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Ep 311: The Fastest Way to Become a Paid Professional Speaker with Kindra Hall | Recap Episode

RV (00:07):
Hey brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for taking the time to check out this interview as always, it’s our honor to provide it to you for free and wanted to let you know there’s no big sales pitch or anything coming at the end. However, if you are someone who is looking to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and get to know you a little bit and hear about some of your dreams and visions and share with you a little bit about what we’re up to to see if we might be a fit. So if you’re interested in a free strategy call with someone from our team, we would love to hear from you. You can do that at brand builders, group.com/pod call brand builders, group.com/pod call. We hope to talk to you soon.
RV (00:54):
What is the fastest way to become a paid professional speaker? That was a big part of the topic of conversation. Of course, in this recent interview that I did with Kindra hall, who is a friend, a colleague, someone who I have now known for years, and it’s been delightful to see how her speaking career has taken shape. I met her when she first started out and I just love, I love seeing people who are winning and who set that, set a goal and create a vision and go out and knock it down. And so it’s great to reconnect with her and and bring some of this. Some of these highlights in education to you and not everybody wants to be a paid professional speaker. Now, if you are in, if you are one of our brand builders group messengers, if you’re in one or one of our clients, you know that we talk about presentations a lot, because we believe that presentations are both your best first product and your best first piece of marketing collateral.
RV (01:57):
We use presentations and speaking as the number one way to drive leads into your business. Now that doesn’t mean you have to be paid to speak. And it also doesn’t mean even that you have to do it on stages or even in person. A lot of times it happened through webinars and podcasts and social media lives and, you know, just little YouTube videos and things like that. But we believe in speaking, but this episode specific to the business of paid professional speaking and that is really a, a very specific thing. And so in our world, one of our, one of our courses is called full keynote calendar, which is where we teach the entire business. It’s the, the whole two day event. Or if you do it as a course, you know, or you do it at a private strategy session with us is completely dedicated specifically to the business of paid speaking, which is what the topic of this conversation was with Kindra.
RV (02:55):
So I wanna share with you a couple of my highlights and takeaways from Kindra and also share, you know, just add in some of our other tips that, that we know of from the, from just from spending a career doing this. So, first of all, one of the things that she said, which is incredible advice, it is completely true. I totally agree. And if you hang out around like the national speakers association or other kind of paid professional speakers a lot or aspiring speakers, you will hear this. This is, this is sort of age old wisdom. And in the, when it comes to the business of speaking, there may not be a better piece of tactical advice than this, which is speak at associations. That is where you start, you start your speaking, your paid professional speaking career, and, and unpaid, you can also do this for, for free speaking engagements for lead gen, right?
RV (03:50):
But you start by speaking at paid, sorry, not that start by speaking at associations. If you are wanting to build a career as a paid professional speaker, why? Okay. Because a few reasons. So first of all, think about it. Associations bring people together who all work for different companies. So associations exist entirely for the purpose of having meetings. That is, that is why they exist. It is, it is for the purpose of best practices and, and networking and creating community among a profession. So associations exist like solely to have meetings, to create encounters with people who are from different companies, but are inside of the same industry. That is why they exist. Now, anytime you have meetings, you need speakers. So that’s the second reason why is in order to incentivize these people to come together collectively, one of the best ways to do that is to provide education.
RV (05:00):
That is a VI that will, will benefit all of them, which means they need speakers. They need educators. They need people who can add content to their program, to their lineup, to create and enhance the value of that meeting, which is inherent and, and necessary and essential in getting people to even show up for the meeting in the first place. So they are desperate for speakers. They’re dependent on speakers. That’s very different from a company, right? Like a company, people are all there gathered every day in the same place. Anyways, they may or may not have a meeting. And if they’re having a rough year financially, one of the first things they probably cut is a meeting, but associations can’t cut the meeting like that is the association is getting people together and they gotta have speakers. So that’s the second reason why they are great.
RV (05:46):
The third reason why associations are great and why you should target speaking at associations first is because they typically don’t have a lot of money. . Now I know that might seem weird. You might say, okay, well, why would I go speak at associations if they don’t have any money? Well, first of all, they do have money, but they, they, they don’t always have a lot of money and you may not get your, you know, the fee that you wanna have one day. But the reason why it’s a good thing is it’s less competitive. That’s why it’s less competitive to get that gig. Not every association is, is non-competitive. Some of them are very, very competitive and some associations have lots of money. Like big associations can pay lots of big money, but generally speaking their nonprofit organizations. So they typically don’t, you know, have oodles and oodles of cash, just flowing around to, you know, dish out to, to, to pay some past president or, you know, some, some celebrity to come and speak.
RV (06:47):
So, so they, they run on a tighter budget, which means that it’s less competitive. Why? Because the higher paid speakers who are typically more established who are world renowned, who are the whatever bestselling authors, the, the, the, the, the people with lots of notoriety or followers or high profile executives, et cetera, they’re competing for higher paying gigs here at associations. Like a lot of times, you know, like these days, honestly, for me, I don’t speak at that many associations. Why, because my fee is outside the range of what most associations can pay. And I am getting as many speaking gigs as I desire to have. So you know, that’s an example. You’re not gonna compete against experienced speakers as much in the association market. So it’s a great place to get started. If you’re trying to speak at, you know, apple or Oracle or, or, you know, the million million dollar round table.
RV (07:45):
Now that’s a, that’s technically an association. That’s a huge one. It’s one of the most illustrious and famous in the world. That happens to be one I am speaking at, in a couple weeks, as a matter of fact in Australia. So there are, there are really, really huge ones that are very, very competitive, but, but the higher end ones have more competition. So when you’re just getting started, it’s good to go in places where you can get momentum and win. So that’s the third great reason to speak at associations. The fourth, great reason to speak at associations is because you are in front of a lot of potential prospects. You’re in front of a lot of potential prospects. I never get more spinoff opportunities than when I speak in front of an association. Why? Because every person in the audience is from a different company.
RV (08:35):
They’re from a different, you know, location, they’re from a different organization, which means all of them are potential people who could hire you compared to when you speak at a company, right? All of those employees work for the same company. So it’s less likely that somebody there is gonna say, Hey, come let me hire you to speak for this other company, because they all work at the same company. Now we’ll talk about that in a second and how to, how to make that work for you really well. But those are four great reasons to speak at associations. And then the fifth reason to speak at associations is because they are easy to find because they’re easy to find. You can just go search association in any industry. And it, it, they’re not that hard to find now narrowing them down and figuring out which ones are, are, are the, you know, the best ones that takes some time.
RV (09:29):
In fact, one of the benefits that we provide to our members and our monthly community at all levels, it’s just inside of our portal. We have a proprietary software that scrapes the web. It’s a, it’s a search tool that scrapes like 60 different search engines. And it’s, it’s set up to have all of these advanced ion logic searches to help you find associations. So if you’re one of our clients make sure you go and, and use that tool in the portal, because it does a lot of that legwork for you, like in a, in a, literally in a split second, but in general, associations are easy, easy to find. All you have to do is ask people, you know, are you a part of any associations and people who are professionals will say, yeah, I mean, this association, that association, you can Google it.
RV (10:12):
There’s directories of them. Like they’re, they’re, they’re trying to be found. So they’re easier to be found. Whereas some companies don’t try to you know, make that much of a public, a public play in terms of who they are. So those are great reasons why to speak at associations five great ones. Okay. So that is where you wanna start. It is the fastest way to get traction. Now you might have to speak for free early on and in general, that’s something we believe in when you’re starting out is you speak for free until you can get until you generate enough demand in the marketplace to speak for a fee. But often you don’t have to cuz the other thing is, even though associations don’t have a lot of money, they have a budget for speakers because they’re essential to the organization.
RV (10:59):
So many of them do have money and they’re willing to, to, you know, spend it with you cuz this is why it exists. So they’re just really, really the great place to start for all of those reasons. And you know, I think that’s what you wanna look at. So it’s interesting to hear Kindra talk about that. Something that we have done, we do, we teach you know, our paying clients and then obviously talking about here, like just for free, it’s a great idea to, to do that. Alright. The second tip, the second takeaway. This was less of something that Kindra said and more of something that something she said reminded me of this is that you wanna learn to work in both horizontals and verticals. You need to learn to work in both horizontals and verticals. And this applies to any profession.
RV (11:49):
Okay. Any, any, any, I would say B to B business to business, any B to B type of environment. You need to learn to work horizontals and verticals. What are horizontals and verticals? Okay. Horizontals applies to the divisions inside of one company and verticals applies to the other companies that are in the same industry. So let me give you an example. Horizontals is if, if I get booked to speak at a huge organization like I’ll give you a good example. Mass mutual was one of, one of our, one of our best speaking clients of all time. I got booked to speak at this mass mutual organization for a gentleman named Michael book, who I became friends with and was someone we profiled in procrastinating on purpose, my second book. And so we spoke for his team inside of mass mutual, but that was just one team inside of mass mutual.
RV (12:49):
So then what we did and, and when I say we, this was really like AJ and, and, and her team. This is part, part of the brilliance of what makes AJ an amazing salesperson is this kind of thing is she then went horizontal and said, what are all the other divisions that mass mutual has? And big companies have many divisions, right? Like they might have, there’s an HR, there’s an HR annual conference. There’s a customer service, there’s a sales conference, there’s a leadership, you know, executive meeting. There might be incentive trips, like big companies have not just one meeting a year. They have lots and lots of meetings across lots of departments or divisions. That’s working horizontally. It’s, it’s going okay. I spoke at this one event for this organization. Let me, let me work laterally in what other departments or divisions does this company have meetings.
RV (13:40):
And rather than, you know, you, you, you do internet research to start all of this, but once you get a little bit of momentum, even, even like two or three customers, you can immediately start doing this and you’ll get way more traction faster because they’re all gonna know each other. And they’re gonna say, oh, Rory did a great job for our HR conference. You guys should look at ’em for your customer service meeting. Boom. Now, now I’m in, right. They, they, even if they don’t know each other inside of a large company, it’s so much credibility to, to be in that organization. Like I, I spoke for Google here, not that long ago. And we’re not proactively hunting keynotes right now. We’re just working inbound. But if we got back into that mode, Google would be one of the, a great example where we would go, oh my gosh, they, they got 25 different divisions probably that have meetings every year.
RV (14:28):
And you could make a, a year or maybe a career just speak into that one company. I had a good friend named Paul early in in my career. This guy spoke at, at just Aflac meetings. Like he, he did so many, he was a mentor and a friend and loved, loved this guy, but he made a great living and he just like dominated Aflac. And he spoke for all these different Aflac. He did other stuff too, but it was like, that was sort of his bread and butter and, and they all knew him. They all got to know him. That’s working horizontally now working vertically. He is working inside of an industry. So that would be like, okay, let’s say I spoke at mass mutual. Then I would say, okay, that’s a financial institution. Then I would say, what other financial institutions could I speak at?
RV (15:11):
Right. Northwestern mutual. You know, I could go to speak to all, all the different insurance companies, because I’m gonna get to know that industry very well. And even though they don’t know the other people at other companies often they do though, because they meet ’em at associations. But even if, if they don’t, they’ll recognize the companies and go, oh yeah, those are reputable companies. They have a lot of the same issues that we have that must mean, you know, something about this industry. And so you get momentum by working horizontally inside of an organization or working verticals inside of an industry. So those are some really tactical, strategic, like important and you know, valuable tips that that will make an immediate difference in terms of your ability to get your speaking career off the ground. Right? So I want you to pay attention to those.
RV (16:03):
And then the third tip, and this definitely was a takeaway from Kindra which, which is more related to her most recent book, which is, you know, she’s sort of an expert on storytelling. And so she teaches how to tell stories and use stories for different things. But what I loved about her second book is it talks about the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and this applies to everybody, but it certainly applies if you’re trying to become a paid professional speaker is you have to ask yourself, what is the story? I’m telling myself about myself. If I’m saying, oh no, one’s ever gonna hire me. I don’t have enough credentials. I don’t have enough experience. I’m not famous enough. You know, I’m not funny. I’m not good. You know, I’m not, I don’t have charisma or like, whatever those stories are. And I loved, I loved kind of the, the method she laid out as this little three step method.
RV (17:01):
And she said, first of all, just ask yourself, is that story serving you? Like, does, does that story serve you to tell yourself that if it doesn’t serve, you drop it, stop saying it, stop propagating. It, just drop it, right? Like you don’t have to like try to lie to yourself. You just drop it and go that story’s not serving me. I’m just gonna let it go. And then step two, your job is to choose better stories. So you tell yourself you know, look, you could say no one will hire me because I’m inexperienced. You also could easily tell yourself an authentic truth, which is the inverse of that to say people are gonna hire me because I’m a fresh face, which is leg legitimately true. Like many of our longest standing speaking clients are always bringing things to me and they’re going like, Hey, do you have any fresh faces?
RV (17:52):
Like, because you know, some of us speakers been around for a while. And so they, they get to kind of, you know, people have seen ’em and they’re like, we’re looking for some fresh faces or media will say, we’re looking for some fresh faces. You know, success magazine asked me that. And I remember candy. Valentino was one of our brand builders group clients that I introduced her to them and they love her. Right. And that she was just in their magazine and like she’s doing other stuff with them and they, they, they nominated her for this award and just like really awesome. Because they’re looking for fresh faces and you know, that’s one part about being great inside of brand builders is we see a lot of the fresh faces we’re trying to, we’re trying to help. ’em Right. We’re trying to make, ’em become the household name.
RV (18:28):
So your job is to choose better stories. And then you need to, you need to reinstall and repeat the new story, right? So drop the old story, choose a new story and then reinforce or repeat that new story over and over and over. And you say, you know what, I’m a deal, right? That was something that I used to tell, tell people, and, and it is like, Hey, it’s a deal. I still feel that way about myself. I’m going, Hey, in a few years, my speaking fee is going to be outrageous. Like this is the best time ever to hire Rory Vaden. Because my fee is only going up, like I’m on sale. Like I, this is the best time. And that is true. Like if you’re listening to this podcast, if you’re one of our members, if you’re doing the things we’re teaching you, your fee is going up for certain, like, there is no question about whether or not the stuff we teach works.
RV (19:21):
It a hundred percent works if you follow it, it is G like it it’s guaranteed to work. The question is how fast and just, you know, when and how fast, but you you’re on sale, right? Like I’m on sale. I am, I am, I am the cheapest. It is the cheapest to work with me right now, either to hire me as a speaker or to hire me as a personal strategist. Neither of those things I would say are cheap. Right? they’re definitely lots, lots more than they used to cost when I first started, but I’m still on sale. Like it will never be more affordable to work with me than it is right now. And to work with our company, right. We do price increases over time cuz we get better at what we do. There’s more demand. And, and the price goes up, but so you need to remind yourself of that too.
RV (20:04):
Like just inflation alone, the price is going up. So it’s the best time ever to hire you. You are on sale right now. So those are a couple ideas to help you. Those of you that are interested in a paid professional speaking career, but they also apply, even if you’re not interested in professional speaking, but just going out and speaking to drive more leads to your business and to your personal brand, which is a huge part of what our audience does. And it’ll change your business, getting out there and being in front of people and speaking and just giving them a sample of what you do, it’ll change your business. So that’s what I got for you today. Thanks for being here on the influential, personal brand recap, share this episode. Would you please like who do you know that you, you think, Hey, they should be a speaker or they wanna wanna be a speaker, share this episode with them and be like, Hey, you, you need to tune into this cuz I think it’ll help ’em so as always, we love you. We’ll catch you next time on the influential personal brand podcast.

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RV (00:07):
Hey brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for taking the time to check out this interview as always it’s our honor to provide it to you for free and wanted to let you know the there’s no big sales pitch or anything coming at the end. However, if you are someone who is looking to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and get to know you a little bit and hear about some of your dreams and visions and share with you a little bit about what we’re up to to see if we might be a fit. So if you’re interested in a free strategy call with someone from Martin team, we would love to hear from you. You can do that at brand builders, group.com/pod call brand builders, group.com/pod call. We hope to talk to you soon.
RV (00:55):
Anytime I come across someone who has sold their company for a B billion or has made a billion, it grabs my attention. I have to admit not because I want anything from them. It’s just like at that scale, you’re talking about somebody who has done something real, real big, and that is what Lisa BIU did as the co-founder of quest nutrition with her husband, Tom Bilyeu, who I have recently become, I guess, friends, acquaintances of, of ours through a various number of different things, not the least of which is Lisa’s recent book launch, which is what we were just talking about here and had a chance to interview her on and, and to give you access to her, which is pretty awesome. It’s not, not easy to get access, you know, sometimes to, to people that are, are high profile like that.
RV (01:48):
And I, I loved it. I have loved my interactions with Lisa and Tom. There haven’t been a ton of ’em, you know, little messages here and there. That was probably the longest dedicated conversation. I had with Lisa about her content specifically, and, and I, I had never really heard the full story from her. I had interviewed Tom years ago on my old podcast that we sold a few years back, right. When they were started, but never really have had a, a focus conversation like that, like just did with Lisa and man. She’s awesome. Like I started had fallen her on social. I mean, she’s spicy, she’s spicy. And I, I, anyways, I just think she’s super cool. I hope that you enjoyed it. If you didn’t listen to it, go listen to the interview again. It’s just like, it’s not every day that you can just access the mind of somebody who’s operating on that scale.
RV (02:48):
And we come across a fair number of ’em actually at brand builders group. We’ve we’ve had a few of ’em on our podcast. Jamie cur Lima is another friend that comes to mind. We interviewed her, she sold her company for a billion dollars to L’Oreal. And that was also amazing story. And actually Lisa and Jamie are friends. So you know, small circles, it’s a small world especially I think the, the more successful you become the smaller the world, the, the world even gets. So I wanna share with you as part of this recap, these three of my takeaways from this specific conversation that I just had with Lisa, which are things that I’ve, I’ve never have never hit me in, in things that I’ve heard her say or, or learned from her before. And so I’m excited to share those, share those with you now.
RV (03:36):
And the first one is so simple, but this is so important and so powerful. And so edifying to what we teach all of our members. And, and it’s, it’s such a small thing that you probably missed it in the conversation, but that’s why I want to come back right now. I wanna highlight it with a big mental high. I wanna make this a salient point to go. Don’t miss this. This is huge. It has huge implications. It’s so small though. It’s so easy to step over this and you’re gonna, you’re gonna think I’m silly, cuz I’m making such a big deal out of this, but I’m telling you, this is one of those things that you will here. You won’t notice it. And yet this one little tiny tidbit can change everything for you. And here’s what she said. She said, when we first launched our product, which was quest these health bars, she said, we sent them to people for free.
RV (04:41):
We sent the, we sent influencers free product and it was fascinating to me because those of you that are in our, you know, monthly members of ours or you do private brand strategy sessions with us, you know how we’re saying all the time, the fastest way to take someone from a complete stranger to lifelong fan is a one hour presentation. And so what you have to do is you have to go speak for free. And this is what I did. I spoke 304 times, 304 times. I spoke for free before I ever got paid 300, four times. And we used this analogy in inside of our, our train inside of our course, like our official coursework. And we talk about chicken on the chicken, on a stick, right? Because when you go through the food court, they give you a piece of chicken on a stick, which why do they do that?
RV (05:34):
Because if you’ve never heard of me, you’re not familiar with me. If you don’t know my product and as it relates to your personal brand, if I don’t know who you are, if I’ve never seen you, I, I Don recognize you, letting me sample you for free is the fastest way to make me a believer. And so you have to give your product away for free. Like you have to give your service away for free. And it’s like, when people first start they’re, they’re so nervous about like, no, I, I, I have to sell this to everybody. And it’s like, when you’re just beginning, it should be the opposite. It’s like, you’re just begging people and you’re giving it away for free. And my, of Damon, John I heard Damon John, one time, we shared a stage at an event about a year ago.
RV (06:23):
And, and Damon was telling this story about how he got LL cool J to wear FUBU. And he just like gave it to him and then took a picture of him wearing it. And it was like such a pivotable point in their journey. And like, you have to, you have to give away your service for free. The newer you are. And the lesser known you are, the more that this matters. And it’s so simple, right? And we overlook it. But when you don’t get paid in money, you get paid in testimonials, you get paid in feedback, you get paid in credibility, you get paid. And you know, sort of like this, these early test pilots that you can, you can adapt and, and, and modify your offering and you get paid in referrals. So if you’re just starting out, you might have to flip this switch and, and, and go from like, how do I sell everybody to instead going, how can I give this away for free?
RV (07:17):
And just get a lot of people, just get a lot of people hooked on this. And, and that applies whether you’re selling, you know, FUBU as a clothing line. And you’re Damon John, whether you’re Jamie Kern, Leman, you’re selling makeup, whether you are Lisa BIU and Tom BIU and you’re selling candy bars, or whether you’re a personal brand, trying to get someone to book you for a speech or hire you for coaching. This is our whole model at brand builders group. Like you’re you’re, you don’t pay anything for this podcast. It’s extremely difficult to get someone like Lisa bill, you to, to, to spend this time. Like we spend a lot of money and a lot of energy and a lot of resources trying to bring people like this to you for, and then on social media, it’s free. And then we have all these free trainings.
RV (08:03):
And what does all of our free content do? It drives you to request a free call with our team. We do the first coaching call for free. Why? Because we know that if you don’t know us, you’re not familiar with us. We don’t have millions of followers, but if you, if you hang around long in a, after you go, you know what? I actually like what these people are about. I think I am gonna talk to them. I think I am going to request a free call, which by the way, [email protected] slash podcast. You can request your free call and we do the first free call. We do the first free coaching, first coaching call with everybody for free so that they can get a sense of what it means to work with us and how we can add value. You gotta do the same thing.
RV (08:45):
People gotta sample you. They gotta, they gotta taste your product. They gotta know who you are. They gotta have an experience with you. And so that happens with content marketing. It happens, you know, with speaking, I mean, I don’t speak for free very often anymore these days, but I’ve been doing it for 20 years. But in the beginning, that was all we did. That’s how we built our, our whole first company was an eight figure business. Our whole model was that we sent people out and they would go speak for free in, in offices, like to small groups of five people, people, three people sometimes, and they would speak for free for a chance to earn trust. And, and I just don’t miss that, right? Like, especially if you’re just starting out the earlier you are in your process, the more this matters or the earlier you are in a new product or a new revenue stream or a new business venture, this really, really, really matters.
RV (09:38):
The second big takeaway for me. And this came up several times in the con conversation in several different ways. And you know, I’ve kind of heard of this idea before, but not so sharp and not so keen as when Lisa was talking about this, you could hear, you could hear that this was like a part of their philosophy. Like this is a part of their culture and it hit me cuz I was like, wow, that’s, you know, this is important. I know it’s important, but I’ve never quite, you know, captured it like this. What she’s saying, you know, is, is she said in her words, when she was talking about their nutrition bar, she was saying, how do you make something yummy for people to eat? That actually happens to be good for them. right. Like that was how she said, how do you make something yummy for people to eat?
RV (10:24):
Which actually is good for them. And then later when she was talking about how they started with the, the, this, how they started impact theory and this whole new, this whole new brand and this whole new company, it was basically about this idea of how do we create enter? How do we create content that’s impactful and inspiring and yet make it so entertaining that people want to watch it? What, what a great as what a great it’s kind of like going, how do I create the, the cure for cancer that tastes like chocolate? How, how do I you know, we, we kind of try to do this with take the stairs with my first book which still to this day, of course I speak a lot on and that’s the message of self-discipline and we go, how do we make self-discipline more, more palatable and, and easier, you know, more digestible and, and, and easier and fun even for people to embrace.
RV (11:27):
And that’s really important because there is, there’s the truth, like there’s principles that change lives and there’s truths that make a difference for people. But then you have to package it in a way that makes it digestible. You have to, you have to solve the real problem. Right. And a lot of times that requires work or at least discipline, or at least the unfamiliar, right. To change your life, you have to do something different. But the, the part that’s so inspiring here is in their, in their sense, it was, it, it wasn’t just the physical packaging, but it, it, it was the physical packaging. And then also the taste right. Of the actual bar. So it’s like, how do you take your business? I, and your personal brand, which solves a problem in the world and how do you put it inside a rapper, right?
RV (12:18):
Like it might be medicine. This, this makes me think of, you know, how do you get a dog to eat medicine? You wrap it in peanut butter, right? And so the dog eats the peanut butter and they take the medicine. Or, or you, you do the, you could do this, you do the same thing with kids, right? Like you mix the medicine up inside of something else. So you gotta have the, the transformation in people’s lives. That’s your content like that’s the inside of the book. But then the, the title of the book has to be enticing and your whole branding, your whole positioning. I remember talking to Louis, how one time about photography? You know, somebody asked him this question. I, I was actually, I, I, I wasn’t a private conversation. I was in a room and he was, he was speaking. And somebody asked him, what’s the most IM like, what’s the most important part of building a personal brand.
RV (13:06):
And he said photography. And that blew me away. I was like, what? That’s, that’s crazy. Like what a weird answer. And, and he talks about it because he think the photography you know, the way that he thinks about it is it is, it, it, it captures this energy, the, the, the image portrays emotion and energy, which is what communicates, what the brand is all about. And I was like, wow, that’s deep , but it’s, it’s this same, it’s this same mindset of going, like, it’s not just CRE ying something that transforms lives. It’s creating something that transforms lives and then packaging it in a way that everybody wants it. That’s genius. So simple. So genius profound though. And so that’s a good question for you, right? Is you go, how do you make your content, you know, life changing, but also entertaining? How, how do you make it truth, but also have a scintillating title?
RV (14:02):
How, how do you, how do you make it to where it’s, it’s, it’s what they need, but it’s also what they want. And to me, this is sort of the difference between you know, for those of you that are brand builders in finding your brand DNA, where we do talk about finding your uniqueness. We refer to all of that as internal Mar moniker, internal messaging, internal alignment, your uniqueness is internal. But then in phase two, we talk about marketing, which is external, and that’s the marriage of this, right? It’s, it’s sort of like to use the quest nutrition bar since that’s the topic here is going there is there’s the guts of the bar, but then it’s wrapped in chocolate and then it’s wrapped in beautiful packaging. And that’s what you wanna do for your message for your, you know, for whatever your personal brand is like for the, for the most part, success is fundamental.
RV (14:52):
Success is built on fundamental truth. And so you’re finding a way that’s, that’s the art of marketing is wrapping fundamental truths in a new and exciting and enticing way. So I love that. And then the third thing, the third thing was when Lisa said, even to this day, she’s the chief creative officer at impact theory and hearing her talk about her passion for storytelling and movie making and, and video editing hit me hard. And I, and I think I’ve missed the boat here. I’m, I’m quite confident that I have the least not I’m nowhere near the way that sh she thinks in her mind is, you know, like when we create content, I’m going, how do we create useful content? But she is going, how do we edit this in a way to where it changes people’s emotion. If you go back and listen to the recording, she said, what I love about V is you have the ability to change a person’s emotion with video, right?
RV (15:59):
So she’s not just, she’s not just asking the question, what’s the most efficient way to transfer an idea. She’s also saying, how do I transform their emotion? And that is like, almost like science and art, right? It’s going, I wanna, you know, I’m, they’re in the business of, of helping people with great ideas, but it’s not so much that the idea itself is maybe, you know, original or, you know, groundbreaking, at least it’s not, it’s not like they’re sharing things that nobody else has ever said, but they’re doing it a in a way that is in literally inspiring. It moves people emotionally. And, and so, you know, this is, this is where the connection point is for us, where in our world class presentation, craft training. So we’ve got, you know, all together inside a brand builders group, we have 14 different two day trainings, 14 different two day experiences.
RV (16:54):
One of ’em is called world class presentation craft, where we talk about how do you construct the perfect keynote? And one of the, you know, the, the central premise of, of that whole training is that you have to learn to move the audience emotionally. You have to move them emotionally. There’s these things that you, there’s so many things you can do with a speech from the way it is structured to the way that the slides are laid out, to the way you use the stage, to the way you tell the stories, to the way you develop the characters, to the way you, you write jokes and add punchlines to the way that you use your voice, your body, your facial expressions, there’s all of these things. And we go through all of these different techniques. And the reason all of them are there is they are arrows in your quiver.
RV (17:36):
And the objective them is to move people emotionally. But the thing that has never quite clicked in my head like it did listening to Lisa was going, oh, that same level of meticulous crafting that I would do with the speech that I’ve been doing my whole life with speaking is the same amount of crafting and effort and energy that needs to go into video editing. And I’m going, yeah, I I’ve been missed the boat there, right? Like, to me, I’m just going, how do I get someone to like, edit this video and like put a bumper on it and, and some music underneath it, but not thinking about it as like, what is the real art here of what is the emotion we’re trying to create? And how do we use imagery and text? And what’s being said, and voiceover and transitions and all of the things, and you can just tell that how, how much she has crafted and, and how much she, you know, they think their, their team and in their brain.
RV (18:38):
And, and that they’re, they’re doing the art of not just communicating information, but doing it in an inspiring, inspiring way to get more views sure. Of, of course, to get more subscribers. Yes, of course. But it’s deeper than that. It’s to actually make an impact. The reason you have to work so hard at crafting your message is because the more well crafted it is the, the better packaged it is, the more entertaining it is. The more likely it is to get through the, the more likely you are to break through somebody’s defense mechanisms in their walls and these barriers that they put up, and the more likely you’re able to impact them. So, and that takes work and energy and, and craft. It’s not just, you know, throwing something up. It’s, it’s, it’s actually thinking about it and constructing it with, as a gift for the person who’s receiving it, not just spewing out like what’s on your mind, but actually reverse engineering, the construction of your message so much to the extent that it is a gift for the other person on the other end, who’s receiving it.
RV (19:53):
That’s beautiful. That is art. That is personal branding at its finest, far above vanity, far above likes and far above just information. It’s truly being centered on the mission of serving people and changing people’s lives. So I hope that you see a rising commitment from our team and a desire at least to be creating content that is moving and useful and powerful and practical and applicable for you in your journey here on this podcast, every single week. I’d love it. If you shared this episode or any of our episodes with someone who you think needs to see it that you’re checking out our free trainings that we have at brand builders group to.com and then you just stay plugged in until you’re ready to request a free call. And then hopefully our team will get the privilege of talking to [email protected] slash podcast, and then that we get a chance to help you start to craft your personal brand journey. Thanks for being here. We love you. We’re grateful for you. We’ll catch you next time on the influential personal brand podcast.

