mentor and it needs to exist, and I don’t see it anywhere. And so whatever I do career-wise, I’m going to write that book someday. And it was, gosh, it was seven or eight years later before I actually got a book deal on that idea, and it started to come to fruition.
AT (06:02):
But it’s so interesting because I’ve, I’ve heard you and Rory say a lot that you are, you are most equipped to serve the person that you once were. And so it was so interesting to be going through that season of life saying, I need guidance, I need direction. Someday I’m gonna come back and I’m gonna do that for someone else. So just one thing I wanna say. If you’re, whatever you’re in the midst of right now, maybe you’re like, I have no idea if I will ever write a book, but I’m like, I’m just in it and I’m wrestling with certain things right now. Pay attention to what that is. ’cause That may be directing you to where you’ll go back and help someone else someday. But that was really, that was really my origin story. So spent my twenties in human rights also as a partner in an impact investment fund.
AT (06:49):
So I was in the business world, and then I always knew in the back of my head that I was gonna write this book. It wasn’t a career move, it was just, it was almost a, a soul calling it that I felt like I had to, I had to follow through on this. And so went down the, the route of, I, I mean, first I built a, a really meaningful network of other authors and people doing similar things. And I just wanna call that out too because I think a, a lot of a lot of aspiring authors have the dream of publishing a book and they just get kind of stuck with it, and they kind of sit in a silo thinking about it. And I think becoming an author starts with becoming a good literary citizen and actually supporting other authors supporting the community of, of that was so strange.
AJV (08:36):
That was so weird. But I know the last thing you said was being a good author, so, okay, we’ll just pick up there. Okay. So it’s still recording. Okay, perfect.
AT (08:48):
Becoming an author really begins with becoming a good literary citizen. And so I, I really got my start in the book space by befriending and supporting other authors and championing them, making connections for them, supporting their book launches. And so I just wanted to call that out just to be thinking, if you have this dream of, of writing a book, how can you begin by supporting others who are further along in that dream knowing that someday down the road, that community will also rally around and support you. So fast forward am able to find an agent, put together a book proposal. I didn’t have any social platform. I wasn’t a well-known figure, but it was really based off of this, this concept that I knew there was a huge audience for and really identifying and communicating that effectively. Now, I made the ill advised ti life timing decision to publish that book while I was doing my MBA at the same time.
AT (09:58):
Which I, I would not advise. That was a very, very intense year of intense year of life. But going through, so I did the book with Harper Collins and, and going through the process of publishing while being in business school got me kind of wrestling with these ideas of why does it feel like a challenging time to be an author? This should be the best time in history to be an author. And so feeling those problems, feeling those pain points got me thinking about what I could do in the book world to help and serve other authors, which I did not ever intend to start a company. I was planning to go back into nonprofits and stay in my social justice work. So life throws you curve balls.
AJV (10:39):
Well, I love, well, I love too that all of this is kind of organic and following your calling, and I love what you said that it’s like more than a career move, writing a book is a calling. Yes. And I often feel like being an entrepreneur, entrepreneur should be like that too.
AT (10:58):
A hundred percent. It’s not worth it otherwise. It’s too hard.
AJV (11:02):
It’s not. But often I think people use this as, Hey, I’m gonna do this thing so one day I can get this thing, which is freedom of time, freedom of money, it’s whatever. But then you realize, oh, snap. Like this is all consuming. And if there’s not like that deep calling, it’s when we feel burned out, exhausted, spent tired, whatever is the word you wanna use. But you know, those are, those are the same. Those are synonymous. It doesn’t matter. It’s like whatever you do in life, it should be a calling, not just a career move. So I love that you called that out.
AT (11:42):
Yeah. And something else that AJ did my wifi.
AJV (11:49):
Yeah, you’re breaking up. All right. You’re back.
AT (12:10):
I have, I have no idea what’s going on. I think I, I, it says I have full bars on my wifi and it’s Google fiber, so maybe I’ll switch to my iPhone wifi just to,
AJV (12:23):
I mean, we can, whatever you think. I mean, we can just keep rolling with it if it
AT (12:26):
Okay. I’m sorry about that. That’s okay.
AJV (12:30):
Okay.
