Category: BUSINESS

Ep 96: Using Micro-Influencers to Earn $65 Million in Two Years with Amanda Tress

RV: (00:06) Hey, Brand Builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for tuning in to listen to this interview, we are so excited to bring you this information and wanted to let you know that, Hey, there’s no sales pitch coming. From anything that we do with this is all our value add to you and the community. However, if you are somebody who is looking for specific strategies on how to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and we offer a free call to everyone that’s interested in getting to know us and is willing to give us a chance to get to know them and share a little bit about what we do. So if you’re interested in taking us up on a free strategy call, you can do that at brand builders, group.com/summit. Call brand builders, group.com/summit. Call. Hope to talk to you soon on with the show. RV: (01:03) I am just ecstatic to introduce you to one of our newer friends. Her name is Amanda tress, and, you know, at Brand Builders Group, we’ve got 12 different events. And one of our events is called eight figure entrepreneur. And we talk specifically about building an eight figure business and turning a personal brand into a business. And frankly, it’s hard to find examples of people who have actually done that. There’s very few people that, that can turn a personal brand in an online business into something that reaches an eight figure level. And Amanda has done that. She is the creator of the faster way to fat loss which I’m sure you’ve probably heard of it’s it’s the premiere virtual intermittent fasting fitness and nutrition program. AIJ and I are clients of the program. So we we’re big believers in fasting. We use, we actually use it. RV: (01:57) And Amanda is Amanda tress, not my AJ. But Amanda used a micro influencer strategy to scale this company, get this… To from zero to $20 million in less than three years. Which what I heard that it blew my mind. And then we got introduced to her through a mutual friend. We’ve gotten to know her and her husband and their family. And she’s just awesome. And I just, I am so excited honestly, to learn with/ alongside of you here. Since we convinced Amanda to come on the show and anyways, Amanda, thank you for being here. Thank you so much, Rory. I’m thrilled to be here. So is this a true story, like zero to $20 million in revenue in three years? Is that a true story? You know, it’s, it’s not a true story. It is a one to 65 million in two AT: (03:00) Years. So that is the story. RV: (03:02) So you went from, from 1 million to 65 million AT: (03:07) In 24 months, a little bit over 24 months. Yes. That is the story. And, and that is with the fast way to fat loss being our main focus over the past two and a half years since I had my third baby, who is my wild child, she was a bit of a surprise, but I decided to truly focus in on the faster way after she was born. So it’s been quite the ride. RV: (03:34) So, and when you say 65 million, is that annual revenue or that’s the total AT: (03:39) The total gross revenue over the past a little bit over two years. RV: (03:44) That’s incredible. Okay. So you’re, you’re looking, you’re looking at like $30 million in annual revenues. I mean, it’s, it’s a membership model, so it fluctuates, but that is absolutely incredible. So I think for the rest of our interview, I only have one question. How did you do that? And I’m just going to shut up and I just, I’m going to frantically take notes as you tell us all of your insider secrets of you know, just tell us the story, like how did this happen? AT: (04:14) Yeah, absolutely. And I’ll back up just a little bit. So I talk about the past 24 months, but I created the faster way to fat loss in January of 2016. In January of 2016, I started the program with only 11 clients. I was able to quickly empower those 11 clients to become micro influencers for the brand. But at that time in 2016, I was still running my marketing agency for female entrepreneurs in the fitness industry. And to be honest, the marketing agency and serving clients with a managed services model through that particular company was my primary focus. I spent 95% of my time empowering other trainers and wellness professionals to leverage the power of social media, to ramp up their own unique companies. And what I found a couple of years ago after having my third baby is that although I could teach a female entrepreneur in the fitness industry, how to show up online video and spread the word about their program, or get more eyeballs on their content with effective marketing and sales funnels. AT: (05:28) Unfortunately, my clients, weren’t fantastic with programming. So two and a half years ago, I said, you know what? I have this little program called the fast way to fat loss that is highly effective. I was running it myself as a bit of a side project. And I said, why don’t I create a certification around this particular program? And then give my agency clients the opportunity to become certified, run my program with their clients. So my agency clients quickly hopped on board. They trusted me because I had been giving them sound advice for a series of years. They became certified and now my certified coaches serve as affiliates for the faster way to fat loss. And in addition to affiliates, we have micro influencers who spread the word about the program, but it’s only been in the past two and a half years that we’ve decided to focus on the faster way to fat loss and coach certification and actually shut down the agency. So we could be a little bit more powerful in our approach to ramp up that particular vertical, the faster way to fat loss. So it’s been, you know, a lot of shifts and pivots and changes for lack of a better word, but we have found our sweet spot now with the model. We now have a membership model, as you mentioned, which we launched last April, so a little bit over a year ago and the rest is history. RV: (07:04) Gosh, that is so wild. And what an interesting way to pivot, you know, as you’re describing this, this is very similar to the direction that brand builders group is heading. That, you know, a lot of our clients specifically that are interested in teaching people about like online business and they do that, they’re becoming our, our strategists and, and not having to kind of create the curriculum and being able to just do relationships and then kind of layer some of their own, you know, like some of their own stuff on top of it. But you know, you totally pivoted. So, so give us an idea of the mechanics. Like how much, how much does the membership cost? And then, I mean, so you’re talking about 70,000 people. You’ve had something like 70,000 clients AT: (07:52) We’ve had over 150,000 clients go through our new client six week orientation program. So I’ll just quickly break down our model. We like to keep things very simple here at the fast way to fat loss. Simplicity is bliss, especially in 2020. Our model simply involves a six week new client orientation program each and every person interested in burning fat with the faster way to fat loss and participating in our online workouts must go through that initial six week program. After the six week program, our client is then auto-enrolled into our VIP membership. The VIP membership is a month to month commitment. The six week new client program is $199. The VIP membership is $79 per month. A client will then remain in the VIP membership until they decide they are sick of seeing me on video, working them through high intensity interval training. But we have an incredible retention rate, which has been a massive blessing. So that is the model. It’s a new client orientation, six week program enrolled into a VIP membership. And we also have the certification that a client can then invest in if they love the program, love the lifestyle and want to share it with their friends, family members, community, and clients as well. So, RV: (09:19) So I love that. So, so basically anyone can become certified if they invest in it and then they go through, how much does the certification is? That AT: (09:25) That’s a great question. Yeah. And, and, you know, the truth is not anyone can become certified because we have a pretty exclusive group and an arduous process to become certified, do, try to focus on fellow wellness professionals for our certification, we just enrolled a cohort of new coaches last month. It was our second time to enroll coaches. This year, we had about 8,500 individuals on the waiting list. We accepted about 300, actually exactly 300 and to the new coach cohort, after an application process and an interview process, and then our coaches, they pay $5,000 for the certification. They are required to pass the exam with 100%. And once they do, they have the ability to share the program with their community and clients as well. RV: (10:23) Now can the other 8,200 people, can they share the program and be an affiliate? They, they, so they could, everyone can share the program, but only certain people are like certified to actually teach in it. AT: (10:38) Yes, that’s absolutely right. It’s difficult to become a certified coach. However, you can apply to become an influencer. If you are not accepted into the coach certification and you still receive a generous commission for spreading the word about the program as an influencer or affiliate, you just do not have the opportunity or ability to teach the curriculum. RV: (11:02) Got it. Geez, that is so cool. I mean, this is powerful stuff. I mean, and so, so talk to me about how do you get the client? I mean, so, so, so your first six weeks, so you have influencers. So what, so what you’ve done, and this is something we talk about a lot is turn your customer force into your Salesforce. You are a living example of, and what you’ve done, which is so cool, which is what I think modern day technology allows us to do, right. Is like business has always been word of mouth, but you’re tracking it. And you’re paying people for the word of mouth that they would probably do anyways. Brand mills are the same way as like, we want people to just refer us, but we actually want to track it and pay them so that they actually put a little more energy to it. And you’ve done that and it’s just spread like wildfire. So is that, is that the primary way that you generate new clients into the six week? Like new client orientation? AT: (12:06) Yeah, really good question. We have what I call a one tier affiliate model. So not only do we allow Rory for example, to become an influencer for the brand, sorry, but you probably wouldn’t be accepted to the certified coach. RV: (12:22) I know, that’s what I was like, Hey, some fitness classes, give me a camera AT: (12:29) They gave me accepted, but we would absolutely accept you as an influencer. As an influencer, you would then refer clients into the program and if your client became an influencer, they would actually be a child affiliate. And so there’s a one tier model and you would receive some passive revenue when your child affiliate refers their friends and family members to the program. I feel this is a really fantastic way to align incentives with our influencers. And we have influencers who earn up to $84,000 per month. We have certified coaches earning up to a million dollars in their first year, but the one tier affiliate or influencer model has been very powerful. And the beauty of it is that we are not network marketing. We are not an MLM. We have been very specific about our desire to stay away from that particular description and be sure that we’re not flirting with any lines. AT: (13:31) But having a one tier model has been really effective. So that is one of the primary ways that we drive new leads into the program. We also do quite a bit in the way of social media marketing. We don’t do a lot of advertising. In fact, for the first couple of years, as I ramped up, we did zero ads. We’re just now starting to run ads to our live trainings. But one thing that’s really unique about how we do marketing is for example, this month I created a marketing roadmap with steps for success, for both my influencers and my certified coaches. And I gave them the script. I gave them links to a lead magnet. I gave them links to a live training and because we have lifetime cookies, they receive credit. If anyone signs up for that lead magnet goes through our effective funnel or signs up for the training and receives the text campaign. So we like to leverage our army of influencers and certified coaches as we look to generate new, highly qualified leads. And then it’s a big benefit that my background is digital marketing because I’m able to, you know, really leverage those strategies. And, and I empower our community to do the same. Yeah. RV: (14:52) I mean, this is insane. Y’all like we do the exact same thing at brand builders group with the one tier affiliate. It doesn’t go forever like a network marketing company, but some of our affiliates are getting paid two years later. Like off of people they’ve never even met because we track, we tracked that. This gives me, this makes me excited because it makes me feel like we’re on the right track because one day we’re going to grow up and we’re going to be Amanda trust. I, I so I, I, I love that. Now you mentioned your background’s in digital marketing. So just a tech, a quick technical question. What are you using to track all the affiliate like payment? That’s a big, you know, like we have a few hundred, you’ve got thousands of people that you’re having to track and track a second tier and the original like cookie link. What are you using for that? AT: (15:46) Yes, really good question. I know, I keep saying good question because many of these are fantastic. We are currently using post affiliate pro. It integrates with our point of sale system, Sam cart, which is fantastic for upsell funnels. And I love a good upsell funnel. And so those two integrate, we have HubSpot as our CRM as well. But to be completely honest with you, Rory technology has been my biggest pain point over the past couple, few years. It remains my biggest pain point because probably a lot like you, we are always just a little bit ahead of the platform that we’re using. So for example, we are using Kajabi for some of our content and we outgrew them within about 30 days of being on the platform. And we’ve been trying to finagle and customize, but what we really need, if anyone’s listening and having speak fantastic at coding is a proprietary product where instead of having seven MacGyvered systems, I can have maybe one to three systems that work well, post affiliate pro has been adequate. However, I’m not going to sit here and recommend it for people with tens of thousands of affiliates like us, because we have plenty of issues that we have to problem solve on a daily daily basis. So that is what we’re using. I know that was a long, long question. RV: (17:12) Your tech stack. I mean, I think that’s helpful for several reasons. We talk about tech stack a lot in our overall, our whole thing is four phases in our phase two is where we get into a lot of like building your tech stack and thinking both short term and longterm and integrating the shopping cart with the reporting, you know, stuff with the con you know, the LMS or whatever with the CRM. And so I think it’s encouraging one to be like, Hey, you’ve done this. And also to, to go, you’re still struggling with it. Like everybody else’s. So I think, you know, that that’s encouraging and just go and like, Hey, but we’re always telling people, the technology is not nearly as important as the strategy, like make the tech, you can find technology or make technology do what you need to do. And when you get to your size, yeah. You’re just probably at the point where it’s like, you got to invest in building your own system so that you can get to where you have a million active members. AT: (18:07) Yeah. Yeah. Because of technology, we are still in a growth phase versus scalability. And my main goal by the end of 2020 or early 21 is to get to scalability. And here’s what I mean by that for people listening. If I were to go on the today’s show next week, we are not confident that we could take on the amount of clients who would hit the website and purchase the product. We are still capping registration. We are closing registration every single month. We are capping the number of people who come in as coaches. And it’s because our technology is not able to keep up when it comes to a more scalable solution. So that, you know, for me as an entrepreneur is, is something that keeps me up at night, you know, or wakes me up at night and two in the morning. What if, you know, we just today announced that we are the fastest growing fitness and nutrition company in America based on inc five thousands report that came out this morning. You know, if we get, you know, tens of thousands of new clients today from a website, then we’re going to have to say RV: (19:13) All the millions of people from the influential, personal brand podcast come pilot, we’re going to do shit. AT: (19:20) We gotta put them on a waiting list. Yeah. So yeah, you know, that’s something that I, as the CEO of the company need to continue to prioritize and problem solve. And, you know, I have the most incredible team of 25 full time staffers. We have literally one man on our team and no one really heading up the technology side. So it’s me creating our, I literally created our website myself on Squarespace, and we’ve been using it for the past couple, few years, free website, you know, we need a better solutions, RV: (19:59) But what a great example, though, of just like using the tools, the free tools and starting out and just kind of like growing and growing and growing. And then, yeah, I mean, you’re dealing with the real issues of you know, an age. And I have been through this once before with our, you know, past of it’s one of w here’s one of the things I don’t know if you’ll find this to be true, but I had a mentor share with me one time. They said that it’s at the ones and threes at all, the ones and threes are where there are big pain points. So a hundred thousand to 300,000 is this is, you know, like, and then a million, so 300,000 to a million it’s about the same. And then a million to like two and a half million is the same. RV: (20:40) But once you hit 3 million, it’s like, Oh, now there’s a bump. And then between 3 million and 10 million is like, we, it, the swamp that’s like almost no one makes it from 3 million to 10 million. And then from 10 million to like 25 million, you’re good. But once you hit 30 million, which is funny, that’s about right where you’re at, that’s where the next big like hurdle is. And then once you get through this hurdle, like, you’ll be good, totally. A hundred million, like most of the things you figure at 30 million, and then you’ll have another hurdle at a hundred million and then 300 million and then a billion. And so the next time we’ll be doing your podcast on your private jet, like we’ll be, we’ll be doing the follow up here. So okay. So that’s, so that’s awesome. So when you, now, when you first started, I want to just kind of like go back to those early days. Your, your, your first customers just came like anybody else, like just friends and networking and social media, but then you turn those first 11 clients basically into influencers and then, but, but, but to turn them into influencers, are they just like saying, Hey, are they emailing you and saying, Hey, Amanda, here’s someone I think would be a fit for the program, or did you build funnels for them that they could like plug into in? Is that how it started to really take off? AT: (22:05) Yeah, that is an interesting that’s an interesting process that we went through from, from the first days of micro influencers. My first 11 clients, I went to my former workplace, walked around and said, I’m starting something new. You need to join, write me a check. We’ll be back by your office in 10 minutes. You know, that’s kinda how I got those first 11 in those particular individuals had incredible results. And I said, listen, if you tell other people at your workplace, your family members, your friends, about the faster way I will gift you with 50% commission. And what I did at the time was I created lead pages for each influencer. So I literally would create on my own a lead page with their name, many times a photo of the two of us, because you know, we happen to be friends and I’d say, you know, share this on social media. AT: (23:00) And then I would do the nurture campaigns. So they would share the lead page. And then I would do kind of the followup. If they’re a family member or friend joined the program, then I would give them 50% commission based on our analytics in the backend we have since grown it a little bit better from that, that system and process to now where we have post Philly pro integrated with the website. But that is how, you know, we got going. And then things really took off Rory when I created the certification around the faster way to fat loss, because our coaches are technically a affiliates for the brand. So that’s when things really started to gain momentum. RV: (23:46) Gotcha. yeah, well that, I mean, that’s very much, you know, like you texted me part of, we hadn’t talked in a while and you’re like, Hey, I heard John Donald Miller’s podcast. That’s what we did. You know, like if you go to that URL that we gave on his podcast, it just, it’s a picture of me and Donald, and then it’s like drops them into the, into the sequence. It’s just amazing that we live in a world and like a time where this is all possible. Really, really mind blowing about that. Just the power of leveraging word of mouth and all that. So I got one last little thing for you. Holy moly. I can’t believe we’re out of time. So, so actually before we do this, allow me to give my affiliate our brand builders group affiliate link, because we want anyone to come and like check you out and learn about becoming maybe, you know, anyone that’s listening, that’s in more of that like fitness space that maybe is a good fit for you. RV: (24:43) So I think we have a link set up if you go to brand builders, group.com/faster way, right? That’s I think the link that we’re going with brand builders, group.com/faster way. And I totally just encourage you to check this out. Like I said, the program is awesome. That’s a whole, we could do a whole nother thing about how you’ve designed the portal and laid out all of like the, you know, the workouts and also like the the, the recipe, like the eating, the eating guides and all that stuff. But anyways, so go to brand builders, group.com/faster way. The last thing I wanted to ask you about is data. How are you guys tracking and keeping up with like average lifetime value and the number of people who convert from the first six weeks to become a member. And like you said, you had really good retention. What are like a few of the things just that have helped you scale and like that you watch and pay attention to in that regard? AT: (25:46) Yes. And your listeners might lose just a little bit of respect for me as I share how we’re going to do, but hopefully this is an inspiration to someone who’s saying I don’t have money to invest in all the tools, or I don’t have the BI dashboards established. Here’s the deal. I have a person on the team who manually adds to a Google drive spreadsheet every single day. I check it at least two or three times per day to see how many clients we were able to convert yesterday into the new client program, the VIP program, I check retention I check any number of things, our, our swag store our merchandise. We look at churn. We manually still enter this information into a spreadsheet. We have some other tools and dashboards that we’ve begun working on. But primarily it’s still very, very much so bootstrapped and MacGyvered and all of that we are able to see our lifetime value via Stripe and PayPal, which is helpful, that does integrate with our point of sale system. AT: (27:01) And then of course, we have a CRM. We recently you’re saying, right SamCart is our point of sale and HubSpot is our CRM. So we just recently transitioned from active campaign over to HubSpot. Hubspot has been much better in regard to marketing data. We track our marketing campaigns very closely but, you know, I wish I had a better answer. Rory, we are just very much so working as hard as we can, the best we can and, you know, we know what metrics truly matter. So those are the metrics that we track on a regular basis. We are most concerned with retention or churn. We are most concerned with conversions for our highly qualified leads that we bring in with marketing campaigns as well. But, you know, it’s, it’s also an example of we’re just doing the right things at the right time for the right reasons. And because of that, we’ve been able to grow very quickly. I can’t sit here and say that we’re just masters at Facebook ads, or we’ve cracked the code with XYZ. We just have a great program that delivers awesome results. And our clients don’t care that we MacGyvered seven systems together in the backend. They just know that I’ve given them hope to maintain their results, their fat loss, their energy their hormone health. And I think because of that, we have developed a strong sense of loyalty within our customer base. RV: (28:34) Wow. Well, a men too, that, I mean, that is the way to punctuate this because it’s just like, you know, there is no fear when the mission to serve as clear. And if you just focus on helping people, like you’ll figure out the rest they’ll forgive you, right? Like our clients are so graceful with us of just stuff that we’ve had to janky together. Janky is a verb now. AT: (29:01) I love it. We janky stuff together all the time. RV: (29:04) Now I do. I w I do want to tell you, I’m going to send you a weaken your data situation. We know the masters at this, that business intelligence dashboards they’ve changed our life. We interviewed him on the podcast. It’s, it’s, it’s practice metrics. It’s Megan, and AIJ, I’ll send you the interview with them and that, but like they do all e-com automated dashboards, lifetime value, like perpetually updating, calculating commissions. I mean, they are the ninjas, so maybe we can help you solve, solve some of that problem so that you can come pick us up in your private jet than later which would be great. So, Amanda, thank you so much for being so transparent. Oh my gosh. Like, I can’t believe that you just, you’ve been so generous with how you do things and the way you do and what, what tools you’re using. It’s just phenomenal. And we just wish you the best of success and just like keep changing lives both financially and, or, you know, physically and financially. And you know, you guys are awesome. So keep it going. AT: (30:10) Thank you so much. It was truly my pleasure. And I’m an open book. If anyone has questions, I’m happy to answer those on social media at Amanda tress, or even via email info at a managed trust. I want everyone listening to be very successful so we can always circulate our wealth to our family church and community. Thanks again, Rory. RV: (30:31) Amen. All right, we’ll catch you later. Bye bye.