Ep 263: How To Grow a Million Dollar Membership Site With YouTube with Jonny May

AJV (00:02):
Hey everybody. This is AJ Vaden. One of the co-founders and CEO at brand builders group. Welcome to another episode of the influential personal brand. And today I’m so excited. And also just quite honestly, I’m so honored to have a personal friend on this show. So I’m gonna introduce Jonny in just a second, and really today is kind of one of those episodes that if you are building a digital business of any kind, if you are trying to grow your audience trying to scale your course, create online content. This is an episode you do not want to miss. So do not fast forward. This do not get off or early, make sure you listen to the whole thing. Take notes, listen to the recap episode and then go follow Jonny because this is exactly the episode that was built for you.
AJV (00:54):
So this is very, a very specific invitation of bringing Jonny onto the show to share some really cool expertise. So let me formally introduce you to my good for and Johnny May. So Jonny is an internationally acclaimed pianist. He is a pianist educator, founder of piano with johnny.com, which you should go check out which is an online piano course platform with more than 10,000 active monthly members across the world. He’s also a viral YouTuber and his videos have earned more than 70 million views with hundreds and hundreds of thousands of followers. He’s also one of the youngest or the youngest ever a pianist to perform at the Disneyland main street as a main street pianist. He’s also just an awesome human being with a heart and just all things good. So welcome to the show, Jonny.
JM (01:49):
Wow, AJ, thank you so much. That was an amazing introduction. Thank
AJV (01:52):
You. I should be like a professional introducer one day. You’re good
JM (01:57):
At it. Yeah, you should start
AJV (01:58):
Business, future business. So welcome. I’m so excited to have you on, because I know that so many of listeners are trying to build their digital platform. They’re trying to grow memberships courses increase their recognition online. And that is something that you have done extraordinarily well and really a short amount of time. And so we ask this question to everyone who comes onto this show and what we really wanna is how did you get to where you are? And so personally knowing a little bit of your background, what I really want everyone to hear from you is how did you go from being a professional musician to a membership site that has 10,000 monthly members, and you have grown a multi seven figure your business in a really short amount of time by leveraging your skillset as a musician to teach others how to do the same thing. So we wanna know how’d you do it.
JM (02:57):
Thank you so much. Well, you did a great job again leading into this. And so my story is so I was a professional musician. I still play professionally, but I did basically, I giggled for a living starting at age at age 18. I got, well, actually before that I was gigging at 16, like little like local restaurants and bars. And then I landed the Disneyland main street ragtime gig. I did that for nine years. I was hired at age 18 and love a gig. That’s a long time, long time. Yeah. Nine years. Yeah. Right. It’s like a little career. And I just like hustled as a musician and I, I remember playing seven nights so a week and I was playing restaurants and hotels and weddings and private parties and just bust, you know, really working hard.
JM (03:46):
And, and I, it was a lot of fun. I loved it. And basically around this time, it was 2012. My brother-in-law, who’s also a professional musician. He had just graduated college, graduated college, and we were driving home from a, a date night, a double date with my sister. He was dating my sister and then my, my girlfriend girlfriend at the time who was later become my wife. And he said, Hey, why don’t we record some of your piano lessons and put ’em online and sell them. And it was like, at the time, not a lot of people were doing this right. 2012 to was one guy who was doing it piano with Willie. So we said, well, we’ll call it piano with Johnny. And so we that’s awesome. Yeah. It was like, okay, you know, whatever cool. So he kind of put things together.
JM (04:33):
He arranged the session and we hired a friend of ours. You know, he set up the cameras, we went to my brother-in-law’s old college, his almond modern, and we recorded three courses and we had no idea what we were doing. I had never filmed like that. So I literally, AJ, I could not talk on the camera. Like I could not just talk the way I’m talking to you right now. I was stumbling over my words. I didn’t know what to say. My brother-in-law had to write out cue cards. And I was like reading these cue cards. It’s like super obvious. But it was just fun. It was like this cool idea. And I was teaching a bunch of private lessons at the time and it was like, Hey, why don’t, why don’t we try this? You know, it was just an experiment.
JM (05:14):
And so we made these three courses. We were like, okay, we gotta make a website. So we went on WordPress and like built basically like kind of pieced it together and hired a couple guys, but it looked horrible. Like it was like tons of texts. And we had, we had these three courses and we made a boogie woogie course, a blues course and a rag time course. And we started a YouTube channel called piano with Johnny. And I started putting up like performances of me, just me playing. And then little, we put up like a free version of the courses, like a 10 minute version. And we, some, we sold a course. We’re like, we’re like, oh my gosh, this is amazing. How much was it for 40? I think it was 40. And I was like, woo, woo, big money. You know, being a musician.
JM (05:59):
And, you know, I was all excited cuz it was like passive a little bit passive. And so we just kind of kept selling courses and my brother-in-law would call me and say, Hey, let’s make another course. And we ended up filming in his apartment. He had like a one bedroom apartment with a grand piano in his living room. And I actually have a, a picture. Maybe I can share it with you, but like I’m teaching at this piano. And he’s like, he’s got the two dining room, table chairs with the tripod legs. And he’s like, looking over me, it’s super awkward, but we had so much fun and we just went for it. It was like, let’s do it. And so we just kept making more courses. And I remember there was a big moment for me. It went from, okay, this is just a fun, little hobby to like, oh my gosh, like this could be a real business. And it was in the summer of 2014, we did our summer special and we made $4,000 that month. And I was like, what? This is, this is awesome. You know, that was a big deal for a musician be making that kind of money. And I just, oh,
AJV (07:00):
On that note, I think this is really important. I think you shared this like your best year ever as a full-time professional musician you made how much?
JM (07:09):
Oh my gosh. I think my best year and I, I took every single gig. Every single, I think I made $60,000
AJV (07:18):
Thousand in a month,
JM (07:20):
4,000 a month. Big deal. That was a big deal. I mean, that was like almost what I was making anyway. And it was a big deal and, and I, but I just remember something went off. I was like, oh, this, this could be a business. This isn’t just like another gig, another side thing. And so I started taking it more seriously. And then basically a few things happened that I lost a couple gigs at Disneyland. They like closed a showdown and they like changed the performers and I suddenly didn’t like, didn’t have work. And I had to like go scramble for work. And I kind of realized, you know, I had been at Disneyland for nine years and like, I, I really did not want to be playing piano at a theme park, you know, in 30 years. And so I had a, a lot of deep interest, a lot of prayer, as you know, I’m a believer and really turned to God said, you know, what, what do you want me to do with my life?
JM (08:06):
And I loved teaching and I had this opportunity and then we had the summer sale and long conversations with my wife and just like, what’s your purpose? And I, I was like, you know, I really, I really think I wanna be an entrepreneur. And it was like, okay, like, wait you’re gig musician. No, no, I I’m still a gig musician, but I wanna do, I wanna be an entrepreneur as well. And so I kind of fused together. These two things that I had always loved as a little side note when I was 16. No, no, no. I was younger. I was 13. I started an eBay business selling pirate at software. And I did that for a couple years. I made like $10,000. So like ripped off soft software. I was like copying these CDRs. I like Napster
AJV (08:52):
The days of Napster.
JM (08:53):
Yeah. It was the days of Napsters downloading music and copying games and making labels. And it was so illegal and this guy emailed me one day and he was like, I’m turning you in. This is like, he, I, he bought one of the products and I was, I emailed him back and I was like, dude, I’m only, I’m only 14 years old, man. I’m so sorry. You know, I’ll never do this again. I was like apologizing and my parents had no idea that I was like running this like illegal eBay business from like my bedroom. But I was always an entrepreneur. I always like liked creating things. And so, you know, as a, you know, I left Disneyland when I was 27 and I had this, like this desire to start a business, this like unfulfilled potential. And I was like, I think this is the time to do it.
JM (09:35):
And so I struck out from Disneyland, we sold our condo. And oh, so this was a big part of my journey as I went back to school to learn business, cuz I was like, I don’t know anything about business, you know? And so I went back to college. This was in 2014 and I got my business degree while running piano with Johnny. And it was really, really hard to do by it. I, I did it. And then we just kept making courses and kept learning from our audience you know, growing, using YouTube. And we launched a membership that was a really big deal for us is we were selling courses up till 2015. And we were like always like running sales and Hey, you know, buy the blues course, whatever. And we were like, Hey, why don’t we just have a membership? And just people can pay for access. That was one of the smartest decisions. And I think when we did that, we had like a hundred members right off the
AJV (10:23):
Bat. Oh my gosh. OK. So I wanna pause right here. Cause I think there’s three things about your story so far that I think are pretty significant to people who are listening to this. Is that one you really built your business leveraging YouTube.
JM (10:37):
Yes, absolutely.
AJV (10:38):
Okay. So, so let’s pause and like talk about that for a few minutes of like, what were some of the keys of building your YouTube following? And like even today, now it’s like YouTube is still like your primary social media platform, right? It’s like, that’s where your go to is. So for those of us who are going, okay, I really want to leverage video and YouTube and I wanna use that to build my business. Like how do you do it? Like, what are some of those insider tips and secrets of growing and utilizing YouTube?
JM (11:07):
Yeah. I mean, you’re so insightful. And this is when people ask me, like, how did you do it? How did you do it? I say YouTube. It is YouTube. Like literally like to your point from 2012 to 2019, we did zero paid ads, zero paid ads. It was all on YouTube. And we, I think we grew in 2019, I mean the business was almost a seven figure business by that point. So YouTube is huge. I don’t think people realize if you get a video that goes viral, it’s the traffic is incredible. So here’s what I’ll first start off by saying is we did not do YouTube very well when we started, when we started well we did some things well, so as a performer that drove a lot of the traffic, but we did not do a good job making content for YouTube.
JM (11:52):
So what we were doing, we had these courses and then we, we would take like 10 minutes from a course and we would do like a demo version and then it would like fade out and say, Hey, you want the full course and the YouTube channel. I would say didn’t grow as quickly as it could have until several years later that we started actually making content for YouTube and making weekly content. So that’s a big, big thing is our YouTube channel did not really take off until we started making weekly content and it was for YouTube. So, okay. I’m gonna make a 10 minute video and it’s gonna feel really good for the rather than give 10 minutes of a larger course, I’m gonna make content for that audience. And I’m gonna get to know that audience really well. That was a big deal. And we started doing that much later in 2019. So
AJV (12:35):
I have a question. You said we created content for YouTube,
JM (12:40):
Correct.
AJV (12:41):
What does that look like?
JM (12:42):
So it’s, it’s knowing the YouTube audience, knowing the content that they wanna see and then creating a short video that they get to the end of the video and feels they, they have this great sense of satisfaction that they learned something. It’s I, I guess the, to me, it’s not as promotional. I think the demos were more like, Hey, it’s a little piece, but you really need to watch the course. This was like the feeling I think for the user was, wow, this is like free like, oh my gosh, this is great instruction. And it was really hard to get to that point because I was like, wait, I’m not gonna just give away my knowledge. Like, no, you have to buy the course. You know, I had that attitude like, no, I’m not gonna give and I cannot tell you how wrong I was about that. As I started giving more, I received more. And that was like so bizarre. Like I would make longer videos for YouTube and like make them really like put everything I had into these videos. And then the, the videos would do really well. And so that’s, I guess that’s what I mean is they weren’t promotional. It was like, it was, I was really actually giving for free and not, it
AJV (13:46):
Was like truly curated content on how to, right. So it wasn’t like here’s a little preview by the course. It was like, no, I’m gonna give it all to you. Here’s a, how to video on X, Y, Z.
JM (13:57):
Exactly. And then of course I would say, Hey, if you want to go deeper check out course. But I, it was like, I think a lot of it was like an attitude thing of mine. And I, I imagine that it came out also in the way I taught in those videos, you know? And then the other thing is a lot of the courses, you know, we weren’t releasing a course every week. We’d really, of course, every two months. So I was only putting out one video every two months. Oh wow. My new strategy was like, oh, I can make a 10 minute video every week. And that’s, I guess the second piece is so not only making content free content with the intention of it being free, but secondly is you have to put yourself on a schedule. And I I’ve talked to so many people who they’re like, yeah, you YouTube, I’m doing this, but you know, I’m not sure what to post and I haven’t posted a month or two. And I always say to them, like, you need to post, this is my opinion. You might disagree with it, but post every week post something. And a lot of the reason people don’t post is they’re nervous on camera, you know? And so you, but you overcome that as you post more, it’s like, well, you need to do the thing that you don’t wanna do to overcome that. And so anyway, I just made a habit of that and that’s when the channel really took off on YouTube. So consistent,
AJV (15:05):
Consistent weekly. It’s like, yeah, I would say daily, weekly, just make it like consistent. So people know when can hear from you. Right. So it’s like consistent but free curated content really to just give like, ultimately give value on how to, for YouTube. I love that. And then every single person we talk about talks about consistency. Right? I think it, I think it was Gary V maybe giving credit to the wrong person here. You said, content may be king, but consistency is queen.
JM (15:37):
Mm. Right. Absolutely.
AJV (15:38):
Content only goes so far. Cause we need to have that expectation of when are you gonna give me more? But then you mentioned something else about when a video goes viral and I know that at this point you’ve posted thousand and thousands of videos. So I’m curious to know, it’s like, do you guys have predictions and indicators of what you think will go viral? Or is it kind of like, who knows? Wait and see,
JM (16:02):
You know, it’s funny, AJ, I’ve not solved the puzzle of YouTube. I’ve been doing YouTube eight years. Right. And just tons of videos. I still, it still blows my mind. I’ll do a video on like, man, this is the video. Oh man. People are gonna love the title and the thumbnail. It’s perfect. And then it’s like, w wa you know, it’s like, and it’s so disheartening too, you know? And then, and then I’ll do a video and I’m like, Hey, like I barely like take any time. And it, it like gets hundreds of thousands of views or millions of views. And so I, you know, there, there are certain things that I do. I mean, yes, absolutely. That I’ve learned that do better, but I wouldn’t say like, well, here’s like the formula I’ve noticed. I mean, I can, I can offer your audience some tips that I’ve
AJV (16:46):
Yes, please. I’ve
JM (16:47):
Realized. So the thumbnail is huge, you know, keeping the thumbnail really simple. And in using images, I’m sure you’ve talked to your audience about this, but try using less text and images to represent whatever you’re trying to say. I try to keep the word, I do put words on my images, but I, I usually try like five words, six words, because it’s that it needs to be that guttural thing, cuz people are St scrolling and it’s the first thing they see. And then actually you shared something that was very profound with me last year and it actually helped my thumbnails. I don’t think I’ve ever shared this with you. Oh,
AJV (17:21):
I’m so in, I’m sorry. I’m trying to hear what this is.
JM (17:23):
Yeah. You, you did, you shared it with me when we were in the Florida retreat, but you said for the thumbnail, it needs to be the, I want to, right. I want to, and I was like, oh, like I never thought of it that way, but that’s true. Right. It’s the, I want, and so I started restructuring the thumbnails that way and I noticed an increase. So it needs to be that, that gut thing, I want to play jazz piano. I want to and so that’s worked well. And then there’s a lot of strategies for like the title, but short titles, not too many emoticons. I like the, the carrot at the end of the stick. Like here’s how to, you know, improvise, you know what, something with this or the top thing I do it like, it’s like, well with that thing. So creating a sense of curiosity. And then I wouldn’t say we’re the best that our thumbnail, our thumbnails don’t look amazing. They’re very simple. But I would say there is definitely a strategy behind the video itself. I can talk about too. I don’t know how deeply you want me to go.
AJV (18:21):
This is so helpful. It’s like titles, thumbnails, the video themselves, like all, whatever you have bring it on.
JM (18:26):
Well, okay. So it’s branded around me, you now with Johnny. So I’m in every video, that’s it doesn’t have to be that way, but that’s a decision we made. There’s always a keyboard because Hey, you know, we’re about the keyboard, but then we don’t do fancy backgrounds. Almost every one of our thumbnails. It’s the same angle. It’s, it’s not like we do a lot of production. One of the advantages of our production is it’s incredibly simple. So we don’t do a lot of product. And you know, we don’t have a lot of camera angles. It’s just me at the camera. I’m usually holding an object pointing to something and just trying to convey a very simple message. Then so, but this is actually in some ways, not what matters the most. Cuz people get to the content. If it’s good, they stay. If it’s bad, they go right.
JM (19:07):
And so really like those are gateways. They’re entry ways to the content. The content has to be excellent. Right. Wow. You know this right? And so we try to make 10 to 15 minute videos. Sometimes they’re 25. We just did a 27 minute video. That’s fine. We’ve done six minute videos. I think the key is teaching. What needs to be taught no more, no less. And then what I found that really works, and this is for me as a pianist is the moment people open the video, you need to show them something they really want. And in my case, it’s like, Hey, I wanna play like that. And you need to show authority. You need to show credibility. And so almost every video, I try to open with me playing something, just like freaking awesome. Right. And I wanna hook them in and then go, ah, I wanna play that.
JM (19:55):
That’s awesome. And I see a lot of YouTube YouTubers start their videos with talking. I think that’s cool. But I just think if you can establish that hook right away, that’s extremely important. And then I structure the inner, I always say, Hey, you know, do you want to learn this thing? Usually it starts with a question to engage them. And then I’ll say, and then rather than give ’em the answer, I’ll say, well, many teachers would say this or a lot of students think this, right. It’s kind of challenging in an assumption. I, again, this is a very like general way of presenting a video and then I’ll go into, but actually this is the case, but no, no can do it this way. And then I’ll say, but you need to learn this thing, right. Again, the, the carrot, right? You gotta keep them engaged and excited about.
JM (20:41):
Right. So, and then I transition to the teaching and then for my staff teaching, I try to get right to the point. I try to, you know, people don’t wanna sit there and listen 15 minutes. So it’s a weird balance of getting to the point, but like having, having more. And so this has taken a lot of time for me to learn, but in the video you always need to be like saying, well, I’m going to, I’m gonna show you this other thing, like in a little bit. Right. Or like, okay, I’ll show to put together a little bit. And so, so it’s a real art I would say to the teaching, but how
AJV (21:10):
Did you learn all of that? I know you’ve been doing it a long time, but for those people who are going what you just said could change my business. How do I learn how to do that better? Like how did you do that? Like, did you watch videos, courses, classes, trial, and error. Watch yourself. Yeah. What’d you guys do
JM (21:27):
Well, I’ve watched a lot of other guys do what I do. Like I’m very aware of the competition. I, I see what works and I try to integrate it. I’m a big Steeler steel so much like, yeah. I mean, I mean, think about it. Like I’m playing the freaking piano, like a sea. I didn’t invent a sea major chord. Like all this stuff I’m teaching like I’m regurgitating, right? Yes. I think what we need to do, this is really relevant for your audience is you need to repackage information, sorry. You know, you’re, you’re not inventing what you do. You learned it somewhere. Another thing that comes to mind is you, is it’s important to coin language. A, a lot of what I’ve done as a pianist and as a teacher is make up my own language around what I do. Because there’s certain chord progressions that there’s not a name for there’s certain scales or techniques.
JM (22:12):
And so there’s real opportunity. I think all of your listeners who, you know, maybe your field is beauty or your field is fashion or your field is, you know weightlifting or whatever. You, there are opportunities to, to sort of own a little space of that field. I mean, I’ve literally made up words for a, I made a, a scale. It was called the major blue scale. Right. It’s kind of a technical name. And I was like, it’s the gospel scale? Right? It’s the gospel scale. And literally it’s now like people search the gospel scale.
AJV (22:43):
That’s awesome.
JM (22:44):
And it was like, you know, I’ve made up, I made up a a technique called pops, Sten. It’s like a pop chord progression and an AA, which is like a boring, kind of a boring classical term. And I was like, it’s, but it’s a pop Sten, like, you know, the sentimental chord progression. Like, so my point is like, I think it’s important if you’re building a brand is to actually build language
AJV (23:05):
Absolutely.
JM (23:07):
In that space that you can kind of own, right. If you’re the first person to coin it. And I certainly wouldn’t go about just doing it, you know, willynilly or just for the sake of it, because you know, there’s a, there’s an advantage to having the language. But I think in every field, there’s what I’m trying to say is an opportunity to kind of use your own language.
AJV (23:23):
Absolutely. I love that so much. I’ve never heard you say anything like that, but I think that’s a whole point of put your uniqueness on what you do. It’s like the, so many of the things that all of us do are commoditized. And the only thing that makes us different is us.
JM (23:40):
Yeah.
AJV (23:40):
Right, right. The, the beauty of what we’re doing and what we’re talking about at brand builder’s group, and what you’re talking about is if you simply be you, what you do is unable. Cause no one else is you. Right. Right. And it’s like, the more that you can infuse you into the language, the culture, the imagery, the feel, the essence of it. No one can copy it. Right.
JM (24:01):
Totally. Totally. Yeah. We call it, you know, barriers to entry in business. Right. I don’t own, I mean, I do have copyrights on my sheet music, but my biggest beer entry to entry is there is no other Johnny Mae. Yeah. And you’re totally right. Like all of your listeners, you know, each one of you guys are watching this, you possess a very incredible and unique skill and you need to own it 100%. Like I’ve never, like, I like, I, I wear this type of shirt, like as a collared shirt. And I’m just, I’m like, you know, the, I just do it. Like, it’s my thing. And, and I think if you can own that and build, as I said, language around it, don’t like, copy’s like the worst thing you could do. And I know I just said how much copying works, but I think in terms of, it’s like a weird balance, I guess. Yeah. You want to copy and you also want to be yourself.
AJV (24:49):
No, I, no. It is a unique balance that it’s like to some degree it’s like, no matter what you do is copying a little bit. It’s like, what is really new today, but it’s how you put your spin on it. Right? Your take your unique perspective and view. And I, I love that those are so many really good little nuggets there. Y’all, it’s like simplicity in the thumbnail. Right? Keeping it about the imagery, the way that you start getting quick to it creating those little cliff hanger moments where it’s like, but stick around because in a minute, we’re gonna talk about and we, we shared this a lot that it’s like, you, you said it and I love that you brought this up and it totally, it was like, ding, ding, ding, ding in my head. Because like, you know, you always hear people say like, save the best for last. Yeah. Our philosophy is you always save the best for first, like lead with your best content lead with whatever you have. That’s going to like grab people’s attention and suck ’em in. And that’s exactly what you said. It’s like, no, it’s like lead with your best stuff. Show ’em what you got. Bring it and bring the heat from the beginning.
JM (25:50):
Oh my gosh, AJ, I need some like organ music right now. Like you’re preaching it girl like that. Like it is so true. And it’s like, it’s like a relationship, right? I mean, when you are courting a customer, you want somebody to post a customer. You, you show off your best, you dress off your best. And then you build a relationship. Like that’s another mistake. I see. So many people ache like in YouTube is they, they ask for a lot before they give, yeah, you need to not only give, but you need to give over a long period of time. Our sales cycle is not based on YouTube. I am not looking for a sale from YouTube. I’m looking actually for their email. That’s the most important thing, cuz email’s a little bit closer to their heart, right? We’re all we will. As consumers, we will subscribe new channel, whatever.
JM (26:32):
Right? It’s not a big deal, but, but who gets my email address? Not many people. Right? You’re a little more protective of that. And so it’s, it’s gradual. And then once I have their email, it’s we drip the content and honestly be people won’t become a customer customer of ours for six months because they’re getting this content weekly and it’s like, okay, you know, you need to build trust with these people. So to your point, give your absolute best. And that should be the first thing they experience. I did have a couple other things I wanted to say about YouTube that I think are really that have helped us. And it, I guess it actually relates to this, but when you’re making a YouTube video, start with the easiest ask, don’t start with a big ask. So, you know, a, a big ask in my case might be by a or sign up for the membership.
JM (27:19):
I will always start usually two minutes in with, Hey, if you like this video hit the like button and subscribe, right? It’s like no big deal. Then the second is generally related to an email address. And then the third is related to a course. And so I follow, if you watch my videos, I almost always follow this structure is very easy. Ask to you know, putting the, the carrot out there. They may or may not wanna get the course, but I think some people ask for a lot early, they’ll start promoting their, like their thousand dollars membership. Two minutes in it’s like, wait a second. I don’t even know you dude. So
AJV (27:51):
It’s building that. Yes. Momentum. So, Hey, if you like this, yes. You’re conditioning their behavior from the get go. It’s like, like this, subscribe to this sign up for this. Oh and Hey, by the way, you can buy this core. So it’s like that gradual conditioning.
JM (28:06):
Exactly. Yeah. You have to be very, very mindful of what you ask from people. And especially if they don’t know you, it’s like, well, you’re just another guy on YouTube making piano videos. You have to build a relationship and there’s so much trust involved. You know, we sell our, our membership is a, you know, 40 bucks a month. It’s not a product, but you you’ll be amazed how long people wait to sign up for a $40 month product or the $300 annual membership. So, you know, I just wanna drill this point to all of your listeners is build a relationship with your customer and don’t ask for the full buy on the front end, defer it, defer it as much as possible. I’d say at least six months. And it depends on your product. If you have a thousand dollars product, like it might take a year, that’s a big, that’s a big chunk of money for people.
AJV (28:53):
Yeah. You know, it’s so funny. There’s been this like ongoing growing conversation and the brand builders group community around. I just thought I would be at a certain place by now. I thought I would have this many followers or this many ERs or this many members. And, and it’s I think this is such a great reminder. And I’ve heard maybe this message is from me today because I heard this from like four people today about the importance of patience.
JM (29:18):
Yeah, totally.
AJV (29:20):
It’s like, it’s like, you gotta win the trust. Then you win a relationship. But that take time. It’s like you wouldn’t ask, you know, your girlfriend to marry you after, you know, six weeks. I don’t know. Maybe you would, but for most people it’s gonna take a little bit of time, but it’s like, why are we asking our customers to buy the moment they show up on our page? Where’s the relationship, where’s the trust. And there’s just some things you can’t expedite so much. And those are such good reminders and a little bit of patience is a good, healthy reminder to all of us, no matter what we’re doing. That’s so good. So, okay. So I have two other quick things for you. Cuz I know that we I literally could continue this conversation. It’s like, I’m gonna have to steal you for coffee and talk more about YouTube.
AJV (30:06):
Cause that is not, I would say our, our wicked skillset, it’s not YouTube, but we want it to be, so I really need to steal some of your brain. But you said two other things I think are really important. You went from a course format to a membership format. Yes. So I’d love for you to talk about how did you make that successful transition because you don’t just have a membership format, you have 10,000 active monthly members and a multi seven figure business. Yeah. And that’s, that is what so many people in this community are trying to do. And it’s like, how do you do it? Like, so what are some of those like simple steps, maybe not easy, but they’re simple.
JM (30:43):
Yeah. It’s a great question, AJ. I would say if you wanna build a a membership business the first, well, the first thing is you gotta have enough content to justify a membership, right? You, you have three courses, you know, it’s like really I’m gonna pay monthly for this. I just wanna buy the course. But for us, the breaking point was about 20 core. Okay. It was about, you know, Hey, you’ve got 20 courses, we’re selling them 40 bucks, a pop that’s $800 of a worth of a catalog and sell to sell someone. A actually, when we launched our membership, we were selling it at $15 a month. It was pretty cheap. So I don’t know if that comes out too, but that’s like, you know like 200, 200 and it was like, well, okay, that makes sense. Right. I’m I’m paying $200 a year for $800 worth of content.
JM (31:27):
Right. That’s like a no-brainer. So I think you have to get to that point, you have enough content. I think you need to be making regular content. A lot of people make their flagship course and then it’s like, they’re done. It’s like, no, if you’re gonna have a membership, people expect, you know, you go on Netflix, you expect new movies. And so we were, we were making about one new course per month. That was, that was a big thing. Let’s see. What are the, what were the big things? I think those, those were key. Just having the content. We didn’t have a lot of people, like a ton of people sign up for it, but we had a hundred and that was kind of pre of concept was like, okay. You know, and then we just kind of grew it from there
AJV (32:08):
Four year membership site. And this is like a pretty technical question. What, what do you guys use in terms of payment processing and a membership access, do you guys use like an LMS or what do you use?
JM (32:21):
We use member mouse.
AJV (32:23):
Okay.
JM (32:24):
We and great. They integrate really well with WordPress. So then there’s a bunch of platforms out there. And there’s ones that make it a lot easier. You know, it’s interesting when we started the business there weren’t teachables and Cajas and all these platforms, you know, we just kind of to do it ourselves. So we have a custom built website, but it was like by necessity, I would say to a lot of people, like don’t spend a ton of money, like just use one of these. You can build a membership site on, on a lot of these platforms and get started there. And then if at some point you need a custom site. Great. But don’t go spend $20,000. Yeah. Don’t do it.
AJV (32:59):
If you use member mouse, then there’s like Meum Thinkific, teachable Cajabi okay. So that’s cool. And so, okay. Another question I have I’m trying to think of all the questions that we get. Yeah. In our community. It’s how did you set your pricing? Like how did you, and then, cause you said it, you started off really cheap and then you’ve increased it. So how did you said it and then how did you decide when to increase it?
JM (33:23):
So a lot of the price setting was just the market. Like what are other people charging? We, our strategy has been not to be at the high side, not to be the low side. We don’t want it cheap and people will, will equate the value to the price. If we put it for a dollar, people go that’s cheap, you know, $60. Right. It’s, it’s somewhere in the middle. I think for a lot of people, you have to be aware of the market. People would disagree with me and say, no, you, you gotta price it to what you think it’s worth, but you’re competing. There’s other places to learn piano. So so $15 just seemed like a reasonable price. If seemed affordable, like it was like a lot of things at the time were 15 bucks like Netflix or Spotify, it was like, yeah. 15 bucks, whatever. What changed for us was it was actually, I was doing a presentation in my college program and I had all these like investors, you know, CRI critiquing it. And several of them were like, you’re undercharging. And I was like, really 15, really? Like, it’s like passive income. Like it’s just so great. They’re like, no, it’s worth 40.
JM (34:22):
And I was like, like really people pay $40 a month. That’s a lot of money. Like, that’s not your like, you know, Spotify music, right. That’s like, that’s like a gym membership or something. And sure enough, I, I couldn’t believe it, but we’re like, let’s try it. And we, you know, if you still business, we talk about, talk about elasticity, right. And the getting the right price points. Like if you raise the price, do your sales go down, our sales didn’t go down. And so it was like, oh my gosh, like we can charge 40 people. We’re still buying our, you know, profits went up and you know, we could have gone up and there’s other people who charge 60 a month or 80, but it’s just, you know, fell it right. It felt like, okay, this is worth 40. And then it gave us some also wiggle room. This is important for your, for your audience is you need to have, if you’re gonna run sales, like you need to, you be able to drop it. And so it’s kind of a sweet spot for us. We can do we can do sales based on that and still feel happy. I will say to your audience, you need a set of a, a base, you know, for us, we never go below 15. We have never offered our membership for $10. That’s where we just say it’s, it’s worth it.
AJV (35:29):
Not worth it. Yeah. So it’s interesting. I have two thoughts here on this. So a part of this is going, how much content curriculum do you have, where people would stay. And then it’s looking at how much are you charging for each piece of content and going, what would be worth it? So I think about like, even like our content and brand builders group, we have 14 full two day curriculums and to come to our two day event it’s a $3,000 ticket, right? We’ve got 14 of those and our flagship program’s a thousand bucks a month. So it’s 12,000. I’m going. Maybe we’re undercharging. Right. It’s like, whoa, there, that was a big light bulb for me of going what we’re literally giving you 50, $60,000 of curated education for 12, right? Yeah. So part of that is like that spectrum. But then another part of it, what I hear you saying is like some, and I, I think this is true for any business owner, for any entrepreneur.
AJV (36:27):
I think most people undercharge, they undervalue what they’re doing, because that’s just the nature of what we do is like we don’t see our own value. So having outside people weigh in to give you perspective, and I can think about this one very particular time and mine and R’s speaking career. And this was like, I don’t know. Our first work came out in 2012. So this month we celebrate 10 years of our first book coming out, which seems impossible. But I remember like three or four years after that, we were meeting with a really good friend and he was sitting down and at this point, like the book had hit like the New York times list and it was doing really well. And he was like, so what are your speaking fees? And we were like $7,500. And he literally said, get up outta your seat, walk out of this room, increase your fiefs to $15,000 and come back, I’m getting a P a cup of coffee. A, we were like double our fees. Are you insane? Yeah. And it was like, the rest of that day was convincing us of how like, no, like $7,500, like that is not 70. That that is not what you should be charging. Totally. We were terrified. We increased our fees to $15,000. Nothing else changed. And we were book solid. Yep.
JM (37:38):
Totally. But
AJV (37:38):
It was some by weighing in and carrying that confidence and seeing the value that we did. And so for everyone listening, it’s like, who are those wise counselors in your life that can give you wise Sage business advice on how you’re doing, what you’re doing and what you’re charging. Right. I think that’s really important for all of us.
JM (37:59):
Well, oftentimes we lack that perspective of ourselves, right? Absolutely. We tend so critical of ourselves, but absolutely. Yeah. You need to build, you need to build like your tribe of people around you. You know, we can, we wouldn’t have gotten to 10,000 members, if not, for all of the support, encouragement, I mean our wives and just a great team. That’s another piece of all of this is you can’t do it alone, like you to, you need the right people. So
AJV (38:22):
I love that. Okay. I have two last questions for you and I promise I’ll keep this on time. So I wanna know, how did you guys grow to 10,000 members? Right. So it’s like you started, I mean, clearly something happened along the way that was like, okay we figured out something, do you know what that, something was like, was there a moment a trigger? Like how did you go from a hundred to a thousand to 10,000?
JM (38:48):
I’m so glad you asked AJ, this was a big piece of it. I think your listeners all should. I mean, I think it’s helpful for them to know this because it was really slow growing. Like I remember we started launched the membership in 2015, in 2018, 2018. I think we had just hit a thousand members. Okay. So we’ve gone from a thousand in 2018 to 10,000, like three years later. So we did three things. Okay.
AJV (39:15):
Everyone write this down.
JM (39:16):
Okay. Write this down. The first is what I already said, which is we started making weekly YouTube content. Our, we, our YouTube channel had about 10,000 subscribers in 2018. And now it has 250,000 subscribers it’s because we started making weekly content make content weekly. And if you think it sucks still it because you’re gonna get better at it. So that was number one second, we launched a funnel. Okay. And I copied this company that all of you guys should be aware of called jump cut. Okay. That’s two guys that were YouTubers and they teach people how to become famous YouTubers. And they had a very successful funnel and I studied it. I analyzed it. I read every email. I watched every video and I took notes and literally copied their format with my words. So that’s what I mean by copy. Look at the people, doing it well and copy them.
JM (40:08):
And so we launched a 10 day blues challenge and we started running ads on Facebook and Instagram. And it was like, Hey, you wanna learn? The blue were free, sign up, you get five free videos, stream, email inbox. And basically we used lead pages for that. It was really easy to set up my business partner. And I literally made the pages ourselves and then connected it to MailChimp. Like we, we did it ourselves. We’re not computer guys. We’re like musicians and then made the email automations. And then at 10 days, Hey, you get 40 per sent off all the sales stuff. And that grew, so our strategy with that, AJ was not to make money. Our strategy with that was to break even and build our email list.
AJV (40:48):
Yeah. Preach.
JM (40:49):
That’s when our email list went from 10,000 to, to like, I mean, we have 150,000 now on our email list because of that. Right. And so the, the funnel was really helpful started doing paid ads. And then the other third thing was we, we needed a new website and we took out a loan for a website at that point. Wow. Yeah. I know, like we didn’t, it was like 20, it, I think it was $30,000, but like we didn’t have the money. And so that was a smart, a decision for us because we had a much better experience. And so those were the three things in 2019 that kicked us up into, I think, 3,400 members. By the end of that year, 2020, we were up to almost 8,000 members. Yes.
AJV (41:33):
Doing the same thing,
JM (41:34):
Doing the same thing we’d always done. But with the paid ads, with the weekly YouTube content, we still have the same website. Of course we’re making improvements on it, but there is a fourth thing. And it’s something that was not in my control, but we were ready for, it was COVID. Yeah. You know, every, everyone stuck at home. And so we did a quarantine offering, like the month of proof, like terrible. It’s like, you’re stuck at home and your life is miserable, but you can learn jazz piano. That’s. And so we gave away a month membership and we had a huge influx of people who came in, it was like, Hey, I get a month for free. And then, you know, people who liked it stayed. And so we were just kind of positioned for that for that event. And so right now the membership’s still growing.
JM (42:16):
It’s not growing as kind of hockey puck as, as we were. But yeah, I would say to your audience is it’s those three things is get the, get the organic traffic right now. We’re actually focusing a ton on SEO. In fact, we just hired a full-time SEO blog writer. But I, I would just really encourage your audience if you’re doing anything, visual people go to YouTube. In fact, if people search on Google for something, Google pushes all the YouTube videos to the top. So you’re not only getting all the traffic from people on YouTube, but you’re getting all the Google traffic. I mean, that is like the world, right? So, so video, I think is key. And then second is the paid is like paid ADSS, you know, funnels all that.
AJV (43:00):
Oh my gosh, this has been so insightful on so many levels. And I love to your humility and all of this goes, and I asked you if you wanted to come on the show, you’re like, I mean, what would I talk about? Like, are you kidding? Like this, this has been so brilliant. So, so awesome. So if people want to connect with you and I’ll put all of this in the show notes for the listeners, so make sure you go to brain builders, group.com/podcast. You can get all the show notes with Johnny Mae but just go to piano with johnny.com and it’s J O N N Y piano with johnny.com. And then if they wanna follow you to see how you’re doing this on YouTube what’s your YouTube channel?
JM (43:45):
Well, we have two, we have the piano with Johnny channel. It is exclusively piano education. So it’s literally me teaching all the, all the time. I have a second channel. That’s Johnny May, it’s just my name. And it’s just me playing the piano and I’m playing on a rooftop somewhere and I’m playing on a hill somewhere and I’m playing a beautiful, like sparkling grand piano. It’s all performances. And I imagine a lot of your audience, you know, if you wanna learn piano, go to piano with Johnny, but if, yeah, if you just like enjoy piano music, then go to just look up Johnny Mae and you’ll have tons of piano videos to your hearts content.
AJV (44:16):
Oh, I love it. All right. So here’s my last question for you. And totally gonna catch you up guard, but where do you see this business going in the next five years?
JM (44:27):
Oh my gosh. That is something I think about every single day. And to be honest with you, it’s something that I, I don’t really know. I, I think right now piano with Johnny has I don’t know if it’s hit, like it’s sweet spot and it’s something to just ride out. I think for me being an entrepreneur and loving the building process, I want to take it to the next level. Something that really, it sites me is taking our model, taking our system and making it accessible to other teachers. It’s like, oh my gosh, I was able to grow this seven figure business. It’s like, why? Like I see so many talented musicians struggling. I’m like, ah, I wish I could help them. It’s like, what if I could like white label what I’m doing for them? And so I, I toy with that idea, but I think minimally getting other teachers involved is quite exciting. We’re actually starting to hire other teachers. So yeah, but it’s like, it’s the journey. It’s the fun part. It’s like, ah, I don’t know. I don’t know. Where do I want take this?
AJV (45:25):
It’s the blessing and the curse of being an entrepreneur. And I think the here’s what I, and here’s why ask this question for all of you. I, I don’t know if you’ve picked this up, but there isn’t a whole huge staff and team. Like you guys are a pretty lean mean operations and production team, and you guys have built a multi seven figure business. You have 10,000 plus members, you have viral videos with millions of use. And you have done that off of being consistent and having exceptional content.
JM (45:55):
Yes, absolutely.
AJV (45:57):
Everyone listening can do that too.
JM (45:59):
Right. And I will say to your audience, you know, you might look at piano with Johnny and go, oh wow, you have this big team. Do you know that we have three full-time employees? That’s it, three full-time employees, our growth, our business has been around great content and doing what I love and sharing it with the world and being authentic and, and being mindful about the business. But I think to your point is your audience has everything it takes right now. It is unbelievable how many resources you have at your fingertips. I didn’t have almost 10 years ago that are plug and play. You just need to do it. You need to take the first step.
AJV (46:32):
Oh my gosh. I need to have be back on the show again, too. This was so good. It was so insightful. Thank you so much for giving us some of your time today. I so greatly appreciate it. This was an incredibly valuable episode and I hope everyone listening comes back, shares this, likes it connect with Johnny and then make sure you come back to listen to another episode of the influential personal brand.
JM (46:58):
Thanks AJ

