Ep 526: How My Brother Transformed His Life with Randy Gale
RV (00:06):
Welcome to the Influential Personal Brand podcast. This is the place where we help mission-driven messengers, just like you learn how to build and monetize your personal brand. My name is Rory Vaden, and I’m the co-founder of Brand Builders Group, a hall of fame speaker, and New York Times bestselling author. And this show is to help experts learn how to become more wealthy and well-known. I know you’re gonna love it. Thanks for being here. Let’s get started. Well, a huge part of my life has been built around trying to inspire people to be more disciplined, teaching them the psychology of discipline, how to get themselves to do things they don’t want to do, and to help them achieve excellence in their own life. But a huge part of where I learned that from and my life was from my brother, my big brother, Randy, who you are about to meet.
RV (01:01):
This is a very special episode. And my big brother was a huge part of raising me. If you know anything about my story, our story but you know, that we were raised by a single mom. My mom was often working and, you know, busy doing things. And so Randy spent a lot of time raising me. Even though today I try to avoid tools and camping and anything masculine, pretty much at all costs. The, the, the manly skills that I have, and most of all the discipline and the perseverance and the resilience that I have is largely because of this man. Randy is incredible in his own right. So he’s done many things. So first of all, he is a military vet. So he served in two Wars. He was in Kosovo and he also was in Operation Southern Watch.
RV (01:52):
So he’s from, he was in the United States Navy, and he is a coach. So in addition to his professional life, he coaches competitive women’s softball and specifically young women. And their teams have been incredible. So he has coached the firecracker softball team in Colorado over the past 12 years. And their, his teams have tallied over 700 wins, and they have had two final four finishes in the Colorado State High School softball championships for the high school teams that he has been associated with. Part of what was the catalyst for this interview was that my brother went through an amazing physical transformation recently. He was always very athletic and very in shape in his younger years. Then as he had kids and built, you know, built a family and was doing the, doing the corporate thing he got busy doing other stuff. And we’re gonna hear about something that happened in the last couple years where his dramatic transformation led him to becoming a professional bodybuilder where he got two first place medals in the master division. I was there to watch it, and I wanna hear a little bit about the psyche for how he was able to transform his his own life again. And who knows where else we’re gonna go. We’re just having a chat with me and my brother, so please welcome to the show. Randy Gale. What’s up, brother?
RG (03:26):
Hey, how you doing? Thanks, Rory. Great introduction. Really appreciate it. Just one caveat, not a professional bodybuilder. I’m an amateur bodybuilder MPC amateurs. So yeah, I did win my show there and the overall for masters, which then qualified me for a national level show that I have yet to do so. But yeah, a big difference between, you know, the amateur MPC level and a, and a professional, professional bodybuilder who’s been doing it for several, several years.
RV (03:55):
Sure. Thanks. So thanks for clarifying for that, for clarifying that. And let’s start, let’s start there. Because that really was the catalyst where I was like, man, I gotta, we, I don’t know why we’ve never had you on the show, but this was an amazing transformation. So can you just give us some stats on when, oh, how much did you weigh Mm-Hmm. What was going in your life? Give us, give us the backstory of like, what was going on with you physically, and then what was the decision you made? When did that happen? And then, you know, at what point how much time passed between the transformation and when you were actually when you actually won in this amateur show?
RG (04:36):
Sure. So kind of what had happened is o over the years, you know, I’ve been coaching for several years and, and work and, and doing all of that sort of thing. But essentially I was kind of having, I wasn’t, I wouldn’t say health issues, but what I thought was maybe gout in my knees or my, my ankles and stuff when I eat certain foods, I was the heaviest I’d ever been. I was 280 pounds, so five foot eight. So there’s not a whole lot of room for that to go. I was, you know, over 50% body fat, like was, I was just fat obese not who I am or what I felt like I was. And I always remember there was one that, you know, there’s been two times in my life where I’ve tried to lose weight.
RG (05:26):
And the first time I remember I actually, a statement that you had told me was, you know, your body will only allow you to get to a certain suck level, right? And then once you notify your suck level, you’re like, oh, turn the gas on. It’s time to go. Well, I had less sight of that obviously from the last time that I had started to sort of train for a bodybuilding competition. And, you know, I, I pour a ton of energy and time into these young ladies and, and trying to help their dreams come true of playing col college softball and, and just, you know, becoming great character kids and, and, you know, contribute to society and whatnot. So we really trying to teach them how life is gonna happen, life skills, what’s gonna, you know, come their way, how to be ready, and how to be disciplined in that facet.