AT (12:30):
It’s like a little trap door keeps dropping me out.
AJV (12:33):
.
AT (12:34):
Well, I heard the last thing you said. I, I can run with it.
AJV (12:37):
Okay.
AT (12:38):
You know, aj what that, what that makes me think of, I actually, so right now at Copper, and we’ll fast forward to this, but, but we’re hosting an accelerator for aspiring authors, and we had my friend Donald Miller on earlier this week talking about his writing practice and, and the process of writing. And he said something that, that really, that really kind of shook me, which was about, he, he carves out certain, a certain set of time every single day to focus on writing whatever book he’s writing. I was asking him how he produces so much, and he said, you know, he is like, you’ve gotta love the process. And it’s funny because if I were to tell you, if you were to ask what is 22, about 22, the book, my book about, I would say the, the moral of the story is that the journey is the destination.
AT (13:30):
It’s about learning how to lean into and love the journey of our lives instead of thinking we’re gonna arrive at some point. And I think that that is such an important piece of wisdom to apply to authors, also to apply to entrepreneurs. I think the, the big temptation is to think that we’re doing these things for some end result. I wanna be an entrepreneur because I want the big payout when I sell my company someday, or I wanna be an author because I want the credibility of hitting some bestseller list. And you are really going to, to hate the entire process if you don’t fall in love with the journey. Fall in love with the actual creation and the writing. Fall in love with learning how to reach your reader, your, your audience, and identifying what their pain points are if you’re an entrepreneur, learning how to enjoy the building. So it was something that was a, a really important callback for me this week of, of just this reminder to, to love the process of these things that we feel called to create.
AJV (14:34):
Yeah. You know, it’s so funny, as soon as you were talking, it made me think about this quote, how, and I think I saw it on Instagram, but you know, you look around at everything you have today and you realize that many times you have today what you once dreamed of and what you have today is what drives you nuts. And it’s kind of like, man, the thing that we wanna dream of is now the thing that is crazy. And it’s like so true. I think we all need to be taken back sometimes to falling in love with the process and not this desire for an end destination. Because if it’s all about that one day, you’re gonna look around and be like, wait, what was this all for again?
AT (15:14):
Totally. Totally.
AJV (15:15):
It’s Hannah Montana. It’s all about
AT (15:18):
Time. Totally.
AJV (15:18):
It’s all about time.
AT (15:20):
Yes. And, and the thing that’s that’s funny is that if you want to continue on that journey, you’re gonna begin again and go through the process all over again. I know authors who not only have hit the New York Times bestseller list, they’ve been selected by Oprah as part of her, the Oprah’s book club, and they still are like, it feels like the first time every time. And I don’t know what I’m doing and I’m still learning. And so I, I think it’s the falling in love with that process because those mountaintop experiences are gonna be short-lived, and few and far between. But if you love the journey of getting there, if you love the hiking up the mountain, then you’re gonna, you’re gonna really enjoy your life a lot more, I think. Oh
AJV (16:02):
Yeah. So tell us about ’cause I know we’ve had conversations about this, but I, what I love is your take on being an author is being an entrepreneur. Yes. Yes. And it needs to be treated like that. This is a business, it requires a business plan, it requires that, and most people who are writing books, unless you’re a full-time author, likely don’t know that going in . And so tell us about that.
AT (16:26):
Yes. Well, I, I think a lot of the frustration around becoming an author starts starts with this point. So a lot of people will say to me, how do you write a book? How do you get published? Tell me how you get published. And they get frustrated because they think that there’s a silver bullet. Like, why isn’t everybody telling me how this actually works? And that’s like someone, an aspiring entrepreneur saying, how do you start a company? It’s, the answer is, there’s a lot to it. And it’s, it’s, you have to be able to give that full life commitment into the pro.
AJV (17:41):
Okay.
AT (17:42):
I’m, I’m gonna switch to my phone wifi. This is ridiculous. And I’m gonna call Google Fiber after this. I’m sorry. I dunno. Okay. It says it’s paired. Can you hear me Okay?
AJV (18:12):
Can. All right. So the last thing you said is it’s a commitment.