AJV (00:02):
All right. Y’all AJ Vaden here on your recap episode of the influential personal brand. Here are my key takeaways from my conversation with Johnny May and Johnny and I are really good personal friends. We both live here in Nashville, Tennessee. We are both in EO, which stands for the entrepreneur organization. He’s in my forum, which means I get to spend an entire half a day with this genius every single month. Just learning and sharing best practices in business. And I’ll tell you what, like, this is like one of those conversations that I had and I pinged him after and I was like we’re are gonna need to continue this conversation over coffee or dinner. So how can I bribe you to continue this? There is so much strategy and wisdom and firsthand experience and expertise in this interview.
AJV (00:57):
Y’all if you were trying to do anything on YouTube or you’re trying to grow and scale a membership model, this interview was literally built for you so highly, highly recommend it specifically if you are trying to grow and scale on YouTube. So here’s just a couple of my key takeaways and I’m gonna heavily lean into, please go listen to this entire episode. It is one of my favorite episodes. It’s so tactical and so strategic and so much firsthand experience and wisdom in this Johnny Mae. So, all right, here’s the first thing. I kind of feel like at brand builders group, we are very new beginner novice when it comes to YouTube. That is not probably our strongest, strongest skillset and terms of leveraging that to grow and scale our business. So this is probably why I’m also so inclined to listen and re-listen, and then re-listen to this episode again.
AJV (01:56):
So first thing as talks about the massive importance of thumbnails and titles, and it’s like, in theory, I get that. But it in practice, are we actually doing that? And he goes simple works, right? Keep the titles very short so they can fit and you can read ’em. He says he keeps his, all of his titles, five to seven words, max make sure that the images are something that actually demonstrates what the video is actually about so that people know, make sure the titles lean into what you’re gonna get from this video. So the first thing was just very strategic tips around your thumbnails, titles and images in the thumbnail. So really important, subtle, but significant. They’ve been at this game for over 10 years. They have a eight figure memberships. And what I mean by that is they have more than 10,000 recurring monthly members, a seven figure BI business of people who are subscribing to learn piano lessons from Johnny piano, with Johnny.
AJV (03:02):
And so he goes like, literally, like our full time thing is focusing on what titles work, what thumbnails work, what goes viral and what does, and he goes, that’s our full-time job. So this is what I’m doing all day every day. And I love it, right? He’s doing it, not as a, an agency, but as the actual business owner. So the importance of titles and thumbnails keep ’em simple, keep ’em clear, make sure that they demonstrate what the video is actually about. Make sure that the title is short and is also very indicative of what you’re gonna get in the video. Loved it. That was the first thing. Second thing is the video itself, because you always wanna start the video, not out with some introduction of who you are or what you’re gonna get. He goes, no, you immediately wanna start the video with a sample of what you’re gonna get.
AJV (03:46):
Then pause, explain it, do a little introduction and tease them of why they need to stick around. He goes, but most people you get into their video and you say, Hey, this is AJ Vaden. And here’s what we’re gonna do today. He goes, they don’t want, you want to get right in and go, all right, this is what you’re here for. Let me show you and get to it in his case, it’s a very tangible show cuz he is teaching piano. But for so many of us, it’s like, how can we start with the best stuff that we have, right? That’s a saying that, and we have a brand builder’s group. As you save your best for first leave with lead, with your best content, that’s gonna catch ’em right in the beginning. Then you can introduce yourself. Then you can explain what’s happening, give context, but then tease why you need to stick around to the very end.
AJV (04:32):
So the first part of this, like, you know, successful three tip trio here is titles and thumbnails. The importance of that, the second is actually how you start the video. I think that makes a really big difference. And then the third thing he talks about is you have different types of videos. Some videos need to be just for content, that’s it? No ask, no offer other videos. You wanna make sure that they’re there to build your email list. He goes, that’s the most important thing we do. He goes, we invest all of our paid traffic, not into converting them into calls or converting them into sales. It’s converting that fan, that follower into an email on our list. He goes, that is what we’re doing. They have a hundred more than a hundred thousand people on our email list by just doing this. And so again, it’s how much of your content is strategically just to provide value.
AJV (05:25):
How much of it is to give something away for free, where you can get their email. And then there’s a separate type of video where there’s the ask, right? He goes, but all the content that we’re making for YouTube is YouTube specific content do not repurpose. He goes, we make content for YouTube. We do not make a piece of content and then repurpose it and all the different channels. He goes, no, we make, we make our content for YouTube. So be intentional about that. And he goes, and we create a ton of free content and we’re monitoring what goes viral and what doesn’t that has to do with the value of the content, the titles, the, the images, how they lead with it. But all of those things are this very, you know, somewhat simple, but yet complicated formula of how do you build your business on social in this particular case on YouTube he goes, build your content for the channel.
AJV (06:21):
That’s really uniquely important. He goes, this is content specifically designed for YouTube. And we have three different types of content. We have content that is just for value just to get people interested. Some is to help us collect emails so they can get ’em onto our list. And then some it’s encouraging them to sign up for our membership. But the majority of what they’re making is unique content just for value, add specifically built for YouTube. Again, I cannot tell you how many more ideas and tips and strategies just like this were in this episode. So if you have listened to this and you’re like, huh, that sounds like me. I would you to go listen to this entire episode. It’s extraordinarily good. You can also follow Johnny May on YouTube or on Instagram to learn more, see it firsthand of what they’re doing. And then please always come back, check out another episode on the influential personal brand. We’ll see you next time.

Ep 261: Learn How To Leverage Awards To Scale Your Business from Microsoft Partner of the Year Denis O’Shea

