Ep 477: Entrepreneur Mindset | AJ Vaden Episode Recap
AJV (00:02):
We’re gonna talk about mindset today. And specifically we’re gonna talk about the entrepreneur mindset. And I’ve got five quick things that I wanna hit on to help you develop a rock solid entrepreneur mindset. And even if you are not a, you know, definitive entrepreneur, I wanna create an entrepreneurial mindset that no matter what you do, what role you have or title you possess, that these five characteristics can go with you anywhere you go. Because having an entrepreneurial mindset really just means you have an ownership mindset. And I don’t mean ownership of a business, I mean ownership over a task, ownership over a person, right? In terms of like owning, like what you’re gonna do in order to develop, develop, and lead that person, it’s over a project, or it could be over a business, but it is an ownership mindset. That’s what I need mean by an entrepreneur mindset.
AJV (00:59):
So number one, build as you go. That’s the first thing. Don’t wait until it’s perfect. It’s not going to be, so you must build it as you go. There’s this great analogy, actually, I saw a picture of this on Instagram so, so many years ago, and it was a picture of an individual who had jumped off a cliff and they were building the airplane as they fell. And the, the caption read below the life of an entrepreneur, right? Building the airplane after you jump off the cliff. And that’s a little bit of the ownership mindset of like, no matter how it goes, I’m gonna own it. I’m gonna own the successes, own the failures, but I, most importantly, I’m going to own the process of building it as we go and knowing that it’s always going to have opportunity to improve and be better.
AJV (01:44):
And we will do so as we go. But I’m not going to wait to launch. I’m gonna own what I’ve got and I’m gonna go and I’ll make it better as we continue. Number two, be a salesperson first. The ownership mindset is the, the key to all business is to make more than you spend
AJV (02:59):
Companies. ’cause Other companies have said, my gosh, they’re better at selling this than we are. They have more influence than we do. They have become great salespeople. So in an ownership and an entrepreneur mindset, you have got to, to own and take on the abilities and the responsibilities of being a great salesperson for your company, your products and your services. Number three, grow only as fast as you can. Serve your community. IE your clients and your employees. Grow only as fast as you can. Serve your community. Some of the greatest stories of all time about companies who have had enormous growth in unbelievable timeframes and in a devastatingly sad story of how they imploded that’s most of the docuseries out right now are about that. And I won’t list any of them specifically, but there are story after story after story about this monumental mind blowing growth.
AJV (03:57):
Only to watch it come to a tumbling disaster. A pile of rubble in the end because they outgrew their ability to serve their customers in a good and decent way. Right? Now, that’s not just their own customers, that’s also your employees. Don’t outgrow your capacity to take care of your people. So if that means you need to slow growth down, slow it down so that you can do it right? You don’t have to grow fast. There’s no accolades and fast growth, although seemingly that’s what people talk about in the market often fast growth is worrisome to me of going, do you have the infrastructure in place? Like if you’ve grown that fast in that short amount of time, like, do you really have all the systems in place? Like, can I see a little bit more into the, you know, under the cover now, under the hood, grow only as fast as you can serve your people, your community.
AJV (04:51):
That’s your employees and your customers. Number four, hire a players only if they are not an A player, don’t hire ’em. You gotta have a players in every single role of your company. This whole idea of the weakest link, why do you have weak links? Why? Why do you have those? I have no idea. I’m not saying that we haven’t had weak links. I’m just saying like, be cognizant of hire a players. An A player can do the job of three C players. So hire one phenomenal person. Pay ’em every single thing that they’re worth and it will save you three other positions. Hire top talent. Hire A players. Don’t settle. Hire the person that can help you grow, help you take it to the next level. Hire top talent. Hire A players. I cannot say that enough on repeat. And then number five, focus on being better over bigger. This is one of my favorite stories to tell right now. And it’s funny ’cause I don’t even remember the book that I read this in last year but I, that’s
AJV (05:57):
Not true. I think it was called To Create, it was a book called, called to Create. And they were telling this amazing story about Truitt Kathy, who’s the founder of Chick-fil-A And it was in the late mid or mid to late 1990s. And there was apparently this, you know, once of kind of like once of a lifetime boardroom meeting with Truit Kathy, who I, I did not know personally clearly, but was known to be a very calm executive. But in this particular meeting they were meeting about a competitor company called Boston Market, who had come on the scene and was growing at an expedient rate, taking up massive market share. And they were on the track to being a a billion dollar company at this point. I think Chick-fil-A was maybe like $400 million. Don’t quote me on the facts here, I’m recalling from memory.
AJV (06:46):
But they were in this conversation about how all these other Chick-fil-A executives were wanting to talk about, well, how do we grow market share? We need to open more stores. We need to do this and do this. And uncharacteristically of Truitt Kathy, he bangs his fist on the table and he said, we’ll have no more talk of this. The only thing that we need to talk about is how do we become better? We don’t need to become bigger. We need to become better and let our audience demand that we become bigger. And this saying has become a mantra at Brand Builders Group because who says you need to be bigger? Who says scale is better? That’s not necessarily the case. And I love this story with Truitt Kathy, because less than a decade later, Boston Market had filed bankruptcy. But Chick-fil-A was now a billion dollar company.
AJV (07:41):
When you focus on becoming better at what you do, you force your customers to talk about you more in the best way. Better quality products, better quality team members, better quality experiences. That’s how you grow. That’s how you become bigger, better, makes you bigger. Bigger does not always make you better, but better, almost always makes you bigger. So focus on being better at what you do, not just being bigger. Focus on better teammates, better training, better experiences, better service, better programs, better products, better services, better, better, better. And then let your audience demand that you get bigger because they want so much of it.
Ep 476: How to Go From 0 to 8 Figures in 5 Years with AJ Vaden
AJV (00:02):
How do you go from zero to eight figures in five years or less? That’s what we’re gonna be talking about today. And I gotta be transparent. I gotta be honest. I was actually in the shower this morning and I was brainstorming, what am I gonna do for this solo episode for our podcast today? And I, I looked over at my husband, Rory, and I said, Hey babe, what do you think would be worthy of doing a solo podcast episode, which is what we’re doing right now? And he said, babe, you gotta talk about the growth trajectory of Brain Builders Group. Because what’s what’s been done is something that has happened organically and the lessons that we have learned are extraordinary for entrepreneurs. And mainly because of all the things that we’ve done wrong. But luckily over the last five years, there’s been a few things that we’ve been blessed to do right through the grace of God and good coaches and mentors and amazing community.
AJV (00:54):
And in a fantastically awesome team at Brand Builders Group, we’ve been able to pull some pretty cool things off. And so we’re gonna talk about that. It’s what are eight things that you should know to help you go from zero to eight figures and five things and five years or less, right? So number one, focus on sales and revenue first. And don’t hear what I’m not saying. I’m not saying don’t focus on people or service. What I am saying is you have to know how to sell your product and service as the first thing you do. You have got to have a sales oriented mindset, a revenue focused effort before you start thinking of things that are ancillary, which I’m gonna throw out there would be marketing, right? And this will hear, hear more about this over our story, but it was sales first. It was like, we have to bring revenue in the door. If we’re going to make it, we’ll figure the rest out later. We’ll get better as we go, but we have to figure out how to sell this first. So it was figuring out what problem we solve, who we solve it for, the unique way in which we solve it. It’s what at Brand Builders Group, we call your brand positioning statement. It’s what are the offerings that
AJV (02:03):
We have and the price points, which will inevitably change. They will evolve. They must evolve. They must change as you grow as a company. But first and foremost, you have to know how to sell what you offer products or services alike. So, sales mindset first, revenue focused first. Not in lieu of service, but you’ve gotta bring clients in the door. You gotta bring money in the door in order to serve them well. So that was number one. Number two,
AJV (02:35):
Make more than you’re spending, right? Simple Law of Economics. Spend less than what
AJV (02:43):
You’re earning, right? In our case, it was like we, we were focused on making more than we were spending. And that means that us as the business owners were the, honestly, the, the lease paid people in the company for a minute. ’cause We could afford it. We had lots of savings. But
AJV (02:58):
We were not getting big office spaces. We still work from home. Still don’t have a permanent office space. We still use coworking spaces. We’ve decided that’s not the right capital investment for our company. We are investing in other things first. Website. We, we had, we full launched as a company way before we had a website. We didn’t even have a website until we were almost a full eight months in to Brand Builders group. So yeah, it’s a little bit amazing that this thing took off the ground, but it did. And we’ll talk about why. But just focus on spending less than you’re making, right? Be wise with the money. We did not take loans. This was all self-funded. I’m not saying don’t take a loan, I’m just saying we didn’t. ’cause We were sales focused first and we were focused on making more than we were spending, right?
AJV (03:43):
That was number two. Number three, build and adjust as you go. We were not tied to, it has to be this way. In fact, we were tied to the fact that we don’t know how it’s supposed to be. That we’re very open and very quick to adapt. And I think that’s one of the, the great blessings of our team and our company at Brain Builders Group is we are quick to pivot and rather everyone that is a part of our team is naturally this way, or they have adapted and adjusted to be this way. Our team has an incredibly high tolerance for change. Myself and my business partner, my husband, Rory, have an incredibly high tolerance for change because we know that in a startup, that we know in order to survive, in order to succeed, things have to change. And they, we have to be able to change them quickly.
AJV (04:27):
There can be no bureaucracy. We have to see a problem, fix a problem, right? See something, say something. Airport policies, we gotta be able to quick to pivot, right? And as a smaller, more nimble company we’re able to do those things. So we have been very willing to build and adjust as we go knowing that what we build today very likely won’t be a fit for even a year from now. And we’ve bought into the idea that that means we’re growing. That means we’re succeeding. So we’re buying into that. That’s a choice. It’s not a choice everyone wants to make, but it’s a choice that is necessary to make. And that with a changing market, a changing economy, changing technologies, as you have to be willing to build and adjust as you go, you cannot build it to be perfect and wait till it’s perfect to sell it.
AJV (05:13):
‘Cause That date never comes, right? It’s never gonna be perfect. It’s never gonna be exactly the way that you want it. There are 1,000,001 things I could list out right now that I wish were different, that I wish were better, that I wish were X, Y, and Z. But that doesn’t mean we don’t launch. That doesn’t mean that we don’t continue as is because what we have is good. And that’s how you know that it’s ready to sell. ’cause You know that it works. You know that it can help people. And we work to make it better every day, every week, every month. But it’s not the best. It’s better. And that’s okay. So build and adjust as you go. Number four, hire, right? Hire for the long term and set the vision for the people hiring, right? You’re gonna probably hear me mention the importance of team members again, in just a, a second.
AJV (05:55):
But hire right means hiring for the long term. And what I mean by that is like, when we bring on somebody literally on our first interview, I tell people and I think that’s something that I would just, I would like to mention, I’m a part of every single interview process. I do not hire anyone for any position in our company without also getting to meet them and interview them. This is a family. This is not just a business to us. This is our ministry. This is our calling. This is what we feel like we were put on this planet to do. And we wanna do it with people who share those values and beliefs and who are in it for the right reasons and who are in it for the long term. So on the very first interview, I say, I’m not asking you to sign a 50 year contract, although I would if I could.
AJV (06:37):
But I am asking you to don’t take this position. Don’t continue this interview if you don’t think this is a company that you could be with in 10 years, right? And I think that says something because we want to hire top talent. That doesn’t mean we can’t afford all top talent, but it means we want to hire the top talent so that we can afford top talent. And you do that with having a long-term in mind of like, Hey, we see the potential in you and in this company, and we want you to be here when we can afford to pay the top, the top pay for the top talent. We don’t want to grow and replace, grow and replace. We want to grow and promote, grow and promote, grow and promote the team that is here today. I would love to say that we hired so well, and so, right?
AJV (07:21):
It’s almost the same team that you’re gonna see in five years or 10 years, knowing that of course there’s gonna be turnover. We have had turnover. We have made not ideal hiring decisions based on fit and skills, but that doesn’t mean that’s not what we aim for, right? It is not hire just a body or hire the lowest, you know, paid person I can find it’s no, I hire the right person and I see if we can, we can make it work. And as we grow, their income’s gonna grow along with us. But that means you’ve got to sell the long term. You’ve gotta know the vision and sell the vision. Being a great recruiter is one of the most important assets of a leader. And as a CEO and an entrepreneur, recruiting is one of my number one jobs as the owner of Brand Builders Group.
AJV (08:07):
And it needs to be one of the number one jobs of our team recruiting, IE selling, right? But recruiting great talent is a skill that can be developed and honed. But a part of that is knowing where you’re going so that you can sell the vision and bring people along with you and actually fulfill the vision and the process, right? Number five, ask clients for feedback and then actually act on that feedback. It’s one thing to get feedback, and I think that’s humbling enough to, to constantly ask your clients like, what are the things we’re doing not so well? As well as what’s, what’s, what’s going well? What can we do more of? It’s a whole nother thing to go, I hear you and I’m gonna do something about it because I want the clients that we have today, just like my team to be the clients we have 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 year, 10 years from now.
AJV (08:52):
I want them to feel like they’re a part of building this company because honestly, our community at Brand Builders Group has been, they are the people who come up with the ideas. They are the ones who give us the feedback. And sometimes it’s not awesome feedback to hear that often is the feedback that is necessary to make that next move to growth. I can give you countless examples of things that I’ve just grabbed off of a survey of going, yeah, why aren’t we doing that? Or a conversation that someone said, Hey, would you be willing to hear me on this? And it created a whole new event or a product line or a service line. It’s ask for it. Genuinely, genuinely ask for it and then actually act on it. Help your community be a part of what makes you great. Because they know, they know where your weaknesses are.
AJV (09:39):
They know where your strengths are. And if you’re humble enough to ask for it and to listen to it and to act on it, it will make you a better company, a stronger company, and it will create more loyal customers. Okay? Number six, dev or sorry, give 10 times the value of what you charge. That’s a core philosophy of brand builders group. Every single time that we look at our, our suite of offerings for each of our product products or programs, we go, do we feel like they’re getting 10 times the value of what they’re paying for? And if not, how do we add more? It’s not, how do we constantly increase prices, although we’re in business at some point, we have to do price increases with the rate of inflation and the, the, you know, just cost of economies. Like, yes, those are things that we have to do to adjust with the rest of the world and the markets, but we are going to add more as we do that.
AJV (10:28):
Why? Because retention matters. Our customers matter. Our team matters. We don’t wanna be a revolving door. We want the, we want lifetime customers just like, and to some degree, I want lifetime employees, right? Again, but it’s, are you giving 10 times the value for what you’re charging for? So instead of thinking, what should you be charging, just be like, how much value can I give? And how can I make it such a no-brainer that it’s impossible to say no. Like I would be so dumb to leave. I would be so dumb not to do this. Like, I’m getting what? Like, is there a catch? Is there a trick? Like you want people to be like, this is extraordinary. How do you afford doing this? In fact, one of the most often questions I get from other people I know in our space is, why aren’t you charging more?
AJV (11:12):
Like, you know, you should be charging more, right? And I’m like, I mean, I know we could be charging more, but I don’t know that we should because we are aiming to do a very specific thing for a very certain group of people. Not to say that our prices won’t increase over time, they will, but always subservient to the value that we’re providing. So give 10 times the value than what you charge. Number seven, care. I’m just gonna pause for dramatic effect. Care, care about your team. Care about what you’re doing. Care about the numbers. Care about the details, care about your clients. Care about how things are done. Care. And I don’t mean you should be involved in every minute detail, that’s not what I’m saying. But in order to care, that does mean you need to stay on the front lines. You need to have contact with your customers.
AJV (12:06):
What we call our community. They’re way more than customers to us. They are our community, they are our friends, they’re our family. These are the dreams that we’re, we are working to empower, to come to life. These are not clients. This is our community. These are people that we care deeply about serving and helping. That’s why we’re doing this. And back to, it’s like we treat this as our ministry, not just our business. This is, these are friends and family. These are relationships, not clients. Customers and employees care. Stay on the front lines. Know your people. Know your community. Know what they’re about. Know what their brands are doing. Know what they’re up to on social media. Now, if you’ve got thousands and thousands of clients, I know that gets harder, but that doesn’t mean you can’t stay on the front lines. You read the surveys, you show up at the events, you get on customer service calls.
AJV (12:59):
You meet with the sales team, you meet with your team of people who deliver your products and services. You stay on the front lines. That’s how you show that you care, right? There’s places that you can care and there’s people that you can care. And what I mean by that is that there are some places that you need to be. And then there are some people that you need to be with. Know the places and know the people, the care, stay on the front lines. And number eight, develop your team so you can trust your team. And that has a lot to do with the mindset of no one is going to step into any role perfectly. It doesn’t matter what their experience is. It doesn’t matter how long they’ve been with you. There are nuances to every day, every role, every market, every year.
AJV (13:52):
They need developing just like you do as the business owner or as the leader. Develop your team. Provide them books to read, classes to go to courses to part, to participate, to participate in events, to go to coaches, develop your team so that you can trust your team. If you are a leader right now who questions your team, then I would question how much time you have spent developing your team. When you develop your team, it grows trust in your team because you know that they are getting equipped with the skills that they need. And they don’t all need to come from you. They cannot all come from you. They should not all come from you. They need to learn things outside of you so that they bring new things to the table. And that means they need developing. And that means you need developing.
AJV (14:44):
So who is your coach? How are you growing? What conferences are you going to? What classes are you attending? What courses are you participating in? Develop your team so that you can trust your team. And if you can’t do it together, right? Have a book of the month, have a book of the quarter, go to events together atti, you know, participate in courses together, whatever it is. Like, do things together so that trust grows at the same time, in the same ways, in the same places. But develop your team so that you can trust your team. Now I have probably like 88 more things that I could have listed, but when I reflect over the last five years of brand builders group, these are the eight things that we have done to go from zero to eight figures in the last five years. Now, there is one overriding thing that I would be remiss if I did not mention, and it is the fact that more so than anything else over the last five years, we have had open hands and we have said, God, this is yours.
AJV (15:46):
Do with it what you will and equip us to do what you want. Now, regardless of what your religious beliefs are and your affiliation with any sort of faith or religion, I would just encourage you that there is power and surrender of holding your business with open hands of going, this is not me. This is not my identity. This is something I do. It’s something I’ve been entrusted with. There are people here that I care about and that I have the opportunity to grow, trust, and develop. I have been entrusted with them. That is a responsibility I carry. It is not a burden. It is a responsibility. It is an honor, it is a privilege. And I hold it loosely knowing that this is not mine. There is no way that we could have done what has been done in the last five years on our own.
AJV (16:42):
And I don’t just mean our team and our community. I mean, this was a, God did it company, it is a God did it company. And it is because that we have been obedient and disciplined and we have listened. We have made lots of mistakes. But you know what? We didn’t stop. But it is holding it with faith of going, whatever is happening, I believe it’s for a reason. I believe there is a lesson for me to learn. I believe there, there is something to garner out of every bad situation that’s going to make us better. And for every ounce of faith that it has taken to do this. When we had to sell our car to make payroll, we said, okay when we had to you know, battle a lawsuit in order to start the company, we said, okay, when we gave up our life savings to start this, okay when it required us taking no pay so that we could pay our team, okay, there is an element of faith.
AJV (17:39):
IE trust that what you’re doing is significant enough that it’s worth the risk. But that doesn’t mean you don’t work. You must work. We, we work, we work hard, and at the same time, we do what we can while letting God do it. Only he can. And that’s where the trust and the faith has to come in. And again, regardless of your religious beliefs, I would just encourage you holding it loosely of knowing your business is not who you are and it is not your identity. It is something that you’ve been given. It is something that you’ve been entrusted with. You have skills that align well with you being successful at this, but it is not who you are. It’s not your identity. And if you hold it loosely there, the success has come a little easier and with a little less ego, but the failures come a little less hard. So five years, eight lessons to go from zero to eight. Hope this was helpful and I can’t wait to hear your story in the next five years.
Ep 475: 6 Tips to Scale the Profits of Your Personal Brand | Jeremie Kubicek Episode Recap
RV (00:06):
Welcome to the Influential Personal Brand podcast. This is the place where we help Mission-driven messengers, just like you learn how to build and monetize your personal brand. My name is Rory Vaden and I’m the co-founder of Brand Builders Group, a hall of fame speaker, and New York Times bestselling author. And this show is to help experts learn how to become more wealthy and well known. I know you’re gonna love it. Thanks for being here. Let’s get started.
RV (00:34):
I want to share with you one powerful principle and six key questions that you can use to scale your personal brand revenue right away. And this is really what I more and more as time goes on, I really believe that this is the secret to making more money. And it’s not something that most people are doing, it’s just the thing that I see the people who are making a lot of money are doing. And what this concept is all based upon is the idea that most people are pursuing width rather than depth. They’re concerned about the width of their reach, they’re trying to get more followers and more subscribers and, and that kind of thing. But the people who are making money are focused not on the width of their reach as much as they’re focused on the depth of their impact, and they’re utilizing something that we have created or coined as fractal math.
RV (01:30):
That’s the, the, the fractal Math method as what we call it. And we didn’t create the concept necessarily, but we’ve kind of branded it as that. And we are teaching it formally in our Brand Builders Group membership to all of our members. And so this is the big idea, this is the big concept that I will share with you. Fractal Math is a principle that says that 10% of your customers will invest at a level 10 times what they have already invested in. So 10% of your customers will buy something that’s 10 times more than what they’ve already invested in, right? So the the simple math example or illustration that I used for this is, let’s say that you had a $30 offer. Okay? You had a a $30 product, a $30 book, let’s say and you got a thousand people to buy it.
RV (02:20):
If a thousand people buy a $30 offer, that’s $30,000. When most people think about doubling their revenue, they think about adding more customers, right? To go, okay, if I wanna add another, if I wanna add another 30,000 revenue, I need to add another thousand customers. But a new customer is the most expensive type of customer there is acquiring, you’ve probably heard the term CAC or cac, the cost customer acquisition cost. It’s how much does it cost to acquire a new customer? Because new customers are the most expensive thing. The most profitable customers are existing customers when they buy repeat business, that is the most profitable because you get to have new revenue without any of the CAC. So the concept here, fractal Math, says to focus on serving your existing customers. And instead of getting a thousand new customers, the, the fractal math says that 10% of your customers will invest at a level 10 times higher than what they’ve already invested.
RV (03:21):
So if you have a thousand people who bought a $30 product, then that means 10 per, that means a hundred people, which is 10% of the thousand, a thousand customers, 10% of those is a hundred, a hundred people would invest in a $300 product. So 10, you know, 10 times what they’ve already invested, they already bought 30 times 10 is 300. So one 10th of the audience will spend 10 times more than what they just spent. And now you have a hundred customers who are already in your database, who invested at $300 rather than 30. And $300 times a hundred is also 30 grand. So you doubled your revenue without adding a single new customer. And it continues, right? So you go, if a hundred people would buy a $300 offer, then that means that 10 people, 10% of a hundred is 10, 10 people would buy a $3,000 offer.
