Category: BUSINESS

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 episodes@fortheloveofmoney.com 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.

Ep 74: Responding Versus Reacting to Injustice with Anton Gunn

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.

Ep 69: Getting to Grips with the Fundamentals of SEO with Rick Steele | Recap Episode

RV: (00:08) well, um, that was amazing. Uh, that interview with Rick Steele, I’m telling you like that is, could be seen as more valuable than like an entire degree or program that you could, you could invest tens of thousands of dollars into and, and listen, right? Like when it comes to learning, uh, how to do it. RV: (00:36) Paid advertising, I’m going to go with the guy who spent $94 million, $94 million in Google paid ads, right? Like amazing. And he’s turned it into billions with a B, multiple companies doing billions of dollars. There’s something to be learned there. And it’s one of the things I have to S you know, I love about brand builders is it’s just when you come to our events, you know, whether they’re the virtual events or there are physical events, you know, our events are small. Like our events are capped at 50 people and most of them are like 25 30 people. And you’re literally sitting next to somebody like Rick Steele who is spend $94 million in ads, ran seven marathons in seven days, is built all these huge companies, you’re sitting next to these podcasters that reach millions of people or people have million social media followers. Like our community just fires me up. RV: (01:35) And so I hope you enjoyed and if you didn’t like go listen to this interview with Rick steel. He’s not like, he doesn’t teach what, like his personal brand is not about the stuff I was interviewing him. He did that as a favor to me cause he’s one of our clients and our friends [inaudible] okay. Him giving away his secrets about how to run, uh, paid ads through Google is just insane. So I’m going to give you the recap here. Um, AAJ wasn’t able to make it today. So I’m rolling so low of course this, this is this, this concept or this topic was square in the center of all things nerdy. And so it’s probably a proposed that I’m doing this recap by myself cause I just love this stuff and I want to try to simplify it and try to organize it for myself and mostly for you know, for you and for my, mostly for myself really just to like make sure I’m understanding things. RV: (02:33) That’s why we do these recaps and learn alongside of you. But here’s the first big idea I think from that interview is that intent based search. It is a huge part of the future for personal brands and that’s a big difference is understanding intent based search, which is Google. Somebody comes and they type in a term like nobody tight. When you go to Google and you type in broken water heater, you’re not typing it in just to learn about water heaters like you’re typing it in because you need that thing at that moment. And that’s the power of intent based search is it is somebody saying I need this thing at this moment versus traditional advertising. Even Facebook is more of awareness advertising. It’s, it’s, yeah. Inserting yourself in front of somebody and saying, Hey, check out this thing that I have, you should be interested. RV: (03:27) So you’re, it’s the difference between creating interest and, uh, drafting off of interest, right? Capitalizing on existing interest in which is what intent-based search is all about. And I, I want to make sure you caught what he said because he’s built huge companies and he said in the interview he said, I only have these two rules. They said, make sure there’s a big enough market for you to make a Denton. So there’s gotta be enough volume that you don’t have to be the only option that, that, that there’s room for you plus competitors. That’s really smart, right? Like it’s to go, there’s a, there’s a big enough market here that you can have at least a few, you know, really, really key players and as long as you’re one of the key players, like you can make a lot of money. So that was interesting to hear him say that. RV: (04:18) And then he said the second rules that don’t create a product that you’re going to be in competition with Amazon, which I thought was interesting. That’s more for you e-commerce people. Um, you know, selling, selling physical goods. But Mmm. You know, for personal brands, most of, most of you, most of us are selling video courses, membership sites, coaching programs, consulting, speaking, you know, like you’re selling, you’re selling more of a, a service or or knowledge, you know, information. And so I think it’s, it’s, you know, that’s a handy advantage that you have that you’re not really competing with Amazon. So, um, anyways, that was super powerful. The other kind of tip in this, in this space cause cause here’s the, you know, here’s the big idea I think in general. And, and, and by the way, so our phase three event, we have an entire event that is called high traffic strategies and it is a hundred percent dedicated to this kind of stuff. RV: (05:14) Now it’s all, it’s, we consider it more advanced because unless you have gone through phase one and captivating content and phase two and you have your funnels built and your visual identity done and your website and all of your copy is in place and all of your tracking, right? Like there’s all of these things that you need to do to build the house first. But then when you come to phase three like, um, this is where we really light it up and, and it’s doing this kind of stuff and, and you know, like the big idea here, it’s very straightforward. It’s in phase two, we’re going to teach you how to build organic traffic, right? It’s all about, you know, we teach this thing called the content diamond and there’s a 50 plus page document that we walk you through step by step, exactly what to do every single week with your social media plan and your email marketing. RV: (06:01) And it’s all organic. It’s all free organic traffic, but you’re building an audience. The difference here in phase three, which is the big idea is going find an existing audience and that the people that you want to do business with, they’re already aggregated somewhere. You just got to go find them. And that’s what the power of Google and intent based search platforms do is like literally someone is typing in a term at a specific and moment in time when they need a problem solved. And if you know what that problem is and you own and dominate that term and you’re willing to pay for it, you can force the traffic because these people already exist out there. And so I think this is something that I think personal brands are way behind on. I think, you know, personal brands in general, like there’s a lot of people doing Facebook ads. RV: (06:52) There’s not a lot of people doing YouTube and [inaudible] the Google ad network, right? Which is really Google and YouTube. Um, a lot of, a lot of you of that do personal brands, you know, like we’re using Facebook and Instagram, which is fine. That’s great. You know, that serves a PR that works too, can work. Um, and, but it’s, you know, it’s totally different. They’re two different universes. The other thing with the YouTube thing, which is, you know, as a handy little tip, if you didn’t pick this up from what he was saying was that in YouTube you don’t even get charged for the ad if somebody skips it. But you know, like if they watch less than five seconds, you don’t even get charged for the ad. So that’s like a free impression, a free show of like, yeah, you got, you got five seconds to do a free five second ad or say your name, your company name, and boom, like I get that impression out there that is super powerful. RV: (07:49) Like free advertising on the biggest ad network in the world. Mmm. Pretty incredible. So intent-based search I think is, is a big future for personal brands. We dive into it completely at our phase three event and it’s just decide all based upon the premise of that your audience has already collected, they’re already aggregated in many places. So while you’re building your own audience, go be in front of the existing audience. And that’s really important. The second thing that is more of a concept, I just want to make sure y’all understand is this concept of re retargeting and it’s important that you get this right because you know I didn’t really understand it and it it’s, it’s something you can hear and not recognize the power of of what it is. And what it means is that, you know, when somebody comes to your website, you’re probably familiar with the concept of lead capture and that’s something we teach in phase two is build a lead magnet. RV: (08:49) Yeah. Which is offer something of value for free in exchange for lead capture. You’re going to capture somebody’s name, typically their name and email at first, but what about the person who comes to your site and either you don’t have a lead capture setup or you know, they come to your site somehow they’re on there, they found their way there from something, but they don’t ever, they never fill out the lead capture. Right. They never contact you. They never say they want more information, but some they’re interested it somehow, some way they ended up there. Well that’s what retargeting does. It’s basically taking this person who would otherwise be invisible. You would have no way to track them. And it’s, it’s almost like you put a beacon on them and, and now it’s like a digital beacon that you can see wherever that person goes throughout the web and you can re target them, you can show them additional ads to try to drive them back to your website for specific products or specific offers. RV: (09:53) That is huge. That, I mean that is insanely powerful is to go imagine if in the real world you can know everyone who ever had a thought about, Hmm, your, your company or your product or service. And you could literally know everyone who had ever had that thought and then you could show an ad just to those people. That’s like what retargeting does. I mean it’s extremely powerful and they never have to give you their email. They never have to give you their phone number. All they do is show up on your site and that is how you get that. And so you know, there’s some technicality parts of that that we cover at the event in terms of how to set them up. But you know, your web person can set it up and Google, Google and YouTube and then Facebook and Instagram, you know those go together. RV: (10:38) They’ll give you what’s called the pixel, which is what you need. It’s a piece of code that you install on your site. LinkedIn also has one. So you know, if we’re managing your brand or or somebody else’s managing your brand, you just need to tell your web person like, I need you to install my Facebook pixel pixel or my Google pixel on my site and you’ll immediately start tracking that stuff. That’s part of what we do in phase two. We don’t teach people about pixels and retargeting, but we do. We do tell them you need to, you need to just do this. Like just, just listen to us and do this. We’ll teach you why later. It’s kind of wax on, wax off type of thing. But you gotta be retargeting, like at least be showing ads to people who are already saying they’re interested in what you do by virtue of them coming to your sites and to your registration pages for your funnels and to your sales pages for your products. RV: (11:30) Mmm, really, really important. And then the third big idea here I think is just optimization, optimization. You know, when he was telling this the, the, his story about, uh, you know, how, how he started his company and, and you know, they’ve done a couple, they were in the mortgage space and now they’re, now they’re in, um, you know, they’re doing blinds. But yeah, I think w when he talking about this idea of the very first ad they ran was for pho blinds and he was saying like, you start with 50 bucks and you just, you put $50 into it and you see what happens and you, you, you measure and you watch to see, do, do people click on the ad and then if they click on their ad, do they come to your site? And you can run different ads. And so even somebody who’s spending $94 million in ads, it’s starting with the $50 ad spend. RV: (12:26) Right. You know, you, you probably go, I don’t have $94 million. Well I don’t either. But you know, you could probably scrape together 50 bucks or a hundred bucks and get some data, get some testing and these tools that he mentioned, uh, I had heard of the first, I had not actually heard of the second, which I’m excited about. So these are some nerdy tools for, you know, either your digital marketing team or your tech person or you. And we’re certainly going to be, you know, getting into the details of these and introducing them to our, our team and our community when we get to phase three, um, is heat mapping. Okay. So that’s a crazy egg was the tool. There’s some other ones, but crazy egg is the one that I’ve always heard of. So heat mapping shows you, it’s, it’s kind of like, you know, when you see an ad for like an acid or Mmm, yeah, somebody is sick and they have, they show like a FA, a figure of a human body. RV: (13:20) And then there’s like flashing red where the pain is like, Ooh, heartburn. Um, that’s like what heat mapping is. It’s just, it shows your website and then it shows these flashing red areas of where people are hovering with their mouse. Right? So that’s one of the things people do is they wherever they usually point with their mouse, the mouse to where they’re reading. Okay. Or to, you know, clearly to what they’re going to click on. And so you can follow the journey that a new visitor coming to your site for the first time who doesn’t know who you are or an experienced person. Just anyone come into your site and, and you can go, you know, is my copy effective? You know, are my, are my lead magnets working? You know, are these buttons effective? And you can see like what are they passing over and what are they spending time looking at? RV: (14:13) And what are they clicking on because of the heat map. Tell you again, without even knowing who the people are, you don’t even have to have their email. It’s just the people who come to your site is tracking it. And then this is the new one, which is awesome. And this is next level. Uh, um, he said the company or the tools called full story, which I had never heard of. So I’m, I’m, I’m jacked about this full story, which is a video experience. So not just heat mapping, which kind of shows like these are the hotspots that people go to, but full story literally records the entire journey of someone on your site. So where do they down and where do they stop and, and, and how does their mouse move across the page. I mean, that is huge. Like what an unfair advantage of the digital world. RV: (15:01) And this is where it’s like, if you’re not doing this stuff, you’re, you’re, you’re behind. And if you’re not doing this stuff in five years, you’re, you’re out of business, right? Like, like right now, if you’re not doing it, you’re just behind. But if you’re not doing this in five years, you’re out of business. But here’s the problem. You don’t, you don’t start with this stuff. This is domino number 76 you got to lay the first 70 Domino’s in the right order, which is what phase one and phase two is all about. And you got to get busy and I got to get busy, right? Like I freak out here some of this stuff cause I’m like, man, somebody is going to figure this out. They’re going to come crush. They’re going to come dominate. So if you’re not doing it right now, you’re just behind. RV: (15:44) But if you’re not doing this in a couple of years, you’re out of business. So this is a big deal y’all like this is, this is happening, it’s been happening and we need to get on board and, and you perhaps need to get on board or your team needs to get on board. We need to up the sophistication here because we’re competing with people who do this, right? You’re, your website isn’t just competing with other people who do what you do. You’re competing with Amazon, you’re competing with Rick steel, you’re competing with Ninja level digital marketers and cutting edge tools and intelligence and data and tracking. And it’s like if you’re not doing any of that, it’s time to pick up your game. You better get going. Um, because there’s only probably a little window here of, you know, a couple of years where you can establish yourself as the authority in your space. RV: (16:35) And then after that it’s going to be hard to come and dethrone the King. I mean, think about if you were launching a store right now that was like, okay, home Depot and if you were going to try to build a brand and to go, you know what, I have an idea for a hardware store and you would be competing against Lowe’s and home Depot and ACE hardware and true value and, and, and Menards and then, yeah, and be like, yeah, I’m going to start a new one. Think of how hard that would be to dethrone these huge national brands with millions and millions of dollars. It would be difficult to do it. It’s not that it couldn’t be done, but it would be difficult. There would have to be something very disruptive. Well, that’s how it’s going to be in the personal branding space. RV: (17:23) I think in five years there’s going to be people who own the verticals. They’re already are right there already are these giants in the space, like, you know, you already have Tony Robbins than you, you’ve got Mmm. Yeah. You know, like Rachel Hall is, you’ve got Mel Robbins, you’ve, you’ve got Brendon Burchard, you have Marie Forleo, you’ve got, uh, you know, Lewis house. So some of our clients have these huge spaces that they own and, and there’s a little gold rush going on, right? And if you’re not in the game, you’re in trouble. Like, you gotta get going now, like move this is, this is it, you’re, you’re living in a time where you have an opportunity to change the world with your message, but there’s a closing window of, of how much opportunity there is there. And, and you know, talking to somebody like Rick in this interview just makes me go, Holy moly. Like I, I’m, I need to pick up my game and I consider myself, you know, towards the leading edge of, of, of thinkers and leaders and teachers and people in this space. But knowing that Rick steel’s out there, whew. Like it’s a new level and it’s a new day, but also massive, massive opportunity. So it’s exciting and it’s fun. And I’m so glad you’re here because you’re learning it now and you’re not learning it before it’s too late. So thank you for being here and we’ll catch you next time on the influential personal brand.