AJV (00:07):
Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode on the influential personal brand. This is AJ Vaden, one of your cohos here. And I’m so delighted to have our guest on the show today, Dennis, she Dennis happens to be a very close personal friend. And also I think one of the coolest entrepreneurs that I’ve ever met. I’ll give you just a little background about Dennis. That’s not super professional because I know Dennis so well. But here are some cool facts that I think any of you who are listening need to know as a reminder of why you need to stick around. So I’ll give you some of the professional accolades. That’s gonna give you some of the interesting facts on one of the most interesting humans in the world. I’m pretty sure, but Dennis is a multi seven figure entrepreneur.
AJV (00:59):
He originally started his business mobile tour in New Zealand. Over 15 years ago, he opened up his us operations here in Nashville, Tennessee, which is where we both get to call home almost five years ago. But I would say one of the coolest things about watching his business grow is the way that they have integrated different business models to fit what the market end was asking for. And cause of those really cool shifts over the last two years last year in 2021, Dennis and his company were actually named Microsoft partner of the year globally. And so a huge part of what we’re gonna talk about today is how to leverage awards and recognition such a, is that to help you grow your business because he’s done it and he’s fresh out of it only like two months out of doing really an amazing accomplishment.
AJV (01:52):
But there’s so many cool things that we’re gonna talk about with what they’re doing in their business and growing and scaling as an entrepreneur. But then also on the personal side Dennis is a fascinating human being. And I have been in the entrepreneur’s organization, EO with him for the last three years. And every single time I talk to him, I learned about a new near death experience. At least every single time. That’s like he has been like almost eaten by a bear. He goes, fly fishing all around the world. I think you’ve lived in like 15 different countries. You have just the most fascinating, I think, vigor for living and excitement and adventure. And I know that you bring that into your business. And so I would help further. I do welcome to the show.
DO (02:39):
Thank you a, I dunno how I’m ever gonna keep up with that. The reputation you have just put out in front of me, but thank you. I’m, I’m absolutely flattered and delighted to be on your show. And I’ve been inspired by you as you know, many of the things I’ve been doing in my business. Our ideas I’ve learned from you and through all the work we’ve done together at EO. So I’m immensely grateful to you for some of the inspirations you’ve given me and Rory as well and watching your journey and your great pivot. And honestly, you guys have inspired me.
AJV (03:10):
That’s so kind. Thank you. That’s so, so kind. Well, one of the reasons I wanted to have you on the show is because I think what doing in your particular field is quite extraordinary. And then also knowing that you, we moved here from another country, started this business, launched this seven figure business, one Microsoft partner of the year. And that all happened really rapidly. So one of the things that we like to start with for every single guest who’s on the show is give our all audience just a little bit of background on how you got to where you are.
DO (03:44):
Ooh, how far back do you want me to go? The second, I, I are a bit more recent than that.
AJV (03:49):
I would say like, like I would think you take, if you take the last 10 years and you go, man, this is where we were, and this is how I got to where I am. Like, what would you say are some of the things that you think budding business builders, entrepreneurs, aspiring entrepreneurs should know?
DO (04:06):
Let me go back a step further. If I may, I used to work for Nokia Nokia, the big cell phone company, and I could see an amazing thing happen where I could see technology getting ahead of people. So as a company, we were inventing this amazing technology that people were not using. Yeah. And one of my customers challenged me pretty hard. One time he said, why should I buy this next generation of technology from you when our customers are not using what we bought from you last year? And that was like a smack in the nose. And it, it really knocked me back and I lost the big sale. And it was one of those learning moments started really thinking about how do we get people to actually use the technology they’re buying. So I left NOIA and I found a mobile mentor to solve that one problem, which was how do we help someone like you make sense of their first smartphone?
DO (04:56):
How do we help you set it up, get email, working, get your calendars syncing, enable you to do web we’re and get your music on it, change all your numbers of the plus format. So you can do international enrolling all that. And we figured out how to do that for one person and make that one person super productive with their personal technology. And then we repeated that a million times for different people around the world, that one on one service for a million people. And so the problem, what we’re trying to address was how to do, we enable people to get more value from the tech they’re buying and how do we enable them to be more productive in business and be more efficient with their time fast forward many, many years later, if you think about a day in the life of a knowledge worker today, people are using laptops and tablets and smartphones.
DO (05:40):
Some of them are owned by their companies, some personal devices, they all need to have work applications. Everybody wants email everywhere all the time and they’re messaging applications like zoom and teams and all of that. So how do you make sense of all that and how do you secure all of that and how do you enable people to work in their home offices? Like you are right now on a consumer grade wifi connection. That’s probably being shared with the TikTok generation and the YouTube generation and the fortnight generation. How do we make sense of this? And in particular in industries that are supposed to be very secure, how, how do you balance this security paradigm with enabling people to be really productive and efficient with their time?
AJV (06:23):
Oh, this is so good. And I love that cuz any of you who listen to our podcasts or follow us at brand builders group, you know, were really big on making sure you know, what problem you solve and to hear you so succinctly say, it’s like, we want to know, like we wanted to make sure people were using the technology they had. How do I get the most value out of the technology I’ve already purchased? Would you say that’s still the problem you solve today or has it shifted?
DO (06:48):
It has shifted. Okay. For sure. It has shifted. And the problem today is more about helping organizations find the right balance between off security to not get hacked, not get ransom and then providing a great employee experience. So you’re not part of the great resignation. So you’re able to hire great people and attract great talent and retain them because you give them a great experience at work wherever they work. And that balance between not going too far with security, because if you go too far, people are just going to push back and resist your security measures and policies and work around you and, and still having a great experience for people. So getting that balance right, and doing that for highly regulated industries like healthcare, finance education government, that’s the problem we solve today.
AJV (07:39):
Oh, that’s so good. And especially, I feel like the, probably the pandemic and people working at home has only heightened this already present issue, but even more so it’s like how many people are doing all of their business on really unsecured network? I would say I probably am. I know that this is
DO (07:59):
Very few people.
AJV (08:00):
Yeah. So it’s, it’s interesting. So I’m curious I’ve two, you just like totally spurred two questions up that what’s not even on my radar for this conversation today, but I think they’re really important is one give people a high level. Like what does mobile mentor do? Like what do you actually do?
DO (08:19):
Sure. So we’re a service company, an it service company, but we’re super narrow and we’re super focused on helping people who work remotely. So companies who have remote workers, people who might be in their home or holiday home, or some days they might be in the office and they’re using a wide variety of devices, some of which are owned by the company. Some are personal. We help them solve that equation and make sure people can be productive and secure on all their devices. Mm. So the end result we try and get to is that our clients don’t get hacked. They don’t get ransom and their employees, hopefully don’t walk out the door in frustration because they, you know, frustrations around their technology.
AJV (08:59):
This is really relevant. Cause I feel like every single person who probably listens to this podcast works remotely at some point. And whether you own the company or you work for an organization, it’s like, we all work remote as like, like the majority of our audience are to be remote ish type of individuals who also have virtual employees or virtual staff members. And so the other question that populated in my mind now is splintering into like a hundred questions. This is gonna like turn into be like a mini consulting session for brand builders group gonna happen.
AJV (09:32):
But so here’s, so here’s two things that I have seen have in our client base, which is really interesting is over the last six months or so there has been an increase of these imposter accounts on social media, right? So their lookalike accounts and people are like my husband, Roy Baden, who’s my business partner. Someone has managed to create a lookalike account that looks just like hit and they have garnered more followers than he has on his actual account. So we’ve seen a lot of those things starting to happen. And then here recently we’ve had a series of, I’m gonna think at least two, but maybe three different clients that we work with. The brand builders group where people have hacked, their Instagram accounts have changed the password and now our manding ransom for them to give them back their password. And so you’re starting to see security breaches in new criminal creative ways. Right. And so I’m curious any thoughts on the way that security breaches are growing in the way that you know, cyber criminal activity is ranging for not even a business anymore, but like an individual who’s just like trying to like grow their personal brand and grow their influence online. They’re now getting their accounts hacked and ransoming to get under yeah. Sticking Instagram.
DO (10:53):
Yeah. You’re absolutely right. There’s been a 500% increase in cyber crime through the pandemic, which is really tragic, you know, tragic for the individuals who get hacked. And then when you look at which organizations are being hacked at schools, it’s hospitals, it’s governments who are government organizations are trying to help people get through the pandemic. It’s really, really tragic. And what, what we know now is that the primary way that people hack us is to our passwords. We know that, and as a society, we’re coming to grips with the fact that we need to get away from passwords. We just need to get away from them because passwords were actually a great invention back in 1961, you know, when somebody invented the combination of a username and a password to get, that was essentially the key Sierra Casa. It was a great invention in 61, but what became really clear in 2021 was passwords to the reason why we were getting hacked by schools, getting ransom, why government departments are getting compromised by healthcare organizations are having all the patient records leaked. So passwords are really a big problem, really, really big problem. And as a society, we need to get away from them and we need to go password less.
AJV (12:06):
How did, what, how does that even work?
DO (12:08):
So password less, you’re probably already doing it without realizing it. So got an you’ve got an iPhone, right?
AJV (12:14):
Yeah.
DO (12:15):
So you look at your iPhone as the camera and it scans your face. Yeah. Takes about 300,000 data points from your face and it recognizes you, ah, it’s H J and it unlocks the phone and allows you to access the operating system, iOS the apple system. And then you’ve got single sign on to some of the applications. So you’re automatically able to sign into your applications. So that’s biometrics. So it could be facial recognition could be, your thumbprint could be your voice in the future. It could be a retina scan. Now that’s a lot more secure than a pastor. That’s, you know, your dog’s name, plus some numbers and, and Ary characters. And you,
AJV (12:53):
That was my password.
DO (12:55):
I know because we’ve done the research and we know that about 15% of the population still use a variation of their pet’s name as their primary password,
AJV (13:05):
Or don’t do that.
DO (13:07):
Don’t do that. But it’s better than the 6% who use the word password.
AJV (13:12):
Oh my gosh. People
DO (13:13):
Not kidding, not kidding. And so passwords are a huge vulnerability, whether it’s for your Instagram account or your work accounts. And so our advice of all industry and all organizations is get on that journey to go password less. So you’re doing it with your iPhone. You can do it with your iPad. If you buy the right laptops, you can do it as well.
AJV (13:33):
Yeah. They have the new, your pass on, like, I got a new MacBook last year. There you go. And it’s like, yeah, but then, so, but then still on all these other programs, I still have to log in and use a password
DO (13:45):
You do for the ones that don’t have single sign on, but the ones that are single sign on you’re signed in automatically when you’re on the device and you’re recognized as a J B. And so that’s the key is biometrics to get to the device and then signal sign on to get into all the apps you use right now. But then you need to have two factor, two factor authentication. So you get the code. So now you put all that together. You can effectively get down to one or two passwords, which are strong passwords. And so it could be IM a J and I live in blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It could be a sentence, right. And only, you know that, and it’s very hard for anyone to hack that. And that becomes the, your effectively, your master password, but you hardly ever need to use it. Like I haven’t typed the password for about a year because my laptop scans my face and I signed into my applications and my phone goes Bing. And I type in the code and I don’t type passwords. And so if we can get schools and hospitals and individuals and government organizations to go there, then it makes the bad actors, it makes their job so much more difficult to ransom our accounts and ransom our businesses.
AJV (14:54):
Oh, geez. So I have a lot of action items to do because it’s, I literally, like I use one pass, right. To like, keep all like, that
DO (15:02):
Is great.
AJV (15:03):
So I, but it’s, but I literally it’s like I was looking at it the other day and I log on cuz you know, it does like the facial scan to log into that. And I have like 150 different accounts with passwords and it’s like every single one of them is like some variation of something. And it’s, I can’t remember any of ’em. So I’m constantly like changing ’em cause I can’t, I get locked out all the time, but this whole concept of having one way to log in and having a super secure, initial way with the two factor authentication, it’s like, I don’t know how I’ve missed this. Like how did I miss this?
DO (15:38):
Well, I would say you didn’t and you are already ahead of the majority of people if you’re using a password tweet. So the research we’ve done tells us that and you won’t believe this 31% of people right there work passwords in a personal, a journal. And 24% of people write their work passwords on a notes file on their personal phone. So you can see the problem. This creates for highly regulated organizations like hospitals, where you’ve got your work. No,
AJV (16:09):
We’re getting our identity stolen all the time.
DO (16:12):
No wonder. And only, only about 30% of people actually use a password management tool like you’re doing, oh, only about 30% of the population. So, you know, my guidance is always go password less. That’s a better future for all of us. But if you can’t quite get there or you think it’s gonna take you one or two years for God sake, get a password management tool. Okay. And do like you’re the, you’ve done one really strong password and inside the vault, then you have all your other passwords.
AJV (16:41):
Yeah. That’s
DO (16:42):
So you don’t have to remember them.
AJV (16:44):
So it’s interesting cuz you’re, you’re bringing up some data points. And I just happened to know that you recently conducted a international research study around security and quite honestly how unsecure we are as a, as a population. And so I’m so fascinated as one, I wanna know two things about this research study because now you have all of this fascinating original data around cybersecurity and what’s working and what not. And what, how is this different and different generat, which I think is just fascinating. I’m a total data nerd, as you know. But I, I wanna know two things for this audience. One, why did you go the research route? Right? Cause it’s not cheap and it’s not quick. So why did you go that route? And then two, what are some of the most interesting findings that you guys uncovered?
DO (17:34):
Great question. The reason we did it is we wanted to define our space. So you think back, you probably use a vacuum cleaner in your home and it’s probably not called Hoover, but you probably refer to the action of vacuum cleaning as hoovering, right? Hoover owned the category. My wife still talks about Hoover in the house. It’s not a Hoover, it’s a dent or something else, but, but Hoover owns the category. What we are looking to do is we want to own our category and we’ve called our category. The endpoint ecosystem endpoint is just a technical word for devices, laptops, desktops, tablet, smartphones, and the endpoint ecosystem. As we see it is the devices you use and all the software on them and your login experience. And then the supporting processes. When you’re setting up a new device or you need new software, you want to install something or get an update, all that mess.
DO (18:24):
We call that the endpoint ecosystem. And that’s where all the pain happens for employees and companies. And that’s where the insecurities happen. But when it all works well, you have a fantastic experience. Your employees can be secure and productive and happy. And so we wanted to really understand what’s going on in that space and that endpoint ecosystem. How do we get some original data? How do we provide some for leadership and how do we inform and educate our industries around what’s happening in that endpoint ecosystem? Because cybersecurity is too big. It’s too broad and everyone’s jaded with that subject. So we wanted to go really narrow and say, what’s actually happening in the home office of AJ and all the other people like you that are in their home office with a bunch of personal devices on a, on a consumer grade wifi connection. What’s going on? How are you working? What’s it like how many passwords are you typing every day? Who’s helping you? How long did it take you to set up your last device? Who do you call for help? How long do you wait to get a meaningful response? So we wanted to drill into all of that and find out what an earth is going on and all those remote offices where people are now working.
AJV (19:37):
Yeah. I think this is really important if you guys didn’t pick this up, but what Dennis is saying is that they really wanted to create this original data to own their space, right? It’s like, you know, it’s like play, plant that stake in the ground and go like, this is a space that we’re gonna own. And we wanna be the thought leaders in this space. We wanna be the ones telling you what’s happening, not reporting what other people are saying. And it’s like for any of us, whatever your space is, whatever your industry is, whatever your expertise or your niche is only one of two things are happening. You’re telling people what happening or you’re telling them what other people say is happening. So if you really wanna own that space and you wanna be the thought leader and you wanna be the expert, then you’ve gotta have real data and research as a way to do that.
AJV (20:23):
So you can own that space and come with a original research of going well, this is what our studies show. And I think that’s a really big trend. That’s on the rise and you know we have so many different friends who really hang their hat on this, including us, like as, you know, look, we’re huge believers in research, but I think one of the best things that I heard in 2021 is that original data is the new competitive advantage. Like that is the new competitive advantage. And so, okay. So tell us as the thought leader in this space with all this new data, what are some of the most fascinating things that you guys discovered that you were not expecting?
DO (21:09):
We didn’t expect shadow it to be as big a problem as it is and shadow. It means people taking it into their own hands out of sheer frustration with their company’s it. And so what we found is that people are using their personal, their personal devices way that companies didn’t know, they’re blurring the lines, they’re using personal devices for work and they’re using work devices for personal use. Wow. And then you won’t believe this 46% of people allow their family members to play with their work device. So these blurred lines are crazy. And then we, about half of the population in regulated industries, they find their security policies to be so restrictive that they’re working around them. And about 45% of the people have found ways to work around their security policies. So this is really indicating a failure on the part of it to provide the tools that truly empower people. People are not empowered. So they’re finding ways to work around there, the tools given to them. And then almost half of people told us they actually prefer to work with Gmail and Dropbox. Now you think about this is healthcare and education, and these people are dealing with patient records. Yeah. And,
DO (22:30):
And government organizations are dealing with citizen records and financial organizations are dealing with accounting records and, and client details. And they’ve admitted they’re working around their own security policies. So we were quite shocked at the enormity of this, this trend that shadow it as we call it using personal devices and unsanctioned unapproved cloud apps and cloud services. So that, that was huge. The other big thing that we kind of expected was gen Z. Now they’re a fascinating bunch. They’re a really fascinating bunch. And if you think about it this way, gen Z joined the workforce during the pandemic they’re in their early. Yeah. And many of them joined and had to work remotely over the last couple of years. They never knew an office based work culture. Like we all knew what it was like to go to work and meet your colleagues in the office and go for lunch and the coffee breaks and all of that gen Z don’t, they were onboarded remotely and my any cases fascinating.
DO (23:37):
And they bring their own attitudes. So they are leaning a lot more towards shadow it and bring your own device. And some of these trends than older people who actually do have some semblance of conformity to what it leadership would want them to do. But gen Z comes along and goes, oh no, no, no, no. This is how we do it. And so as we come out of the pandemic and gen Z starts to float back to the office and the next generation of gen Z joins summertime, when everybody graduates, the workforce is quickly gonna get flooded by gen Z and they’re gonna bring their attitudes and their behaviors. And the big challenge for employers is how do we deal with this? Cause no leadership team and no, it leaders can change gen Z, right? Yeah. You can’t change their attitudes and behaviors. But what we found through the data is that we can learn from them.
DO (24:32):
We can learn a huge amount and we’re gonna repeat our study every year for five years. So that we build, you know, as you said, thought leadership, truly understanding the trends, the mega trends that are happening in this space, how people work, work remotely in their home office and work and all that. And we’re really gonna follow gen Z, cuz we think gen Z is the predictor of the future. The more we understand gen Z’s perceptions, attitudes, behaviors, the better we can predict what the world will look like in the workplace will look like five years from now. Cuz they’ll get promoted. They and bigger jobs they’ll eventually be in charged. Their attitudes will prevail. Ooh, their behaviors will prevail. So if you’re an it leader watching gen Z be very, very scared, be very afraid because there’s a tsunami of them coming and they bring a totally different mindset.
AJV (25:24):
Yeah. So, and I think that even is interesting because I would say that it’s even more, I’m gonna use the word interesting about terrifying for like small business owners. Like I would say like myself at grain builders group where we are intentionally building this virtual workforce and don’t have a ton of like it infrastructure in place and kind of of this like yeah, bring your own technology. That’s what we do here. We’ll even pay you to bring your own technology because it’s easier and we know that you’re gonna use yours anyway. So what would you say to the hypothetical employer like that? Who’s like, I’d actually rather just pay you to bring your own technology because I don’t think that you would use ours anyway. It’s like you’re gonna use what you’re used to and what you’re comfortable with. And so I I’m so curious because I think it’s fascinating. And I do think where goes gen Z goes the trend, right? That’s with any like emerging workforce. And it’s specifically in this predominantly, still even today virtual environment where people really don’t wanna go back to the office full time and companies aren’t making you come back full time. Like how do all of those shifts specifically with small businesses, hypothetically speaking, what would you say to those people of here’s what you need to do? So you don’t get yourself or your customers in trouble.
DO (26:54):
I would say there’s a couple of things. And the way I think about it is people process technology like any, any major change. I think list thing to gen Z and involving them is going to be super important. So gen Z just sees the word differently. They, they are hyper aware to anything to do with privacy. The personal privacy is their castle. They don’t give a rats about corporate security. And we know that from the data. Yeah. It’s like four to one. When we say to them, what’s more important to you, personal privacy or security for your company, they all go personal privacy and to help about company security. It’s unbelievable. And other generations have a bit of that going on, but gen Z is so extreme in their bias. It it’s unbelievable. So what companies need to do is that actually bring them into the tent and get them to help figure out how do we craft our policies?
DO (27:50):
How do we do our messaging? How do we say to people? We, we absolutely want to protect your privacy and the privacy of all our employees and the privacy of our customers and protect everyone’s data. So we’re taking the following initiatives. That’s the first involving them listening to them. And then when you’re selecting products and tools that you want to use or applications you want to use, we think it makes a ton of sense to involve the remote workers in that decision making process, not trying to do with the people who work in the, in the office, right? But the remote workers, cuz they would be the most critical and they will do the, the most thorough testing effectively. So that’s the first thing involving remote workers involving gen Z, cuz they were pressure tests, the future paradigm the best. And then secondly, when you are thinking about how you secure this hypothetical small business, that’s encouraging, bring your own device.
DO (28:45):
It’s all about picking applications that have some embedded security, like some of the Microsoft 365, the office 365 applications have some security controls you can turn on or turn off depending on okay, what you want to do. And then when it comes to devices, you really need to set some minimum specifications. Okay. You know, for example saying, if you’re bringing a, we expect you to be on at least the second, most recent version of Macs or if it’s a windows device you gotta be on again, might be the second, most recent. So making sure people are updating their devices, updating their software and applications that will give you some, some control and so will reduce your risk profile. Okay. And then, and then go on the journey to get rid of passwords. Yeah.
AJV (29:32):
Right.
DO (29:32):
At least minimize your
AJV (29:33):
Passwords. That’s huge. And it’s like, I’m literally going to, after this call be like, it is now mandated at brain builders group, you must have some sort of biometric screen in and at the very least you have to start using like a one pass or something. Yeah. that those are, those are like very tangible takeaways that no matter
DO (29:53):
What, they’re very, and they’re very affordable aging. Yeah. So like a pastor manager too will cost a few dollars per person per month. But if it saves you Bitcoin and a ransom, it’s a no-brainer
AJV (30:04):
Seriously. And I like this is only gonna be getting more intense. And so we better figure this out. Now
DO (30:11):
We have to figure it out because you know, they are literally coming after us. And if you work in education, for example, this is a great example. There’s a spreadsheet floating around right now showing the money that the federal government is pumping into the schools. And it’s updated every few months with the, the latest round of funding that’s coming out. So if that’s available to us in the public domain, it’s available to the hackers, that’s right. They won’t follow the money. So they could look at any local school and figure out how many millions of dollars are being injected and what dates is the money arrive. And so therefore they’ll set their ransom at the level of what they know the school can afford to pay
AJV (30:49):
It’s. And I think, say, say if it’s like, I would liken that to like in the world of social media, which is, you know, we talk a lot about is the more followers you, a mass, the higher a target you are for someone to hack in, change your password and then request a ransom for you to have your own account. Back to me, it comes back to this like whole concept of first party data. Right? You gotta own your data. You gotta have a CRM. The days of every single person having a CRM are coming and they’re coming quickly. And this just kind of like counteracts with that in terms of like there’s all these things on the horizon and what are you gonna do right now to be prepared before it happens to you? And it’s like, go passwordless at least have some sort of app storage management.
AJV (31:36):
And to me it’s like own your data. Like don’t, don’t think that your followers online are going to be what build your business as like that’s your email list. So do you have your own data, like, or do you have your own contact management system? Those are all security measurements. So such a fascinating conversation. I could literally geek out on this kind of stuff all day. But in the, in this, in the event up, we even have all day we have just a little bit more time. I also wanna talk about, and I mentioned this in your introduc that you and your company, mobile mentor recently won Microsoft partner of the year. So one, congratulations.
DO (32:13):
Thank you.
AJV (32:14):
Accomplishment globally. Like you guys won and I know the power of leveraging huge global awards like that. And so I’m curious for everyone who is listening to this, like one, how do you even go about doing something like that? And then two, why did you do it? And three, how do you think it’s gonna help you?
DO (32:37):
Ooh. So the first question was how was the first, was that the first, how
AJV (32:41):
Do you do something like that? Like, I mean, there’s so many different types of accolades and recognition and awards locally, regionally, nationally, and even globally. It’s like, how do you even prepare to go about trying to win something like that?
DO (32:57):
We started the preparation about a year before the set admission. So we were very, we were very intentional about this.
AJV (33:03):
This was not an accident. OK. This
DO (33:06):
Was not an accident and you won’t believe this, but we didn’t expect to win it. Last year, we thought last year was gonna be our practice run. And we thought we would learn a lot from the sub submission process. We thought we might become one of the finalists, but our plan, our goal was to win it in 2022, not 2021. Now we worked so hard on the application and we did such a good job in finding a great customer story, which was based here in Nashville, a live hospice, how we helped them save many lives through COVID using some Microsoft technology. And we told their story with a very emotional video and a really powerful story. And Microsoft just loved it. They loved the, the human interest side of it, not the technology application, but, but more how it was used to save lives through COVID and we won the award.
DO (33:55):
So we were just, we were so delighted, but it caught us a little bit by surprise because we, we just weren’t the expecting it. So we had to do a big scramble to figure out, oh my God, what do we do now? What’s the next step? And how do we leverage this? And how do we take advantage of it? And my wife reminded, and she said, this will be old news before you blink. So we knew we’re gonna have to move super fast. And so we sat down with our board and had a, had couple of big sessions on this figure out, how do we leverage this? This may be a one and a lifetime opportunity for our business and our company. And we decided to invest like crazy and try and double the business in one year. So it’s taken us 17 years to get to where we are now.
DO (34:38):
And we thought let’s go for broke. Let’s try and double this company in, in one year. And so we’ve just been pouring resources in hiring like crazy building marketing content. We’ve done this research study. We’ve just got a whole bunch of work happening, hiring people all across the country from Seattle to south Florida. It’s just been amazing watching the growth of the company. And, and I was hoping, you know, that this would help us win some new clients. And I was hoping it might really lift our credibility inside Microsoft and help us attract some, some good new people. And all of those three things have been exceeded beyond my expectations. So it’s amazing. Microsoft have seven, I think, 7 million partners or something like that around. So how do you stand out when you’re a small company from Zealand, how do you get their attention? How do you get Microsoft to walk you into some of their biggest healthcare education government clients or winning partner of the year helps enormously? It really does. And
AJV (35:40):
I wanna pause for a second. There are 7 million Microsoft partners and you guys want something
DO (35:46):
Like that, something like that. Now there are different categories of the awards as well. So we won in our space in this endpoint ecosystem space. So we won our categor. There are other categories
AJV (35:58):
But still like, it’s
DO (36:00):
Amazing. Yeah. It’s incredible. It’s difficult. Yeah. But one of the, one of the wonderfully energizing benefits of this has been the ability to attract great talent. Ah, it’s a battle out there trying to get talent. It’s a real battle. Everyone’s struggling to get good engineers and good architects. And we found the last year because we won the award because top talent see us as a market leader. Now they want to come and work for us. We didn’t expect the effect or the impact to be as, as, as, as positive as it has been. So I’m truly energized by the all the great people we’ve got coming in. We had three yesterday in one today. So four new people this week, these are all high level, really, really good people who choose to work here when they had many, many other offers.
AJV (36:47):
I think that is such a important reminder for every single person who is listening to this. I don’t care if you are aspiring to do your own business or build your in one day or you’re already at the top. And it’s like, if you can that leverage something that other people hold is credible. It does three really important things like to Dennis just mentioned one. It helps you stand out. It helps you just get a foot ahead of the rest of the crowd and the foot race. Right. I think that’s really important. And I love hear you say, it’s like, we know that in a, you know, somewhat commoditized market. It’s like, how do we stand out? Right. We gotta do something. That’s going to put attention on us. Yeah. The second thing is that when you do that, not only do you get more customers, more recognition, more credibility, but it’s a talent acquisition tool.
AJV (37:38):
Yeah. And I’ve never heard you talk about that. A, of going well, of course it is the more trustworthy you are, the more credible you are. The more prevalent you are, the more people also want to be a part of that. So that is so amazing. And so I’m, I’m curious too. It’s like you won it last year. So how like to what Lisa, your wife said, thanks for, you know, giving us one minute celebration. So how do you plan to extend this out? So do you think that you will continue to apply for this year after year and or how does, like, how do you wanna, how do you plan to continue this vantage point?
DO (38:17):
We have a plan to win it again this year, and I’m not kidding. I believe if we have a winning strategy again this year, and it’s because we’ve done the original research, we have unique insights. We have unique data in, in a way that nobody else has. And we’re sharing that with the industry. You know, anyone can go to, to the new website, endpoint ecosystem.com, download the reports, the research data, all of that. So we’re making this bigger than us. So that’s a really, really big deal. Cuz Microsoft really likes to see partners, sharing, learning, and sharing. It’s a big deal in their ecosystem. And then we’re producing so much thought leadership content around how organizations can stay secure, be safe, empower people to work remotely. We believe that’s, that’s really strong. And then we’ve just done so much work in the last year, helping big healthcare clients become more secure schools, universities, government departments. We think the combination of the research, the thought leadership content and executing at scale and doing really good, solid work. We’re genuinely hoping we can win that award again.
AJV (39:24):
I
DO (39:24):
Have no doubt that will extend.
AJV (39:27):
I have no doubt. Honestly. I think one of the best things that any single person has going for them is their own belief to, they can do it. And it’s like, if you don’t believe it, why would anyone else believe it? But I think this is so cool. It’s so fascinating. And you guys are doing some really amazing things in your industry and your space. I mean, and then, so I just, again, one of the reasons I wanted to have you on is just that great reminder to all of us. It’s like, we all have opportunities to create a vantage point. It’s just, do we believe in ourselves enough to go after them? And do we have the patience to do it? And I think that’s something I wrote down as you were talking, it’s like, you guys prepared for this a year in advance. Yep. Like let that sink in to whomever is listening. Yeah. A year in advance, a year of prep, a year of planning a year of execution. And they’re like, and we still were considering it a practice round. I think we live in this world of instant gratification. And if we don’t have a million followers, a million dollars sell a thousand courses overnight, somehow we’re not successful. And it’s like, you guys were preparing and planning for an entire year as a practice.
AJV (40:38):
Yeah. I think that’s a really good lesson for all of us.
DO (40:42):
And we see this as a long, a long journey, like building a partnership with Microsoft, the biggest it company in the world that doesn’t happen quickly. We’ve been on this journey for five years and we had a really simple strategy. I called it one plus one, which is we would meet one person, impressed that person and get introduction to one other. And that’s how we built our network inside Microsoft. And we’ve now got 833 people in our CRM system, you know, context inside Microsoft, but it’s one plus one, one person at a time build the credibility in the trust, get the next connection. And then the same with clients. They walk us into our client organization. We do it stunning job for that client. So they got your guys are great. I’m going to introduce you to the next school or the next hospital or the next, you know, government department. It’s that one plus one strategy and takes time. Right. It really takes time for that to build. And some people will be too impatient to wait that out, but I’m patient. And I know that all those one plus ones add up becomes a big number over time.
AJV (41:43):
I mean, that is an entire business strategy, right there. Y’all if you are not taking notes and paying attention to this shame on you, it’s like just even that whole concept, like that’s like an entire, your business strategy. It’s like impress one person and get that person to introduce you to one new person repeat right. And press one person. Get that person to introduce you to a new person that is brilliant. Let’s the whole conversation has been so insightful. I literally have like a half a page of notes. I’m not either in your industry, I’m not in your space. I’m like, here’s so much to do actions. Here’s all my takeaway. This was brilliant. This was fantastic. And I want to leave with two things before I do my very last thing. I wanna remind everyone of where to go to learn more about this awesome study that they just released about the endpoint ecosystem. But how to make sure that you are not vulnerable to all those cyber criminals doesn’t matter what level business, personal brand solopreneur nine figure business, this pertains to you. And you can just go to mobile, M O B I L E mentor.com. That will also be in the show notes. If you wanna connect with Dennis personally, Dennis, where should they go?
DO (42:52):
Linkedin easies, if I may LinkedIn and it’s Dennis with one in
AJV (42:56):
One in, and I’ll put off list in the, at the show notes, it’s Dennis Oche on LinkedIn or go to mobile mentor.com. Get that study, check out what they’re doing. They’re doing revolutionary stuff. It’s so cool to watch this firsthand, such a ed, such a gift. Okay. So before you go, I mentioned this, like you are truly one of the most interesting humans in the world, so I want you to share just what do you think is the most interesting adventure that you’ve ever been on?
DO (43:28):
Oh, it’s gotta be my crazy Alaska trip where I took 15 weeks off work and I went to Alaska and just a immersed myself in the wilderness and the outdoor life. And I was camping in beer country for 13 of the 15 weeks. I spent a week on a kayak following whales around glacier bay. I saw a lot of Alaska. I was victory there for three months. And so three seasons because it was like the end of spring, somewhere in the big getting a fall. And it was the most incredible immersion in wildlife, which I love and, and the outdoors. So that for me was a trip of a lifetime.
AJV (44:04):
So 15 weeks 13 of which you were camping in bear country. Yeah. And then you canoe watching the whales,
DO (44:13):
Kayak. Yeah. Fall of the whales. Yeah.
AJV (44:15):
Yeah. But then this is also where you almost got eaten by a bear
DO (44:20):
Twice.
AJV (44:21):
Twice.
DO (44:22):
Yeah. Survive two bear attacks.
AJV (44:24):
I mean, y’all,
DO (44:25):
I tell the story,
AJV (44:27):
One of the things that I love about you so much, and one of my personal goals for this year is to have more fun. But I think this is also, I know Dennis has a hundred stories like this, and I think one of the things that we forget to do in business in life is have fun. And Dennis is I think you’re such a, an example, but also such an inspiration to me and my family, a of how do we create awesome memories? And we don’t live to work, but we work to live. And I think that there’s this concept of hustle culture out there where it’s like, if you’re not working 80 hours a week and working to your eyes bleed, then you’re not, you’re not successful and you’re going, no, it’s like you work to enjoy the fruits of your labor.
AJV (45:10):
And it’s like of adventures, make memories, do unique things. And I tell you what you are definitely the person that everyone wants to talk to at the party, because you got stories for days. Which to me, it’s like this one plus one works, not just because of what you’re doing, but because of who you are. And I think that’s a good reminder for everyone. It’s like, how do you incorporate a little bit more fun and enjoy all the fruits of your labor, Dennis, thank you so much for being on the show today. Such a privilege to have you on
DO (45:41):
AJ. Thank you for all the inspiration you’ve given me because I wouldn’t have done that research study if I hadn’t been for you and what I’ve learned from you. So thank you and thanks to you and Rory for all, all the, all the guidance and inspiration I’ve been able to take from you guys and learn from you.
AJV (45:55):
Thank you, such a pleasure. I love having you on to everyone else stays tuned for the recap episode and we’ll catch you next time on the influential personal brand.
Speaker 3 (46:06):
Hey, brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for taking the time to out this interview as always, it’s our honor to provide it to you for free and wanted to let you know there’s no big sales pitch or anything coming at the end. However, if you are someone who is looking to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and get to know you a little bit and hear about some of your dreams and visions and share with you a little bit about what we’re up to to see if we might be a fit. So if you’re interested in a free strategy call with someone from our team, we would love to hear from you. You can do that at brand builders, group.com/podcall brand builders, group.com/podcall. We hope to talk to you soon.
AJV (46:53):
All right. Y well welcome to the recap episode of my conversation, what the one and only Dennis Oche, who is the founder and CEO of mobile mentor who my Southern accent calls it mobile he’s. So kindly correct me off time. Mobile mentor, AJ, not mobile. You read that. But that’s okay. I, I love my heritage and I don’t mind it whatsoever. Y’all here are three huge things that I learned from this episode that I was really not expecting. I thought we were gonna talk about how to leverage rewards and become more well known and so much more wisdom came from this call than I had planned and plotted for. And I’m so grateful for that. Here’s the first thing is a super, super tactical takeaway is the concept of going passwordless, which he talks about often to me and our personal friendship and had never Dawn on me today.
AJV (47:51):
What that really was so shame on me for not asking more questions, but this is a big deal right now. And specifically for you, if you have a personal brand, there is a, an increase in cybersecurity with different social media accounts and people are being targeted and people are breaking in there are hacking your passwords, logging into your account, changing your password, and then asking for a ransom to give it back to you. This is bizarre. Like if criminals will just channel that creativity and just sort of send you something productive, imagine what we could be doing here. But I think this was fascinating. It’s make sure that you have biome logins on your phone and on your computer, and then you have single sign on with all of your different applications that you’re using. So that you’re not using an actual password that like that Dennis mentioned in the interview, that’s a combination of your pets name and some numbers fascinating.
AJV (48:47):
It’s like, duh, like those things sound simple until someone breaks it down and go, and here’s why, right. Someone cannot take, you know, 3,600 points on your facial screen and duplicate that, but run a few algorithms. They could probably figure out that, you know, it’s Dotty 1, 2, 3, 19 40, right? It’s like, like just some of that is common sense that it’s not. So I think that was really important. And if you’re not gonna go to the biometric route and if you’re not gonna do single sign on all the things at least take that first step and use an application like one pass, right? One password where it stores all of your passwords in a secure location where it is using facial screening or your fingerprint in order to do those things. And so I think that hacking cyber hacking, personal brand individual information that’s on the rise.
AJV (49:40):
It’s already been on the rise and it’s only growing, right? This is, this is the era of that. And so we’ve gotta take proactive steps to become more secure in our personal space, as well as in our business. So, so many awesome takeaways from that and good reminders and aha moments from the research study. But those were like very tactical. It’s like, yes, single sign on, get my facial screen fingerprints set up for all the things double down on my one pass and get myself secured Pronto ASAP. So my to-do item set. Second thing is Dennis’s company, mobile mentor recently won Microsoft partner of the year, woot so exciting for them, but I loved what he said. He said we did not win because of all of our technology successes and accolades. We won because we told a human story of people saving lives by using our services.
AJV (50:36):
It is a testimonial, right? It is a story. People remember stories, emotions matter. It’s like, and it’s, I love what he said. He goes, you have to make it bigger than you. It cannot be about all the successes that you did and all these things you’ve accomplished. It’s like, what are you doing to make your business bigger than you? How are you making, how are you making it about them? How are you making it about your customer and their wins and their successes? And then how are you making it about the people around you and the lives being and touched, you know, two and three people removed from you. But I love that he goes, and we didn’t, we did not win because of what we do. We won because we showcase the people that we serve. I loved that telling a story.
AJV (51:21):
We know that, but are we doing that? And then simple, just like, make it bigger than you. So what are you doing to make it bigger than you in your business, with your products, with your services, with your marketing, how are you making bit bigger than you? Then my third takeaway was prepare to win. And this goes back to how they won the award. And I love this. He said we were preparing and planning one year in advance of our application for Microsoft partner of the year. And we knew it was gonna take a year of plotting planning, preparing, and we did not expect to win. We totally went into this as a practice round and they still started planning a year in advance. Now they won probably because they did it a year in advance. But how many of us have this feeling of if like it’s not working in three months or six months?
AJV (52:11):
Well, it’s just not gonna work. Y’all, that’s not how business works. That’s not how building a brand works. That’s not how building a reputation works. You can’t meet someone one time and expect them to expect them to trust you. There has to be exchange, right? There has to be repetition. There does have to be time involved and that requires patience. And that’s not something a lot of people have today, but you have to have patience, right? It’s so important, such a great business and just life reminder of you have to prepare to win. And if, and if you don’t consider it a practice, but don’t give up, right. There’s a difference between quitting and failing. I say as quickly, and as often as you can, but don’t quit. Don’t give up, just fail more so you can get better and keep learning but prepare to win, love that.
AJV (52:59):
And then last but not least, this is a bonus takeaway. His he said this at the end of like, we just have a really simple model. Like, no, this is an entire business plan is one plus one, right? In order to scale, a very successful business, all you have to do is focus on impressing one person and then get that one person to introduce you to one more person and press that person and get them to introduce you to one more person, repeat over and over and over. And after a little while that one plus one plus one, plus one becomes many, many, many, right. But focus on doing a good job for the one and get that one person to introduce you to that next, love it so much brilliant. So many insights. Not just because he’s a personal Brent generally he’s one of the smartest people I know. He is so fascinating. So if you haven’t gone back, go back, listen to this episode. But then also go download this study. You can visit mobile mentor.com and get a free download of this new endpoint ecosystem study. How do you secure your company and your personal brand until next time? We’ll see you later at the influential personal brand.