Ep 95: The Vision Driven Leader with Michael Hyatt | Recap Episode

AJ: (00:06) [Inaudible] RV: (00:06) Hey, welcome to the recap edition of the influential personal brand podcast, breaking down the interview with our friend Michael Hyatt, who got real and totally transparent with us about his personal brand journey and his business. And just awesome. So I’m going to turn it over to my wife and our CEO. AIJ and give us your thoughts. What was your, what were your three big takeaways or your first, AJ: (00:33) Well, one, I love Michael Hyatt and I enjoy all interviews with Michael Hyatt. He is such, he has such a depth of knowledge and a real life expertise and experience that he is just, he is one worth learning from so always really excited to listen to anything that Michael does. But I’ll start with my, I’ve got my three points here. So I’ve been really good about taking notes. I’m doing them. Okay. Number one, this is the, this was important for me, cause I felt like you just don’t hear enough about it these days is that nothing is more important than your email list. Nothing. And I feel like so many times in today’s social media driven world all we hear about is how many followers do you have or how many fans do you have and how many likes and what’s your social engagement. AJ: (01:26) And not that that’s not important, but we talk about this a lot at brand builders group is that social media is rented real estate. And the only really way to own your virtual landscape is through an email list. And if you don’t have an email list, if the algorithm changes or the platform changes or the platform goes away, or the government says you can use the platform or they get consolidated or merged, all of that means that all of this work, that you’ve done all of your content, all of your, your audience just poof vanishes into thin air. And I just, I love it. It was, it was clean, was simple, straightforward, but does not get enough credibility anymore. People think that email art marketing is old school. No, it’s not. No, it’s not. So nothing is more important than your email list. That’s my number one. Yeah, RV: (02:22) Those big. And I, you know, for me the biggest thing, it’s interesting because he was promoting, you know, vision-driven leader. So that’s his new book that’s out. And then we were kind of, I thought my biggest takeaway was just seeing that applied to the personal brand business and hearing him tell his journey of how he started with just like basically himself. And then they’ve grown that into a huge team doing major revenue. And if you’re curious, he shares on the interview, he shares like you got to go listen to it, but he shares his revenue numbers. Yeah. AJ: (02:57) How many staff they have the total staff RV: (03:00) And the size of their email list. He’s he shares it. And you know, he didn’t talk about this in the interview, but we were with Michael at Blackberry farm a few years ago. And I, gosh, I wish I could remember this, but you, what you said made me think about it is that basically he was making the case that the amount of revenue that you do every year is directly tied to your email list. And I want to say it’s something to the effect of a dollar per month per email. So if you have a hundred, I think this is it. If you have a hundred thousand people on your email list, then you typically that company is going to generate about a hundred thousand in revenue a month. Okay. So that’d be a $1.2 million a year. So for every hundred thousand people on your email list, you grow that by a million dollars a year in revenue. And you know, so I was thinking about the relationship he was sharing between their numbers and where they’re at now and, and that, and just kinda what you were talking about. But that was powerful for me is just to go like, this is how you do it. And, and, and you can build and build and build by just starting small. And, and just knowing though that if you follow these principles, there’s a huge business available to you and right in front of you. So that was my first big takeaway. AJ: (04:25) Yeah, no was so good. And that’s like, if you look at all of Michael’s social following, cause they have good followings, but their email list is so much bigger than their social followings. And then the revenue of their company is very reflective of their email list, not per se their social platforms. So I just think that’s really important for all of you who sometimes get hung up in the outwardly appearances of social and be like them. Then though you need to be focused on the inwardly. Who’s on my email list. And I just think that’s a great reminder. We’ll have that. Okay. My second thing was that the vision should change in the midst of chaos or the vision should not change in the midst of chaos, but the strategy has to, yeah, the vision should not change, but how you get there. The strategy is something that needs to be flexible that needs to be able to bend and mold to the times. AJ: (05:21) And he gave this great example as we are we’re we’re in the midst of a pandemic, things have changed, right? Things have changed. And that doesn’t mean the vision has to though the strategy changes, but the vision doesn’t have to. And I think that’s a really big deal in terms of just paying attention to where do you want to end up and how you get there may look a little different, but the, the longterm vision, the longterm goal doesn’t have to change in order for the path in which you take to get there. And he used this great example and I’m not going to go through all of it right now. It’s you should go listen it. But he gave the great example of Slack. And I thought, what a great example of what’s, how Slack started as a company and how it started as a company. And then actually what you know it today as is Slack, right? It’s this communication tool that is not what it started as, that was not its original intended use, but that’s what it is today with a billion dollar valuation. I think that’s a really big deal to pay attention to, or the, the vision didn’t change. But the strategy changed in order to meet that vision in the midst of chaos. I think that’s very relative to what RV: (06:35) Well, and I would say brand builders group has been interesting. You know, we, we, we had a vision for our events this year and we had to immediately go to all virtual events. And that was a, I thought a real life example of, of how it affected us internally was how many events did we do in this year, 21, 21? We had no plans to do a virtual event and then all of a sudden they’re all, they’re all virtual and we may never do a live when again, it’s been awesome. I mean, everybody has loved it. And that leads to kind of my second takeaway, which was along the same line of vision. And I really liked the distinction that he was talking about between vision and mission and values. Yeah. So, you know, the vision is where, like, where are we going? The mission is, is Y and then the values are sort of like who we are and who we’re becoming. And I liked, I liked that. I think of you know, I just think that the idea of where we’re going is, is a really good illustration. And yeah, I mean that, I don’t know what else to say other than that was really clear for me AJ: (07:42) And clarity around what is vision, what is mission? What are core values and how do they all connect? I think that was, that was very good, RV: (07:48) Complicated. I mean, I remember being in grad school and being like, why is this so complicated? What the difference is? And that was just, that was super simple. And, and Hey, by the way, you personal brand, like if it’s you one person solo preneur, you need to have these things. Like, you need to have vision, you need to have a mission and you need to have core values. Even if it’s just you brand builders, we’ve got seven core values. And you know, we’ve, we’ve had to do these, these things that like, it’s a big, big, hairy deal. AJ: (08:18) Yeah. I think that’s important too. Cause he talks a lot about how vision is, what guides you it’s like your North star. And if you don’t have vision, then how do you know where you’re going? And he said, the challenge is, is most people don’t. So they get sidetracked and pulled in all these different directions and they’re plagued by distraction without ever making real progress towards this one, you know, uniform vision. And I think that’s a lot of, to what you’re saying and not getting that confused with mission and core values. It was, it was a, it was a great conversation. Okay. I could digress. This is a good topic, but this is my last one. Right? So I’m going to read this exactly. This is how I wrote it. When I listened to the interview that it’s never too late to reinvision your company or your brand, you don’t have to give up on the vision, you just have to change the strategy. AJ: (09:04) Right. And I think that was the part, I think that’s kind of connected to my point too, but it’s like, it’s never too late to reimagine reinvision and reinvent your company or your personal brand. In fact, I think the whole concept of reinvisioning reimagining reinventing speaks to the point of like, now that happens all the time, it can happen all the time. It’s never too late. It’s always the right opportunity to do that. And I know that for us, we hear it. We hear so many people say, it’s like, well, I’ve just been doing this so long. Right? I’ve been at this for this many years, or I’ve already invested this much time or money or resources. And I say to you lovingly, so what, so what, right. Those were great experiences and great learning. And you have taken from that to create what is next, right? You would not be able to create what is next, if you hadn’t been through what you have been through, but it’s never too late. And I just, I really love this concept of living forward, not living in the past, RV: (10:06) Which is another book title of Michael Hyatt living forward. There’s another book. Yup. AJ: (10:12) But I think all of those are just very not synonymous with the time that we’re living in of like, if you’re, if you are not reinventing today, you’re in trouble. Like that is not an option re-imagining and reinventing yourself. And your business is not an option today. It must happen for you to evolve and change with the changing landscape that we are living in. Right. That’s just fact, and I just think it’s never too late, which means that it doesn’t matter if you’re five months behind or 50 years behind, you can still do it. RV: (10:42) Yup. Well, you touched on the vision and distractions there. And that was my third, my third takeaway, which I thought applies both to your personal brand and just to life in general, is that the difference between opportunities and distractions can be very deceiving and that a lot of times opportunities or distractions show up on your doorstep disguised as opportunities. And so like when you were saying, you gotta have that vision and be super clear on what you’re going for and go after it. I mean, gosh, the more we do this and the more we’re working with personal brands, the more I become convicted that the reason people don’t succeed is not because they’re not smart enough or they’re not good enough. It’s because they’re freaking distracted. They get pulled by some ad that they saw that, Oh, they should be launching a membership site now. RV: (11:38) Or their buddy says, well, I made a million dollars doing a challenge. And so now I gotta launch a challenge or, you know, the path of glory is a coaching program or like they just get pulled. And it’s like, yeah, the reality is you can, you can be successful in any model, as long as you drive that one model to success. But if you’re trying all these different models, like you, you can’t work when you have diluted focus, you get diluted results. And to hear Michael come out and just say that so clearly it’s like, gosh, that’s it. And preach it. And just lock in on a model, lock in on a message lock in on an audience and go serve them and make it successful. Quit dancing around looking for things that you’re dipping your toe in. Hoping you find something that works out and, and make it find one thing and make it successful. That’s the way to get there with focus. Focus is power. So yeah, (12:41) Rory got excited. (12:42) I got excited about that one. I got excited. I always get excited. And like you said, any time Michael Hyatt speaks and we have a chance to listen. We’re like always, AJ: (12:52) Why’s so such depth to his experience. And that’s what I love. And it’s like, if you guys don’t know Michael, or you haven’t listened to the interview, like this is just scratching the surface. He is someone who has been on both sides of the coin. He has done it. He is living it. He’s got a team he’s gone from personal brand to full blown a company. And it’s like, again, it’s he is one to follow. Like if you were really wanting to turn your personal brand into an eight figure business, he is one to follow to say, how did it start? And then what, and then what, and I just, again, if you haven’t listened to the interview, go listen to it. So much depth, so much wisdom. RV: (13:33) And I want to do a plug on that note because we’ve interviewed him twice. We interviewed him. If you go to influential personal brand summit.com, you can watch a video interview that we did with him. Like not so much just about vision in the business, but how he built his whole personal brand from scratch. And you can go listen to that influential personal brand summit.com, check it out, tune in and follow Michael. And thanks for, we’ll see you next time. Speaker 3: (14:05) [Inaudible].

Ep 94: The Vision Driven Leader with Michael Hyatt

RV: (00:06) Hey, brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for tuning in to listen to this interview, we are so excited to bring you this information and wanted to let you know that, Hey, there’s no sales pitch coming from anything that we do with this is all our value add to you and the community. However, if you are somebody who is looking for specific strategies on how to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and we offer a free call to everyone that’s interested in getting to know us and is willing to give us a chance to get to know them and share a little bit about what we do. So if you’re interested in taking us up on a free strategy call, you can do that at brand builders, group.com/summit. Call brand builders, group.com/summit. Call. Hope to talk to you soon on with the show, such an honor, always to introduce you to my friend, Michael Hyatt, if you don’t know him already you probably do. RV: (01:11) He’s the former CEO of Thomas Nelson. He is a number one wall street journal, bestselling author, New York times bestselling author of several books, multiple books. His new book is called the vision driven leader. And I’m so excited about the timing of how the timing worked out with this topic at this particular moment in history. And I mean, one of the things that you should know about Michael, that I just really admire is like he’s actually led large companies as a corporate, you know, CEO and also built a very large business as an entrepreneur. It’s rare to meet that type of a person. And so I, I really admire, and I’m an excited ticket sort of his instincts on leading right now. So Michael welcome. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me back on. I appreciate it very much on the topic of personal brands. RV: (02:07) Okay. Just since that’s a, that’s a big part of our audience. Can you give us an idea of some of the magnitude of what Michael Hyatt and team has become? How many people are there? Like how many people do you reach or like, what are some of the metrics Cosco and you started as a solopreneur and, you know, cause I think of you as being one of the premier models in terms of scaling, turning a personal brand into a very real business, something that is scalable. And there’s not that there’s not that many personal brands that people can model to go like, Hey, actually there’s a big opportunity here of a big place that I can take my personal brand in terms of jobs I provide and people I reach. So like what are, what are, give us an idea of just like the magnitude or the scope of like what your team, what your team does? We have 40 people, so it MH: (03:00) Just started off with me that I got an executive assistant that I hired a copywriter and then it kind of grew from there. So today we have 40 full time teammates. We’ve got a lot of contractors that work for us as well. We’ll do about $16 million in revenue this year. Wow. That’s awesome. Yeah. And so we’ve been growing at about 60% a year, so, you know, we’ll probably hit 20 million this next year. And yeah, I’m trying to think of impact. We, we probably get a million unique visitors to our websites every month, RV: (03:33) A month, MH: (03:34) Probably 50,000 a week, you know, 200 to 250,000 a month. We have a big coaching program. We have 450 business coaching program or clients that are in our business coaching program. We have eight coaches that work with us. So I’m not the only one delivering the content by the way, this interesting thing, I think for people to know about a personal brand, at some point you have to say, okay, how can I expand this beyond myself? And as you’re successful, you get the opportunity to do that. Name is still on the company. My name is still on the company, but I’ve been able to replicate myself and have other people that are also delivering content. RV: (04:12) I love that. That is so cool. I mean, think about that. Y’all a million visitors a month, 50,000 down podcast downloads a week you know, like a quarter of another quarter million people versus that, not to count all your social media, right? And like whatever your social media is, your email list. Like you’re reaching millions of people. You know, every single, every single month that’s MH: (04:35) Our email list is about 800,000 people. And so we keep that pretty pruned, you know, people that don’t respond, you know, we take them off of it, but, but I, I will say to people that are building a personal brand, nothing is more important than your email list. RV: (04:50) There you go. There’s another, if you want a more, a more in depth interview of Michael and I talking about that we have that on the influential personal brand summit.com. You can listen to our conversation there. Of course, it’s also back in one of our earlier podcast episodes on influential personal brand. So what you know, vision-driven leader, like, how did you, I mean, it’s kind of perfect timing for that with like everything in the world. Of course you, this was had to be way in the works before everything that COVID was going down and quarantine and all that. But what, why did you decide to write this, you know, specifically right now, at this time in your career, MH: (05:31) Just a funny story. So the book came out on March the 31st. And so when the president gave his speech on March the 11th, the next day I called my publisher and I said, this has gotta be the worst time to launch a book. Is there any way that we could delay it? And they said, Nope, the toothpaste is out of the tube and all the, all the orders we’ll cancel it, Amazon in particular, but all the other retailers too, it’ll just create chaos. So I just dug deep and I said, okay, why is vision more relevant now than ever before? And I think that’s what every business owner has to figure out in the middle of the pandemic is how was their service? How was their product more relevant than ever before? And one of the things I realized is that vision is crucial, especially in a crisis because you don’t, if you don’t have a North star, if you don’t have something that is guiding you, that you’re working toward, you’re just going to be lost and drifting on the sea. And one of the things I’ve noticed with my coaching clients is those that have a written vision script, which is what the book advocates are doing pretty well because vision doesn’t change, even in a pandemic strategy will change because there’s a major difference between strategy and vision, but the vision should remain the same and people need to hear it. Now your team needs to hear it now more than ever before. Yeah. RV: (06:50) I love that idea that that strategy will change in a pandemic, but vision will not. That’s a, that’s a really huge idea. You mentioned the vision script and I want to, I want to talk about that towards the end. I want to hear about the tool that y’all created, but so you, you, you lay out these kinds of different questions of, of, of what should be a great vision and what does it make a great vision? Can you just kinda like talk, talk us through some of the ones that you think are maybe the, not so obvious characteristics of what makes a great vision or even like some of your favorite characteristics? Cause you know, this, this is something that you’ve been around a long time. MH: (07:30) Well, let me, let me go ahead and define it, what I’m talking about. Cause I think that in a way kind of encapsulates the whole thing and then we can unpack it if you’d like. So when I talk about a vision script, I’m not talking about a vision statement. So I’m using that language very intentionally, but when people talk about a vision statement, they usually mean a short, pithy, almost a slogan that you could put on a coffee mug or slap on a tee shirt. The problem with that is it’s incredibly intimidating to come up with you think I’m not that clever. You know, I’m not that, that bright to reduce everything I want about the future in terms of a slogan. And I think most people aren’t, but even if you could do it, it wouldn’t be robust enough to really guide your organization into the future. MH: (08:13) So when I talk about a vision script, what I’m specifically talking about is a written document. That’s three to five pages in length. It outlines a clear, inspiring, practical and attractive picture of your organization’s future. This is key. It describes reality three to five years from now, as you see it and written in the present tense as though it’s already beginning to happen, that’s a vision script. And I find that when people get this on paper, you don’t have to be Hemingway. You don’t have to be a good writer, but when you start to disentangle your thoughts from just floating around in your brain, you start to achieve clarity about where you want to end up three to five years from now. And that’s kind of the key to leadership. If you don’t know where you’re going, if you don’t know where you’re taking people, you probably shouldn’t be leading them. So vision and leadership go hand in hand. RV: (09:11) Huh. And then, so, you know, if it’s three to five years out then like how often do you have to be updating it kind of every year? Is that the idea is like, you’re kind of always three to five ahead. MH: (09:22) Definitely not a one and done kind of thing. It’s definitely easier to do much easier to do after the first time you do it. It’s that, you know, initial draft, like you’re a writer, you know, write a book. It in that initial draft is tough. Same thing for a vision script. The hardest work you do is at the beginning, I’ve tried to make it as easy as possible, almost paint by number with the book division driven leader, but thereafter you’re going to revisit it every year. Now I’ll tell you that the way that I recommend organizations do that is as the first part of their strategic planning process. So every year at Michael Hyden company, and I did this when I was at Thomas Nelson publishers, is that we would do a strategic planning week where we would look at things like our vision, look at a sort of a SWOT analysis. MH: (10:08) You know, our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats out of that came our strategic priorities. And then we began to set goals and then we began to chunk that down into, you know, sort of what our quarterly objectives were and then even down to, you know, our weekly outcomes and daily tasks, but it all begins with that vision. And so every year you’ve got a chance to look at it and go, okay, we’ve got a little bit more clarity where you’re closer to where we thought we were going to be three to five years out where you’re closer. Do we see anything differently with more clarity, with more precision? And if you do that, you’ve got a chance to tweak it. And like you said, it is a moving target. Cause it always needs to be something that’s always three to five years out. RV: (10:49) Yeah. I mean that concept in and of itself is I think powerful, like the classic business school vision statement is like, Hey, we like put a paragraph down and everyone threw it in their drawer and never looked at it again. Nobody knows what it is, but you’re, this is a, this is more like a constitution or something, you know, something that’s being updated or it’s I guess constitution is not a great example. It’s not updated very often, but you know, it can be it’s amended and, and it’s, it’s a, it’s a, it’s an ongoing development part of the process here. So what do you think that people do wrong with the vision and, and leaders? And it’s like what do you think are some of the common mistakes or the things that aren’t going that are, are, you know, like an entrepreneur or even a corporate level leader kind of person they’re not doing, or they don’t either in the way the vision is written or in how they reference it or refer to it as part of their normal operation. MH: (11:49) I would say that the first mistake that entrepreneurs or business leaders is they don’t have a written vision. Like in our survey, we less than 1% of the business owners that we surveyed had a written vision statement or script of any kind. Wow. So they may have had something rattling around in their head, but they didn’t have anything on paper. And when you don’t have it on paper, first of all, you’re probably not clear because when it’s in your brain, it’s ambiguous, it’s kind of, you know, just vague. It’s not specific, it’s not concrete. You’d probably don’t have the clarity that you need, but you also have a difficult time communicating that vision. And certainly you’re going to have a difficult time ensuring quality control so that the people who are under you are the people that are working with, you can also continue to, you know, express that vision should their teammates as well. MH: (12:38) So not having a vision script is the biggest single biggest mistake that people make. I couldn’t find a single course in any college curriculum or university curriculum that taught on vision. I could only find a few books that were written about vision and actually too, as a matter of fact, and one of them kind of confused vision and mission and strategy, and they just didn’t take time to define the terms. And I’m very clear on all those terms and that I find many of them in the book, but a vision is a very specific thing about the future. RV: (13:08) Yeah. Can we talk about vision and mission? Cause I feel like those, that’s where the cloud is. Like, what’s the real difference here. Yeah. And I remember going, I remember going through MBA school, coming out more confused about which each one was then going in. MH: (13:26) Yeah. So here’s what, here’s what I would say. Vision answers the question where, where are we going? And mission answers the question, what do we do and why do we do it? So vision is about the future mission is about now I’m working on my vision every day in the hopes that as I do that, I’m going to come closer and closer to that vision for the, for the future. Now strategy is an interesting question too, because that answers the question. How, how do I get from where I am to where I want to be, how am I going to get from our current situation to this envisioned situation that’s expressed in the vision script and just to round it out, then we have core values and values are really about who we are. And more importantly, who are becoming on this journey toward this vision. That makes sense. RV: (14:19) Yeah. So you got where vision is where mission is, why strategy is how and then values are just kind of like, are the who, okay, so who we are, who we’re becoming. Huh. Yeah. So I, I, I get that. And I think, you know, the whole, the concept of having it written down, I mean, clearly it, it makes it difficult to propagate something if it’s not documented somewhere, just that in and of itself. MH: (14:47) And I didn’t say before, but the vision script to Rory is into four parts because it’s not just like you’re thinking about the future is, you know, kind of this under differentiated hole, but I have it broken down into four sections. So if you use the vision script kind of format, it’s really about what’s the future of your team team is everything, the culture you’re building, the people that you’re recruiting, the people that you’re retaining, how you’re developing your team, because the team is the primary means by which you’re going to bring this vision into existence. So team is number one, product is number two. What is it that you produce and bring forth into the world? You know, maybe it’s a product, maybe it’s a service. Maybe it’s a combination of both, but the future of your product, then the future of your marketing and your sales. So how do you reach the market? How do you take your products or your service to market, and then finally the future of your impact that could be expressed in terms of, you know, what is your revenue size three to five years from now? What’s your profitability? What are your podcast downloads or your website visits or whatever metric you want to want to use. It are important to your particular business, but the, that vision script is expressed at each of those four sections. RV: (15:58) Yeah. So you mentioned the podcast downloads, can you apply this to me for personal brands specifically? Right. So like, you know, I think everyone goes, Oh, I’m a corporate leader. We should have a vision or even entrepreneurs like that. But if you’re a personal brand and you know, it’s like mostly built around you, do you still think you need to have one of these? MH: (16:17) Absolutely. I am a personal brand and RV: (16:22) That’s a big one. MH: (16:24) Well, and, and you know, so, so yeah, I started out as, as a solo.

Ep 91: Using Data to Make More Money with AJ Yager and Meagan Connell | Recap Episode

AJ: (00:06) [Inaudible] RV: (00:07) Hey, welcome to this special recap edition of the influential personal brand podcast joined by my wife, best friend business partner and CEO of brand builders, group Aja Vaden. We’re breaking down the interview with Megan and AJ from practice metrics. The other AJ, the male AJ also with red hair, AJ: (00:28) Male and female version. RV: (00:30) So why don’t you kick us off? What did you what’d you think? AJ: (00:33) Yeah, I thought it was a really data interview. And I think the first thing that I think is kind of the essence of the entire interview, if you haven’t listened to it and you’re always in forever reminder, please go listen to the whole episode. And this is really just your recap version, but it’s this whole concept of information is a competitive advantage. And I love that. It’s so true. And it’s the one thing that I think most companies and most brands, personal brands never have enough up. They’re making decisions based on emotions. They’re basing decisions based on what other people are doing. They’re basing decisions on what they were told to do. They were basing decisions on what used to work, but on not actual information and data that is live in real time. That is today. And I think that’s huge. And I really do believe that it’s like information is the new competitive advantage. AJ: (01:25) And I love the way that I think it was Megan raised it. And she said, if you just think about it, you have two very similar brands and they have similar prices and similar features which one’s gonna win. The one that has more information or less information, always the one who has more information, you have more information on your customers, their spending habits, what your Mark, what marketing tactics work, what converts what’s the lifetime value. It’s all these things make such an incredible difference. So I just love that. And I think that’s the essence of the whole interview of information is a competitive advantage. RV: (02:01) Yeah. And I, I think what we got to at the end about tracking was really important. And it’s, it’s related to that where again, I think it was Megan who said it, if it hasn’t been tracked, it does not exist. Yeah. If, and you don’t have to get everything right. You don’t have to know all of this stuff. You don’t even have to do anything with this yet. The one thing you have to do right now is you is you have to get it tracked. You gotta just get the stuff installed and make sure it’s installed correctly. And that was a big takeaway for me to come back even and go, even, you know, we know a lot of this and I’ll go through our stuff and be like, okay, like, are we actually, as the tracking installed properly, like, are we getting it? Cause we can deal with it later, but we got to track it. Now AJ: (02:45) We track a lot of stuff and sometimes it’s are we tracking the right stuff? And I think that’s even a, you know, an issue with us is what are we tracking that really makes it different? And this was one of my other takeaways I would say, this is my second one is, and this is what it relates to us. Cause I was thinking about all the things that we track and it’s like, Oh my gosh, I think we have like a hundred dashboards. We track a lot. We track financials and marketing and social media and retention and cancellations. And we track a lot. I’ll just say that. And here’s what I took away is are we tracking the right things to help us make quick decisions? And they put it like this it’s what are your predictable levers? What do you know that if you just do more of this or spend more here, it will give you X results. AJ: (03:37) And I think sometimes like, and I’ve thought about us intentionally. It’s do we really know that? And it’s like, to some degree, I was like, yeah. And others. I was like, I don’t know. And I thought that was really good and a very, you know, self reflection of all of these dashboards, because I think I have a hundred and it’s like, which ones are my production? My predictable levers of, if I do more of this, I know I’m going to get this output. I put more money here or more attention here. I know this is what I’m getting. And I think for all of us is the whole point of tracking is so that you can start to create what are your predictable levers so that you know what to push and what to pull when RV: (04:15) Yeah, that was my second takeaway too, was the predictable levers, you know? And I know I had it didn’t even know you were going to do that. In fact, I was going to do it third, but you did it second. So I was like, all right, well, I’ll jump on the bandwagon. But she, she said that, you know, they work with these VC firms and that’s what they’re looking for. And that makes sense. Right? And it reminds me, and this is really relevant for me right now. Cause we have our eight figure entrepreneur event that’s coming up. It’s one of our phase four events where we talk about what does it really take to grow a personal brand into an eight figure business. And it’s a huge part of the, the premise of that event is thinking like a real entrepreneur and real entrepreneurs make data driven decisions. RV: (04:57) They look at, they look at the metrics. They should. I mean, you don’t really get to eight figures probably without doing some or you have someone on your team. Otherwise you have a lot of good luck and a whole lot of charisma, but personal brands, a lot of times we don’t, we don’t run it enough like a real business. And you need to know. And I think in our business specifically, we know a lot of like, you know, we know our affiliates are the number one lever we have. Like if we have something coming out with affiliate, we know that works, but we even brand builders group, you know, we’re almost two years in as a company, AJ: (05:37) July 27th. RV: (05:38) Look at that. We’re two years old today. The live taping here. That’s cool. I didn’t even realize that that is awesome. So the, but, but for us, we’re just now as a company getting into phase three, which is high traffic strategies and all paid, and man, you don’t even want to mess around with that stuff until you got this, this dialed in and the data, but that’s, that’s a huge part of the future for us with our, you know, this company brand builders group is we’re going to be able to pull the levers and know this is what works and this is what doesn’t. So I thought that was huge. AJ: (06:16) Yeah. And I think too, that, and I process this interview like I do most, but probably more. So this time, the recent past of more of this introspective look at our own data, our own personal brands, dashboards, and our own company dashboard and thinking about the difference between growth and scale. And I bet this was very, very insightful is that there’s a difference between growth and scale because growth requires money and people it requires investments of time and resources and human capital. But scale is when you get more revenue with the same expenses where growth is like you’re growing revenues, but your expenses are growing with them. But scale is when those expenses, those expenses plateau, but the revenue keeps going because the systems are in place to scale without having to add tons of more people or tons of more technology or tons of more stuff. And I really love that. Just this concept of, okay, am I in growth mode or am I starting to scale? And just knowing where you are and your own business pattern, I think was really insightful. It was really strong. It was a great company. RV: (07:29) That was a great distinction. I’d never heard that before and we’re were close personal friends with AJ and Megan. I had never heard them say that before. And they’re withholding the goods. Like how, how long do we have to be friends before they give us the good stuff now? So my third takeaway which fits in with that was that, you know, she said actually I think Aja said we help brands scale by eliminating waste. And that’s like the difference there where growth is just, we’re adding more to get more, but scale is we’re growing with not incrementally more expensive, just like a fractional increase in expenses or no increase in expenses. And so that’s about eliminating waste. And, and I think as a personal brand, you’re pretty far ahead if you’re tracking this stuff, you’re really far ahead. If you’re looking at it and you’re interpreting the data wisely, and then you’re really, really far ahead if you’re actually using it, not just for marketing, but other parts of your business and figuring out where can we eliminate waste, how can we streamline? And in our case, we kind of came in at the reverse because we needed it so badly on the operational side, it was out of desperation. You know, that, that AJ: (08:44) There was nothing that you can’t use dashboard reporting form. We do it with expenses. We do it with our financial analysis. We do it with commission reporting, affiliate reports, retention, cancellations. There is nothing that we don’t use dashboard reporting for. And, you know, we have Mary seriously considered adding a pull cumin position about what have been complicated to say the least. And I feel like their workload would have been just full of Excel spreadsheets. And these dashboards have eliminated the need for a full time position so that we can use that money to hire other positions that can’t be automated. So I, I can’t say enough about this concept of data. It is the new competitive advantage RV: (09:29) Nerds are taken over the world. Check out Praxis dot brand builders, group.com. If you want to see that free training that they’re putting together or queue up for that. And Hey, we want to be the ones helping you prepare and plan and figure out exactly how you’re going to scale your business. And we’re honored to be going on that journey right along with you.