Ep 68: Getting to Grips with the Fundamentals of SEO with Rick Steele

RV: (00:00) Okay. So you are about to meet one of the, the world’s most interesting men. Okay. So Rick Steele I want to let you know upfront, he’s a little bit different from the kind of people that we would normally have on this who are sort of like personal brand experts. You know, they’ve built a personal brand. Here’s what Rick has done. He’s the founder of multiple, multiple billion with a B billion dollar businesses. He’s a celebrated philanthropist. He’s a bestselling author, but he’s really an ambassador of effective altruist. So he has been twice featured on the inc 500, not 5,000, inc 500 list. He was named humanitarian of the year by Harvard business school. He’s been listed among fast company’s, most innovative companies and he has been helping growth minded entrepreneurs create more social impact. And that whole movement has gotten him featured in the Washington post, Forbes entrepreneur, ESPN HuffPo and Fox news. RV: (01:05) And right now he is kind of, you know, he is, he is the founder of select blinds, which we will talk about. That is like his current main business that he is, is operating. And but you know, like he, he really is organizing a movement of high net worth business leaders to bring them together to solve immediate humanitarian and environmental concerns by not only lending their talents, but contributing a significant part of their estate to kind of nonprofit causes. So he is sitting in his garage right now, his, his car dirt with his car collection. And if you’re watching this on video, he also has his gym upstairs. And that is because he has also a 13 time iron man. And the reason we are what we’re talking about on this, cause he’s done a lot, but we’re going to be talking about paid traffic acquisition, search engine optimization, pay-per-click strategies, which is what he, he’s also one of our brand builders group clients. RV: (02:06) And so we’ve had the opportunity to get to know him and he has this ridiculous level of expertise that nobody has. And we’re going to talk about that. But he also just completed in his spare time something that he called the world marathon challenge. He did not kidding. Listen to this. Seven marathons in seven consecutive days in on seven different continents, seven marathons in seven consecutive days on seven continents. And when we started working with him yeah, he was actually one of our private clients. He came to Vaden Villa. He worked with us at the house and he was planning this. And I was like, bro, this seems like a little bit of a logistical challenge, like even, and so we haven’t really talked, so I need to hear just like for a minute, how in the hell did you do seven marathons on seven continents in seven days? That’s insane. RS: (03:07) Well, you, you know, you first have a really really good travel person and the guy that put this together for us, a guy by the name of Richard Donovan done this a few times for small groups. I think you can only do it with a small group because it was chaos, you know, getting, you know, we still had to go through security and had to go through customs at every continent and, you know, make planes and all that stuff. But you know, it, it, it’s a logistical nightmare. Yes. But it’s a, the idea of, you know, picking up and training in the training for it was, was really, I think, harder than the marathons itself. Once we got on, you know, you’re thrust into this group of, there was 35 of us, you’re thrusting this group of people that like 34 of your friends now are not going to let you not do this. RS: (03:54) Right. So you are doing this. And the first one is, Aaron has got a big smile on their face and by the third or fourth, you know, everybody has blisters and shaping and hurting somewhere and you know, so you, but you have, you know, you can go far by yourself. You know, you’ve heard this before, but you can go a lot further with the team. And you know, we had a team of people we didn’t know the minute before we met him and it was a brotherhood, sisterhood. I mean, it was, it was amazing. A group of people that just helped everybody get through this thing. We started in Cape town, we went to Antarctica, almost died in Antarctica. I mean, we literally were in a hundred mile an hour winds in Antarctica. We got delayed there and it came back and went to Australia, Dubai, Madrid for, to Liza Brazil and in Miami where we were met by all of our family members friends or a few hundred people there. It was just, it was amazing, RV: (04:47) Man, bro. Like, we’re going to have to do a separate podcast for, for my, like our leadership podcast of just the mindset and the mentality of training for that, because that is just, well, congratulations like ed to the whole crew. I mean, you’re also depending that nobody in the 35 gets seriously injured and sick and you know, like, RS: (05:10) Yeah, that it was incredible. You know, Kobe had just started in China and in fact there were six members that couldn’t make the trip because they were flying from Beijing and all the flights have been shut down. So they couldn’t participate in it because we had, you know, this was just the beginning. You know, time where the world started shutting down and really China shut down at this point. When we got back, we were about two weeks away from, you know, what we’re going through now, which is kind of a U S shutdown starting in Washington. And you know, it was I believe it was just incredible that we were able to pull it off. It was just the timing of doing it. You know, had we been a few weeks later, it wouldn’t have happened, which would have been okay too. You know, we live in a different world today, so we just have to and get used to what’s happening. RV: (05:59) Yeah. Well I think that gives good backdrop for people a little bit, just kind of about your mindset and your mentality. Mmm. You’re also a nine figure entrepreneur. You’ve built companies that do over a hundred million dollars in revenue a year. Mmm. And you know, there’s just so many amazing things that you have done that has been inspired me. But you and I started geeking out about some stuff and I was like, wow, Rick really knows this stuff. So can you just tell everybody a little bit about select blinds specifically and what you do and how you and your team, I know you have an amazing team. How have you guys built it and kind of what makes select blinds different, you know, from like most blind shops, so to speak. RS: (06:51) Yeah. You know, w we started blinds in Oh three, you know, before that I was doing mortgage, how had an internet mortgage company that we exited and blinds was a, you know, I didn’t want to create something so new, I had to go create an audience for it. So the idea of going into blinds was what can we sell differentiate ourselves a little bit from the market. But w you, you know, basically sell online in a marketplace that already has traffic. The traffic’s there, there’s already intent based buyers typing searches in. All we have to do is find a better way and sell them a better product. And it was easy for us to do back in 2003, you know, this whole I was reading an article the other day, talked about, you know, Warby Parker, you know, kind of pioneered this space of DTC in 2010 and I was like, wait a minute. No, no, me and my buddies, we were all doing this in 2003 it but it’s a RV: (07:48) In DTC, just clarify DTC, RS: (07:51) See direct to consumer, meaning that you are selling only your brand, right? And you are sending it right to the consumer. There’s no store, there’s no middleman, there’s no wholesale. It is drop ship right from you to the consumer. Which allows you to have an intimate relationship conversation, narrative with the customer. It’s so hard to do when you add one component in there. When you start adding that component in, now you’re forcing a sales person, distributor, somebody to share your message with the consumer. So DTC just means I have a direct line right to the customer. They get to know exactly what I’m about. So we had done that mortgage. We’d had that relationship. So we, we didn’t, you know, we weren’t no Nostradamus Domus or anything, but we did kind of see that there was some silly stuff going on in mortgage. RS: (08:37) Pretty much everybody could get approved for a loan. We decided to say, listen, let’s insulate ourselves from, you know, we didn’t know anything about mortgage backed securities or what was going to happen, but we just knew that the fact that home values continue to go up, everybody could get approved for a loan that wasn’t right. So we wanted to insulate ourselves, our team, our company from that impending crash. So the idea was what could we sell? Like what is something we can do that’s fundamentally different than taking a lead online and that was sell a product. And if we sell a product direct to consumer, we can have a little bit more of the control. So that was 2003 we started that thing in our bedroom. And you know, really started building the site, not knowing exactly what products we were going to sell and not knowing all the details about how we were going to sell it but just with enough passion to go out and figure it out over the course of like the next 30 days. RV: (09:28) And this is, this is select blinds that you’re talking about. So, but, but in some ways this is insane. Like you chose blinds to sell on the internet. Like there couldn’t be a more necessary like come into your home, measure it and if anyone’s ever installed blinds, like it’s a, there’s a lot to it. It’s not the, the, the simplest process and there’s lots of different tastes and styles. But to me the, the probably the first major lesson that you’ve already shared here is you went and saw intent-based traffic. Like you made a decision, a business decision based upon there is an existing audience who is looking for something and rather than, rather than starting and saying, I have something and I want to sell it, you said, what is there a market for? How do you do, like how would you do that today? Or like how does somebody determine that, what, what the, the appetite is or what intent there is out there in the market? RS: (10:39) I mean, it’s real simple in Google ad words. I mean, you can go set up a Google ad words account, put no money on it and Google gives you a keyword tool that lets you basically go in and in any region S only worldwide, you know, somewhere in between start inputting keywords. And for instance, if I wanted to start a blinds company today, I would go tell Google, show me how many people are Googling the word blinds. And Google will show me how many words how many keywords there are, what the cost per click would be if I were in the number one position. But then also start recommending a lot of other words that are also pretty accurate. You know, this wasn’t the case five years ago, but today, but man, they have nailed it with the AI. I mean, they know what I’m bidding on, they know what my competitors are bidding on. RS: (11:22) So therefore when somebody new comes in and says, Hey, show me blinds, they can pretty much tell you what the bucket of keywords are to about 99% accuracy from there. You know, really, you just, you gotta become a mathematician, you gotta start working the numbers. You’ve got to start making some assumptions on what the average order value would be. You know, you can get pretty close to that. What’s your expected click through rate would be and what your conversion rate would be. And when you can figure those things out, you can very quickly come up with, it’s a little bit of a guesstimate, but you can come up with what your average cost per order would be to actually close the sale, close an order. So much of that though gets refined when you get into the battle. A lot of it is just, it’s inspiration enough to know. RS: (12:07) For me it would be to say, listen, there’s a market here, and I don’t know exactly how big, but I know it’s a big market. It’s a mantra market. There’s a million words a month for the word blinds. I’m just making stuff up here. There’s a million intentions every month. Somebody type in the word blinds in, I’m going to go figure this out. And then it’s just get on the battlefield and figure it out. Right. Start taking people’s guns, start figuring out where to fire, you know, start figuring out where you need to hide. When your competitors have launched missile attacks at you start, you know, when those missiles miss and you know, they don’t blow up, you go pick one up and keep it for yourself. I mean, it is truly a battle that you have to figure out. But you know, for me, I’ve got so many friends in this in this space where they go out and create audiences like on Facebook and they create new demand for them. RV: (12:59) Yes. And I want to talk about that. Like, can you, can you, can you delineate here like what is the biggest difference between Facebook ads and let’s just say Google. I mean, you really, it’s, it’s really Facebook and Instagram and then it’s really Google and YouTube. So what’s the, what is the thing that separates those two categories? RS: (13:21) I think when somebody comes to Google, they have said inherently when they’re searching for a product, and that’s what we’ll, we’ll, we’ll relate this to when they’re searching for a product. They are saying, I am ready to buy for product based. You know, sometimes that is, I’m ready to just do some window shopping and research, but most of the times it’s, I’m ready to buy on Facebook as an example with running ad campaigns and setting demographics, you know, not talking about retargeting, but in Facebook it’s more I’m going to go put an advertisement in front of somebody that is likely to buy this product. They’re not right now in the market for blinds, but you know, I know them to be a homeowner. They just bought a new home. You know, there’s a lot of different, you know, kind of triggers I can put in Facebook ads that would say get me in front of an audience that is ripe for, for new blinds. Google is these people type the word blinds in. I mean it is somebody literally just walked through the threshold of a store and stood there and said, you know, I’m here to buy. Sure, put me in the right direction. RV: (14:23) Nobody is searching blinds for fun. They are searching, RS: (14:27) They don’t want to see pictures of blinds. Right. I mean say there’s a small small piece that would, you know, be looking for some inspiration because I think they can do it themselves