RG (06:20):
And in doing that, I lost sight of who I was, and I didn’t the focus wasn’t on me. So when I started having some health issues, I was kind of like, you know, this is, this isn’t gonna work. You know, I just, I’m not comfortable. I can’t tie my shoes. I can’t
RV (07:24):
Just to pause, just to double click on that for a second. Hmm. I mean, one of the ways to say that is just basically, it’s a reality check, right? It’s like you come face to face with an irreconcilable truth. And I think that’s powerful for, in lots of ways, right? Like, people who are struggling financially, they are often afraid to look at their statements and they’re, they’re trying to avoid. And then it’s like, at some point you come, you’re forced to come face to face with this reality to go, this is my, this is my real situation. And so anyways, so so you saw, you basically saw a picture of yourself and you were like, I gotta do something
RG (08:09):
Yeah. Well, it, it’s, it goes back to how am I, I’m, I’m this coach and everybody knows, how can I ask these young ladies to do something I can’t even do myself? Like, if I can’t be disciplined in my eating habits and my healthcare, how can I possibly ask them to, to be committed and disciplined into their sport and the things that it takes to get to that next level? So that was really the, that was really the, the thing that kept me going. Once I had saw, you know, the physical, the, the way I looked physically, I was like, you know, that’s what got me going. You know, I, I did, you know shameless plug to Joe Rogan, ’cause I used to list, listen to, I listened to his podcast in the morning about when I was getting up and I was doing this cardio, and it was like, you know, I’ve already completed something in my first half an hour of my day, then most people will do all week, right? And so it was understanding that to complete something that other other folks wouldn’t do. And it’s just get through it. Just get through it. People say that it’s, you know, motivating motivation is what keeps you, it is not, it’s, it’s discipline. Motivating gets you started, something motivates you to get started. But once that motivation’s gone, you have to have discipline to carry it out. Mm-Hmm.
RV (09:28):
RG (09:28):
And for me, I’m very goal oriented, right? So,
RV (09:33):
Yeah. So tell me about the competition and tell us, like, okay, so you were 280 pounds. Yeah.
RG (09:38):
You
RV (09:39):
Were over 50% body fat. Mm-Hmm.
RG (09:50):
So that, that was not on the radar yet when I got started, obviously, right. It was just about, you know, getting healthy and trying to lose some weight. Biggest thing was, can I, can I change my diet to make it like a lifestyle where it wasn’t so extreme, I couldn’t handle it, and I’d be right back where I always am. So that’s how it started. So the first year, I, I picked the biggest, baddest dude in the gym, and I went up to him his name’s Taylor. And I said, Taylor, you’re working out with me
RV (10:39):
Dropped. Hold on. How, how long were you training? Like, that’s, that’s
RG (10:46):
I lost 50
RV (10:47):
Year. How often were you working out?
RG (10:49):
Well, December to like, the following December, I had lost 50 pounds. Wow. and I worked out five, six days a week.
RV (10:55):
Okay. How long
RG (10:56):
Cardio three, cardio, three, four days a week. 20 minutes to 30 minutes. And it was just, you don’t start there. So for your audience that’s listening is like, you can have in your head, that’s where I want to get, and you can attain it, but don’t set yourself up for failure and say, Hey, I’m gonna go start here. ’cause In two weeks you burn out. Right? So start slowly do what you, what you’re capable of, and put goals in front of yourself. Right.
RV (11:21):
Well, and I think the other thing that’s really powerful is, you know, you talked about suck level, which is a concept that, you know, like, I used to talk about that a lot. I I, I, it’s funny, I haven’t talked about that in a long time of like, that’s a good concept because it’s like your suck level is basically when you push yourself at red line to reach a new level, then it pushes you forward. Then you’re, what you would consider sucks, is actually much higher than you, you normally operate at. And the other way to do that is to do what you did, was to like surround yourself with people who are operating at a higher level. You’re, it’s like your, your baseline suck level goes up automatically because their expectations are so much higher. And just like you adopt their psyche, you adopt their habits, you adopt their, their self-talk, their way of eating. And that must’ve been going on with Taylor.