RV (04:13):
And that’s another 30 grand because $3,000 offer times 10 people is $30,000. And then that means that one person, ’cause 10% of 10 is one, one person would invest at $30,000 with you potentially. So that’s another 30,000. So that’s three sets of $30,000, a thousand people buying a $30 product, a hundred people buying a $300 product, 10 people buying a $3,000 product, and one person buying a $30,000 product, 30,000, 30,000, 30,000, 30,000. That’s $120,000. That means you have not just doubled your revenue, you’ve quadrupled your revenue, and you’ve quadrupled your revenue without adding a single new customer. And that is the most profitable way to do it. And so this is, this is one example When we say that we teach monetization strategy inside a brand builders group, right? Part of our spiritual gifting is making money. We are good at it, we are good at teaching people to do it, and it’s through helping them understand principles and concepts of money that are like this, that a lot of people don’t know.
RV (05:21):
So that’s the concept. The concept here is fractal math. 10% of your customers will invest at a level 10 times higher than what they’ve already invested with you. And another way of saying it at a principle is to say, focus not just on the width of your reach, but the depth of your impact. And so now I’m gonna give you the six key questions that we ask for to, to increase our monetization at Brand Builders Group by increasing our, our level of service to our clients. And there’s six of the same questions that we ask, you know, my private clients who, who you know, either come invest to spend two days with me, one-on-one, or they come to one of my Brand Mastery events, which are very, very small events that I host now that are just like five or 10 people.
RV (06:07):
And we spend two days together. And basically I fractionalize the cost of two days with me, one-on-one across like five to 10 people. And so it becomes much more affordable. And these are the kind of concepts that I’m helping walk them through, okay? So here are the six questions that will help you extract more revenue from your current customers. But I don’t wanna don’t just think about it like that. And this is what question number one is. Question number one is, how can I help my clients succeed faster? How can I help my clients succeed faster? That is something that you should be asking. This is not just how do I get more money out of people, right? That’s not it. It’s thinking in a service centered way. And that’s what these six questions are. These are six service centered questions that lead to scale, that lead to more profitability for your personal brand and really for any business.
RV (07:02):
Although we only focus on working with personal brands. So when you ask that question, the quality of your answers is determined by the quality of your questions. And so if you want different answers, you gotta ask different questions. And if you ask better questions, you’ll get better answers. And that’s why these questions are so important. How can I help my clients succeed faster? Remember, money follows speed. That’s a principle of money. The faster you can, you can get a result for somebody, the more they’re willing to pay you for that result. And the more people there are who are willing to pay you that money. So that’s a question you should be asking. How can I help my clients succeed faster? Number two, what can I offer to help my clients succeed in a deeper way? Right? So how do I, how, how can I serve them in a deeper way?
RV (08:01):
How can I give them more access to me? There’s a, a, a principle and a, a framework that we teach in monetization strategy in our, in our formal curriculum that’s called the services spectrum, which is basically this idea that as, as intimacy goes up, as, as, you know, proximity to the messenger goes up, the price goes up because you’re able to serve people in a deeper way, right? Like the most expensive thing someone can buy from brand builders group is two days with me, one-on-one that’s expensive, but that’s also the most value that I’m able to give. I can completely customize everything I’ve spent my life learning to one person’s business or one person’s strategy. And that’s what, you know, most of my big private clients, the Louis Howes, the Ed millet, the, you know, the, the Eric Thomas’, the, the, the Amy Porterfield, the Jasmine Stars, the Jim Quicks, right?
RV (08:47):
These are people that are private clients of mine where I’m able to work with them one-on-one, and I can help them create massive value. Some because of who they are and what they have. And, and, and some just because, you know, they’re massive action takers and they, they, they execute and they’re coachable. So how can you serve your clients in a deeper way? How can you give them more access to you? More access to you requires more of your time. If it requires more of your time, then you should, you should. It’s justifiable to collect more money for that. It’s also worth more money to people because you’re able to shorten the learning curve because they’ve got more custom solutions coming directly from you. As they get closer to you, the solutions become more custom to their unique situation and more applied to their specific questions.
RV (09:34):
And so it’s worth more, and it also is worth more because it takes more of your time. So there’s more opportunity cost to your time. So how can you help your clients? How can you serve your clients in a deeper way? How can you give them more intimate access to you? Number three, what tools can I create that make it easier for my clients to implement? What tools can I create that make it easier for my clients to implement? Right? So especially if you are some type of educator or you, you’re an expert, right? We, we serve mission-driven messengers. A lot of our clients are experts. They don’t all sell information like courses and eBooks. A lot of ’em are professional service providers, right? They’re doctors, they’re lawyers, they’re accountants, they’re chiropractors, their financial advisors, their real estate agents. But what tool can you create where the tool can help your clients succeed without you having to be there?
RV (10:30):
Especially what tools can you create that help them implement the things that you teach or implement the things that you ask them to do? The more that you can create those tools, the higher value you, you, you are providing because you’re moving them from just education to application. And remember, that’s another one of our principles that we say is that people don’t pay for information. They pay for organization and application and tools accelerate the time, you know, it takes to, to implement it. You know, they, it compresses the amount of time that it takes to, to execute related lead. Number four, what vendor partnerships or vendor relationships can I form that I can refer my clients to that will help them execute, right? So maybe you can’t execute everything for all your clients we’re that way, right? Like we have over 800 clients in our, in our flagship membership program now, right?
RV (11:23):
Like, we’re serving 800 people. Our vision when we started the company was a thousand messengers. We’re getting really close to that. And we have like another 1500 private clients that just do, you know, private two day sessions with us. Well, the, the question is, is to go, well, we can’t write the copy for all, you know, 2000 of our clients. We can’t build every funnel for 2000 clients. We can’t ever, every video, you know, launch every podcast, manage every speaking career, do every single book launch write every single speech, write every joke. We can’t do that for all 2000 clients. And so we are going, what tools can we create to make it more accessible? And then also, where are their strategic vendor relationships? And I think one of the most valuable parts of our community when someone becomes a, a, a paying member of Brand Builders group is we curate a community of vendors, right?
RV (12:13):
So it’s like you need people to write copy, graphic design, do video editing, do websites, you know, build funnels like, you know, do research studies. Be a literary agent, book you for speaking like what all, you know, PR services, all of the things that personal brands need that we can’t provide. We’re just not that big, at least not yet. We go, well, let’s, let’s let’s curate vendors to introduce you to. And we do referral fees with the vendors, right? We pay them when they refer people to us, and they pay us when we refer people to them. So it’s a win-win win for everybody. Number five, big question. Where do my clients most often get stuck when they’re trying to implement the things that I teach? Right? So that’s a big question. Where do my clients most often get stuck when they’re trying to implement the things that, that you teach to them, right?
RV (13:06):
So you know what to do, you know how to do it. You’ve been doing it your whole life, your whole career, or some big chunk of it, right? And so what you gotta identify and your current clients well, and your past clients can help you do this, is go where do they fall apart, right? Where does, where does everything fall off the tracks? Where do they, it’s like they, they get excited and inspired, but then when they get to, you know, blank, it all just disintegrates and they lose all their momentum. You have to identify those roadblocks, those bottlenecks, and then you have to provide support to them. And then question number six, what problem can I solve for my clients? That never goes away. What, what problem can I solve for my clients that never goes away? And I give you example of some of the ones that we do at Brand Builders Group.
RV (13:51):
People come for our content, right? They come for our expertise, they come for our principles. They come because we give them a world class education that, in my opinion, exceeds the practical value by a long shot of what you would get from, you know, a a hundred thousand six, multi six figure MBA. And we teach them how to apply things quickly and make money for an a, a, a fraction of what something like that would cost. They come for the content, but they stay for the community. See, people leave college, they get their degree and they leave here. They stay because there’s, there’s community, there’s relationships, there’s joint ventures there’s friendships that are formed, right? There’s accountability that’s developed. They’ve got access not just to me and aj, but to our strategists and, and to the other clients. We also provide a lot around data and trends.
RV (14:41):
So our clients get insider access to like, what’s working right now. Not what worked five years ago, or just what worked five years ago, but what worked right now. Another thing that we have started doing for our members is pr. Our members need pr. They need publicity. They need to get in front of more stages. They need to get on more podcasts. They need to be on more YouTube shows. They need to be doing more Instagram lives. They need to be doing more, you know, onstage speaking breakouts, virtual summits, et cetera. Well, we are not a PR service, so you can’t hire us to book you for pr. We don’t do that. But what we figured out is, wow, we have 2000 clients. Almost every one of our clients, e every one of our clients has some type of a platform. They have podcasts, YouTube channel, they have events, they do stages, they do summits.
RV (15:27):
And so what we, we hired a full-time person to do nothing but connect our members to one another. So it’s an internal PR service inside our own community. And so people are going, wow, I’m paying for education, but I’m getting community and I’m getting these tremendous PR opportunities because I’m sitting next to people at your events who write for Forbes and do big summits and have huge podcasts. And all of them have social media followings, like is PR and then related is gigs. This is the next thing that we’re, we’re moving towards is helping our clients actually get paid gigs. And that’s like the new emerging area for us. So those are problems we can solve that never go away. So there you have it, one key principle, fractal math, and six key questions to ask to help you scale the revenues of your personal brand much faster.
RV (16:20):
Don’t be so consumed with the width of your reach that you ignore the depth of your impact. If you want more strategies like this, and you’re serious about taking your personal brand to the next level, make sure you go to free brand call.com/podcast to request a call with our team. If you’re not ready for that, that’s all right. Hang on here. Stay tuned next week, share this episode with someone who you think it would be valuable for. Come talk to me on social media and we’ll catch you next time on the Influential Personal Brand Podcast.
Ep 474: How to Build a Personal Brand that has Enterprise Value with Jeremie Kubicek
RV (00:02):
One of my favorite sayings that we’ve been talking about recently with our community is that, you know, in golf, you drive for show and you put for dough, and we’ve been talking about how email or social media is for show, and email lists are for dough, and that’s really where you make money inside of that same vein of that concept, a lot of the personal, the biggest personal brands in the world that you meet and you follow and you hear of often don’t have that big of businesses on the back end. And that’s usually because they’re really built around one person and one person can only do so much, they can only be available so many days in so many ways and so many places. And so there’s a very different conversation that happens around building a personal brand versus turning a personal brand into something that has enterprise value, basically a, a business or a revenue stream or set of revenue streams that you can sell.
RV (00:59):
And that’s what we’re gonna talk about today. We’re gonna talk about how to turn your personal brand into a business that you could actually sell one day, or just that has enterprise value, that it would live beyond you if you died, or that could be transferred to your kids or your employees you know, after you die. And to talk about that, we’re gonna bring one of the people who is truly the best in this space of anyone in the industry, of any, anyone that I’ve ever met in the personal development industry. So his name is Jeremy Kubek. I’ve known about Jeremy for years probably over a decade. We’re gonna, you’re gonna hear some of his background. But this person, like this man has had a lot to do with being a part of John Maxwell and helping build the Maxwell companies and some of the things they’ve done.
RV (01:47):
If you’ve ever heard of Chick-fil-A leader cast Jeremy was a huge part of that. These are, you know, huge catalyst catalyst conferences. This is a man who was very involved in a significant way behind the scenes. Now today he’s a Wall Street Journal bestselling author. He’s a speaker. He talks, he’s a thought leader and he is a serial entrepreneur, and he, you know, generally works in this space of kind of corporate leadership. And we’ll talk about some of his model today. But I really brought him on the show to talk about his newest book, the Communication Code. So, we’ll, we’ll touch on that a little bit, and also to really talk about how do you turn your personal brand into something with enterprise value. So Jeremy, welcome to the show,
JK (02:32):
Or good to be with you. Thank you, man. I’m, I appreciate all that you do. You have such a good reputation and just fun to be here.
RV (02:38):
Well, thank you, man. I, I, so you too. And, and I think specifically when I, the brands, the, the, the, the brands, the movements, the conferences, the companies that you’ve been a part of are ones where it’s like, you know, they have very, very strong reputation. So knowing that the context of this conversation is kind of around building a scalable enterprise can you just give us sort of like a brief history? I know you’ve done so many things, but like some of the high points of the big personal development brands that you’ve been a part of, of building.
JK (03:15):
Yeah. And so much of what I’ve done in the past, you know, which was, and I’ll tell you why I shifted to where I’m going and where I’m now, but we were a part of helping John Maxwell. We bought John Maxwell’s assets years ago inside Enjoy Maximum Impact. We bought inside of that was Catalyst. We stripped out and built the Catalyst conferences. We created Leadercast as a brand and started that as well. And then we partnered with people like Henry Cloud, pat Lencioni, Craig Rochelle, Andy Stanley you know, these thought leaders that were just doing amazing things and, and still are. But at the time that was, you know, that was back in the day, right? It’s like, yeah, I’m the good old days. And it was at the height of the conference world, and I, I saw the writing on the wall.
RV (04:08):
What year is this? What year is this? This is
JK (04:10):
2007 to 2015 that timeframe. And up to, I sold it all in 2011 and then 17 in parcels. And these
RV (04:23):
Were all on my vision board. FYI like Leadercast funny. I’m speaking at Leadercast this year. That’s, that’s still going. I’m actually speaking there in April. But like Leadercast and Catalyst, like these, these were events that were on my vision board as like an, as a up and coming speaker. So that’s, that’s awesome.
JK (04:39):
Yeah. And so, and you know, catalyst was so fun because Brad Lanik and I I was CEO he was exec director. He, he did such a good job, but we built an unbelievable experiential event. I don’t think there’s anything like Catalyst today. And, but the problem was, is that I, I was looking at it going, okay, this is a 20th century model. We are one pandemic away from going outta business. We’re one terrorist attack. And I was trying to figure out how to scale, how do we scale content? And most all the content was speakers having books, and what do you do from here? Right? And that led me on this journey of like, man, I wanna, I wanna actually go and look at how do you actually scale. So I moved to London, sold all of that, and people thought it was crazy. But we started over because I was trying to look at the 21st century, how do adults learn? How do you actually work inside B2B and actually make it stick and last? And that’s what we’ve done since that time.
RV (05:46):
Uhhuh
JK (06:06):
Yeah, that’s right.
RV (06:07):
Is that like, and how do you, how do you get a title sponsor? How did you even think to go to them? Like how did that come about? And like, if somebody has a big event, like what, what do they do to land sponsors like that?
JK (06:18):
Okay. It was, it was unbelievable how this happened. This is an epic story. So I my, I have a phrase like, who says we can, right? And so I had built a relationship through Chick-fil-A through David ERs, and he was over marketing and a good friend of mine, JT Robinson at Chick-fil-A and they connected me to Dan Cathy, and then we started becoming friends. And, you know, they loved the Catalyst conference. We were in Atlanta, so they already knew all about us because of that, right? So we already had these great relationships. But I invited, we were, we had Tony Blair, we as the speaker with Leadercast, and I invited David to come with me, Sawers and Dan, Kathy and I had Henry Cloud do the interview. So we’re in Tony Blair’s office, which was the home of John and Abigail Adams that shows you how old it was.
JK (07:08):
Wow. And we did the interview there, and it was, I have funny side stories with Henry Cloud and, and Tony Blair’s socks. But anyway funny things that happened. And then Dan, Kathy was with us and he saw the gravitas of it. He saw it. And on the way home David Sawers we took another trip to Paris and let, let’s get a couple of days and just, you know, process a partnership. What would a partnership look like? We’re on the way to the airport in a taxi, and David throws out a number, he’s in the front seat. I’m right behind him. He goes, Hey, how about X? And I go, how about Y? And then he goes, well, how about Z? And we shook hands at the, at the airport as we’re both flying back, and that’s how it took place. And we created the title sponsorship with a vision of the Chick-fil-A leader cast. Unfortunately, I had sold down by the time we were finished, I had sold down. And the other owners, they made different moves and didn’t value that partnership. I think it was fear of political positions of Chick-fil-A and things like that, that I think they overthought it. And now Chick-fil-A’s at 22 billion and Leader cast missed out on it. But I had already sold at that point in time.
RV (08:30):
Yeah, that is, that’s just wild. And so, like,
JK (09:21):
Well, so let’s take Leader Cap. I meant Catalyst is pretty simple. You have an arena, it has a cost. You build an amazing experience and amazing brand. And we actually, we, we did Catalyst. We said you had to be over 40 to come under under 40 to come. And we, we carted people at the door. So we created Scarcity with the idea, and then we produced the ticket price, and we said it’s for volunteers inside churches. So it’s not just church leaders, it’s the entire volunteers of a church. So they would use it as their annual retreat. And so Catalyst became kind of a mecca, probably the wrong word to use, but from that, the, a mecca of that, that that world. And then for Leadercast, it was different. I had already done the Maximum Impact simulcast, we own that. And then I sold that with John Maxwell and I sold it back to him.
JK (10:11):
So I built the leader cast brand. And we just took a brand that we had, we had done before, but we hadn’t used it. And I basically thought of Jake at State Farm. This is State Farm Insurance around the, the United States, like small town insurance agents, small town chambers, small town bank presidents. They want to gather and have events, but they can’t afford to bring Tony Blair in. They can’t afford to bring John Maxwell in or pick a thought leader. So really, there was a simulcast for small towns. And then you get them to, to host it, and they pay a host fee. And I can’t remember what we charged at the time the fees, but we basically, there’s different levels. They sold tickets and it was different. You know, if you bring X people, if you bring under 50, it’s this price, 50 to a hundred, a hundred to, and then you just sell the host fees. So we’d have, I think the highest I had was 184,000 people at 874 host sites. And that was the highest that we had ever gotten. I
RV (11:21):
Said 184,000 people watching live from how many host
JK (11:25):
Sites? The simulcast at 874 sites.
RV (11:30):
8 74.
JK (11:32):
Yep.
RV (11:32):
Wow. And so each of those sites, they basically pay a fee to be able to host it, but then they go resell the tickets and they keep the profit from it, some of
JK (11:40):
It that’s right. Mm-Hmm.
RV (12:08):
A break in the agenda for like a local person to get up and speak.
JK (12:12):
Mm-Hmm.
RV (12:13):
Oh, that is brilliant.
JK (12:16):
So, so now that became a massive business year over year. And then we would do live, well then Chick-fil-A sponsorship basically helped me pay for the live location, because that’s where all the expense is. You have the technology back in the day, this is, this was before the modern streaming, but you had a lot more broadcast, literally broadcast trucks, you know, and, and so it was just, but it was a lot of risk, man, a lot of expense. Just to pull it all off, you work 360 4 days for one day, and it was just, it was intense.
RV (12:57):
Yeah. Yeah. Uhhuh
JK (13:03):
We had, we had we had, we got hacked. The group that we bought got hacked, and we had Aramaic on the bottom screen for 45 minutes one year. You know, this is little spooked out after nine 11, things like that. I mean, it was just, we had some hard stuff that took place, but we did it from 2000, whatever, all the way to you know, it’s still going, you know, I sold it and now it’s become a lot smaller. But it’s, it’s the concept. Anyone could do it. I mean, it’s, if you have vision for it, yeah. But what was the problem was this, the group that I sold to, they started going to larger companies. Larger companies. They get to see Tony Blair, they get, and they took, I think they took their eye off the ball of Jake at State Farm. It’s small town America, small town, you know other countries that, that’s where the, the, the opportunity is. But how do
RV (14:01):
You reach those people? Did you have local reps or do were you just do an advertising and stuff like that? You have an inside phone sales team? All,
JK (14:08):
All, yeah, we had a sales team. And so the sales team, then we had leads, and we’d have, when I, what I had at the time, we had regional connectors and, you know, people who would be one city leader. Hey, I know 10 churches, three chambers, you know, and you kind of build it that way.
RV (14:28):
Amazing, amazing. So you, but then you thought, you saw going, man, we’re one pandemic away here from live events or something. So you saw that in 2017 and bounced out. That was, that was about as perfect autonomy as you could have gotten. And, and you basically thought, okay, adults are gonna be learning virtually, and how do we deploy this to companies? And that’s so, so, so catch us up now to what you’re doing now.
JK (14:55):
Yeah. So Steve Cocker and I my business partner in England, we started to, like, honestly, here’s how we did it. We’re like, who’s scaled better than anyone in the world? And we’re like, Jesus
JK (15:11):
How did he do it? So we dissected the Jesus model, and this, I’m not even religious when I say this. Just how did he do it? And we’re like, oh my goodness. He used parables. So we use visual tools and we figured out that most adults, they, they’re cynical know-it-alls, and they don’t read much anymore. And they have short attention spans, and everything they do is on video and short video. And so we’re like, okay, where we go. So we took all of these concepts and we built 75 visual tools, and we made the tools so scalable that they help people get healthy relational, intelligent, but we teach them to multiply. So they have to teach it to other people. ’cause When you teach, you learn. So we started packaging these programs and we started certifying people. And eventually, now we just, we’re just a wholesaler. We just certify our content for coaches and consultants, and anyone in the world can use it. And so now we’ve got a, a system. So the Five Voices is probably what we’re best known for. Okay.
RV (16:13):
So hold on a second. Let me just, let me back up and pause there to make sure I understand. Because, because you’re saying we’re just a wholesaler, basically, you’re a, you’re a wholesaler, a wholesaler of your own product. Like you basically created ip and then you allow coaches to resell that IP wherever they are at, to whoever they want. So then how do you, how do you make money? And how does the coach make money? So
JK (16:41):
Here’s how, here’s what we figured out. It’s a win type of, of proposition. And it’s really interesting. We to set in 2019 we were more traditional in our certification process, 2019. I’m like, we have to be in technology. We have to be ready to scale. Don’t, didn’t like our business model. So we shifted and we launched in January of 2020 into a SaaS business. Wow. So we moved in January with the pandemic in March. We had no idea, but we, we turned and we started selling to coaches, in essence. I don’t know why that does that. But we started selling to coaches for 2 99 a month. So $299 a month. They get to be certified in our content. They take our content, and then they become a partner with us. And we built a community and we help them build their business.
JK (17:37):
And then they take our content of the Five Voices, 100 x our toolkit, and they sell that inside companies. And then we have an operating system, it’s called Giant os pro. And they take five Voices assessments, team performance assessments, and it’s a recurring revenue machine. It’s basically a SaaS business for them. We, we help coaches have a SaaS company. And if you don’t know what SaaS is for those listing, it’s software as a subscription. So it’s, it’s technology at $10 a month. So we have now they sell price points and products inside companies, but they get to keep a hundred percent of their workshops, of their keynotes, any of the content. They keep a hundred percent of that. They pay us 2 99 a month. And then they sell products, technology products inside companies. And then we do a rev share with them.