or whatever it is. But dying, you know somebody types in guns and roses t-shirt like their, their intent right now is to buy a guns and roses T shirt right now. RV: (14:47) And that is what we so so the phrase you dropped it in earlier and I don’t think is aware of it would be intent based search. Right. And that’s kind of the, that’s kind of the technical term is they’re typing in something because they are hot, ready to buy or ready to look. You know, they’re seriously interested. And that is the power of what happens with Google. What would you call it on Facebook? Is that just like an awareness campaign? Is that like, is there a term you would use for the, that kind of, RS: (15:18) It would be awareness. I mean we, we run the retargeting and we run retargeting campaigns on Facebook, meaning somebody, RV: (15:24) So hold on on retargeting, let’s talk, let’s, I don’t want to get, I don’t want to get everybody lost on the retargeting just yet. But, but not counting retargeting. Facebook is just like, it’s just kind of like a general marketing campaign. Like if it’s like just kind of a broadcast campaign of awareness, the difference is that you’re able to really narrow down the who versus just buying a billboard on the interstate. You’re able to say, I’m going to show it to certain types of people. RS: (15:54) Correct. And, and, and even with a billboard on the interstate, there’s, there’s some targeting, right? Cause you’re choosing where you want to put your ad on what, but Facebook is a is a is it, it’s a, an exploded view of that. So let’s, you be very specific about who you want that ad to go in front of. I don’t, I have friends have such success with this. I don’t know how they get it to work. It feels like so much effort to me. I’d rather I’d rather work backwards and say, you know, put me where there’s a bunch of intent, a bunch of people looking to buy a bunch of things already saying it and then let me figure out the product. Let me figure out how to improve the experience, improve the product and and be a better company for the customers that on that landscape today. RV: (16:41) And I think, and that’s one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on is because I think that the personal brand influencer market has just, you know, completely crushed Facebook ads. And it’s not that they don’t work, they do work, but I think that the intent based search for the most part in the personal brand world, nobody is doing it. And they, they, they, they don’t know how, and they don’t understand it because they don’t, people use Facebook as a user. The average person has never used ad words or done keyword research. And I think there’s a huge frontier here, particularly with Google and YouTube that I think personal brands are sort of missing, missing the boat on. So so you’ve got intent-based search happening. I want to back up a little bit. You threw out some terms about the, the average order value you threw out, like click through rate, cost per order. These are important terms that somebody, somebody needs to understand. So how do you, how do you make a prediction, like RS: (17:50) You’re saying effectively you look for, there’s a lot of demand here and then you’re going to use these kind of key terms to go, how do I make a prediction, an estimated guess of what I think I could, how I could turn that search into money and how much it would be worth it to me. So can you kind of like slow walk us through that, that, that thinking, let’s use, let’s use like the guns and roses t-shirt as an example of that. Let me do some simple math, right? So let’s say it’s a $50, and this is a, this will be a millennial hipster guns and roses t-shirt, right? Probably the guy wearing it doesn’t even know who guns and roses is, right? RS: (18:30) I love giving millennials shit. But they, so it’s a $50 t-shirt. It’s a Mmm. And you understand that you can buy that t-shirt for 25 bucks. So I own the tee shirt for 25. I’m selling it for 50. I’ve got 25 bucks in margin. That’s what I’m going to make, right? And we’re going to start talking about shipping or I’m going to make $25. So now I get to go to Google and say, how many people are typing in guns and roses t-shirts? They’re going to give me a number. And that number comes with a couple of figures. They’re going to say 300,000 people per month. Type this term in, in the average number one position is a dollar 40, which means you would need to spend a dollar 40 to get someone to your site. If you wanted to own the first spot in Google, Google estimates this, but it’s pretty close. RS: (19:17) You would pay less if you want to own the second, third, fourth spot, right? So let’s talk about the number one spot. I want to own it and it costs me a dollar 40 so when I get somebody to the site at a dollar 40 I’ve got two I estimate some conversion rate. I’ve got to be able to know that I have to close. Well, let’s see if I close 5% that’s one in 20 that would cost me $28 it would cost me, so for 20 clicks it would cost me $28 that’s 5% closing, right? Okay. So you’re saying a dollar 40 a click dollar 40 a click, 20 clicks are going to cost me $28 now I need to close more than one per 20 clicks. Right? 5% to get that as those numbers to work out just mathematically based on what the, you know what the profit margin is on the tee shirt I’m selling. RS: (20:09) So let’s let’s say 10 let’s say 10% and that’s, that’s a high conversion rate, but it’s not unheard of with really good skew based products that are quick to buy. You can get in and out of the cart quickly. So let’s say 10% conversion rate at a dollar 40 meaning that it costs me $14 to get 10 people to the site. Once I had the 10 people, there are one person purchased, so I made $25 so my costs per click was was $14 for the 10 people. One person purchased, I made 25 bucks, my profit margin was $9 right on my $50 products. Let me just make sure I got it. So there’s a, RV: (20:47) There is a $50 t-shirt sale, you got $25 wrapped up in your cost of goods to buy the tee shirt that or make the tee shirt that you’re selling to the person and then you just paid an additional $14 to get 10 clicks on that term of which one of those people bought. So you got, you’ve got $25 in the cost of the shirt, $14 in the advertising cost to get the customer and so that leaves you a net profit on a $50 sale of nine bucks. RS: (21:19) Sure. And then you’ve got some fixed costs, you know, your rent, your employees. Like of course you know you have all that stuff you have to fig, you have to factor in. And that’s why it’s good to just kind of get a spreadsheet out and start factoring this in. These numbers start becoming pretty easy to figure out if you’ve got a big enough market to go after. So if I, if I went to, if I typed in Joe Jones yet, right? Let’s say I only wanted to sell Joan Jett merchandise, well I need to first understand is there a market, like is there a big enough market for me to start my own Joan jet website? Right. Very quickly. If I go to Google and Google tells me there are 580 searches every month for Joan Jett t-shirts, I can pretty quickly say that’s not a big enough market for me to start a company on this, but let me look at starting a rock concert t-shirt or you know, picking the top 20 whatever RV: (22:07) Broaden. So basically like if there’s not enough search volume on it on a narrow term, you’d have to broaden it in order to accomplish the same thing. RS: (22:15) Correct. You know, I have two rules. You got to make sure there’s a big enough market and understand that there’s a big enough market for you to make a dent in where you can you can have success whether there’s competition or not. Meaning that if there’s six or seven competitors, you’re just going to make each other better. It’s gotta to be big enough that you can have that success. The second thing I think is just as important, maybe more important, but it’s definitely just as important is you cannot be a product that you’re competing with if you just can’t compete with Amazon. Like, if you are trying to sell something that Amazon is shipping to customers in 20 of their warehouses, same day, good luck. I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s almost impossible. I don’t like to tell people you can’t do that or it’s impossible because I don’t believe really anything’s impossible. But RV: (23:06) You also have been kind of the guy who ran seven marathons in seven, seven days. You have to know what you’re up to, RS: (23:11) Right? So it would, you know, it would be silly to go out and try to build a model on competing, and I’ve done this before. We own mean we own a company called betting.com we sold sheets, comforters, blankets. We owned the number one domain name in that space. So how could it not work? I mean, how could we not crush it? And we failed because we started selling products that we were drop shipping. We own an inventory, but we were drop shipping from the vendors and they were getting there. You know, we would have to tell people three to five days, sometimes seven days shipping in Amazon. Zappos, a lot of our competitors have these products in stock. They were shipping same day. Amazon had some of the products they were shipping two hour delivery. So it’s like, how do you compete with that? So you’ve got to, you know, you gotta know what you’re up against and you also got to no, that if you are on a level playing field on shipping, how do you differentiate yourself? How do you make, how do you create a better product RV: (24:07) Now? And, and, and this is part of what I wanted. And just for those of you listening, like most of our audience is not in true e-commerce where it is products and logistics and drop shipping and vendors. Most of our, most of our product base you know, personal brands are selling informational type of products, membership sites, video courses, these things that don’t have the costs. But [inaudible] you need to apply the same type of rigor and thinking it’s all the same concepts that would apply here is to still go figure out what are people searching for. What is there a market for that I’m well suited to serve? I mean, would you agree with that? The same rigor could apply here RS: (24:50) A hundred percent and I think also, you know, when I, when I saw your company out Rory, I didn’t Google Rory Vaden, I Googled a term, I’m trying to remember what it would have been, but I’m pretty sure I was searching for the number one, like who would I work with when I want to work with, with my personal brand that’s going to crush it for me, that’s going to help me crush it. So my search term was probably, you know personal branding, a mastermind or something, right. There was some search, and I don’t know if you know, I found you guys via a paid ad, but I would say what you can do, no matter what you’re selling, even if it’s just informational and you’re using Facebook ads, you know, what is w what are the physical products that you that somebody could search on Google that are somewhat relevant to what you’re also selling in your informational business coaching, whatever it may be that are relatable to, you know, to, to that product. Because then if you can buy those clicks and you can sell a product cheap, you know, that’s a, that’s an easy and cheap way to list build too, right? So you can then sell them a product you make a little money on. Maybe it’s a loss leader. RV: (25:58) Well, that’s what a lot of people do with the book. That’s what the free plus, the free plus shipping model is with the book. But you know, so here’s what’s interesting. We are number one for the term personal branding, but it’s not our website. It was, I was interviewed on social media examiner, which is a monster website, but they did an interview with me and that it, the interview did so well. Plus their audience is so big in general and there’s such a high authority site that when you search personal branding, at least at the time of this interview that comes up. And so I think that’s probably what happened. Cause I know you found like you, you listen to that podcast with Michael Stelzner and then, and then we meet you. But, but okay. Yeah. So, so, so basically you’re going to make a prediction here, right? RV: (26:48) You’re going to, you’re going to have some forecast, you’re gonna throw out some numbers. You’re going to look at go, where’s the demand? How much is it going to cost for the click? That’s a good tidbit. I didn’t realize that the number that Google publishes is the number is the number one position for the click. So what about, so at that point then, basically you just start putting some money into the machine. You’re driving people to a website and you start monitoring how many people visit that page versus how many buy is that basically it, RS: (27:20) Yes. I mean you, you know, you want to make sure you’re setting yourself up for success and having, you know, when somebody lands the page has got to be good, right? You got a good product that’s got an easy way to check out. You know, I’ll equate this to, you know, our first product, full wood blinds there, which are fake wood, you know, they’re like a poly blind. We had this product live the very first day we turned it on to pay-per-click. I mean we probably put 50 bucks in there or something. And we said at an immature, it was like a dollar per click that at that time, you know, bring people to this page for full wood blinds. And we just, we watched it, you know, we sat there, this is before Google analytics, but Google and there was a, there was a competing product before Google analytics where we’ve been watching the traffic. We would see what they were doing. W how much time and RV: (28:11) Okay, so, so what, let me just make sure, so you’re saying that when you first started that it was like a page for pho blinds and you just basically threw 50 bucks in there to sort of test it. Like is that basically what you were doing was to watch to see what happened? RS: (28:26) Sure. You know, we said let’s put 50 bucks on and that’ll give us 50 people to the site. Let’s see if anybody buys. And if somebody does, it’s going to be amazing. We’re all going to jump up and down and cheers that we actually have something that will, you know, that works. And they did. We actually sold to a couple of customers, I’ll never forget it because it was a it was this moment where it was just like this. We knew it was going to work, but we didn’t, we didn’t know conversion rates. We didn’t know, you know, how much it was going to take. We didn’t