AT (18:18):
Let’s see. I, I think I’ll go back to the beginning of the author, entrepreneur thing. Okay. how did you tee up the question, the idea of just
AJV (18:29):
The fact that most people don’t know that being an author is like starting a business
AT (18:35):
? Yes. Well, the, the, the thing is, I get so many authors who, or aspiring authors who come to me and they say, how do you publish a book? And the reality is that’s kind of like somebody saying, how do I build a company where it’s, there’s not a silver bullet, and I wish there was like, nobody is hiding the answer from you, because it is a multi-year, whole life commitment to bring this book into the world. But the good news is, is that it’s not, it’s not rocket science. Rocket science. And there are best practices and you can learn the process. It’s just gonna take time, commitment, energy, and attention. So I think about writing a book, like building a company, and the actual writing of the book is like developing a product. Gone are the days of Hemmingway where you sit in a cafe in Paris and ship the manuscript off to the publisher, and they just take it from there.
AT (19:33):
The author really needs to be the entrepreneur. So if you think about the book writing as being the product development, after you develop the product, then you need all the other parts of the business. So you’re gonna need marketing, you’re gonna need sales, you’re gonna need partnerships, business development, operations, finance to make this all happen. And I also think about when it, when it comes to choosing your publishing path, should you self-publish? Should you go with a traditional publisher? Should you go the hybrid route? I really think about that just like taking an equity partner. So if you work with a traditional publisher for your book, that’s like being a startup that’s taking venture capital. It’s not for everyone. It’s for a small percentage. And that, that finance partner is gonna give you money upfront, which is fabulous, and they’re gonna take a lot of ownership, and they’re going to expect a huge result.
AT (20:30):
And they’re, they’re investing and making these risky betts hoping that one outta 10 books that they invest in are gonna pay for all of the ones that they lose money on. So it’s understanding those economics. And if a traditional publisher isn’t jumping at your book, it doesn’t mean it’s not a great book or a great idea, or that you’re an amazing author, just means they’re looking for that like venture return, then it means that they’re not seeing that based on the market, based on your reach. And that’s okay. So, so traditional publisher is like having a venture investor. Self-Publishing is like bootstrapping where you’re, you have a startup and you’re like, I am going to learn to do all of the pieces of the puzzle, and I’m gonna do it myself. I’m gonna own the whole thing myself. I’m gonna figure it out. Or I’m going to hire for the pieces where I don’t have natural strengths.
AT (21:20):
I’m gonna hire brand builders group to help me with the book launch part and to understand the, the branding and marketing piece. So I’m, I’m gonna, I’m gonna get support in different areas. And then you have the, the hybrid publishing down the middle, which I kind of think of like having an equity partner. You get to own your intellectual property, you get a lot more control over the process. You still get the high-end professional results, but it’s a higher cost of capital. You’re putting more in on the front end. So I think shifting our thinking as, as authors and creatives realizing that if you just wanna write, there’s plenty of spaces to just write. There’s ck there’s, there’s blogging, there’s newsletters, there’s LinkedIn, there’s you can journal, there’s a lot of spaces to write, but if you wanna be an author and publish a book, you’re actually selling a product to a customer. And because you’re selling a product, the book, you’re gonna have to think about it in the same way that ACEO thinks around selling the product in a business.
AJV (22:31):
Oh my gosh. Every single person in the world needs to hear that . Like they do. It’s like, I, I love, I love that whole concept of traditional is venture capital, hybrid is equity partner and self is like bootstrapping, entrepreneur, startup. Right, right. I love so much because it’s so true. But regardless of how you look at it, like if you just go through those lens of things, it’s like imagine what it would be like if you were truly going after venture capital, what they would require of you Yes. What documentation they want, what planning you want, what forecast they want. Like y’all, that’s called a book proposal.
AT (23:12):
Yes. No, it is.
AJV (23:14):
You know, it’s like,
AT (23:16):
Yes. And, and I spent as much time, so I was able to get that traditional publisher, Harper Collins chose to work with me, but my book proposal took about as long as it took to actually write the book, which is crazy. But it’s because I had to show them that this is a worthy investment. Mm-Hmm. . Especially because I wasn’t a celebrity or a superstar that had a baked in audience that was gonna want anything I put into the world. So I had to show them how I was gonna hustle, and the people who were gonna hustle on behalf of me, and how I’d identified this audience that was gonna actually activate and purchase this product I was creating, that it was solving a pain point for them, and that they would exchange money in order to solve that pain point.