JK (18:33):
So it’s brilliant. They have direct work. They have directed work because now we have a community and they help each other around the world. They get pulled in to each other to help each other at Google or Pfizer or Biogen or wherever. And then they have a recurring revenue, a SaaS model. Well, here’s the beauty. If you think about us from enterprise, our evaluation of our company in 2018, we had a hundred coaches at 2018, and we did rev share splits. When you take their gross margin and all the way down to our ebitda, we maybe would’ve gotten three times our ebitda, which was really low. And we’re like, we’re gonna work this hard for that. It’s not sellable. We have content that everyone loves. We have this coaching community. It’s kumbaya, people love Giant, but it, the economics weren’t working. We flipped it, went to a SaaS model.
JK (19:31):
We’ve spent the last three years really, really pushing hard to get it established. Now we’re at scale, but now we’re being traded off of revenue. And Rory, this is the craziest part, you know, this, but SaaS businesses are traded off of revenue because our growth rate is so high. Our gross margins are so high, but now we’re probably worth on the minimum of six times revenue up to 12 times revenue, depending on our growth rate. Growth rate, not of ebitda, off of revenue. So a, a business that was worth maybe 900,000 in an EBITDA model is now worth 30 to 40 million in a SaaS model. And that’s the beauty of it.
RV (20:18):
Yeah. And let me just, just to walk y’all through like some rough math on this. If you’re not familiar with valuations, right? So let’s, let’s say you have a company that does just for easy math, 10 million in revenue and 1 million in profit or ebitda, right? Earnings before interest, tax risk, depreciation and amortization, that’s basically profit. So most companies are valued at a multiple of profit. That’s what we’re talking about here. That’s what Jeremy is saying. A, a service-based business would be valued at a multiple of profit. So if you had a, a three x multiple on profit, that’d be three times your ebitda. So in this case, three times $1 million would be a $3 million company. But if you’re a SaaS company, you’re valued off of revenue. And instead of three times a million, which is, you know, the multiple times the profit, it’s, it’s maybe something like, let’s say five for easy math, five times the revenue.
RV (21:09):
So five times 10, which is 50 million, right? So that’s by, by repositioning the company. For, for those of you, that’s just like a quick little math, like lesson in how this works. And so anyways, so, so come back. So, so it’s blowing my mind here is now you said the coaches are creating a recurring revenue, you’re creating a recurring revenue model for them. So I see how you’re creating a, a recurring revenue model for yourself because they’re paying you 299 a month. Got it. They get to use all your content. They get to keep all a hundred percent of their training and speaking, which is cool. ’cause That’s always a rub, right? Is who gets to, you know, who gets to keep the percentage, but then you have these IT products you’re talking about that they’re then selling into companies. And so are those basically subscription products and that that’s what your revenue sharing? Yeah.
JK (21:58):
So they’re selling the operating system inside companies. So when they do Five Voices, for instance, five Voices is we think the most innovative personality driven growth tools. So you understand your personality and wiring. Well, people take the assessment through the operating system and it’s $10 a month per employee. And then they, they find or
RV (22:20):
Limited access to the test,
JK (22:22):
To the operating system. Mm-Hmm.
RV (22:24):
Whole operating system,
JK (22:25):
They get everything. So the employee, they get, and, and it’s robust, they get team performance assessments, they have peace index assessment, communication code assessment, all of our books and tools, they get access to all of it. So, and employees now can build their team leaders. They can run their teams through Giant, but we’re partnering with a coach, a consultant. So each of them are then bringing on, like today I showed you that list that wins channel. Becky in England, she brought on 45 people at $10 a month. Well, that’s $450 a month, so it’s really low for the client. But that adds up because our churn rate is super low. It’s less than 3%. So people stay with us a long time because they’re using it as an ongoing basis. So now we’re in the software model. So now we’re helping coaches and consultants actually have a software business because they couldn’t afford to build what we’ve built.
JK (23:27):
So now we’re partnering with them. They’re selling five Voices, pro or Giant inside the company. They’re adding people onto the software and technology, and they’re running their systems off of it. The coach and consultants working with the company to do that. So now you have your direct income. So the, the direct income would be if you do a workshop or speaking, that’s a hundred percent yours. If you are so full and you need help, you can pull from any of the other giant community and ask, Hey, can you do this work for me, Rory, I can’t do it. But you keep a percentage of it. So you get a percentage of you directing work to people, and then you have recurring revenue. So we have one group, and it’s the largest group. So be be mindful of this, we have one group that’s making 49,000, or they have 49,000 a month in recurring revenue, and they’re making 25% of that. So 25, 30% that they’re making of 49,000 a month. We have other people making 9,000 a month. We have other people making 1000 a month. But it’s the idea that as a coach or consultant, you can actually have recurring revenues. You can actually be in the SaaS model itself. And that’s the partnership that we’ve, we’ve figured out.
RV (24:43):
Amazing. So, so basically they get a hundred percent of the speaking, you get a hundred percent of the coach’s monthly fee, and then they get 25 to 30% of the recurring. But then they also have a, they’re also vested in making sure people are logging in and using it and using the tools and all that sort of stuff. Yeah.
JK (25:00):
And it’s a frequent
RV (25:00):
That is so brilliant. That is so magnificent. I love that so much.
JK (25:05):
JK (25:59):
We’re doing different businesses, but Giant has now got five voices, but we are building certifications around five voices for other things. There’ll be a future of five Voices for healthcare, five voices for cells. And so now we’ve got this community that wants to take it in different directions than they can, but it’s just a different way to think than the other alternative, which was, I go speak, I sell books, and then maybe I get a certification product that I can sell to people. There we go. I’ve, I’ve already sold it. Maybe they do renewals. Well, in this case, it’s like we’re trying to, we we’re, we’re, our churn is so low. We’re trying to get to 3000 consultants. We’re at a thousand right now. We’re trying to get to 3000 consultants minimum that we think that will be the kind of next level for us. So, and we made it where it’s just very inexpensive. It’s 2 99 a month in that regard. So,
RV (26:56):
Yeah. Interesting. Well, that, I mean, that is so fascinating, and it’s just part of what I wanted to, to, to show in the interview is like, there’s different, there’s different ways to do this. And sometimes a shift in your thinking sometimes a minor shift in your thinking, create an exponential difference in the outcome of, of what it’s worth. And I think, you know, there, there’s a lot of people chasing like big speaking fees and, you know, wanna be the bestselling author and want to have lots of followers and like the celebrity, which is not bad or wrong. I mean, there’s, we, we do a lot of that, right? And we, we understand that world, but it’s also like there’s a way to be filthy rich and totally obscure at the same time.
RV (27:42):
You can get your content out. You can change the world. You can, you can multiply through other people. You can leverage. I, I also love how in both the story of Leadercast and in this model, you are really like reaching like the small town people and the, you know, the independent coaches. And, but, but, but pulling all those people together becomes a really powerful force. So I think that’s just really, really fascinating. So all right. Well, I, I, I, I, I, we, we gotta wrap up here soon. I, I wanna make sure that you get a chance to talk about the communication code. And maybe you can, you, you can just do a brief mention of how does that book tie into what you’re doing and, and you know, why did you write it and all that? ’cause I know that’s your, your most reset.
JK (28:24):
Yeah. So real fast. So I create content. The content then goes into our operating system and it goes into our consulting pool. They use that content for marketing. So we have the five gears, five voices, a hundred x leader, peace index, communication code, so on and so forth. So the communication code is one of our powerful tools in the giant community. They love it. And you can check it out giant worldwide.com if you want to find out more of what that community looks like. But communication code was really a tool. The idea is this, that Rory when we communicate, we have communication has expectation attached to it. Every communication is an expectation. And every expectation has a code word attached to it. If you understand and learn the code word, then you’ll unlock the expectation or the relationship. If you miss the code word, then you’re gonna miscommunicate.
JK (29:17):
And when you miscommunicate walls go up and then relationship sour, that’s the summary. So the five code words are, there’s care, there’s celebrate or celebration, care, clar, clarify, collaborate, and critique. Those are the five things that people are wanting when you understand what it is, and specifically how, and you customize it. ’cause Your care might look different than my care. But once you figure it out, then you actually use code language. Hey Roy, all right, we’re working today. Hey, what are you wanting today? Well, I want you to clarify first, and then I want you to collaborate. Awesome. You gave me the code words. I, I probably won’t miscommunicate, but if, if you come to me with desiring care and I start critiquing and then you pull back and I’m like, dude, what’s up with him? And most relationships are strained because we’ve missed the code words of communication. So it’s a, it’s one of the tools in our communication sec or section of Giant. We have communication, we have a relationship alignment, execution, and capacity tools. And that’s one of the key tools for that.
RV (30:28):
Very, very cool. So Jeremy, where do you want people to go if they wanna learn more about you and be connected with what you’re, what you’re up to? Yeah,
JK (30:36):
So jeremy ache.com. It’s not the easiest spell. Maybe that can be in the show notes. Giant.
RV (30:41):
We’ll put it in the show notes.
JK (30:43):
Yeah. And giant worldwide.com. Those are two that are very easy. You can also find our books on Amazon.
RV (30:49):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And if you reach out, make sure you just let ’em know that you heard ’em with Brand Builders Group and Influential Personal brand and show ’em some love online to some of his social counsel stuff. Jeremy, thanks for that story, man. What, what an amazing trip kind of down memory line and just the evolution of the industry and, and kudos to you for making a lot of impact. I mean, separate of money and all that stuff is like, I just think about all the people who came to Leader, leader ca have come to Leader, cast and Catalyst, and, you know, Maxwell and all the stuff that you guys are doing, you’re doing now at Giant. Like, it’s really, really cool to add all that up and go, you know, somewhere, somewhere, somewhere somebody’s lives been vastly improved by the sacrifices and the work that you’ve put in. So kudos to that. Man. We wish you the best. Thanks for being here. And we’ll continue to follow your journey.
JK (31:38):
Thanks Rory. Appreciate you
Ep 447: 5 Keys to Being Financially Secure as an Entrepreneur | Rob Luna Episode Recap
RV (00:02):
Well, I always love a good chat around tax strategy and investing in financial stuff and just learning about money in general, because I don’t think there’s enough conversation and enough knowledge that is transferred around making money, saving money, keeping money, investing money, spending money wisely, and just in overall generating more, more money. And so I’m always looking forward to those opportunities. And I enjoyed that chat with Rob Luna. I wanted to share with you as part of that go, I just wanted to off the top of my head, grab five keys to being financially secure as an entrepreneur. So as I look back over like my career and mine and AJ’s journey as entrepreneurs to go, what are some things that have, have really led to our financial security, at least to the level that we have at now? And I just thought, man, let’s rattle these off ’cause these are good.
RV (01:01):
And, and, and I would’ve wanted to have known these or, or heard them over and over again as an entrepreneur. So here they are, five keys to being financially secure as an entrepreneur. Number one, get debt free to own your freedom. Get debt free to own your freedom. And this is one that I just, I will be forever grateful to Dave Ramsey because he has the program that teaches people how to get debt free. And we followed that thing to a t Now, I don’t know, it was coming up on 20 years ago when I went through financial piece, but those principles became a part of my financial psyche that I adapted and adopted that are ingrained still to me today that have, I think, set me up in a completely different financial capacity from several of my friends and colleagues and clients and, you know, even mentors and people I look up to.
RV (02:00):
And a huge part of it is just being debt free, because people try to make mathematical arguments for why maybe you shouldn’t be debt free, right? They try to make mathemat mathematical arguments for like, well, think of all the money you have tied up in your house, right? And going, if you took that money out of your house and instead had a, you know, debt on your house, you could be investing that money in other places and making more money. And sometimes, and in some markets, that’s sometimes true. But here’s what’s always true. When you don’t have debt, you are free. I mean, the Bible says this, right? The borrower is slave to the lender. And what’s, what is more powerful in your life than having millions of dollars is just being free to do whatever you want to do. And
RV (02:58):
That comes, that’s a mental thing. And it’s a spirit that’s a spiritual condition. And that has more to do with not owing people money than it does to do with how much you make. And one of the things that you’ll realize as you make more money, and hopefully you realize this, this is one of the things that AJ and I learned over the years, is that we don’t need more money. We need less stress. We don’t need more money. We need less, less complexity. Peace is the new profit. It’s not about going, oh, I have some number in my account. And then that number’s bigger and bigger and bigger. Like it’s just a number in an account. What really matters is your peace of mind. How do, how are you feeling? How secure are you? How stable are you? Versus how worried are you that if a change in the interest rates in the are, are gonna completely, you know, tank your business?
RV (03:55):
Or are you worried that if you don’t get a customer to pay in time, you’re not gonna have a chance to pay your vendor and you won’t make payroll. And like all of the stress that comes from leverage, which is like basically playing arbitrage with money, that is risky business. And it’s not that it can’t ever work, sometimes it does, but more often than not, it all nets out to be about the same as just doing it the simple way anyways. And regardless of it, it’s just when you come to a decision to go, I don’t need more money, I just need less stress, that is powerful. And that’s buying your own freedom. When you, when you’re debt free to go, once you’re debt free, you can buy whatever you want as long as you can pay cash for it. Like it, everything becomes simple.
RV (04:42):
But when you’ve got multiple investments and multiple, you, you know, loans from different people at different rates and some are variable and some are fixed, and like, it’s all of this stress to manage, even if you’re healthy, it’s like you have to keep an eye on all of these different things. It’s stressful. So get debt free and buy your own freedom. And I just go start small. Be willing to go start small and be willing to go slow. And over time, it adds up to be something that’ll be far more than you ever need and you won’t have the stress along the way. So that’s number one. Number two is invest in yourself First. Invest in yourself first. If there are, when, when you, when people think of investments, what they, they tend to think of like, ooh, buy real estate or invest in the market, or maybe do non-traditional investments, right?
RV (05:32):
Like, you know, artwork or crypto or you know, wine or like whatever. There’s all these different things. You, you, you know, currencies, there’s all these things you can invest your money into, but the number one thing you should invest your money into is yourself, your own mind, your own personal development. The, the, the greatest return on your money that you will ever get is strengthening your mind, your education, your knowledge, your, your mental capacity, and just you’re building your own confidence and your own strength and your ability to create wealth and create opportunity for yourself and those around you. And we just don’t hear about it. And people don’t think about investing in themself in enough of a literal way of like, if I could put money into the stock market that might grow at, you know, maybe 7%, maybe 8%, maybe 10% over years.
RV (06:25):
But if I put that money into myself, I go, I could grow my income exponentially over time, like in a, in a short order. If, if I learn how to do it and I learn and I’m, and I’m, I get in environments where I’m around other successful people. So invest in yourself first. Then the second thing I would invest in is invest in your business, right? Before I’d be looking at investing in the markets and all these things that you may or may not understand, and maybe you understand it better than I do. Like, you know, I consider myself reasonably smart, but there’s a whole lot of investment stuff that I don’t understand. I don’t understand all these fancy terms. And I have an MBA, like I have a, I have an MBA from a private university like I was a millionaire by the time I was 30 years old.
RV (07:08):
I have, I have, you know, been the, an entrepreneur now for a couple decades and there’s a whole bunch of this like speak this, this financial speak, I don’t understand. And all these, you know, you know, just weird terms. And I go, when I look around the people who have a lot of wealth and a lot of security, the big, the best investment is into yourself and then into your business. Because if you think about, like, you know, even trying to find, try to find a company that is gonna give you a 20% return, would, would be outrageous. It’d be so difficult. But if you can grow your profit margin as a business to 20% of profits a year, then that means every dollar you invest in that business is gonna give you back 20 cents. So if you can build your own business, that can, that can, can, can grow over time.
RV (07:54):
And maybe it’s, you know, it’s not a lot at first. You might, you know, break even, hopefully and make a little bit of money, 1%, 3%, 5%. But that business starts to grow. You inch it up and you’re gonna start, you build a business that clocks 15% a year, 20% a year, every single year for the rest of your life. Like you’ve built the greatest investment machine you have for yourself. Now, you don’t wanna have all your wealth tied up in your business ’cause then you don’t have diversity. ’cause If something happens and you get sick or you lose key employees or customers or vendors, or the market changes or regulation or competitor kills you, like, there’s, there’s risk right there. But, but a lot of that risk is a much more in your control than investing in some other asset that you have nothing to do with its performance.
RV (08:38):
So I always, you know, think, invest in yourself, invest in your business, then invest in your retirement. So that’s how I would think about investing. And I would go, okay, I wanna get debt free first. That’s simple. Then I wanna invest, but I wanna invest in myself and then I wanna invest in my own business, the things that I’m controlling. Like if I have, if I have a choice between place and money with some outside person or entity, or a real estate investment or some project or investing into the business that I run and operate and control every day, I’m gonna invest in that one, the one that I have control over, the one that I understand, the one that I can influence, the one that I can shape. And so we just don’t think of investing enough with just invest in yourself, invest in your own business.
RV (09:21):
So that’s investment number three. Okay, so talking about real investments. I’m gonna just say this and, and you know, maybe some of y’all will disagree. Have a boring investment strategy, have a boring investment strategy. You know, you heard Rob talk about buy, buy boring businesses. You know, Cody Sanchez is one of my favorite people to follow online. I’ve developed a little relationship with her recently and that she talks about buying boring businesses all the time. Like, your investment strategy should be boring. And I don’t, I think buying businesses is not boring. I think buying businesses is like scary and risky. And half the time that go, more than half the time that investment probably goes to zero. You know, just doing single, like, you know, investing in startups and stuff is that is not for the faint of heart. That is, that is, you know, typically very risky.
RV (10:12):
I’m talking about growth stock mutual funds like the, the, the s and p 500 in here in the us. These are, you know, the, the big large, stable enterprises that they’re not gonna make you millionaire overnight, but they’re gonna grow steady and consistently. And if something happens to those, if those all go under, that means the world is like, the world is in such dire straits. It doesn’t matter what your money is because you’re probably like you, you know, fighting for candles and, and water and stuff. Like these companies, the big companies, they’re, they’re, they’re, they’re, they’ve been around a long time. They’re stable. They’re not typically going anywhere. Y you know, they’re not going anywhere anytime soon or easily, right? And so it’s a boring investment strategy if you, if you don’t understand the investments, don’t make them. And, and if it feels like a lot of work to understand what it is, again, I would say don’t make it if it, if it, if it seems complicated or complex.
RV (11:12):
Like if you can’t explain what it is to someone else, don’t do it. And you know, if, if you’re doing it just because you saw someone on the internet telling you it was a good idea, man, be careful. I mean, just be careful. The, the people that I know that are the most happy, right? If peace is the new profit, that’s something I’ve been saying so much lately. Peace is the new profit. The people who are peaceful are not the people I know that make a a the most money. I know lots of people who make lots of money that aren’t peaceful, they’re constantly stressed because they’re constantly managing chaos. The people who I know are the most peaceful have simple plans, simple strategies, simple savings is they do simple things that they can understand and explain and, and that make sense to them. And they don’t do things because they wanna look smart or look sophisticated or to feel like they’re caught up at the crowd.
RV (12:12):
They, they do things that they actually understand. So have a boring investment strategy. Number four, choose abundance over scarcity. Choose abundance over scarcity. I think one of the most costly things that we have in the world today is a scarcity mentality. Simply stated. I think a scarcity mentality is, is often like an is is an an an either or thing. Either you can win or I can win. Abundance is going, we can both win, right? Abundance is going, there’s a, there’s a way to figure it out where everybody wins. Scarcity make feels like, well, if, if I help this person, that’s gonna take, if I help this person succeed, it’s gonna take something away from me. Abundance is thinking as I, if I help this person succeed, it’s gonna come back to me. And I think that too many people hold on too tightly to their money because they have scarcity.
RV (13:17):
They’re afraid that if they let that money go, it won’t come back to ’em. And so they don’t invest it, right? So what they do is they just hang on to it and, and they go, I don’t want anyone to steal it. I don’t wanna do anything with it. I just have to hold onto it. ’cause I’m not, I’m afraid if I let it go, it won’t ever come back. Well, one of the things that wealthy people do is, is they’re using their money. See, ironically, I think a lot of times people think that rich people have, are, are, are overly focused on money, or they’re like overly like, consumed with money and they go, oh, that’s why they have money, is because they just, all, they, they must love money. And that’s like their whole life. It’s their whole focus. That’s what people think.
RV (13:57):
That’s what I used to think, right? Coming up from, you know, a lower class family financially and, and not having much financial education until I self-educated. And in like my, you know, late teens and early twenties, what I have actually learned is that wealthy people, not all of ’em, right? Some wealthy people are not this way, but most of the wealthy people I know, they actually have the most healthy detachment from money because they know if they lose it, they’ll get it back. They’re not, they, they’re, they’re not hanging onto it for their, their own survival. They’re not so scared that going, oh, all of my security is in money. They’re going, no, I’m gonna invest in myself. I’m gonna invest in my business. I’m gonna invest in growth. I’m, I’m willing to take risks. I’m, I’m willing to. And, and I’m willing to invest in investments, whether it be real estate or it be the stock market or, you know, I I there’s not that many non-traditional investments that I am a fan of, at least unless you’re, unless you’re like a professional investor and investing’s all you do all the time and it’s all you think about and talk about.
RV (14:57):
But you, you have to be willing to think of money as a tool, right? The, the analogy I use is don’t think of your money as like a shield. Think of it as a tool. Like, like, don’t, don’t, don’t think of it as like, don’t depend on it, just for your safety. Think of it as like something you use to build something with. And that’s abundance is going. No, I, I, I I use money to, to make money. I mean, one of the things that we’ve done our whole life, we hire people to do everything. Like the number, probably the number one thing we spend money on even more than ourselves per se, is hiring other people around us to help us. We have lots of work that we need done. We need lots of help and going, part of why we do that is we don’t even make a lot of money, but we get more peace back because all the stuff there is to do, we hire, help people to help us do it.
RV (15:50):
And so even if we make no money, we go, well, at least we have help and we don’t have stress. And that’s the idea is, is is being willing to choose abundance over scarcity and, and be willing to invest. And, and by the way, that’s the risk of being an entrepreneur, right? Is you pay yourself last, right? The, the potential upside is one day you would make a lot of money, but it’s, it’s like we always pay ourselves last. Everyone else on our team gets paid whether there’s a good month or not. Like we have to pay them. That’s the commitment. And so that’s the risk. But you go, gosh, if we have, you know, there’s good months and bad months, and even if there’s bad months, I trust that like over time it’s gonna work out. That’s abundance, right? And it’s, it’s, it’s thinking long term.
RV (16:32):
And then number five this is another thing that I think this is related to abundance, and I don’t think enough people talk about this. And I think this is something that’s like maybe is kind of rare about me and aj. And I think this is something, I think part of what, how God blesses people with money. And part of how I think part of how other people bless people with their money and they wanna see people succeed is because of this. So number five is become great at helping other people make money, become great at helping other people make money. If you become great at helping other people make money, you will make a lot of money because people love being around people who help them make a lot of money. Like, and this is just something we do like, again, in the abundance mindset, our goal is to, is our goal is never to pay people the least amount possible.