Ep 259: What You Need to Know About How CSX is Changing with Brittany Hodak

AJV (00:07):
Hey, everybody. Welcome to the influential personal brand podcast. This is one of your co-hosts AJ Vaden here, and I am genuinely so happy. I’m so excited to have the amazing Brittany Hodak on the show today. She’s a personal friend, but she’s also someone that we go to for customer experience, training and advice. So we, we’ve got some shared personal and professional lives, which I’m so happy to merge those together for everyone on the show today. And let me just give you a little bit of background. But before I, I wanna tell you why you need to stay tuned for this entire episode is like there are two things that propelled me to COER Brittany to come onto the show today. And the first one is the fundamental belief that every single person in your company is in charge of customers experience, rather that is service or sales or marketing as like everyone, to anyone who touches your customers, which should be anyone and everyone at some point they are in charge of experience, which means this is an important conversation to be had for every single person, no matter what your job is, what your role is, what your company is, what industry you’re in.
AJV (01:22):
If you sell things to people, this is an episode that you need to listen to. So stay tuned for that. The second thing is this merging trend of how we’re seeing the marketing departments merge with customer service and experience. And this is happening in huge companies all across the world. And we wanna talk about why, like, what is the impact on customer service and customer experience on sales and hyper specifically on marketing. So stay tuned for that. So now let me give you just a little bit of a highlight of the all inspiring, all, all inspiring. If I can talk today of Brittany Hodak. So Brittany is an award-winning entrepreneur. And so speaker who has delivered keynotes across the world to organizations, including American express and the United nations, right? Like what, that’s amazing. She’s also published more than 350 articles for different media outlets, including Forbes ad week success magazine.
AJV (02:20):
She’s been on NBC, CBS, CNN, CBC. I mean, the list goes on and on. She also is the author of an upcoming book that we’re gonna get a little bit of sneak peek insider perspective on that’s gonna come out in about a year from now. But you know, she literally has done fan engagement for some of the biggest brands in the world, including Disney, Amazon Walmart, and then my favorite Dolly Parton. Right. So you kinda had me at Dolly Parton, so I could go on and on talking about your accolades and your awesomeness both professionally and personally. But at this point we’ll actually start the conversation. So Brittany, welcome to the show.
BH (03:00):
Yay. Thank you so much, AJ. That was so kind, I am thrilled to be here for the record. It was very easy for you to coach me to come on the show because I am a long time listener. And when you asked me, I was like yeah, that sounds fun. We should do it. So thank you for having me. I’m excited to you know, take some of the conversations that we usually have without a microphone and have them in front of a microphone.
AJV (03:24):
Yeah, I am honestly, I’m so excited. And for everyone listening, I actually asked Brittany to come and help us at brand builders group. And she and I had a, a multi-hour session just a couple of weeks. So talking about customer service and experience, and it was one of the things that it was like, oh my gosh, these are the things that every single person on the planet needs to hear. And so let’s start, let’s just start a little bit of, how did you get to where you are? Like, how did you merge from being where you are like being where you were to this real true expert, but not just an expert is something you’re truly passionate about. And it literally does just bubble out of you that way around customer experience and service that like, how did you get into this? Like where did this all start?
BH (04:08):
Well, you know, I think a lot of it started during my childhood because my dad was the most passionate customer service proponent of any anyone I ever met. And he when I was really young, he managed a restaurant and I used to love to go and sit in the restaurant and just see the way everybody who came in knew him. And he was so happy to talk to people and he didn’t mind being up front or in the back. Like all of his employees loved him and the customers loved him. And, you know, he would tell me stories about like some of the crazy things that would happen. And then when I was a little older, he was in charge of customer service at a car dealership and I thought everything was so fascinating the way, you know, he would talk to me about like the referral things that they were doing and retention plays and all of these things.
BH (04:57):
And like simultaneously, because he cared so much customer experience and customer service, anytime he was like wronged by any store, we were like forbid to ever go there again, which I remember as a kid was like, so frustrating. There was this one time in the summer I was probably like six or seven and, but he was the yard and the lawnmower broke and he was like, I’m gonna go get a new lawnmower. And, you know, we grew up in a small town. There weren’t a lot of places. But he went to the mall and tried to buy a lawnmower at Sears. And they were like, well, we don’t have any, like, you’ll have to come back in week. And he was like, but I see it right there on the floor. And they were like, oh, but we can’t sell you that one, cuz it’s assembled.
BH (05:42):
And he was like, right, but you have an assembly charge. So like, why can’t I have this lawnmower today? And then you can just like make another one when you get the other ones in. And they were like, yeah, sorry, we can’t do that. And so my dad got so mad, like when we left, he was like, we’re never shopping at seas again. He’s like, I’m not even gonna take my craftsman tools back when they break. And I was like, what do you mean we’re not gonna shop at Sears? Like where am I gonna get like clothes? Like what do you mean? But he, you know, there were probably like seven or eight brands over the years that were on like the do not buy, do not support lists either like retail or D TOC stuff. So I, anyway, he was so passionate about this idea of putting the customer at the center of everything you do and making sure that everyone on your team knows that the only reason you are there is because of the customer.
BH (06:30):
So every decision you make should be in the service of customers. And you know, I think I sort of like absorbed all of that without even realizing it. I always wanted to work in entertainment. I worked in the music and entertainment industry for like the first 15 years of my career. And as I started doing more and more brand staff, I realized that there’s this huge intersection of those two worlds and that the same things that make people love an artist or an entertainer are the things that make people loyal to a brand or a retailer. And, you know, it’s all about building that affinity and getting to that point where people wanna be advocates. And that’s where I really had this aha moment of if I can bring some of these principles, I understand from entertainment into the customer experience world to make people realize that customer experience can be fun and sexy and cool, then you know, that will serve a lot of people.
AJV (07:23):
Oh my gosh. I love that. And I, so, so I am curious. So and maybe this is a little bit of, what’s gonna be coming in your upcoming book, creating super fans, which is coming out a year from now, roughly give or take a little bit. But, and so I’m curious, like in your opinion, what makes people fall in love with entertainers?
BH (07:43):
I am so glad you asked this question. So I always say super fans are created at the intersection of your story and every customer story. And so I’ll never forget the first time I met Taylor swift, she was like 16 or 17. I was like in my early twenties, I was working at a record a company and I’d flown to Nashville where I live now. But at the time I lived in New York, I flew to Nashville for an award show and it was the very first award she ever got. And she was actually at the show with an artist who I knew because I’d worked at his label in college. So we were all at this after party together. And I was just, you know, talking to her about like the marketing that she was doing, because at the time she was really innovative with MySpace in particular, but like social media in general.
BH (08:27):
And so I was talking to her about, you know, all these things that she was doing, which of course came very natural to her cuz she was a teenager and she said something to me that hit me like a lightning bolt. And I thought it was like the most brilliant, some of the business side of the music business that I’ve ever heard an artist articulate. And she said, my dream is to sell a million records. And I know that if I’m gonna sell a million records, I have to make a million people care enough about me to want to buy my music. And so she was spending her time like paying it forward, like showing her fans that she cared about them even before. In some instances they were like showing that they cared about her. And I remember are like turning to my friend who I brought to the party with me.
BH (09:17):
And I, you know, after like we were talking I was like, that girl is gonna be a superstar. Like she is gonna be one of the biggest artists on the planet if she keeps this mentality and keeps this attitude. And I think one of the biggest common denominators that you see between the artists who, you know, sort of come in fast and hot and then dizzle out and the ones that have that longevity are the ones who really take the time to invest, invest in their fans. Like the ones who have that fan centric attitude. And the same is true of brands. Like the brands that are most customer-centric are the one who stand a test of time because people aren’t constantly looking for the next thing.
AJV (10:01):
Oh my gosh, that’s so good. And I love that. It’s like, I know I’ll sell a million records once. I know that there’s a million people out there who care enough about me to support me. And it’s like, that is so true of business and of companies and of business brands. And so, and I would say it’s like, it’s not that companies don’t know that they just don’t know how to do it. Or maybe they even know how to do it. They just can’t seem to execute it. So I have two questions on this. OK. One, how do companies do this? Right? Like give us like a couple of insider tips on how do we become the type of company that really is customer centric, customer focused while also battling the realities of trying to turn a profit and pay our employees and all the necessary things that have to happen. So that’s my first question. And then the second one I want you to be noodling around is like what’s, what’s the company to be watching who just does this exceptionally well that maybe we don’t know about. So those are my two things, so let’s start there.
BH (11:01):
Okay. Awesome. I love it. So the first one oh my gosh. I’ve already forgotten the first part of your question. It was
AJV (11:09):
So a couple I was
BH (11:10):
So concentrating on not forgetting the second one that I forgot the first one,
AJV (11:13):
A couple of tips on how do we actually do this? How do we become? Oh
BH (11:17):
Yes. Okay. Thank you. Yes. So, you know, one tip is to really be honest with yourself about where you’re at right now, because if you ask a hundred CEOs, are you customer-centric, you know, 99 of ’em are gonna say yes and the other one wasn’t listening. But if you add ask customers of those same hundred companies or employees of those same hundred companies, you’re gonna, you know, get wildly different results. So the first thing is to really understand what being customer-centric means and it means putting the needs of your customers first and there will be conflict. There will be times where you have to make a decision between, am I putting profit first or am I putting the customer first? And those are the moments, those moments where you’re being tested, where you have to have the resolve to say, we are doing what’s right for customer.
BH (12:13):
We are going to make things right for this customer. And if you can do that, if you can model that for all of your employees to follow, not only is your customer experience going to improve, but your employee experience is going to prove improve. You’re going to see the improved loyalty and advocacy on both sides inside the company and outside the company. But the thing where, again, a lot of people like don’t wanna hear this message at the top of the company, but in the middle of the company, people are like shouting this from the rooftops. It has to start at the top. And to your point at the beginning of the show, one piece of advice that I have is don’t try to have your chief customer officer or your chief experience officer operating in a silo. They need to have as much of a voice as anyone at the company, across every single department, actually a client of mine like five or six weeks ago was talking to me.
BH (13:11):
And this was somebody I’d worked with for keynotes before and, and worked with them on a consulting project now. And they’re adding the title of chief customer officer for the first time, which is great. Like it’s a wonderful step forward for this company. They’ve got like 50,000 employees across the world. And the CEO said to me, you know, I really can’t handle another direct report. I think I’m gonna have the CCO report to the chief revenue officer. Do you think that’s a good idea? And I said, yeah, it’s a great idea. If you want to send a literal message to your customers and employees, that customers are less important than revenue, because that’s what you do. When you have a CCO who reports to the CRO, whoever at your company is going to be the flag bear and the champion four, your customers has to have a seat at every table in every conversation because their insights are going to inform, not just sales, not just marketing, not just customer service, not just product design, all of it, everything from start to finish, because if you don’t make those decisions with your customers and my you’re going to pay the price long term, you’re either going to lose the customer’s trust.
BH (14:20):
You’re going to lose their business completely. Or what I think is like one of the most underrated threats to every business that nobody really talks about is apathy. Like people are just gonna not care. They’re either not gonna care in the first place or going to stop caring. If you aren’t putting the needs of every single customer at the forefront of every decision that you make.
AJV (14:43):
Oh, solid. That’s really such a great reminder that, that you told me the exact same thing. You’re like, whoever is going to lead customer experience, customer care. They have to report to you. It’s like, it’s gotta be that level of importance. And so I’m curious when it comes to this topic of customer-centric like, are there a few things, one thing, two thing, three things that people could do to go, Hey, I know if I know I’m being customer-centric if we’re doing this.
BH (15:14):
Yeah. So one real thing that you can do is, you know, I, I was having a conversation with ear with somebody earlier today and we were talking about how so many companies try so hard, especially like as they grow and grow to come up with a policy for everything so that when people start the onboarding and training and enablement process is almost about stripping them of everything they’ve brought into the job rather than amplifying those unique talents that you hired them for. So instead of saying, I trust you, here’s generally like here are core values. Here are guiding and principles. Here are our customer promise and here are some general things to help you with, you know, frequently asked questions or frequent concerns. But instead companies, especially with their customer service and customer support teams are scripting everything out saying, do exactly this. Do exactly that.
BH (16:10):
Do exactly that. They’re giving these, you know, hundred page manuals of policies to employees saying like only say this in an email or make sure you follow the script exactly on a phone call. And then they’re wondering why not only are customers not happy, but employees aren’t happy and they’re, you know, leaving their jobs at rates. We haven’t seen in almost a hundred years. And I think a lot of it is because when you don’t equip every individual employee with the power to make something right, the way they see fit in that instance, within a certain larger set of parameters, you’re basically asking your people to be robots. And so one of the like interesting things about customer experience is like, you will never have better customer experience externally than your employee experience internally. Like an unhappy employee is never, ever gonna show up in a good way for a customer. And so again, this all has to be modeled from the top. And that’s why it’s so important, not just to hire for customers to interest, to make sure that everybody on your team, regardless of the position they’re in actually does care about customers and, and making their lives better. But to not train that out of people, because you’re so worried about having them fit the perfect mold of, you know, a BDR on your team.
AJV (17:34):
Oh, that’s good. And it’s like, and it, I think that’s the tendency, cuz I think as a business owner we’re typically, it’s like, well it’s like, is this how I would do it? Or you know, so that’s why I think so many people, you know, it’s like I come from a very corporate consulting background. I was like, I was paid for a living to like build scripts and like make sure they follow these process and these procedures. And this is what you say on a sales call and da, da, da, da. And it’s like kind of like coming back of like, no, you need a, a set of parameters, these larger guidelines, but goodness gracious. Don’t strip the humanity out of people, just teacher people, how to love people and how to have good conversations and then know what’s acceptable and what’s not
BH (18:13):
Exactly a hundred percent. And if you study some of the most innovative companies, that’s exactly what they tell their people. They say, this is the promise that we’re going to uphold to our customers. Your job is to make sure that we live up to that. And then, you know, of course you have to give them parameters of, of course you have to say, you know, use your best judgment within these guidelines. But when you don’t allow people to solve problems, as they see fit, it doesn’t feel like a personal solution to the customer. It just feels like, you know, I’m in another PO or another order and you like, you know, rubber stamped, the same solution that you do to everybody else versus where there are those opportunities for a customer to forge like a true connection with your company because of something that that employee did.
AJV (19:04):
Yeah. And again, it comes back to human connection, human relationship, right. It’s like saying back to this Taylor swift thing, it’s like people I have to get people to care enough about me. Right. And it’s like, yeah, you gotta do the same for our customers. So, okay. So before I get to this like model company example that I’m so curious to hear who you think it is. I wanna also talk about this like concept is like how we create this experience and how we prevent it from being siloed. Right. So what are some tips around making sure that customer experience doesn’t get siloed to just a customer service department, but it’s like, there’s huge trends. And it’s like, like one of our very close friends just merged with a huge company. That’s basically saying no marketing and customer experience are now the same. And there’s this trend of merging customer experience and customer service in, within marketing and I’m going well, that’s breaking down some serious barriers and silos of going no there’s synonymous to us. And so how do you, how do you do that?
BH (20:10):
Yeah. Well, that’s a great question. And I think a lot of that is of course the evolution of the fact that traditional marketing going back, like pre-social media and perhaps even pre-internet was all about intent. So it’s like the marketing department, you know, existed to create leads for the sales department and then maybe do like trade shows and stuff that were sort of like that, you know, bottom of funnel activity. And I think as social media really exploded and businesses were like, we don’t know what to do with this. Like who, who do we give it to? What do we do marketing. They can handle it. Right. They’re the ones who work with people to make like logos and stuff. Yeah, yeah. Do our social media pages. And so what you’ve seen is kind of this just like, you know, attrition of like marketing gets a little more, gets a little more, gets a little more, but you’re right.
BH (20:59):
Like experience. Now the customer experience, I feel like is having like a real moment right now. Like people are writing books about it to including you’re truly creating super fans in stores January 20, 23. But you know, it’s like people are talking about it on podcasts. And I think that a lot of C-suite executives are sort of just like changing their title from chief marketing officer to chief experience officer or chief marketing, an experience officer. But it’s gotta go beyond the marketing department and even like the marketing and the customer service department. Because as I said, like, everyone in your company is part of the experience department, whether they know it or not. And if you don’t have clear guidelines to teach them what the model is, you’re gonna, it’s gonna be like, you know, some people are great and some people are terrible because it’s gonna be just the variance from person to person.
BH (21:55):
And so you’ve really gotta remember that. I like to say that experience is everything. Meaning CX is, you know, the biggest factor for brand loyalty, more than two thirds of brand loyalty is driven by CX, which is more than price and product combined. So experience is everything in this economy that we’re living in right now. But the inverse of that is true as well. Everything is experience every touch point, every message. And some of those are gonna be controlled by marketing. And some aren’t somebody said to me a couple of months ago, you know, you never see a skinny per running on a treadmill. It’s only fat people. People who are in shape always run outside. You know, who said that to me, the guy delivering my new treadmill. And I was like, I kind of like, didn’t say anything, cuz I, you know, I wasn’t like expecting the guy who had just like loved this treadmill upstairs to I have that hot take. And I like, I don’t know what kind of response he was waiting for, but I was just kind of trying to decide if he was, you know, maybe kidding or not. And he goes, oh, I bet you got a big husband’s your husband fat.
AJV (23:02):
That’s awesome.
BH (23:04):
And then he went on to tell me like how you never see somebody who’s in shape running on a treadmill. And he runs side 30 miles every single week. And like that’s the only way to run and the best way to run. And I was like,
AJV (23:16):
As he’s delivering a treadmill.
BH (23:18):
Yeah, exactly. And I was like, so do you work for an Nordic track or are you like a third party delivery? And he goes, no, no, no. I work at the company. I’ve been there a few years. I could get a treadmill for so cheap. I don’t even want one.
AJV (23:29):
Oh, got a real advocate. Real advocate he’s doing.
BH (23:33):
Yeah. So every single person at your company is part of the experience department and every decision needs to be approached with that customer in mind. Another like totally crazy story. So I switched vets about a year ago after going to the same vet for more than four years for my dogs. And the reason I switched vets is because the message on the answering service changed. So like camp appointments online, you have to call and you never get a receptionist. It’s like, you know, a phone tray. So I swear the, this is the message. Thank you for calling the name of the place. For hours in location, press one, to get a refill, press two for cremation and euthanasia, press three, press four, to schedule an appointment. And then it was like, press zero for the receptionist. And the first time I heard that, like I hung up cuz I was like, that had to be wrong. And I called back again and I was like, Nope, they’re asking me to press three for cremation in euthanasia before I even get the opportunity to like schedule an appointment or talk to the receptionist. And I was like, I, I, I need a new vet. Like, well, cause I had so many questions as a customer were right. I was like, how many pets are they having euthanized that they like put that so high up in their
AJV (24:52):
Priority list.
BH (24:52):
Yeah. Like I, I don’t understand. And then, you know, and I mentioned it to my husband and he was like, do you think maybe you’re overreacting? Like, you know, maybe it’s like not that big video. It is a little weird, like maybe just say something to them. And I was like, you know, I don’t wanna say anything because the vet either a like signed off on this, which tells me that there’s some judgment issues or B wasn’t a part of this and has no idea that like this is happening, which is also scary, right? Like both of those are bad and I’m entrusting the care of my pets who can’t talk to me to somebody. I wanna make sure that it’s the right person because you know, as sustain goes the way you do anything is the way you do everything. And so I switched pets just because of that. Cuz I was like, well, there’s like a serious either lack of judgment or you know, like mismanagement of priorities going on on here. So everything is experienced. And that’s why, whether it’s like the former head of marketing or somebody else, you need to make sure that you’ve got visibility and influence across every part of the company. Because only when all of those come into alignment, can you truly shine and truly showcase your uniqueness as a company?
AJV (26:08):
Yeah. I love that. And it’s like, you know, and it’s interesting as like so many of the people listening are, you know, building personal brands and they maybe are a part of an organization or they’re running their own organization. And so as we, as we kind of relate this to a personal brand, right? So you’re a speaker author consultant. For, for anyone who’s out there who maybe doesn’t have a team of people and they’re like, okay, well I don’t have departments or teams to do this. Like how do you, so as a, you know, entrepreneur speaker, author consultant, like how do you do this for yourself as a personal brand, without a team.
BH (26:45):
That is a great question. I think the first way is to approach it as if you did have a team because the concepts are the same, whether you are one person or a thousand people. I had somebody a very nice man named Perry who came to fix sink last week, my sink was leaking. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. I called the insurance like the home company and they’re like, okay, we’ll send somebody. And so this guy, Perry came out, he fixed my sink. This Friday afternoon, my four year old was like yelling, trying to get his attention to show him some star wars toy. The dog was barking. The baby woke up for his nap because the dog was barking. And he was like at crying upstairs. And you know, I was like apologizing for all of this chaos.
BH (27:27):
And he’s like, no, no, no, it’s totally fine. And then so he like finished with a sink and he stood up and he points up on top of him. And like, this is so embarrassing. He like points above his head. And he is like, what am I looking at here? And I was like a dirty light fixture. And he’s like, yeah, like what’s going, went on with this light fixture. And I was like, I don’t know. It’s just like, you know, I always have little helpers and it hasn’t been a priority. And the reality is like, we have a tall ceiling and it’s like a expensive, like big glass, light fixture. That’s like a two person job for like for me and my husband. Right. Like somebody has to like, hold the ladder and then like you pass the thing down. So you’re not like climbing down the ladder with a, whatever.
BH (28:04):
He is like, give me a ladder. I’m gonna clean this for you. And I was like, absolutely not. Like you came to fix my sink. Like you do not need to do this. And he was like, my mom always taught me that if I can make something better, I’m not allowed to leave it the way that I found it, go get me a ladder or I’m gonna go in your garage and look for it myself. And I was like, oh my gosh. So he proceeded to not just like climb a ladder, it take down this gross light fixture. That for some reason is like where every moth in America goes to die. He like dumped out the dead bugs, used the dish washing soap to like clean it out, dry it, got it. Sparkling clean. Showed it to me saying like, how does this look?
BH (28:40):
And I was like amazing brand new climb back up the ladder, like reconnect all the pieces. And as I’m like thanking him profusely, he’s like, it’s nothing. This is what I do. Like I’m here for you. So who do you think I’m gonna call the next time I have a plumbing issue, right? Am I gonna go through the home warranty company and like take you over? They give me no, of course not. I’m gonna call Perry and say, Perry, I need your help come over. And as a preneur, the same rules apply. The biggest threat to your business is apathy. A lot of times I work with small business owners and they say, I’ve got this huge awareness problem. Not enough people know who I am or what I do. And in reality, when I dig in, it’s like, plenty of people know you don’t have an awareness problem.
BH (29:22):
You have an apathy problem. Plenty of people know, they just don’t because you haven’t given them a reason to you. Haven’t found a way to connect your story to theirs in a way that makes them not see you as a commodity provider, but view you as a category of one to be like, you know what? I found it. Cause you know what, like the truth is like a lot of people are lazy. Like once you get a solution, like I’m not ever gonna look for another Perry, I don’t need to. I found my Perry. Right? So what the easiest thing until now has been to just call the home warranty company or like get out my phone and Google, whatever I need and pick the first person with good reviews. But then once you have a person like you don’t ever have to look for a person again. So for solopreneurs to approach it by saying, what special or unique gifts do I have? What can I do to connect my story to a customer story in a way that makes them like, not even be able to dream of ever replacing me because they know that even if they can find somebody else to fix a scene, they’re not gonna find somebody who gives your home the love and attention that you do.
AJV (30:26):
Oh, that’s so good. And it’s such a great reminder of like this. Isn’t just customer experience advice. This is business advice, right? This is like, this should just like bleed through and the business and say, okay, I have one more question for you. And I promise I’m paying attention to the clock. Cuz I’m sensitive to everyone’s time, yours time and everyone who is listening it’s for those of us who do have teams, right? So maybe it’s one team member. Maybe it’s a hundred, maybe it’s a thousand, maybe it’s 50,000. How do you train this? Or do you hire for it? So it’s like, how do you instill this culture? Cuz that’s really what it is. This is a culture. This is a belief system and add, how do you get that ingrained outside of you? So how do you transfer this?
BH (31:08):
Love, love, love this question. Yes. Sometimes hiring a consultant does help because then you have somebody who isn’t afraid to say the hard things, right? You have somebody who isn’t having to like walk on eggshells or you know, doesn’t know the whole background of, you know, what led things to be this way. Part of it is hiring for it. And it’s so funny. Like sometimes I’ll just look at job descriptions from big companies either that I’m working with or just like for fun on LinkedIn. And it’s so funny how many people will be hiring for customer facing and the word customer never appears in the job description like at all. And it might say revenue or profit or leads like a hundred times, right? It’s an exaggeration, but sometimes it’s like a dozen times and it doesn’t say customer and I believe that you can improve like 95% of job postings, adding the words to serve customers by.
BH (32:07):
And then just like whatever it said, right? Like cuz that is ultimately the job is to serve customers. And so yes, training your recruiters and your HR team to ask questions about customer centricity, as part of the interview process is important, but you have to set the standard. You have to have a model to say, this is who we are. This is what we believe in. And everyone on our team is like playing from the same playbook and to do that, to infuse the DNA of your company and your unique story into a way that all of your team members, you know, love and can, can embody it such a powerful thing. And like Chick-fil-A does a great job of this and you know, everybody everybody knows, you know about Chick-fil-A’s commitment to service, but what’s really interesting. And this is a actually something Macy said earlier today when she and I were talking is like restaurants all over America right now are closing their dining rooms or they’re changing their hours, like two or three of the restaurants near me.
BH (33:08):
Don’t even open now until noon. And they close at six because they’re like, you know, we can’t get staff, we can’t find workers. Or there’s these signs saying starting pay $17 an hour, but Chick-fil-A have any problems with their staffers. And about two weeks ago I was going through the chick fo Chick-fil-A drive through line, which like I do a lot. And I heard one of the girls say to another girl, those people at taco bell could never do what we do. And the other girl was like, yeah, you’re right. And so I, and the car was like, you’re right. Like they couldn’t. And they were both like so embarrassed. Like they definitely were not saying it for me to hear. And they were so embarrassed and apologizing and I was like, no own it. Like they couldn’t. And it’s not just like, it’s not a people problem. It’s a process problem. And if you put a good person into a system with bad processes, the bad processes are going to win every single time. Those two same roles probably would not even be doing the same if they were the ones at taco bell because they haven’t been trained. They haven’t been told it hasn’t been ingrained into them. That service is what you’re selling, not chicken sandwiches. So
AJV (34:15):
Y’all need to write that down service is what you’re selling. Right. That is so powerful and such a great reminder because I agree. It’s like, I don’t have like, there’s no staffing issues that any Chick-fil-A that we live in Nashville, there’s a lot of them. There’s no issues. And it’s like one of our favorite pizza joints. It’s like, they don’t even have an open dining room. Like to that point. It’s like it’s. Yeah. And to that, it’s like, it’s interesting cuz we keep asking we’re all the people and well, is it a people problem or is it a process problem? Right. That’s a really good distinction. So, okay. Last question back to this one I’ve I’ve given you like ample time to like subconsciously think about this. So a couple, one or two company examples that you think are doing this extraordinarily well that maybe people wouldn’t recognize or know. I know a lot of people talk about Disney and they talk about like all like Ritz Carlton, but are there any like, you know, kind of undercover giants that are really doing a great job at this that we could look to for an example?
BH (35:17):
Well, I’ll give you one undercover, giant, and then I’ll give you another like under the radar when, so the undercover giant, I would say is Warby Parker. And I have been a Warby Parker super fan for years now. Neil, the founder and I did a bunch of stuff together for Forbes back in the day. And you know, I just love their glasses. What I love most about word we partner now is you can get your eyes checked online and it’s so easy. You just take your phone and your laptop and it’s you feel like you’re playing a video game and you get your prescription. And it’s amazing. And the reason that I know this is because the last time that I went to try to order glasses and my prescription was expired, it was expired by like two weeks. And I called the eye doctor and said, you know, can you like do me a solid?
BH (36:04):
And she was like, no, you have to come back in. And I was eight months pregnant. Anna was during COVID. But like when you’re pregnant, your vision can change. So I was like, can you please just like extend it? Like I don’t understand. And she was like, no, I can’t. So anyway, like regardless of what you do, if you think people can’t replicate it online, like they will figure it out. Like I literally got my eyes checked online and now it’s like, I’ll go in probably like once every five years to, you know, check for glaucoma or whatever you get. But like everything can be replicated digitally. And I know where like just at the top of the hour. But the last one that I’ll give you is a company called arm more and it’s arm more style is the web, the, the, or URL, the URL arm more do style.
BH (36:44):
And it’s like a clothing subscription service similar to rent the runway. But what I love about them is that you can send them an email and say, Hey, I’ve got XYZ event coming up. And a real person will style clothes for you. Like it’s not an algorithm. It’s a real person who will email back and forth with you, send you pictures, ask for ideas, and then you get your clothes. When you get your clothes in the mail, they’re always tied up like very pretty packaged with like twin and paper. And then they make these like paper mache, dresses like not paper mache, origami like an origami dress out of like a really cool decorated sheet of paper. And I always look forward to getting them because I I’ve got a four year old. Who’s always like having fun playing with like the little like origami dress, but it’s just such a great personal touch. It’s like everything rent. The runway was like 10 years ago. And now our Mars, like getting a bunch of market shares. So underestimate the power of a personal touch, never underestimate the opportunity to connect your story with your customers story by showing them what that, what matters to them matters to you.
AJV (37:51):
Ugh, this has been such an inspiring conversation. If not for anyone else for me. Great.
BH (37:58):
I,
AJV (38:00):
I like clearly, if it’s gonna help me, it’s gonna help someone, but these are just such great reminders. And I think back to, you know, I said that as soon as you said, like, remember what you’re selling a service. It’s like, yeah, like, don’t forget, like you got in, you got into this to serve people or whatever it, your businesses it’s, you’re working with people. So whether it’s a product or a service or whatever, it’s like, don’t forget the people, right. People over profits. I love this. This was so good. So just a couple of quick things for everyone who’s listening. I wanna make sure that you know where to connect with Brittany. And as she mentioned, her book creating super fans is coming out January, 2023. So you got a while before it comes out, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t start getting content from Brittany right now. And she has put together a really cool mini course, a little video series for you guys. So if you want to go to Brittany hodak.com for live you can get access to that mini course. And of course, we’ll put this link in the show notes, but again, that’s Brittany ho.com/live. And then Brittany, if where would you say is like, if do you have a preferred social site for people to go and find you,
BH (39:11):
My preferred social site is whatever your preferred social site is. I always tell people you should be active on all of them. Yes. You wouldn’t be active on all of them because you never want somebody to be like, oh, I would love to follow her if except I’m not on tick. Well, I have a TikTok account, but I don’t post anything. Cause I’m like way too old. My
AJV (39:31):
Pretty much TikTok.
BH (39:32):
Yeah. Yeah. But I do have, I do have my handle. So like you can send me a message. I don’t even know if you can send messages on TikTok, but if you can, you can send me, you can send me a message there. Yeah, I know I’m super
AJV (39:43):
Old, but everywhere. It’s at Britney hodak.com at Britney Hodak yes.
BH (39:48):
Everywhere is at Britney Hodak and at video course you mentioned is totally free. So check it out. It’s Britney hodak.com/live. It’s a five, five day video course delivered via email. And it’s designed for everybody on your team. So if you’re somebody listening right now and you’re like, Ugh, I would love for my team to get a little bit more of this and think a little bit more about customers. Just let ’em sign up for the course. It’s totally free. It’s five days of training and there’s not even like an upsell at the end. Like it’s literally just like, I want you to care more about your customers and, and here’s how, and then the upsell will come in January when I’m like, Hey, sorry you buying my book. Cause you should buy my book.
AJV (40:22):
Very good. It’s just infiltrate with value. And eventually people want, actually want more. This has been so awesome. Thank you for being on the show. Everyone. Thank you for listening. We’ll catch you next time on the influential personal brand.
Speaker 3 (40:41):
Hey, brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for taking the time to check out this interview as always, it’s our honor to provide it to you for free and wanted to let you know there’s no big sales pitch or anything coming at the end. However, if you are someone who is looking to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and get to know you a little bit and hear about some of your dreams and visions and share with you a little bit about what we’re up to to see if we might be a fit. So if you’re interested in a free strategy call with someone from our team, we would love to hear from you. You can do that at brand builders, group.com/pod call and builders group.com/podcall. We hope to talk to you soon.
AJV (41:28):
All right, y’all this, isn’t the recap on the just had with Brit Hodak on creating amazing customer experience, not just service but experience. So these are a couple of my key takeaways and just great reminders. And I love this so much because to me it is universal and is for everyone. It doesn’t matter if you’re a personal brand or a CEO or a frontline employee, or if you’re in customer service or sales or whatever it is you’re doing this applies to you. So here are my highlights in this universal fashion when it comes to customer experience is one, I think I said this like five times in the interview, but I’m gonna say it again here too, is that remember what you’re selling is service and I is so important and it’s so easy to get caught up in building systems and processes and building manuals and writing scripts and you know, building project management systems and email campaigns and all this stuff.
AJV (42:26):
When at the end of the day people just need to know that you care. And it’s really hard to tell if someone cares in an email or a text, right? And I’ll be the first one to say, it’s like one of the number one things that we’re trying to change at our company at brand builders group right now is we are a call first company right now, if your preference is email, we will correspond an email, but we want to talk to you. We wanna actually have a real conversation and a real a real relat up of like, tell me where you are. What are you going through? How can we help? Not just fill out this survey and maybe someone will look at it one day. It’s like, it’s a call first culture. And a lot of that started from some work that our company did with Britney in preparation for starting 2022.
AJV (43:11):
And we basically said, it’s like, our business has gotten too automated. So how do we rein infiltrate back that human connection? And again, it’s like, people don’t remember all the things that happened. They may not remember what you said or what you did, but people do remember how you made them feel right. And people care to know that care about them. So remember what you’re selling is service. And as long as you can make someone feel cared for and feel heard that’s a win, right? It’s I would much whether I would much rather win the relationship than win the sale. And that’s a tough pill to swallow sometimes as a business owner, as an entrepreneur, and it’s going, sometimes I choose to lose the battle so that we can make progress in this overall war of, yeah, we’re not gonna be a fit for everyone.
AJV (44:03):
And we have to figure out like within parameters, what makes sense for the customer, right? And it’s like, and how do we also not like go under and we can still pay our bills, but we do have to remember, it’s like we got in this to serve people, just like you did whatever it is that you’re selling whatever it is that you’re doing. It’s like you got into this probably to help someone and somewhere along the way, we forget how to put people first and how to keep people first. And so if you can just like one key takeaway is just remember what you’re selling is service. I thought that was amazing. Such a good reminder for me. So hopefully it is for you too. The second thing that, that was so impactful is this reminder that building a, a business building a brand, which I was same thing cannot happen in silos.
AJV (44:50):
And man, is it easy to get caught up in silos? Because communication and collaboration take a lot of work and emotional energy and physical energy and meetings and all the things, right? It’s like, that’s actually a lot of work to do that, to break down silos and go, no, like these are universal culture components that we share. And so how do we transfer culture from the personal brand or the owner or the entrepreneur or the department head down to every single person who touches anything that you do it’s that customer experience is universal. And I think her Nordic track example is so important of at some point along the way the, the mission or the message what we do at order track got lost. And for someone who is actually delivering this piece of equipment into your home to go, I mean, I never see skinny people running on these and I run outside, must have a fat husband, like, wow, just imagine if you do have any staff, people it’s like, are they sold?
AJV (46:00):
Are they bought into what you do as much as you are? And would they actually encourage you, like encourage your customers, not to work with you and not to buy what you offer inadvertently by just not sharing this like, culture of like, this is why this product exists. This is why this company started. Like, this is the story. All right. And just back to that, it’s like, there’s gotta be a story. And I love that Taylor swift example. It’s like, I have to figure out how to get at least a million people to care about me. If I’m ever gonna wanna sell a million records. Right. We gotta do the same thing as companies, right? It’s like we have to care about our customers in order for them to care about us. And so how are we doing that? And how do we create this culture at every single level and every department at every position.
AJV (46:50):
And there’s a great upside. For most of us, you who are running small businesses or building personal brands is we don’t have to worry about the masses. We’re not trying to infiltrate a thousand different people to get on board with our culture. We’re dealing with one or five or 10 or maybe 20, right? And so there’s a lot of power, but it still takes the same amount of work. Right. We have to transfer that emotion, transfer that mission transfer the way that we wanna have people treated and then have other people treat them the same way. So again, it’s like customer experience is universal and that goes for your vendors too. So remember it’s like, if they represent you that counts for them too. So number one, remember what you’re selling as service. Number two customer experience is universal. And then the third thing, which I kind of led to a little bit is this concept of how do you get people to care about you?
AJV (47:45):
Well, number one, you care about them somewhat simple. So then I ask yourself, and I don’t have the answer for you for this. This is a rhetorical question I’m asking. But ask yourself, how do I care about my customers? How do I make sure that these people know that they’re cared for? How do I, as a entrepreneur, a personal brand, a business owner, an executive, whatever, how do I show my customers that I care about them? And I think that’s gonna look really different. And I think you gotta first ask with what does our, what do our customers want from us? And that may start with simply asking them, cause I think everyone values different types of service differently. Like I know for me, like one of my personal core values when it comes to working with other companies is responsiveness. Like even with my own team, it’s like, I hold responsiveness, like above the bar in terms of importance.
AJV (48:43):
Like to me, it’s like, if you are responsive to me, I’m important to you. And if you are not, I am not. And so when it takes other companies and vendors and suppliers, days or weeks to get back to me, well, I’m not important to you. So I might as well start looking because somebody else can, will prioritize me. I just have to go find who they are. So may not be that for you. So what it is, what is it for your customers, right? And then you gotta figure out what it is. And then how do you put protocols in place guidelines to allow for, for that to happen whatever it is in your culture and your company and your environment. So again, just ask yourself as like, how do we let our customers know that we care about them and not just our customers, but our perspective customers as well. So again, if you didn’t listen to it, go listen to the entire episode. It was so good. Go check out her video course, Brittany ho com slash live. It’s a free five video video course. Go check it out and get inundated with how to create super fans out of your customers. We’ll see you next time on the influential personal brand.