know what we would need to adjust pricing to be, you know, because you know, you, you could only, you know, if we sold one out of 50 people and that’s a 2% conversion rate. If we sell two out of 50 people, it’s a 4% conversion rate. So we’re able to make better economics at 4% conversion rate of course. But a lot of it was just, you know, today the capabilities are just, I mean, I can’t even imagine having these capabilities 15 year, 18 years ago, whatever it’s been in looking at Google analytics and watching customers come to a page, see how they interact. How long do they stay? What buttons are they clicking, where are they hung up? I mean, you can physically see their mouse scrolls and you can see, you know, kind of RV: (29:36) Google analytics show you hate map. Does it show you heat mapping? RS: (29:40) They don’t. They’re, they’re heat mapping tools RV: (29:42) That you can add in, which is, which we have in and there’s several of them out there right now, like crazy egg. And we use a company called FullStory. Fullstory. Just watch, let’s you literally watch via like a video recording session, the customer’s journey. So you can see like if they’re on their phone, they’re scrolling, pinching and zooming where they pick up on something. It’s so you can really understand their interactions beyond a click or beyond a patient. Wow. That is incredible. I’ve never heard of that RS: (30:14) In this. I liken this to if, if you were a store, like best buy and you had a bunch of people come through the front door and then a lot of people go to, let’s say the TV aisle and then everybody just stood there and looked at this one TV but then walked away and didn’t buy. You would want to know specifically what’s wrong with this one TV and why they didn’t buy. So you can start asking questions. You could start, you know, really looking at that page and saying, what’s wrong with this? And almost always you will find an error on the page. You’ll, it’s priced too high. It’s like, you know, you’re saying something that doesn’t really give them the information they need. So, you know, these tools are truly just unfair competition to like traditional retail. I mean traditional retail really, unless we live in, in like this minority report world where you see where Tom cruise walks in and they start, you know, doing the eyeball tracking and identifying stuff. We are like dozens of years away from that. This is the world we get to live in, in e-commerce when using tools like Google analytics and crazy egg and full story to see a customer’s intentions and behaviors. RV: (31:20) Wow. So, so then basically, I mean, at a high level you’re going to do a little research to figure out what is their intent for. Then you’re going to look at some numbers, you’re going to make some hypotheses about how much it’s going to cost. Then you’re going to build a page and you know, a product and you’re going to put a little money into the machine and then you’re going to watch how it performs. And then after that, it’s basically just this perpetual tweaking and updating and optimizing. I guess would be would be the word. And and then is that, is that more or less what it is just and it’s just that over and over again. RS: (31:57) It is. I mean, and then in one day, you know, you find yourself spending a hundred thousand dollars a day on Google and managing tens of thousands of keywords and you know a lot of time a lot of growth. But that’s it’s, it’s exactly what it is. I mean it is, you know, the direct to consumer brand with millions of customers. Like we are had to start with a couple of people in one sale and then you know, evolve to a dozen sales and then hundreds of sales. RV: (32:22) Can you share how much you’ve spent on Google or like give us like any sort of idea of like how like just how much has your, have you spent on like pumped money into the app? The Google ad machine, me and my, RS: (32:34) Me and my Google, I spoke, I spoke at Google about this a couple of years ago and it’s funny, they asked me to talk about, you know, why we, how we have such good conversion rates and what are we doing? Like what is the thing that gets us to, to move the needle. And I kind of put a joke on my PowerPoint, which was the formula. It’s a three step formula. Formula one is I give Google my credit card, step two is Google charges my credit card. And then step three is I find a way to make all that work as a marker. But my rep and I, every now and then we will w well I will do a screenshot on the account and I think the last time we screenshotted it between our two accounts were just under a hundred million. Right now, $9 million in spend. RS: (33:13) Yeah, $94 million. $4 million. But it is, I mean, every single dollar has been worth it because they have all, you know, it has all been intent-based traffic. I mean, so it is a, I mean, it feels unfair, but I mean, this is where, when you look at Google, I mean these, this multiple, almost trillion dollar company gets almost all of its revenue, right? So just let that sink in for a second. All of its revenue from pay-per-click ads and those pay-per-click ads are dominantly intent-based. You know, customers, I’m looking for this right now. Sell this to me. So it is a you know, it doesn’t have to be blind. I mean, it could be duct tape, it could be a variant of a new product that’s out there. You know, Shopify, some of these platforms give you the ability to spin up a site and have tools that are really even greater than what we architect with. RS: (34:14) I’m so much greater than what, how, what we built in the early days from day one for like 30 bucks a month. It’s, it’s truly insane. The platforms that are out there and that’ll let you spin up a, a really good eCommerce platform. And so does this also, is everything that we’re talking about with Google, does this also apply to YouTube? It does. You know, we do, we do some advertising on YouTube with video ads that are both intent based video ads and then also, you know, retargeting video ads as well. So we have a, a couple of really good high production videos we’ve done that are commercial quality where somebody, when they come into our site, they leave. I mean the best use of YouTube is, is a being there in a retargeting narrative that shares a little different message than what you were sharing on the front end. RS: (35:04) So, you know, if somebody came to your site and they left and didn’t buy your, your ads probably didn’t work. I mean, that’s kind of what the assumption should be is my ad was wrong. So I need to deliver a different narrative, different story on the on the back end. And so it’s the retargeting on YouTube. We get the opportunity to do that in those, you know, if you’ve seen the ads that are, you know, they make you play for five seconds and then skip. Yep. There’s, there’s ways to gain that. Just make sure you get verbally your name and audibly audible, your name and digitally your name in the first five seconds so they hear your brand’s name and, and see your logo in the first five seconds. And if somebody does skip, you actually get that brand impression for free because Google doesn’t charge you for it. So and a lot of people skip, a lot of people get through these and it is, again, it feels like cheating the system, but it’s, it’s best practices with what we get to do. And I’m delivering an impression to somebody that’s not watching the full 32nd ad. RV: (36:00) Yeah. And you’re saying you only pay if they watch more than five seconds? RS: (36:04) Yeah, I think we, we start paying, there’s some level that we start paying at. But, and they don’t have to watch the whole video, but if they skip at the five second Mark, we don’t pay. RV: (36:14) Yeah. And so then you’re literally telling people about what you do for free. Like the Google machine is pushing you out there. RS: (36:24) I mean the first five seconds of our ads has select blinds verbally in it. I mean our logos in the bottom right of the screen, it is you, you will have known what that commercial was about if you skip it. RV: (36:36) Yeah. Well I mean this is so fun. Like we didn’t even get into retargeting like there’s so much here. And it just for everyone to know transparently, I, when I was polishing up our, we have our, you know, we have our, our nine different events. When I was working on our phase three high traffic strategies event, I called Rick because I was like, Hey, I want to bounce a couple ideas off you, make sure I got this right. Like and it’s just, you know, like you were someone that I tapped personally to go help me try to get my mind wrapped around this. And it’s in some ways it’s really complex, but mostly it’s very logical. It’s very systematic. I do have one more question for you, but before that, where, where should people go? You know, Rick, if, if they, if they want to, they want to connect with you and follow you. RV: (37:27) I know your, your personal brand and just so everyone knows, like Rick is not in the business of teaching people this, his personal brand is really about effective altruism. He’s, he’s really driven by making a dent in the world in a positive way. And you know, building a, a network of you know, more or less high net worth individuals who, who have a real desire for humanitarian and environmental concern and help. So if you’re one of those people, I’m sure he’d love to connect with you, but just in general, people want to like follow up and know who you are. Like, where would you direct them? RS: (38:02) Yeah, I would say, you know, best channel is Instagram and that’s a Rick Steele official on Instagram. You know, you’re going to see you know, a brand there that if you hold my Instagram up to select blinds, you’re going to say, wow, this guy’s crushing it and blinds. Where’s this guy going with this personal brand? What’s a personal brand? Right, exactly. I feel, you know, the game of building a personal brand. That’s why we need really great leaders like you and helping us out with this because this is, for me, it feels very hard. I mean, it feels very hard. The, the game of e-commerce direct to consumer, it feels easy, right? Maybe it’s because I’ve been doing that longer and I’ve been immersed in that game for some time, but yeah, Rick still official will be the place to go see, you know, just a guy that I think is, you know, I’m living a hard charging life, trying to be a good dad, good husband, good business guy and and good athlete all at the same time. RV: (38:58) Yeah. And you’ve got a very entertaining, you’ve got tens of thousands of followers, a hundred, hundred over a hundred thousand followers. So you got, you got some good stuff going. And you’re just like, yeah. And like most interesting man in the world, maybe it’s the most interesting man in the digital world. Like it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s pretty incredible. So here’s our last little question for you. Where do you think the future is going as it relates to paid traffic acquisition into and intent based search? RS: (39:32) Listen, if you would have asked me four weeks ago, I would’ve, I would’ve given you the same answer, but with maybe a little bit less enthusiasm. You know, I feel very lucky to be in this game of direct to consumer where somebody orders online. Listen, I don’t know about you Rory, but I’m doing stuff around my house now that I didn’t think I would ever do. Like again, maybe which is, you know, landscaping my entire house. Not that I’m bored, but I just like, you know, I’ve got some extra time. I’m doing some stuff around the house. I would say if you’ve thought about building a DTC direct to consumer e-commerce, this is the time is now, you know, this, this Corona virus coven 19 has, I believe is going to leave a generational Dennis and, and I think it’s gonna be positive. RS: (40:21) I do, but I believe that we are going to be more grateful when we do get to spend time with people that is going to be more quality time. But I also believe on the flip side of that, people are going to be doing more of their own stuff, buying and securing, procuring their things. We’ve already seen this as an immediate pop in direct to consumer and just online search in general across everything. I’ve got friends in different, you know, spaces online. All their searches are up. I think people, this, this has given people the ability to have a little bit of empowerment and say, Hey, maybe this is something I can do myself now and, or, or by myself and have shipped to me. So, yeah, I don’t, you know, I’m a, I’m a small business too, so I still, for me, I want to support small business as much as possible, but I also believe that we’re living in we’re going to come out of this with a little bit different behavioral change then when we came into it with, and a lot of that is do I need to walk into a store? RS: (41:21) Do I need to have a sales person in my home? I mean, there’s just a, it’s a, it’s a real interesting time we’re living in now. So I think the you know, with enthusiasm for me and, and the type of business that ran, love it, but it’s still yet to be seen. I believe the behavioral changes is going to be here to last. I don’t believe this is a, you know, something that we forget very soon. So, RV: (41:44) Yeah. Well, RS: (41:45) If we ever get out of quarantine, if we ever get, I’m in my garage right now. I mean, this is where I’m doing all my stuff is in my garage, so, but I like it. RV: (41:55) I love it. I love it. Well doing business from home, it’s it’s, it’s I think it’s a trend that, you know, clearly was a trend that was happening. I think this has accelerated it. It’s only accelerated it. And given that that’s the case, the insight and the wisdom and the experience that you have just so generously shared with us is, is truly priceless. I think that understanding these basic concepts can literally be worth millions of dollars. They have been to us just understanding intent based search and you know, where is demand and getting in front of it and hypothesizing with some basic ratios and then testing and optimizing like this is, it’s, it’s interesting to see at your scale that, that that’s how you get there. It’s this, it’s the same process. So brother just thank you so much and we wish you the best. I know, you know, some, some of us will get a chance to meet you at one of our brand builders group events in person when we resume our in person events, maybe virtually for the time being. So all the best man. RS: (43:02) Yeah. Thank you. Really appreciate it. Thanks.