RV (17:30):
Our goal is to pay people as much as we can. We wanna always pay at the top of the market. We don’t always have the money to do that, especially when we’re starting something new, right? So Brand Builder’s group is still only five years old. Like we’ve, we’re still, you know, we just coming outta startup mode. But like over time, we want to pay more money. We wanna pay our, our team the most we want. We wanna help make money for our clients. We wanna help our clients succeed. Why? Not because we need their money, but because we want to help them make money. We know if we help them make money, they’ll return it, they’ll help us make money. We, we really focus on trying to help our affiliates make more money to go, ah, how can we help our affiliates make more money?
RV (18:08):
If our affiliates make more money, they’re gonna wanna help us make more money. But I think if you focus on just going, how can I make more money for myself and all I care about is how do I make more money, then it’s like you’re taking money from other people. And so other people close off to you. But if you figure out how can I help the people around me make more money, then you’re opening a, you’re like opening the door, you’re opening a relationship, a connection between people to help you make more money. And you know, a lot of the people who are around who have been around us, they make more money because it’s a rising tide raises all ships, is we try to help them make more money. They’re working hard to take stuff off of our plate and make us free us up to be more productive and more efficient.
RV (18:55):
As we’re more productive and more efficient, we make more money and then we share that back with them. So this is, this is, again, is, is a difference and mentality. Most people are thinking just about themselves. How do I make more money? You know, who could I find that would just pay me the most? Versus going, what can I do to help the people around me make more money or help them have more time so that they can be more efficient, so that they can make more money trusting that it will flow back to them. And that’s what happens is I think money cascades down to the people who, who help. And, and that always happens. You know, and they say proximity is power. I would also say proximity is profit. I’m sure you’ve heard that before, right? Proximity is power. I, I think Tony Robbins said that.
RV (19:35):
I mean, I, that’s who I heard say it. I that lots of people have said it, but I, that’s who I think it was like the original source of it. I don’t know if it was him or not, but that proximity is power. But I would, I would adapt that to say proximity isn’t just power. Proximity is profit, right? And if you’re around, if you are literally in proximity to people who have the ability to create income and create revenue and build businesses, I promise you, if you help those people succeed, it will cascade back to you. We always want to reward the people who are helping us grow, right? And, and I’m saying that we like in a general sense and in a and in a literal sense of like me and aj, I mean, wouldn’t you right where you go, aren’t you going to reward the people who are most critical to like helping you grow?
RV (20:24):
Yes. If, if they’re really helping you and they really, you really have that mindset of like, it’s an effort, it’s a partnership, it’s a collaboration. We’re growing together. And so I’m constantly trying to find my, I’m constantly trying to find ways to add value to the people around me. I mean, just today, so I was on a call, I was on two different calls today with Ed Millet, some of you know, ed Millet you know, he’s, he’s one of our, our more well-known clients. And we’ve gotten know Ed a lot over the last few years ’cause we helped him with his book launch and we’ve done a number of things together. He’s one of our top affiliates. And I’m trying to figure out ways to make Ed more money, not just with us, but this other deal. And, and I brought Ed an opportunity that this is a, is an equity opportunity.
RV (21:06):
And I’m going, I mean, ed makes lots of money, right? But I’m going, how can I help him make more money knowing that if I can add value to Ed’s life, there’s a good chance that some of that value rolls back to me somehow. And I don’t always have to know how. I just have to trust that if, if I become great at helping other people make money, they’re gonna want to help me make money, they’re gonna want to reward me back. And, and, and that is true. I have found that to be true. And you, you align with people who are that way. And I know that’s true about me. If there’s, if there’s people around me who are helping me make money, I want to return and go as I make more money, I want to return it back to them. It’s a rising tide raises all ships.
RV (21:49):
And so proximity isn’t just power, proximity is profit. So pay attention to the people you’re around in your life to go, who, who has a capacity here to make a lot of money and how can I support them and, you know, be around them and partner with them and, and, you know, serve them and align with them and add value to their life. You’re likely going to win because of that. I mean, I have been the, the, the, the beneficiary of that, the recipient of that, and the benefactor of that also to other people. So there you have it. Five keys to being financially secure as an entrepreneur. First of all, get debt free to buy your own freedom. Number two, invest in yourself and your business first before you invest in other stuff. Number three, when it comes to inve outside investments, have a boring investment strategy.
RV (22:37):
Number four, choose abundance over scarcity. And number five, become great at helping other people make money. And you will make money with all of that. Just remember, peace is the new profit. You don’t need more money. You need less stress. You don’t need more money. You need as much as you need less complexity. I mean, we do want more money. You do, you, you should go for more money. You’re creating wealth for the people around you. But in reality, for most of us, we don’t need more money as much as we need less stress. And as we don’t need more money, as much as we need less complexity. So go out and create value in the world and watch the money flow back to you. Hopefully we’re helping you do that every time you listen to this show. So thanks for being here. Share this episode with someone who needs it. Keep coming back. If you haven’t yet, please go leave a rating for us on iTunes so that other people can see what our show is all about. We’re so grateful for you. We’ll catch you next time on the influential personal brand.
Ep 443: Using Speed as a Competitive Advantage | Jay Baer Episode Recap
RV (00:02):
Growing up with very little money. I’ve spent a decent part of my professional career studying money and learning about money. And one of the principles that I’ve heard consistently from different places about how do you make money and who makes a lot of money, is this principle. There’s, there’s a principle about making money that says money loves speed. Money loves speed, money follows speed. And, and I have really found that to be true, right? I mean, people are paying, they’re willing to pay for results faster. That’s what people are, are, are willing to pay for. And you know, this interview with Jay Baer blew my mind as it always does. And I, you know, Jay’s one of my best buddies and mentor and a friend, and like we’ve, we’ve helped him through the years. He’s helped us a ton. And every time this guy writes a book, it’s a paradigm shifting book.
RV (01:06):
It’s one of the things I love about Jay Baer books. And, and you know, he’s written on some different subjects over the years, but it’s like every time it’s like a new big idea every single time. And this I think is brilliant, right? His whole premise is speed as a competitive advantage. Speed as a competitive advantage going, I am not, what if you focus just on being faster? And I think that this is one of the most powerful questions that you can ask for, to make more money and to get more referrals and to break through Sheehan’s Wall and become more well known. It’s to say, how can I help my customers succeed faster? How can I help my customers succeed faster? That is like the whole mission of Brand Builders group that we’re on right now, right? Like when we first started the company, it was sort of like survival mode, getting it off the ground.
RV (02:06):
Then it was sort of like, you know, scaling up our, our operations and infrastructure. Then it was streamlining and, and really clarifying and, and distilling down what it is that we do. And, and you know, we had a one year that was basically like creating all the curriculum. And now we’re, we’re entering this era where all we’re doing everything that we’re focused on is how do we help our clients succeed faster? And I didn’t really think of that as a competitive advantage ’cause we don’t really compete with people. Like, we don’t make strategic decisions based on like, what other people in the market are doing, but just as an advantage, right? Or just, just, just as a, you know, as a, as a differentiator, right? Speed as a differentiator, or speed as a reason for people to choose you. And that the, the, the stat that blew my mind was when Jay said, two
RV (02:58):
Thirds of people say that speed is as important as price, right? So this is from Jay’s book, the Time to Win, which is obviously what we were talking about. Get it, it’s a great little book. I mean, it’s super quick read. And two thirds of people say that speed is as important as price. Like we live in this era. You know, this is where, what he said, where people interpret speed as caring and responsiveness as respect. That’s so good. And that that is so true. Like that aj you know, there’s the, there’s the five love languages, whatever it is, like gifts of the heart and acts of service and all that. AJ’s love language is responsiveness.
RV (03:54):
What’s the delay? When’s it gonna be finished? What, you know, what’s the deadline? What do you need? Who’s the bottleneck? Da dah, dah, dah, dah. Like, what’s the, what’s the plan? And when she sends a message, it’s like she wants an answer immediately. And, you know, for, for A-C-E-O-I think she’s, she’s insanely responsive. Like most CEOs are not all that responsive. You know, they’re pulled in all these directions, but she just values it so much. And she interprets responsiveness as respect. If you’re, if you don’t respond to her quickly, it’s a sign of disrespect. And I, I’m, I’m starting to see this, right? This whole conversation with Jay opened up my eyes because I go, this is me. I care more about, as a consumer, I care more about speed than price. I go, yeah, I’m, I’m willing to pay more, to move faster.
RV (04:43):
And, and that’s part of what, you know, the era we’re in at Brand Builders Group is like, we’ve always, you know, we’ve been a, we are a strategy firm. Like at our core, we’re a strategy firm. We’re not an agency. But we, we are creating more tools and templates to help clients succeed faster and to always create better strategies, more customized strategies to help them access what they need so that they can get results faster and faster and faster to get things deployed. And here’s a, here’s another line that I love from Jay. When he said this, he said, it’s okay to be a little bit wrong if you’re a lot, a bit fast, it’s okay to be a little bit wrong if you’re a lot, a bit fast. And, and many times, you know, you think of like search engine optimization, like demand driven marketing.
RV (05:31):
When people are searching a term, it’s like they want something, they want it. Now, a huge part of whether or not you make that sale is like, who can get to that person first? Who can return their phone call first? And so I just, I thought this was really, really cool. One of the tactical things that I just wanted to come back and underscore and highlight to the, you know, for everybody is, is the idea of a fast pass, right? The idea of a fast pass is that people will pay to be able to skip the line to people will pay, people will pay, people will always pay to be able to go to the front of the queue, right? I mean, this is like the VIP line. This is any anything VIP or, or you know, Disney has the, the fast pass or all the amusement parks, right?
RV (06:20):
If, if you go to Universal Studios or whatever. And that’s one of the things that we have started offering, right? Is, is we have created opportunities for people to coach with me directly. And it’s, it’s a higher investment because I can help people get to results faster. Just ’cause I got the most experience doing this personally and the most experienced coaching other people to do it, right? So historically, I’ve, I’ve never been available like formally to do private coaching with our clients, right? I, I mean, I, and, and I coach everybody. I’m at, I’m at our events and I do two group coaching calls a month. So like, we have different tiers in our membership, right? And so there’s, depending on what tier you’re in you know, you get to come to our live events. Well, we do, I think we’re doing 32 live events next year.
RV (07:13):
And so four of ’em that are two days, I’m, I’m at and AJ’s at personally, those are, so in-person event not all of our events are in person. And then twice a month for all of our members, I lead group coaching where people can ask me questions and, you know, we do like rapid fire, but doing private one-on-one coaching is, is not something that historically that we have offered until recently. We, we have created something called Brand mastery, which is when people can work with me directly in a, in a very small group, right? It’s still a small, a small group, but they can work with me directly as their strategist. And there’s a higher level of investment. And that’s ’cause we go really fast, right? And we have an, we have an annual pass of that where people are able to spend up to 10 days with me a year and we can crank.
RV (08:01):
I mean, if I get 10 days in a room with someone, I can, we typically, like we can transform their personal brand quickly. So that’s an example of a fast pass. We’re also working on a for years we’ve been developing something that we’re just, just now rolling out called Instant Automation Toolkit. Instant Automation Toolkit is something that’s only available for brand builders members, right? So you have to be one of our strategy clients. ’cause You have to have the education, you have to understand how it all works together. You have to know what a brand positioning statement and, and the 15 Ps and the content diamond and webinar funnels. And like you, you know how all of these, the, the, the modular content method, like how it all fits together. But then we, we took all of our six core campaigns for our, our web, our, our high converting webinar funnels, selling high dollar offers, booking keynotes, doing book launches, building websites, the six most important core campaigns.
RV (08:57):
And we templatized all of them. And now we make it available to members. They can either buy ’em and own ’em out outright, or they can just rent them for like a much lower fee so that we can get them live quickly. That’s why instant automation toolkit is everything about going, okay, now you’ve learned the strategy. The next era of Brand Builders group is going, how can we help you execute faster and, and cheaper? Because if you have to go source and hire all these people, whether they’re employees or vendors, it’s slow, it’s painstaking, it’s expensive, and you’re likely to make mistakes that cost you money because you don’t really know how to coach them. Well, instant automation toolkit is going, what if we just give you ours? And so we’ve been developing this for years and it’s, it’s amazing. We’re, we’re just about to roll it out.
RV (09:43):
We just, we’ve already rolled out our copywriting templates. So half of it is copywriting templates. The other half is the actual technology where we build the, we build the funnels and build the websites for you using our, using our actual one. So we take our exact funnels and then we swap out our stuff, put your stuff in there. So the copywriting templates have been available and it’s like we’ve got people cranking out entire pipelines in a few hours or a few days. Like it’s, it’s amazing. And going, yeah, people will pay for that because there’s, there’s value to that. ’cause, ’cause Money loves speed. You know, the other thing is, is when you think about money in relation to time, time multiplies money, right? Compounding interest. If I, if I take money and I invest it today, you know, it, it money invested over time is it grows and grows and grows.
RV (10:34):
So the earlier I can, the earlier I can have access to money, the earlier I have access to cashflow, the longer amount of time I get to benefit from interest, right? From compounding interest. So it, there’s value to having money today versus having money in the future. This is another thing that we do. We, we started in Brand Builders group about a year and a half ago we rolled out a pay in full feature. And so what happens is, you know, we have our, our programs are annual memberships, and we’ve got, you know, now, now counting brand mastery, we’ve got three different levels of, of membership. Well, there’s a, there’s a discount for paying in full where we give, we give people two months free if they pay in full today, because even though it costs us money, right? We lose money on that.
RV (11:26):
And we still have all the costs of delivering those last two months of service. But there’s value to having all the cash in hand now because we can deploy, we can reinvest that cash into growing the business versus having to wait for it and not seeing it for 10 months. There’s also value in the certainty of collecting it, right? And so we, we share in that with our customers to go, Hey, if you’re willing to, if you’re willing to commit for 12 months and pay us now and go, we’re in this together, we’ll give you a discount. And so that’s the first time we’ve, we, we don’t, other than that we don’t discount, we never discount, we don’t change our prices. You know, people can buy a lower thing and get a lesser price, but we don’t sell the same thing to two people for lesser prices.
RV (12:07):
We, we just, we don’t discount. So, but, but we have offered this fast pass and it’s been massive. C clients love it. They also get to accelerate the deduction on their taxes, right? So like right now, as an example or, or when you get to the end of the year or the end of a fiscal year, you know, they, they can pay us for a year in full and they can accelerate that deduction on like this year’s taxes. So we see a lot of that happen at the, at the end of the people’s calendar year, the end of their fiscal year. So think about how can you incorporate a fast pass concept into your business model? Because this really, I think this really, really is true. My third big idea or takeaway from Jay in this interview was when he said, give your customers a clue of what to expect as it relates to time, absence of any guidance.
RV (13:01):
They’ll expect it instantly. And I thought, wow, that, that, that really is powerful. And so make a time promise the way he said it was, make a time, pro promise, but make one that you can overdeliver on. And I think that’s really key, right? It’s, it’s, it’s not, you know, if you don’t tell me when I’m gonna get it, my brain defaults to, oh, I want it tomorrow, right? Even if it’s like building a website, right? You go, okay, well I’m hiring you to build me a website. Like why can’t I have it tomorrow? Like, why can’t I have it next week? Like, what’s the big deal? Right? Part of the reason, and and I think that’s a natural default that people have because part of the reason why they’re hiring someone else is they don’t have the wherewithal to do it themselves. So they often aren’t knowledgeable about all of the details and the steps and the processes and the things that go into doing something, and that’s why they’re hiring someone in the first place.
RV (13:51):
So we tend to, we tend to underestimate how long it takes other people to do things. We tend to underestimate how long it takes other people to do things. And that’s because we don’t know how to do them. And so we’re not aware of all of the steps, and absent that, absent that awareness, we don’t have the ability to calculate the time or really appreciate even sometimes everything that they’re doing. So what happens is, if someone communicates though and they say, oh, no problem, we’ll have your, we’ll have your website done in two months. Well, I don’t love that, but it’s better than them not saying anything. And like, after the end of month one, I’m going, well, I was thinking this would take a week. Like, why is it taking four weeks? Like, what, what’s the deal here? And now I’m annoyed. Versus if you say, oh, it’s gonna take three months and you actually deliver it in eight to 10 weeks.
RV (14:44):
Now I’m ecstatic. ’cause I go, oh, you know, while I would love for it to be done tomorrow, you set the expectation for me that it wasn’t gonna be done for three months. And then you, and then you over-delivered and you beat that. So now I’m ecstatic. So this is a really important conceptual point to understand that it’s not really how long something takes that annoys people or makes them happy, it’s how long it takes in proportion to their expectation of how long they thought it would take, right? So if it takes six months, that’s neither long or short. It’s only relative. So this is very similar to how we teach we teach our members when they’re selling high dollar offers, there’s no such thing, there’s no such thing as expensive or inexpensive. There’s only such a thing as relative, right? So if somebody’s gonna pay me a hundred thousand dollars to spend two days with me, you go, well, that feels expensive.
RV (15:44):
And it’s not nothing. But I go, well, yeah, but if I can help someone land a half a million dollar book advance, if I can help someone become a New York Times bestseller, if I can help them get speaking engagements where they’re gonna, they’re gonna do, you know, half a million to a million dollars a year in speaking fees for the rest of their career. If I can help them save a hundred thousand dollars on their taxes every year for the rest of their life, if I can teach them, you know, how to build a sales team that will grow millions of dollars. Like, it’s, it’s not, it’s not much relative to that. So, so it’s always relative, right? Well, this is the same thing. Time is never really long or short. It’s always relative. And, and in this case, it’s the, for your customers, it’s relative to their expectation of how long it was gonna take, right?
RV (16:27):
So give them a time promise and, and make it one that you can overdeliver on. Because if you tell me it’s gonna take four months and it takes six months, now I’m upset. But if you tell me it’s gonna take eight months or 10 months or a year, and you’re done in six months, man, now, now I’m ecstatic. It still took six months, it took the same amount of time, right? Like, it, it, it takes whatever time it takes to do something. So of course, hopefully you can operate more efficiently. But, but I think what you wanna do is you wanna, what people don’t allow for the, and part of the reason why we underestimate how long everything takes is because what people never allow for, they never account for is they never account for unplanned expenses of time or money. They ne they never account for emergencies.
RV (17:15):
They never account for extraordinary items, unforeseen thing, unforeseen delays. I, I remember early in my career as an entrepreneur, I had a, a financial mentor, you know, and I, and and I, we were looking at financial statements and I was saying, well, gosh, you know, I feel like we’re being punished because there’s this one unusual item that, you know, we didn’t have in the budget. And I go, well, how is that our fault? Like, none of us saw it coming. It’s not like it was poor management of the company. And and his response to me was, he says, well, you have to create a budget that always has margin in it for things like that. Because while it’s unexpected, you can always expect the unexpected. You can always plan for the unplanned. You can always assume that something is gonna happen that you weren’t assuming was gonna happen.
RV (18:06):
And that is a radical mind shift as it relates to your personal finances, right? And not spending every dollar you have, but saving to go, I can’t spend every dollar because what happens when my, I get a flat tire or when the, you know, the water heater breaks or, or, you know, I have to take a sudden flight somewhere that I wasn’t planning on. You know, like you have to be able to, to do that. You wanna, you wanna have margin, margin, you wanna have margin in your planning margin, in your budgeting, budgeting of money and budgeting of time. And so understanding all of this and, and realizing that time is, I mean, in this case, according to Jay’s research, right, this is empirically validated. Now, two thirds of people say that speed is as important as price. And I’m in that two thirds, right?
RV (18:54):
I go, man, if one person you know is gonna charge me 10% more, but they can get it to me, you know, 30% faster, I’m in every time, every time. So minding people’s time, treating it as sacred you know, making a time promise overdelivering on it, giving them an opportunity for a fast pass to pay extra to, to, to move things faster. And, and just realizing that, that people interpret this is right from Jay speed as caring and responsiveness, as respect. That is from a man, Jay Bearer, his new book the Time to Win. Go by the book, y’all. It’s not even a full-size book. It’s a little tiny book. Like you could, you can read it in an hour. And it is life changing, paradigm altering, you know this idea of using speed as a competitive advantage. So thanks for tuning in.
RV (19:53):
Hopefully listening to this podcast is helping you accelerate on your journey. And I hope we get a chance to move you at some point from being you know, a, a free consumer of our content to working with us and watching how we can accelerate your dream, coming true faster and faster, faster, to help you drive more leads to your business, launch a new revenue stream, you know, write books, be a speaker, grow your audience, grow your impact. Whatever your dream is for building your personal brand, hopefully we get a chance to partner with you to make that dream come true faster. That’s a big part of our wish. Until next time, we will you know, we’ll, we’ll, we’ll sign off for now. Have a great one. We’ll catch you here. Next episode, influential Personal Brand podcast. Share this with someone who needs it. See you then.
Ep 442: The Time to Win with Jay Baer
RV (00:02):
Well, I am excited and honored to introduce you once again to one of my very best friends, one of my favorite mentors someone who I legitimately think is one of the smartest people on the planet. We’ve had him on the podcast before. His name is Jay Baer, Utruly one of my best friends in real life. And I’m so grateful for this man. And he has a new book out. And every time Jay writes a new book, it completely like changes the way I think about whatever the topic is. And we’re gonna talk about speed as a competitive advantage today. Uif you’re just meeting Jay, he is a New York Times bestselling author of seven books. He is a hall of fame speaker. He has worked with over 700 different brands. He speaks on some of the biggest stages in the world.
RV (00:48):
He’s worked for companies like Nike and Oracle and I b m and United Nations. And another thing we’ll probably talk about, which we’ve never talked about on this show before with Jay, but something fun happening is he has blown up on TikTok and Instagram, this personal brand. He is now the second, the world’s second largest influencer on tequila, which is something he does in his personal life. And it has become a huge explosive personal brand. So that’s kind of like a, a side project we’re gonna, we’re gonna talk about, but mostly we’re gonna be talking about his new book. It’s called The Time to Win. Without further ado, my brother, welcome back.
JB (01:33):
Thank you very much. Great to be with you, my friend. I gotta tell you, I’ve been a business strategist and author and speaker for like 30 years, and there’s been some degree of, of notoriety as a result of my behaviors and activities in that category. But now that I have a tequila education channel, I get recognized in hotels and airports, literally every week,
RV (02:22):
Yeah. So hold on a second there, buddy. So you cut out, I think I cut out. So just you were saying, I get recognized in airports every week.