Ep 90: Using Data to Make More Money with AJ Yager and Meagan Connell

RV: (00:06) Hey, brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for tuning in to listen to this interview, we are so excited to bring you this information and wanted to let you know that, Hey, there’s no sales pitch coming from anything that we do with this is all our value add to you and the community. However, if you are somebody who is looking for specific strategies on how to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and we offer a free call to everyone. That’s interested in getting to know us and is willing to give us a chance to get to know them and share a little bit about what we do. So if you’re interested in taking us up on a free strategy call, you can do that at brand builders, group.com/summit call brand builders, group.com/summit. Call. Hope to talk to you soon on with the show, nerds are going to take over the world. RV: (01:06) That’s what somebody told me when I was young. And I was like, hell yeah, I’m going to be a nerd. Who’s going to take over the world. And these two days, you’re about to meet. These are super sexy data nerds. They are a beautiful couple, extremely intelligent AJ Yager and Meaghan Connell. And they are close personal friends of ours. They’re clients of brand builders group. More importantly, we are clients of theirs and they are one of our most impactful vendors without a doubt. Their data dashboards have literally automated the work of what we’ve had, like two full time people doing. And so this is what we’re talking about. Okay. So they are a data driven power, couple. They are the cofounders of a company called Praxis metrics. So this is one of the fastest growing data dashboard companies in the world. And they’ve got a team of like 30 different, you know, 30 data scientists and engineers that, that provide like major company insights and tracking and reporting, but at a fraction of the cost. RV: (02:12) And one of the things that is very unique about them that you should know about is we have a hyper special arrangement with them where we have been working with them over a couple of years to build our, our personal brand dashboard. And we have it set up exactly how we want it and their team helps implement that for our clients. So they are amazing and they’re geniuses, and we’re going to talk about all things, data, and tracking, and dashboards, and it’s going to blow your mind, just watch. So anyways, friends, welcome to the show. MC: (02:48) Thank you for having us where you’re so excited to be here. AY: (02:51) Always a pleasure to hang out with. I hang out with you and sexy data nerds. That’s that’s pretty, that’s a nice compliment. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and you know, data rich, you’re helping people. RV: (03:02) I mean, I guess, you know, when I think of describing you, I kinda think like, okay, this is data dashboards. You help us automate, tracking and reporting so that we know what marketing is working, how much we can afford to spend. What’s the lifetime value of our customers. Are those, how would you describe what y’all do to specifically? I know that you work with a lot of bigger companies too, but most of the people following us, right? Or like, you know, their speaker, author, personal brand types. So like, how would you describe what you do? MC: (03:36) I think the first distinction we want to make is, you know, data, most people, as soon as they hear it, they glaze over and, and data. Isn’t just ones and zeros. It’s not math and science it’s information, that’s all data is right. And if you were to think about your brand and another brand, and if one of you guys had more information than the other, who do you think would win? Naturally, whoever has more information, whoever has more knowledge about whether it’s their clientele, their target demographic about their area of expertise, right? Information has always been and will always be a competitive advantage to those who have it. And so what we do is we help individuals and companies become more informed about their own clientele and about all of the information that they can gather that will help them do better in life and do better in business. RV: (04:31) Yeah. So is that, is that the spot on? Yeah, so I love it. And for those of you that don’t know, like a data dashboard, this is like this, the coolest thing I wish I could show people this, like, if you’ve never seen one, it’s like, it’s just a website that you log into and it tracks you. It can, I mean, this tool, the way y’all set up, it can track everything, but it pulls like ours starts with front end traffic. So it pulls like we basically start with like our social media reach and what’s going on with social media and our engagement in our followers. And so were you guys pull in our data from Instagram and Facebook and LinkedIn and, and Google analytics. So then we go from social media to then like Google analytics, how much traffic are we getting to our site? RV: (05:23) And then we look at how many people from our site are getting into our funnels and like in our email list. And then you show us every single stage, what percentage of people opt in which people make to the percentage of the next checkpoint? What percentage of people buy, how long they stay in the program, what their average lifetime value is. Anyway, so there’s probably supposed to be a question in there somewhere, but I get so excited about this. So what do you think that personal brand specifically need to know and be thinking about when it comes data and how data can help them make more money? Yeah. MC: (06:02) And I think you hit the nail on the head. It’s the fact that they need to understand their entire customer journey, right? And the problem is you use 15 to 20 different technologies to, to gain customer awareness, to nurture your clients, to then convert them and then to fulfill your services. Right? And so with each of these different systems, it’s all tracking one individual piece of that customer’s journey. And so without the ability to aggregate that all together, to take all of these disparate pieces of information, like, Hey, this customer clicked here. And then they went and purchased here. If those all stay disparate, then you can’t understand what’s working and what’s not working. Right. And our goal is to help brands scale and to help individuals scale by understanding what’s working and not working. Because if you can eliminate areas of waste in your organization, that becomes a catalyst, right? Because a lot of people that we work with, they focus on optimizing, optimizing, optimizing. But if you’re also, you know, it’s kind of like the, if the front door is opening, you’re bringing in more leads and then the back door is also open and you’re losing a bunch, right. You’re never going to grow. You’re never going to scale. So our goal is first to eliminate areas of waste, whether it’s wasted time. Right. And how much time are you spending, looking up all of these things, how much money are you spending on this RV: (07:24) Excel spreadsheets galore? Like someone logging in going to Instagram, pull on analytics, putting on a spreadsheet, going into Google, going like every, like you’re saying, I mean, you just like that, was it 20 different systems to log in just to know what happened last week? Like, are we growing or are we shrinking? Are we reaching more people? Are there any of them paying attention or any of them engaging? Yeah, spreadsheet, hell, it’s a real thing. It really is spreadsheet. And you kind of do that. And that’s one of the things probably practically you do is it’s like you kind of eliminate spreadsheets and you like automate, you basically like make a spreadsheets where they automate themselves in a digital thing that updates every 60 seconds. Right? Right. AY: (08:13) Not to knock spreadsheets. It’s a part of the journey that you’ve got to go on. MC: (08:16) It’s an important stepping stone, right. In order to understand the value of data, you have to first manually aggregate it and be like, Oh wow. Knowing my conversion rates actually helps me make better decisions. Right. And it helps me understand where to spend it and where not to spend. So it’s important for you to start out as a business where, where you’re kind of going through these spreadsheets. Cause it, it makes you understand what KPIs are important, right? What are those things that are measures that will actually help you and will help you make better decisions? Okay. RV: (08:44) Would say before, that is what business questions need to be asked right now. What is most important? Right. Cause there’s a lot of things we could do, but it’s really, what should we do based on where we are in the business from a revenue standpoint, from a traffic, from a conversion standpoint, what’s working, what’s not, it’s a lot of like bringing the insights and the data into a point where that answers the business questions that are crucial to your goals right now. Yeah. Yeah. Just to get it for us. As a, as an example, you know, it’s interesting, my vision and passion has always been around like the marketing and tracking all of that. But we actually first engaged you to automate our commission statements and more of like our accounting. And I think that’s something that people don’t realize is like the power is, you know, we think like marketing and sales, like social media and Google analytics, but y’all automated our commission reports for our affiliates and for our salespeople. And like also our sales reporting of like just how long their people are in certain stages and all that kind of stuff. So there’s a lot you could do here. AY: (09:51) And then the sexy part is the sales and marketing. That’s usually the best place to start for ROI, but in your case, AJ and part of the team were probably ripping their hair out, trying to do all that stuff, which is, again, I didn’t find the waste and where can we automate things that people where people should not be doing. MC: (10:05) And honestly, that’s how we got into this business. We were a marketing agency and one of my top, most valued employees who was brilliant, he was reduced down to data entry. He was logging into 12 different systems, putting it all into a spreadsheet, just so that we can understand what split tests works, you know, where we were seeing the most traffic and what we should do for the next week. And when he was doing that, he was basically not doing his actual job and where his super power was. And so our house, AY: (10:35) Which was not only marketing, but looking at that data for each client, going through it, looking at the patterns, the trends and things that needed to be changed. So he would do the reports, maybe have a limited amount of time to kind of give a quick little insight and then moved on to the next one. Whereas if he had spent flip that on this other side, but able to deliver those insights with those clients, it could have been even more impactful. MC: (10:56) So that goes back to organizational waste. We were paying the salary of a top marketer to do something that literally, you know, coding could do. And that’s why we started this company was really because we were a small company and we didn’t have unlimited resources. And so we needed to pull as many levers as we could to automate and reduce the amount of waste in our organization. And that was the big thing was, you know, I was spending a lot of time doing financial like financials spreadsheets. He was doing the marketing spreadsheet. So looking at each area of the business, whether it’s fulfillment, marketing sales, and then saying, where, where can we reduce all of this human error or human effort? And then once that’s been reduced, right, you now have that person that their skill set can now be used. And they can now, like AJsaid, start analyzing, really start looking for these patterns and not just seeing what happened, but why it happened. MC: (11:53) And cause if you can understand the underlying levers, you know, and what, what really caused these outputs. And then you can start to move into a business model where now, you know, what happens and why it happens. And more importantly, how to make that happen in the future. And that’s where we’ve been able to help brands really shift from being on the treadmill and not understanding why they’re successful or how they’re successful to having a repeatable formula of success, an algorithm to scale. And then all it is is printing money because they know if I do X, Y, and Z, here’s the results I get every single time because I understand why it works. And then they can just go and repeat, repeat, repeat, and scale. RV: (12:36) Yeah. And not you, you know, you said that earlier, like we help brand scale. I really think that’s so compelling. And that is, that is part of as a clear part. I think you eliminate ways to reduce costs and you also help scale on the revenue side you know, in our MC: (12:55) Well, and on that note before we dive deeper, one thing that was an important delineation that I discovered in this journey as a business owner was the difference between growth and scale, because I was always focused on growth. How do we grow our top line revenue or our bottom line revenue, right? How do we grow, grow, grow that? And oftentimes growth needs you to spend more money. You need to hire more people. You need to spend more on systems. You need to increase your ad, spend, whatever it may be. Growth is not the end goal in order to scale, scale is a very different definition. Scale is when you can spend the exact same amount of revenue and increase your top line. So that’s where you get to increase your profit margin. That’s where you really get exponential growth is when the bottom line or when those expenses and cogs data saying. And so the difference between those two is, is my Newt, but it’s important because really as owners, we don’t want to be in a business where it’s just treadmill, treadmills, scraping a little bit off the top. We want to have that scale. And so, sorry, sorry to interrupt. RV: (14:00) Good. I think that’s a really cool distinction is that, you know, growth is, you know, growth is like you pump money into something and you make it grow scale is the idea that you, you streamline it. And so you squeeze more out of the money. You’re already spending data, allows you to do that. Not just the data like you’re saying data is the first part of it is like data collection, which I know we’ll talk about. Really what we’re trying to get to is like insights, right? From the data that we can apply. But, but you know one of our phase three events is called high traffic strategies. And that’s where we teach paid media. And we’re always telling our clients, don’t go to paid media so quickly. You’re wasting money because if you can’t track everything, Every single step of what happens After that click, you’re just wasting money. But once you that, like once you have the data, like you’re saying, you can just ramp the thing up because if, if I, I will put a million dollars in the front, as long as I can track and know for sure 2 million is coming out the back. And I feel like that is the thing that you guys do and that data data does. And your team specifically helps you do. And it’s almost like we can guarantee somebody’s brand to scale and to expand and to reach more people because we can, we can say we can afford to pay for it cause we know what it’s worth. Cause we’re, we’re tracking it. Is that feel right? Does that line up with what you would say and do? MC: (15:36) And a lot of our, a lot of clients that we work with are actually VC firms, right? So if anybody knows the value of numbers, it’s them, right? All they’re doing all day long is evaluating the potential success of a brand. And what they’re looking for are those specific levers. If I know without a shadow of a doubt that if I spend X and it produces, Y all I have to do is increase the money going into this company, and it’s going to, it’s going to expand. And so that’s what we’re doing is we’re really, we’re finding without a shadow of a doubt, what those KPIs are, what the levers are, what are the variables that impact it, and then presenting that, so that then you can take action and you can really make the make better decisions. RV: (16:19) Yeah. I mean, that, that kind of concept of like a predictable lever is just super, super duper powerful. So, alright. So I want to take it down a notch in terms a little bit more into the details. Okay. What is sort of like the first thing? All right. So if I’m sold, I’m like, okay, I see the vision here. Like now I understand why I should do this. And maybe it’s not me. Maybe it’s someone on my team, or maybe it’s a vendor like you, or whatever somebody is going to do this. How do I start? Right. Like if I’m not the Google analytics nerd, and I don’t understand tag manager, and, you know, I don’t know what all, what is the first thing I need to do or make sure my team does to like move in this direction. AY: (17:03) Well, first, before the doing part, I want to also speak to those out there who don’t want to become a data scientist, or don’t want to become a data engineer, but think they might need to, if you’re a founder or a team member, that’s not in the details and not somebody that’s maybe a savant with numbers, you don’t have to be that. That’s what we want to make sure there. The mindset is understanding that inside of data, there are answers there and that can really help you chart a path to success in your company, understanding how to work with the people. Well, first understanding that it’s really important to invest in your company and invest whatever kind of budget you may have at whatever level you’re at to getting clarity on your numbers and getting really good tracking in place and whatever reporting. Even if you’re in spreadsheet, hell right now that’s okay. At least you’re tracking certain things and reporting, but it’s, it’s okay. If, if you don’t have data background. And secondly, it’s also very difficult to maybe work with data scientists, or even understand how to hire one, which is why practice practice exists is we wanted to build that out for people and become an extension of their team. But it’s like, they know data is important. Know that you don’t have to be the, you know, don’t have to it’s if it’s to be it’s up to me type thing, but start asking the questions that we’re gonna go through here and start with tracking. MC: (18:13) Yeah. And yeah, we’re tracking. RV: (18:15) So before you get into tracking, just to, to Edify that, I would say, you know, this is something that, you know, cause AJ and I are, are all, you know, we’re very like, data-driven, this is one of the things that we want brand builders group to be the place where it’s like, we can prove, like we can show that this stuff works and we can track it and you can monitor and you can see it because so much of marketing and branding is like, yay, throw up a billboard, you know, like throw some money at it. And, and does it work? I don’t know, like, did it work or not? But yeah, so, so talk to me about, about tracking and again, specifically to personal brands, you know, like kind of keeping that context of what are some of the things that we should be doing, MC: (18:59) One of the foundational pieces for your tracking and Google analytics, it’s a free tool. It is something that is extremely powerful. We’ve got brands that are doing over 150 million in annual revenue, and they’re all using Google analytics, right? So it is an incredible tool that needs to be leveraged in your business. And like JJ said, if you’re not the one, if you’re the, you know, if you’re the thought leader or if you’re the face of the brand, it might not be you who needs to understand this, but you need to have somebody on your team. That’s owning this because it is the foundational aspect that can connect and collect all of the data around where your prospects came from, what they saw when they saw it, what they clicked and how they interacted with your brand before they decided to spend their first dollar. And all of that is a foundational piece to success. Yeah. AY: (19:46) I was just going to add to that as, as you also want to have that as a redundancy, because there’s other pieces of technology that we’re going to get into that are tracking data as well, but you have to find the source of truth. And by, by having Google analytics on everything that we can possibly and helps you without variability that gap analysis, right? So one is that Google analytics. And I want to be very specific in that, that doesn’t just mean having a coder, put the code on each page and be like, Oh yeah, I’m using Google analytics. That is not, I can’t accept that as a line that we had to raise the standard here. That means you’ve got to find a company or someone online that understands GA is certified in Google analytics and knows how to set up the advanced e-commerce tracking the triggers, the goals going inside of this engine and like building out everything that needs, that needs to be done for your, for your product or service, everything you’re doing for lead gen, all of that. So that’s one part of it. And then also using UTM. Yup. RV: (20:44) Alright. So fail. Everyone’s like okay. Messed that part up. But yeah, so, so, so it’s like version one point, I was like, get the code installed on your site, but you’re saying that you need to know, even if you don’t know how to do it, you need to know like there’s a lot more to it than that to really leverage the true power that’s available here. MC: (21:05) So, yeah. And here’s, here’s the reason why, okay, if you start a brand today and you don’t have this tracking setup, and then in two years, you’re at, you know, 5 million in annual revenue and you’re ready to hire a company like us to analyze your data. If you don’t have data, we can’t analyze it. If it has not been tracked, it does not exist. And so there are simple just buttons, like click buttons within Google analytics that aren’t defaulted as a selection. And if those aren’t collecting data, there’s no way for us to historically go back and find out who these customers were, where they came from and what their actions were. But if you, at this point, don’t have the revenue to go in and buy. AY: (21:48) Yeah, you got fun. And that got punched in can be very specifically, like if people go into their Google analytics and they’re looking at the channels, they’re like, well, 87% is indirect and then there’s like Facebook, and then there’s this. You’re like, Hmm, what’s that big bucket of direct well, that’s, that’s because the tool wasn’t set up to, to grab all these different streams and identify and label them separately so that you can be like, Oh, where do my best people come from? Does that make sense? MC: (22:14) So even if somebody’s not ready to go and analyze the data, just set up the system, right. In order to capture the data and two years in the future, you will thank yourself for having set that up properly. So that in the future, you’ve got two years of storytelling. Imagine not being able to understand or have information on what’s gotten you to this point and that’s all too often what we see. And so we’ll have to, no matter how big the brand is, we’ll start with companies doing 150 million. If they don’t have this tracking foundation in place, that’s where we start, go back to, we always go back to that. And we say, okay, you’re asking these questions. Where did the customers come from? How did they find me? AY: (22:57) What’s my true lifetime value? MC: (23:00) We can’t answer those without the foundational pieces being tracked. And so Google analytics, UTMs, if it’s something that you don’t already know how to do, or you don’t have somebody to do it, we have a couple different paths that we can take, right? We’ve got an educational piece where you don’t even have to work with us for data stuff. We have an educational course where people can go in and learn this stuff and go and turn it on without ever having to talk to a data scientist. And it’s just kind of the step by step educations that you can do yourself. Or you can hand off to somebody on your team to go and learn and implement so that you at least have that foundation for success. RV: (23:38) Yeah, Well it does. I don’t know how much the courses, but I’m, we’re going to buy it. We have, we are we’re we’re. So if you haven’t publicly announced that where you’re we will pay and be your first customer, because this is the, I think this is the future. I mean, this, how could this not be the future? Like at some point it’s going to come down to who can track where the clients are coming from and spend more money going to those places. Like, there’s just, now you threw out, you threw out a fancy, fancy word there. The UTMs. Okay. So what the heck is a UTM? Like what, why do we need to know it? And, and what, what do we need to know about a UTM? And then also I think my question specifically is how do I set one up? RV: (24:28) Like, where do I go to create one? And then I know we’re going to, we’re going to run out. We’re gonna run out of time, which. AY: (24:35) there’s so much more to talk about. I know there’s a lot here. Well, to be really tracking as the first piece of all of it, it’s like if we get a tracking, right, nothing else matters. AY: (24:44) And UTMs is a part of that. It really is. And it goes along with the whole Google analytics conversation and UTMs is urgent tracking mechanism. All it is, is a link specifically that is created for every single piece of marketing material that you do online, anything, blog posts, social posts, anything you’re doing needs to have a unique ID. And basically there’s little parameters in there. She can say, Oh, I sent it via an email. This was a subject line. This was the call to action button. You know, advertising ads, every single ad you run should have in unique UTM by tagging these individual things create that creates this big mapping, all these fishing lines out in the sea, where you can like, Oh, well this is where it came from. So you’re creating these identifiers that when you reel it into the dashboard, you’re like, Oh, well, 90% of my customers are coming from this 10% are over here. And they’re not even that great. I’m going to cut that and I can focus on this. So UTMs is simply it’s free, which is great news, easy to set up. And when I say easy, I mean, it is literally easy to set up. Cause you can do it through Google analytics. You can do it through our tools. MC: (25:45) It takes one minute to set up a UTM link. Like it is extremely basic. You just have to have the right structure to it, but in order to do it, it, it only takes a quick minute. So in the beginning you might take 30 minutes to an hour to understand why it works, how it works. And then subsequently every time you send out an email or a post or an ad, you just add that in. And it all gets tracked and aggregated through Google analytics and the easiest way for somebody to see the power of UTMs is go to your favorite brand, just like Google it. And then, you know, the ads that pop up at the top of Google, if you click on any of those, it doesn’t actually drive you to brand builders, group.com. It has 37 extra characters at the end with question marks and all these things go and look at it. And it actually says, source Google ads, medium this campaign for eCommerce brands, right? And you can actually look at other people’s UTM’s and how they’ve structured it, because all it’s doing is it’s saying where specifically, if I click on that link, where did I find it? How did I get there? RV: (26:52) And so basically a UTM is a longer URL that has parameters built into it that are set up uniquely to tell the story of where that person came from. Not just they came from Facebook, but they came from this Facebook post, not even a page, but this post or not from my ad campaign, from this ad, with this creative, like that kind of granular detail that you would know it was this ad with this picture is the one that people are clicking on. AY: (27:26) Exactly. Exactly. RV: (27:28) Wow. And so you, and then where you actually build that is either inside of like y’alls platform or inside a Google analytics. And you basically just kind of like, you’re saying, you have to have the right structure. Is it basically just source medium and campaign? Or is there like a whole bunch of them? AY: (27:44) There’s five. You don’t have to use all of them. I’m one of the last ones you don’t content or term you don’t have to use, but inside of Google analytics, it’s just a link creator. So they have a built one inside. We have one called track funnels.com, which helps you create them and organize them. So it’s free to do several different places. You just have to use that link On those specific. MC: (28:02) And the reason we said, there’s a specific structure, is it, there’s also naming conventions are extremely important because if you think about, RV: (28:11) Cause then you don’t remember, you can, you can have the data, but not know what it means. Cause you’ve got 75,000 links in there and going, I don’t, I don’t know what I have to be able to read the link. And it’s got to tell me the story. Yeah. MC: (28:23) Well even, even simple things like we’ll have clients come back to us and say, Hey, I’d like to understand how all of my top of funnel campaigns are doing with driving traffic and impressions, not conversions because we’re just generating awareness. And then we say, okay, great. How are you tracking that? And then say, Oh, we were not. Whereas other companies will say, well in every single ad that I’m running, that’s just an awareness campaign. It says T O F in there, top of funnel, right. Or we’ve got clients that say, I want to see how all of my emails are performing and how, how they’re generating revenue. And then when we go into the data, they’ve got email capital E lowercase mail, then they’ve got lower E capital M lowercase mail or E dash mail. And all of those will then be splintered as separate sources of data. Whereas if you just met with your team once and said, Hey, we’re just using it in this way. Everybody agree. It’s email all lowercase. We’re good to go. Then it creates clean data. So simple things like that can save you a lot of headaches down the road. And it’s, it’s a, it’s an internal conversation that takes 30 minutes to an hour. Everybody high fives, you have it documented in a Google sheet somewhere. And then anytime you create this in the future, you just refer back to it. Right. So simple principles that really Strong foundations of success in the future. RV: (29:45) Yeah. I mean, naming convention is something that we’re huge on for your marketing. We use it for our file structure, like where we save files. We use it for a marketing automation like infusion soft or whatever we use it for our Facebook ads. Unfortunately I don’t think we have a strong one in place yet, yet for our UTM. So that is going to be the next generation. So y’all, if you’re listening, here’s what I want you to do. Go to Praxis. PRA X I S Praxis dot brand builders, group.com Praxis stop brand builders, group.com. Y’all are hosting some free trainings that are a little bit longer than what we got time for here, about how to get this started specifically with the tracking analytics. At some point I want to have you guys back because I want it to, I want to know about tag manager and I want to know about after tracking and I want to know about interpreting the data and drawing insights. RV: (30:41) But I think the big idea for me today is that you got to get the tracking done, right? And if you’ve just, if that’s the one thing you get done today, then we have the rest of time to come back and figure everything else out. But if we don’t get that done today, like we’re hosed and, and we’re, we’re, we’re missing all this. So it’s the Praxis Praxis dot brand builders group.com. Guys, you freaking blow me away every time I talk to you. And I feel like, I feel like we have like a secret weapon, but by being friends with you, cause this is, this is, I’m just convinced this is the future. And I just really appreciate you guys and what you do. So thanks for being here. Thank you so much.