Ep 57: Dominating the Customer Service Vertical with John DiJulius | Recap Episode

RV: (00:00) Hey brand builder, welcome to the special recap edition of the influential personal brand podcast. John DiJulius is somebody that I love that I trust, that I know that I have watched build an amazing business. And there’s people who have very public reputations, right? And some of our clients, some of our friends have very public figures, very high profiles. And you know, there’s something to be said about that, right? That’s very valuable. But I think what’s even more valuable is the private reputation of, of what do people say about someone behind their back. What do people say when nobody is around, you know, and it’s just the one on one conversations and everybody that I know that knows John de Julius fellow speakers industry, you know, Bureau’s agents, his customers, his team, they all say amazing things about him. And I love that. I love that about him because that is what reputation I think is, is really, really all about. RV: (01:05) So, you know, first and foremost, I just wanted to say that and make sure that, you know, and if you’re, you know, if you’re looking to improve your customer experience in any way, man, he’s, he is one of the guys. There’s a, you know, one of the, one of the people, there’s, there’s a handful of people who do that really well. But he’s, he’s certainly the top or one of the top. So so I thought it was cool to get a little behind the scenes look at how he became that way. And, and these were my three biggest takeaways two of which he didn’t even say. So one of which he did say, but two of them that he did not even really talk about. So my number one takeaway from John D Julius is practice what you preach, practice what you preach. RV: (01:54) See one of the things that I think is most compelling about him and it’s most amazing about him, it’s also something that a J and I aspire to and have always aspired to, is this idea that we’re not teaching, we’re not teaching people ideas that we’ve learned as much as we’re teaching people principles that we practice. We’re not teaching people ideas that we’ve learned. We’re teaching people principles that we practice. We’re teaching people to do the things that we actually do. Right. And I think that’s why in the personal brand community, brand builders group has grown so fast because so many of the people who advise brands haven’t actually built one that for themselves. And that’s not a, I’m not, that’s not a strike necessarily against them. I think it’s, it’s hard. It’s extremely hard to teach people how to do something and do it yourself at the same time. RV: (02:56) Like it’s extremely difficult. And, and so I think, you know, in many ways it is, it’s, it’s, it’s okay and it’s right for an agency to go, well, don’t look at me, look at my clients. But I think what John has done, which is unique and this is something that we aspire to, is to actually, in addition to teaching people to do it, to, to do it and to continue doing it ourselves because it also keeps you relevant, right? Like the fact that you are building a company yourself gives you ideas and lessons and struggles and stories and pain that you’re experiencing every day that you pull into your personal brand. I think where the risk of becoming irrelevant happens is where it’s like, okay, I’m teaching all the stuff that I used to do or that used to work, but because I’m not actively in it anymore [inaudible] nobody, nobody knows, including me, nobody, nobody knows if these things actually work. RV: (03:56) So [inaudible] I love that about him and that is something that we, you know, always aspire to bring to you. And, and everybody that we bring on our show, we look at them in some way. They’re a practitioner of, of what they’re teaching. And that’s, you know, if you, if you want a little interview tip about how I do the interviews is I’m always asking myself, what does this person, I don’t even really care about what the person teaches. I really ask, what does this person actually do in their real life that I want to learn? I want to understand the behind the scenes truth, not of what they teach or how they present themselves, but of the things that I look at their life. And I go, man, I really admire this specific piece of, of their life. And I think I think it was Mark Twain who said, every man is my superior in some way. RV: (04:54) And so I’m always, I’m not asking myself ever, can I learn from this person about anybody, about every single person I meet? I’m never asking myself can I learn something from this person. I’m always asking myself, what can I learn from this person? And there are people who I think I have despicable personal track records or polarized opposite philosophies on things that I have that I still go, Oh, I can learn a lot about something from this person. To me it’s not, it’s not an all or none, but anyways, I say all that to say, practice what you preach and maybe a better way of saying this is preach what you practice. That’s probably that, that’s, that’s actually as I’m talking this out, that’s what the big, the big idea is, is preach what you practice, teach what you do and then you will know there’s always substance and support and evidence and and data and real experience behind what you’re doing and I think John does that as good as anyone preach what you practice. RV: (06:04) The second thing is, I mean, gosh, I’ve heard John say this a hundred times. It’s like one of his signature things is making price irrelevant, but specifically the thing that he said in this interview, which I’ve never heard him clarify or it never sunk in with me until just now was he said, making price irrelevant. Does it mean you can double your fees and not lose your customers. So he’s not saying, Oh, you can just charge whatever you want. What he’s saying is you’re so good and your, your, your prices are fair enough for what people are getting that even if they are premium prices, your customers never stop to check what your competitors are charging. So be so good that your competitors never stopped to check. Well who your competitors are like they never stopped to to ask that could someone else because you’re servicing them so well. RV: (07:03) You’re over-delivering, you’re, you’re exceeding their expectations, you’re giving them what you said and more and, and that’s, it’s been, it’s hard to do that. It’s hard to do that. Like one of the reasons that we have gotten into the agency side of the business at PR, at brand builders group and started helping people build websites and build funnels and write copies and do video editing and manage their social media is because we have found it so incredibly difficult to find reliable vendors and agencies who will over deliver. And I’ll tell you now that we’re in the business, it’s really hard. Like it’s really hard. It’s a thin margin business. Yeah, people have high expectations and you know, if they want to spend the least amount of money and get the best product, it’s, it’s just like the nature of it is really, really challenging, but you have to aspire and push and, and, and even if you can’t do it on day one, you want to always be going, how can we make price irrelevant? RV: (08:02) How can we over deliver so that our customers never even stopped to go, ‘You know, I wonder if somebody else could do this better. I wonder if someone else could do this cheaper. I wonder if someone else could do this faster.’ That’s making price irrelevant. And really what it’s like making competitors irrelevant and it’s just keeping people locked in. So you’ve got to be that good. You have to be that good and always be, be striving in that direction. So that’s super, I think powerful and just a good reinforcement. The third takeaway for me from John is also something he did not say explicitly. And the way I’m going to summarize this as this follows one message, multiple modality modalities, one message, multiple modalities. Yeah. John has one expertise, one focus, customer experience that his entire career is built upon as an entrepreneur and the spas that he runs and owns and operates. RV: (09:08) It’s about customer experience. And then you know, as a personal brand, as a speaker, author, influencer, whatever term you want to use, it’s all about customer experience. It’s one message. And yet he has built this multimillion dollar business based upon multiple modalities, right? So he’s doing consulting, he’s doing keynote speaking. He is also has his own conference that people are buying tickets to come to. And then he has, you know, the customer experience executive Academy. So he’s got these four different like verticals, if you will, but all on the same, all on the same message, in the same market. It’s just, it’s a great example of what we call the services spectrum. And those of you that are members of ours, you know that we, when we talk about, I’m like phase three and phase four, we look at the services spectrum, which is exactly that. RV: (10:07) It’s, it’s one message, one market, multiple modalities. And that is what I think John has done really well. It’s going, I’m providing the same information but in multiple mediums and our event, you know, our, we have an event specifically captivating content where we talk about this, where we help somebody create their body of work for their, for their next book or their next course or their next thing. And it’s all the same thing. It is, you know, the way we design our content both internally at brand builders group as we teach personal brands to build and monetize their personal brand. And as the Rory Vaden personal brand, which is all about helping people, helping leaders overcome procrastination and move people to action. Those are, you know, how I designed my personal content is all around this thing we call the modular content method. And when you build it out this way, the book is, the co is a video course. RV: (11:09) It is a two day event. It can’t, it’s a half day training. It’s a keynote, it’s a coaching curriculum. It’s, it’s, you know, it’s a consulting program and you just build a body of work, a body of knowledge that then gets subdivided and broken a ProCon apart into a Ted talk, a keynote, a half day training, a full day training, a two day training, a public event, a coach, a six month coaching, yeah. Program. And it’s organizing your content. It’s one message, one market, multiple modalities. And John is just a really great example of doing that. It’s not creating a different product for a different business model for every different market. It’s kind of dominating one vertical and then servicing them and multiple, which is, you know, a simple idea. It’s just vertical integration. But it’s something that I think most personal brands don’t do very well. RV: (12:00) And I think we’re quick to launch different types of business models that serve different audiences instead of going, how can I serve this one audience fully? Which is a lot of what we [inaudible], you know, we talk about here and every, you know, you hear the guests come on and talk about that so consistently. Cause it’s like that is the discipline and that is what works. And that’s part of why we bring you all these different guests from different backgrounds is because you can see how these people have built, you know, high six-figure, multi seven-figure. Occasionally we get the eight-figure entrepreneurs on here that have just built [inaudible] deeply in one vertical. And that’s what we want you to do, is to go, you know, who can I serve most powerfully? Who can I help in the most profound [inaudible] in meaningful and impactful way? Because that is like the foundation and the heart of a mission driven messenger, which is who we’re honored to serve. And so I’m honored that you’re here. Thanks for tuning in. We’ll catch you next time on the influential personal brand.