JB (02:32):
Yeah. Every week for, for, and it’s always like, oh, you’re Tequila J Bear. I watch all of your videos. Like, nobody caress that I’ve written books. Nobody cares that I’ve ever given a presentation, but they are locked and loaded on the personal brand of tequila educators. So I think there’s a lesson there for, for you and your audience,
RV (02:51):
Man. Well, I do, I do. I I do want to hear about that because I, I, I, I’m curious, and it’s part of that is I have a side project, I’ve got like a personal side project going on right now. Yeah. That’s very similar.
JB (03:01):
I know. It’s exciting.
RV (03:02):
It has nothing to do with like our business, but it’s like, I have to do this. Yeah. But let’s talk about the time to win.
JB (03:10):
Yeah.
RV (03:11):
‘Cause this was something that I was like, it’s another one of those things where when you started talking about it, I was like, oh my gosh, how have I missed this? And you just blew it up. Like, oh, this is such a big idea, such a simple idea. So, so tell us, what’s the premise here? What’s going on? Yeah. And then the research that started it,
JB (03:28):
My, my observation coming outta the pandemic Rory, was that it changed the way we think about time and, and reshuffled how important it is in our lives. Time’s always been important, of course, but the pandemic made us remember a simple truth, an important truth, an often overlooked truth, which is that all of us only have and will ever only have 1,440 minutes a day. Doesn’t matter who you are, where you are, what you are, you get 1,440. You can’t make more. You can’t buy more. I’ll tell you this, I think now that I’ve been studying this for a while, I, I think time is the only resource that we actually share equally on this planet. The only one.
JB (04:13):
And a lot of the trends that we talk about now, things like the great resignation or people wanting to work from home don’t wanna come back from the office because they don’t wanna commute, or people spending more time with their kids or, or bleisure travel, which is the combination of business and leisure travel. That’s when you bring your kids to the conference and double dip the trip. Even baseball games are 25 minutes a night shorter now, right? Because they got a pitch clock. Like, all of these trends are the same trend, which is that we care about our time and how we spend it more than ever. So that was the, the premise. But as always, as you mentioned, when I, when I write a book, I first validate it with really deep research. ’cause I’m not gonna go on stages and pages and tell people to change their business unless I’ve got it proven other than just Jay says to do this. So it turns out that in the research we found that two thirds of people say that speed is now as important as price.
RV (05:09):
Wow. But
JB (05:10):
There’s not very many businesses that behave as if that were the case. And you should.
RV (05:16):
Yeah. I mean, that makes, I mean, you know, when you shared that with me, it was like, oh, yeah, that makes sense. As a consumer, I go, I, I just want it fast. Like, I don’t, you know, I think about the hotel thing. It’s like, I don’t wanna tell you my life story. I just want my key and get to the room. And like, I just wanna be like, it’s a long day of travel. It’s not that I wanna be rude, but it’s just like, I just want as fast as possible to get from the car into my hotel room to just chill out. Right? And then I go, but as a, as a business, how much are we really thinking about doing things shorter? We’re trying to go, maybe we make it better, better. Maybe we can charge more money, but not going, how do we do this faster?
JB (06:02):
That’s the mystery. That’s why this book, the Time to Win exists. What I tell people is you’ve gotta elevate speed and responsiveness on the priority list in your business because your customers already have.
RV (06:19):
Hmm. Like
JB (06:19):
Most businesses think they’re fast enough, but then when they look at the world through their own eyes as a consumer, they realize that they’re not fast enough. Partially because speed expectations never go backwards. Right? What was, what was fast five years ago is very slow today. And that will always continue. And I’ve been doing this a long time, as you know, I’ve never, in my whole life, under any circumstances whatsoever, heard a customer say, Hey, you know what? Next time it’d be cool if you guys just did that more slowly.
RV (07:03):
Yeah. And
JB (07:03):
I got, and the key, the key thing to this real quick, is that the reason why this book is so important now is that everything contained in this book is going to happen three years from now. We’re gonna have to delete this episode because it will be pointless. Everything we talk about will have been done by every business because your customers will simply require it of you. But this is your opportunity. This is why the book is called The Time to Win. This is your time to use responsiveness as a competitive advantage before other people in your category start to do it. You’ve got, in my estimation, a 24 to 30 month headstart where if you lean into speed, now you can eat your competitor’s lunch until they realize what’s going on and are forced to catch up.
RV (07:53):
Yeah. And I just on this, on this note of not priorit, prioritizing speed as a competitive, like not thinking of speed as a, as like a value to the customer. We had Amy Porterfield on, on this show a while back. You, she’s one of our clients and she’s sort of like the queen of courses, right? I know. You know, Amy and I, I asked her, I said, I said, you know, what’s the right price to charge for a course? And I said, I said, basically like, if, you know, if I have six modules or 10 modules, like how many modules do I have to have in there in order to charge $2,000? And she said, the price has nothing to do with how many modules are in there. She said, everyone thinks that having more modules makes it more expensive. She said, it’s the opposite. If you can deliver the result to the customer with less time and less modules, it’s more valuable to be able to get your customer from point A to point B. And I was just like, I literally have been thinking about this backwards in the pricing, you know, game. And then, and then you’re going, oh, you need to do this for every part of the business.
JB (09:08):
It, you go back to the 16 hundreds blaze, Pascal, a famous writer from, you know, those days said, I, I would’ve
JB (10:04):
And here’s when I can come give you an estimate. And here’s when I can come do the job. Second painter got back to me in two days. Third painter got back to me in 11 days. At which point I’d already painted the house
RV (10:50):
Dude, whoa. That this, not just in your business life. This is one of the central marriage issues between me and aj. Responsiveness is her love language. And her, one of her frustrations is she’s like, you take forever to respond to my work emails ’cause we work together. But she’s like, you are so slow to respond to like, project deadlines and that stuff. And it’s like, she, she treats it as like, I’m disrespecting her. And I’m like, I’m busy. And she’s like, I don’t care. It’s, it is disrespecting. Like that is absolutely true. Responsiveness is, is a form of respect. Well, so, so you have this, you, so the time to win, which is, that’s the, the url, right? The time to win.com is where you’ll go to get the book. And y’all, just fyi, this book, Amazon, this book is a small book. You can read the entire book in an hour, like the entire book in an hour. It’s also, which
JB (11:53):
Is obviously intentional because I sat down to write a book and I’ve written six full length books in the past. And I started to work on this. And I’m like, wait, I, I cannot ask people to spend five or six hours reading a book about speed and just like, just like did. I’m like, wait a second. This is the exact opposite of the advice in the book. So it’s like, alright. And look, the reality is, and I, I’m not ashamed to admit it, the reality is most people don’t read business books. They skimm them,
RV (12:22):
Right? Because
JB (12:23):
Most business books say a thing, then they say that thing six different ways. And I’m like, you know what? I’m just gonna cut out the middleman here. No, no fat only meet all the key pieces that you need to implement. It’s a six piece framework for, for winning with responsiveness. And that’s all that’s in the book. There’s, you know, and boom, in and out. And people love it.
RV (12:43):
Yeah. And so, and so speed, like, okay, so, so now when you go, let’s apply, apply speed to business
JB (12:50):
Mm-Hmm.
RV (12:50):
You know, like the example that I used that construct is deliver the result for the client in less time. And we, we are super focused about on this right now. Yeah. Of now, now we’re going, we’re embracing this, right? And going, how do we get our client the result faster? How do we teach them the information in less time? How do we give them tools to help them implement, you know, like cheaper, faster. So there’s that construct of like con condensing the time for them to have the experience. But then it’s almost like there’s another half of this, which is responsiveness. So yeah. Which side is it? Is it both of those things? Or is it more one side than the other? Like
JB (13:35):
It’s both. We actually tested that in the research. So we asked people, and I, and I will say, this is very comprehensive research. This isn’t, Jay did a SurveyMonkey. This is many, many, many, many, many tens of thousands of dollars university level research. And we found when we asked people, okay, where is responsiveness most important to you? Early stages when you’re just trying to get information. Late stages. If you need help in the middle where somebody’s actually delivering whatever it is they’re delivering out, always
RV (14:47):
Well,
JB (14:47):
How can that be? Well, remember if we interpret responsiveness as respect, at some point, every customer has to revalidate the buy. It could be a week later, it could be a month later, it could be a year later, it could be a decade later. But at some point in every customer and client relationship, they’ve gotta say, do I wanna sign on again? And so, yes, it’s important to be quick at the beginning of the relationship, but it’s also important to be quick throughout the totality of the relationship, because that’s going to ultimately impact whether or not they rebuy, which has of course, huge implications for your conversion rate, your churn rate, your lifetime customer value probably,
RV (15:28):
And
JB (15:28):
Everything else
RV (15:29):
That builds great
JB (15:30):
Business. All of it. Yeah.
RV (15:31):
All the things. So I wanna ask you about ai, ’cause I haven’t asked you about, about, about, mm-hmm. This, right? So the part that’s scary about this to me is to go absent ai, this is ha I think this is happening anyway, right? Absent, we’re just going like, I need an answer. I need it yesterday. I need it immediately. I want my food immediately. I want, you know, my show immediately. I want to be on the airplane immediately. I wanna be in my hotel room immediately. Like it’s, everything is speeding up. The part that freaks me out is you go, you add AI into this conversation. And now it’s like, dude, it’s just gotta be an exponential multiplier of this. Yep. Entitled, I need it immediately thing. Yeah,
JB (16:20):
Yeah, yeah. Probably. Yeah. And look, I, I’m not suggesting that this is a net societal positive that that’s not my job in the world. My job is to tell you how to beat your competition. And that’s contained in the book. Now, whether
RV (17:01):
Right? So
JB (17:02):
I think you were there one time when our, our mutual friend, Jason Dorsey was talking about Lemonade, which I use as an example. Now in the stage presentation of this material, lemonade is an insurance company. They primarily work in rental insurance, but others as well. They’re the number one rated rental insurance company in the country. Highest average revenue per employee as well. I mean, every success metric there at the top of the table. Here’s how it works. They were built for speed from the beginning. This guy, Paul has like a $979 Canada Goose, like Parka, super nice jacket, lives in Manhattan, goes to a bar in Manhattan. Someone steals the jacket. Oh man, my jacket got stolen. I gotta get a insurance claim. So he goes on the Lemonade app on his phone, presses, opens the app, presses file a claim, makes a 25 second video into his phone.
JB (17:56):
Hey, it’s Paul, I’ve had this Canada Goose jacket. It was $979 that got stolen at the bar. Submit after he hits, submit Lemonade, runs a bunch of fraud algorithms. Not only on the, on the video itself, but on Paul, his case history, the location, his age, a bunch of other stuff. They already have access to his bank account ’cause he did it. When he set it up, they decide to approve the claim. They wire $929 into his account because he is a $250 deductible. All of that happens, right? Assess the claim, approve the claim, wire him the cash. All of that happens in three seconds.
RV (18:36):
Holy smack.
JB (18:38):
Three seconds. So if you’re Allstate,
RV (18:42):
Yeah. Now
JB (18:43):
What? Now what?
RV (18:46):
I mean you don’t even, you’re trying to set an appointment to talk to the person and then the paperwork, and then you file the thing and take all the pictures and you fill out a police report. I mean
JB (18:57):
Yep. So now obviously, does Lemonade have a higher ratio of fraud than the alternative where like, you know, sitting down with somebody Of course. But one of the lessons in this book that I think is really applicable, it’s okay to be a little bit wrong if you’re a lot, a bit fast.
RV (19:17):
Ooh, that’s good. Yeah, it reminds me of like John De Julius says, you know, don’t punish 98% of your customers for what the 2% take advantage of.
JB (19:31):
Yeah. It’s an edge case.
RV (19:33):
Yeah. That’s so good about being a lot of, bit a, a lot, a bit fast. Well, so
JB (19:42):
Do you think, here’s something I wanna mention if I can. It’s a really important technique, especially for this audience that I wanna make sure we get to, is one of the key recommendations in this book. And it’s to offer a fast pass. So the idea of offering a fast pass is that in the research we found that one in four customers will pay as much as 50% more to not wait. You should give them that opportunity. Now, there are increasingly FastPasses all around us ’cause people are figuring out how powerful this technique is. TSA pre is a fast pass. You pay more. Wait list clear is a fast pass. Disney has one now, I think it’s called Genie Plus, we pay more. You don’t have to wait in line to go on Space Mountain or whatever,
RV (20:27):
Right?
JB (20:29):
You should do that in your business. Everybody should do it in their business. So when people come to me and say, will you review my new tequila? And I say, well sure, but we’ve got a 10 week waiting list. Or you can pay us this amount and you can be the next tequila we rate. All you’re doing is offering them a fast pass. Every sort of, every business in the world has a sequence, has an onboarding, has a customer list. You just charge them more to jump the line. Now, I was at an event and a guy came up to me and said, well Jay, what do I do about the person who was the next customer I was gonna help? And now they get bumped back one, aren’t they gonna be mad? Here’s how you do it. You say to the customer, who doesn’t wanna wait? Who wants to be the next, okay, it’s gonna cost you 20% more to be next. Then you talk to the person who was next and you say, I’m really sorry, something came up. We gotta bump you back. It’s gonna be an extra week. Now you’re second, but we’re gonna give you a 5% discount. ’cause We feel bad about it. You just kept 15% for doing nothing other than shuffling your customer sequence.
RV (21:31):
Mm-Hmm.
JB (21:33):
It’s free money.
RV (21:35):
Yeah. I mean, I’m that guy. I mean, I’m that guy. Like, it’s like I, I will pay. I do not wanna wait in long. You’re
JB (21:41):
Literally that guy. I
RV (21:42):
Will not, I will pay so much more to not wait in line. It’s the most frustrating thing that I experience is waiting. Like if my computer is loading, my internet is down, loading a webpage, you know, waiting in line at the grocery store, like waiting in line is probably the most frustrating thing in my life where I get angry. Like I am losing time. So, and I think probably that’s true. Like people who, the people who have, it’s
JB (22:11):
Not true for everybody. It’s not
RV (22:13):
True for everybody. It’s not true for everybody.
JB (22:14):
But for those who it is true for it’s manifestly true for like you,
RV (22:18):
And they will pay more money for it.
JB (22:20):
Absolutely.
RV (22:21):
They’ll pay more money. Won’t
JB (22:22):
Even bat an eye
RV (22:23):
Won’t even bad an eye. Yeah. No way. And it’s like, I don’t care if
JB (22:26):
You give ’em the choice,
RV (22:27):
The same experience as someone else, but I can just not have to, to have the weight. That’s so good, Jay. Like, that’s so simple. You know,
JB (22:34):
You’ll make so much money for, for free. Like, and it doesn’t matter if you’re a consultant, an author, a chiropractor, you’d run a preschool, you’ve got a landscape business, you’re doing plastic surgery, it does not matter.
RV (22:47):
Oh yeah, the country club,
JB (22:48):
What business you’re in club or getting into, it doesn’t matter.
RV (22:50):
Private, the private school, oh my gosh, like this is I’m trying to think about how we would apply this to brand builders group. We need to have a conversation about what, what can do, what we would, what we would do. So what else should I be asking you about this that I haven’t asked you about as it relates to speed as a competitive advantage?
JB (23:10):
The, I’ll tell you what the first piece that you’ve gotta do on this. Okay. lemme two, two quick things. One, I don’t want people to think that the takeaway here is Jay says, be as fast as possible all the time. That’s not true. And it’s also too simple. Yes, you should probably be faster than you are much of the time because your customers will reward you for it. If you give your customers time, they will give you money. If you cost your customers time, it will cost you money. So yes, you should probably be faster than you are much of the time. But there are scenarios when you can be too fast. When you are too fast, it decays trust. So if somebody came to you, Rory, and said, Hey I’ve got a book I’m writing, can you help me with a bestseller campaign? And you said, sure. Can you start in an hour? That would probably feel less trustworthy because if you’re that available,
RV (24:12):
Right?
JB (24:13):
Like, how could, could you be? Right? So what you want in your business is not necessarily to just be as fast as you can. What you want in every customer interaction is to adhere to the right now, the right now, the right now is the perfect amount of elapsed time. It’s not too fast and it’s not too slow. It’s the Goldilocks zone for speed. And you’ve gotta figure out what that is in your own business, right? There’s no standard for that. But for every business there is a, right now it’s the perfect amount of time. So the first assignment that you’ve gotta do as a business leader is to figure out what the right now is in your business.
RV (24:57):
Well, and the subtitle of your book, okay, so the book’s called The Time to Win. The subtitle is How to Exceed Customer’s Need for Speed. And the way that I go is part of what we know about the right now is it is at least a little bit faster than whatever their expectation is. That’s right. If, if we are, if we’re faster than their expectation than we’re winning, and then probably you know, the, then, then, then, then we’re ahead. So we probably need to look at what’s their expectation. But, but similar to how I remember like one the things
JB (25:32):
And how to set that expectation too. Like how to, how to actually manage that expectation. It’s one of the thing that, that a lot of businesses are terrible at this, they’re really bad at, at giving customers any sort of cue or clue as to what to expect. And one thing I’ve learned since I started down this, this research path is absent of any guidance, customers will expect everything to happen instantly.
RV (25:59):
Yeah. So
JB (25:59):
You’ve gotta tell them the thing that you want or need is going to take this long. And crucially, especially for younger consumers, here’s why it takes that long.
RV (26:14):
Uhhuh
JB (26:15):
You’ve gotta connect the dots for them. Because if you don’t, they will always think it should be faster. We learned this in the first day in business that you should always under promise and
RV (26:31):
Overdeliver,
JB (26:32):
Overdeliver. But you can’t do that if people don’t know what the promise is. So if you know it’s gonna take 10, 10 days, you always tell them it’s 12 days always. Because then you are slightly faster than they expect. And that’s the, right now
RV (26:53):
Uhhuh
JB (28:02):
Yeah. I mean, you think about the world we live in, technology and big enterprise companies have changed everybody’s perspective on what is quote unquote fast. Like if Uber and Lyft didn’t exist, we would have a totally different perspective on transportation. But it does exist. And that experience of being able to press a button and a car shows up naturally leaches into your expectations for other things that you need in your life. And, and that’s just the way it is, right? So yeah. Does the fact that Amazon can bring something next day put a lot of pressure on a mom and pop business who doesn’t have that kind of warehouse? Heck yeah, it does. Freaking does. But but then, but them’s the breaks, like what, you know, sorry, that genie’s not going back in the bottle, right? Mm-Hmm. You know, well
RV (28:53):
That’s why I think about the AI thing, right? You know, it’s like in and bb in brand builders group. We don’t have like a queue, right? People can come, but where our, where our delay is, is helping our customers implement faster, right? Getting their funnels built, getting their website built, getting, and, and, and that’s where it’s like AI is going to compress that even more. Like you’re saying is just AI applied to every, you know, rising customer expec expectation, growing, you know, speeding up technology, adding in ai like you’re saying three years from now, five years from now, this is, this game is over. Like it all, we’re all gonna have to be instant. Yeah. And
JB (29:29):
That’s why you’ve got this chance now, right? If you lean into it sooner. If you don’t wait for your customers to pull you kicking and screaming and you lead them, you’ve got two, three years where you can dominate your category. You’ve just gotta get started.
RV (29:44):
I think this is so brilliant. This is like, you, you, you were, you were so ahead of the curve on content marketing, right? And it’s like, if I would’ve done then what you were saying about that, I would’ve caught that wave. We’d miss that wave. But like nobody else is talking about this. I mean, it’s like we talk about speed, but no one is going speed as a competitive advantage until you said that. And the moment you said it, I was like, that is so freaking brilliant. So the time to win.com is where to go to get the book
JB (30:13):
Yeah. Or Amazon or anywhere else that you get books at the time to win.com. There’s also the full research paper that powers the book. It’s like 30 pages and you can have, don’t we don’t even ask for email address, you can just have it. I just want you to have it. Cool.
RV (30:26):
That’s awesome. So that we can go download the research there. So we’ll put a link to the time to wind.com. Okay. I don’t wanna let you go without talking about Tequila J ’cause this is such a phenomenon. You spent 30 years of your life becoming one of the most respected consultants. You know, you after that you’ve amassed, I don’t know, a whopping 10,000 or followers or something on Instagram or something. And then you start Tequila Jay, this side project, give us a sense of the magnitude that this total, like my personal passion, hobby, give, give me a sense of the magnitude of how long you spent on it and what, what your reach has come with your, it’s truly like your personal, personal brand.
JB (31:10):
Well, first I, I’ll acknowledge that none of this would’ve happened without you, you know, your premise that, that your ideal audience is the person that you used to be
RV (31:19):
Is
JB (31:20):
The north star for my work in the tequila space. Because when I started this project which is just 18 months ago, there were a number of people creating content for advanced tequila fans, right? So there’s nerds talking to nerds, and I like that content. ’cause I’ve been a tequila fan for a long time. I like the kind of deep dive nerdy content, but I realized that there’s just not that many people in that category. There’s a lot more people who are just getting into tequila or have a margarita here and now, or have a Paloma here, and now that’s the much larger addressable audience. And so I always try and keep in mind what it was like to be a person who didn’t know much at all about tequila. And I was that person. It was a while ago, but, but I was that person. And so the content that we create is very intentionally pegged to the novice and intermediate tequila
JB (32:13):
Fan. And that’s been the lift underneath the whole project, right? That’s why it’s so popular because we’re not talking over people’s heads. Mm-Hmm. And it’s been a really interesting journey. We did it on Instagram reels and TikTok mostly because I don’t have a lot of experience historically with short form content. I’ve always done long form content. And I was like, well, let’s just see what this is. Like, let’s learn how this algorithm works, et cetera. And, and it’s been great. You know, five videos a week is a big lift. It’s a heavy lift you know, to do it every single week. But, but we love it. And now we’re really monetizing it across a bunch of different dimensions, right? We’ve got brand sponsors and tequila sponsors and a, a merch store and our own tequilas and a a and events business and private tastings. So there’s a bunch of different revenue streams that all kind of funnel into are in the business. And I’m not ready to quit my day job as a speaker and consultant yet, but, but it’s it’s definitely a real business, right? And considering my only goal was to be able to buy tequila on a business card instead of a personal card. I have, I have very much past, past the goals.
RV (33:19):
Well, the other thing is what’s gnarly is like you have pretty major celebrities reaching out to you.
JB (33:24):
Yeah, yeah.
RV (33:25):
Like, I mean Yeah. And you just built this huge audience. What, so it’s a couple hundred thousand followers, right? On TikTok? Yeah.
JB (33:31):
Between, yeah, between Instagram and TikTok. It’s a couple hundred thousand. Last month I think we reached 400,000 accounts. Wow.
RV (33:39):
So it’s,
JB (33:39):
It’s pretty, it’s pretty good group. Yeah.
RV (33:41):
And then you’re getting, you’re getting all these celebrities who are launching their tequila lines going, will you please review my
JB (33:47):
Absolutely. Yeah. And my house is just full of tequila. Allison is so mad
RV (34:05):
Oh man. Yeah.