AJV (24:03):
I mean, that’s so important for everyone who is listening to realize of as you’re, you know, thinking and dreaming of one day, you know, I’m, I have all these books in my office, but it’s like holding up this book, and it’s like, that’s a product.
AT (24:18):
Yes.
AJV (24:18):
And businesses produce products, and in order to make the product get into the hands of other human beings, there needs to be a sales pitch, a marketing plan, a distribution plan. And those things take human resource, human capital, capital and dollars. They take dollars. Yes. Yes. And it’s treating it like a business. So I would love to know from you, in this world today, as you think about this author, entrepreneur, what do you see? Because I think this is a great opportunity for you to also share like, what is Copper books and what does Copper Books do? Because you have so much access to authors aspiring and current, but what are they doing well, and what do you know they should be doing if they wanted to be doing better?
AT (25:11):
Yes. Well, my, my heart in this journey has always been for the author. I, I believe for one, that a book can change your life. Like, quite literally, can, can change your life. It can change the world. I, and, and it sounds like a cliche, but I really mean it. I I mentioned earlier that I began my career in anti-trafficking and human rights, that entire social movement, the reason why you as a listener know about that issue right now is because of books. There were a series of books published in the early mid two thousands on, on this issue, and it laid the groundwork for an entire social movement. So I get so passionate about the way that, that a book can move the needle, but then even more so, I think there is no more transformative or meaningful process for a human than to write their story and to write a book.
AT (26:05):
So, wherever you are, however many people you think may wanna read your book, I could not encourage you more to do it, because going through the process, it will transform you. It will be a before and after. It’s a meaning making journey. So I, I love the transformative process. I also think that this should be the golden age of publishing. It used to be that that publishing was an industry of gatekeepers, because it takes time and energy to determine what content can potentially sell. It takes a lot of time to read a book, right? And so the industry has operated off of gatekeepers and a small group of people being able to publish their work that has gotten blown open, blown, wide open over the last decade. It has never been easier to self-publish a book. It has never been easier to reach readers yourself to build an audience yourself.
AT (27:04):
20 years ago that wasn’t possible. Authors weren’t able to build their own audience. And so a lot of people get frustrated by the fact that they need to build a relationship with their reader. I think it’s the most liberating thing possible. You need to be more intentional. You need to, to really strategize it, you need to develop your personal brand and think about how you’re gonna outsource that trust so that people are coming to you to solve these problems that they have. And there’s consistency in all of that. But I think it is the most exciting time. If you have a dream of writing a book, now is the time to do it. Okay. So fast forward to, to Copper. So we built actually a tech platform. So, so you’re in the, in the iOS store, you can download the Copper Books app. We, we made it a place where authors and readers can connect and build community around books in a way that was centered around the author.
AT (28:00):
So with, we always say the author is the star of the show. If you are a, an author with a book, however you published it, self-publish, hybrid, traditional, you get verified. We link your book. There’s a all of this book data on the back end of it. And then readers can connect directly with the author of the books that they’re reading. We have a live events feature. If you’re a reader and you just love books, it’s a really great place for recommendations. You can track what you’re reading, create bookshelves, all of these things. So that’s the, the platform we created. And I actually did that with venture capital backing, which was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my entire life to, I think the number is about 2% of, of all venture funding goes to, to female founders. So, I mean, you wanna talk about a steep mountain to climb that was, was not the most enjoyable the entire way.
AT (28:50):
I’ve gotten a lot of rejections, pitching, pitching this company, but was, was able to build raise the capital, hire engineers, build the platform. Here’s what we learned, seeing all of our community and our users. I realized that the people who were leaning in the most, who needed the support, who needed, who needed the tools and the resources and education, was actually the aspiring author. And so I built this platform thinking it was a two-sided marketplace for authors and readers. What I discovered is that the aspiring author is the most underserved group. And so I say all that in that we have shifted the entire focus of the company into how do we serve the aspiring author? How do we serve the person who is getting woken up in the middle of the night because they have this dream, this calling in them, this idea that they wanna put on into the world and they don’t know where or how to begin with it.