Ep 56: Dominating the Customer Service Vertical with John DiJulius

Speaker 1: (00:06) 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@brandbuildersgroupdotcomslashsummitcallbrandbuildersgroup.com slash summit call. Hope to talk to you soon on with the show. RV: (01:03) It is my honor and distinct pleasure and privilege to introduce you to somebody who is really interesting. I admire this guy as a mentor. Also value his friendship. But in addition to all that, this is someone that I have actually learned so much from in terms of how to run a great business. So John DiJulius is his name and it’s hard to refer. It’s hard for me to refer anyone else in the customer service or customer experience space that’s like, this is the man that I learned it from that I follow. He’s written all the books on the subject. Several books customer service customers, [inaudible] secret service. What’s the secret customer service rep revolution. He ha hosts every year. The customer service revolution conference. I’ve spoken there twice. AGA has spoken there. And John is just an amazing guy who has totally dominated a vertical, is a real expert. And I asked him to just come and share the true story of how he built his personal brand in such a dedicated, consistent way. And so here he is. John de Julius, welcome to the show. JD: (02:15) Thanks Rory. It is such an honor to be here and the best and only piece that I care about in that introduction is that our friendship, that that means the world to me. RV: (02:25) Yeah. I you really do live that, you know, brother and the relationships and, and I, I’ve always admired that about you and I’ve looked up to you and I think, you know, when I think about your business you’re a great example of one of the things that we talk about brand builders group. It’s just, you know, breaking through the wall by becoming known for one thing and in your space it’s just like you’re one of only a few people really that are even at that top tier, top caliber. Tell us a little bit about how you got started. You know, cause you used to be a truly like a, you know, tell us about spas and then tell us like, how did you, how did you move into where you were teaching customer service? JD: (03:12) Yeah. you know, all on accident. I wish I could tell you I had this great plan. And and you know, I like sharing this even with kids, you know, kids be in, you know, college age, just cause, you know, I feel like kids of today have so much pressure on them to figure out what they have to be. And I think it’s crazy for a 21 year old nobody wants to do for the next you know, 50 years. And so when I graduated from college, first I was a horrible student all the way through, really bad, you know flunked out of college, but eventually went back and finished. I was working at UPS and I was driving a truck. And only because it was a significantly better pay than anything I can get back in the late eighties. JD: (04:01) I was making $45,000 as a driver, which might’ve been wet, might as well been $1 million to me. And, and coming out with the marketing degree, it was like 18 to 22,000. So my plan was, you know, I always wanted to be an entrepreneur and, and I was gonna own my own business, so I wanted to put as much weight as I can for the next five years as a ups driver, then quit and open my, and I couldn’t think of anything what that would look like. There was only, you know, two things. I was passionate about owning my own business and sports. And so the only thing I could put two and two together was I was gonna open a sporting goods store. Like that’s really, you know, the only logic I can come up with. And thank God I didn’t end up doing that, but meet my future wife. JD: (04:49) We get married, she’s just fantastic hairdresser. And you know, the, the challenge with, you know, in the late eighties, early nineties was the hair salons and, and, and hair dressers weren’t thought of as a professional place. A lot of great hairdressers quit. While they loved it, they had to get real jobs, right? Jobs that paid vacation and benefits and 401ks and all that training. And so, you know, good hairdressers should be equipment or friends and at work would be quitting. And so, you know, that’s where we got the idea, let’s, let’s open a salon at, offered something different to customers. Unlike not, we didn’t want to be known as the best customer service hair salon. We want to be, you know, anywhere, you know, you went that day paled in comparison, right? I’m kind of like, you know, when you take your kids to Disney you know, every business you visit after that is just disappointing because Disney just blew your mind in the way they take care of it. JD: (05:52) So I’m taking care of employees and then give back to the community, and so my initial plan was if if that took off, I get quit this golden handcuff job that I had at UPS and start my own business. Well, you know, as, as luck, fate would have it, we we almost went out of business the first four weeks. It was my wife and three of her closest friends from cosmetology school you know, for several years earlier. And you know, our, our, our business plan was really a sophisticated back then. It was made of a three or four cocktail napkins. That’s when we’d be out at a bar and talking about opening this Lao, we’d say, Oh yeah, write that down. And we lived there. I have them framed you know, treat customers really well and treat employees really well. JD: (06:42) But we were passionate about it, but the, the three others didn’t want anything to do with that. So it was back to my wife. We’re open a month. I really thought we were going to go out of business, but that’s where I jumped in at full time, a little bit more kicking and screaming cause I didn’t want to be in the industry initially. And then between her artistic and my customer service we just started blowing the doors off. And so we had a 900 square foot salon and, , and it knocked down you know, the doors and expanded at 1200 to 2000. And then we vacated, built, you know, one of the largest in the countries. And then you know, they have open evermore, so 27 years later still have them. But it’s, it’s not what I do. I, you know, I, I don’t have anything to do with it. [inaudible] RV: (07:27) How many are there? How many, how many? You still have JD: (07:31) Four. RV: (07:31) Okay. so you still have these and then at some point you, you go, Kay, I want to move and I want to start teaching this. Did somebody ask you or did you say, was it like a definitive, like I want to go teach customer experience? JD: (07:47) I wish I could say, you know, Rory, I had this plan and it just like going into the salon and distribute, kicking and screaming. I didn’t want to, at first I was so glad I did because we saw the opportunity. You know, while there was a salon at every corner, none of them operated at a high level. Today is a different story. But back then you know, professionalism, all that customer service. So, so we started growing really, really fast and making a lot of noise in Cleveland and they’re all in Cleveland and in the salon industry. So now it’s the mid nineties. We’ve opened up three, four years and people in Cleveland and the salon industry would ask if I’d speak because they were like, you know, what do you guys do here? You’re growing really fast. Your reputation’s X off for customer service. So at first you know, it probably like you, like a lot of people, a total accident. JD: (08:37) I was flattered, you know, that someone wanted to hear my story when I did it locally. I was like, this is cool cause that now I can promote the salons to the local chamber of commerce or whoever at the time when it was asking me. And then what happened was it never thought it would, you know, materialize to you know, two or three people, two or three people come up to me after speak and say, you know, you do this for companies. And I kind of like yeah, what do you charge and I’m like, know charge for what? Like, you know, I didn’t know that there was, you know, you could do this all, you know, on the fly, I’m like, shoot $150. And, you know, they were, you know, shocked. But that, that’s all I’m like, Oh God, I should have asked her more. JD: (09:21) So, but every time I spoke, two or three leads came from that. And so it, you know, and so I was a salon owner that, that spoke a little bit. And then in 2002 I wrote my first book, Secret Service. So you know, again, I know you, you went through this when I started getting a bigger conventions, I was a, the breakout speaker in the basement. They had the map and a flashlight defined and that’s where I belonged. But yeah, the world beaters, you know, Michael Gerber, Tom Peters, Jim Gilmore on main stage, and I watched them, I’d be like, Holy cow. So I’d wait in line without all the 500 attendees when I finally get up there and say, hi, I’m John, I’m a speaker too, and get it. And you know, they, they, they were all so generous and slow down and they gave me their number and, or you know, it may have email, but they said, you know, Hey, I, I’d be happy to help you. JD: (10:17) I couldn’t believe how generous they were. So, you know, I reach out, they said, here’s what you gotta do. You know how to create a website, you got to get demo, you got to write a book. And you know, so I, I listened to them and you know, so my first book comes out and a 2002 secret service and overnight basically that in the next 12 months it took me from a salon and it spoke to a speaker that owned salons. And then since you know, 2003 I haven’t been active in the salons. And then, you know, the salon, the speaking consulting business just exploded from that. RV: (10:53) So then So that’s interesting. So you started as a speaker. Now today, your primary business model, like if you have to go like w you, you know, you’ve got, you’ve got customer service revolution, the conference, you’ve got keynote fees, you’ve got book sales, you’ve got consulting, you’ve got other trainers. What is like, where does most of the revenue come from today? JD: (11:19) Those streams, number one, probably at 50, a little bit more than 50 is customer service consulting. You know, working with Starbucks and Lexus and Pricewaterhouse and you know, all those great companies, the Chick-Filet A’s of the world. And, and we have our consultants and that’s just ongoing in there every month, every quarter. The, the second revenue stream is, you know, keynotes and I primarily do that, but that’s where we get our leads from for our consulting. And then, you know, the, the customer service revolution conference. And then we also have the customer experience executive Academy, which is something that people come to Cleveland for a, for a whole year. They come four times a year. And, and you know, it’s like a, a master’s degree in customer experience. RV: (12:08) Interesting. So they come for four times a year. Like, like how long do they come? JD: (12:13) Three days. January, April, July, October. So next week literally is to 20, 20 class start. So it’s sold out. And so now the, you know, if you want to take the next one, you have to wait until January 20, 21, because you can’t come midstream. It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, it builds a pipe. We do have an online version, but, but the, the physical class, it’s, you know, 20 to 25 of the tops chief experience officers from all over. You know, they get together and learn our methodology. RV: (12:46) Man. So that is awesome. So then so