JB (34:06):
I mean, if I move this camera like six inches, you would be flabbergasted how much tequila I have in this office.
RV (34:12):
That’s awesome. So is there, is there any other lessons that you think for personal brands, like specifically? I mean, that’s super powerful. I didn’t, I didn’t, I never even realized to put that together that, you know, ’cause we you that that you, that’s what you were doing was specif specifically creating content for the person that you once were, you know?
JB (34:30):
Yeah. And I talk about that in a lot of podcasts and people ask me about tequila and I always give you credit as I should. And how powerful that that premise is. And it’s really, really effective. You know, look, we all have the curse of knowledge and the curse of expertise. And if you don’t constantly disvalue yourself of that notion, you are truncating your addressable audience. The other thing that we do in the tequila space that I think you’ll appreciate and your audience will appreciate is we are the only tequila educator that de anonymizes the audience. So there are a number of other people, four or five that do Instagram, TikTok stuff like me. There’s a handful of kind of YouTube tequila educators. There’s a couple of podcasts, et cetera. But we are the only ones who have a list. So I produce a list every quarter of my recommended tequila brands.
JB (35:19):
Mm-Hmm.
RV (36:25):
Mm-Hmm.
JB (36:33):
It’s,
RV (36:33):
It’s a game changer. It’s al it’s also amazing to me how it’s like, you have social media and you have lives and all this stuff, but like building the email list, it’s just like, it always just re still the, it’s still the holy grail. Like Yeah,
JB (36:46):
I mean, I I, I mean, it’s great to do lives and social media and everything else, but, but you know, if all of a sudden you know, meta decides that they’re not gonna do any alcohol content on the platform.
RV (36:59):
Yeah. You’re hosted
JB (37:01):
Business is over close up shop. Right. and that could ha I mean, that’s not a, that’s not that far fetched. Like that could definitely happen, right? So you know, you gotta un you know, you’ve gotta build reliable reach, not, not unreliable reach.
RV (37:17):
I love it. I love it. Well so j tequila.com is where people can go get that list if they’re, if they’re
JB (37:24):
Yeah. J tequila dot com is for the list. The merch store is tequila j bearer.com and yeah, we got, we got a lot of web properties. Now all of a sudden,
RV (37:33):
I mean, if you’re, and if you’re a tequila person, which I’m not, I don’t drink, but like, you just, like, you’ve gotta go see this, right? You gotta, and and even if you’re not a tequila person, I would go, go check this out because you’ll see, I’m
JB (37:45):
Still gonna send you a hat though ’cause the hats are pretty great.
RV (37:48):
Well, I’m a hat person, so I could do, I could just, I know you’re, I can wear hats to soccer practice for the kids. So it’s really awesome, dude. But, but anyways, this speed as a competitive advantage blows my mind and scares the crap. It scares the crap outta me. And go, and I go, you know, this idea of going, how do we build brand builders group from the ground up from here for speed is like really has, has rocked my world and it’s, it’s affected us, right? So you know, I’ve been talking to you about instant automation toolkit, like this has been in development luckily for the last couple years, and we’re, we’re, we’re finally hitting, we’re finally about ready to release because it’s just like, that is the whole thing. Instant automation. It’s like we have to help people get this stuff deployed faster. So powerful stuff. Y’all. The time, the time to win is the book like it, this thing is, it’s so, it it fits in the palm of your hand. You read it an hour, get the, get the good stuff. So check it out. And it’s
JB (38:49):
Like nine bucks too. The book’s like $9. So if you don’t like it, let know. I’ll send you $9 back.
RV (38:54):
JB (38:59):
More than $9. Yeah. Private.
RV (39:01):
We’ll figure private stash at the house. Like when you start emptying those out. Well,
JB (39:04):
Because, because I, because as you know you know, we live right by campus in Indiana University, so all of our neighbors are university students. And so I get sent a lot of tequila that I don’t want to keep because it’s not very good. So I’m just like, I’m, I’m like, I’m like
RV (39:16):
Dishing it out, walking
JB (39:17):
Through the neighborhood, like who wants a bottle of tequila and all. Yeah. The college students love me. That movie neighbors. Like I’m the Seth Rogan character in that movie. Yeah. It’s fantastic. Yeah.
RV (39:27):
I love it. Well brother, thanks for sharing your wisdom. We wish you the best and it’s a pleasure. You, you, you are, you are stud, my man. I’m so grateful for you and my life and for having you share your wisdom here.
JB (39:38):
You too. Say hi to AJ.
Ep 419: 7 Tips for Winning a Lawsuit | Rebecca Zung Episode Recap
RV (00:02):
Well, I am sad that I have to have this discussion with you or to share this bit of content, but I’m afraid that I do. I’m afraid that this is necessary. And what we’re gonna talk about today is how to win a lawsuit, how to win in a lawsuit. The th there are, it is a reality, unfortunate reality of life that you may end up in a lawsuit. In fact, I remember one time talking to my friend and our client, Kevin, Kevin Harrington, who is one of the original sharks on Shark Tank. And Kevin said to me, he said, Rory, you’ll know you’re really starting to get to be successful when somebody sues you. And the more successful you get, the more likely it is that at some point you are going to end up in a lawsuit. And so that’s why you know, going, go back and listen to the interview that I did with Rebecca Zung on negotiating with narcissists such an, a powerful interview, such a useful and tactical interview to understand just the psyche of who these people are and how they got to be that way.
RV (01:28):
And also to, to give you some hope and some to, to have you know, some encouragement because it can be a very, very difficult situation. Also, her book, slay the Bully is out, it will be out soon if you’re just listening to this podcast. There you’re still some pre-order bonuses you can get. And some of you, if you’re listening to this later you can check, you can check it out, and she probably has some bonuses still available on her site. But we wanted to release this early so that you had a chance to still take advantage of some of her pre-order bonuses. And and she’s dynamite. She’s one of our clients. I’ve learned a ton from her. I she is the, the preeminent expert in the world on negotiating with narcissists. And so that inspired me to share something that I’ve never shared which is just in general, I’m gonna share with you seven ideas for how to win in a lawsuit.
RV (02:20):
And she wasn’t necessarily talking about lawsuits, but you know, she is a lawyer and you know, has been a, a high profile divorce attorney. And, and this does come up. And so I wanted to share with you, and I’m gonna have to do this one from a, a little bit of a, don’t ask me how I know but let’s just say that I have been involved in multiple lawsuits. And it really is for someone, if you are a mission-driven messenger, if you’re someone like that, if you’re someone who is in our audience, you listen to this show, this is a really difficult thing because you may have done everything in your power to never get in a lawsuit. You may have never thought you would be end up in a lawsuit. And yet you find yourself in one, one day, and it can be so discouraging because you’ll, you’ll be shocked at how you, you’re someone who wants to pursue the right thing.
RV (03:15):
And yet you end up in a lawsuit and it’s a very, very scary, can be a very, very scary situation. So, I’m gonna walk you through seven things that, these are seven things that I wish somebody would’ve told me, you know, kind of as an entrepreneur before I’d ever had a lawsuit. So that if I had ever gotten into one, which I have been in multiple ones now, that I would have known. Okay? And so here’s the first thing, the first thing to know, and I don’t know who said this quote, but it’s a good one, that sometimes the only way to win a fight is to not have one.
RV (03:54):
And in particular, when it comes to lawsuits, this is one where I really would encourage you to, if you can avoid it, avoid it. The only people who really win in a lawsuit are the lawyers. And I don’t, I don’t mean that in a rude way, but that’s, you know, something that people say, and I have found that to be true. And it’s, it’s not like they win and everybody loses, but, but they get paid no matter who wins and who loses, right? They typically are gonna get paid. And so they make, they make money. In some cases, this is not every lawyer, but something that you just gotta know logically is even if you’re talking to a lawyer on your side they get paid, the, the longer the lawsuit goes on, and the more time it takes, the more money they get paid, right?
RV (04:45):
So they’re, most lawyers are paid hourly, so they’re not necessarily aligned with you on an incentive basis. The incentives aren’t necessarily aligned to end things quickly because they make their money from the time that they spend. Now, I don’t, I don’t think that every lawyer nickels and dimes people and tries to like, drag it out as long as possible. I’m just saying, you gotta pay attention when you pay attention to behavior, how people, what people are incentivized to do, and lawyers, most of ’em that are paid hourly, they’re, they’re incent, they’re not incentivized to do things the fastest possible way necessarily. So be aware of that. But the other thing is, now some lawyers are paid on contingency, meaning it’s basically like commission where they get a percentage of a settlement or the percentage of, of, you know, whatever, if you win.
RV (05:36):
And if you, if you lose, they get nothing. And, you know, that can be a very powerful very powerful person to have in, in your corner. And, and it was for us, we, we had an amazing lawyer and, and it was our, our hourly lawyers who referred us to a contingency attorney for one of the lawsuits that we were involved with, which ended up being a really, really a huge blessing in our life. And I’m, I’m so grateful to, to Doug and, and other lawyers that we’ve met along, along the way who’ve been important assets and, and advocates for us in our life. And so the, the, but the thing I wanna say here is you don’t wanna get into a lawsuit. You want to try to steer clear of it, because as you’re about to hear, it’s, it’s painful.
RV (06:24):
And it can be very, very, it’s very financially draining, right? We’ve spent lots and lots and lots of money over six figures. We, well, well, well into six figures we’ve spent on lawyers. And that is a very tough way to lose money. So if you can avoid the lawsuit, swallow your pride, apologize, right? Like, make things right, do what you can to, to stay out of it. Because sometimes the best way to win a fight is to not have one. And I, and generally speaking, this, this is the case. And when we get to number seven here, you’ll understand really why by the time we get through all of ’em, and especially number seven, you’ll, you’ll understand why. And so that’s the first thing. Try to avoid the lawsuit. The second thing, and this may be simple, but it’s worth saying, is avoid crazy people.
RV (07:17):
RV (08:20):
You might think, oh, that’s never gonna affect me because that’s not me. And I wanna tell you that that would, is a naive way to think that when people are engaged in wild living, whatever your version is of that, I’m telling you that proximity is power, just like proximity is power, and you can get drawn into good things. You get drawn into the drama of the people around you as well. And you can be a completely innocent bystander to some choices that people make in their personal life that suddenly overtake you, that, that because you work together, or they’re your customer, or you’re their customer, or they’re your vendor, or you’re their vendor, or you are their business partner, they’re your business partner, or like you’re, you know, their, their spouse is wild and they’re a friend of yours, and it’s like suddenly you’re in a car together and one of ’em is driving drunk, right?
RV (09:12):
And you go like, whoa, how did I get here? And a lawsuit can be like that. You can, you can get sucked into things that really don’t have anything to do with you. And I’m not just speaking from, I’m not just necessarily talking about my experience, but my friends other entrepreneurs, people I know, you know, our clients, we, we hear and see a lot of stuff. And so you wanna try to just not be around people who engage in wild living and do wild things because they, they will pull you into what they’re into sooner or later willingly or not like it’s, there’s, there’s just, there’s a lot to be said for that. And if you have a customer who is giving you a lot of like weird signs in your sales process, don’t sell to them. This literally happened to AJ and I, I mean, this has happened multiple times where we will fire a client.
RV (10:03):
And this happened to us recently where there was some language that a client was using with us early in the relationship, and we’re like, you know what? We’re not gonna do this. We’re we’re we, we we’re deciding that we’re not gonna work with this person, and we unwind it because it’s not worth getting involved with people who are super high drama, that have absolutely outrageous, unrealistic expectations who lose their temper, people who fly off the handle, people who are doing crazy stuff in their personal life. It’s like to, to, to the extent that you can try to stay away from crazy try to stay away from dramatic, try to stay away from unreasonable and, and try to stay away from just like outlandish, exotic, like, you know, I, I just use the, the biblical term wild living because you get caught up in that, even if, if you don’t mean to.
RV (11:05):
So that’s the second thing. The third thing, and this is something I really, the, this is one of the most tactical pieces of advice I wish somebody would’ve told me. When I, when I, they, they say, Roy, you’re gonna be an entrepreneur. You’re gonna be in a lawsuit at some point. Don’t read the lawyer letters. Don’t read the lawyer letters. So here’s what happens in a lawsuit. You know, you get, once you get to the point of like hiring letters, these lawyers before they get to court, a huge part of the negotiation is trying to generate emotion and get you off and angry and scared and like frustrated. And because they know that the more emotion they steer up in you, the more likely you are to acquiesce to their terms, right? So if somebody can make your life, it’s, pardon my language, if someone can make your life a living hell, they know by doing that, that you are gonna be more likely to wanna just end it quickly or to surrender, or to give up, or to give in, or to quit.
RV (12:18):
And so a huge part of, of the letter writing that happens back and forth, it is nothing to do with truth. It has everything to do with getting you off in emotion. And they will lie. And, and this is something that has been very sad for me. I’ve been involved with situations where I could not imagine people that would lie, lie through their teeth, blatantly lie. And they will do it just to, to get their way to win at all costs, to take advantage of you. And one of the things they’ll do, and a and, and a lot of times what people will do if they’re, if they’re skilled in, in legal battles, they will hire the nastiest, scariest letter writing attorneys, and they will, they will hire them for the skillset of being able to intimidate you and scare you and threaten you and twist the truth.
RV (13:21):
And, you know, those, those letters are not like part of evidence. They’re not like things that get ad ad admiss, they’re not like admissible in court, but this is what the, this is how it works. And so when they send a letter and you read it, you think that what this is, is a matter of, of settling what is the fair thing? And it’s not that, right? If, if you are somebody who is a naive, heart-centered, service centered, mission-driven messenger and believe me, that is me. I operate from a sense of altruism and a sense of service and kindness and, and believing that if I treat people nicely, it’ll come back to me. And that’s worked really, really well. But it is also a place where I’ve had to learn a hard lesson that people will, they will play on that, and they will threaten you, and they will lie, and they will, they will twist the truth to make you feel like you are the person who has done something wrong.
RV (14:21):
And they do that as a negotiation tactic. And so part of what, part of why you need to have a lawyer is so that you don’t waste your time reading the letters, because the letters don’t have to be factual whatsoever. And so related to that, I would say don’t take things personal. This is part of number three is like once you’re, if once you’re into a loy a a legal situation, don’t take things personal because they’re trying to make it personal. They’re trying to get a rise out of you because they, they want, they want you to want to resolve the situation. They want you to want to acquiesce, they want you to want to surrender. And so the more objective and logical and, and unemotional and even keeled, you can remain the better off you’re gonna be just mentally and emotionally. And again, that’s why it’s like, if you can, if you can avoid a lawsuit, avoid the lawsuit altogether.
RV (15:19):
So the, that’s number three. Don’t read, don’t read the letters and don’t take things personal. Number four is keep meticulous documentation, keep meticulous documentation. Now, before a lawsuit, what happens is it’s all hot air
RV (16:20):
Number five is to build a timeline. Number five is to build a timeline. This is, this is a little bit of advice that somebody gave me that seemed really silly at first when I, when, when, when I first was involved in a lawsuit. As they said, keep a timeline of events, because usually it takes a long time to get into court, sometimes years and years and years. And the details will become fuzzy about how things happened and when they happened, and why they happened and, and what happened exactly. And you know, when you get to a court, it’s all about having your details tight. It’s all about having a clear story and having evidence and documentation that supports it. Well, even a very honest person can lose sight of the actual facts of like, wait, what, when was that? Did that happen first?
RV (17:08):
Or did that happen first? And wait, when, when did that, and who actually said that? Like, so keep a timeline of dates and, and descriptions. The moment you realize things are turning south with, with a relationship, and you go, Hey, this might be heading towards a lawsuit, or this, this is starting to head towards getting lawyers involved. Build a timeline. And, and or, and if you’re in one, now, go backwards and reconstruct a timeline of exactly what happened. Because even as you can, as you can keep a documentation of the timeline of events, it’ll help you remember important details that you forgot. And it’ll help you corroborate things. And so build a, build a timeline because it also will help you refute things when the other side is intimidating you and scaring you. And, you know, blowing hot air and like doing all these things.
RV (18:01):
When you have a timeline, you go, Hey, if we ever get into court, even, even though they’re saying nasty things in the letter, and you know, that’s why I say don’t read it. ’cause It’s like, it’s not at all about being factual. It’s, it’s just about getting you emotional. But when we get into court, you go, yeah, I’m not gonna be worried about that because I can prove it because this happened, this happened, this happened, and then I can document all of it, right? So keep meticulous documentation. And part of that is building a timeline that relates. And, and when I say meticulous documentation, you know this ties into number six. Have contracts, have contracts, have dates. Keep your contracts, keep your email threads. If you start to think that something is heading towards a lawsuit, then go do the work now of going back and extrapolating all of the email correspondence and keeping all of the written correspondence.
RV (18:54):
And this is the other thing, get people to commit what they’re saying to writing. Because I’ll, again, don’t ask me how I know, but there are people who will make promises to you and promises to you and promises to you through the spoken word, and then they will never write it down. They will never, because they can say whatever you, whatever they want, they can tell you, you know, this is while you’re working together or, you know, whatever, like, whatever the situation is of your relationship, they can, they can make you all sorts of promises. They can tell you all sorts of great things and, and they can make you think they would never not follow through. But I’m telling you, this has not only happened to me personally, where they have said something, I’ve completely believed it, and then they flat out lied, completely lied in a court of law, they’ve lied.
RV (19:47):
People will do this, right? And I’m not, I’m not referencing any specific case or anything here. I’m just saying in general that this will happen. I, the lawyers, lawyer, friends that I have, they tell me, they go, Rory, that happens all the time. People get into court and they lie. That’s what they, they they do hand, you know, they swear oath on the Bible, and then they lie. They, because, because for some people it doesn’t, it’s not about, it’s not about right and wrong, it’s just about winning and losing. And that is really sad. But it’s true. And you, and I’m telling you, it’ll be, it’ll be people you never, ever thought, and it will, it’ll be people who, you know, looked you in the eye and promised you this and that, that they swore up and down they could be counted on. And so get it committed and writing, get it documented.
RV (20:37):
If you can get it in an agreement, if you can’t get it in an agreement, get it in a written email get it in an, an employee handbook. Get it, get something that says, like, like, Hey, here’s the documentation of when they told me this. And, and I will tell you if somebody is making promises to you, but they, they delay and kick the can on getting it writing, that’s a red flag, a major red flag that they’ll make promises to you, but they won’t commit it to writing because that’s, they know they can be held to that. So that is something that is a red flag. Now, I do believe, you know, this is, you know, something that Dave Ramsey said, which I, I, I agree with him, and I, I, I agree and I disagree. What I agree with is, is he said one time he said, if I can’t trust, if I can’t trust the person’s handshake, then the contract doesn’t matter anyway.
RV (21:30):
And I do agree with that, right? If I can’t, if I can’t trust their handshake, if they’re gonna screw me, they’re gonna screw me, whether it’s in writing or not. The difference is if I think I can trust their handshake, and it turns out that they’re willing to lie and they’re willing to compromise their integrity later, the fact that I have it in writing means even if they’re gonna try to take advantage of me, I have a real strong negotiating basis. Whereas if it’s just the spoken word, I do not because it’s my word against theirs. And nobody really, you can never really prove that. And in certain places, you know, even recordings aren’t admissible into court. You know, there’s certain circumstances where they are and they are not. But so keep meticulous documentation, you know, that’s number four. Build a timeline, number five, number six, get it in writing and written contracts.
RV (22:19):
And here’s something else that I’ve learned about lawsuits. Your interpretation of written contracts is pretty much as good as any
RV (23:12):
And they’re, and then they read it and they go, no, I, I think I feel the same way as you. I when I read it, I think the same way. And I’m going, well, why is it written in such crazy language? Right? So one of the things that we’ve tried to do is, is a part of attempting to avoid lawsuits, right? We don’t ever want to have to sue anyone. We certainly don’t wanna be sued. But we don’t wanna have to sue people. And we go, we just write that, we write our agreements in plain English so that the goal is not to trick someone. It’s not, at least for us, right? The goal is not to take advantage of somebody. It’s like to lay out on paper and your, if you can’t understand it, then don’t sign it Like it should. It should be straightforward.
RV (23:51):
Don’t think that, oh, it has to have fancy legalese in order to be enforceable. Not at all. Your interpretation of it is as good as anyone’s. And if you can’t understand it, you shouldn’t sign it. And so that is really, really important. And, and you should, you gotta get things in writing and have a copy of it. Because if not, that’s just a sign that like you guys aren’t on the same page, or you’re dealing with someone who is maybe not super honest and they don’t really have every intention of following through on their word. And that happens a lot. Like if they can’t show you the detail, if they can’t, if, if, if, if they, if, if they get dodgy in any way around, like, you know, hey, we’re negotiating a contract of some type, like we gotta get this thing in writing.
RV (24:37):
Like, what if, if it’s an agreement, what are we, what is there to hide? There shouldn’t be anything to hide, but just, just beware of that and, and get it in writing. And then, you know, number seven, and, and this is the part that’s most heartbreaking to me, and I hate having to share this, but if, you know, again, I’ve been involved in multiple lawsuits. I’ve been on the board of organizations that have been involved with lawsuits. I have lots of friends who have been involved in, in lawsuits or, you know, been in lawsuits. And when I say lawsuits, it’s like, you know, sometimes it goes to court, sometimes it gets settled and resolved. Sometimes it’s just a bunch of threatening lawyers back and forth. And, you know, it comes to some agreement. You know, sometimes it’s just nasty people saying, if you don’t do this, I’ll then I’ll, you know, take action.
RV (25:24):
But all of those things, unfortunately, what I have found is that it’s not really about justice. It’s often the, the, the person who wins is often not the person who is right. It’s often not the person who is ethical. Unfortunately, the person who wins typically is the person who has the most money and who has the longest timeline. Because if you have a lot of money and you can pay a lot of lawyer fees, you can scare people, you can intimidate them, and you also can drag things out. You can appeal things. You, you, you can delay things and understand this, that there is a playbook that some people will run against you. And that playbook is to drain your bank account to where you are forced to acquiesce to terms that are terms that, that are less than favorable for you. And it is one of the most heartbreaking things I’ve ever experienced to, to see, you know, to be involved with people that you trust and that you think are good people, but to then watch these scenarios where there is a playbook that they’re running just meant to drain the other side of cash.
RV (26:51):
And this happened. And, and, you know, here’s another thing you should do. You should watch Suits. I know this is silly, but if you’re involved in a lawsuit, you should watch the, the TV series, it’s called Suits. It’s an amazing show. It’s really, really a, a, a fun show. But if you are new to lawsuit, you’ve never been sued or you’ve never sued someone, and you fi you find yourself where you have to, you should watch that show because it teaches you a lot of just how it works. And you see like, oh, nobody is actually interested in figuring out what’s the right thing to do. No one is really interested in fairness, it’s just about winning. And it is really, I, I hate to paint such a sad picture of humanity, but that is how it often gets to, and that’s why it’s like, if you can avoid the lawsuit on the front end, do it.