RG (12:12):
Yeah. Well, the other piece of that too, right, was, so after that year, I had talked to Taylor. I said, I wanna do a show, man. Like, I need another goal. I dropped the 50 pounds. I need another goal. I was two 30, and I was like, okay, I’m pretty fit. I’m, I’m looking pretty good, you know, like, but I wasn’t what I had still pictured in my head. And so when I talked to him, I said, gimme a show. Let’s pick a date. We picked October and this was in December, and I started full, full go. It was, it was on. And the way I made sure I did it is I told everybody I was doing it. I had to make myself accountable to other people, not just to myself. Because when you’re only holding yourself accountable, until you’re disciplined enough to continue to do that by yourself, you need something to push you to keep you doing it.
RG (13:03):
Because for me, I didn’t want to fail everybody. I told I didn’t want to fail my kids that I said I was doing this for. You know, I, I didn’t want to fail and prove that I couldn’t do something. So for me, I told everybody, I said, I’m doing, I, I, at first, I was, I was slow about it. Like January, February, I was kinda like, Hey, something new coming. I didn’t like fully commit. And then by March when I had dropped another, like, you know, 10 pounds, I’m like, Hey, I’m doing a show in October, by the way. And then it really kicked up another level. And it was, and, and to be quite honest, the hardest part for me is bodybuilders are selfish. You have to be a very, very selfish individual at that time, because right then it’s all about you.
RG (13:49):
It’s all about what you’re doing and how you’re com you know, competing and how you are making yourself look and how you, everything evolves, evolves around you because you can’t, you can’t do it up the other way. You would fail. And so, yes, I did surround myself with very like-minded individuals. You know, even at home it was like my wife Nicole, and my, my son Carter was like, you know, I’ll eat what you’re gonna eat. I’m not eating that. I gotta eat this. Right? And so that’s not always easy to have to, you manage three different types of meals or whatever. When it’s like, Hey, we could just make one meal. I was like, no, can’t I got six
RV (14:37):
So by telling everybody, basically you kind of like, you don’t have a choice after that. Like once you, once it’s, once it’s out there now, your integrity’s on the line, your reputation’s on the line. Like, and these, it’s amazing how much these girls from your team, like how much of an impact they played here without, they, they maybe they didn’t even know. I don’t know if
RG (15:02):
I would talk to them about it. ’cause I, I would, I would tell them like, listen, ’cause they would ask me, you know, they’d see me eating six almonds or whatever on the sidelines, you know, during tournaments. ’cause We’re, you know, I’m coaching constantly. We’re always playing whatnot, but I bring my, my lunches or whatever, you know, and, and they would see, and I’d say, listen ladies, I’m not doing this to just do it. I’m doing it to win. Like, I don’t, I don’t set out to do something to just to do it. If I’m gonna do something, I’m gonna go out to win. And that’s exactly what I expect you to do. I don’t expect you to step on the field to just be on the field. I expect we’re gonna win. So that was my whole motto the whole time. That second year, and in that second year, I dropped another. So I got down to two 30. So dropped 50 at first, and I dropped another 30 pounds to step on stage. So I stepped on stage. I weighed in at 1 99. After two years of, you know, just going mad crazy. And, you know, I think the day of the show, I was 1 97 that morning.
RV (16:04):
Wow. So it’s over 80. So over 80 pounds,
RG (16:07):
Three pounds. Yeah.
RV (16:09):
And what was your body, what did your body fat
RG (16:11):
RV (17:00):
Well, and if you go to, if you go to if you’re on Instagram, if you just look up the, the Randy Gale, GALE, the Randy Gale, you can see these pictures. Like, I remember I posted a picture on my Instagram that showed the before and after, and people went nuts. I said, it was like, that’s freaking massive 80 pounds. But, but dropping 45%. Yeah. In body fat in less than two years. That’s gnarly.
RG (17:27):
It’s really the body composition, right? The, the weight you can drop off. But if you are not, if you are not doing the right things, you’re just going to lose weight. And yeah, you’ll recomp yourself a little bit. But, you know, for me it was like, when you’re that big, you have X skin, like you have extra skin. That was the hardest thing. You know, and I think even you had heard some comments, you know, in the, in the stands, I was like, man, that dude lost a lot of weight. ’cause I had skin that you can’t hide that. And I wasn’t about to have surgery to have it removed. ’cause Why would I, you know? But it’s like that’s the biggest thing. I think that was the most difficult or most challenging thing. Wouldn’t you have lost that much weight? Is like, what do you do with all this skin that you were stuffing before
RV (18:07):
Well, I mean, the, the, I mean, it’s a reminder. I mean, it’s a reminder of the price you paid, right? It’s like scars. It’s going, this is a reminder that I’m not the person that I once was. That I’m not going back like that. It’s this, you know, it’s, it’s a, yeah. It’s, it’s a relic. It’s a relic of a different time in my life where I made different choices and I had different outcomes. Umspeaking.