Ep 255: Scaling an 8 Figure Coaching Business with Casey Clark

AJV (00:07):
Hi everybody. This is AJ Vaden here. I’m the CEO, co-founders at brand builders group, but also one of the awesome hosts of the influential personal brand podcast. Of course that slightly by as I talk about myself, but I’m really so excited for you guys to meet my friend Casey Clark today. He is so awesome that he and I are newer friends, but we’re in a, a little two person mastermind. We’re gonna be meeting every month together. And I I’m so, so grateful that he was kind have to entertain being on the show today, but just a little bit of background. So you know who he is, cuz you’re gonna get to know him and his business really well over the next 30 to 45 minutes. But I even learned some really cool stuff. I did not know. But Casey came from a franchise background and when you left the franchise visit, I didn’t even know this, but you had 90, more than different franchise owners.
AJV (01:04):
And I had no idea that’s like a really massive accomplishment, but what I mostly know about is what Casey is doing now. And he owns a company called cultivate advisors and it’s one of the largest small business coaching firms in north America. And so that’s a huge part of what we’re gonna be talking about. And then just in 2020, he was ranked within the top 800 fastest growing companies on the Inc 5,000 list. And that is no easy feat. And so we’re gonna talk a lot about how you did that. And a huge part of our audience are people who identify as coaches or trainers or consultants or speakers which is why I wanted to have you on the show. So welcome
CC (01:46):
AJ. Thanks for having me excited to be here.
AJV (01:48):
Yes, it’s gonna be so fun. Okay. So to give everyone just a little bit of background, tell them, how did you get started in the world of small business coaching?
CC (02:00):
Well, it goes back to, you know, those franchising days, we were training first time business owners, how to scale a business and it was in the home service space. So it wasn’t as exciting of a space. Right. But it was, it was one of those businesses that allowed you to spend more time learning how to run and grow a business versus necessarily how to be amazing at the industry. Right. Hmm. And so through that period, we just, I kept starting up more franchisees. I, I kept going through that cycle. When I started seeing these patterns, I started seeing how people got stuck and where people would find these gaps. And I went, I wonder if this is the same in the outside market, if I were to go across, you know, hundreds of industries. And so, you know, started doing some research, started to kind of get into the coaching advising space. And within a few years it was very clear that what I had experienced was very similar to where most entrepreneurs were, you know, that stop gap where they get on that treadmill or they, they, they lose control if it’s growing too fast, you know, et cetera. So that’s kind of what got us into it. I got addicted to this idea of being able to help small business owners kind of take back their life per se and start to control growth. And that’s, that’s kind of what cultivate was built on.
AJV (03:02):
Oh, that’s so good. So I’m so curious. What was the industry for the home services, business
CC (03:08):
Painting, painting industry.
AJV (03:09):
So I have a huge past life as a consultant and I did tons of work with Iffa. So I’ve got oh yeah. Clients. but
CC (03:18):
I know Iffa I was certified with Iffa. Oh yeah. I’ve been panelists at their conferences in the past, you know, all that stuff, so.
AJV (03:25):
Awesome. Okay. So you get started in this now. How long, how long ago was it that you started cultivate?
CC (03:33):
We founded at the end of 2013, we didn’t do any revenue till 2014. My co-founder was one, one that kind of went full time. We have a fun story where he just called me one day and said, you know, that idea we talked about, we set up a, you know, an LLC for, I, I quit my job today. I’m gonna start doing this full time. I’m like, all right, I guess we’re doing this. And so I, I still had my other business. I was still working on that exit and, you know, working on that. So it took me about two years. So I was part time. He was full-time for the first two years I joined full-time really at the start of 2016, so, okay.
AJV (04:04):
So
CC (04:04):
Like I think that, what does that, what does that make that now? Five, six years maybe. I
AJV (04:07):
Mean that, but that’s pretty significant to, and I we’re gonna get to this, but to go from 2016 to what, what we call it first quarter of twenty, twenty two, like that’s pretty phenomenal growth and a short amount of time. So do you mind telling the audience, like how much are you guys doing in revenue? You don’t have to give us like to the, to the stint, but
CC (04:27):
No, you’re you’re all right. Yeah, yeah, no, you’re all right. We’ll, we’ll probably do you know, just shy about 16 million or just over this year. And we’ve got about 126 employees, so yeah. So it’s, it’s been a quick runway
AJV (04:41):
Five years and I think that’s really important cuz I know so many of the people that we talk to and that we work with they have the dreams of building and scaling something that’s beyond them, delivering coaching services and you guys have done something extraordinary in a really short amount of time. So some of these questions that I have prepared every cause I wanna know
CC (05:01):
I wanna know, get some, gotta get some dirt, get some ways to, to copy. I love it. R D Rob duplicate, wanna know
AJV (05:08):
Too. So that’s pretty phenomenal growth in five years. Right. And from somebody who also has been a part of building and growing an eight figure coaching business, like that’s not easy. So I wanna know it’s like, how did you guys do it? Like how has it
CC (05:22):
Grown? How long do we have AJ? How long do we have? Well back to the beginning. No I, I think I can distill it down to a few things. I, I think one is the, the quality of the output, right? What goes into that? It’s, we’re really specific who our advisors are. They’re only past business owners that have seen success. We’re very, very strict on that. We’re not the license or the franchise. I would, I don’t think you should franchise this, this industry licensing you can get, you can get away with. And if you set up the right structures, but you know, I think for us, we really saw this vision to say, we’re gonna create an employee model for advisors. Let them feel like internal entrepreneurs within our brand. And how we’re gonna approach is we’re only gonna bring in folks that have walked the walk before, you know, out of a, I, I, I, I read a stat the other day that, you know, it’s $11 billion industry.
CC (06:13):
This coaching industry is the average business is like 156,000 in revenue. That’s, that’s almost half what my average advisor does a year in revenue. Right? So it was just a quality play that we took out, say, we’re only gonna bring these folks. And I think that was step one. And just this relentlessness to measure the customer’s experience and not just measure, are they happy? You know, they give us a good net promoter score, good, you know, status action score. But more importantly, we started tracking really early on how many businesses are growing double digit revenue and growing double digit profit that we’re working with. And because we were niche in and we had that focus, it allowed us to prioritize. I think the third thing that really stood out and, and I, I don’t always agree with this, but it’s just what worked for us.
CC (06:55):
We kind of hit the marketplace at the right time. What we saw was that we did not need to be industry experts. We could be industry agnostic. And what we needed to do was fuel growth. And what we found is that a lot of business coaches had niched into I’m gonna help you with your sales or I’m gonna help you with this or this part of it. And that’s great. I mean, I, there’s no discredit to that. We just really saw the models that there’s nobody out there as a generalist that even go bring those people in on their behalf and truly meet them as a business partner. So I think a lot about how our model got created is that’s also why we’ve scaled so quick. When you bring on talents and entrepreneurs already that have ran a business, you go, you need to go find 10 or 15 businesses to work with. It’s not that hard for them to do that. And we can start to scale very quickly as we built the model. So those are some of the nuances that I think helped kind of scale at the end of the day, just chalk it up to a lot of hard work and a lot of really good talents of people that are smarter than me. Yeah. That’s how we kinda got over the line. We should
AJV (07:50):
Always be the dumbest person in the room that
CC (07:52):
Is try to be, try to be trying to be.
AJV (07:55):
So I think there’s something that is really unique about what you, and it’s this concept of building it in an employee based model, because I think that’s pretty contradictory in most of the consultant coach worlds, for sure. And so why did you go that way?
CC (08:13):
Well, I don’t know if it’s the easy way. I think it’s the hard way. It’s harder to get off the ground, but if you get off the ground, I think it’s ways than the second tier scale, right? Like our, a lot of our growth has happened in the last three years. We’re exploding and we’re, we’re set up to continue this really, really fast scale, really because we’re able to control the levers of growth because we’re all employees, we’re all, you know, guided towards the same north star that we’re driving towards. And it just starts to get this, this engine that you can’t turn off what I find when you’re in the, the non-employee model, which again, there’s nothing wrong with that. Right? We’ve got tons of clients in our portfolio that have built license or contractor programs. You just lose this element of quality and you lose this element of control.
CC (08:54):
And I shouldn’t say you, you lose it. It’s just harder to hold. It is probably the better way for me to frame that. It’s harder to hold that element of control for the, for scale, because at the end of the day, you can’t tell somebody what they have to hit and what they have to go achieve. You’re you’re only gonna go as far as the, the tenacity or drive of the individual. Yeah. In the other side of that agreement. Right. And you won’t get their full I endeavor. And so what really I’ll talk about what I think holds people back from this it’s it’s money. Like really what I find people in this industry, why they stay away from this is the cash side of it. Yeah. And, and we were in the same boat. We, we just, we just said, you know what, we’ll go bring on three and we gotta make th sure.
CC (09:32):
They’re all successful. And then we took all the and earnings from that. Now we’re gonna go bring on six. You know, this year we just started 15 in one class, we’ll bring on 30, this year, 35 this year, next year we’ll probably bring on 40 to 50 advisors. Right. And we just keep, we just keep taking the earnings and then you can afford to bring on more people. Cause we really don’t break even on advisor for almost 11 months. Yeah. So it’s a long term strategy that we’re playing for a long term growth. It’s it’s, there’s no shortness about it.
AJV (10:01):
Yeah. I love it though. I think one, one of the things that I love so much is it does give you that ability to create a more standard experience because yes they are employees. Right. I think that’s one of the hardest things is creating a, it’s not, you want it to be, you know, cookie cutter, but you wanna be able to set standard expectations so that every client has a somewhat similar experience, even if what they talk about is uniquely different.
CC (10:28):
Yeah. And I, and I’ll tell you, like, I don’t think a lot of our team members like really view, like I’m an employee of cultivate, you know, I hope they don’t. I think most, most, most people within our organiz are coming at it going, yeah. Yeah. I hang my shingle at cultivate, you know, but I have my own portfolio, my own book of business. We’ve created compensation incentives that create unlimited upside in every role in the organization. So they feel empowered. They feel that same sense ownership, but we’re able to maintain that standard. And again, our, our team members, you know, hit those standards easily and, and drive towards those standards without, you know, cause the talent we hire. But that’s the other thing too, right? Your talent pool totally changes. When, when you say I’ll pay you this salary, I’ll pay your benefits. I’ll give you a 401k match.
CC (11:07):
I’ll and I’ll give you unlimited upside for revenue share based on your output. It, you know, transparently after selling franchises for a long time. And then now offering money and really to write checks heck of a lot easier on the second part of that than it’s on the first. I mean, there’s a long line. You get to kind of sort through to pick the right person. Now we’re lucky in our industry, we haven’t been affected by the great, you know, resignation and we haven’t been, you know because we hire these past entrepreneurs. It’s, it’s just kind of a different niche we’re in. But so I don’t wanna be Des sensitive, you know, to what’s going on in the world right now. But it, it really is compared to my experience of franchising, I find so much easier to just go, I need to 10 people. It’s not gonna be that hard for me to go find 10 talents of people. I just have to do some, some hard work to, to pull ’em out.
AJV (11:50):
So for somebody who is in this world and they’re building this coaching business or consulting or training, right. Didn’t use any of those and they’re going, I just don’t have the money to do that. Yeah. Right. That’s somewhat of a mindset.
CC (12:02):
Oh
AJV (12:03):
Yeah. So what would you say to that person?
CC (12:05):
Three answers. One, get a partner who has money. Now you have money. You know, don’t hold the degree, don’t hold all the equity, you know, go after your, go after vision, see the reality, figure out how to buy out the partner later. Option two, start, start on the freelance. Start on the, the, you know, that’s what we did our, our first year and a half, the people we brought in, they were, they were all contractors set percentage, you know, and just, we were really lean. We didn’t over invest in anywhere except for talent. And we saved our pennies. We didn’t pay ourselves very well. Yeah. We, we intentionally held off to the best of our abilities while paying the bills. You know, we’ve got families and all that, but you know, we just really focused hard. So we were double dipping. We were advising full books of businesses in our, in our terminology, but we were also then leading a few advisors, each getting ’em off the ground.
CC (12:49):
So we had to play had kind of be that player coach there for a bit, but we had the site and we had the vision. We laid out the forecast. We knew exactly how much money we had to get to, to have the amount of money to invest. And we had ran the model to know what we had to invest to get. And then we flipped all the contractors to employee and then started to only bring employees. And we started growing at the speed. What was cash? Now our speed of growth is limited to the number of leaders we can promote. So how fast can we, people skilled up to where we feel comfortable putting in a leadership position. That’s now what holds me back in terms of the next chapter of growth of waiting for that element. So that’s how I personally, you know, look at the money side is get a partner, number two you know, set up as a contractor first, take those earnings and, and bootstrap this thing up. And the, the third, another option is just of the day, like create an equity program out of the gates. Like, you know, your first five or 10 folks like tie them in for being those early adopters. And you do something kinda a little different where they’re more of a partner and then the next batch, as, as you get 10 people up running full blast, putting, you know, deposits back into that bank, it’s gonna create the, the nucleus of money for you to then, you know, push out.
AJV (13:54):
Yeah. Love. That’s so good. So, all right. Let’s say somebody buys into this, they’re listening to this interview and they’re like, yeah, I’m not gonna grow. I’m not gonna scale unless I have more people. Right. Yeah. Be a very finite amount of clients and time that we can all do this individually. So where would you say, like, where’s your go to place for finding great talent right now?
CC (14:15):
I mean, it’s a honestly poaching LinkedIn. It really, it really is. I just you know, why, why though, like a lot of people just talk about it, like, I’ll give you the new, the new, the nuances of why you know, I can search CEO co-founder owner. I have the ability to search that on LinkedIn. So for that reason, I have the ability to find their right talent by, by putting those filters. I don’t really know of any other place online that allows me to search that. Yeah. I think you can search resumes on indeed now. And there’s a little bit of searchability in that, but it’s a different,
AJV (14:48):
It’s a different person.
CC (14:50):
It’s a different pool, you know, for us now, now I don’t think that I, my, my gut is not a lot of people necessarily for the niche or what you’re trying to get into always need past entrepreneurs. Right. So if I were to talk to, you know, we’ve got a, a very large client base and portfolio, I mean, indeed is really the number one job board still. I mean, nobody’s even touching it in terms of the amount of hires and, and what you get out of it. But I would really, if I worked with any, any company say, how do you get going on recruiting in a professional service environment, okay. In this type of environment, I would say three ways, LinkedIn poaching, you know, you’ve gotta have somebody, either a recruiting firm or somebody in house actively going out and trying to find the right people on getting them educated to where they wanna apply.
CC (15:36):
That’s the key don’t poach and say, would you like to have a conversation? Don’t do that. Like, I just wanted to introduce you to the role, go check it out, have some great videos on your website, let them apply. So they feel like they’re trying to earn the role. Yeah. Otherwise you just turn in just a negotiation of salary and that’s not, you’re probably not in that situation yet. Option two, make sure you have posts all over. Indeed. Especially if you can work remotely anywhere, open up your, open up your mind to talent across the country. That’s just the new way of life. Now, everybody we’re, we’re there. All right. The whole, I’m gonna hire people in my back door that in my backyard, that’s gone. So you’re missing out a massive talent if you’re gonna limit yourself. Yeah. The world’s changed. Right. And then option.
CC (16:11):
And especially in this industry, just don’t, you don’t need walls. You don’t, you know, you can work remote and then, you know, option three is, is, is really referrals. Like you think about your own network. You think about, get on the phone, do the hard work, get on conversations with people, you know, and go, I’m looking for somebody who is this background, who do you know, that has this background? And then as you start to get your first few employees, instead of a have conversations with them, like, how can I get three or four of your friends that are similar to you in this organization? What do we have to do to make that happen? And just, if you start with that intentionality, you’ll get outta the gates. And then once you get outta the gates, you have a following us, you know, we’ve got kind of an endless application pool that we get to work through now, but that’s because of our size and our, our success stories. Right. It doesn’t, it doesn’t start that way. It’s like, I remember being, you know, convincing people. I promise, like we really do know what we’re doing. It’s helping small businesses grow. I remember those conversations like yesterday, you know, oh, that’s now, they’re now the story speaks for itself. But,
AJV (17:05):
But you know, it’s, it’s so true. It’s like, you know, we recently just brought on five new, full time employee strategy. One thing about me is I, I take, I take advice quickly. Once I agree with it, I’m like, I’m on it. It’s like, I think we had our conversation like first week in December and it’s like January, we had five full-time employees. Right. And so a lot of it is
CC (17:25):
Ask how you’re feeling a couple months, that risk tolerance
AJV (17:29):
Been a little crazy, but you know, four out of those five, I got, I poached off a LinkedIn.
CC (17:34):
Yeah.
AJV (17:35):
One was a personal referral. Yeah. And one and four out of five, straight up just poached off the LinkedIn. But it’s, it’s knowing how to navigate. Right. But it’s looking, it’s knowing what you’re looking for.
CC (17:46):
Somebody, somebody told me this a lot of years ago. I can’t remember who I wish I could give credit. Cuz I share this all the time. It’s one of those things where it’s like somebody once said, right. But you, you should always employ the employed, not the unemployed. Yeah. Right. And so it’s, you know, the reason why I like LinkedIn poaching is I like to take people who already have a gig. I already have something going and I’ve gotta convince them that my gig’s better. It’s usually when you get the talent, there’s a reason why the person’s unemployed and now that’s not fair. Cause some people might be here and go, whoa, wait, I kind of got unlucky. Like don’t mean any disrespect by that, but just a general rule of thumb at scale, as an owner, growing a business, how are they employed? Not the unemployed.
AJV (18:23):
Yeah. It’s such wise advice.
CC (18:26):
Especially when you’re first getting started.
AJV (18:28):
Yeah. I think that’s yeah. Okay. So I love this. Right. And so then, so my next question comes around around. All right. So in order to get to the place where it’s like, all right, I need to bring on more talent. I need to make this happen. You gotta like have sales. Right? You gotta have some growth.
CC (18:41):
You gotta need some revenue.
AJV (18:43):
You gotta have some revenue. So I would say like, what do you think other than having great talent and doing all the things which I having great. Yes. That’s a given, right. That’s an expectation, right? Yeah.
CC (18:52):
If you don’t, if you’re not, if you’re not good at what you do, you’re not, you have no business scaling it anyway. You’re gonna lose yourself in it. Yeah.
AJV (18:58):
But so what’s your sales strategy
CC (19:03):
That I have to be careful what I should. No, I’m just joking. I think, I think there’s a few, few ways we view it. We kind of break this out. I mean, I’ve always believed that the fastest way to grow a business is that your number one marketing task, I’m gonna go to marketing versus sales. Cause I think as long as you have the leads and you offer a good value and your right price, you’ll sell, I mean, we can get into sales, conversion ratios. And I know you and your husband have an amazing sales background. You could, you know, teach at the end of the day of how to close. Cause I’ve grabbed my own strategies from watches your, your videos of the past. And, and you know, I think that I look at the marketing source where most people struggle is actually how to get the leads in yeah.
CC (19:40):
To then be able to sell. I think that’s actually where people struggle on the route. I agree with that. I agree with that. People can learn sales. It’s kind of hard to learn marketing. You can learn how to sell stories. You can learn how to set up your Facebook or LinkedIn profile. You know, these are all things you can do, but like how do you actually build an engine of leads that’s sustainable. Right? So that was really what we focused on. And, and now what we did is we turned all of our advisors that came in, we have them also generate their own opportunities. Right. So a lot of our advisors are bringing their own personal network when they come in. They’re in to do so, but it’s real, we’re really focused on a referral business. If you think about coaches, we’re no different than financial advisors or insurance brokers or lawyers.
CC (20:21):
How many times have you ever gone on Google and said, I wanna meet a lawyer. Not very often. Most people are like, they’re gonna get referred. Right? You’re it’s just so I, I call this the referral industry. You, you got how to be referred in. You gotta set yourself up to get referred in. So however you can build that engine, that’s how we approach it. And so knowing that that’s the model knowing that’s how we approached it. We just skill our advisors up, unbelievably on how to build this referral model. And a lot of different ways from building, running, speaking events, to partnering with different programs, you know, et cetera, et cetera. But I do have a full partnership team. That’s out, you know, working, setting up partners with people to where we come in and provide content and, and value to their organizations and all their, their you know, business owners within their network, depending on what the, the partnership is.
CC (21:08):
We focus on, you know, we we’ve for a little while we land, we ran a LinkedIn program, but that’s really become saturated. You’re not really gonna get a lot of sales outta LinkedIn with these days. You know, really it’s always come back to the root, can we get 40 to 50% of our clients every year from more client referrals? That means you’re doing an amazing job. Yeah. Right. If you can grow 50% year over year, just because of the num you know, one in every two clients give you a referral client, go figure that out, ask the clients for referrals, be active, then figure out how to get the connector. What we call kind of the connector referrals, the outside influencers, people, you know, connecting your, referring you and then use your own personal network from all the business owners where you’re essentially going, Hey, I wanna work with you in your business or whatever, you know that your niche might be. We’ve really kept it simple. And we just, we follow the goals, follow the KPIs. And we
AJV (22:00):
Deliver you say it’s simple, but for most people they’re like, wait, what?
CC (22:04):
No, I know, I know this is what we do every day though. Right? I don’t wanna give away too much cuz this is what we say it down. And help people do is like, let’s figure out how to build a sustainable lead engine. Because that’s usually the biggest, here’s what, here’s what I find people either struggle between, you know, sales and marketing on the growth side or they struggle on the capacity side, which I consider leadership and recruiting. Yeah. Like those are the two. And I think of like financials as in the middle, right? You gotta have financials locked down, otherwise you can’t scale. So once the financials are solve and I don’t just mean you have money, I just mean cash flow price per widget margin per, per widget, future performance, stress tests. You know, now I’m just, you know, sharing a bunch of random terms, but all these things are vital to be put in place. And then it’s, we just find business owners, Teeter, totter back and forth. Like, do I need to drive the sales and marketing? I, or do I need to drive the leadership in recruiting? And you’ve gotta build an engine for both. And once you have it, you get this really nice. We call it the propeller. You just start taking off, you know, flying to wherever your destiny is. Whenever you have those two things running at the same pace.
AJV (23:04):
Yeah. We, it’s so funny. We talk about that all the time. But it’s like, if you only have one of ’em that’s growth, but you have to both to have scale, you can grow on both sides. Right. But you have to have both to really have scale. And I, and I love that. And so, so I have two, two quick follow ups on this and I’m watching the clock too. I promise. I’m not gonna keep you here all day. No,
CC (23:24):