Ep 89: Building A Sustainable Speaking Business with David Avrin | Recap Episode

AJV: (00:00) [inaudible] RV: (00:06) Hey, welcome to the special recap edition of the influential personal brand podcast. I’m so excited that you got to meet like my mentor, one of my, my real, real early mentors and best friends, you can see how much love I got for Dave. And yeah. You know, I hope if you haven’t listened to the interview that you go listen to it. If you want to know anything about where I started and you know, how it began for me began with Eric gesture and Dave Everyn that’s right. AJV: (00:36) The whole episode is basically just a bunch of bro love from beginning to end. It’s just both of them telling each other how much they love admire and respect and how much they’ve learned from each other, the whole episode. And there’s some takeaways, but there’s also a lot of love. RV: (00:55) Yeah. Well, you know, he’s made a big, yeah, I know. Well, and so I’ll share, I’ll start with my, you know, we’re going to do our top three takeaways. Um, and, uh, AJ came in with her glasses today, which I’m excited about talk nerdy talk nerdy too. Yeah. AJV: (01:12) Screen time, too much screen time. RV: (01:14) Um, so, so one of the things that was a big kind of moment, just a reinforcement, even for me to hear it again, was it just this idea of like, do you love the delivery of speaking and teaching enough that you’re willing to endure the prospecting part of it? Like, do you, do you want it bad enough to figure out a way to do whatever you have to do to generate the business? Now that may be that that might mean you’re the one that has to make the phone calls and send the emails. It might mean that you have to hire someone and pay them to do it. That, you know, there’s lots of things it could mean, but it means you got to figure out that part. And I’ve never met a speaker who was like, Oh my gosh. My favorite thing in the world is to just spend my time getting gigs. Like the reason you become a speaker is you want to be on stage or you want to be live on the webinar. Like you want to be in front of thousands of people, but there’s this part that you have to do. And it’s just the truth. The perspective of going look, what you see on stage is not what the life of a speaker is. It’s all the things. It’s the people and the team and the processes behind the scenes. AJV: (02:25) Uh, mine is kind of similar to that in a much more succinct version, but it’s speaking is not the business. Getting the speaking Gig is the business. That is a much better way of, I say AJV: (02:43) We had the same point. I’m not sure, but at brand builders group, if you’re a client of ours or if you’re just a listener or follow us on social or whatever it is, we kind of have this 13 phase in our 13 event process in four different phases. And we teach you how to craft a keynote, right? That’s a part of what we do in our business. We also teach you the business of speaking, right? So there’s two different topics that we cover. And I thought it was really interesting the way he said that, because there is so much of what we do. It’s called full Key, or it’s called CA what is it called? RV: (03:21) Keynote craft is she doesn’t teach world-class keynote craft is the event that I teach the art of speaking, which is what so many people are drawn to. Right? AJV: (03:32) And I loved what Dave said in the interview where he goes, I love how so many people tell you that you should be a speaker that have no idea what it’s like to be a speaker. You should go share your message. And it’s like, I have no idea what they’re talking about. That’s actually what we teach and what we do. And full keynote calendar, which is the business of speaking. And that is so much of what I loved about this comment is that speaking is not the business. That is the art, right. It is not the business. It is getting the gig is the business. And that is like any other business out there. You have to have marketing, you have to have a team. You have to have staff, you have to have technology. I mean, it’s not like anything else. I mean, it’s the same. So I just thought that was really a nice, succinct way of saying RV: (04:18) A better way of saying it. Yeah, absolutely. But that’s the, that, so two different versions of the same, big takeaway, AJV: (04:25) Second point. So I’ll go and then I’ll leave. I have no doubt. They’re probably similar. This was a very, very good interview for any of you who were like, okay, I want to start building up my speaking business. What are the, you know, behind the scenes behind the curtain? So my second takeaway was this concept of you need to be systematic, methodical in your processes, but very personal in your outreach, because we know so many people in the business of speaking where it’s all about, just put it out on social and do email blast and just do mass mailings and do it all as efficiently as it, but trying to be as effective as possible, but they have no staff. It’s just them or it’s just one person. So they’re really trying to do it as general and as masses as they can. Um, and he’s was saying, it’s like, no, be systematic and methodical in your processes, but be highly personalized in your outreach. And I thought that was a really good way. RV: (05:26) Interesting juxtaposition AJV: (05:27) Sum up. It’s like you can do things that are templative that still feel personal with a little bit of research, with a little bit of effort, with a little bit of like, let me pull this up, let me see. And my third point kind of goes into some of the things that I took away, but it’s not going to share those now, but that was my second. It’s like, you got to have a system and you need to be methodical with it. Right. There needs to be clear, checkpoints of do this, do this, do this, but then also take the time and effort to be personal in your outreach. So it doesn’t feel like another speaker that we’re getting marketed to. Right. I think that was really, that was really, RV: (06:03) Yeah. Yeah. I think that that really is a good, that’s a good dichotomy to understand and, and to be clear on, um, my second takeaway actually was, was different than that. It was a reminder of something that I struggled for so long in my career, and I still struggle with today. And I think it’s in a word it’s being self centered, not being selfish, right? It’s not about taking advantage of other people. It’s just, it’s just that you, as a speaker, it’s so easy to approach the world through what you think and what you do and who you are. And, you know, like what he said was, it’s not about what you do, it’s about what they get. And if you don’t tell people about who you are, tell them about what you can do for them. And that applies both to your marketing and to when you’re on stage, is that, you know, there’s, I think there’s, it’s probably safe to say that any speaker has some level of ego, some, you know, fair level of ego involved in, you know, just the idea of saying, Hey, I should be on that stage in front of all these people. RV: (07:08) Like they should be paying attention to me, which is good. You need, you need some, you need some real confidence to do this right. And pull it off. But at the same time, getting your mind switched to where it’s like, it’s not about you. It’s not about even what you’re passionate about. It’s about connecting your passion to their problem. It’s about connecting your expertise to what they’re struggling with every day. And your marketing has to communicate that your sales person, whoever, if it’s you, or it’s an agent or somebody, they need to be able to connect your expertise to the problems. And then when you’re on that stage in front of the audience, you need to be able to connect what you know, and what you studied and to how people can apply it into their lives. And David told me this exercise, I think when I was 20 something years old and it still to this day has stuck with me. RV: (07:56) When you write, copy on your website, go through and highlight in one color, everything that’s about you and then go through and highlight and another cover, color, everything that is written about your customer and your, you know, your prospect. And you’ll find that almost in every case, it’s a speaker is talking all about themselves and who they are and how great they are and what they’ve done. And very little about the problem they solve and how they help organizations and who is a right fit for them to serve. And so that was just another great reminder of something I’d heard over and over that you just can’t hear enough of. AJV: (08:33) You always know when Rory really likes something because he talks so loud. So she’s always kidding. RV: (08:42) she’s always kidding I’m gonna have me for like yelling and stuff, which is part of it. AJV: (08:45) I got in this tiny little room, right? Like one foot away. RV: (08:50) I got banished to the basement, by the way, I used to be upstairs. And I’ve been at one AGA tried to banish me to the wilderness. When we were building our house, she was like, what do you think about putting your office out in the forest? Which is we live in like a little wooded area. And I was like, you’re banishing me to the woods. We’re not even moved daily upset. Yeah, it was bad. So anyways, I’ve been banished to the basement. So this is my you’re in my yelling zone. Yes. I’m excited. AJV: (09:18) Dave actually talked about something in their interview that I thought was really good. He said, if you think that you’re going to get paid to get on stage and have some sort of cathartic experience, you’re severely mistaken, right. When people say, gosh, you’ve got to share your message, or you gotta, you gotta tell your story to some degree. It’s like, no, you don’t. It’s it’s how do they perceive your story? That would benefit them? What can they learn from your message that would solve their problem? And so many people, and I think you’ve said this, or you took it some somewhere, but it’s like this concept of an, an I focus story. You focus message. And I think that’s really important because you can tell your story, but it still has to resonate with the audience. Um, that was really good. That’s not my third point. My third, RV: (10:06) Well, that was a bonus tag onto my point. That was really similar. But yeah, that’s Craig Valentine. Y’all 1999 world champion of public speaking. Tell an eye focus story with a youth focused message. AJV: (10:16) Okay. My last point, um, and I just, it’s a combination of something that Rory said and something that Dave said, and I just kind of put it together. And I thought it was really good. Is that speaking, being a keynote speaker, right? Being a professional speaker is one of the best jobs on the planet. However, it is not a good business model because it’s not automated. It’s not evergreen. It’s not digital. It’s not recurring and it’s not scalable. It’s very limited. And it’s you on an airplane a lot, it’s you away from your family a lot. However speaking is one of the best ways of marketing your business. So let me say that all again. I thought this was really good. It’s like being a speaker is one of the best jobs on the planet for you for finite amount of time. But it’s one of the worst business models in terms of growing and scaling something. But it’s one of the best ways of marketing, a bit RV: (11:17) Paid marketing. You get paid to market. AJV: (11:19) That’s really good. And I think for all of you out there who were like, I want to be a speaker and I want to scale my speaking business. You also have to be asking yourself, what’s my backend. RV: (11:31) Yeah. If you want to build a business, otherwise you just, you have a job and you’ll go play in the plane, the plane, right. AJV: (11:36) Needs, age, 70, 80, whatever. You’re not going to want to do that. Or your wife isn’t or your kids. Aren’t like, at some point you don’t want to be gone 200 days a year, right. Unless you’re living the single live live in Lavita loca. Totally fine. But I would bet for most of you out there where this seems like a, uh, a passion and I loved, and this is last thing I’ll say, he said, just remember, like speaking is my job. It is not my passion. And he said, my passion is my family. That I’m not saying that it has to be yours, but speaking is my job. It’s not my passion. So it’s speaking a job for you or is it your passion and what does that look like in terms of growth and scale and money and how does that? RV: (12:22) Yeah, I would totally agree with that. It’s a job. It’s a great job, not a great business. Now you can like, like any job, you can work a job for your whole career and make enough money. And then, and then retire. And AJV: (12:35) We know plenty of seven figure speakers. You can make tons of money. RV: (12:39) Yeah. Just know that on the front end, like you’re saying, it’s like, that’s not going to be the way that you scale a huge business. Um, so my last one is actually, it’s an ageism, honestly, it’s from you. And there was something that Dave said that, you know, a lot of things he said that really reminded me of, I think, a philosophy that you carry, that I’ve always admired, that I have also found to be true, that I think you believe, and you practice really well, which is that everyone becomes a customer eventually. Like if you stay in touch, like they may not book you this year. They may not look us next year, but they’re gonna, if you treat them well and you care about them and you stay in front of them and you just follow up with them, everyone buys eventually. And I think that that is something that, you know, he was saying that just really reminded me of just like, yeah, you’ve got to have a process here, you know, the system and stay in touch. RV: (13:36) And just, especially in the speaking world, I feel like if you get really good, like if you’re following the brand builder journey stuff, and like, you’re doing the things we’re telling you to do in terms of crafting your positioning and building your marketing and all that sort of stuff, at some point, you’re going to be really good. And once you become really, really good, you know, if you’re not already, well, yeah. Some of you already are already. I mean, we can all get better. We can all get better. But when you’re really, really good, these meeting planners and companies, they need to hire you. They have to book somebody. And at some point, if you’re really good, they’re gonna go with you. If you’ve stayed in touch with them for five, six, seven, eight, 10 years, like at some point it’s just timing, AJV: (14:22) But that’s with any good business model, right? You provide enough value and have a good longterm followup strategy longterm. You know, I have this concept, which I guess I’m what you’re referring to is it’s not, no, it’s just not right now. That is my philosophic. Belief with all customers, with all prospects who don’t buy, it’s not, no, it’s just not right now. Um, and so, um, again, consent, she’s concise defying. RV: (14:52) She’s concise defying me. AJV: (14:55) Yeah, it’s true. It’s like you got to have a strategic and methodical plan when Dave talked a lot about that and gave lots of tips. Like if you want to build a speaking business, you need to go and listen to the interview of somebody who truly is at doing it for the long haul. He’s had a very consistent and sustainable speaking business for 20 years. Um, and he gives a lot of tips away. So you really do need to go check out the interview. We’re pulling out some of the things that we took away, but there’s so much that we did not cover. RV: (15:23) Yep. Very methodical process. And I would also say, you know, in a world of virtual keynotes, all of this still applies if not even more. And, um, yeah. So go check out the interview, get to meet one of my best buddies, Dave Afrin. Uh, thanks for listening to AIG and I banter and hopefully share some highlights that are useful for you. We love you. We’ll catch you next time. Bye. Bye. AJV: (15:45) [inaudible].