RG (18:34):
Well, it’s also kind of a, a scary, a, a scary concept too that, that folks don’t really understand or I, I never really, I think thought about was, you know, there’s a lot of food diseases out there, right? That, and, and, you know, I even had a young lady on one of my teams that had a, a, a eating disorder. By doing this, it gave me somewhat of a, an eating disorder as well in the sense that I would freak out when I didn’t eat something right. And do an extra 15, 30 minutes of cardio. And so getting where I’m at now, which I’m, I’m, I’m maintaining, I’m out of, I’m call off season, right? I’ll start training really hard again here in July. It was really hard mentally for me to be like, okay, it’s okay to eat that because it’s that time of the season as opposed to, oh my God, freaking out. I’m gonna get really fat. You know? And so that, you know, that’s something that if, if somebody goes down this journey, they have to be ready for, they understand they need to talk to people. You need, there’s a right way to get back to say normal conditions of eating as opposed to, you know, super strict and, and you know, that bodybuilding diet.
RV (19:54):
Yeah. I mean, when you’re, when you’re training for a show, it’s like all consuming. I mean, it’s a very, very intense that the, I I, so I, I want to go back actually, like, on, on the topic of being, not being the person that you once were. Mm-Hmm.
RV (20:51):
Like, I see. So it’s, it’s, and, and, and that’s part of why I wanted you to, to have you on the show, because your life, your life is too, your life is dramatically different from where we started. And then you also had this more recent transformation that was also very dramatic in a very short period of time. And I think there’s people that are listening that maybe are not in the best situation, or maybe like, not in the best circumstances. Hmm. And sometimes it feels far away like that. You know, you, you could have a different, you could have a completely different life in two years or five years, like a radically different life. What do you remember about us growing up? Like what, what do you, ’cause you were older, you’re five years older than me.
RG (21:39):
Yeah.
RV (21:39):
And
RG (21:40):
Four and a half. I’m not five years. No,
RV (21:41):
You’re five and a half years older than me. Well,
RG (21:43):
Five and a half. Yeah. I’m getting older. I’m gonna tell you
RV (21:46):
Yeah. It’s but you, but I, but I have, I have at least five point a half per more percent body fat than you do at least
RG (21:54):
Right now. You don’t, I
RV (21:55):
Believe the, you know, a lot of those, you know, the, the stories that mom was telling was, you know, like, I don’t remember a lot of the hard, I feel like a lot of the hardest times I don’t remember because I was still a baby. But you were old enough to remember some of those times. Mm-Hmm.
RG (22:52):
Yeah. I, I, I, I would say first off, like, just to mom, like, as we’re older right? And understanding how difficult it is to raise kids. ’cause We have our, our own kids. And how not having another person there to support you and to be able to have two kids that turned out like we’ve turned out pretty freaking amazing, pretty amazing. Doesn’t, you don’t hear about that. I mean, and to understand not only the, the, the difficulty and challenges you have to, who’s gonna watch my kids when I go to work so we can eat, like, thank God for, you know, the ETLs and, and Danny and all the people that, you know, mom brought up and that were there for us. ’cause They didn’t have to be, and and times were different then, right? I mean, community was a lot more community back in those days.
RG (23:50):
And, but, but fortunately for us, like there’s, I don’t know. There’s no way, there is no way that we’d be where we are without the help that mom got. Because I don’t know how, I don’t even know how she got where she got without, you know, without them. But prior to them, it’s like I do, I would tell you, like as I listened to the, the, the podcast, like there are things that mom stated that I think are different than what she said. But that again, as perspective, right? She’s older. I’m anywhere between five and 10. So I see things differently or I remember things differently. You know, I, I can tell you that.