All good.
AJV (23:24):
But you have this one thing, which I don’t think is confidential. So hopefully I’m not like
CC (23:29):
No, no. It’s okay. Yeah. What is it?
AJV (23:30):
This concept that you have of enterprise affiliates.
CC (23:34):
Okay.
AJV (23:34):
Right. So I think that’s pretty revolutionary and not something all that common in this industry. And I don’t know what report you were reading, but I was probably reading the same report just a few weeks ago, talking about how the estimated market net worth of the coaching industry is about 11 billion, right. That is estimated over the next 24 months to reach 20 billion. It’s
CC (23:55):
The second. Yeah. It’s growing a
AJV (23:57):
Growing industry in the world, but here’s the part that’s crazy. It’s totally unregulated. Right? There’s no regulatory body that’s governing this no industry. So it really does come down to who’s being referred. Who’s most trustworthy who who’s got these connections. And I think that’s really substantial because that’s ultimately what we do brain builders group. Right. It’s how do you establish a personal brand? It’s how do you build your reputation? How do you become known as the go-to person for X, Y, or Z? And so this concept of being able to multiply this referral concept within an entire organization or association, I think is brilliant and revolutionary, and it might, may seem like duh, that’s what we do. But I think for most of most of the world, but I’m sorry, what are you talking about? What is an internal,
CC (24:48):
Well, you made it, yeah, I was gonna say you made it sound really fancy. I don’t even, I don’t even say that those words together the enterprise affiliate, that’s what I call it. I’m gonna steal it and go into my team from meeting next week and go, it’s time to talk about our enterprise affiliate program. What I, I just, I just call strategic partnerships, right? This is, this is about the idea of a one to mini model, right? You could spend your time selling a single business owner and are, and I’m using in my language, you know, whatever your end user is for, for you, whoever’s listening. And then, or I could go sell the person and create value for the individual, to, for them to bring me in to as many of their clients as possible or their network or their association.
CC (25:28):
And so this started back. I mean, we were, we were one of the, we were one of the companies that came out of the WeWork, boom, you know, WeWork went up next to my house. We got our glass box that we sat in for a few years when we got our start, before we moved into other offices. And when we were going through that, you know, I, it was right at my fingertips. I’m just, I’m working with the community manager of the it’s local WeWork. So just remove enterprise. Cause I think if people go after enterprise, they may, they may fail quite a quite quickly. I we’ve got a lot of enterprise partners now, but I didn’t start by going after enterprise partners. I wouldn’t have got time a day. Right. You have to get to a certain scale to, you can keep up with the enterprise partner.
CC (26:03):
So I would share that openly. So people don’t get just misguided here, but think about what is enterprise for you, right? Think about who’s your type of strategic partner. So this cowork space, really simple example. When we got started this community manager, I’m talking about going, how do I help you keep your clients here? What’s your biggest issue? Oh, your, your business is coming for a year and then they don’t renew. What if I could help you double that renewal rate? What would that do for your, your depart? What would that do for your job? Your role here as an employee, like you would do this like great. I wanna put together an education series and I want your help to go around and get all the businesses to come meet with me. I got like 13 clients outta this one, WeWork by just doing a couple simple little tactics of focusing on that partnership.
CC (26:43):
Another example is, you know, we figured out the financial advisors they make more money when they have assets under management, the more assets they have. So let’s go have a financial advisor, introduce us to every business owner that they know, because we know we know how to make the business owner grow. As they grow more assets under management, financial advisor wins, we win accountants accountants when they grow their, their, their book of, you know, the business that they’re leading as a tax accountant as they grow that, that, that business grows, right. They have to bill more, it gets more complicated lawyers. They get to bill more, the larger the business becomes. So we just started going around telling our story and going, this is the type of growth rate we’re getting it kind of a no brainer. You should probably just introduce all your clients to us.
CC (27:24):
Let’s figure out the right way to do that for you organically, that doesn’t come off as a sale and instead just pure added value. And we’ll be your partner in crime. And by doing that, you know, they’re gonna stay with you as a lawyer and accountant and they’re gonna keep growing. And so there’s just a pure belief in that. And we teach our advisors do that on the individual level. And then, you know, my partnership team’s going out and working with what you call these more enterprise levels now where we get these massive partnerships and yeah, for sure. It’s, it’s helping us scale. So yeah.
AJV (27:50):
You know, it’s interesting because a huge part of our business comes from our affiliate partnerships, but all of our affiliates are individuals, right? Yeah.
CC (27:58):
But that’s where you gotta start, but that’s where you started. Right. And it makes sense that you going, I gotta go to enterprise now. I think I’m getting up. And AJ, you guys have had a huge successful ride. Right. So I get it. But other people just starting, I just didn’t want them to hear like, yeah, I’m gonna go have a conversation with Amazon. I’m like, Amazon’s tough. I’ve had that conversation. Well, you knowing, cause
AJV (28:17):
Like I left that conversation and I literally went to Roy and was like, we have to have an enterprise affiliate program like that, like move my head and immediately went and
CC (28:25):
To how corporate you made it sound overnight. Yes. So
AJV (28:29):
But it’s like one of those things where it’s like for anybody it’s yeah. It doesn’t matter if it’s your local chamber chamber of commerce or your business journal or it’s, you know, a national association it’s like, where can you create strategic partnerships? And one of the things I love is I think a lot to people naturally today when they hear marketing, they automatically think of digital marketing and there’s a whole world of offline marketing that surprise still really works.
CC (28:58):
It does. I, I, I, I’m so glad you brought that up. I mean, you know, look, we, we do digital marketing, you know, we’ve got marketing companies out there supporting us and helping us drive and, and all of their different niche, you know, and they all tell me they’re gonna be my best lead source. They’re not like client referrals is still my best lead source. But you know what? You have to look at it when you’re in a professional service base. I put all of us in a professional service. Okay. So that’s how I just view the category of what we’re at. And if you look at it, you rarely hear about a profess service scaling because of digital marketing. Now that’s different than brand reputation. You need Google Yelp reviews. You need people to understand reputation, you need success, or you need an awesomely built website that does SEO rank that does allow Google to find you.
CC (29:40):
I mean, those are just the that’s any business. Now, if you wanna be relevant and you wanna have a chance of growth these days, you’re gonna have to have a nice, you know, online footprint, right. But then there’s this outbound, you know, digital marketing approach, HubSpot will say, it’s the inbound, you know, put out content, get people to follow you. I, I personally find that unless you’re gonna go at scale that it’s really hard. And, but you need to put out content because you actually just wanna help and tell your story and help, you know, towards your mission of whatever niche you’re in. So use that as I view digital marketing, more so as competency as how you like help support conversion as people meet you, it tells your story on the footprint when they’re like, oh wow, look at all these things they publish or look at all these content piece is they’re obviously an expert at what I’m trying to solve.
CC (30:24):
Instead, get out pound the pavement, get into conversations and get people to refer you in. And you know, if you, if you pass that five to 10 million line, all right, go hire a big digital marketing firm and PR firm. Like I have to go do what I need to do to get additional scale, but I pay five to six times the acquisition costs per client on the digital marketing space than I do to get a referral. So, and that includes my, my employee’s salaries to manage partnerships by the way. So it’s not free, right? It isn’t free. There are other costs associated. It’s just that it, it just comes out so much cheaper than the digital marketing scale, especially now, right? All their algorithms changing. It’s just more and more expensive to play in that space. And it’s and this industry so busy, it is so busy.
AJV (31:09):
Yeah. Well, I think one of the things and why I wanted to pop this up is again, it’s like, I just think about all the questions that our community and our clients ask us and a constant one is how do I get more clients? And I’m like, well, step one, it’s not gonna happen from your Instagram count. Most likely
CC (31:26):
No, but
AJV (31:27):
Probably where it will happen is in your local community. So let’s not forget about the importance of that offline brand, that offline reputation is offline efforts. And it’s not one or the other, it’s both. Right. But I love the, hear, you just reinforcing the power of doing great work and getting good referrals. Right. I think that’s huge. And then if you can build those start small, maybe not enterprise, but those small strategic partnerships, Right? It’s like, if you believe in what you do enough, then go say, I’ll do a free workshop. I’ll do a free training. Just invite people
CC (32:02):
For sure. We get we of all day. I mean, every, every single person, you know, every business owner we meet, you know, if we feel there’s somewhat qualified, we’ll sit down and give ’em two hours assessment. We’ll, we’ll blow their mind by the time they walk outta to our meeting, this
AJV (32:13):
Is the next thing I wanna talk about. You think this is normal, this is not normal. So I talk about, so cause I would say this is a part of your sales strategy.
CC (32:22):
Right? All right. Fair enough.
AJV (32:23):
This is part of your sales strategy. So walk everybody through it. Like how do you acquire a customer?
CC (32:29):
Sure. I, I can’t go into all the detail, but I can share this. You know, what we believe is that there has to be a partnership formed for a coaching relationship to happen, right? Or a speaking relationship or whatever it is. And so often what people wanna do is come, you know, have us pitch, what can we do for them? And we just refuse to do it. Our perspective is no, every business is different. Every, every way we approach this is gonna be slightly different. Yes. We’re gonna use the same type of resources, expertise, and all that to help move you. But it has to be tailored. That’s just, you know, a foundation of a, our values. And so when we meet a business owner, we are always quick to say, you know what? Let’s just cut the crap. Let me sit down for two hours.
CC (33:06):
Let me bring third party. Let me start ask, just show you what we’re capable of doing and how fast I can connect. Some things you probably have not connected in your own business. And that usually peaks everybody’s interest to go. Well, now I’m curious, right? We sit down and we’re, we just bat a really high average when we do those two hour sessions where people go, if I had you by my side, I’d know I’d be going way faster. And then we have to deliver, right. People start to measure how much they’re growing. We make sure they know how much they’ve grown since they’ve joined us and to reinforce it. And so way we go, I mean, and that’s just, we’re, we’re very quick. And, and if we got to the end of the first two hours and they weren’t blown away and oh, we’d probably give another two hours. Cause we’re confused. Why they’re not blown away. You know, if we really thought there was an opportunity you know, and so we, we, we prove it. We prove it, right. We let the Google reviews speak for themselves. We let the, we let what we could do for them, you know, and let them experience, prove it versus ever showing them a deck or explain to them how amazing we are. Cause we just don’t think any of that matters. I feel like there’s too much noise.
AJV (34:03):
So good. It’s like one of my favorite saying is why tell if you can show, right? It’s like, yeah.
CC (34:09):
Why show’s tell all day? Why,
AJV (34:10):
Why are we talking about this? Let me just show you. So I think for everyone listening, like here’s the main takeaway that I really want you to grasp onto. It’s like, if you know what you do works, if you know, what’s gonna change someone’s life. If you know, it’s gonna make a difference, then give as much of it away for free because people will sell themselves. Yeah. They, they will sell themselves. If you can provide something, that’s going to help them. Right. And it’s like, make it so good that people are like, how do I buy this? Like, can I give you my money? Like how do I have more of it?
CC (34:41):
But Phish in the right pond, that’s also really important. Right? Because be, you know, sometimes I see people like go on Instagram or Facebook cuz they like, I just laugh. Sorry. I was laughing earlier when you’re like, they think they’re gonna grow by doing this, my favorite comment. And some somebody says, I need to re update my website. I always just love on how many people have seen your website, you know? And they’re like 500 and the last six, I’m like not your issue. That’s not need to spend your time. Yeah. That’s not where your time should be spent if you wanna grow. If you’re solopreneur trying to scale that next chapter. But you know, I, I, you know what I always, what I always think about is these, these folks that, you know, they’ll put out the, the ether go offering free sessions. We would never do that.
CC (35:20):
Notice how I said, I said, if you qualify, yep. Right. We’re always willing to take a quick call, but we’re just gonna ask you a couple questions. We know when it makes sense to work with us, when it doesn’t we ask just a couple questions, just tells us a little bit before we would then commit our time and what we always tell people before we set that free assessment, you better treat this as paid. Otherwise we’re not interested. Yeah. You better come ready, you know, to learn. And so it’s all about how you set those expectations and where you fish, meaning what type of leads are you pulling in that will, you know, meet, be your qualified type of you know, ideal client
AJV (35:49):
And what’s your filter. Right. So I think you said you guys call it an assessment, right? Like take our,
CC (35:54):
We call an assessment. Yeah. We, we do a two hours assessment to break down the business. Yep.
AJV (35:58):
And then it’s like, so we, we do something similar, right? It’s like we offer a one hour free brand strategy call, but you have to apply. So like we actually have you go through an application and if you don’t fit, we give you a bunch of free resources and say, come back when you’re ready until then. Yeah,
CC (36:14):
Exactly. It’s not, it’s not the right fit free
AJV (36:16):
Stuff. But I love, I love this concept and I don’t, I don’t remember if this is what you call it, but when I talk about what you do, I call these the tribe before you buy it calls. What do you mean? Okay. Yeah. What do you call ’em?
CC (36:28):
We call ’em a free advising session. I mean, you can, you can call you, can you like to you’re you’re the storyteller though. AJ you’re you’re the, you’re the one that teaches people how to manage your brand. So ill run with the way you designed the words.
AJV (36:39):
Listen, I have literally constructed our entire team about your in enterprise affiliate program.
CC (36:45):
Yeah. I’ve never used those terms together and
AJV (36:47):
Your try it before you buy it program and
CC (36:51):
Love you just, you just turned it into a widget for yourself and put it into the business, which I, I was joking earlier R and D everybody listening. I mean, this is how you grow business. Right? How did I learn all this stuff? I’ve just robbed it from other people that’s right, right. Just R and D Robin duplicate. So duplicate.
AJV (37:05):
Oh, that is awesome. Okay. So one last question. And then one of the things that’s so cool for all of you guys listening is I’m gonna provide a link in the show notes where Casey and his team are gonna give you guys the chance to take this assessment. And if it’s a fit, then you’re gonna get one of these two hour business consultations with his team, which I think is so awesome. So thank you for that. I’ll have the link in the show notes. But my last question, before we are going, all right, actually I wrote this down, right? So if there was one thing that any, I’m gonna say, coach, that any coach needs to do in order to grow their business right now, current day, like present tense, what would you say is like the number one thing to do? If it’s only one thing, what’s the one thing they should do,
CC (37:54):
Help your clients tell your success story.
AJV (38:00):
Love that. That’s why I love you.
CC (38:02):
Figure how to do that. You’ll scale. You’ll grow.
AJV (38:05):
Oh, this has been so good. Thank you so much. So insightful. So enlightening, so many great takeaways. I love the concept of really just focus on building an employee model building strategic partnerships, focusing on client referrals, getting away from this trendy thing of digital more, not that it’s not important, but there’s other ways to do it. It’s it’s not, you know which one it’s just how much of each one? Yeah, so good. Casey, thank you so much.
CC (38:34):
Oh, you’re so welcome. Thanks for having me.
AJV (38:35):
And then last but not Lisa, if people wanna connect with you directly. I know I’ll put this link in the show notes, but it’s connect with you directly right on LinkedIn.
CC (38:43):
Yeah. Best way to get, get in touch with me.
AJV (38:45):
Yep. On LinkedIn. I’ll put all the links in the show notes. Casey, thank you so much.
CC (38:49):
You bet, AJ. Thanks so much. Bye-Bye
Speaker 3 (38:52):
Hey, brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for taking the time to check out this interview as always, it’s our honor to provide it to you for free and wanted to let you know there’s no big sales pitch or anything coming at the end. However, if you are someone who is looking to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and get to know you a little bit and hear about some of your dreams and visions and share with you a little bit about what we’re up to to see if we might be a fit. So if you’re interested in a free strategy call with someone from our team, we would love to hear from you. You can do that at brand builders, group.com/pod call brand builders, group.com/pod call. We hope to talk to you soon.
AJV (39:39):
All right. Y welcome to the recap episode on my conversation with Casey Clark one of the founders cultivate advisors, and this is all about how to build and scale and enterprise coaching business which they have done exceptionally well. And it’s just a exploding on so many different levels. So what are we gonna do on this recap episode? I’m gonna talk about two or three different things that I learned from Casey that I think as a as what I consider myself a coach, right? Of how to really build and scale your coaching business. All right, these are things that I think are fascinating and I think are really important. Number one, an employee model versus contractor. It is such a temptation of, of an as an entre entrepreneur to go. And there’s so much risk involved with bringing on employees, especially in that start, those startup years of going.
AJV (40:32):
There’s just too much risk, so I’ll contract the workout. But I think to his point, it’s like if you’re really building a business and a company where you wanna influence the experience more and you wanna have people bought into this business, like it’s their business employee model is the way to go. And that is not the norm for Mo most coaching practices. But when you look at the scale of cultivated advisors compared to maybe other firms around the country like that I think at the results speak for themselves and I love what he said. It’s like, I hope they don’t feel like employees. I hope they feel like partners because that’s really what they are for us. And so it’s building a culture where people aren’t working for you. They are people working with you, right? This whole concept of two is more better than one.
AJV (41:17):
And five is better than two. One of my faith quotes is an old African proverb that says you can go if you go alone, you they’ll go fast, but if you wanna go far, you need to go with others. And this concept of bringing people in but with this employee model, it’s like, there’s a win-win benefit of like, they’re committed. They’re in, you got all their time, all their interests, all their commitment and vice versa, right? So there’s this partnership mentality of like, no we’re doing this together to get everyone on the same page and to create a, a unified experience and to be build something together. And I just think that’s abnormal. But very much worth looking into if you really wanna build and scale a coaching business. So we we’ve done it both ways.
AJV (42:02):
So I have personally been a part of companies where we built and scaled our coaching business with contractors and now one with doing with employees and it is drastically different. And so you gotta figure out what works and what, what your risk tolerance is, but knowing that you can do it that way and perhaps that’s the way to go for you. So I thought that was really insightful and not something you hear so many people talking about in this industry. Second thing is not what he calls it, but what I call, what he does is a lever, the strategic partnerships and what I call enterprise affiliates. I just, I heard that wrong in my mind and made up a new term for him. But strategic partnerships is really what they are. Right. but creating organizational relationships where it is a one to many referral relationship.
AJV (42:51):
And I love what he said. He does. We do a lot of digital market and we do trade shows and we do a lot of things. Like they’re a healthy eight figure coaching business. He said, but I’ll tell you where the majority of our business comes from referrals. Right? And it’s like, what is your system for generating referrals? Right? Cause if you’re waiting on all inbound leads or you’re just banking on SEO or paid traffic, that’s, that’s a long and very potentially expensive game. Right. It also takes a lot of other people to make those things work. And those are a lot of assets where really to get a referral, it just takes you to do a really good job. So what is your referral system, right? Yes. Should you have SEO? Yep. Do you need social media? Yep. Do you need content marketing?
AJV (43:33):
Sure. You do. I’m not saying those things. Aren’t important. I’m saying, do you put as much time, energy intent, focus, resources on generating your referral system as you do all that other stuff? Because I tell you what, there’s a lot of trendy conversations around digital marketing. Are you listening to as many of those conversations around human relationships and human connections, just asking for a good old fashioned referral from the customers who actually work with you and the people who work with you and your suppliers and your vendors and your friends and your family and networking meetings and all the things. Right. so referrals, like, don’t forget the importance of those and doing that on a one to one, but also one to many. So it’s asking yourself, it’s like, what organizations can I go out and serve to create some strategic relationships with that?
AJV (44:20):
Perhaps what I do would be of benefit to the people that they serve. Right. And it’s finding complimentary partners. Right? I think these are great examples. And he gave a couple of them. He goes, Hey, it’s like, you know, we’re gonna go out and we’re gonna talk to a financial advisory company where we have one or two people and it’s like, I’ll go out and do a free workshop. And it’s like, this is how I can help you build that business. Or maybe it’s a local association where they need speakers and they need content, but it’s like, yeah, you can promote your services to our members. You, but it’s like, what, and who are those organizations and people in your local community or your virtual online community that you could create some strategic partnerships with and create a one, one a win win relationship on a one to many scale.
AJV (45:08):
So again, just that emphasis on, on where do you wanna put your time and energy? Because it can easily be diluted in a lot of different arenas. But I just fundamentally believe it’s like, if I need a coach, I’m not going to the Google. I’m not going there. I’m gonna reach out to my friends, my entrepreneur, friends, associations, I’m a part of masterminds and I’m gonna go, who have you used? And who do you recommend? And that’s word of mouth marketing. And we need as much time and intent on that. I E building our reputation, shameless plug, building your personal brand, as you do anything else. And so who are those people and what, what relationships are you nurturing to build those strategic partnerships? So great reminder, right in the gut number two. And then number three, is this concept of sample calls of going, if you believe in what you do, then why not give some of it away for free, like prove it, right.
AJV (46:08):
It’s what I I’ve been telling our team that they do at cultivate. It’s called try it before you, right. You don’t know if this is a fit for you. You don’t believe us. So that’s all right. We’re hap we’re happy to give you in their case, a two hour consultation to show you what we do so that, you know, if it’s a fit for you and if it’s not, the two hours are yours and if it is then we should work together. Right? And it’s like, I think so many of us us are afraid to give anything away for free. Well, why not? Like you can find any information that you need out on the internet for free people. Aren’t paying for information anymore. They’re paying for guidance and application. They’re paying for organ organization of the information and application of actually the how to not just the, what the, how to, and it’s like, I’m so much inclined to go, right?
AJV (46:55):
I’ll try this for two hours and prove that that it’s good. Give me the confidence. Show me. You can help me. I’ll happily give you my money versus going, man. I don’t know. I hope so. I think so. I guess I’ll try it, but I don’t wanna sign a, you know, like a long term. I don’t wanna sign my life away. Like what do I do here? So what are you doing to help increase the confide of your perspective? Buyers of making it a, a very easy answer so they know what they’re getting into. They’re getting value up front. And it’s making the sale a whole lot easier because the quality of your service sells itself. So those are three core takeaways. I thought this was such a powerful interview. It’s like, if you are in the coaching industry, if you are a coach consultant trainer, you must listen. To this episode, it is a sure way of helping you build and scale your coaching business. So until next time we’ll you later on influential personal brand.