Ep 88: Building A Sustainable Speaking Business with David Avrin

RV: (00:06) Hey, brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for tuning in to listen to this interview, we are so excited to bring you this information and wanted to let you know that, Hey, there’s no sales pitch coming from anything that we do with this is all our value add to you and the community. However, if you are somebody who is looking for specific strategies on how to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and we offer a free call to everyone that’s interested in getting to know us and is willing to give us a chance to get to know them and share a little bit about what we do. So if you’re interested in taking us up on a free strategy call, you can do that at brand builders, group.com/summit. Call brand builders, group.com/summit. Call, hope to talk to you soon on with the show. RV: (01:02) So you have an opportunity. You’re about to learn from one of the first people and one of the most important mentors in my life. And certainly in the trajectory of my career, David Avrin has become one of my closest friends and he was one of the first people I met on my journey when I was just a young kid with a dream. And so technically, so here’s what David does today. He’s gonna talk, we’re gonna, I’m going to interview him to share with you his process. He has a very systematic process for acquiring keynotes and growing a keynote business. And we’ll talk about why that’s important, but as a speaker, he is one of the most in demand customer experience and marketing speakers in the world today. And he speaks all over the world, Singapore, Bangkok and tour bueno Situs, Srilanka Brisbane, Johannesburg, I mean, London, Barcelona, Dubai on and on and on. RV: (02:04) And he’s speaking for companies like Harley Davidson, Remax, PPG ups, and he’s the author of a couple of books. Okay. so it’s not who, you know, it’s who knows you visibility marketing and then his latest book, why customers leave and how to win them back, which was named by Forbes as one of the seven business books that entrepreneurs need to read. So he has done it and he has spent a lot of time teaching people like myself. And it, those of you that are members of ours, you know, when you go through our phase one experience and we talk about the brand DNA helix, and I talk about questions, like what have you earned the right to talk about? You’ll hear me quote, that that is directly from David Avrin. What problem do you solve? What do you do better than anyone else in the world? These are, these are things that I learned from this man. So brother, thank you for making some time to come on the show. DA: (03:01) Well, I am humbled. I am honored and, and isn’t it ironic over the years that when we look back to that was decades ago, when we all started our friendship, our relationship and how much we’ve learned from each other over the years, I, I loved the idea when the master becomes the student and the student becomes the master and you were a kid and you no longer now you have kids of your own. And and I love seeing where you are. I love being able to have these conversations and then letting other people listen into what it is that we talk about, but we continue to learn from each other because the world is changing. And so how we do what we do has to change as well. RV: (03:40) Yeah. Well, amen to that. And I think one of the things in recent years, and this is, this is where I kind of, you know, I definitely want to step into the student’s seat here again, because I’ve been so impressed. I mean, you, you kind of like, we’re a marketing consultant. And so you were advising companies on that, and then you were advising speakers on that, and then you kind of stepped into becoming a speaker and then you built this really fast speaking career. And one of the things that I love about how, how you’ve done it is, is, you know, too many people teach the business of speaking like, well, Hey, you throw up a website or you, you do a demo video and people just come or Hey, you write a book and people just come, but it’s not that way. It’s never been that way. And most people don’t have such a systematic process that they follow and, and watching you develop that I think has been inspiring for me because I think it’s something that is teachable and it’s scalable versus, Hey, you know, you gotta become famous. And then you’re a speaker. DA: (04:47) I think it’s the only thing that’s scalable. I mean, that’s, that’s the whole point of it. I think it’s, it’s, I think the tragedy of our profession, whether you are a professional speaker or you just speak as part of what you do to share your message and build your audience, whether it’s consulting or otherwise as well. I think the big tragedy of our profession is all of the false information of what it takes to be successful in doing this. And we have, and I think you’ll agree with this one. It always makes me smile a little bit that I think we’re the only profession for those of us who actually do this for a living where most people become speakers, because they’re encouraged to become speakers by people who have no idea what it’s like to be a speaker, right? It’s like, you have to tell that story. DA: (05:29) You got to go and inspire people. And all of those people say, listen, I just want to touch people’s lives. I want to, I want to share when to help inspire people and sheer joy, you know, it’s like, yeah, don’t quit your day job. I mean, it doesn’t mean that we can’t do that. It doesn’t mean we can’t inspire people, but the reality is this is a business and meeting planners. Aren’t going to pay you $10,000 for you to have a cathartic experience on stage. They’re going to pay you $8,500 for you to live your life’s dream, touching people’s lives. However, they will pay you to solve a problem of theirs now in doing so you can live your dream. You can, you can, you know, indulge your passion, but this is a business and speaking, isn’t speaking, isn’t a business. Getting the gig is the business. DA: (06:14) And that’s the key that most people don’t realize you and I both know that most people will enter and leave this profession within two years, because they’re literally starving because they took it. I took a class on storytelling or hand gestures, and why won’t my phone raise like pick up the freaking phone. And so what, what you talked about sort of very quickly, I don’t know that it was quickly. I’ve been doing this for over 20 years now. And I am a 20 year overnight success in that we spend a lot of time myself and my staff in learning what works and what doesn’t, and what doesn’t work is, is promoting your passion. And here’s what I, it it’s solving somebody’s problem. Now, if you can connect what you’re really good at and what you really love to do with a problem, somebody willing to pay to solve, you have magic. You have Nirvana, you have the chance of being successful in this business. RV: (07:08) I love that. I love that. What you said there about speaking, isn’t the business, getting the speaking gig is the business. And that’s like that one insight alone, I think, is just people overlooked DA: (07:25) Dramatically. We, we love inspiring people. We love teaching. We are by definition. I think all of your brand builders, of course, I’m part of your brand builders group as well. We’re all teachers, to an extent, aren’t we, we have something that we want to share with somebody. We believe something, we know something we’ve learned, and we want to impart that to others. And we can do it through consulting and online courses and books and everything else, but it’s not about us. And this is where this is where I will differ from some very big names who talk about it’s important that people buy your why. And I don’t think they buy your why. I think they buy their why. I think you have to be very clear on your why you have to know why you’re doing what you’re doing, but you have to connect it to their why, why are they buying? DA: (08:10) What is their problem? What is their challenge? What are they looking for? And not everybody has a problem. I mean, sometimes their problem. My problem is I just need a bigger flat screen TV than Phil does down the street. That’s an, that’s a, that’s a that’s my, my problem is I need a bigger snowblower than my, in my neighbors. But but speaking in general for no matter what you do, if speaking as a part of it, there is a process and the system. And, but don’t confuse that with automation. Cause I’m not an automation guy. I am everything for us. It’s very highly personalized. And I think part of our success in finding and converting paid speaking gigs is that we are very systematic in our approach, but very personalized in our outreach. Does that make sense? Say that again. You’re very say that again. DA: (08:57) We’re very, we’re very systematized in our approach. We have a process in this system that helps us be efficient with our time. It helps us to make sure that the activities that we’re engaged in are effective activities. They are strategic. We know why we’re doing what we’re doing and when we’re doing it, but how we’re doing it is not about how many can we do as quickly as we can. It’s very easy to get a list of associations, craft a general email and send it out to everybody in 45 seconds. And it’s the worst possible approach ever because you’re just going to be thrown in the bucket with everybody else who spams them with that information. So that’s super efficient, but it’s not effective. Part of what makes us very effective. And we are, is that we take the time to look up every prospect. DA: (09:52) That would be a good fit for what I do right now. I talk about customer experience as a meaningful, competitive advantage. I speak to corporate audiences and association audiences about how to achieve advantage over their competitors by being remarkably easy to do business with. And so as we call that list and go through and see which one would be an appropriate audience for me, like if somebody is in business and they’re in a competitive marketplace, it’s a great audience. So the national for the international glove manufacturers, which is a big deal, of course, during the Corona virus, it’s a thing I’ve spoken for them before. That’s a great audience for me, but the national society of operating room nurses, not a good audience for me. They’re not in business. They’re not competing against other amazing people, but not an approach for me. So strategically we would never pitch them because it’s wasting time. Cause they would never hire me. So we’re very selective in terms of we will buy lists or on the, on the association side, on the, on the government side, on the corporate side. RV: (10:58) So can we, can we, can we tell about that? I wanna, I wanna cause I wanna, I want to hit that part first. Cause I do think a lot of people miss that step and, and I think even that as a first step, there’s a lot of people that go, Oh my gosh, I didn’t know. You could do that. And then the ones that do it, they buy a list. They send a broadcast email to everybody, nobody buys and they say this to them. DA: (11:21) It didn’t work. Right. RV: (11:24) How do you get the list though? Let’s like, sure, do you, where do you go together? DA: (11:28) Let me back up. First of all, not only does it not work, but you’ve actually just poisoned the well for future outreach that you’re gonna do. So there’s listen. A lot of places. I will be honest. My staff does a lot of this. So I’ve got you know, Tiffany’s met with me for almost nine years. So there’s association list. You can look them online. A lot of them are free. The Hoover’s list, which is the Dunn and Bradstreet for of us who grew up in business dun and Bradstreet is probably the most current UpToDate corporate database of major associates or not association, corporate executives, personnel it’s updated constantly. And so the mailing list sort of part of that is called Hoovers. So if you look at Hoovers, it is not inexpensive. You know, it might be, I think as much as $3,000 or so for a year. DA: (12:21) But, but for many of us, that’s 15 minutes on stage with one gig, the advantage elite to sort of go through both of these. Cause I think this is really meaningful for those who are, who are listening the association side, they tend to pay a little bit less, but every association, every industry has an annual meeting or multiple meetings look around the room wherever you are right now, listening to this or watching this, everything you see in that room. Somebody makes that, and they have an annual meeting. So the lights and the switches and the, and the fixtures, everything you see there, a there an association and they meet every year, look them up. And here’s what we do. We go to one of the associations that we go through a little matrix. So with everyone we look up, we look up, when is their next meeting? DA: (13:06) We, we market in their, in, in our form. When was their last meeting, who were their speakers? So we’re you and I have been around the business for a long time. We know who’s basically making what, if you don’t know, just go online and look them up. You can get a general idea of what their fee is. So if I see some very big names, if I see a Rory Vaden or a Jay bear or a, or a Sally Hawk said, I have a pretty good idea of what they paid for that person. Last year, we look at when their, when their next meeting is coming up, coming up. So we get all that information phone numbers, everything else. And then that’s in our database and our CRM we’ll use that to craft a personalized pitch letter. Now we’re not writing them all from scratch. DA: (13:48) 95% of is done, but we will tailor their name, the name of their event. We’ll pitch me as a good prospect for it. And it’s about how many of those can we crank out, but they’re very personalized. They’re different one at a time and we’re sending them one at a time. But, but think about it this way. If you were able to do, maybe it takes you 20 minutes or so, and you could do maybe three an hour and you treated this like a job. Cause it’s a job that people sleep until noon. You know, I mean, success is being willing to do the things that other people aren’t willing to do. Where did I learn? Where did I learn that and take the stairs. And so if you treat this like a job and safe it four hours a day of just pitching and you could do three an hour. So that’s three times four that’s 12, a day, times, five days a week. That’s 60 organizations who now know who you are, who wouldn’t have known otherwise multiply that in a month. That’s 240 organizations. You’ve with a personalized, tailored pitch, which makes you stand out from others as well as somebody said to us, how are you converting such a big portion, big percentage of the pitches that you’re, that you’re sending out. I want to hear that quickly. And I, and I say, I don’t think we are, but RV: (15:09) Yeah. So, and I do want to hear about that process, but one of the things I think that stands out to me and what you described is there, isn’t a magic list. It’s not like there’s some secret list that you know about that no one else knows about it’s the same place you’d buy any lists, the business journal, you Google stuff like it’s, there’s not like a magic clean list that has it. And some of those lists are probably inaccurate and you’re sorting through some of that. And when you send the email, you get a bounce back and you got to call them DA: (15:38) While we do do some of the research, we look up something and think, well, that takes some time. Sure. And for what we get paid, we’re not selling widgets. You know, if you’re at, whether you’re at $7,500 or $15,000 for a keynote, we make a really good living for what it is that we do. It is worth that investment. If you’re doing that and you’re doing 12 a day or five a day, it’s more than you’re doing now. And you’ve got a hundred pitches. If you pull out three or four gigs in a month, that’s more than 99% of the people in the world will make, this is a job. You got to treat it like a job. And so, but you also have to be very strategic in how you pitch. When we craft our letters. For example, we give them an easy out at the end of the very first paragraph we say, I think David David ever would be a great fit for your, your event, blah, blah, blah. DA: (16:28) And this coming up on this date so that we know, they know we did some research. If you want to skip the rest of this letter, click on this link to watch his preview video. You’ll know in a few short minutes, why he’s one of the most popular customer experience speakers in the world today? We give them a digital link in an analog letter letter, essentially, right too. I’ll say that again, just because it kind of jumped down in case you want to take this quote, it’s a digital Lincoln, an analog letter that allows them to skip everything else to skip ahead. Cause everything we do is about getting them to watch my preview video. If they, that is our one key factor that is our leading indicator. People will watch my preview video, which is pretty good. It’s got me speaking around the world. DA: (17:13) If they watch that I’ve got a good shot of getting the gig. If they don’t watch it, I have zero chance. So there’s a whole bunch of other things that we don’t have time to go into in terms of what they need to make this successful. But in terms of our process, we will go through. Now, let me talk about the other side. So that’s the association site and it’s just it’s work. It’s being clear on who your audience is. Don’t pitch and waste time on ones that aren’t make sure it’s personalized. And your whole goal is one of two things. Either get them on the phone or get them to watch your video. And if you can get one of those two things, you got a good chance. Knowing the corporate side, they tend to have a bigger budget. The problem is, and this is the Hoover’s list and others is they don’t post anything in terms of their events because they’re not public. DA: (17:57) And so you’re kind of going in a little bit blind in terms of pitching a specific event, but we have a strategy for both of those. So our strategy is it’s timing, it’s followup. And I’m happy to give you some of what that is. I mean, there’s certain days that we pitch in certain days that we don’t write no pitching on Fridays. Cause even if somebody likes you, they’ll forget about you by Monday, it’s all trial and error. Friday is when we’re, we’re filling out RFPs, which is contrary once again to what most speakers will tell you don’t fill out RFPs. They’re just for breakouts. Nobody pays. I made six figures on RFPs last year, six figures, but we have a template. So we just cut and paste. Here’s our takeaways. Here’s the, you know, what are the three takeaways from session, outcomes, outcomes, all stuff. DA: (18:47) And so we just cut and paste and we’ve got it now. Cause we’ve done so many. If it’s a healthcare organization, if it’s retail or restaurant or, or financial services, which we do a lot of, we can cut and paste and get those in. Some of those have turned into keynotes, but what else are you doing on a Friday? Now, granted, there’s a lot in, in, through the brand builders group. Of course you, you teach a lot of great systems and processes, but the best way to get in front of people as you build your audience, as you build your visibility is to treat the speaking part as a business. And we do so, and we’ve had good success because of it. RV: (19:21) Yeah. You know, and I think that’s, it’s really interesting. I say this a lot to people as much as we’re virtual and you know, automated and scalable and all these things that we talk about, the there’s still, nothing does such an effective job as converting someone who is a complete stranger, never heard of you to an absolute lifelong raving fan in one hour as being in the same room, physically with you watching you do a P a well-polished crafted and delivered keynote, which there’s a lot to it, but that is the shortest distance between stranger and raving fan. Now we try to emulate that with a webinar experience online DA: (20:09) And you can to an extent, and I do that as well. We use all the vehicles in venues that we can, yeah, RV: (20:15) It does. It does to some, some, some fraction or percentage of that. But I think that the tricky thing about the speaking business, like what you’re saying that I really love is I go, it is a job. You have to treat it as a job. And the bomber is that it’s not super scalable. Like you have finite inventory. Now you could still make a couple million bucks. DA: (20:37) Maybe I can be a one stage at a time. I can be on one airplane at a time. But that said, the effectiveness during that interaction is, is Speaker 4: (20:48) Infinitely greater than the, you can, you can have 10,000 people on a call or you can have 500 people in an audience, but the impact you’re going to have on those people is going to be that much more so. And nobody knows that better. And I’ll brag for you for a minute. Then Rory Vaden, who at a very young age, as a young kid was top 10 in the world for world championship of public speakers. The next year, he was second in the world in the world, like 25,000 people started, but there’s something about charisma and there’s something about about communication and that, and yet you’re not equals. Here’s the other thing that that is so beneficial for what we do. When you have an opportunity to get that stage, you are not equals, you are not meeting Ida. You are elevated both figuratively. Speaker 4: (21:33) And literally they’re seeing somebody who is a passionate messenger for whatever it is that they’re espousing and you have a captive audience and they’re listening to you and if you are practicing and it doesn’t mean that you’re overly rehearsed, but you know what you’re saying, you’re teaching what you do. There is a power in that. And if you are, as we are generally, pardon the gender specific reference. If we’re the good guys and we’re teaching something that is important, that’s going to help them and benefit their lives. There is a power in that and it’s, and it’s, and it’s using that power for good, as opposed to using those super powers for evil. But in terms of galvanizing them as followers, as somebody who wants to know more, that’s why people line up for us afterwards to get a signed copy of our book and to take a picture with us. Speaker 4: (22:23) It’s surreal, right? It’s not real. Most people don’t have jobs where people clap for them. At the end of the day I come home and my, my beautiful wife is like, Hey, big deal, go take out the trash, like planting trees, my backyard yesterday. But that moment there is something surreal. There’s something powerful. And it certainly energizes us. And I am passionate about what I do, but this isn’t my passion. It’s my job. My passion is my children. I love what I do. I’m doing exactly what I should be doing, but my passion is my family. And so that, that part of, as sort of dovetail of what you were saying of being able to be on stage, it’s a really effective way to deliver your content in a way where everybody is touch. You, you can’t sit back in your office and throwing a tennis ball against the wall during a, you know, during a webinar. That doesn’t happen when we’re on stage. RV: (23:19) Yeah. And, and I, you know, I was processing it too, is like, I think speaking is the greatest job in a world, but it’s not a great business because it doesn’t actually scale beyond you, but it’s the best form of marketing for a business that ever could be it’s. So it’s like you have this great job on the front end and Speaker 4: (23:42) Treat it right. It feeds into whatever the, whatever RV: (23:46) The business is on the backend. That is the scalable, that is the scalable thing. But that front part of it, of just going, it starts, it starts with a list. It starts with figuring out who to reach out to, and then tell us about the followup process a little bit, Dave. So you have that first outreach, your first outreach, there is a, is a, is a tailored email. That’s what I hear you. Right? Speaker 4: (24:10) We actually have a schedule and I don’t mind sharing it with you. We have a video series that we weave to do a, a live bootcamp that we just don’t do any more than we recorded it. But here’s our basic process we pitch on on Tuesday and Wednesday. Sometimes on Thursday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday pitches might go out. It’s the first email. And as soon as we do in our CRM system, as soon as we send that first email, we set a task to follow up in two weeks with another one. If we get no response, we’ll follow up in two weeks, but here’s something different than we do. So on Friday we actually send a hard copy brochure letter, follow up saying, Hey, we sent you an email last week. We send them on Fridays for a reason, because it’s a hard snail mail. Speaker 4: (24:55) It’ll arrive on Tuesday or Wednesday of the next week. So now we’ve gotten two touches one week apart, one virtual, one physical. If we get no response from them in our CRM system, we’ll get a tickler two weeks later, that will say follow up with so and so, so we have a second email and here’s, what’s interesting. Our response for the second email is three times what it is for the first email, to an extent, I think people go, Oh gosh, I was going to get back to her or whatever, because we get, we all get overwhelmed every day. We try and work really hard to make sure it’s not spam, right? So the second one emails are very simple. One, Hey, sent you a pitch, but David ever would be a good fit. Let us know if there if we can find a time to talk and, and we’ll get response, it doesn’t mean they all say yes. Speaker 4: (25:42) Some say, Oh, I’m so sorry. We’re not meeting till whenever or something else. If they don’t respond to that, we do not reach out a fourth time. So it’s two virtual, one physical, and it’s all within a two week period. If we don’t hear back, we don’t reach out again. We just put them back in there and we set a responder for the following year. Now here’s the most important part, and this is our big secret that I’m going to give out to everybody and I’m not selling it. Oh. And, and this is people who paid thousands to come to our boot camp, which we don’t do anymore. It’s the win because our business tends to book eight to 18 months out in the U S overseas. They’ll do a shorter time period. When I’m, I was just in Mumbai India, we launched our book out there. Sometimes they’ll book six weeks out, but here we generally do that. So RV: (26:32) 17 to 18 months, that’s what he’s 18 months Speaker 4: (26:35) Sort of when the window book out. But here’s when they start the process. This is the important part. If we look up an organization and let’s just pretend people are listening to this right now, and it’s may, and their event is coming up in July, they’ve already got their suite. We’re not going to pitch them. Now if their event is in July or August, because don’t forget about us. So what we do is we always give them 60 days from their last event before we pitch this, honestly, for those of you listening, who will do something, this is worth a hundred, $200,000, just this tip of knowing when to pitch them. So if we reach somebody and their events coming up, we just put a tickler in the system for 60 days. From that date, it’ll pop up on our screen. We know into pitch them. Speaker 4: (27:21) If we pitched them too soon, they forget about us because they’re already in the throws of their event, scheduling take a monk off. And then they’ll start thinking about when to form their committee to work on the following year. And so it’s been very successful. We’ve learned it’s taken nine years to, to decipher this part of it. So whenever their event is 60 days from that is the day that we pitch where sometime within the next couple of months after, but never before that. And that alone gets us so many more responses. And everybody’s in the system. Our goal is to get them to click on my video. And then once, if they say within