RV (24:30):
Well, and just to, just to underscore what you said there. Yeah. ’cause It’s like, I, I go like, you know, me and AJ are happily married and we have a team. I mean, we got a team of people, like, and I go, we’re, we struggle, like, we struggle to raise kids and like keep up with the family and like, working and, and just, just keeping the house clean. And just like having Santa, just getting the kids to go to eat and like, go to sleep at night. It’s, it’s like, it’s so hard. And what
RG (25:01):
I, what I would tell you is I think now, and, and you’ve written me and you, and you’ve told me the affinity that you’ve had for me, an understanding, like, I raised you from five to 10 because mom was working. So when you say you were with me a lot of the time, you were with me all the time. Like, I never got to go anywhere with just me. It was always me and my brother. This is,
RV (25:28):
You’re talking about from when I was age five to when
RG (25:30):
I was Yeah. From when you were like five to 10. It was like, you were always with me. We were always doing stuff with my friends or whatnot. You know, they were your fr they, a lot of my friends growing up were your friends because you were with us. Right? but I think you also kind of started to understand like, I was being a parent, right? I didn’t know how to be a parent to you at that age. So, you know, even in talking with mom, and she’s apologized because I didn’t have the childhood, you would have Right. That, that a normal, you know, two, maybe a two parent home what people would call normal, I guess upbringing of, you know, a, a family, kids are allowed to be kids and you get to a certain age and then, you know, you start figuring out adulthood. Well, for me, it wasn’t about that. It was, take care of your brother, make sure you don’t burn down the house or wherever you’re living.
RV (26:26):
Yeah, we weren’t living in houses. We weren’t living in houses.
RG (26:28):
Yeah. We weren’t living in houses. And it was a dungeon, you know, Utah, I talked about the dungeon. It was a dungeon. It was a boiler room. The boiler was literally in the kitchen across the street, like the sink. Like it was, I’m, no, I’m telling you, it was, it couldn’t have been more than 36 inches wide. We’d walk in the door and it was just like two rooms with a boiler room and a kitchen sink. I don’t even remember a stove in there. I don’t remember if mom said it was a stove, but I don’t, I don’t remember ever cooking in there. But it, it, it is what it is. So, I mean, we always, always had a roof over our head somehow. I don’t how she did it. You know, she was
RV (27:04):
Resourceful in that way. I mean, my mom was resourceful. She was good at making friends. Yeah. And she was good at getting people to care about us. And they looked after us. I mean, we had so many people. So she was super resourceful in that way.
RG (27:18):
Well, I, I will tell you that, that is what created who I am as far as, you know, when I meet people, I’m, I, I, I love making friends. I, you know, everybody’s a friend to me. But I’m also that person that like, I try to take charge to take care of, if that makes sense. So I, I’m, you know, people are like, yeah, you know, you’re that a type personality. Well, it’s really because I’m always on, I’m always just looking out for everybody,
RV (27:47):
Like on duty. Yes. Like, that’s how I think of it. That’s how I think of it as like, you’re my big brother who is always on duty. Like you were on duty training me, looking after me, watching over me, you know, doing. And, and even now you carry that. Like, I see that with the girls, like on your softball team. Like, it’s like you’re on duty.
RG (28:08):
Yeah. I don’t, I don’t know how to let somebody else take care of me and my situation stuff. All I know is how to take care of everything and handle it, if that makes sense. So you know, maybe that’s kind of a fight or flight thing from when we were little is just like, figure it out. Like, we always just figured it out. We never got in, in a bad situation that we didn’t get outta because we would just, I’d figure it out.
RV (28:42):
And what do you so, so what do you remember most about growing up? I mean, out outside of just in general, taking care of me. Like,
RG (28:51):
I remember moving a lot. I remember, you know, I, I know like I did, I went to like three different first grades. I think Mom even said that, you know, like three different first grades. Which we were always in sort of the same sort of area, but it was like, we didn’t move states at least. But we did move around. I, I felt like we moved around a lot. I remember, you know, mom had always had me in sports though. Some way she managed to get me into sports. So like, I would, I did Boulder Valley Soccer when I was younger. I don’t think we paid, ’cause we didn’t have any money. And she found a way to get me in there. And so she never let us have downtime to just get in trouble. Right. She always like found a way to have us with somebody somewhere, or doing some sport. At least for me. You were a little bit younger, so you, I mean, you, I guess somebody was watching you. I don’t remember like where you were when I was, you know, playing soccer and whatnot. But so I was always kind of involved in sports growing up.
RV (29:58):
Do you remember, like, do you remember feeling poor or thinking we were poor or having other people like tell you we were poor? Like, do,
RG (30:10):
Do you, I remember, remember that what I do rem what I do
RV (30:22):
I remember that.
RG (30:24):
And that was my dad had sent child support. We had a little extra money and you and I would go get Happy Meals and that was a big deal. Right. Because it was like, whatever that character or whatever was in the Happy Meal.
RV (30:35):
Ronald McDonald Oh no. The thing, the toy and the Happy Meal. Yeah.