Ep 49: Orchestrating a Career Pivot by Owning The New You with Donald Miller | Recap Episode

RV: (00:00)
Welcome to the special recap edition of the influential personal brand. Such an honor to be breaking down our interview with Donald Miller. And I just have to say up front, like we have learned so much from Donald. We love StoryBrand, we love the SB7 framework. And we love this dude. Like he is such a quality guy and, and just, just frigging smart, smart, smart, smart. So if you haven’t listened to the interview, go listen to the interview, read the StoryBrand book, like do the StoryBrand stuff. They are amazing. And I thought some of the things that he shared on this interview, because we’ve interviewed him before and we know him so well, it was actually quite unique, not things from his book and necessarily and, and not things that I, I had heard him say, you know, so many times.

AJ: (00:46)
Yeah, and I would just say this was actually one of my favorite interviews on all of our episodes so far. And I think the reason why is it wasn’t about his book, it wasn’t about the framework and it wasn’t about the business. It was about his personal brand and his take on what it takes to make it and the benefits and the risks and the pains and the rewards along the process. That’s why I loved it.

RV: (01:11)
Well, and he made a big jump, and you may not all realize the massive shift in personal brand. Not many people at his level make such a dramatic shift,

AJ: (01:21)
Which is funny because I was a Donald Miller follower way before Rory, because I was, I was hooked on blue light jazz, which is an amazing book. Oh my God. Well, it had to be over a decade ago. Well, it had to be before that. It was before we were together, the app out a long time ago. Make me feel so old right now. So yeah, no, I love that. I love this. I love this interview and I’m looking at my notes right now because I actually took a lot of notes and I think this is really amazing. I think the biggest thing, or not the biggest thing, but my first thing I would say is this concept of what does it take to reinvent yourself at that level when you have become so well known for one thing and his case, it was Christian memoirs, how do you go from that to being a branding business strategist,

RV: (02:15)
Millions of copies, millions of copies he had.

AJ: (02:17)
So it’s a big job. That’s a very big jump to go from this very niche Christian market to, no, I’m now I’m a I business branding expert. How do you do that and how does that whole process work? And here’s what I love because I’m not one who likes to ease into things. So I think maybe this resonated with me because this is very much my style. It’s like, Hey, if you’re going to do it, you got to do it. He goes, here’s the thing, and I, this is my paraphrasing of what he said, but this is how I interpreted it anyway. He said, people are going to really, it’s going to take time for people to relearn the new view, right? They’re going to have to reassociate themselves with the new new you. And so why would you confuse them in the process by trying to blend your past in your future for any amount of time? And that just made a lot of sense to me. It’s like, well, yeah, it’s like, in I past I was a sales and leadership consultant. Why would I confuse my audience for months or years? Trying to ease them away from this and into my future, which is a personal branding strategist. Why would I do that? It confuses me. It confuses them. It dilutes the message 100%. That made a lot of sense to me. You’re looking at me like deer in headlights glazed over.

RV: (03:42)
No, I’m just, I’m not, I just, I’m this listening to you.

AJ: (03:46)
And I just thought that’s so true. And it’s actually what we did, not necessarily by choice, but it went from one thing to the next overnight. Yeah. It was very stark. It was very stark. And we’ve seen the benefits of how helpful that was to be still black and white. So stark. So from this to this. There’s nothing in the middle.

RV: (04:06)
And to this day, people call us, Hey, can you come do sales training? Nope. Sorry. Not interested. And we’re really not genuinely not interested

AJ: (04:16)
And it’s actually very liberating to be able to go, that’s not who I am anymore.

RV: (04:21)
That’s a great word. It is. It is liberating. Yeah.

AJ: (04:25)
And the freedom that it like it gives me inside to go, I don’t do that anymore. And I just, the clearness and the clarity of Nope, I’m making a pivot. That’s not what I do and I’m not going to confuse anyone in the process including myself.

RV: (04:42)
So to tie that together with, with one of my top things, which is, is very much connected to that, as he said, be known for one thing and be disciplined to only do that thing. And so what, what clicked for me was we talk about, you know, like a large percentage of the clients that we work with at brand builders group I would say are, are novice to intermediate. They’re kind of earlier in their journey and we take them through phase one, which is brand identification, but we’re getting, we get all these calls from like pretty well known celebrity type influencers that have been in the industry a long time because they’re not really in phase one. They’re, they’re really in, you know, we have four phases. They’re really in phase five they’re circling back around, they’re in reinvention and they’re having to get clear on what is my one thing for the next chapter.

RV: (05:30)
Like I’ve been this one thing and now I’m not. I know I’m not that thing anymore. I need help getting clear on what my, my next one thing is going to be. And it’s, it’s funny to see, like you can tell from the people who are more intermediate in their journey. You go, wow, this person really has a chance to succeed because they’re disciplined about sticking to one thing. And then the experienced people, you go, wow, they’re going to break through to even bigger level because they’re still, they’re still committed to that process of just, I am going to be known for this and I’m going to make sure that I shaped the world’s perception of, of, of me in this way. So that was a big one. That was a big one for me, which also tied to something that I know you want to talk about with the

AJ: (06:20)
Oh yeah, yeah. This was God. Can you believe it was four years crazy? Same election year. Oh Lord. Watch out. So yeah, so I thought this was really interesting and a lot of the concept was it’s not, it’s not that the best message wins always and it’s really not. Sometimes it’s the easiest message, the clearest message. But I loved the way he said it. It’s, it’s the message that’s easiest to memorize. And I was like, yeah. And here’s the analogy, and it doesn’t matter if your left, your right blue, red, whatever. The point is, there’s a really great analogy if you look back at the last election, really in the primaries before election Republican thing. But what was the message of Jeb Bush?