that two week period, if they come back with any kind of interest, this is about taking a contact and turning it into a lead and a lead into a prospect and a prospect into a paid speaking gig. Speaker 4: (28:11) And we know what influences each step of us. Initially, there were contacts or just somebody we have in the system. The minute we email them, they become a lead. And if they respond in any way, other than how did you get my information, please stop emailing me. They become a prospect. And so if they say, yeah, we’re interested, send us some information. We’ll then, then all the rains are offering and we love them up. We send them a signed copy of the book. We set up a I’ll do a virtual, a BombBomb video email message to them. We will send them a try and set up a followup conversation because here’s the reality. I can’t let everything be equal when I know I’m a finalist. I don’t cross my fingers because my competition is guys like Rory Vaden it’s it’s it’s women like Connie Podesta and Sally Hogshead and Peter sheen and just amazing speakers. Speaker 4: (29:07) I can’t let everything be equal because my competitors are phenomenal. So that’s when we really, when we know somebody has an interest, we send them information. I do a video email that tells me where I can talk to them specifically and tell them what I know about their industry. And when I do a BombBomb video email, for those of you understand where bomb bomb, it’s a horrible name for a company, but it’s a great service because we can track the email. We’re over 80% success in landing the gig. But at that point we’ve already know that they have an interest in me. You’re saying if they’re, if start opening your video RV: (29:42) Emails, then you’re like, you’re Speaker 4: (29:44) No, no. I’m saying those who I record a BombBomb video email and send it to a prospect, consort express, some interest, we convert over 80% into paid speaking gigs because I’m granted, they’re already interested. The point is we are methodical about our process. But we’re very personalized in how we do what we do. We just need to be efficient with our time, because most pitches I don’t get. But even when, even when I don’t and they said, we’re going to do you for next year. And my staff will, you know, cause to what extent their part of their compensation is, is a commission and they’re frustrated. It says, okay, I need to pay my mortgage next year too. We play the long game to create a sustainable business in this business is absolutely rare. But to do so and much of what I’ve learned from Marie and AIJ in terms of process, we have to, we treat this like a business and we get, I get up every morning and I look at my beautiful wife and my, my, my absurd house and my high-maintenance children and I get my butt. RV: (30:57) Oh my gosh. That’s so funny. Yeah, I mean, I think that’s probably the, the, the, the, it seems like the big, consistent part here is methodical about the process, but personalized about the pitch. And that is, that is so powerful. And then, like you’re saying playing the long game, I mean, the one thing that AIJ always says that I found to be so true, particularly in the speaking business, not just personal brand at large, but in the speaking business is like, if somebody engages with you, like if you get to that point that they’re engaging with you and you send them a book, if you just stay in touch with that person, they will eventually book you. It may not be this year. It may not be next year, but if they have engaged with you at all, it’s like, eventually that person is going to book you just because at some point it becomes easy for them to do it because they trust you just for the sake of the matter that you have been around forever. Speaker 4: (32:05) Right? Well, and sometimes those people book you and they no longer work for the same place that they worked before. You just rubber organization. And then they book you. RV: (32:16) Yes. When they book you and then they move and then they book you again for the exact same. Speaker 4: (32:21) We had a thing last January, not this January a year ago, January, I did. I had two gigs that Tiffany and my office had been working on for three years. And it was just, it was weird, but literally three years that she’d been working on both of them and two very big organizations, and it’s not like she was bugging them. It’s just, she pitched them. We didn’t get the gig and put them back in the system. We pitched them again the next year, sometimes it was a tweak or it was a new keynote tide or something else. And ultimately it booked and she made the point that she’s not like I’m going crazy. She’s like just, it comes up in my system. We do a crafted pitch and we don’t get it. We pitch them again next year because the organization isn’t going into wasn’t going away. Speaker 4: (33:03) So I get down to Phoenix. I’m, I’m speaking for this organization. I walk in the door and the guy says to me, he goes, your assistant is a pit bull. And I just, she has persistent. And of course it went great. And they booked me a second time since which is, which is wonderful. But I, and to be clear, I love what I do. You love what you do, but the only way I get to do it, as much as I want to do it is by treating it like a business. And so the delivery part of it is the part that we all love. Even when I, when I’m there and they’re asking me like, well, how much more for this? And Tiffany in my office, she tells client. She says, Oh, you’re just paying for him to leave his kids. He loves it. He’ll, he’ll do as much as you want while he’s there. You want him to facilitate your lunchtime panel discussion. You want to break out, even though he loves this, but, but the fee is for him to leave, to leave his family, but he loves doing this. So we very much treat like a business and have been able to grow and scale in terms of the the other offerings as well. RV: (34:08) I absolutely love that. So I got one more question for you before that. Where should people go if they, if they wanna learn about Dave Avar? And if you have a video, I mean, if you have a video course somewhere, we’ll put a link to that. Speaker 4: (34:22) Sure. Here, my speaking and consulting, look, we have a David [inaudible] dot com and it’s a V R I N. David alburn.com and my, my greatest initiative and part of what I learned from Rory Vaden, as well as I, every wonderful subscription model initiative that I’ve launched, I think is the most powerful work I’ve ever done. If you look at customer experience, advantage.com, you can see some samples, great URL, just customer experience, advantage.com take a look and and reach out. I’m not hard to find and look my name up online, and I’ve got videos and, and everything else, but I appreciate the opportunity with my, my little brother, my best buddy, for all these years. I’ve loved watching your success and in holding and squishing your babies. And I couldn’t be more impressed and proud with of what you’ve done and who you are. So there’s me sucking up to you a little bit, but how fun is this when you think about where we were 20 plus years ago? RV: (35:29) I mean, it’s, it’s crazy, Dave, and, and I’m so grateful for you. I mean, I, I literally just in so much of what teaching now is built upon the tenants and the principles and foundations that you shared with me that, you know, I paid you in chips and appetite, Speaker 4: (35:48) Nacho cheese. Yeah. I was to say, RV: (35:52) And that we now sell for thousands of dollars. Speaker 4: (35:58) We’re all helping each other, but isn’t that, isn’t that the best part about the brand builders group and everything else that you do is there is a, there’s a community of people who are learning and sharing best practices. And some of them will ultimately become best practices because they’re new practices. And until we realize what works and what doesn’t, but what a perfect time to get into this business, but what you do and what UNH and your team do is you help people slice 10 years off their learning curve and to be able to, to share their message and their, and their brand and build all of that and do it in a shorter period of time, it gets them to the port where they can do the work that is impactful much, much sooner. And and I applaud you for that. RV: (36:47) Well, thank you. And so here’s, my last little thought is if, if, if there were somebody listening right now, right? Think of me, think of me 20 years ago, or even yourself, you know, 20 years ago, in many ways it was like just stepping into the industry. Now they kind of, they have the dream, right? Like Speaker 4: (37:05) What, you know, what, what is the, RV: (37:08) What is the one thing that you feel like they, you know, they need to know, or they need to, they need to hear in terms of, you know, being able to go, this can become a sustainable way to feed your family and make a difference in the world. Speaker 4: (37:27) You know what I, I, and I, I want you to listen and take this in the right way, because it will make sense. It’s not about you, but it’s not in lieu of you. Does that make sense? So it is about them. It’s what can you do for them? But it’s what is special in you? What you’ve learned, what you can do, your unique gifts and how you can apply that to better somebody else’s life or their business. So I think the biggest mistake people make is they get so caught up in their own story and who they are that they forget. There’s an old exercise that says, take everything you’ve written about yourself and your sales sheets, your brochures, your website, and look at all the content and everything you say about yourself. You highlight in green and everything you say about your customers or clients or prospects and their life and their business. Speaker 4: (38:16) And when you highlight in yellow and they’re supposed to be more yellow than green, but there never is. Cause we do most of our time talking about ourselves. It has to be about them, but it’s not in lieu of you. So it’s not just what is there, what is your unique way of helping them, your unique that you can apply to better their situation or life. So they’re both very important. The challenge that most have is, are so focused on their passion. You, I just want to impact people. I just want to spread joy. People are going to pay for that, but they will. If you can do that in a way that helps them. So the advice I would give is, is, is uni clarity on the front end? What are you really good at? And how does that impact somebody else in a positive way? Speaker 4: (39:04) And that’s the key to the messaging is what do, it’s not what you do. It’s what they get and how you do it is important. And some people will be too, there’ll be too stringent in through this thing. It’s not about you. It’s all about them. It’s not all about them, but it is about them. But, but it’s, it’s what you can do. So don’t focus all on. You. Don’t focus on them, but it’s, it’s be clear on the front end and feel free to, to work with others in online chats, with your social group, your, your mastermind groups and others to try things out. But ultimately it has to be, what’s slipped down to what it is you provided. I love it. Well, thank you brother. We appreciate you. And I appreciate you as well to you and your family and your lovely, amazing kids and yours as well. My friend [inaudible].

Ep 77: Getting Your Slice of the Personal Brand Pie with Chris Harder | Recap Episode

RV: (00:06) Hey, brand builder. Welcome to the recap edition of the influential personal brand podcast. I am joined by my wife and CEO and business partner. AJ Vaden, we’re breaking down the Chris harder, which Chris and Lori have that in common with us, that they work and do business together. It’s pretty rare. It’s pretty rare. So we’re sharing our top three highlights three and three. AJ you go first, babe? Well, this isn’t necessarily whatever AJV: (00:36) My highlights, but one of the things that I think is really important one of the things we talk about a ton at brand builders group is the importance of identifying what is your primary business model. And I think that’s one of the things that really makes brain builders group really unique in the marketplace is we’re not just a strategy firm in terms of what is your personal brand. And what’s your message. I think one of our real uniqueness lies in the fact that we focus a ton on the business side that’s our background RV: (01:07) Making money is AJ spiritual gifts. AJV: (01:10) But I think there’s so much that so many people talk about social media and websites and the visual identity and without a plan, none of that really makes you money. And that’s a real core competency of ours is how do you actually turn your brand into a business? And what I loved about what Chris talked about kind of throughout the entire interview is how they’ve leveraged direct sales you know, kind of just whole concept of how do you, how do you find what your primary business model is? And we talk a lot about that. We have an acronym for that page. We have a lot of acronyms here. But what I loved is he talked about how direct sales has the lowest point of entry, the lowest barrier to entry, but also has some of the biggest upsides. And if you’re not really sure what your primary boss business model is, or maybe you don’t have a secondary or ancillary, this could be a really great option for you to leverage because how I see a personal brand, as it relates to direct sales is really more of like attraction marketing. AJV: (02:15) It’s the fuel that happens on your blog and your podcast and social media is really attraction marketing as you as the face, but yet you’ve got this really great product and you’ve got the fulfillment, you’ve got the shipping, you’ve got the backend business, the infrastructure, the technology with that direct sales company. So it’s a really interesting component and I kind of will tie this into my first point. I changed my mind mid thought, but I just love that. And I think for anyone who is in direct sales, you need to listen to this interview and anyone who isn’t completely confident that their current primary secondary ancillary business model is going to make this a full time gig. You should consider direct sales and see what’s out there and see how that fits into your business model. That could be a really great one. And I just, I love that. AJV: (03:04) So my first point how that kind of connects is the difference between a personal brand and what he calls a media brand. And I loved this as it relates to a podcast and he shared this example that I thought was really kind of aha. It’s like, are you building your audience to be big enough so that you can sell just your coaching program or your consulting or your speaking, or your course, or are you trying to make it big enough that you can get ads and sponsors and brand deals. And that to some degree is the difference between a personal brand and a media brand. And I thought that was very insightful because we have clients on both ends of the spectrum and they have a really solid like, Hey, I want to build a coaching business. I want to build a mastermind. I want to build a course. I want to do live events. And for that, you don’t need millions and millions and millions of followers, right? RV: (03:57) In particular was the permission to say, you don’t have to have millions of followers. You can make money from a brand, from a personal brand. And to think about the media brand AJV: (04:08) A totally separate. Now, if you’re trying to get ads in sponsors and brand deals, different story, but is that really your business model? And I think that just even having that filter as you’re making these decisions to help, you know, like, what am I doing this for really makes an extraordinary difference of what I know one of yours is not comparing yourself to the person who has millions, because you don’t have to, because you don’t have to mail. You don’t have to have millions of followers to make millions of dollars. RV: (04:41) That’s my point. Oh, I love that. Well, yeah. So I’ll, I’ll go right off of that, because that, that was part of the conversation about the comparison game. And I think, you know, it’s easy to be like, well, I don’t want to start a podcast cause I don’t think I can get millions of people or go, well, my podcast is an important cause I only get a few thousand downloads a month and, and the point is like, no, millions of downloads does not equal success. It all depends on what the strategy and the purpose is. You may only want a thousand people listening and it’s like, but it’s the right thousand people that are listening and he’s extremely targeted. And I would say that there’s a lot of people who make more money from a targeted podcast. That’s like the right thousand than just a broad one that reaches a ton of people, but there’s no clear monetization strategy. And you know, what w what he was saying specifically on the comparison game that spoke to me was if you’re gonna play the comparison game, play the full comparison, meaning you can’t just look and, and you mentioned. Yeah. And, and him and Laurie, I also thought it was interesting to your point about the direct sales that they still to this day draw a lot of income from their, their direct sales business, which really was years and years. AJV: (05:57) And it’s been the launching pad for all the other, RV: (05:59) For everything. Yeah. And, and, you know, I got, I got a big part of my start in direct sales and, and, you know, my mom was in direct sales. I’ve grown up in the whole direct sales world and we speak a lot to direct sales companies and just, just love the love of the business and the people. But if you’re gonna play the comparison game, just keep in mind that when you see somebody that has a million followers, there’s hours and hours and hours of work that they have done to get there, that you don’t see. And I think a lot of our clients, when they become brand builders group clients, and they see us breaking down the content diamond and the relationship engine and the funnels and all of the things that we teach about how to do it, they go, wow, there’s a lot of work here. And it’s like, yeah, it doesn’t just happen by accident. And you should give yourself permission to just like, be like, to be okay with where you’re at and don’t compare your, your step one to someone else’s step 77. AJV: (06:56) Yeah. I love that. So my second point was something that we talk a lot about Cod the fastest path to cash, but Chris also kind of referenced that. And he said, I know, I know dozens, if not hundreds of people who have launched their personal brand and made six figures in the first year. And I also know people that it’s taken them five years to make six figures in just their personal brand. And I thought it was really interesting. And I think a lot of it has to do with what is your primary business model? What are you selling? Because if what you are selling is a $10,000 membership program that lasts a year, you don’t need a ton of clients. You just need the right ones. You need a targeted audience with a very clear offering to the right people at the right time at the right price. AJV: (07:46) And if you sell 10, you’re kind of at six figures versus if you are launching a hundred dollar, of course, it’s a volume business. So what is it that you’re selling? And if you’re going all in and launching your personal brand, it’s keep that in mind. It’s what are you selling? Doesn’t have to be the long game or the, the, the end of it. Doesn’t have to be what you do for the long term. It’s just, what are you doing now to play the long game, knowing that your business model may shift over the course of time. And there may be things that you have to do right now that you don’t want to do a year or two or five years from now. But you know that you’ve got to kind of pays the path to get there. You’ve got to build your audience. AJV: (08:31) You’ve got to build your content. You’ve got to build your platform. And I just thought that was really interesting of well, but two people could be both launching a personal brand, have the exact same platform, the exact same number of followers, but just because their offering is different, one is going to make a lot more money quicker than the other. And I think all of those things, and I don’t think building a personal brand is about money. However for many of you you do have to make money. So I think that’s important to talk about and to reference. And I just really thought that was a very interesting concept. And one to keep in mind as you’re making these decisions of what should I launch and how should I launch it, and when should I launch it and what do I want to do short term, and what do I do longterm? And RV: (09:18) That reminds me of a time. One time I shared the stage with Jesse Itzler Sarah Blakely’s husband. And he was, you know, they’re both super wealthy and successful independently. And he was telling the story, I forget the name of the company is maybe net jets, but as a private jet, it was a private jet company. And he said, the reason that I got into that business, as I figured out, it would take me the same amount of work to sell like a hundred customers, a a hundred thousand dollar product, as it would take to sell a hundred customers, a $10 million product. And so I realized that if I could just go get a hundred customers, I might as well just get the higher price point and just go for a few customers. And I didn’t, I didn’t have to be the guy that had 10,000 customers or a million customers. I only needed like a hundred to turn this thing into a billion dollar business. And you know, that’s, to what you’re saying, the price point selections is important. And that’s a big part. I think, of phase one that a lot of our clients do struggle with. Cause they don’t think so much about the money part or look at it at scale, like you’re talking about of what is it like the longterm? AJV: (10:25) Yeah. I think so many people see a personal brand just of what you see on social media. And that’s such a teeny tiny, very last thing you do part and there’s so much work and thought and strategy that goes in beforehand. And that’s why I loved Chris’s interview is it talks a lot about the things, not just the podcast and the, and the brand deals and social media, it’s all the other infrastructure that has to be in place. RV: (10:47) So the biggest takeaway for me, which was my second with Chris, which I loved was he said, ego is your greatest overhead. I just loved that. And that is tweetable moment. That’s a pillar point as we would teach and that concept y’all have that ego is the thing that holds you back because it’s the thing that keeps you scared and keeps you worried and like keeps you stuck is because you’re afraid it won’t be good enough. And it will, you know, whatever you’ll face criticism. It’s also the thing that keeps us from scaling because we’re so focused on ourselves and we’re, we’re not just serving our audience and helping them. And I just thought that was super powerful. And if you’re stuck in any, in any form or fashion, as it relates to the business, it’s like, God, ask the ego question. Who am I thinking about? And who am I producing content for? And how am I making decisions every day? Is it for me? Or is it for the best interests of are our customer? And that’s just, that was strong. Ego is the greatest overhead AJV: (11:54) That is strong. Alright. My third point, I’ll make it short and sweet of just this whole concept of, you have to know where the trends are heading and if you’re not creating them, you need to at least know where they are, because they’re all relevant to you. If you’re building a personal brand and he used the example of social media and he said it, you know, it kind of, if you look at the evolution of where people are going and what people are doing, it went from MySpace to Facebook and Facebook to Instagram and Instagram now to take top. And we were just having this debate before we started the interview. And I’m like, yeah, just, I started really like Ted talks on my thing and does it really have to be my thing to have a presence on there? And is that where the trends are going and what’s it going to look like in one to five years, but to just say, that’s not my thing, I’m going to ignore it really. It’s probably a little bit negligent. If your business is in the business of personal branding, so it was a good aha moment for me. RV: (12:51) We did ignore Snapchat though. We made a conscious decision to ignore Snapchat and that worked out well. But what we didn’t do was go all in on stories yeah. At the time, which is what we should have done, which was like, okay, AJV: (13:04) Again, it’s all about just, you gotta be in the know, and that takes time and research. And just knowing what’s out there, it’s like, if this is your business model, make it your business and it’s your business to know what’s going on. Yeah. RV: (13:17) Be where the people are on that note. So one thing our team shared with us this morning is, is they saw something that apparently Instagram is about to start on rolling ads on IgE TV posts. So that’s a new thing that’s coming. That’s more of a, what we would call a phase three conversation about paid traffic. But if you’re listening and you know, you, you know, our lingo and phase three, and you’re in that paid traffic section, that’s a big time, big time win because if someone’s watching HGTV, that’s a super fan. And so the idea to be able to run ads to those people is yes, powerful, powerful. So be on the lookout for that. My last thing you know, is what Chris was all about is this thing is all about generosity and just giving. And he’s such a giver him and Lori, they’re always doing sponsor your, to like contests and sponsoring small businesses and giving them money to help them start. RV: (14:09) And they’re just really awesome about that. But I think he, you know, he said, it’s the key to everything. One it’s good for your heart. But the other thing is, as a business strategy, it creates massive reciprocity. And even it doesn’t mean you have to be given away a thousand dollars sweepstakes every week, but you’re giving away your ideas. You’re giving away your knowledge. You’re giving way education, encouragement, insight information. And that creates the law of reciprocity when you give to people. And that’s the power of podcasting and YouTube and all social media and email is that you can give, give, give, give, give, give, and it’s like, you can’t lose you. You can’t, outgive, you can’t, outgive the universe. If you just focus on giving away an amazing experience and everything, you know, it’ll come back to you. And we call this the rule of 10. RV: (15:04) When we talk about pricing in phase two, when we work on your offer structure, and the rule of 10 is, is when, when you’re setting your price, set the price at a rate where you feel confident that you’ve already given away 10 times the value for free as what you’re asking them to pay right now. So by the time they even see a price from you, if it’s a hundred dollar product, the person is literally going, I’ve already gotten a thousand dollars worth of value. And we shared this on a webinar a couple of weeks ago, the rule of 10 and somebody in the comments wrote, and I love this. They said the rule of 10 takes all the slime out of internet marketing. And that’s exactly what we’re talking about is just generosity. Create the law of reciprocity, like test it, try to give away everything. RV: (15:56) You’re not, you know, and see if it doesn’t just come pouring back in to your business. And so Chris just nailed that on the head for me. So that was, that was it’s great interview. God, listen, SP you know, if you’re, if you’re in any kind of network marketing, direct sales, for sure. These guys are superstars, they turned it into a whole media empire. An awesome, awesome couple, although Laurie’s not there. We’ll get Laurie we’ll we’ll, we’ll rope her in to come and do an interview too. So thanks for being here and we’ll catch you next time. Bye.