RV (27:43):
Because by the time you get into a lawsuit, it’s like people abandon all ethics, all morals, all decency, all you know, human dignity, all respect, honesty, integrity, those things go out the window quickly. And the name of winning and the name of, you know, taking you to the house and the, and, and, and being right, and being the victor and having power over you. And it is sad, and I’m, you know, I’m hating to to say it, and I’m, this is not just these things I’m sharing with you are not just from one episode in my life. These are from having multiple episodes multiple experiences, some more involved and more painful than others, but witnessing, witnessing them. We have clients at Brand Builders Group who, you know, we, we’ve had, we’ve had four clients that are billionaires, like in the last year and a half or something like four with B billionaires.
RV (28:37):
We have lots of clients that are worth hundreds of millions of dollars. We’re around a lot of wealthy people, and many of them have lawyers on staff and on retainer for nothing other than fighting off frivolous lawsuits, right? Because they’re, they’re so wealthy. And that’s like, I mean, man, you know, on the one hand it’s like, must be nice to be that wealthy. On the other hand, it’s more money, more problems, you know, and people are just suing you for, for insane stuff. And sometimes people pretend to sue you just so that you’ll settle, just so you’ll go it away. So it’ll go away because it’s cheaper to settle the, the matter than to take it into court and pay all the lawyer fees. So this is, it’s, it’s, it’s really sad. Like, and so that’s why it’s like the best thing you can do is avoid this and, and, and avoid people who seem litigious and that, you know, wanna get involved in these, these kinds of things. And I would say, you know, being around people who are narcissistic in nature or in tendency, those are risky ones because like you heard on the interview, or if you didn’t go listen to the interview with Rebecca,
RV (29:41):
They’re very serious about just demonstrating their power over you, their control over you. And in, in many cases, it’s even more about that than money. They want to own you. They want to defeat you. They want to, in a way, it’s like they want to kill you, even though they may not want to physically kill you. It’s like they want to see you cry, they want to see you squirm, they want to destroy you, they want to destroy your reputation. And it’s like, it’s not actually about who was right or what is fair, or even what the law says. It’s really about who has the ability to persevere longer. And a lot of that has to do with how long can you be peaceful? How long, you know, like, how long can you handle all these nasty lawyer letters and not get upset? It’s also how long can you be peaceful knowing that you have a lawsuit going on?
RV (30:31):
Which is not it, it consumes a massive amount of stress. It creates a lot of, lot of stress. And the other one is, who has the longer financial runway, right? If someone has a financial runway, and I would say, you know, I would add this to the conversation, not only would you try not, would you try to avoid a lawsuit? I mean, of try to avoid getting into one with somebody, or being around people who might get you into one, but do the right thing yourself. Try to abide by contracts, right? If, if you make a commitment to do something, do it. Because you don’t wanna be on the receiving end of a breach of contract. It’s like, you know, it, it, it comes down. On the one hand, you would say it comes down to integrity, but unfortunately it doesn’t un unfortunately, people can sue you for anything, and they can really make your life miserable, even if you did, not only if you did nothing wrong, but even if you do everything right, they can still make your life miserable.
RV (31:24):
And so a lot of it just comes down to the people and treating people with kindness and treating people with respect. And I would say this too, like, the more that you, the harder you punch, you know, it’s typically the, the harder they’re gonna punch back. Like, if you get into a lawsuit, it quickly spirals outta control. And that’s why it’s like, I think the strategy is to neutralize, right? Like neutralize, neutralize, neutralize to the best you can. But I, I’ve been a part of multiple scenarios where it was like I was doing everything that I could to neutralize it to not to, to, to go, here’s, here’s how this could go down very amicably. Here’s how we could end this quickly. And sometimes people didn’t want to. They want to bury you, they want you to hurt. And and many times they’re willing to do whatever.
RV (32:16):
And I know that’s not a great picture of humanity, but that’s where it’s like, you wanna stay out of this if you can. But if you can’t and you get involved, try to stay logical. Try to neutralize and keep documentation and you, you know, build the timeline, get the contracts in writing, keep your email threads, go back and audit that. And you know, I I, I’ll say the other thing is, is be nice and be nice, even, even when they’re being mean to you. Be nice. Because if you end up going to discovery and this has happened to me before, where they can, they can make claims that you’re saying all these nasty things. If you go into discovery, the court can, can say, give me your phone, give me your email accounts, give me your bank accounts. And they get to audit all of them.
RV (33:09):
And that has happened to us. And we’ve been in a scenario where, where somebody swore up and down that we were doing some things and saying certain things, and that happened. They got to go through all of our email, our financial records, our phone accounts, and it, it sure served us well when they came up completely empty. There was no cussing, there was no, you know, there was, we weren’t doing the things they were saying. We weren’t, we weren’t saying nasty things about them. And you know, for them to be left empty handed shows a lot about our character. And, you know, that was important to us just ’cause it’s the right thing to do, but it also can play really, really well, right? So you certainly don’t wanna be firing off nasty emails about people to them, or even internally to your friends and your family, or, you know, other people in the company like that will come back on you.
RV (34:01):
And so those are some things. Those are seven ideas for how to win a lawsuit, you know? And namely by winning, we’re saying, try not to have it and try not to get wrapped up in it. And so I do think ultimately kindness and treating people and integrity is the best strategy on the front end. And then, you know, once you get involved, you know, you’re trying, if you, if you get sucked into it, and in multiple cases, we’ve been pulled into it where it’s like, you know, we were either a innocent kind of third party that got pulled into something or somebody came after us. And you know, I do believe where it’s like the truth will set you free in every scenario, the truth has set us free. And one of my biggest philosophies in life is to live a life that stands up to the scrutiny of transparency to go, if someone did audit everything, and they did, they did get access to look at your phone records and your email and all of your text messages and your, where you’re spending your money to go.
RV (35:08):
I’m not willingly gonna turn that over to somebody just because I don’t want to and ’cause it’s private. But that if somebody did, you go, I have nothing to hide, right? Like, go ahead and look at my e go ahead and look at my internet browsing history. Go ahead and look at my bank account. Like, go ahead and follow, you know, put a private investigator and follow me around. You’re gonna see that I’m an honest person. I’m not taking advantage of people. But that doesn’t mean people won’t try to take advantage of you. It doesn’t mean they won’t lie. It doesn’t mean they won’t say horrible, horrible things to get you, you know, fired up. It doesn’t mean that they won’t waste their money just to try to get you to burn out all of yours. So try to stay out of it. Try to, you know, try to avoid the fight, try to try to be around good and kind people, keep great documentation, build a timeline, get it in writing, and then ultimately realize it’s not about justice.
RV (36:01):
That’s, it’s often about, you know, who can, who can, who can last the marathon without going crazy or going broke. And if you do that, you, you’ll ultimately, you’ll get there. And I do ultimately believe the truth will, will set you free. So not the most uplifting content I know, but boy, if you know someone who is in a lawsuit or is being threatened by one, I think it would be good to, to share this with them. I certainly wish that I would’ve had something like this in the times that myself or organizations I’ve been a part of or my friends other entrepreneurs have been involved in lawsuits. Because having the perspective of someone who’s been through one that can really be helpful, even, even though a lot of times they can’t share specific details, because a lot of times lawsuits end up getting resolved with confidentiality clauses and things like that.
RV (36:56):
But somebody can sure give you a lot of perspective. And that helps me too. I’ve, part of how I know a lot of this is, I’ve talked to a lot of people who’ve been in a lot of lawsuits, and it’s good to have their perspective to that. For many of ’em, they go, yeah, lawsuits is a part of business and a part of life, and you, you learn to be desensitized to it. Which, you know, again, isn’t the most beautiful thing, but you go, it’s kinda like, you know, paying your taxes or something, you go, yeah, I don’t love it, but I gotta do it and I gotta deal with it. And it’s a, it’s a, it becomes a piece of the business, you know, that you just, you do. So try to be nice to people, do everything you can, but, but I, I think the thing also that I want you to know is that if you find yourself sucked up into a lawsuit, it doesn’t mean you’re a bad person.
RV (37:45):
Sometimes people are literally thinking that they can take advantage of you because they, there’s a lot of people who will assume your kindness is weakness, and kindness is not weakness. Kindness is incredible strength. And the people who have misunderstood our kindness as weakness you know, it, it, it ended up costing them, you know, a a, it, it was a misinterpretation right to go. Kindness and weakness are not the same thing. Kindness and strength are the same thing. And, you know, you can get sucked into this. You can be a perfectly honest, hardworking, ethical, kind human and still find yourself unexpectedly in a lawsuit. And people can be trying to just take advantage of you and trying to hurt you even when you did everything by the agreement and by what is right. So don’t take that personal either, ’cause that can weigh heavily on you of like, gosh, there must be something wrong with me.
RV (38:54):
And, you know, if you listen to the other side, there’s probably a good chance they’re gonna try to make you feel that way. They’re gonna play into that. So you can be a good person and you can step through a lawsuit in an honest, ethical fashion. You can let the facts surface for themselves. Just don’t get caught up in firing off the hate and making the threats and doing those things that will just spiral outta control and it’ll make it more expensive and more time consuming, which makes it even more expensive.
Ep 418: How to Negotiate with Narcissists with Rebecca Zung
RV (00:00):
RZ (01:33):
Thank you. I, you were actually one of my favorite people, is you are so brilliant. I’m really actually in awe of you, so thank you. Thank you for having me.
RV (01:43):
Yeah, well, thanks Fran. And I
RZ (01:45):
Don’t say that actually very easily. Let me just tell you that it’s, it’s, I, I don’t suffer fools very easily, so I have to tell you, I’m really, really impressed by you.
RV (01:57):
Well, thank you. Thank you. Well, and I genuinely am impressed by you. I mean 40 million plus views on YouTube, several hundred thousand followers on Instagram and social. You’ve built this, this massive email list, you know, well into the six figures and hundreds of thousands of followers on Facebook. You know, but you know, before all of that, you were a true expert. I mean, you’re just like the, the epitome of who we like to work with, that brand builders group, this, this person with deep expertise who really solves a problem in the world. And I have to tell you, and, and my very first question I want to ask you about is such a fundamental question, which is how do you define a narcissist? Because honestly, that term wasn’t even on my radar until I met you. And then, you know, I started following you and like seeing all the stuff and going, wow, so many people are resonating with your content. So apparently there’s a lot of narcissists out there in the world, and, you know, maybe my eyes are just being open to that. So can you like start there and, and tell us what that is?
RZ (03:04):
Yeah, I actually wouldn’t have been able to define it myself either, even though, you know, I probably came a across a lot of them in my practice and even in my personal life as well. So the way I like to define it is, is really in layman’s terms, and in my book, of course, I, I give the DSM five and all of that because I, I, you know, I felt like I needed to, which is what the professionals, the mental health professionals use. But I like to use layman terms because I think it’s easier for all of us to understand. And, and it is a, a spectrum. And, and so if you go all the way to the end of the spectrum, there is a legitimate personality disorder there sitting at the end of the spectrum, which is narcissistic personality disorder. But obviously as you get closer and closer toward the end of the spectrum, you’re gonna get closer and more and more and more of, of the characteristics, right?
RZ (04:00):
And all of us, of course, have some characteristics of being narcissistic at times, and there is a healthy version of narcissism, by the way, too. Interesting. Okay. Yes. Yeah. So, but what narcissism is, is a person who has no feeling of, of value, and I say they don’t feel valuable because obviously all human beings are inherently valuable, but they don’t feel any sense of internal value. And so what they do is they go around trying to get feelings of value from external sources. And so the way it’s described is narcissistic supply, and that’s the, what everybody call refers to it as is narcissistic supply. What I have done is actually tier that and, and, and tier it into diamond level supply and coal level supply. So they, they get this, you know, external diamond level supply from anything in, in how they look. So it could be big houses, impressive friends, lots of money, all the things that you think of as the best things of how they look to the world, you know, puffing themselves up by making themselves look good.
RZ (05:25):
And then there’s what I call the dark underbelly of narcissistic supply, which is put, you know, making themselves feel better by pushing other people down. Mm-Hmm. Which is degrading people, controlling people, manipulating people, making other people squirm. So that’s what I call coal level supply. But what they do is they, they suck you dry of energy because they’re trying to make themselves feel better, but it’s a black hole and it can never be filled. So you are left feeling totally and completely depleted, yet they’re still starving and, and it, they’re like desperate for air, gasping for breath, and it’s, it’s scarcity to the utmost extreme. And it can never be healed. And it can never be, you know you know, it’s like a salve that they’re trying to put on themselves and they can never get enough. And so you are there and, and, and feel totally compl depleted. They’re still starving, and, and there’s this black hole and it’s goes on and on and on and on. And, and that’s why they have no empathy. That’s why they have no empathy. It’s like they’re in pain all the time, and it’s deep shame.
RV (06:47):
Interesting. And so that’s, that’s part of the characteristic is no empathy for others because they’re just consumed with basically trying to satisfy this, this void, which is impossible for them to fill with external stuff, which is impossible for them to fill.
RZ (07:03):
Correct. Uhhuh
RV (07:05):
RZ (07:18):
Did she have the pink Cadillac?
RV (07:20):
She never got the pink Cadillac. She did have the, the red Grand Am for a minute, for like a hot minute. Oh, okay. So she did it more of like a side hustle than like a career, but I still learned a lot of like, personal development principles from sort of being around like the Mary Kay culture and the events and stuff that she had. But anyways, can you take, tell us, like, I’m curious, how did you become one of these top attorneys? And, and you know, you’ve been on Extra, and I know you’ve had like, some very high profile like divorce cases that you used to be involved in. And I know you’re, you’re, you’re still like a partner in your firm, but like, how did you, how did you get into all of this stuff? Like, tell us your personal story.
RZ (08:03):
Well, interestingly enough you know, I’m actually first generation Chinese on my dad’s side and second, second generation German on my mom’s, you know, I’m so half Chinese and half German. So I, I always joke that I have no fun genes whatsoever.
RV (08:56):
Devastated. I mean, nine, you dropped outta college, got married at 19 and had three kids, and you’re 22 years old. Mm-Hmm.
RZ (09:04):
RV (09:36):
Were on your own, you were an adult, you were out there on your own,
RZ (09:38):
You’re done, we’re done. You know, or no, I used say this was the nineties by this, this time, it was the nineties. And so they were like, okay, you know, you can do whatever you’re gonna do. And so I got divorced and went back to law school. This is definitely in the nineties already at this point. And I, I met my husband in law school, and we you know, still in my twenties at this point, right. And, and we have now been married for 23 years, and we have a 20, 21 year old daughter. And I, you know, at, but that point, I mean, I, I still made law review. I went to University of Miami Law School at night, and I mean, they don’t even have a night program anymore. I mean, so, you know, it was a crazy time in my life.
RZ (10:38):
It was crazy. And so we you know, I, I ended up starting at a law firm where the partners were, you know, top family law attorneys in the country. Okay. You know, my, my, they were both members of the academy, the international academy. My, one of the partners that I worked for she had been, you know, president of the American Bar Association for the, the country. And, you know, so I just, that’s where I started, you know, and, and high net worth family law is a very, very specialized area of the law. You have to know, you know, tax law, estate planning, law, business law, you know, trust law. I mean, there’s, it’s a very, very high you know, highly specialized area of the law. So that’s where I started right from the beginning. And I came up through, through that.
RZ (11:40):
They, they retired. I ended up starting my own practice and continued on, you know, I was in Naples, Florida, which is a very affluent area. At one point, when I had my daughter, I stopped and I ended up going to Morgan Stanley for a few years. I did wealth planning there for a little while, just like two years. And I had my series seven in 66 for a little while. And then I went back and, and had my own practice. And then just, you know, I wrote my first book in 2013. I had John Gray actually wrote the four, or he wrote an endorsement for me. And from there, I actually started to get some television work. I started doing, you know, T M Z, and, you know, some things like that. And that was when I started to think, you know, maybe I wanna do something a little bit more entrepreneurial.
RZ (12:36):
You know, it was like I didn’t have to even step outside my firm anymore to do any networking. You know, it was like hamster wheel, you know, from my practice. And I just started to feel like you know, let me do something else. So in 2017, I merged my practice with two other guys who were both members of the Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, and my husband and I moved to Los Angeles, and I was going back and forth, and we started, I, that was when I started learning about funnels. And I just started like teaching myself some things. And I got involved with this other person at that time who turned out to be a narcissist. And that’s when I started to,
RV (13:25):
In the business
RZ (13:27):
Not, she wasn’t a, you know, it wasn’t a law firm. No. But it was an entrepreneurial endeavor that, you know,
RV (13:37):
And so that’s when you really started diving in specifically to negotiating with narcissists. ’cause I think as I think about the people listening to this show, I think you go, you know, you might be negotiating fees with clients, you could be negotiating customer service issues with like, people trying to like, cancel or get a refund. You could be negotiating something with a business partner, right. In terms of we hear a lot of those stories, right? A lot of our clients have had very tumultuous, tumultuous, we’ll say, separations from business partners and joint ventures and things like that.
RZ (14:19):
And yeah, well, I had, I ended up having that. I mean, I ended up having that, you know mm-hmm.
RV (14:59):
But you, basically, the short of it is you had this experience where suddenly you were tied up with a narcissist. And I guess ultimately what I, what I would, what I’d love to hear is how do, so how do you negotiate with the narcissist? Like yeah. Knowing, knowing now what some of their characteristics are and why, which is super helpful to understand the reason they are the way they are is because they’re starving. They’re searching for basically love and importance and to feel valued. And that’s a really scary place to go, oh, you know, nothing I can do is ever gonna make them feel that way. So they continue going, which means I’m gonna constantly feel drained. So, you know, I always feel like when I think about negotiation and the way that I approach negotiation, like, I don’t think of negotiation as a battle. I’ve always thought about negotiating. I think of negotiation as collaborating and going, how do I help you get what you want, and you help me get what we want? And we all, we all win together. But if somebody doesn’t have empathy, if they don’t care, they go, I have zero interest in helping you get what you want. That, you know, how do you, how do you negotiate with that person?
RZ (16:08):
Yeah. And therein lies your problem right there. So right behind me, I’ve got a book that I wrote called Negotiate Like You Matter. Robert Shapiro wrote the Fore. And, and in that book, I talk about how both sides wanna feel, seen, heard, and know that they matter. And if you don’t walk away with both sides getting some amount of value out of it, the deal’s gonna fall apart. And I have participated in thousands and thousands and thousands of negotiations, and I know what it takes to get a deal to stick. Okay? Here’s the problem, when you’re dealing with a narcissist, okay, let me explain something about how a narcissist ha was formed. And this is actually was, it blew my mind when I was doing the research for this book.
RZ (17:02):
How a narcissist was formed during childhood is actually a result of trauma to the brain. So when we are dealing with trauma as adults or as human beings, we are presented with when we’re, you know, feeling like we are under fire. We feel like we need to fight or, or flee, right? Fight or flight. And when that happens, our brains emit chemicals to allow us to prepare to be strong or to run faster. So it’s adrenaline or whatever it is. Right. You know, to, to be able to, you know, so it’s the sweat glands go and all of that. Mm-Hmm.
RV (17:52):
Cortisol, all that stuff.
RZ (17:53):
Yeah. Cortisol, all of that. Exactly. So when that happens on a continuous basis though, it actually can start to cause damage within the limbic system of the brain, especially for children. And it can actually cause arrested development to that area of the brain. And what that is called is called narcissistic injury. And when that happens for a narcissist as they grow, while the prefrontal cortex of the brain, which is the thinking area of the brain, can continue to develop that limbic system, part of the brain as it continues to, as they grow when they’re presented with situations where they feel like they need to be back in survival mode again. And it doesn’t mean it’s rational to you, it means it’s rational to them or reasonable. So it could be an eye roll, it could be a tone, it could be anything, anything where they feel slighted or they feel like they need to, to be back in there and they’re triggered, then that narcissistic injury is triggered, and that limbic system comes back into play and takes back over. And now you’re not dealing with rational, now you’re not dealing with reasonable anymore. You’re dealing with that limbic system, part of their brain. And what I learned in my research is that sometimes they don’t even remember what they have done during that period of time. And what happens is it’s actually called splitting, meaning
RV (19:47):
Phenomen, they don’t remember or what happened to ’em when they were young, or meaning they don’t remember the irrational stuff, what they’ve done, stuff they did to you,
RZ (19:53):
They’ve what they’ve done to you. Okay.
RV (19:55):
Wow. And
RZ (19:55):
Yeah. And it’s, it’s actually phenomenon called splitting. And so they actually, they actually will say, I didn’t do that. That didn’t happen. We didn’t have that conversation. That’s not how it went. And, and so, you know, you’re not dealing with rational, you’re not dealing with reasonable. And, and so here’s the other issue. Here’s the other issue with that. These narcissistic people, narcissists not, you know, they are, let me go back to this other conversation that we started with, which is the narcissistic supply conversation. Remember that conversation we had, right? Yep. We’re, okay. So when you were having this conversation about where do we wanna go with this? Most people think, well, narcissists just wanna win, right? They wanna win, they wanna look good, they wanna be come out the winner. That’s not necessarily true. That only takes into account one form of supply. And that’s diamond level supply.
RZ (21:06):
It totally discounts and forgets about coal level supply, which is manipulating you, seeing you squirm, making you sw sweat, controlling you. They love that too. They need that too. And so when you’re dealing with them in a negotiation, both things are at play constantly. And they don’t even realize that sometimes. Sometimes it’s, it’s actually subconscious on their part. And so you are sitting there going, well, how can we rationally and reasonably come to a conclusion here? How can we figure out a resolution? The, the very question that you asked at the outset of this is what a rational and reasonable person would ask. But that is not the question that they’re asking. So what your motivation is, and what their motivation is, is completely different. When you sit down at the table, totally different. Their motivation is, I, I wanna control you. I wanna see you squirm. I enjoy seeing you sweat. I enjoy manipulating you. And so they will gameplay, they’ll constantly move goalposts, they’ll change their own deal. You’ll come back and say, I accept every single one of your points. And they’ll say, oh, deal’s already switched. It’s already changed. ’cause You took too long because I don’t like your face anymore, because you parted your hair on a different side today.
RV (22:47):
Yeah. That’s so frustrating. I mean, it’s so frustrating. Like, and so, so you have this acronym slay, which is sort of like, okay, so if you’re in this situation, and that’s super insightful. I’ve been in this situation before to go, what they really wanna do is not only win, they want to bury you. They want to like, they want to hurt. You just
RZ (23:09):
Bury, you
RV (23:10):
Just play with you. Like, they just want thank you, you to, to feel, they want you to feel awful and horrible. And, you know, controlling is the word. Like, they’re able to to control you, so
RZ (23:21):
They’ll take themselves down to take you down.