Ep 203: How to Hire Great Contractors with Hanson Cheng | Recap Episode

Listen to the episode below In today’s episode, we revisit our conversation with Hanson Cheng, a rapid skill acquisition expert, speaker, and multi-million dollar earner who helps CEOs optimize their time to ensure more freedom and flexibility. Tuning in you’ll hear Rory and AJ discuss their top three takeaways from Rory’s interview with Hanson, from […]

Ep 202: How to Hire Great Contractors with Hanson Cheng

RV (00:07):
Hey brand builder Vaden here. Thank you so much for taking the time to check out this interview as always, it’s our honor to provide it to you for free and wanted to let you know there’s no big sales pitch or anything coming at the end. However, if you are someone who is looking to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and get to know you a little bit and hear about some of your dreams and visions and share with you a little bit about what we’re up to see if we might be a fit. So if you’re interested in a free strategy call with someone from our team, we would love to hear from you. You can do that at brand builders, group.com/pod call brand builders, group.com/podcast. We hope to talk to you soon.
RV (00:54):
Biggest business blunder ever have I made the interview you are about to hear is not the real interview Hanson. And I have been working on our schedules for like three months to do this interview. We did the entire interview two days ago, and at the end of the interview, I got to the end and I was like, where’s the stop button where wait a minute. Where’s the stop button, no stop button. Because some bone head moved named Rory Vaden forgot to hit the start button. So we didn’t record the entire thing. And Hanson’s been, so you’ve been so gracious man to come back. Thank you for that. I feel like a total bonehead. I mean, nothing frustrates me more than losing time. And so to do it to somebody else is just like sucky. But no, oh
HC (01:47):
Man. Things happen, right? We’re entrepreneurs things, always seeing the not happen the way we planned, but you know, I’m glad we could get it done and do it again. Well,
RV (01:56):
Yeah, so here’s the good news for y’all is Hanson is going to save you some time. We had an epic interview and we just, him and I are newer friends, but we met on a project that he was working with. We have a mutual friend, Celinna De Costa, who is a writer and you know, they’re friends and we met for a thing. They were, they had going on for Forbes, but Hanson is really smart. And as soon as I met him, I was like, gosh, I really liked this guy. I like his brain. You know, he is a speaker, he’s a multi, multi seven figure earner. And he helps CEOs basically figure out how to remove themselves from their company. Either with people or processes. We’ll talk a little bit about both of those. Just so they have more freedom and flexibility and make more money and, and, you know, just more profit and, and be able to have more time on their vision. So he’s really good at streamlining things, automation he has worked around the globe and he, he lives Bali and right now I happened to catch him in DC. So he just, all things, entrepreneur and systems and, and man, the interview we did was awesome. So I couldn’t let him get away without getting it actually recorded, man. So anyways, welcome back officially.
HC (03:14):
Thanks for having me back.
RV (03:16):
So so freedom to ascend dot com is your website. And you’ve worked on a lot of different things, but I think that our conversation, you know, that we had a couple of days ago, what stuck out to me was I was going okay, how do you help entrepreneurs? Who is get their time back? And basically the way I thought of it was, you said, okay, we’re going to either put in awesome people and, or awesome processes. I mean, is that, I mean at a high level, is that kinda, what is that kind of how you think about it?
HC (03:59):
Yeah. I mean, every, every business is different, but we can use the same principles and analyzing how to best leverage the owner’s time. What we do is we just, you know just take an inventory of where they spend all their time, what is moving the needle most and how can you automate that exactly with systems current software. So keeping up with technology out there to replace or reduce the amount of people or time needed and adding people in to either do those tasks or to maintain those, those, the software.
RV (04:32):
Yeah. So the I’m a big nerd, like autumn marketing, automation, nerd, and, and, and stuff like that. And I like a lot of the systems, but I want to talk about the people part here first. And I think the thing that’s so frustrating for so many entrepreneurs, whether they’re trying to hire a VA or a full-time employee, or just a contractor who can get something done, like, you know, like I need a guy, like I need a guy who can edit a video. I need a, I need a gal who can like write some copy. I need a, I need someone who can like build a website or do design me a flyer. And it is so freaking hard to find good people to just like, knock out a job. And you’ve got two tips on this that I’m going to make you reshare, because these were two things I had never heard. But you know, you don’t, you don’t have to dive into those exactly. If you don’t want to, I do want to, I do want to cover them, but like, how do you find the people? Like, what’s the mindset here? And then, you know, like what, what give us like a couple techniques or strategies on this.
HC (05:44):
Yeah, sure. I think what most people default to is searching for job listing boards, like Upwork or Fiverr you know, or Craigslist or whatever it is to find these people and problem with that is we run into a lot of stuff we need to sift through. Right? You definitely can find quality in there, but I mean, it’s, it’s a lot of stuff to sift sifter. And a lot of times as business owners, we just want to get that task done in a, in a, in a hash process. So what I’ve done is like, okay, how can I basically make this process, the system more efficient and what I, so I found this hack. I’ve never heard of anyone doing it before. But what I do is I use this for my actual website was I was like, okay, where do I want my business to be?
HC (06:28):
If I were to five or 10 X or 15 exit, and who are the people in the market right now that are leaders in the what in my market who are 10 times ahead of me, I would go to their LinkedIn profile. And I will look at the recommendations they did. Not that they received, that they actually give, because what that will do it will show me who along the way, in the last three, four or five years have they worked with who experienced that growth or help and skill that growth that I can now talk to bring in as a consultant or ideally how I hired them as part of my team to then they have the blueprint they’d experienced the blueprint, they know where I am, and they knew they know what they did to get to where the person I’m looking at. Gotcha. And so I can just hire them, bring them on. And automatically I absorbed, it’s like a matrix. I can absorb their knowledge, right. Just by hiring them. So this is one way I like to acquire new skills or knowledge is just by hiring people. Who’ve already done it. And the fastest way to find those people is to hire the ones who have been recommended by the people who are invested in your industry.
RV (07:34):
Dude, that is such a practical tip that is, is free. And it makes so much sense. And we have, we have learned and studied so much about recruiting and hiring and we’ve hired so many people, employees. I mean, we’ve hired hundreds of people at this appoint, like between our various businesses. We’ve helped our clients hire hundreds of people. I have never heard anybody share that. And it’s such a simple tip. And you know, when you think about LinkedIn, of course, LinkedIn has its own job board, which we’ve used a ton and, you know, costs, I don’t know, maybe 500 bucks or something. We’ve used Upwork, we’ve used Fiverr, you know, whatever Craig’s list marketplace. Like we do all, all the things. But we have always found that like our best hires come from referrals either from like friends and family or clients, or from people who work here, but on your LinkedIn network, like those are referrals.
RV (08:39):
It’s, it’s like you don’t, and you don’t even have to ask for them, you’re going, who is out there, that’s the best in my space, or that does the best in this, this thing. And then like, we all think about recommendations in terms of who’s given us recommendations. How do I get recommendations, but never have I even thought to go, oh, and there’s an, you know, anyways, so we, you and I recorded this interview. It, two days ago this morning, I went on LinkedIn. I started doing this and I was like, whoa. And I, I found a VA case. I found one person that was like a VA. I found one person who was a social media marketing manager for somebody. And this is like top people. And this is like, the recommendation they wrote was like six years ago for like five years ago before they even became who they are now going, oh man, like they’re right there. And it was really amazing. And I saw a bunch of others, like web developers. I saw membership some, someone who had built memberships for one of these people. And I just, I don’t know. I dunno, Hansen. It was just so simple. And I just can’t believe I’ve never heard of that before, so that, and you’ve done this for yourself, but then also like you can help. You’ll help, you know, what clients you work with. You’ll go do this for them and figure out who they’re hiring.
HC (09:59):
Yeah. It’s very, very easy. Once, you know the process now I don’t even have to do it myself. Right. I can train a very like one of my team members to do this or a VA just say, Hey here are the competitors. Here’s a list of the people that are in my market, who are the best. And I don’t care. Like I want to know everyone they’ve ever given a recommendation and recommendation to, because I may be looking for a social media manager, but they might have recommended someone completely. I’ve never even thought about hiring. And then now that gets my brain to start thinking, like, why did they hire that person? Let me talk to him, shoot him a message on LinkedIn. Hey, I saw that you worked with this person, what did you do there? What were your results? And everyone’s super, super, because it’s just like a referral. Like you said, you, you refer them to who gave the recommendation and you’re like, I’d love to learn more about you and add, I’ve never had anyone not respond in a, in a, in a good way.
RV (10:50):
So do you just send them a yeah, I mean, that’s just so, so cool. And, and it is true. There’s something about LinkedIn recommendations. Like I even find that people will kind of write an Amazon review and there, you know, a lot of times they’re like very forthcoming, but there’s something about a LinkedIn recommendation that feels very like vulnerable and honest and real. It’s like, I won’t write a LinkedIn recommendation for just anyone who asks for one. No. Oh
HC (11:18):
No. It takes some time. It’s not easy. You got log in. You’ve got to go to recommendations. You need to set it up, you know, rent it out. Yeah.
RV (11:23):
Yeah. So, well, that’s awesome. That is such a great tip, you know, and, and, and on the LinkedIn recommendations, I mean, this is not really what we talked about it and not really the topic of this conversation, but the other Jim of how to use recommendations is like you know, like for keynote speaking, we, we have done, this is you go look at other speakers. We don’t really consider other speakers as competitors because they hire different speaker every year. Right. But you go look at who is a top speaker and write on their profile will be recommendations from all their past clients. And if you’re, and you go, like, these are the peop, like, these are literally the decision-makers who hired this person to come speak. And you just never think about using the tool like that. Like, it’s, it’s the, it’s not even just like the cold search power of it. And the social engine it’s like working through real human relationships and they’re all visible missing as an incredible so okay. So then the other thing I wanted to ask you about was you live in Bali, you grew up in DC, right?
HC (12:37):
I grew up in DC. Yeah. How long do you live in Bali?
RV (12:42):
I would say about four years. Okay. So the international hiring place, right. And you always hear of these, like hire someone in the Philippines for two bucks an hour to just like do this. And we’ve had certain things that has, that has actually been, it has actually worked, but in most cases it’s like, it takes more time than it is worth. And you shared with me that there is another kind of secret little thing that you have figured out about hiring, about hiring great people. Can you share, share it with us? Yeah.
HC (13:22):
Yeah. This is, this is a superpower of mine because when I discovered this man, it made, it made hiring so much easier for, for teens of people who have been working here. So I’ll, I’ll just get right to it. So I do have a competitive advantage, so I’m gonna let you know upfront. My, my fiance is Russian and my, my hack is to find groups of people, teams of people in Russia to hire who have been working with each other for specific pieces of, of, of labor in my businesses. And the reason I do that is because like you said, when you hired from the Philippines or India, and you’re looking for the low-cost salary for unfortunately their level of education and, and just their mindset on, on problem solving is a lot different from Western countries. Okay. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but if they find an, a problem they have trouble finding a solution to a problem.
HC (14:21):
They’ll come back to you and you have to basically use your mental bandwidth to figure it out for them. Now, Russians, on the other hand do not, they are very, very competitive. Technology wise, they, they consume so much education Americans, Canadians, like they, cause they want to grow their skills so they can get out of Russia or at least perform on a competitive basis across the entire world. So what I’ve found working with Russians is that they’re, they’re sharp as, or maybe even a little bit sharp enough because they have the work ethic and they have the education and the mentality of like, okay, like what are all the different options we can do in chess? And what I’ll end up in there? Their cost of living is so dramatically lower than ours, that you can get a very, very one of, some of the best teams in Russia. And I’ll give an example. I have a social media team, well, more of a marketing team about four or maybe five people on the team and I’m paying less than 2000 a month. Or, and these are these, these, this agency works with grants like Coca-Cola pioneer, large, massive brands. So I have a lot of experience with the most up-to-date marketing strategies.
RV (15:36):
Huh. So, yeah. So like, what I hear you saying is, you know, each, each culture, like when it comes to hiring internationally, you have to like pay attention to the kind of cultural norms and the like course you do. Right. And it go, yeah, it’s, it’s different. Hiring someone in India is different than hiring someone in the Philippines is different than hiring somebody in Argentina is definitely the higher. And you know, I, I had to think back over the years, I’m like, I don’t think I’ve ever worked with a contractor from Russia. And what I hear you saying is going, Hey, there are certain countries that have an education level. That’s very comparable to what you might see in wherever the U S or Canada, or, you know, w England or whatever name, your pick and the work ethic is similar or better. And the problem-solving skills are similar or better, but the cost of living is still much lower. And and Russia’s one of those places. Are there, are there others, or as right now, is Russia like, well, Russia is also massive, so yeah, yeah, yeah.
HC (16:42):
Yeah. I mean a lot of the Eastern European countries. So my main sources are Ukraine and Russia. Okay. And this is what I call it’s like labor arbitrage. Right. you’re getting a very, very, very high level of skill for Le much, much lower price. Now the trade-off however is English is not a first language. Okay. So and I’m going to introduce you to a soccer. We did not discuss about this up the last conversation. This is another tidbit that I I’d like to add in here. I found, I found a software that uses AI to now repurpose, so I can have a Russian write anything. And they, they use the same structure, but it’s in Russian. I usually translate it. It’s not proper English. And this is where I was struck that man, I still got to hire an English copier.
HC (17:31):
Now I found a software just recently, just a few months ago, and I’ve been playing with it. It works tremendously. So I’ll have a Russian copywriter write email sequence or redo a website. And I will take that, dump it into the stock where that’s AI and it will repurpose it in perfect English. Really perfect. Yep. And now I’m even exploring might maybe even replacing my copywriters because I can take a copywriting. They’d let you funnel, hack your competitors. You see what kind of, what, how they’re speaking to their audience and their what’s on their website, their emails. You can just take that, dump it into this AI software. It will rewrite it. 99% plagiarism free. You can repurpose email copy. You can repurpose website. You can repurpose blog posts is incredible. The software I’m using is called conversion.ai.
RV (18:23):
I thought that’s what you might say. I thought you that’s what you might, you might say. Yeah. I’ve heard about this. Yeah.
HC (18:29):
Yep. And yeah. So this one, this one has closed the loop that had been like, okay, the trade-off is there. They don’t have the, the first or English as a first language. Now that’s not an issue for me. However, I’m still paying the same rates.
RV (18:43):
So that’s amazing. Does it go the other way too? Can you take your English and run it through conversion.ai and move it to like Spanish?
HC (18:56):
I have not tried. I haven’t tried to that. Yeah. I’m not sure I have that, but that would be a really good case study or case use.
RV (19:05):
Huh. Yeah, so this, I think I heard this tool in regards to in, in regards to like headlines and stuff like that. Yeah. Is, is I heard it as like basically like you’ll, you’ll plug in some copy and it’ll kind of like spit back some stuff. So I have not heard about this feature. So actually AIJ is the one. So our CEO, my wife, she’s the one that’s been telling me, Hey, you gotta look at this, you gotta look at this. You gotta look this, I haven’t actually gotten to look at it. But now that don’t tell her crap, she’s gonna listen. She’s gonna listen to this. There’s nothing more annoying than when your spouse tells you something like a thousand times that you don’t do it. And then like some random person says it and you’re like, oh, Hey, let me tell you
Speaker 4 (19:53):
About this awesome tool conversion. He’s like what? I’ve been telling
RV (19:58):
You this for years. But so you’re saying you’re getting a copywriter at a much more affordable price who kind of like understands persuasive marketing, et cetera, et cetera, writes it in their native tongue. You run it through this tool and bam, it spits it out in English for you.
HC (20:17):
Well, they write it in English, but the English is not, you know, it does. It’s just, you can tell it’s not written by speaking person. And then I read the word it. So they do have caught like they work with international brands. So they’re starting to try to find copy, but that’s their struggle in Russia. It’s really hard to find English speaking, Russians who sound like, you know, you can just tell it’s not written by a native English speaker. And so they can get 78. They, you get the idea, but just didn’t sound right. You plug it in here and now it sounds great.
RV (20:53):
Okay. So they are writing it in English, but it’s a little bit of broken, broken English, and then you, and then this cleans it up, basically
HC (21:01):
It’s better than Google translate. Not as good as you or I, right.
RV (21:05):
Huh. Got it. Okay.
HC (21:08):
For the Russians and then a conversion AI polishes it up to where you and I, even better than you arrived. I write it because they did different variations. So you can plug in, like they can write one thing and you can just sit you compose or generate generate journey. So they would come up with unlimited variations of that. So then you can AB test each one and be like, okay, I, they wrote one great headline. I’m going to create this one headline and put it into 20 and then I can give it to my person and they can run tests on all day.
RV (21:37):
Huh. And then see basically split test different headlines and see how they perform. Yeah. That’s how, that’s how ADA described it. To me was almost like a headline generator tool and kind of go in like, Hey, you know, different. Like we could even take our email sequence, put it in there and then it can give us like another rendition to kind of test. So
HC (21:56):
W w I want to real quickly, so re talked about basically SEO and stuff like that. So this is where it’s starting to hit the STL market Flores. SEO nurse are listening. You can actually take, and people have built software. I’m actually working with a developer, build a software where you can go and see, all right, here’s Google’s top ratings for how to make money online. The top 10 articles, take those top 10 articles, dump it into Jarvis or conversion.ai, re spin it. And then you have a brand new article, not plagiarized that you can now clean the top topics from those other articles. And you have your own on your own website without hiring an SEO. Right.
RV (22:39):
Interesting. Yeah. That’s interesting. Cause it’s like, it’s definitely not plagiarism. You’re literally not copying the words, but it’s kind of like you’re taking the concept and the content and then re re repurposing, which people have done for years as you go like, oh, look at what this, this, I want to research this search term. I’m going after this search term, this is the website. These are the 10 that have it. And you go, w you know, what are they doing? And then you’re just kind of like reverse engineering it. But you’re saying using a tool like this kind of like, does the reverse engineering for you? And then you kind of add your Polish and then you do this is like it’s almost like digital war games
Speaker 4 (23:22):
Is like
RV (23:24):
The, the, the future of, of this stuff is going, you know? And, and, and I think that to me, of going, like, when I hear somebody, like you talk at your, like, w dealing live in this world all the time, and I go, there’s a lot of people who don’t even know this is happening still. Like a lot of people are just like, what does SEO mean? And it’s like, Hey, you’re still living that world. Like, you got to pick it up here. Like, you need to do some binge listening of, of some influential, personal brand podcasts and like some stuff, because this is, this is where it’s at. And, and I think here’s what I think is amazing is there are like, this kind of tactic is kind of like a nimble small business tactic applied to a huge, big business concept of like SEO and keyword research.
RV (24:12):
And, you know, just like page optimization and traffic analytics. And there’s like this merger of these like small business hacks, and also small businesses are able to compete with big businesses without having to spend like massive dollars for the clicks because of, of, of techniques like this. And a lot of big businesses are trying to become more nimble and, and smaller businesses are being able to compete. Anyways, I’m coming back to the, to the international thing, you know, is there a place you can go to find great talent? I know you said you have an unfair advantage because your fiance those of us that are married should probably not go get a Russian fiance. Is there is there another way whether it’s Russia or, you know, you mentioned Argentina last time we’ve worked with some folks in Argentina, some creatives that were, have been really, really spectacular w finding the right people overseas, is there a way to do that other than the LinkedIn thing, cause that would lead you to some of those people? Probably.
HC (25:14):
Yeah. How I would do it if I did not have, like, Beyonce is, I would find similar to you kind of went over it, you conferences, finding the speakers that so you could find, if you want a social media person, you can find the top social media conferences in Russia, look at the speaker list and reach out to those speakers. And then just through those connections, figure out okay, who recommended them? Who are they working with? It’ll be a little bit tough because it OER in Russian. However, you can very quickly decipher, okay. Who are the best. But the, the good thing is, is that you’ll know, I, I you’ll be much more likely to be able to afford the best because their rates are so low. Okay. So you don’t have to do a lot of digging for a comparable rate because it’s going to be pretty comparable to what you might. Yeah.
RV (26:03):
So it’s kind of the same way you would, you would find like, who’s the top person, who’s the top expert on blank and English or whatever. Like you would just search it and you’d, you’d see it, but it would be in Russian, but you could also view it through Google translate and be able to kinda like read a lot of those sites. Yeah. And then, and then just reach out to them. You’re going, it’s not that hard to find the top people. It just be, you just wouldn’t have much relationship connection with them. So you got to like, you know, reach out to, or whatever,
HC (26:31):
But you’ll be, here’s the thing you’ll stand out because you’ll be a non rush and reaching out to them. They want to work. And we talked about this before. They really want to start branching out and working with American or Canadian or UK companies. And so if you reach out to them, they’re going to super excited. You may even get on the phone with the actual owner CEO of the company and they’ll bring their, their 18. Right. They’ll roll out the red carpet. And they many times I’ve, I’ve had like zoom call, interview calls with the owner, the, his right hand, man, and then three or four of their top project managers. I’m not sure if it’s a training car or whatever, just to, just to really put their best brains together to work on, on my, my businesses. Yeah.
RV (27:14):
I mean, that’s, that’s interesting. Guess it’s just people, it’s people and going, what, what do they want and how can I help them and where are they? And yeah, that, that’s super, super interesting. So w what I want to talk to you about the PR concept a little bit, so we didn’t get it to chat about this last time, but I, I wanted to understand this. I feel like, I feel like I’ve heard that you’ve created a similar kind of system, which is like, you know, just in general, I feel like how your brain is working. You’re constantly reverse engineering. What is like, you know, labor arbitrage is such a great concept. That’s such a great term. I’ll just go and how can I solve this problem in a different way, in a more efficient, economical way. And I feel like you developed some good process with this related to PR and publicity, which is obviously how we met. We, you know, we kind of met through this, this Forbes article, which wasn’t even under your name I noticed, or Celine’s like, I was working with you all, but somebody else wrote the article. Like I expected it to be under her pen name. And then I was like, oh, this didn’t even come out under her name. So I was like, clearly you were doing something there behind the scenes for relationship building. And like so how do you, like, how are you tackling some of this PR stuff and building relationships there?
HC (28:40):
So very similar I’m reaching out on LinkedIn. I’m just, this, one’s a lot more manual. I mean, when you want to develop a relationship with cause Forbes, contributors or entrepreneurs, they get messaged a lot. Right. And so I, I come in and I’m very, very, very focused on just providing value develop relationships. And once they, I give a lot of free advice and coaching or whatever for this area, they don’t get paid to contribute to these columns. Right. And so they have other businesses. So what I do is I come in and if we click on a good level, I will give free advice. I’m like, okay, I’ve grown up several companies. I’m what are you working on? A lot of them are in my niche, which is building websites for there. And so I give them a lot of value in exchange, not even exchange.
HC (29:30):
I just say, Hey, I have a PR company. This is not based on any exchange or anything, but if they’re a good fit or I have an article that you’d like to publish, like, could we work? You know, basically could I, could I interview some of my clients? And so if you think they’re a good fit and you might write about them, and that works really well, super relationship-based. And I just, I’ve been doing that for a couple of years now. So I’ve built up a really strong network of people that contribute to different magazines. And as I’m growing my personal brand, now I have ins with editors or, or people who can make decisions. So eventually when I build my personal brand, I can have my own columns as well.
RV (30:12):
Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s crazy. Like I think, I think this wasn’t our conversation that I was saying, media is like the thing that has the littlest financial dollar value of anything you ever do short term, but this monster credibility and influence and relational power, which all leads to financial stuff later on. And and yeah, that’s, that’s the thing. Is this going like, what’s, what’s different about the world today is these people are accessible. Like you’re not going through some, like secretary on a phone tree, or like a, you know, some people blocking you to get to the writers. They’re all out there on LinkedIn and Twitter. They’re super easy to find. I mean, we got on good morning America last week because the guy I’d never even met he’s on Twitter. He saw some posts that we made about this national research study that we just, that my wife did that we just, we just published.
RV (31:13):
It’s just coming out now. And he was like, Hey, can I do an interview for you? And, and he reached out, you know, he’s ABC news.com and we’re like, sure, we did an interview. He didn’t even say it was going to be on good morning, America. We thought it was going to be on some late night, late night show that he does. We, we knew he was reputable, but then, then they rerun the story on good morning, America. The next morning, we didn’t even know some, our friend was like, Hey, did you know? You’re a good morning America? And it’s like, they’re there, they’re there. They’re right there. It’s,
HC (31:43):
It’s incredible. Yeah. I mean, I would say maybe three or four, three or four years ago. I, I had no social media for, I still don’t. I haven’t worked on it, but know nothing about me. I met some guy and we became friends. We hit it off. Same thing. We just were talking about business. He wrote an article. This what happened. I found his article on Reddit, reached out to him about, I love your article. We just started talking. And I was like, Hey, something working for me. I figured out a way to hack Cora. And I got a million views in less than 45 days. So I was like, Hey, I don’t know if you’ve heard about this, but I did this. And you know, I don’t know what you’re working on, but maybe you can work at di didn’t expect anything in return.
HC (32:23):
It turns out he was a contributor for entrepreneur. Ended up reaching back out to me like couple weeks later, like, Hey man, I was thinking about your core hack. I’d like to write about it. Had a full feature done on me in entrepreneur, out of nowhere. And then we’ve just became really good friends after that. And yeah, if you’re just providing value out there and you want to be strategic, you can provide that value to contributors of these large publications that you can find on LinkedIn, but you’re not going in saying, Hey, I want you to write an article about me. It’s like you go in and you find out, okay, they might be someone you were friends with. They happen to write for whatever publication, just
RV (33:00):
How can you help them? Which is the, which is true of anything. Like that’s the way you build relationship with anybody is you go, what can I do for you? How can I support you? Who can I introduce you to? Like, what tip can I give you? Can I share your stuff? Like, can I volunteer at your conference? Can I give you an endorsement? Can I like give you a retweet? Like it’s, and this is what people like, just don’t understand. And it’s so freaking simple as you go, how can I add value to this person’s life? What can I, and that’s why, you know, it’s funny. Cause I think Hanson that one of our brand builders courses is called podcast powered and we, you know, we teach people like, Hey, here’s how to like create a unique podcast and the technology. And here’s how you like deal with the, the premise of the show and you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, like everything you needed to know to like launch an awesome podcast.
RV (33:49):
And one of the things that we always tell people is we go look, the best reason to rock launch a podcast is not because of the money you’ll make it’s it’s, you know, hopefully because you’ll impact a bunch of people. But even if like you don’t have that many listeners, there is no faster way to meet. Like anybody you want then to go, Hey, I have a show. Can I interview you? Can I tell my audience about your book, about your website, about your column? I mean, it’s just the, it is the most incredible networking tool in the history of mankind, because you could, you could email that person a million times and call them and they would never respond. And you’re like, Hey, I’d like to interview you. And this is the power of writing for entrepreneur or for Forbes. The it’s, it’s, it’s one of the things I’m doing at success now is I’m you know, here you go.
RV (34:41):
Like we were friends before and now suddenly I’m the entrepreneurship editor of success magazine. That wasn’t even a thing. I don’t think when we met. And you know, there’s all these people that it’s like, they would never respond to me, but now it’s like, because I want to interview them. They’re like, yeah, of course. When do you know is next week? Okay. And it’s like, this is crazy. Like the power of being the media is it, you know, it’s just crazy and anyone can start a podcast or a blog. And then if you get a chance to write for entrepreneur or Forbes or any of these, like Celine does, I mean, it’s lien rights for ton of these. But you’re just giving value to them. Yeah. What you’re doing right here, right here for us. That’s so cool. Y’all so anyways, Hanson is as you could tell, he’s a real smart guy.
RV (35:28):
Like he’s kind of like that guy where you go, I need something. I don’t know who to talk to. I should, I should, I should hit up Hanson and see what he thinks about this. Because if he doesn’t do it, I’m sure he knows no. So who does it? And if you’re going, Hey, I need someone to like build some systems and processes so that my business isn’t like completely dependent on me all the time for everything and every question and every problem freedom, freedom to ascend.com, right? Is your website. That’s where you want people. Where do you want people to go to learn about you?
HC (35:59):
Yeah, they can come to your website. They, if they want to reach me personally they can go to Instagram. My Instagram handle is Canson. Shane H a N S O N C H E N G G
RV (36:11):
Extra G on your instant handle. Cause someone stole your,
HC (36:15):
Another Hanson. J was a little bit quicker on the trigger. Yeah.
RV (36:19):
Chang’s a kind of a tough, that’s a tough last name, man. I mean, you, you got S E N G, but it’s like, it’s like being Smith or Williams or something. You’re just like, you got a lot of people out there you’re racing to secure URLs and yeah. Before social
HC (36:35):
Media, I thought it had a very unique name, but I think there was like seven or eight aunts and chains in the United States. Yeah. Yeah.
RV (36:42):
I, I, my, I got lucky with the Rory thing is there’s not a ton of, not a ton of Rory’s, but I always feel so, so sorry for someone where it’s like, yeah, I have, like, I have one of, one of my buddies is Mark Brown.
Speaker 4 (36:54):
It’s like, oh man,
RV (36:55):
Like good luck. Like good luck. That’s that’s, that’s tough. But anyways man, super creative practical. Thank you for these tips. And we just wish you the best Hansen. Yeah. I look forward to getting to know you more and, you know, seeing how you work on, on these projects and stuff and, and just good luck to you, man.
HC (37:16):
Awesome. Thank you so much again for having me on the Chevron,
RV (37:20):
The good news Hanson. It looks like this has been recorded.

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