Ep 76: Getting Your Slice of the Personal Brand Pie with Chris Harder

RV: (00:00) Man, I have to tell you that I have been so impressed with the man you’re about to meet, Chris Harder. And it’s the generosity of this guy’s heart that blows me away. I would say it’s his generosity and then it’s his humility in terms of how much he still to this day invests in his own personal development. I met him in a very high-level mastermind. He runs masterminds though. I mean, this is a great example of the guy that is usually teaching is still also always learning. And him and his wife, Lori, are just incredible individuals. We, we’ve gotten to spend some time with them. AJ adores them. And this is someone who’s just built a personal brand. Him and his wife both have monster personal brands. They built it from the ground up. They’ve done it right. RV: (00:47) And he offered to come on and, and, and share. I, and I asked him to come on and be like, Hey, can you share some of those secrets? So his podcast is called for the love of money. That is, you know, probably his, his biggest platform he’s got like a quarter million people on Instagram at the time of this recording as well as a lot of lot of people. And I think, you know, but beyond that, it’s just entrepreneurship and success in general and really more of the heart of, you know, what it takes to succeed as both a personal brain and an entrepreneur. So Chris, my brother, welcome to the show. CH: (01:23) Hey Rory. Heck of an introduction. Thank you for that. And let me just say I echo all of those kinds of thoughts right back to you and AJ and just think the world of you guys. RV: (01:32) Well, thanks brother. I yeah, it’s been, it’s been fun for us to kind of, as we’ve shifted more from like the corporate world into more of the entrepreneurial world the last couple years and then also starting my personal brand over, like really getting into the space and seeing what people have been doing. And you were one of the first people that kind of popped up on my radar and in my feet and I was seeing around. And I would love to just, so being that you are a money guy and you talk about money and gratitude and generosity and giving and accumulating and, and, and, and investing from a personal brand perspective, are you open to just share with us? Like how do you actually make money? Cause I think that’s just a question people still have. It’s just like there’s so many different ways to make money. What actually pays your bills every day, CH: (02:19) Every week. Yeah. What a great question. Okay. So this, and I love that you’re all about personal branding because what I’m about to share all comes from one central piece and that is the personal brand, right? So as of today, when we record this, we have sole ownership or partial ownership in seven, I’m sorry, eight different seven and eight figure businesses. So some of the obvious ones for us where the revenue streams come from is my brand with the podcast underneath that, I call that a coaching brand. So there’s a media brand or there’s a coaching brand, right? So even though the podcast is a form of media underneath that we monetize it through e-courses, through two different masterminds, through one on one coaching and through events that we throw. Then under Lori’s brand I would say is more of a media brand because she’s monetizing her podcast through sponsorships and affiliate deals and things that are a little bit more traditional. CH: (03:14) When you build up things with the intention of media behind it, and we can get into that later. The difference between a media brand and a personal brand, I mean that’s a great like and it’s important for people to understand that distinction because podcasting is one of those things that people go, well, my business model is podcasting. And it’s like, well no, podcasting for most people is a traffic source. Your real business model, like what you’re saying is courses, masterminds, coaching events. In the case of Laurie or Lewis house or you know, people like that, Jordan harbinger, their business model actually is podcasting cause they’re doing brand deals. They’re monetizing the podcast itself. That’s cool. That’s an important distinction. So I love that. Well, it’s a, it’s a very important distinction for this reason. When you’re building something, even though we’re all doing it, let’s say through a podcast, it really helps you decide, do I need to build a large enough podcast in order to sell the number of coaching programs I need, whatever fashion it is, or do I need to build this podcast to the size and attraction to sell brand sponsorship deals? CH: (04:17) And those are two very different sets of mechanics behind the scenes, right? So what we’ve done is we’ve built these personal brands and think top of funnel. So pop two large podcasts feeding into Instagrams and Facebooks and mailing lists. And then we’re able to leverage those large brands to do things like investor deals in outstanding foods and investor deals in a tech company and investor deals in a vegan what do you call it? Coffee creamer company. And we’re able to also leverage it into, we built a huge network marketing team because of it was easier with personal brands. We’re able to pivot into an alcohol company that Lori has started all because we have audience. And when you think personal brand worry, you really got to think constant audience acquisition and interaction because if you master that you can pivot and build whatever you want. CH: (05:14) Mm. And, and the, so which came first? Like did you have the audience first or did you build a business first and then you took that money and use it to build the personal brand? Like what was the sequencing of how, you know, and now it’s, it’s sort of like, you know, we talk about she has wall, I know you’ve heard us talk about that. Most of our paying clients will know what that is, is like you guys are on the other side of the wall. And, and I think of ’em, you know, you’re focused in terms of what you spend your time on, but when you move to investing, it’s different. You’re not spending your time on it as much. It’s more of just you’re putting your money there. So what was this one? Do you agree with that last part and is that how you think about it? CH: (05:54) And then what was the order of how it kind of happened? Yeah, that’s, that’s exactly how it happened is you need to really go deep and specific in one category first until you break through that she hands wall to use your example and then you’ve kind of earned the right to expand off of that. So where our first large audience came from was Lori’s fitness brand. It’s really funny that we’re recording this while we’re kind of facing this pandemic crisis economy because I was thrown into entrepreneurship, which by the way, I always wanted to be in any ways during the last financial crisis, 2000 interesting. I came from banking and of course that was a banking crisis and Lori and I were young and arrogant and ignorant. We thought that it was going to last forever. And so we did not take care of our money. CH: (06:38) And when the music stopped, Rory, we had to get rid of it. Everything. And I don’t mean like kind of getting rid of everything. I mean we had to short sell the home that we had just finished building. We had to get rid of the cars, the investment properties. And the most humiliating part was this. We had to put every possession on Craigslist and watch his car after car pulled up in front of the house and person after person walked into the home and they would bargain for the couch and bargain for the chairs and bargain for the TVs and the grills, whatever they wanted. And they would walk out while the neighbors looked on in judgment with our possessions. But do you know what that did? Worry that moment that felt so horrible while it was going on? I felt so humiliating while it was going on. CH: (07:26) That was the moment that actually allowed us to downsize into a tiny little 900 square foot apartment and decide again, choose again, pivot and reinvent again. And so without that back against the wall moment, we went to started building personal brands. Now here’s why I share that story. I don’t care where you’re starting from. What do you already have a brand or whether you feel like you are below zero right now? The very first thing we did was Laurie had a gym at the time and she really had no career up to this moment. She said, I’m never going to let this happen again. So that’s when Lori rolled up her sleeves. And so she had a small gym, one on one studio that we built out on the weekends on her own, and she created the beginning of a monthly plan and she started competing in fitness and build a Facebook following. CH: (08:15) Now keep in mind we’re talking 12, no, 2009. I mean this is before everyone’s doing it, right? Yeah. And the minute it caught fire her, her Facebook started to grow quickly. She made an effort to put herself in magazines and I’ll, I’ll, I tell you what that has to do with today’s brand building in a little bit here. She made an effort to get herself in magazines, which at that time drove her Facebook and driving that Facebook drove her online workout program, which they were not a dime a dozen back then, like they are now. Right. And it was building that very intentional building of a Facebook audience and building an online revenue stream in addition to that gym that made us really take off and realize that this is what we wanted to do from here on out. And at the time Roy, I was a partner in a mortgage bank. Yeah, you’re right. So I left the bank that laid me off and I took a partnership in a mortgage bank and I took for the wrong reasons. I took it cause I was scared and, and I didn’t have a lot of other options. But when I saw what Lori was doing, I sold out my partnership because I said that’s what I want to be doing. I came home and I helped her grow that brand and we’ve never looked back ever since. RV: (09:28) Wow. Interesting. Yes. So you mentioned something there about not everybody was doing it right. And so to that your back against the wall, that’s an, that’s a powerful story. Cause I know for sure there’s, there’s somebody is listening right now that’s going through something similar to what you went through. CH: (09:50) Do you think it’s too late RV: (09:52) To build the personal brand? Like, like you said, workout programs are a dime a dozen. You have Facebook? Yeah. Is, you know, now it’s really Instagram and it’s even Instagram is like on the later part of its maturity cycle. Yeah. Like what do you think? It’s too late, do you think? Is there, is there a next thing? Do you think it’s just the same old tools and just kind of starting from ground zero? Like what, what’s your opinion on the life cycle? CH: (10:17) Cool opportunity here. I’m so glad you asked this. It’s never too late. Number one opportunity never goes away. It just changes shape, form and location. So it might change from Facebook. Actually, let’s be honest, if I changed from my space to Facebook and Facebook to Instagram and Instagram to tick tock now and but it’s always just changing shape and location and it’s our job as we’re building personal brands to always be aware of looking for how it’s changing and where it’s changing into and to go that direction. And so if you’re just starting a brand right now, you can not have thoughts of it’s too saturated or everybody’s already doing it because you’re going to do it differently. You’re going to have a little different swagger, a little different spin, a little different set of beliefs, a little bit different energy behind what you teach. CH: (11:06) And so even if someone has already started a similar podcast, even if they started a similar brand, even if they started a similar membership or similar mastermind, yours is going to be different and it’s going to speak to the people that don’t yet resonate with the ones that are out there. And here’s the most important point. If people are afraid that it’s too saturated, all you have to do is reel yourself back in and say, what is my financial goal? Great. Let’s pretend it’s, you know, a million dollars. Okay, how many customers do I need at blank dollars to make a million dollars? So we’ll say your program was a thousand bucks. Okay, you need a thousand customers at a thousand dollars to make that million. Okay, great. How many months do I have to do that? 12 months, so what do I really need to go out and get out of that gigantic slice of pie of potential customers? CH: (11:56) It’s something that is so minuscule to meet your financial goal that even if other people are doing it, there’s still more than enough to go around and that should be what makes you excited to go out there and just carve out your tiny slice of the pie. Yeah, I mean if you get a hundred customers a month, that’d be 1200 a year, but if it was a hundred a month, that’s 25 a week. So do you get 25 people a week? That’s five a day. You get five, five people a day. You’ve made an at a thousand bucks, you’re making a million dollars. Yeah, and there’s some, if you do a 10th of that, like if you do a 10th of that, for many people, you’re probably still landing in an okay place. Exactly. Yeah. I don’t want people to get caught up in a million dollar example. CH: (12:38) You want to make a hundred grand, then it’s just a hundred customers at a thousand or maybe a thousand customers at a hundred dollars there’s so many different routes to your goal, but the point is this, there, the number of customers required. It’s such a tiny percentage out of the whole pie out there. Then even if you’re starting today, there’s still more than enough to go around. You’re going to find enough customers that will resonate with your style and your teaching. Yeah, I mean a thousand. Yeah. You’re talking about a thousand customers. There’s however many 8 billion people on the planet. Like you only need a thousand. Exactly. Exactly. The other thing that’s crazy is like your thousand or probably, you know they’re already, they already, even though they don’t know about you, they are all gathered somewhere. Right? They’re all following somebody that’s like you and that because of digital marketing, like you can actually go get in front of those people fairly directly. CH: (13:32) Yeah, and Roy, I’ll also add this, it’s not like all consumer only chooses one brand or one person and ignores all the other ones. I always say people are junkies and I don’t mean like drug junkies. I mean it in a fun, positive way. People are junky. So the same person that loves Lewis house also wants to consume Jay Shetty and they also want to consume Tom, bill you and they also want to consume, you know, just the list goes on and on. So they don’t stop at one person. They consume as much as they possibly can. That’s what I mean by they’re a junkie self-development. A junkie is going to go get all the self development they can and entrepreneurial junkie is going to go get all the entrepreneurial guidance they can. And so if you are starting today and you’re bringing a fresh voice and a fresh spin and a fresh facade, it’s actually, you’d be welcomed. CH: (14:21) Bye. Probably millions of people who are saying, boy, I wish somebody fresh would come onto the scene because I’m already, let’s say a use to following these, these individuals I’ve already found. So you used the term junkie. So I want to talk about that because one of the things that I think it’s interesting like that we have a family member who refers to what AIG and I do as a Hocus Pocus. That’s what it’s, it’s not like in a negative thing. It’s more, it’s not like a demeaning thing. It’s more of like a, I don’t understand it. It’s just like this Hocus Pocus. And I, you know, like personal development and like the idea of a junkie I think over years is like I had somewhat of a negative connotation, but as my life has gone on, I go, gosh, the only thing that’s really different from where I am today and where I started raised by a single mother is I am a total junkie. CH: (15:17) I am the self-help junkie. Like I am the conference junkie. I’m the coaching junkie. And I don’t know if you would agree with this, but one of the things I feel like you and I have in common is I think you are too. I think you’re a junkie for sure. I mean, listen, I wake up in the morning and I have a rule that I must consume a book or I must consume, not a whole book, but I must consume pages of a book or I must consume a podcast as the first in first experience in my day. Right, and it’s because during the day, every single one of us, we’re going to consume a ton of propaganda. Yeah, and a regular individual who’s not a self development junkie, they’re just going to consume whatever propaganda falls in their lap. And let’s be honest, there’s a lot of negativity out there at all times. CH: (16:05) What if you are a quote, self-development junkie? Then that means instead of consuming any propaganda that falls in your lap, you are selectively choosing and seeking what I call positive propaganda, podcasts, books, YouTube channels. I’ll make you better courses, whatever it might be, and that positive propaganda, when that outweighs the negative propaganda and you’re able to consume, consume, consume. What it does is a couple things. One, it kind of chooses what colored lenses you’re going to see the day through, right? Number two, it kicks you back in the game quicker. Okay. A bad circumstance happens during your day. You’re not going to unwrap it if you know what to turn to or if you just got off a great podcast or something motivating, you now have the tools to handle that rock circumstance in a better way. And that means the outcome turns out more in your favor. CH: (16:56) And so I will take the label of being assaulted, self-development junkie all day long because it’s better than just consuming what happens to fall in my lap by circumstance out there. [inaudible] Yeah, I love that. So I want to tie this back to network marketing and direct sales a little bit cause that’s another kind of thing that we have a shared background of it at different companies. But a lot of our clients, that brand builders group and I, and I know some of the people in your masterminds, our indirect sales, how, how does, how do you use social media and personal branding and digital marketing? How have you guys used that? Cause you still draw some fair, some fairly significant income, right? From a direct sales company that you earn a residual residual income of over seven figures of a team. We started building 10 years ago. Wow. Yeah. RV: (17:51) So how do you, do you still, do you still actively kind of promote that using the tools of digital or is it more just like the fact that you’re out there and you, people meet you and they ask and they’re looking for opportunity and it just kind of comes up in conversation? CH: (18:06) At this point? It just falls in our lap. You know, people just see us or hear of us and by proximity, a lot of times they’ll just go sign up on our team. So we’re not very active in it anymore. But we spent a lot of years being wildly active in it. And I’ll tell you what, one of my favorite things about network marketing is this, and I want to talk about a quick, it gets a bad neck, right? Right. So, and this is coming from somebody who, number one used to totally judge it. I thought I would never do that in my life. Number two, we have so many different types of companies and so many different arenas that I’m not sharing what I’m about to share from being. This is my number one income source. I’m sharing this from the standpoint of in all the samples I’ve been a part of, I really stand behind this one opportunity and here’s why. CH: (18:52) So in my opinion, it is the greatest set of training wheels in order for entrepreneurship that you could ever like earn your coupon that you could ever learn that. And here’s what I mean. The barrier of entry in almost any kind of company is always very low. It’s something you’re consuming anyways, something you’d spend money on anyways, right? But the upside is limitless. You know, I know probably at least 200 different people from different companies that have made over seven figures, some eight figures in network marketing, right? So the upside is limitless. The barrier of entry is very low. And the entire journey from start to finish is one of self-development. It’s one, I’m learning sales, it’s one of learning marketing, it’s one of learning brand building and how to leverage it. It’s one of learning team building and money management all slowly and all in a way that you really don’t have anything to risk other than a little bit of self esteem and a couple of friends sometimes because that is probably the highest the biggest cost of entry is a few people will judge you in the beginning and if you can let your ego go, it’s a great set of training wheels to truly learn real entrepreneurship. RV: (20:08) Man, I’ve never heard that quite like that and I totally believe in what you’re saying. And the, the other in terms of the training wheels, the part that’s so cool. And you know, at this point we made it, we were out of all direct sales because I speak to so many of the different companies that I, I, we actually got it had to kind of move, move out of that. But I still believe that my mom, we just actively helped get my mom back into a direct sales company and she was at Mary Kay years ago when I was younger. But the other thing is you don’t have to build the product. Like, and even in a personal brand, like half the battle CH: (20:48) Is creating an amazing product. The other half is making sure a whole bunch of people know about it. Like in network marketing or direct sales. A lot of times the products are awesome. Like a lot of times you, you have this great shake or oil or makeup or you know, whatever the thing is, your workout program and you don’t have to do any of the product development, you just gotta go tell a bunch of people about it. How’s this for a real life example? I was like to lift the curtain and use ourselves, right? So if I were to add up all the money, we’ve made a network marketing over the years, it’s over 10 million bucks. Wow. We started for probably $200 worth of shakes that we tried back when we were saying I would never do this now for comparison, this drink, this beverage company that Lori is starting, we have over a quarter million dollars into lawyers, IP formulations, sampling trademarks, you name it. CH: (21:40) And we don’t even have a run of product yet. So how was that for like a comparison of barrier of entry compared to payoff if you are just joining a network marketing team in a very safe way to learn entrepreneurship as opposed to what it really costs to develop and launch any other physical product? Yeah, and, and I think, you know, this isn’t meant to be a commercial for network marketing by any means, but I, the thing that to me speaks so consistently about your story is one of humility of being, of being willing to do the things you know, to take the stairs is the metaphor that we use all the time of doing the things that no one else wanted to do and not being afraid of judgment and having your back against the wall and selling all your stuff off and then doing direct sales. CH: (22:30) And then I know for sure because this is true about every personal brand that you started a podcast, nobody was freaking listening. You were doing Facebook. Nobody was there like it’s easier now because you know that you’re actually impacting lives. But when you first start it’s like, well this happened to me. I shared this with somebody this week, so I just relaunched. I had to start over and I have a brand new YouTube channel. My video from this week has three views. Oh my God. One of them is mine. I’m pretty sure the other one is like the person on my team who posted the video. I’ll go watch it. You’ll have four dice. Yes. and as you listen, but it’s you and I are willing to do that. We are willing to have zero followers. We are willing to have three views. We are willing to take the stairs. CH: (23:22) We are willing. Two how other people look and say, Oh boy that looks like it’s failing because we know that we are in it for the long game and I think that’s where people go wrong. Well and back to network marketing or whether it’s traditional business or any other form of business. People dip their toes in and when they don’t have a a quick hit right away they say, see it didn’t work. If you know that you are in it for the long game. And listen, I had to teach myself years ago when we were losing everything. That Eagle will cost you more than anything else in life. Right? I’ve got a saying. It’s ego is your greatest overhead because ego will will cost you by speaking up when you shouldn’t. It’ll also stop you from speaking up when you should because you’re afraid you might look dumb. CH: (24:08) Eagle will burn bridges, it’ll burn relationships, it’ll make you miss opportunities and ego will stop you from building that YouTube channel or that podcast or that Instagram or that tic TAC because you’re so afraid that people are going to look and see that you have three views, which is such a silly, a silly thing too. It’s like even if you have three views, it’s like you say you want to make a difference in someone’s life. There’s three people you know too. Not counting yourself even as like you’re making a difference. Like so, so I want to talk about the time, cause you bring up the time horizon and that’s good. I think that’s important for people to understand too. So realistically here, how long does this take take to start? Like, and let’s talk about the personal brand specifically, right? Like podcasting, putting content on social, like whatever you want to call it, blogging, doing videos on YouTube, whatever. CH: (25:06) Like how long does somebody have to be willing to do it for before they go, yeah, it’s not working. I should pull the cord on this thing. Or you know, like give us in today’s world, cause I know, I know you have a lot of your students are kind of like brand builders group. A lot of ours are kind of starting in there earlier in their journey. So I’ve got a two part answer to this. The first part is don’t start anything that you don’t see yourself still doing and enjoying in three years. So don’t start that podcast, not started that YouTube channel. Don’t start that Instagram account unless you see yourself enjoying it three years from now and continuing to build it. And then the second part of that answer is you can monetize a small audience very quickly, but you shouldn’t hang your hopes on monetizing it in a large way. CH: (25:57) Very quickly and saying, if it didn’t work at first, I’m out. Right? Is it possible? Yes. Should you quit? If you don’t do it right away, Nope. You gotta have that longterm commitment. So I’ll give the example. I’ve seen people with a very small following, find 10 clients at $10,000, whether it’s a coaching or a mastermind and make a hundred grand in their first few months of business. That’s a very realistic scenario. I’ve also seen people work five years before they hit six figures, and there’s a lot of factors that go into it. How much effort are you putting into it? Are you willing to reinvest your revenue into hypergrowth or are you starting to use it as a paycheck? Are you good at collaborating and mixing it up with other people out there that can point their audiences back to you? Or do you feel like you’re going at it solo? I mean, these are all very important things that will affect how quickly you get to grow and how quickly you get to monetize. RV: (26:55) Yeah. That’s so, so good. And is so, so important. I think yeah, I mean, you just, you, you nailed it. And that’s the thing too. It’s like, it’s not how long have you been doing it? It’s also how much have you been doing it, right? It’s like there’s plenty of people say I’ve been podcasting for a year and it’s like you’ve released six episodes. That’s not podcasting for a year. That’s podcasting for a week, spread out over a year. That’s exactly, that is exactly. It’s like, for example, Laurie’s show like caught fire and is X exponentially larger than mine right now? I could get jealous or I could say, huh, guess it’s not made for me. CH: (27:42) Or I could look at where her hockey stick moment happened and say, mine is right down the road. I just gotta stay the course until my hockey stick moment happens as well. Because if you continue to, and I love what you said, not just do it for a long time, but how often, how much do you put into it while you’re doing it? If you continue to say I’m committed to both of those components, your hockey stick moment will happen, right? It will shoot up at some point. You get the right break, you’ll get the right follow where you get the right share, you get the right you know, episode that goes viral. But don’t stop short of that hockey stick moment just because somebody else has gotten there as, and you haven’t reached yours yet. RV: (28:21) Yeah, that’s good. That comparison thing is a real, I mean, that’s a real, that’s a real struggle to like, it’s just you’re always looking at how many followers do they have and how many downloads do they have? And that’s, yeah, that can be a discouraging moment. Yeah, I think it’s important to, if you’re gonna play the game of comparison and say, look how good someone else is doing, then you need to play the full game of comparison CH: (28:44) And look the other direction and say, wow, look at all the people that wish that there where I’m at. And by the way, I’m not an advocate of playing the comparison game, stay far, far away from it. But if you’re going to play it, you need to play both sides of the field. RV: (28:56) If you’re gonna look at this end zone and say, CH: (28:58) Not fair, look what they’re doing, look where they are. Then you also have to look behind you at the other end zone and say, Oh wow, people wish that they were at the 40 yard line at the 50 yard line like I am right now. RV: (29:08) Yeah, I love that. And I would also, I would also say that too, to that point of the full comparison, it’s like you can’t look at where Laurie is at today and go, okay, where am I compared to her? You have to go, how many total hours has she put in? How much heartbreak has she had? What is everything that she has been? What is everything that she has been through? And it’s like, I’ve done six episodes so far. Right, and you don’t, you don’t factor in that because you don’t see that part. It’s but, but it’s like, again, if you’re going to play the comparison game, play the game CH: (29:42) And remind yourself like there’s a whole story here. You can’t compare their chapter 20 to your chapter one, you’re, you’re so spot on because if you’re going to do that, you must seek out all the facts. So if I was looking at Lori compared to me some additional facts or this, she had a great big Facebook following that she worked hard to build long before I decided I wanted to build a brand. And then she had been kicking out three episodes a week while I was only kicking out two. And when I went to three, she went to four. Right. So she has been doing more longer and that is why she has exponential more growth than me. I can’t look at a timeline and say, Oh boy, at the three year Mark, you know, she was higher than I was. That’s not fair. CH: (30:29) Yeah. That’s one reason why she’s doing better than you. The other reason is because you and I both share the same problem with our wives are actually better than us and we have more charisma. We just got you know, we just have to live, we have to live with that every day. But sugar mama. I mean, that’s all I’m saying. Sugar, sugar, mama. You know what’s really funny? I do want to talk about that. When you find the right partner, when you find that right ride or die, that lifts you up when you’re down and you lift them up when they’re down. When you guys have complimentary skillsets, right? So my strengths are her weaknesses, her weaknesses are, and I should say her strengths are my weaknesses. When you can decide to make that work, Oh look out, you can accomplish anything at any level that you want. CH: (31:18) Right? And by the way, if you don’t have a partner, this is not an excuse. This doesn’t mean, Oh, see, that’s why it’s working for, for Rory and Chris is because they found great partners. So I guess I’m screwed. No, that’s not what the message is. The message is by yourself. You could do absolutely extraordinary. And when you find that right partner have been, it’s just like everything you’re trying to do amplified. Yeah, it can. Yeah. It can be right. I mean when you’re by yourself. And this was something for me that, you know, it was like I worked till midnight when I was single every night, like all the time, other than Thursdays and Fridays, like when I was in college and you know, like Thursday and Friday nights and maybe Saturday nights, but it was like four nights a week I was working like crazy because I didn’t have a responsibility to somebody else. CH: (32:08) And then when you get a partner, you know that can work for, you can also work against you. You get the wrong partner, you get the wrong business partner, you get the wrong relational partner, you know, that can also, you get the wrong vendor. Partnerships can accelerate or decelerate, but you know, like what you said, you’ll know you have the right partner if they lift you up when you’re down and you can pick them up when they’re down. And when you decide to work together, it’s like one plus one can equal four. Absolutely. Without a doubt. It’s, it’s, it’s just such a magical thing to find. I love it. I love it. I love it. I love it. So Chris, buddy, where obviously you’ve got the podcast, if people aren’t listening for the love of money where else would you direct people if they want to kind of connect up with you and see more about what you’re, what you’re up to. Make sure you follow Chris, not Lori because he needs the followers. She does. CH: (33:04) Here’s two great places to find me. I’ll find all my [email protected] and Instagram is a platform that I hang out on the most right now and I’ve made a commitment to answer every single business question that comes in. And sometimes it’s a daunting task, but, but I stick to it. So go find me there at Chris w harder. Yeah. alright buddy. So last little thing here. Right. Do you think that generosity is a necessity for a successful personal brand or do you think it’s an act, an accessory? Do you think it’s a necessity or is it an accessory to the success of a personal brand? What a great question. Absolute necessity. Here’s why. When you are generous in your relationships, then they’re going to using law of reciprocity, give you things back that will help you grow your brand. When you’re generous to your customers, then law of reciprocity is going to kick in and they’re gonna be more loyal and give you things back that helped your business grow. CH: (34:09) When you are generous to strangers, when you’re generous with your time, when you’re generous with your knowledge. For example, if you create incredible opt-ins, you’re generous with your knowledge for free. If you do amazing webinars for no charge and you’re being generous with your knowledge and your time, then those have exponential returns on growing your business. And here’s a real live a example. I do live webinars right now while we’re going through this crazy economy. I wanted a platform for people to be able to ask questions about their pivots. Right now it costs me, in other words, I’m investing two hours a night, three nights a week, so six hours of my life. Wow. I mean, that’s big. At the time that we’re recording this, I charge $4,000 an hour for my coaching. So, I mean it’s a big commitment, but what happens every time I hang up, when I’m done serving, when I’m done adding value, when I’m done, I’m like answering the questions and I’m on that great high cause I just got to help people, their businesses. CH: (35:07) I open up my Instagram and there are always, you know, when you click on your notifications, there’s the mentions by the way, this is what everybody should always be. Measuring on their Instagram is shares and mentions, not likes and comments, but the thing that says, mentioned the caps out at 99, every single time I’m done with the webinar, it’s capped out at 99 mentions, right? Screenshot. Wow. I just learned that screenshot. Wow. He just said this. Then your followers grow exponentially faster, exponentially higher because of all those mentions. And so that is a perfect example of if you are generous with your knowledge, if you’re generous with your time, if you’re generous with everything that you can be, then law of reciprocity kicks in in a real tangible way. Gosh, I love that. The whole freaking personal brand business is built on the law of reciprocity. CH: (36:01) It’s like you can’t outgive people like you. You can’t, you can’t give away. Everyone’s like, well, I can’t give that away cause then what do I sell them? And it’s like, it’s not how it works. It’s like you, you, you just, you give it away and it always comes back. It’s the craziest thing. Like this whole, this whole space who is invented and built upon and thrives because of that one single law, Roy giving is the secret to everything you want in every aspect of life. And listen, it’s counterintuitive. People think if I want to make more money or if I want to accumulate money, I need to save. But the answer is giving is a secret to everything you want. And here’s how I learned that. I’ve always actually had a generous spirit ever since I was a kid. You know, my parents grew up teaching me how to tip extra as a kid and they let me figure out the tip and they’d explain why we tip extra because that’s someone who left their family to serve our family. CH: (36:55) And then at church they would give us boys, my brother and I, the money to put into the offering plate and explain, here’s why we put a little bit more in than other people that you might see. And we weren’t rich growing up. It was just they wanted to teach us generosity. So I always had the spirit. But here’s where it really hit home for me. About five years ago, I read 30 books in 30 days. Laurie was on a rocket ship. I was just treading water in the good, good land of good. And I wanted to catch up the Lord. So I’m like, you know what, I’m gonna read 30 books in 30 days and halfway through those books, and by the way, all the books had different agendas. They were spiritual books. They were seven steps to this. They were autobiographies is how to do this. Didn’t matter. Do you only agenda was it had to T improve me in some way and had to be less than 300 pages so I could finish it? CH: (37:46) Exactly. So at the two week Mark, I remember being in bed, finishing a book I rolled over to Lorina said maybe you’re not going to believe this, but two weeks in so far, 14 out of 14 books, no matter what they’re trying to sell me, giving is the common thread through these things like giving us the secret to what they’re trying to sell me. And then I watched for that common thread and it held true through all 30 out of 30 books and of all the gifts that I got from taking on that little personal challenge, the number one gift was confirmation of what I kind of had a hunch up. And that is the more you give law of reciprocity will kick in and the more wonderful blessings you’re going to get back in different ways in life. Wow. Wow. My friends Chris, harder. RV: (38:36) This is the story behind the story that you see. We’ll have to see if we can get Lori on here sometime to get her part of this. Without doubt. I mean this is a, it’s just so awesome brother and I, I appreciate you sharing so transparently. You know, your mistakes, the failures, your insecurities, like your journey and and just kind of be at being a champion in the world for believing in people and encourage them to be generous and, and just modeling that generosity over and over and over again. Man, we just, we, we pray for you guys and we wish you the best. Well, well, thank you so much. I know how much your audience means to you, and so I really appreciate you giving me this platform to share those stories and share those mistakes and share those insecurities like the more people that, that do, that it gives other people permission to take that first step. So thank you.