AJV (29:53):
Mm. I love that. I love that you said that too. They get woken up in the night with this at least once a week. I will wake up around four or 5:00 AM like looking for Rory, looking for my husband on the other side of the bed, and he’s missing. And then I’ll usually like go back to sleep. ’cause I know where he is, . And then he’ll come in at like six 30 when I’m getting up and he goes, I’ve been bursting. I just couldn’t sleep. I’m bursting with ideas. , he’s like, he bursts with ideas and he knows that he’s gotta get up and go write them down. But it’s, but it’s like what you said, it’s like when you do, when creating content and writing messages and just writing is yes. Calling, it’s like, you do, you, you can’t sleep. It’s like they’re emanating out of you even in your sleep and Oh
AT (30:40):
My gosh. Yes. Yes. I would say I, all of the best parts of, of my last book 22 were like one-liners that I voice noted into Evernote in the middle of the night. Like, so much of my writing process is sitting up in bed being like, oh my gosh, I have to get that down and, and I’ll, I’ll voice note it into voice to text. So then I get up in the morning and it’s half gibberish, but I’m like, that’s a really great idea. Buried in there. I gotta put that in the book.
AJV (31:10):
But a lot of that comes back to enjoying the process. Yes. The process. And it’s a calling. Yes. It’s not a career move. It’s a calling that needs to be one of your signature lines, ally. It’s a calling, not a career move. Oh,
AT (31:25):
That’s good, aj. That’s good.
AJV (31:28):
It’s gotta be one of your signature lines. But I think all of this is so important because for the author, right, it doesn’t matter if it’s your first book or your 10th book, the same business planning is required for every single book. So tell us about this new awesome course that you are launching the author entrepreneur.
AT (31:49):
Yes, thank you. Well, so one of the things that, that we’ve experimented with this, one of the things we experimented with this year was helping to solve this pain point for aspiring authors. And we launched an accelerator this fall for aspiring authors nonfiction specifically who are working on their book ideas. And AJ it was one of the best, most fun, most life-giving things I have ever done. Everyone who went through it said that it’s, I mean, it’s totally rocked their world. It’s been the fav their favorite thing in their life right now. It’s, it’s been an incredible, incredible ride. And that was kind of my test ground to see is this a real felt need and can we, can we solve it? Is this you know, are these the questions that aspiring authors are really asking? And so, coming off of the success of the Accelerator, we’re, we’re, we’re wrapping it this week.
AT (32:47):
We’re gonna transition that content into an evergreen course where someone can go through it on their own time. So, so the accelerator was a live accelerator twice a week, every week. It’s a, a much bigger commitment. And a lot of what I heard from these aspiring authors was, oh my gosh, I want to do this, but it’s, you know, I don’t have capacity right now, or I, I’m gonna focus on the book next year, or Is there any way, are you gonna do it again? And and so instead of trying to do the accelerator all over again, I, I said, well, what if I can make this easier for that aspiring author and cheaper, honestly, to do it on their own time? So that is this course that we’re launching, we’re announcing it and opening up registration on December 12th. And because we love Brand Builders Group, we wanna give a discount to anyone who comes through Brand Builders Group. So just use the code bb g Yeah. For $200 off the course. We would love, love to have you in it. Oh,
AJV (33:49):
That’s awesome. And if you guys are listening and you wanna check this out, you go to copper books.com/course. I’ll put that in the show notes, and then use BBG as a discount codes copper books.com/course. Use BBG for the discount code. Now, what I, I know we’re almost out of time, but what I wanna talk to you about is kind of what you just said. It’s like, are these the questions that these aspiring authors are really answering, and what are the answers they need to know? So if you were to highlight one or two things that an aspiring author needs to know, what would they be?