RV: (07:12)
I have no idea. I have no idea. And you know, and this is the United States election. We’re talking about the primaries from 2016 in the U S

AJ: (07:21)
Yeah. So, but what was Donald Trump’s campaign? Again? Nobody can deny that. They don’t know what that is. It’s great to get that thing. And I think that’s, it’s not that it was the best per se, but it was the clearest, it was the easiest to memorize, but more importantly, it was the one that you heard over and over and over and over and over and over and over. It was the one that was the most repeated. He had it on hats. He had it on tee shirts, he had it on bumper stickers. He had it all over Twitter. Of course, you know that he had it all over his messaging. It was everywhere. And that is what we have to do and is like, it doesn’t matter how good it is if no one hears it. And part of that is your job to share it. And that kind of ties in with a little bit of what I kind of, I’ve really picked up and it’s a little bit of a nuance here. And he said that he works with a ton of artists and one of the [inaudible]

RV: (08:18)
Hold on, hold on, hold on. Say that one. Cause you’re going to go into the promotion was

AJ: (08:21)
No, Oh no, I’m tagging this in. I know what I’m gonna say. And I thought this was really good because as he’s talking about, you’ve got to have the clearest message, the one that’s easiest to memorize, but you also gotta be the one who’s willing to repeat it the most. And he said, and there’s a real challenge with that with a lot of people in our space and to, what I was gonna say with artists is that he works with a lot of artists. And he said, and you know it’s not the most talented that always gets to be the most famous either. That’s not always what happens. He said the ones that are willing to work and hustle and promote and brand and get themselves out there and do it over and over and over again. As soon as he was talking, I was like, that’s bright. Kissell that’s one of my clients and his interview is in the influential personal brand summit. Yeah, dude. That dude was hustling from age 16 on, he was a salesman. He was selling his music and he said the real challenge though with a lot of artists types, this also could be entrepreneurs who are waiting around on investors or whatever. This is me. I struggle with what you’re about to say. You know what I’m going to say? Talked about it before because you never put someone on the air.

AJ: (09:32)
Sardine. Yes, but now he said it’s like, here’s the thing, there’s a real arrogance to people who are not willing to promote themselves and does that and it’s, it’s counterculture. Cause really you think, Oh, the people who are promoting themselves are all self-promotional and it’s me, me, me. And he said, no, there’s an equal amount of arrogance to the person who goes, you know what? I’m so good. I deserve to be found. My business idea is so good. I deserve that investment money. You know, I’m so talented, I shouldn’t have to work this hard. I should have somebody catering to me. I should have some body getting my stuff out there. I’ve got the talent.

RV: (10:09)
Yeah. It’s a form of indulgence and arrogance. People should find me and I don’t want to do the work of promoting.

AJ: (10:16)
Yeah. And I thought, let me know. And again, regardless of your political affiliation, I loved his, his kind of tying that into this you know, Jeb Bush, Trump thing. He goes, man, Trump was hustling and we all remember the message regardless of how you feel about the outcome. We all were member the message. And I just thought that was really good. In terms of are you willing to promote yourself? Are you willing to share your message and do it again? And again, and again, I loved it. I thought it was really solid.

RV: (10:46)
Yeah. I had never heard Donald say so directly as he did in the interview that that branding and marketing is an exercise in memorization. Like I, you know, I’ve heard him talk about clarity and being clear. I’ve, I’ve heard him talk about how to find, you know, like the way to tell your story of course, but just saying it’s really an exercise in saying the same thing over and over and over and over again. It’s not just clarity, it’s repetitiveness, it’s memorization. So that really hit me hard. It also is when we teach about titles, we have this thing called the five title tests and we talk about why most titles are terrible. And some of the mistakes that we’ve made around titles, one of the title tests is called the memorability test. And that half the battle is just being remembered. And if you look at take the stairs to take the stairs book, that book fails four of our five title tests, but it is a 1000% on the memorability test because people remember take the stairs, they see the escalator in the stairs and just they remembered it.

RV: (11:54)
And so that has always been such a mainstay part of you know, my personal brand journey. And that was just by dumb luck. But yeah, so I think memorization, that was a huge, huge takeaway for me is as well. My third takeaway, I’m just going to jump to it and then I’ll let you do yours, is they, he said this, he said, if your goal is to help someone make money, you will never have to worry about job security. What a great truth as so simple and profound that if you are just trying to help people make money, then you’re, you’ll never have to worry about a job. Like if you get good at helping other people succeed. And this it really, I think part of why it hit me as I’ve been working on our our workbook for our, we have phase three, we have our phase three event is called high traffic strategies and, and one of the, it’s like a lot of the more advanced strategy traffic strategies and one of them is affiliate marketing.

RV: (12:55)
And there’s this part in the phase three workbook where I say, look, you know that you’re doing affiliate marketing, right? When you wake up and you’re consumed with, how do I make my affiliates a whole bunch of massive passive mailbox money? I want it to be massive passive mailbox money. When you’re have that mindset, you’re going to attract a lot of affiliates and you’re going to make them a lot of money. And guess what happens is a byproduct. Like you’re probably gonna make some money out of that too. So if your affiliates are making money, you’re making, you’re making money, right? But it’s kind of like, how can I make this easy for them? How can I make this a no brainer for them and for their audience? Like what actually moves the needle and could make them real money. And when you lend yourself in a direction like that, not just with affiliate marketing mode, anything, right?

RV: (13:46)
You could be just an employee, an employee. I don’t, I don’t mean to say just an employee. I mean, you could be an employee, you could be a business owner, you could be a personal brand, you could be a corporate executive. You, you can be anybody in the world seeking to add value to anybody else. That’s a great life. And you’re gonna, you’re gonna make money. That’s the point. And I, I just, I love that. I’d never heard him say that again so clearly. Yeah. And there’s no just in front of anything. Yeah. I didn’t mean I’ve learned that hard lesson because I write with just, and almost every sentence, like just a minute or justice. I’m like, somebody wants to tell me there’s never a, just before anything. It is what it is. Thank you for calling me out and for making me feel completely inadequate in front of everybody. I know this is going to be as long as the interview I recap is a third one I really love. He said, and I think this is really relevant, what I’m going to bring this back. I said it’s so many of our clients and brand builders group are in that stage of making a pivot, right?

AJ: (14:52)
They were this and now they’re wanting to do this and it doesn’t matter if they’re going like so many of our people have these huge online social followings and they’ve been this huge digital influencer, but now it’s like they want to take that and they actually want to do something and make a more solidified message and write a book or be a speaker or create a product or they want to solidify all this stuff they’ve been saying into one unified message. And it goes from that or it goes from the person who just exited their business or just exited a job and now they want to work on this next phase of their life. Or we have actually a ton of people who have been a full time mommy’s, which is a full time job. So five jobs, like I used to say, say, Oh mom.

AJ: (15:33)
I’m like, no. Like what? What? Yeah, you’re at home, but you’re not studying there. You’re, you’re on the, I’m exhausted the days I’m home with my kids anyways, but they go from like, they’ve been a full time mom and he’s two now. They’re doing a side hustle. And it’s like, how do I make this pivot? And I just, I love this. He said, anytime you make a pivot, any, any process of reinvention is going to come with a fair share of haters. And it’s just to be expected. And he said, but you will lose some, but you will gain more. I said, you will lose some in this pivot. People are going to be mad that you’re doing this. They’re going to hate on you for doing this because they haven’t, or they can’t, or they think they can’t. He said, you’re gonna have some haters.

AJ: (16:19)
And he gave this really unique example that was really personal as something that happened online with him here recently when he left this, you know, Christian focused wife see this business strategy life. And and he, he gave this biblical reference of, you know, as we all know, Jesus, you know, one of the parables in the Bible is the story of turning the other cheek. And there was something in the way that he said that, that just immediately I made me remember the sermon at church. Here in Nashville. We go to cross point major props to Kevin queen. He did this amazing sermon series. Maybe it was last year, I don’t remember, but I remember the message and actually, no, it wasn’t. It was no, it was Chris Nichols. It was Chris Nichols cause it was a Martin Luther King holiday. So the whole point of this is he’s a, people get this whole parable of turn the other cheek, very confused in the Bible. He said, because back in Jewish times and in a way for you to turn your cheek this way, and I may get the directions mixed up, not my strong suit, but you would have to have smacked somebody with the left hand

RV: (17:42)
If somebody was going to smack you in those times. They would have backhanded you so they would, they would have hit you up from your right to left. But anyways, turn the other cheek meant punch me directly. No,

AJ: (17:55)
There was a whole nother connotation to that. And how I remember it, he said there was one thing because in order to do that is that you wouldn’t have been able to like do like this. You would have had to do it like this. He said an if to go with your left hand. He said that was a hand in which everyone wiped with because I didn’t have toilet paper back then and he said there was a, there was a sign of like just the absolute disgrace and nobody would have done that. And he said, so to turn the other cheek says, no, you’re going to have to use your other hand and you’re going to have to treat me with the equal respect that I deserve. And he said there was a connotation in the, not just the direction but the actual hand that you were using and this idea of turning the other cheek. It isn’t a fight back, but it also isn’t a cower down and just be belittled. It’s not that you just stay in there and take it and you don’t stand up for yourself, but you do it in a way that has kindness. You do it in a way that says, I’m not going to stand for this, but I’m also not going to attack you back.

RV: (18:52)
No, it was different. It was an act of defiance. It wasn’t an act of acquiescing. It’s not retaliating, but it’s saying, if you’re going to hit me, hit me like a man. Like I’m not beneath you. If you’re gonna hit me, you’re gonna hit me like you’re eating.

AJ: (19:06)
That’s right. And I thought that was really good because the way that he shared their response on social media just immediately made me think about that. He said, it’s not that you don’t respond, it’s just you don’t respond with the equal intensity and hatred in what you’re receiving. And he said, no, at some point, feel free to take it down. He said, but it’s not that you just let the haters go and you don’t, you don’t argue it. And he said, you’ll just let it go and ignore it. And he said, Ben, at the same time, you don’t have to do it with the intensity and hatred that’s out there. He said, because it’s just part of life. You’re going to have haters. People aren’t gonna like you. They’re not going to like what you do and what you have to say. And if you work this and you’re going do this, people are going to not like that.

AJ: (19:47)
Or they’re going to be jealous or confused or whatever they are. And that’s just part of it. But those people will fall off and you will gain more. You will take who the key part of who you had and you will add on to it. So don’t be afraid to make that pivot. Don’t be afraid to make the change and don’t, don’t be afraid of the haters. Just stand your ground and be rooted in your message. Which is why something that we promote at brand builders all the time is it’s like you have to have a message that you are willing to go to the grave with and that no one can tarnish that message because of what they think. It’s your truth. It has to be your truth. And if it is, then let the haters come. Yup.

RV: (20:30)
Standard ground be or be clear, be direct, be disciplined repeated often. Just powerful, powerful stuff on, on like the way of being, of being a, of a, of a big, a big personal brand. So thank you for that Donald Miller. Totally inspired us and hopefully inspired all of you. Thank you for being here. We’ll catch you next time on the influential personal brand podcast.