RV (23:25):
Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. That’s fascinating. So then what do you do? Is that what Slay is about, is slay basically what, what you’re supposed to do to deal with all this. Yeah. ’cause This is very discouraging and very, like, what you’re describing is so real. It’s like, you know,
RZ (23:42):
That’s why what I do works, but that’s why what I do works. That’s why I literally have thousands of testimonials from people who said, I’ve saved their lives. That’s why what I do works. That’s why I have 40 million views on YouTube.
RV (23:58):
Yeah, yeah. Is
RZ (23:58):
What I, what I do works, because I understand this. And
RV (24:02):
So talk us through slay, like, walk us through that. Yeah.
RZ (24:05):
Yeah. So strategy, leverage, anticipate, and focus on you. So strategy is you have to have a vision. You have to understand where you’re gonna go. You have to have a G P S, you have to, you know, because you’re on the offensive, I mean, you’re on the defensive so much when you’re dealing with these people that you’re just like, oh my God, I I can’t think anymore. I’m paralyzed. I’m, I’m powerless. I can’t, I cannot think. And most of the time when people are at the other end of this, they have cognitive dissonance. They have C P t, SS d, they, you know, they can’t think straight anymore. So the first thing you gotta do is know where you’re gonna go and have a very specific vision about it. Right? You talk about so beautifully about, you know, having a, a, a thought conceive, believe, achieve, knowing where you wanna go, make it specific, same principle, right? Understanding where you’re gonna go, have a very specific vision. So that’s number one. Then creating that action plan, that’s all part of my strategy. Having an action plan, knowing exactly where you’re gonna go.
RV (25:07):
So, and does that mean knowing what you want? Is that what you mean by just being clear of like, this is what I want to have happen? Yeah. At the end of this?
RZ (25:15):
Yeah. I mean, so many times when I ask people what it is that you want, the first thing they’ll say is, I just want them to leave me alone. I just want it to stop. I just, that’s not a want. Mm-Hmm.
RV (25:26):
RZ (25:27):
You know
RV (25:28):
You’re saying like, specific outcomes that you document that you go, here’s what a win, here’s what a win in this scenario looks like for me. And just getting the first step is getting clear on that yourself,
RZ (25:41):
Getting clear on that yourself. At the end of this partnership, I wanna take over my company, I wanna buy them out. Here’s how much I think the company is worth, you know, whatever it is. Or I, I want them to buy me out, or I want, you know, the company needs to be sold, or, you know, what’s the specific outcome for you? Mm-Hmm.
RZ (26:27):
And many people wanna go straight to leverage. You can’t have leverage. You can’t get to that point unless you’ve developed a strategy first. Okay? You need to know what’s motivating these people. So here’s your, your diamond level supply versus your coal level supply. So, so diamond level supply, what’s most important to them, what is most important to them? And, and you know, how, as far as what they look like to the world, it’s gonna be different for every narcissist. But, you know, it’s basically every narcissist has something that, you know, is, you know, most important to them as far as how they look in the world. That’s gonna be the most important to them. And they will protect and defend that at any cost, at any cost. That diamond level supply, they will hang onto that more importantly and most preciously than anything. And that’s the thing that you have to threaten.
RZ (27:27):
You have to threaten a source of supply that’s more important for them to keep than the supply that they get from jerking you around and then, and then threaten that source of supply. But you can’t actually take away that source of supply, because if you do, then your leverage is gone, obviously. All right? And so, and then you’ve gotta come up with like 40 different ways that you kind of like have the guns pointing at it, you know, so what does that look like? Summary of their lies, an inconsistent statements, or, you know, potentially, you know, deposing, I call it deposed to expose, you know, so potentially deposing their new source of supply, you know, their new paramore maybe, or their new business partner, or all of the people in their new company, or, because, you know, when you, a lot of times you’re breaking up in a partnership, they go to take half the clients with them.
RZ (28:23):
So, you know, are you gonna go depose all the new clients? Are you gonna, what are you gonna do in order to potentially expose them and have this conversation? I call it ethically manipulating the manipulator. These are all very legal things that you can do. I’m not talking about blackmail, I’m talking about things that you can do. These aren’t, but, you know, these are offensive strategies. Most of the time when you’re on the other end of a narcissist, you’re a, you’re an empathic person. You’re a person that goes, ah, I don’t wanna have to do that. It seems cringey to you. You don’t wanna do that, then I hope you enjoy the, you know, being a, you know, on the other side of a steam roller, because that’s what’s gonna happen to you. You have to be offensive when you’re dealing with this, because, you know, they have to feel like the hammer is gonna get dropped on them, you know?
RZ (29:21):
And then a is anticipate, anticipate what the narcissist is gonna do, and be two steps ahead of them. What are they gonna do? Well, first of all, there’s three different types of narcissists that I like to, you know, sort of talk about, which is covert, overt, and malignant. They each act differently in negotiations. And in my book, I talk about how they act because they’re each different, which is, you know, we can’t really get into all of that right here as it’s kind of long. But, you know, they do act differently in negotiations. But the one thing I do wanna talk about here, just briefly, is that they are going to try to trigger you. They are going to try to get under your skin. So you have to stand firm, you have to stay calm, don’t take the bait, don’t go, don’t allow them to go fishing, and you end up with a hook in your mouth.
RZ (30:18):
You know, like, don’t defend yourself. Don’t explain, don’t justify. They’re gonna say stuff to you like, oh, you’re you know, like for you, Rory, you are a person who prides himself on being, you know, a person of integrity, a person who’s honest, a person who does what he says he’s gonna do when he says he’s gonna do it. So for you, what would be the first thing you’re gonna do? You are dishonest. Mm-Hmm.
RV (31:12):
And make you squirm. That’s the, like, what can I do to just like, control you and manipulate you and see you just be completely off kilter? Yeah. yeah. That’s amazing. And when you say, don’t, you know, like, don’t defend yourself. I mean, so this is, I’ll, I’ll share this. One, one of the very, like, the very first time that I was in like a real lawsuit, and this is like a piece of legal advice that, that I, I wish somebody would’ve told me, like, the one thing I wish somebody would’ve told me was don’t read their letters. Like, I read, I read their letters and it was like, this letter is outrageous. This is a flat out lie. This is un like, unbelievable. How are they even saying this? And it’s like, that’s the point of the letters. Yes.
RZ (32:18):
Go through this. And they always come at four o’clock on Fridays, by the way,
RV (32:22):
RZ (32:34):
Right. That’s why I say anticipate what they’re gonna do. Mm-Hmm. And, and don’t defend yourself. Never explain, never justify, you know,
RV (32:43):
Honestly,
RZ (32:43):
Pretend like you’re reporting in the news.
RV (32:46):
Yep. Once you ha, once you have the perspective, you go, oh my gosh, this is hilarious. Like, it’s such a predictable, immature, like what would somebody that just, just to, just for no other reason to try to hurt you, and you’re like, oh my gosh. Like, it’s yeah. So that’s interesting. And not justifying, like if you’re justifying you’re win, they are winning, you’re doing exactly what they want. If you’re defending yourself, you’re, you’re doing exactly what they want to do.
RZ (33:11):
Exactly.
RV (33:13):
Fascinating. Okay. So is that, so that’s anticipate, that’s
RZ (33:16):
A, yep. And then, and then y is the you. And so I, I split you into two sections, which is you staying on the offensive, which I, you know, just sort of addressed a moment ago. And then y the other part of why is a hundred percent of winning is, is your mindset. And, and you, and you alone define your value. And you know, I used to say 80% of winning was your, was your mindset. And then I interviewed Bob Proctor and he corrected me on my own podcast. I will have to tell you
RZ (34:17):
And then I decided, yeah, a friend of mine was leaving Naples and decided to give me her law practice. Basically. She was like, I have a, you know, about, I don’t know, it was like 15 clients or something. And she’s like, I have these clients. I’m gonna just basically dump ’em in your lap and you can, you know, start a law practice with them. And I was like, okay, nobody’s ever gonna be giving me a law practice ever. So I, this is my chance to start a practice. And so I did that, and I had a business coach at the time who’s still somebody I go back to often, and she’s one of my very best friends and one of the smartest people I know on the planet. And I said to her, I said, oh, I’m so worried that the people of Naples are gonna think that I’m such a flake that, you know, she was a lawyer first and now she’s back.
RZ (35:11):
She was a, a financial person and she’s back to being a lawyer. And I, I was so nervous that the people of Naples were gonna think I was such a flake. And she said, people will think what you tell them to think. She said, you can tell them to think that you’re a flake, or you can tell them to think that you are the only F law attorney in town that has, has a financial background, so therefore you are actually more qualified than any other family law attorney in town. Which story would you like to tell?
RV (35:49):
Hmm.
RZ (35:51):
And I said, oh, maybe I’ll tell that story
RV (36:59):
Mm-Hmm.
RZ (38:02):
Yeah, I have two answers for that. So one is, and that’s a great question by the way. I love that question. So I have a couple of different ways that I go into in the book for that. One is that I tell people that they can either and, and it kind of depends on what’s going on in their situation, but, so if there’s something that they want from them, for example, I, I tell them that they can use a tactic that I call fluff or favor vomit later
RZ (39:01):
You’re so much better at it than I am. And it’ll be done so much faster if you do it. You’re so much more efficient at it, you know, and, and you know, something like that. And, and, and you just, you make sure you don’t say anything good about yourself or anything like that. No tone. Because I always say narcissists hear tones, like dogs hear whistles. Like even if there’s no tone, they hear tone. So, you know and then, you know, I always say, if you have to go shower or vomit later, that’s fine, but, you know, get them to do something for you. So fluff or favor vomit later. So that’s one thing. The other thing is that I say you know to, to use, it’s wise to use the element of surprise. So, you know, never let on what it is that it, that you’re up to, what it is that your leverage is nothing.
RZ (39:58):
You know, I would act like they’re winning. I would act like you don’t know what’s going on. I mean, even till the very end, I mean, I would throw out decoys about what it is that you actually want in, in a, in, in, in a negotiation. Because if you tell them what you actually really want, then they’re gonna want make sure that you don’t get that thing, you know, because they don’t want you to win. They don’t want you to have that thing, you know? And at the very end, you know, at, if you end up with, you know, the thing that you wanted or the, the settlement that you wanted or whatever, I would act like, oh my God, they, they really got me, or whatever. You’ve gotta take your ego out of this thing because if, if they think that they got you or, or didn’t get you or whatever, it, it’s like, at the end of the day, if you can walk away from this thing and be done and you know, and, and, and, and have, you know, not have to look back and, and have them outta your life, that’s what you want.
RZ (41:10):
Because especially the more malignant that the narcissist that you’re dealing with, the worse it’s gonna be. I mean, you know, I know for me with my, my narcissistic business partner, I was just like, gray rock. So, you know, that’s another term that they have. And that was one of the other things I wanted to mention to you. The more you can just have no reaction to the types of things that they’re trying to do and that try to get a reaction out of you, the more you can just not take their bait, the better it’s gonna be for you, you know? Oh, that’s interesting. Oh, that’s, that’s really you know, great feedback. Thank you. Thanks for letting me know mm-hmm.
RZ (42:16):
Because, you know, I I, I mean, another phrase that I really like is I agree with you. You’re like, I agree with you. That’s what you think, you know, I agree with you that that’s your opinion. You know, I agree that I, you know, I heard that’s what you said, you know, I mean, you’ve agreed to nothing when you said that
RV (42:52):
Mm-Hmm.
RZ (43:15):
They can get [email protected] and it’s, you know, it’s, it’s available wherever books are sold, but slay the bully.com is the best place to go check it out and get all the bonuses that come along with it, which is, you know, a lot of really cool stuff, including, you know, access to my private launch team and bam. Yeah. And, you know, masterclass with me and, you know, early access to the manuscript, depending on, as you said when you’re hearing this and all kinds of really other cool stuff. So.
RV (43:48):
Yep. I love it. So we’ll link, we’ll link that up in the show notes and you can check that out. The last little question I’ve got for you, Rebecca, is just what advice would you give to somebody who’s really feeling discouraged right now? You know, like I said, I’ve, I’ve been in this spot before and you can, you can be acting like the Gray Rock. I think that’s really great advice. I wish I would’ve had that advice. You can be doing this stuff and in, in reality, deep down you can still feel quite a lot like crap. Like you are being manipulated, like you are dealing with someone who’s unreasonable, like you are losing, like you are, they’re getting their way with everything. And there is just, it’s just comp. You just feel like it’s completely unfair. And what would you, what would en encouragement would you give to somebody that is in that spot right now?
RZ (44:41):
First of all, I’m gonna tell you, they don’t attach themselves to you because you have so little value. They attach themselves to you because you have so much. Hmm.
RZ (44:50):
That’s one of the first things I tell you all the time. They don’t want the clearance rack item
RV (46:30):
Yeah, that’s great. Well, thank you so much for this. It feels empowering to have a, a little bit of insight to what’s going on and how to navigate away through this. And we’re so excited about the book and, and wishing you good luck with that. And we just wish you all the best, my friend.
RZ (46:46):
Thank you. You are the best too. You are the bomb.
Ep 403: How to Set Your Fees | Mitch Matthews Episode Recap
AJV (00:02):
All right, guys. We are going to talk about how to set your fees. In other words, how to be well paid as a speaker, coach, consultant, author, who also does speaking, coaching, and consulting. But this is a conversation specifically designed for what we call the expert community. That person who is trading their content, right via coaching, consulting, speaking, writing, content, creating for money. And ultimately, this is to help you make more money so that your, your message gets more out into the world. At the end of the day, I believe that most of you who are listening to this are driven by mission and purpose, and you want to make money as a bri, as a byproduct of doing really good work. But at the same time, if you do really good work, then you should be paid like you do really good work.
AJV (00:56):
And for many of us there, a reason you’re not getting paid like you should is because you don’t have the confidence or the conviction to charge what you should. And that’s what this conversation is about today. So at Brand Builders Group we believe that there are four categories, sorry, five categories missed. One, there are five categories that really will help you decipher how do you set your fees? So we could talk about things philosophically or in theory, we could share best practices. That’s not what this is about today. What this is about today or what are the five categories that you need to evaluate yourself in to know how to set your fees. All right? And each one of these, I just want you to rank yourself on a scale of one to 10, one being not existent, 10 being crushing it out of this world, killing it.
AJV (01:53):
That’s what we’re talking about. So high level here are the five categories that we’re gonna go through. Credibility, content, delivery, right? Your presentation style, right? Stage presence, we could call it that. Marketing materials and reach, right? So I’ll say ’em again. Credibility, content, delivery, marketing materials, and reach high level. That’s what we’re going after here. So I’m also trying to keep this 10 minutes or less. So we gotta crush, we gotta roll. First one, credibility. Again, rate yourself on each of these on a scale of one to 10. One being I don’t have any in the market. 10 being I’m a household name, right? So this is what we’re talking about. A 10 is like a PhD or a global thought leader. These are people who have viral TED Talks, New York Times, bestselling books, people who are regularly on some of the biggest media and podcasts, your mainstream, right?
AJV (02:47):
That’s a 10. One being is you’ve got no specific expertise or track record in the public. Now, you may have a lot of hidden credibility. In other words, only a few people know about what you’ve done. But man, for those who know about it, they know it really well, and you’ve done an excellent job for them. But that’s a one, right? So this is credibility in the known marketplace. One to 10, one is going to be a lower fee. A 10 is going to mean a higher fee, right? And we’re gonna do this five times. So I want you to take an average at the very end, right? So as you jot down these numbers, so let’s just say you give yourself a five in credibility. I want you to take your average of each of these. And at the end of the, you know, episode, I want you to go, Hey, what’d you average, right?
AJV (03:37):
Did you average a five? Did you average a seven? Did you average a three? That’s what I want you to do. So that’s credibility. Content is the next one. Rate yourself on a scale of one to 10. 10 is someone who’s got award-winning ideas, original research. You are regularly referenced in the media or in the mainstream, but people come to you for this piece of content. You are known for this thing, right? You have a truly original thought leadership in this area, okay? That also means that you’ve got well-documented frameworks and IP that could be in the form of books, courses, speeches, TED talks, all the things. But it’s documented as yours, referenced as yours. That’s a 10 a one. As someone who has loosely constructed ideas, but no specific frameworks, f frameworks or organization. There’s no unique methodology or processes. And if you were just honest with yourself, these are somewhat largely repackaged ideas that already exist somewhere else.
AJV (04:44):
In other words, nothing original, truly yours yet, yet, okay? So give yourself a ranking of scale of one to 10, one being got none, 10 being I own this. Okay? That’s content. So you’ve got two. Now. Now, let’s go into number three, delivery. This is, again, I kind of said this earlier, stage presence, right? What is that? You know personality or charisma that comes across on camera, on stage in front of people one-on-one, right? 10 being you are
AJV (05:37):
But it’s like people are constantly commenting on the delivery of your presentation, of your content, right? One would be, you don’t get that
AJV (06:33):
That’s with websites, demo videos, slides, workbooks, resource guides your social media, right? It does not mean you’ve got to have the fanciest, most expensive stuff, but it looks good, right? It looks well presented. I just came off of seeing Taylor Swift in the ERAS tour. Now, she spent millions and millions and millions and dollars. I’m not saying that’s what it is, but man, it looks well thought out. It is well planned. It is important how things look and come together. You can tell that. So is that yours or are things mismatched together and you’re just scraping by? And that’s okay. You don’t have to be at a 10 here, right? But this is, this is just helping you go, man. It’s like, you know, people always say, don’t judge a book by their cover. Well, unfortunately, sometimes they do. They go, man, that looks so good.
AJV (07:21):
It must be as good as it looks. So gotta take some of that in. I’m not saying I agree with all of that. I’m just talking about where, where, where we are here in the world. And number one is that, I mean, you’re just, you’re first starting out and it’s version 1.0 of everything. You’ve got things in word docs and PowerPoints, and you’re using your own stuff on Canada. That doesn’t mean it looks bad, it just means things are kind of compiled together and mismatched, right? That will affect your fees and pricing. It just will. So let’s just call it what it is. Where do you fall on a scale of one to 10? Always knowing that we get to improve at every level, right? We get to do better then reach. So reach is how many people do you reach?
AJV (08:04):
How many people do you have access to? How many people follow you on social media? E email list, subscribe to your podcast, how many people you are in front of on a consistent basis, right? So a 10 would be you’re someone who reaches millions on the regular, right? This is in some sort of controlled medium as well, not just on social media, but you’ve got a large email list. You’ve got a huge amount of subscribers and downloads to your podcast. And you’ve got social media, right? So when you think about this, you probably have hundreds of thousands of people on an email list, hundreds of thousands of people on social media. You have access to reach through main media other top known, well-known podcasts TV shows, radio shows et cetera. But that would be a 10, right? A one would be you’ve
AJV (08:55):
Got no email list. You don’t even know how to make an email list.
AJV (09:39):
I only have like 9,500 people that follow me on Instagram, maybe 15,000 all in on social media. So this is not all about having a huge social media file. I don’t care to have that. But we have a fairly large email list, which I do care a lot about. I have access to lots of large audiences through other people’s podcasts and stages, but I would not rate myself anywhere near a 10. I would say I’m, in terms of reach, I’m somewhere like a six or a seven, right? And I do this for a living, right? But is, is being honest with myself to go through each of these. It will help, you know, one where you are today and in what of these categories can you quickly improve on. Like, I could improve on reach if I so desired, right? I’ve spent a ton of time and money and resources over the last year to upgrade my personal marketing materials.
AJV (10:26):
That was an area I was focusing on. My content, I feel like is world class, right? I do believe you should believe in yourself, and I believe in myself. Credibility. I have good credibility, right? Can always be more, we have original research, we’ve spent the money to get original data, like we’ve done that work, but it’s like where you score also lets, you know, where could you do more? Where could you get help? Where could you get coaching? Where, where do you need to put some attention is also really helpful. So here’s how I would base across, if you averaged ones across the board, I would just say a starting point would be, you are probably charging for, this is for a speaker fee or coaching fees. I’m just calling it for an hour, right? But if you’re charging, or sorry, if you’re averaging a one, you’re probably charging in the hundreds, not the thousands in the hundreds, right? And then just for the sake of time, just to kind of give you some averages here, if you average a five, right? So if you’re averaging fives across the board, you’re probably charging somewhere between thirty five hundred and fifty, five hundred, right? That’s a five. So at one would be you’re charging hundreds of dollars, right? And then the twos, threes and fours are those low thousands. And then as you average out of five, you’re probably charging somewhere between, and this, I’m looking at an hour here. This is kind of like for a speaker fee,
AJV (11:52):
Right? For $3,000, right? So if you were gonna do that for coaching, that might 3000 might be your first coaching package, right? Then again, trying to give you some baselines here. If you’re, try, if you’re averaging in the eights then you’re probably at a keynote fee. If you have eights across the board, you’re probably charging somewhere between 25,000 and $30,000 as a coach or a consultant. That means your package is probably somewhere between 25,000 and $30,000 if you’re averaging the eights. Now, if you were averaging tens across the board and you’re just like, you know, pit bull, pit bull is to worldwide himself, right? Like a speaker fee for you would be like a hundred thousand dollars of speech, right? You’re talking about like presidential rates here. You’re talking about Brene brown rates and Mel Robbins rates, Tony Robb rates who are more, right?
AJV (12:45):
Those are even more than this in some cases. But if you’re a coach or a consultant, right? Those are your packages, right? You could be upwards of the a hundred thousand dollars packages of your tens across the board. So this is how I want you to think about this. It helps, you know, one, what’s your baseline, where you are today in these categories, credibility, content delivery, marketing materials, and reach. And then I’m just giving you some averages. If you averages one across the board, then you’re in the hundreds. If you’re five, you’re in, you know, averaging five, somewhere between the three and 5,500 range. And then eights, you’re up there, you’re getting up there. It’s like that’s that 25 to 30 range. And if you’re, tens are across the board at six figures and up per speech or per package. So how to set your fees back to this, it’s like there are five categories that we believe are really important for you to consider to have some unbiased internal look at.
AJV (13:38):
What’s my content, right? How original is it? How forward thinking of it is it what’s my delivery style, right? How, how much have I invested into making sure that I know how to deliver it? Well, marketing materials, your reach. And there’s so many different things to be looking at here. And I hope this is kind of gives you a baseline. It’ll help you know where to start, where to improve. And also as those numbers, those averages increase. So do your fees. So how do you set your fees? You ask yourself, how credible am I? How good is my content? How good is my delivery? How good is my marketing material? And then how, how much reach do I have? And those are the five categories to help you set your fee. So go set your fees, go raise your fees, and go get well paid. We’ll see you next time.