AT (34:27):
One of them would be get to know your reader, who identify who your reader is. So thinking about your audience is one of the most important parts. If you wanna write just for you, that is beautiful, and I could not encourage you to do it more, but if you want to sell a book and actually create meaningful transformation in the lives of the person who decides to read your book, then you need to, you need to write with them in mind. Mm-Hmm, . So I would get specific into the, the psychographic, the demographic of who that reader is, and then start building a relationship with them now long before the book comes out. And this goes back to the idea of building your personal brand. Think about what the pain points are that they have. What is keeping your reader up at night? What are they wrestling with?
AT (35:23):
What are they struggling with? Because that is going to be the big umbrella idea that’s gonna be the consistent line through the book that you write. It’s gonna be the, the shareable the way that, that people talk about your book and share it with others is to, to solve that pain point. And then it’s gonna help you start to, to speak on that content and attract that kind of reader, that kind of audience now long before your offering something to sell to them. So, so that would be one. And the second, which is related to that is I would really get clear on what your big idea is. So if you could distill your book down to one sentence, I think that the books that go the farthest in the market are ones that can be easily distilled down to one big idea.
AT (36:16):
Because I know when I buy a book, I’m usually buying into the big idea that I know that the book stands for and saying, I want more of that. So I agree. Let me give an example. 4,000 Weeks by Oliver Berkman. I’ve given that book to so many people, and it’s, it’s about how, it’s about the shortness of life, and yet how you can expand your days. I, I call it the anti anti productivity productive productivity book. And so it’s easy for me to share the concept of the book with other people and encourage them to buy it. And many times I’ll buy a book because I love the idea. Maybe I read part of it, but I’m buying into the concept. So I would encourage you to really get clear on who your reader is and start to build a relationship with them now and then. And then really, once you’ve identified their problem, identify the big idea of your book that’s gonna solve that problem for them. And that is gonna help you make decisions around the content that goes into your writing.
AJV (37:19):
Hmm. I love that. And I think I love that. It’s just clarity. All right. You gotta know what yes. What it is and who is for
AT (37:25):
Yes. And, and it’s an act of service. It’s an act of service.
AJV (37:30):
I love that. All right, one last question. Yes. what is your favorite book?
AT (37:36):
Oh my goodness. Oh, I have so many. I would say my favorite book is Vitor Frankl. Man’s Search for Meaning. Okay.
AJV (37:45):
I’m
AT (37:45):
Obsessed. I’m obsessed with this. I with meaning, with meaning making. Mm-Hmm. And, and I think it is, is the most beautiful. I think it’s one of the greatest books of the 20th century and the most beautiful journey in how you create and build a meaningful life. And everything I do in my work is around trying to help people build meaningful lives, whether it’s through reading incredible books or creating them.
AJV (38:12):
Oh, I love that. Well, I always love a good book recommendation. Ooh, A man search for Meeting. I just wrote it down. Put it on the list.
AT (38:19):
Amazing. And 4,000 Weeks, too. You’ll love that one. All right.
AJV (38:23):
I’ll put that down too for you.
AT (38:24):
Bonus
AJV (38:25):
, thank you so much for being on the show and getting us your time and introducing us to the platform that is Copper Books and the discount for the upcoming course. And I think most importantly, what I’m most grateful for, for this audience is a great reminder that a book should be a calling, not a career move. Yes. This is important. It’s like, if you wanna be an author, then you’re also saying, I’m ready to be an entrepreneur. Yeah.
AT (38:56):
Yeah. And
AJV (38:57):
Those are not exclusive. Those are, those are, you know, together. And we have to treat it that way. And that was such a good reminder to all of us. It’s one thing to write a book, it’s another thing for someone else to read it. And so thank you so much. Ally. If people wanna connect with you online, where should they go?
AT (39:16):
You can find me on Instagram at Allie Bridge also at Copper dot books, on Instagram and LinkedIn. All the places, all the normal places. Would love to chat with you all. Would love to hear what your book idea is. And lastly, I just wanna say, if, if that dream won’t let you alone, it’s, it’s there for a reason and follow it.
AJV (39:40):
Hmm. Love it. So good. Everyone please check out Allie go to copper books.com. Visit her online, chat with her on Instagram. Do whatever you gotta do. But get connected and stay connected. And also catch the recap episode, which will be coming up next. We’ll see you next time on the Influential Personal Brand. See you later, y’all.