Ep 75: Responding Versus Reacting to Injustice with Anton Gunn | Recap Episode

RV: (00:00) Hey there. Brand builder. Excited to bring you really a special edition here of the influential personal brand podcasts, a very unplanned, spontaneous we want to introduce you to a good friend of ours. I’m a client of ours, somebody who believes in us, somebody who we believe in tremendously. Somebody who we look up to. His name is Anton Gunn and he is a former senior advisor to president Barack Obama. And Anton is one of the world’s leading authorities on socially conscious leadership. So he has a master’s degree in social work from USC and was a resident fellow at Harvard. He is the bestselling author of the presidential principles and he’s been featured in time magazine, the wall street journal, BBC, NPR, and on good morning America. And as an international speaker and consultant, he’s worked with organizations like Microsoft, Sedexo, KPMG, Verizon, Aetna, Vanderbilt health and Boeing on and on and on. RV: (00:58) And so from playing sec football and being the first African American in history elected to the South Carolina legislature from his from his district early in his career to now working as a C level executive for an academic health system and serving on multiple boards. He has spent his life building or help helping people build diverse high performing teams and world-class leadership culture. And was this on our heart for you to hear from him about some of the things going on in the world and specifically how to use your personal brand to influence real change? And I’m going to let AJ say something cause she, I can, I can tell she’s bubbling. And you know, if you’ve listened to the show, you know that AJ does not often conduct the interviews. She does all the debriefs, AJV: (01:53) But since then RV: (01:54) This was, this one was right from AJs heart. So AJV: (01:57) Well they’ll say yes, Amazon has this really nice, fancy bio with all of this amazing accomplishments. But the real reason that I felt led to forced Anton to get on this call of us, which he was so happy to oblige so quickly, it’s honestly, he’s so representative of what we believe in as people and as a part of our, our community at brand builders group, we just believe like Anton comes from a place of real experience. So do you also comes from a place that he really believes in justice but also doing it in a way that actually creates change by using real influence because he’s doing things the right way. And that’s not easy. That’s actually really hard and it takes a lot of discipline to do things the the long way and that, but I just feel like you’re such a extension of what we believe in. And so thanks for, thanks for popping. AG: (02:53) Thank you for saying that. AIJ and I love you both. You are awesome. So happy to be a client. Happy to be your friend and happy to help you and all of your listeners and supporters understand that this is an important time for all of us to use our influence in authentic ways, in ways that we feel comfortable with, most importantly to help bend the arc of the moral universe more towards justice. And it already bends that way, but it requires each of us to do something in a way that helps to make things better. That’s what our responsibility to our leaders is to work, to make things right and every chance that we get. So I appreciate you creating the space for that and doing that and living up to who you are as individuals and as a business. RV: (03:39) Well, I love that Anton, and honestly we’ve struggled with what to say. I mean there’s a lot of things that I could say and kind of want to say, but don’t necessarily feel like they’re appropriate or you know, right on pace. I think that’s a lot of a lot of people. And, and, and like you said, as. AJV: (03:58) I feel like it’s so sensitive right now and being twisted and turned, and even with the best of intentions, it comes across as you’re ignorant. You don’t know anything. You don’t understand. Yeah, no, but that doesn’t mean we’re not trying. RV: (04:14) And, and I, I think, you know, when we reached out to you, we said, Hey, we don’t want to make this like a news media commentary on anything specific that’s happening in the news. But okay. You know, you’ve got a moral compass for fairness and justice. RV: (04:27) And I think one of the things that I struggle with, and I just wanted to ask you as your friend is, you know, there’s been a lot of stuff that says, Hey, you know, being silent as part of the problem, you know, silence, you know, basically if you’re silent, you’re racist. I don’t necessarily, that doesn’t necessarily connect with me. I don’t necessarily think that being silent means you’re racist any more than I think making a post will change the world. But what I am very interested in is what are the things productively that we can do? And that we should do like not just, not just using our voice, but what are the things that we can do. And you have such an interesting perspective from working in the white house to being, you know, a division one athlete to leading it in the healthcare world there. Yeah. AJV: (05:23) They’re all of these things, right? AG: (05:26) Yeah. So let me just say AG: (05:30) Know you gotta you gotta remember a leader’s responsibility is to respond and not react. And what do I mean by respond and not react? You know, whenever you’re in the heat of any kind of difficult circumstance, any kind of crisis, your emotions will get the best of you immediately. And what you see some people doing on social media are there emotional responses to what’s going on? And it’s not understandable for people to have an emotional response. Some people’s emotional response is to or emotional reaction is to lash out and scream at you for not saying anything. Cause if you’re not saying anything, then that means you must agree with the bad people who are doing bad things. Right. That’s a, that’s really a reaction. That’s not really a thoughtful prepared response. That’s a reaction. Some people’s reaction is because they’re so shocked by what they see. AG: (06:28) They freeze and they don’t want to say anything. I mean, we’ve all seen in circumstances you’re going to do three things. If you’re confronted in a crisis, you’re going to freeze, you’re going to fight, where are you going to flight any other direction? And I think what we have in the middle of any kind of crisis is that people freeze. Some people fight and others flight, and so I think the people who are fighting are the ones who are screaming out on social media. Some people are so distraught about what they see that they freeze and so that is sometimes silent. You’re when you freeze your assignment and some people could immediately assume because you’re not fighting like me. Oh, because you’re not running like me. Then that means you must agree with those who are doing bad things. That is not the case, but what you should do is be thoughtful about how you can have a positive point in the specs. AG: (07:23) How can you add to the construction of a solution and not to further destruction of the problem? And so what I tell people to do is first of all remain yeah. In your lane. And when I say remaining your lane is, you know, for the first 12 years of my career I actually was a community organizer. So I’ve organized protests, I’ve organized marches, I’ve done sit ins, I’ve actually hold politicians accountable for not doing the right thing. And that’s actually why I got into politics, because I got tired of politicians telling me one thing, but then doing the complete opposite. And I say, well, why am I asking you to do something that you clearly don’t have the capacity to do? Why don’t I just run for office and take your place? And literally that was my goal. But that’s not everybody. It’s not everybody’s name. AG: (08:15) Some people’s learning to say, Anton, you’re better to be out there on the front lines, but here’s what I can do. I have a hundred dollars and I’ll put it in a bail fund. So if you get arrested and go to jail, you can get out and go home to be with your family. Or maybe I’ll support your education campaign to teach people about what good policing policies are or what good environmental policy. So it doesn’t matter if it’s this current crisis or there’s other, some kind of injustice that exists. I will tell you this, we’ve had injustice in wrongdoing as long as we’ve had challenges in this country and around the world. I’ll give you an example of that is unfair and, but it’s something that everybody can relate to. The two of you decided to go out to dinner and you go to your favorite restaurant in Nashville and you’ve been waiting 90 minutes for a table and then my wife and I walk in five minutes in a manner of these sets us down at the best table in the house. AG: (09:16) But you’ve been waiting for 90 minutes now already. You know that that was wrong, that that was not right for me to be able to walk right in and sit down at a table where you’ve been waiting for 90 minutes. It doesn’t make you feel good. It doesn’t make you like the restaurant anymore because you felt that you were treated unfair. So the question is, what am I going to do if I learned that you’ve been waiting for 90 minutes, do I just keep my table and keep eating and say, you know what? Too bad, Roy and AGA, you had the weight, 90 minutes. What do I say to the maitre D? That’s wrong. I’m going to get up and I’m going to give them this table because they’ve been waiting for 90 minutes. And if you saw me sit down at a table, do you decide to storm out of the restaurant or do you just stand there and do nothing? AG: (10:05) You just accept that you know you lost the table. Or do you walk over to the maitre D and says, you know what? I don’t think it’s right. I don’t think it’s fair that we’ve been waiting for 90 minutes and we didn’t get the table that we asked for and you let somebody else have the table. Now the maitre D also has a choice and an option at that point. He can say, well, you’re just going to have to wait a little longer. Well, he can say, you know what, Roy J I’m sorry. As soon as our next table come available, I’m going to put you at the top of the list in all appetizers and a bottle of wine is on me. So in that situation, we all have the opportunity to respond or we could react, but the key is whatever it is, you want to be authentic to yourself. AG: (10:50) Where do you feel comfortable? And also when you have some expertise, because what I try to remind people is that we all have personal experiences in our lives that we can connect the dots to something else that’s going on. So you may not know what it’s like to be a black man living in America. I can count seven particular instances that I could have ended up like George Ford or Tamir rice or Eric Garner. All of them happened before the age of 27 Hmm. I did nothing wrong. I was a college athlete. I went to a gas station with my uncle to go in to just, he went to go get a bottle of Boone’s farm. Just tell you how long ago it was and I went in to play the lottery. You just connected with AGA. You might have more in common with Aja than you think. AG: (11:39) As it turns out, as it turns out you love boons Romney J yes, we all did. So we were leaving the gas station and out of nowhere, five police cars pulls up. They draw guns on us, they drag us out of the car, they throw us on the ground, he puts his knee in my back in accuses us of being a part of a game and doing a drive by shooting. We didn’t even live on that side of town, but my uncle worked at a restaurant over there and I caught the bus to his job. We got in his car and we’re driving home. We stopped by the gas station and this happened to me. So this is real for me, but it may not be real for you. You may never have experienced anything like that. But I would say you might know someone who has. AG: (12:28) And so in this time, I would say the first thing people can do if you’re trying to figure out how to use your influence, if you have people in your spear network, your friends with those people who you have in your cell phone, who you know might be feeling some kind of way about what’s going on, it’s okay to send them a text. We’ll make a phone call and say, Hey, listen, I don’t fully understand all of this going on. I don’t fully know what to do about any of this. But no, I’m thinking about you. And if you have people who follow you on social media, who you know fit that demographic, you can easily say, listen, Hey, I know you guys watch my pocket. You listen to my podcasts, you follow my feed. You’re on my list. I just want you to know for the interview who are affected by the current circumstances. I want you to know that I’m thinking about you. And I’m not sure what to do yet, but I’m trying to find out. [inaudible] AG: (13:19) We’re all going to be better because of this. And that’s the approach that you have to take is to say something, but you don’t have to have all of the answers because you don’t, you’re not an expert in that. This is about how to build a brand for a movement. Then they should definitely be talking to you, particularly if there’s a person leading the movement. But if this is just unrest or this is just community up uptick and outrage about things, you don’t necessarily have the lead dog role in this, but you can play a role. But first empathizing with people who might be experiencing it. And that’s what we all want. We all want someone to understand our pain, to understand what we’re going through. And you guys have done that just by creating the space and the opportunity. Second thing I was telling people, you are good at something. AG: (14:06) So some of us are great writers, some of us are great speakers, some of us are great at teaching people how to manage and deal with stress. So there are ways you can say, Hey, in the middle of the most stressful time that we might’ve seen in our lifetimes, here are three things. Things that you can do to lower your stress. That message becomes universal. No matter what your race, gender background is, that’s a universal way that you can help him make it. You provide people a way to say, listen, I want to create an outlet for people to be able to express themselves and let me provide feedback on how I can help you to channel that into something positive. Those are simple things or you can really start to do a little bit of research and say, who is working to make sure that injustice and unfairness no longer exists and how can I offer some free advice or some free counsel or free coaching session to help them through it. AG: (15:02) Now, that doesn’t have to be public at all. That can be very private, but it’s something that you can do too to add value and to be comfortable in your space. But speak to the times that we’re in because I do think Roy, there is a fear about the silence if, if it’s, if the silence goes on too long and people will assume silence is complicity. And so I don’t expect anybody in a emotional moment to react in aggressiveness or to jump right out and be a part of anything. Cause that’s what I’m not doing. I haven’t left my house. I still remember that we’re in the middle of a pandemic. And so I’m concerned about my health and my family’s health. So as bad as I might want to go out and Mmm, be a participant in some civil disobedience, I’m not doing it because one, that’s not my role right now. Number two, I don’t think it would be in my best interest for my health and my wife’s health and my daughter’s health. So I’m going to stay home. But what I am doing is reading everything that I could get my hands on about who’s trying to find a solution and rather than be a part of the problem and what can I offer in terms of expertise and support and help to do that. RV: (16:16) So can I, I have a question too. You should have scheduled your own interview, Anton. We need to have you. We’re going to do multiple. That’s right. All right. This is, AJV: (16:26) So what other questions I have, because I think this is just really pertinent and I think it’s a part of your expertise is there just seems to be a lack of leadership and all of this and a lack of a real coherent and consistent message of what do we want to see happen. And you know what’s like w where does that leave everybody? If there isn’t true leadership and there isn’t a true cause and a true message of like, let’s make this clear. AG: (16:54) Yes. AJV: (16:55) What needs to happen. So, RV: (16:56) Right. Like lighting a church on fire doesn’t signal a real clear message about what we want to see happen. In fact, it’s a very conflicting message to respond to violence with violence. At least that’s how it feels to me. AG: (17:09) Yes. So you’re exactly right. So I literally did a Facebook live about this last night for about an hour. And I hearkened back onto successful change efforts in America. I mean, you can go as far back from women’s sufferage to the civil rights movement. We’ve had a lot of successful change efforts in all of those efforts. You have to know what you want. Yeah. And not only know what you want, be able to clearly articulated in a way that everybody presents. You know, when you talk about building a brand, you gotta have clarity, right? You’re on problem and clear on the solution. AG: (17:51) Exactly. You have to be clear on a problem and clear on the solution. And the problem that we have in this current environment is there, there’s no clarity about this. There’s zero clarity from my vantage point around what do we want? I know what I want, but the solution to that is not clear because again, if you’ve got, you know, multiple things happening in multiple cities, the problem in Charleston, South Carolina is completely different than the problem in Nashville, which is completely different than the problem in Minnesota, which is completely different than the problem in New York city. And so because those problems looks similar on the surface, people are trying to apply a solution to fix all problems and there’s not one solution. This is a, a local by local problem and solution framework. And so when you, when you don’t have good leadership, the problem stays. AG: (18:49) I, I, I give people this kind of advice and I’ve given it to president Obama. So I just tell you anything I’m saying here is stuff that I say all the time to leaders at every level, from the dog catcher to the mayor, to even the president of United States. And the first is whenever you had a crisis, the first thing you must do is remain calm. The second thing you must do is you got to tell the truth. And when I say tell the truth, you have to be honest with people about where you sit and where things are cause people in a time of uncertainty, in a time of fear in a time of the unknown, people are looking for a beacon of hope. And so you got to tell them the truth and you got to tell them the truth, even when the truth is unpleasant. The thing with so many people forget. AG: (19:35) They want to tell you the rosy truth and they want to tell you the happy true. But they don’t want to tell you the unpleasant truth. So the unpleasant tree is difficult, but it’s grounding. And I, and I say this all the time, the truth doesn’t hurt. It heals. So if we can begin to say, AJ, you are a Rory, you have skin cancer. So I can lie to you and say, Oh, you just got a blemish on your face and telling you you have a blemish on your face is cool and nice and, and you, you don’t feel bad about it. But if you find out that that blemishes cancer, then you can begin to do something about it. Because some people may say, Oh, I got a blemish. I’m just going to accept the blemish and be okay with it. But if you know a skin cancer, then you have to respond. AG: (20:20) So we got to tell people the truth and we got to tell it to them in a heartfelt way. You don’t need to be angry with the truth. You don’t have to be screaming about the truth. You can empathize with people and be heartfelt about telling the truth. But then the third step after that to me is you got to seek out expertise who can help you to find a solution. Yeah, that’s the problem is that we, Einstein said this one time, that many spend 95% of their time trying to solve the problem but only spent 5% understanding the problem. Well, we need to spend 95% understanding the problem and 5% of the time on the solution and you got to have experts to help you to solve the problem. And that’s what leadership does, is that they remain calm. They tell the truth, they tell it in a heartfelt way, and then they find experts to help them to solve the problem. And that’s what we don’t have in this kind of environment. The people who I know have expertise on not being sought out, they’re being questioned, they’re being antagonized, they’re actually being accused of being complicit in the problem when they actually have real ideas around a solution. RV: (21:32) Well, that’s an you know, that’s something that I’ve struggled with with this personally. You know, you talk about leaders, just leadership in general. You respond, you don’t react. You know, I’m seeing a lot of message and I’ve had some people messaged me about like, Hey, why haven’t you shared? Or why don’t you share something? And as a leader, my, one of my first thing is I’ve been afraid to say this, one of my very first things is I need to find the facts in any situation. It’s like as a leader, not civil rights, just leadership training is going, I need to understand the facts. And there are, as you said, and I, I love that you pointed out, I believe that it’s different in every city too. And I believe that every instance of this is different. RV: (22:17) Any type of silence is not condoning something. It’s going, I don’t have the full context of what happened in Minneapolis or in Atlanta or like, and, and until, I know I’m afraid to come out and judge anybody in any, you know, cause I just, I just don’t know. But I think it’s, it almost becomes popular that people want you to just lash out and rage. They want you to just throw fire. They be because they want you to be mad. And it’s like I am mad. Like I’m, I’m heartbroken. And there are, there are parts of these things that you go, they’re undisputable, they’re worth being mad about just like looking at it. But then there’s, there’s context around every situation, every social interaction, every communication with a spouse, a child, a teacher, a colleague. And that context really matters. And it, and it shapes a lot. And I’ve been actually afraid to say that cause I’m afraid of people just being pissed off at me for not being pissed off right away. Like, like you know, publicly. AG: (23:19) Yeah. So, so I will tell you this, and this is one of the things that I, I’ve gotten very comfortable and as a leader is recognizing that somebody is always going to be pissed off at you. And if, if nobody’s pissed off at you, then you’re doing it wrong. That’s the main point. And I know as an influencer you want to grow your brand and you want everybody to like you and everybody to on your team. But you know what? The happiest thing that I get every day in my inbox is the number of people who unsubscribed from my list. You know what? I’m happy about that. Yeah. Because I know what I’m offering is not for you, you, you, you’re not invested in what I’m invested in and, and you don’t like it. And that’s okay because I want the people who do like it, the people who do get the value, the people who do want to build, adjust organization. AG: (24:14) An organization full of ethical, inspiring and empowering leaders who worked in the unfairness in the workplace. That’s who I want to talk to you. Okay? I don’t want to talk to the people who want to carry it on or the people who are indifferent to it. And I think the thing that a lot of people are probably most frustrated with but people that don’t speak out is the indifference. And so my context would be you want to have the facts, you definitely want to have the facts. But for many of us, particularly me, that what happened in Minnesota is not the straw that broke the camel’s back. My back was broken on March 3rd, 1991 when I saw Rodney King get beat 56 times by LA police officers and they all got off Scott free. So for me it was a a moment as a teenager that said that I thought this was over. AG: (25:09) I thought this happened, you know, during the civil rights movement. I thought this happened in the 18 hundreds where you know, you could get pulled over and never be seen again. But here I am in the midst of getting ready to go to college and this is what’s happening. So some people would say, we’ve known this all along. There’s no additional facts for you to gather in this situation. But I think the, the burning and the riots and in the burning down buildings and kicking in Apple stores and all these other kinds of things, this is what I also have learned doing this work. Everybody who is with you is not for you. Your body does for you is not going to be with you. And there are some agent provocateurs who are using this yeah. Crisis or this opportunity to advance an agenda that has absolutely nothing to do with justice in equity and fairness in the right thing. They have some of them. RV: (26:09) Yeah. And Anton, I just wanted to make sure that you said everyone who is with you is not for you and everyone who is for you is not with you. AG: (26:17) That is correct. Everyone who is with you is not for you. And everyone who is for you is now with you. So let me break it down. So you understand when I say everyone that is with you is not for you. There are people who are showing up and turning peaceful protest into violent protest, right? There are people who will show up at your events that are not really there to support your business there to copy and steal what you do. So everyone that is with you is not for you. The people who follow you on social media, they might be your followers, but they’re not for you. They’re for themselves. And we all have to understand that that’s always been the case. And secondarily, the people who are with you, sometimes they can’t be there for you. They’re with you in spirit. They may be with you in dollars, they may be with you in some other kind of way, but they’re not always going to be there side by side with you. AG: (27:16) So I’m with a lot of people that I can’t be side by side because I want to be here longterm. I want to be a person who lives a long time. And so for me, knowing that I work in healthcare, 90%, knowing that we’re still in the middle of a pandemic, I know it’s not cool to go back out and socialize right now. I get reports on how many new positive coded cases are showing up every day and we’re not in a clear, so I’m with a lot of people for a lot of people, but I’m not going to be there all the time. So you got to understand that you gotta be able to figure out who is with you and who is for you and what are they doing to help you and who are those that are not really for you. AG: (27:59) And again, I go back to some years of go work when I was being trained into the seat. So to be honest with you, I was trained at a place called Highlander in Tennessee. Tennessee’s where actually Dr. Martin Luther King jr and Rosa parks, all of them got their training on community organizing. Like some people thought Rosa parks sitting down on a bus and refusing to go to the back was a spur of the moment off the cuff event. It wasn’t not, they plan this for months in advance and they have five different people and Rosa parks actually was the one that was chosen to stay on the front of the bus. So most people think this is big civil rights broke protests started with a seminal event of someone just deciding not to get up anymore when she was a trained, a prepared leader who knew what to do and when to do it. AG: (28:54) So in my training, I learned then whenever we do things like this, there are people who are not really with us who are going to see what we’re doing and want to jump in. We got to control that because they could destroy the message, they could cloudy the message that we’re trying to send here. Then it can turn into something that is not. And that’s what I think we, we are seeing right now that there’s some people who are clouding the message that is not really about, you know, police violence. It’s about anarchy or it’s about I hate the government or it’s about, I hate rich people. It’s about I hate America. Because I do believe there’s some form foreign people who are involved in some of these efforts. And so we don’t know which is which at this point. We don’t know the enemy, our friend, because we haven’t taken a time to, to develop the right structure and strategy to move for change. AG: (29:51) And, and to give a quick plug to my former boss Barack Obama, his foundation has been trying to do his best job of this stealing information around what’s a right way for you to get involved. He posted the article on medium recently about, I know everybody’s upset. Protest is a part of, of making change. And we’ve always used protest in America from the Boston tea party onto present day. So he’s not saying not to protest, but he’s saying is getting involved in a way that can make sure that the positive change is lasting and that we actually do the right thing. And so he provided resources at the Obama foundation website. And so I would encourage people to figure out what you can do. But I think the main thing is we got to separate the wheat from the shaft and know that everybody that is with you is not for you and everybody that is for you. Sometimes it’s not with, AJV: (30:45) That’s so wise. That’s so good. One of the, one of the interviews that I saw online here recently was the son of an Atlanta, a city police officer. I’m a black man and he was, he did this really great speech, super emotional, but the thing that has stuck with me and I can’t get out of my head, he said, you don’t fight the enemy by burning down your own house. AG: (31:08) Correct. AJV: (31:08) And you said people were burning down our own house. Wait, that doesn’t work. AG: (31:14) It’s not smart. And that was killer Mike. He’s a hip hop artist, activist. I’m one degree separated and kill Mike because one of my mentees actually used to make beads for him. And I’m trying to get him to be a brand builder client too, by the way. So so yeah, I was willing to help, but that’s a point that, that everybody should understand that if you’re trying to solve a problem, go to where the problem is. Don’t go to where the problems now. So here’s how I explained it to him, the friends of mine and a conference call. If, if I have a nail in my foot five a nail in my foot, it doesn’t make sense for you to put a bandaid on my shoulder. Yeah, that doesn’t, that’s not solving the problem. Why don’t you haven’t taken the nail out of my foot and you haven’t stopped the bleeding on my foot. And so if the nail is in Minneapolis, well, if the nail is in Louisville, Kentucky, why are you burning down in Atlanta, Georgia, right? While you’re riding in Charleston, South Carolina. And again, my point is there are problems in every one of those cities. Atlanta is not perfect. Nashville’s not perfect Charleston, that there’s no perfect utopian city in the United States of America. But those problems require a specific and clear solution to those problems. AG: (32:37) If there’s a nail in your foot, it doesn’t mean there’s RV: (32:40) A nail in every foot. Like the problem isn’t even as a city necessarily. It is a person, a few people, a set of people. And if you can understand who it is, you can proactively handle the problem, which is the truth about any problem in business or our personal life or anything. You can’t. But if you’re blinded by just rage, it’s like you can’t see the problem. All you know is you’re in pain and so you start bandaging yourself and shooting other people and it’s like, Hey, there’s a nail in your foot. Get the nail out. AG: (33:14) Yes. And that’s exactly right. And in problems have levels to them. So, so I, I, you know, my training is social work. When I got my MSW was understanding systems in organizations where you have individual problems, you have group problems, you have family problems, you have organizational problems. And so like when I work with a healthcare organization, I want to understand the problem across the organization. You might have a problem in this department or you might have a problem with this person, right? But is it representative of a systemic problem of how you hire people and who you hire and how you train them and what you allow them to do and what don’t you allow them to do? And what I find more times than not is that people want to solve problems, but they feel paralyzed because they’re going to be punished by a largest system for trying to solve the problem. AG: (34:09) So it requires us to have some level of depth and understanding around what problems are, what our role is, and to solving those problems and going right to the source. As I told my group last night, I said, listen, Mmm. If, if you have police officers who are committing bad acts, okay. Then RDC that the person who can specifically do something about that problem is the police chief that hired them. And if the police chief doesn’t see the problem and doesn’t understand the problem where there’s a specific person who can do something about that person. And that’s the mayor of city manager that hired a police chief. Yeah. And if the mayor and the police chief doesn’t see that problem and doesn’t understand that problem, there’s a specific group of people who can do something about the mayor. And those are the voters who live in that city. AG: (35:07) But if you don’t live in that city, you don’t have the ability to get rid of the mayor. You don’t have the ability to affect the chief of police and you don’t have the ability to affect those officers. Now you can contribute in ways to influence their problems. So going back to the word influence, there are a few things that each of us can control. There are other things that we can influence if we can’t control and if we can’t control it or influence it, our responsibility is to lead. And we, we, we lead by being the example of what we want to see in the world. So if there’s injustice be just, if there’s unfairness, be more fair, if there’s inequity being more equitable. So it’s about what you can control, what you can influence it, where you can leave, but you got to understand the problem. AG: (35:56) And I think so many people haven’t taken the time in this situation to just understand the problem from a societal problem of law enforcement, police and communities, particularly communities of color, two. Our response to when those things happen because I think the main thing, and I’ll say this last point about what happened in, in any of these specific events, it’s not just that we see a bad cop do a bad thing because in every industry there is a bad person that does a bad thing. So you got a bad doctor who does a bad thing. You might have a bad hairdresser that does a bad thing, bad speakers, every industry you can’t fix bad things that individuals do. We can’t control in police individual behavior. The question is when that individual does a bad thing, is there any accountability for that individual? And I think what people are so outraged by is the continued bad things done by certain officers. AG: (37:06) And they rarely get in trouble. They rarely go to jail. The worst thing that happens to them is they lose their job. I mean, think about it. If you murdered somebody and the worst thing that happened to you is that you lost your job. Yep. That’s where is w where the outrage reviews until the conflict. How do we make sure that when bad things happen that we improve the process so they don’t ever have to happen again? Like if you take the airline industry, I’ll give you this, this example. Mmm. We rarely have plane crashes in the United States of America now 35 40 years ago we had a lot of plane crashes, but every time a plane crashes, the entire airline industry works like crazy to find out what happened, to make sure that it never happens again. Like we have four hijackers who crashed planes into buildings, into the Pentagon and nine 11 and there was nobody that was a Homeland security expert on September 10 2011 there was no Homeland security experts, not one. AG: (38:16) But after that day, the entire country, the entire government, every single person began to find a way to make sure this would never happen again. It doesn’t matter why it happened, how we let it happen, we want to investigate that and understand the facts of what led to it. But we’re going to do everything in our power and spend ungodly amounts of money and ungodly amounts of training and hiring new people and changing our processes so that it never happens again. And if we’re going to be good at solving problems when bad things happen or bad people happen, we got to figure out how do we prevent them from ever happening again. And when we don’t see that happening, that speaks to a larger challenge. RV: (39:03) I love that. That, and so, and I need to ask you this question specifically that that parallel is so good. Anton and I, I certainly, you know, even though I’m saying like, Hey, we got to find the facts and things are different in every city, I also very much empathize with when you see Rodney King all the way to where we are now and you see example after example, it’s like, Hey there, there certainly is evidence that there is, there are some systemic problems that need to be dealt with and people need to rally. But even to just know what you shared here of like go to the police chief, go to the mayor and also, you know what I’ve never seen as an article that recounts all of these instances. Yeah. What were the facts afterwards and then what happened to all the officers? RV: (39:50) Right. Like all in one place. You know, I’m thinking to myself like maybe that’s an article I should write is to go show people because once the facts have been revealed, justice should be served and it should be clear and Swift. But, but so anyways, that was so awesome. So much. This is so good. But hold on. I got it. Okay. So I have to ask you this question specifically as it relates to our audience and this, the theme of this podcast being personal branding. You, you’ve mentioned several times, examples of staying in your lane. You spent a part of your life as, as an activist and organizer and being on the streets. But now you’re saying you’re making an intentional choice to stay at home because of various, you know, considerations. Mmm. Do you feel like personal brands should be using their platform? RV: (40:42) Like if I teach yoga, should I be telling them, should I be taking my audience and telling them why racism is wrong? Should I be connecting? It should buy, should I be saying, Hey, that doesn’t, that’s not what my expertise is about. Like how do you balance? Yeah, because a platform is a sacred thing and audience is a sacred thing and the audience that you have didn’t necessarily show up for your opinion on everything that you’re not an expert on. But at the same time, we’re all people, we all have beliefs and as humans we are all in this together. And this, you know, Martin Luther King’s in an injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, which I fully believe and support. Well, finding that balance between, so do you go, yeah. Tell people what you believe and even if it’s outside of your lane, but you’ve used that term stay in your lane. How do you, how do you find the line? AG: (41:33) Yeah, so, so I think the, the, the summary of how I would explain it and when, I mean stay in your lane is that Mmm, the best brands, the best personal brands are the people who are the most authentic that people connect to intimately. They just don’t know, Oh, what you want to teach them. They know who you are. Like I know who you two are. Okay, I don’t, you might teach me everything I want to know about being a personal brand, but I know who you are. I know how you met and how your relationship started and what you did before you were building a personal brand and your, your, your life story so to speak. So you can’t divorce yourself from who you are if you’re really building a strong personal brand. So my point is staying in your lane, if it’s something that is connected to who you are and what you do, then they find a way to connect it to what’s relevant. AG: (42:26) Because I think one of the things that you teach in personal branding is how do you, how do you take what you do as a personal brand and connected to what’s going on in the world and what people need. And so if you teach yoga, you don’t necessarily have to say racism is bad and that, you know, you know, police brutality is bad. You can say, I know everybody is stressed out right now and the world is stressed and we’re seeing bad things happen all around us. But yoga is a solution to get personal alignment in yourself so you can help get personal alignment in the work. So again, you’ve given some money to say, you know what, I never done yoga in my life, but if something can help me to get this tightness out of my neck because I’m angry at what happened in Minnesota or I’m angry about what happened last month and what happened last year, maybe this is a way that I should try that I haven’t tried before. So if I’m a yoga teacher, that might work, but not, maybe I don’t do anything related to yoga or I don’t run a fitness gym or maybe I teach karate or RV: (43:36) So, but to stick with the, to stick with the yoga thing, if I’m going to follow a yoga instructor. Do you think it’s important that the yoga instructor I’m following is sharing their personal viewpoints on abortion, women’s rights, politics, racism AJV: (43:52) For both of you here, like this is actually something we teach. We say once you know what your problem is, you answered all of the things, all of the questions that are happening in the world through the lens of the problem that you solved. AG: (44:04) Yes. AJV: (44:05) What is your unique lens on whatever the problem is that you saw? Like for me, my personal brain problem is irrelevant, right? I don’t speak on racism or discrimination. I don’t speak on gender equality. I don’t speak on those. But that doesn’t mean that my problem of irrelevance, it can’t be seen through the lens of all these things happening. Not to go out and say, here’s my opinions for the world to hear. But that doesn’t mean it’s not connected to who I am as a human being. Because the problem that I solve is connected to all of these things. It’s just how do you take what’s happening through the lens in which you see things as a personal brand. AG: (44:45) Yeah. So, so you agent you hit is something, and definitely Roy, I’m going to connect to that point. If you’re, if the problem you solve is irrelevance. There’s a lot of people who are feeling very irrelevant right now. Okay? Mmm. Women in the workplace feel irrelevant every day. So, so there, and that’s a problem. And so you can find a way to connect to it. But to Roy’s point about my views on abortion are my views on, you know, X, Y, and Z. My opinion is you don’t have to go there to go there. So like if, if I’m living my truth, if I’m being completely authentic, then it only takes one word or two words in Google, Google, gun and Obama. So you’d Google my name of Barack Obama’s name, then you know my position on healthcare issues, you know my position, well healthcare reform, you might know my position on how do we rebuild the economy, but you don’t know where I stand on abortion. AG: (45:47) You don’t know where I stand on gay marriage, you know where I stand on any of these issues. And those things are personal to me, but they haven’t been the full scope and scale of what I’ve done in my life. But again, if it’s connected to what you’ve done. So if you’re a yoga instructor who had an abortion and it caused you to go down this spiral dark hole in your life and the only thing that pulled you out was that you learned how to do yoga, then maybe it’s okay to connect the dots in that way. But that doesn’t mean you showing up at every abortion rally and trying to give keynote speeches around abortion in America because that’s not your lane. Your lane is yoga. Okay? But your personal story gives you a way to connect to what’s real. So I tell people to be authentic. AG: (46:39) And then the last piece of every influencer that if you got 50,000 Instagram followers or 150,000 or 5 million Instagram followers, I’m pretty sure your local elected official knows who you are. And if they don’t, they should know who you are. So if nothing else, you use your influence to say, Hey listen, I would like to meet with the mayor to understand what’s going on in our community and how it’s similar or different than what’s going on in another community. And so if you can get an education, just say, you know what, we haven’t had a case of police brutality in this city since the mid 1980s well that’s a good thing to say. You know what, this is happening in America and is wrong. But I’m very proud of my city because it’s not happening here. But you should never make that statement unless you know, never, ever, ever talk about what you don’t know because it will make people ask you questions that you can’t answer beyond the surface level. AG: (47:47) So to your point, Rory, doing some research around, you know, the last 25 years or 30 years of police encounters that ended in a death of a person of color and understanding how many it is because it’s, it’s much more than we got on video. I will tell you that much cause I’ve done that level of research. So, but no the answer and then say, Hey, this statistically is a problem and we should be doing something about it and I can’t fix the whole world. I can solve every other problem, but I can talk to the mayor of Nashville. Well I can talk to my city council member or my state legislator and understand what are we doing to prevent this from happening here? And if they give you an answer, be happy and be proud about that. That’s the main point. AJV: (48:36) Yeah. I so agree. And what are the, there was two things that happened over the weekend that prompted me to bring up this interview with Rory cause I really, I really like, I prayed about it hard because we had both been kind of like, okay, yep. What’s our role? Like what’s our role in this? And there was two things that happened over the weekend that I just felt like I thought literally was like, and this is the path for you [inaudible] stuff. The first thing was Whitney Hawthorne, who’s one of our brand builders clients, right? She’s awesome. She’s amazing. And she recently had her son, her second son. And you know, we have two boys and there really close in age. Like our boys are only a few months apart. Both of them. Yeah. [inaudible] She posted something really simple on social media about this newborn baby and however she drafted it, it made me think I will never [inaudible] [inaudible] the fear because she has, AG: (49:36) Do you want I just lost it. Yeah. I saw that post too. And know I think God every day that I had a daughter and a son, and it’s hard to, to, to fathom that to say, you know, you know, God gives you to get the children you want, whatever God gives you. Right. But when I had a daughter, there was an extra sense of relief in me that I didn’t have a son because I know what me and my brothers have gone through with our encounters with law enforcement. And I know that even as a 40 something year old man who’s lives in a suburban nice neighborhood, you know, professional got multiple degrees, I got a great career. Everything is going the way that I wanted to go. The moment I get in my car and just drive to the grocery store, if a cop pulls behind me, my entire physiology changes. AG: (50:44) I break out on a full sweat. I wonder, do I have my driver’s license? I wonder where’s my driver’s license? I don’t put it in my glove compartment. I literally keep it on the visor above my head because I don’t want to reach down or reach into the console and make it think that I’m doing something. I’ll throw my phone on the passenger seat because I don’t want him to think that I have anything in my hands. And so I don’t want to teach my daughter those kinds of things. Yeah. But unfortunately, there’ve been enough cases with women that I’m also having to teach my daughter because it’s happened to black girls too. It happened to Sandra bland. And so, so I don’t want any of this. And I know that there are a lot of people who will never understand this. And, and I, and I’ve been selling into a lot of my friends who I’m not black and no share my experience. AG: (51:36) I’ve been getting text messages from them and they literally have been, Mmm. I don’t know what to say. I want to help. I just want you to know I’m thinking about you and my response to them is that I appreciate you think it about me. I appreciate you caring about me and I appreciate you empathizing with my situation and [inaudible] and that’s all that I can ask you to do. And then if they ask me further, what is there anything I can do to help? I said that the one thing that I believe that you can do to help is you can talk about this because, and talk about this in a way that is, talk about this in places that I can’t go to talk about it. Okay. Mmm. You know, my pastor, I go to an a interracial church and my pastor is white and he is the founder of the church, is a massive church with more than 25,000 members. AG: (52:30) And when he was retiring and handing over the ministry to his son, he says, I’m going to spend the rest of my life in ministry, tearing down the walls of race in America, and particularly in church because Sunday is the most segregated day in America. And so I’m going to use my platform. I’m going to use my influence. I’m going to use my brand power to make sure that we tat on a Rosa wall’s race. And that didn’t mean doing anything visceral and violent. You know what that meant? That meant every time we invited a guest speaker to church, it was a speaker of color. And, and let them come in and preach to the congregation. It means standing up a diversity group and asking Anton to chair to diversity group, it meant going down to the city and asking the mayor, what are you doing to bring people together of color? AG: (53:23) And the mayor is going to respond to him because he’s the of a church with 25,000 people. So again, he didn’t step outside of his lane. He just started asking questions and talking about this in places that I couldn’t talk about it to people who wouldn’t give me the audience to talk about. So it doesn’t have to be big. It could just really be a conversation. No, to be clear, there’s some of us that got to give beyond the conversation because you can talk to somebody and they can continue to do the same behaviors over and over again. And then that means you got to move to the next level of how we change. And, and I think that is warranted where we are right now. But again, there’s so many people who are not talking about it. As I, as I teach the people who live in oblivion. AG: (54:06) Mmm. You know, I, I teach that in the social conscious construct, you got about half of people who are living in oblivion that they didn’t see anything that you saw that pricked your heart and mind and want to have this conversation. They never got a text or a message from their friends saying, why you aren’t saying anything. They just kind of, you know, a happy go lucky move in. And leave it to Beaver land or whatever, and they don’t see anything that’s 50% okay. Yeah. The 35% of them who sees something’s wrong, but they either don’t know what to say or they thank you, somebody else to this problem to solve or they say, little low me can’t do anything about it. And that’s understandable for time, but because you know better, you should know that there’s always something that you can do. The small baby steps lead to the bigger steps, but then there’s a smaller group of people about 10% who literally believe that they benefit emotionally, morally economically, politically from being, staying the way they are. AG: (55:17) Yeah. And we have to find a way to deal with those people, but those people are in the minority. Right. I listened to your podcast religiously, and so when you did the interview with Andy Andrews, and he talked a little bit about his book, how do you kill 11 million people? He pointed out in the book that at the height of the Nazi party, they were only eight and a half million of them when there were 80 million people in Germany. So you had this 10% minority that had control of an 80 million minority. So we got to stop the 10% wherever they are in business, in the world and wherever. But it’s so many more of us on the other side who can do the right thing, it should do the right thing. And that’s what I’m trying to teach is how to become a 5% leader. AG: (56:13) The admired leader who stands up for justice and there’s a laundry list of people, Dr. King Nelson Mandela, Margaret Thatcher, mother. These are people who says, you know what? I’m going to figure out what this problem is and I’m going to use my pulpit, my brand, my platform to figure out what I can do and what mother Teresa could do is not what Dr. King could do. So we’re all different. Well we got to stay in our lane and figure out what we can do to make a difference. And that’s what building the best brand is all about. RV: (56:46) Well you are a 5% leader and this has probably been one of the most enlightening conversations that I’ve had. Amen. And a really, really long that, and it’s just so helpful. I mean, just as a, as a friend Anton, to just hear your voice and hear your perspective on it. And I think it’s such a, a balance of what’s right and not who’s right and just doing what you can and not overstepping your bounds but standing for what is right. I’m just really, really graceful. We love you. We believe in you. Where should people go if they want to connect with you? I mean your, your brand is about leadership and like you, your, your voice man, like this is, this is why you’ve been through everything you’ve been through is like this time in the world right now I think lends itself to somebody just like you at just this moment. AG: (57:42) Well I really appreciate it and I agree. And if people want to connect with me, you can go to Anton Gunn. Com. That’s the home for all things. Anton, I’m on all social media platforms. I love Instagram, but LinkedIn is where I do the most dialogue around helping leaders be better leaders. So please follow and connect with me on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter. But this is a time for all of us to learn how to grow as a leader and to have a greater impact and be the person who is the difference maker that makes the biggest difference. That’s what we all can do. RV: (58:17) Thank you, Anton. Thanks, buddy. Thank you.