RG (30:38):
Toy and the Happy Meal. But we also used to go to the train at the McDonald’s in Boulder. They used to have that one over by Crossroads Mall back in the day. And it was like, you could go in the caboose and whatnot and I don’t know, but
RV (30:49):
Right. I remember that
RG (30:50):
Used to do that. I, I remember not feeling poor because mom would take us to do stuff. Like we were always in the mountains in the foothills. I know you didn’t like it. But for me it was great. That’s why I liked fishing. And, and like, I al one thing I do remember was I always wanted a dog though. Like, we never had our own place. Like we were always living with somebody or lived in somewhere that we couldn’t have a pet. So that was one thing that I wish I always could have. And then I finally did, you know, in high school we got, you know, mom allowed me to get Roscoe.
RV (31:28):
And Did you? Yeah, that’s right. We had Roscoe
RG (31:56):
After. It was like yesterday.
RV (31:57):
I hit the Christmas tree, Christmas tree completely tips over and crashes. And mom’s favorite ornament. Was it ACO cu Buffs ornament Or a, I think
RG (32:08):
It was a Broncos ornament. A
RV (32:10):
Broncos ornament crash and shattered and all And what happened, mom goes, I took care
Speaker 3 (32:17):
Of it. What happened? Randy
RV (32:19):
Took care of it. Mom
Speaker 3 (32:21):
Roscoe knocked over the Christmas Street.
RG (32:27):
Yep.
Speaker 3 (32:28):
You did. You took care of it.
RG (32:29):
That’s why I always wanted a dog was ’cause I was always getting caught. ’cause I had nothing to blame it on. It’s like, plus mom knew everybody, so it was like I could never get away with anything.
RV (32:37):
We did tell her the truth of that story. Like 10 years later, maybe I don’t even something like
RG (32:40):
That. Don’t even remember. Maybe this is the first essential here. I don’t know about
RV (32:43):
Yeah, maybe. I think we told her the truth.
RG (32:45):
Yeah. And then
RV (32:46):
Anyways, we’re honest people. We’re honest people. But we did, we did lie about the
RG (32:52):
RV (33:33):
Was, this was, this is the greatest Christmas present baby I’ve ever gotten
RG (33:44):
I think we got it at a church or something.
RV (33:45):
A church or something. But when you, his little plastic eyes, he’s got these like hard plastic eyes. When you throw this bad boy, he perfectly spi I mean, perfectly spirals. Yep. And so we played with this for hours, for years.
RG (33:59):
Yeah.
RV (34:00):
And then this last Christmas outta nowhere, Randy sends me this no note or anything. There was nothing. It just showed up. Because you must have ordered it from Amazon or something. Yeah,
RG (34:11):
We looked that for it.
RV (34:11):
Yeah. And it showed up. And when I opened it, I knew, I knew it was from you. Like, ’cause this was, and I so it sit, it sits on my desk. That’s where I just went to grab it.
RG (34:25):
But it, I mean it’s the, it’s what you talk about in some of your you know, when you’re, you’re speaking sometimes you talk about the Garfield and, and, and that’s it. I mean, for those that don’t know, that’s that’s it. That’s the thing That was football for us for years. Same thing. You know, we just made do, we emptied two liter bottle and we make paper baseballs wrapped up tape balls. And we played baseball. I think most kids didn’t have things, did that sort of thing. And we, we played baseball. We had
RV (34:52):
A two liter empty, two liter bottle of soda was our bat. Right. And then you had take a, take a pick paper and roll it up and tape it up. Yeah. We did that all the time. We
RG (35:01):
Used to do, we used to do great things as kids. I mean, we, you know, even things that I did with Carter now is, you know, I made a tournament, a basketball tournament bracket. Right. Like how you and I used to play that all the time. You know, I was the older one, so I got to pick out and do all the fun stuff and Yeah. You
RV (35:18):
Got to shoot all the three pointers and I sat and rebounded
RG (35:21):
Yeah. Hours
RV (35:22):
At a time and
RG (35:23):
Yeah. But you were a great rebounder when you got the high school.
RV (35:24):
That’s true. I was a great rebounder in high school.
RG (36:09):
I never felt
RV (36:09):
Somebody because we don’t have money.
RG (36:12):
I never felt like, I mean, I guess the, it, I don’t know if it’s a good example or not, but you know, some kids, when you’re going to school, you’re like, he, well that kid’s, the, the, the dirty kid or he smells or he doesn’t take a shower because they can’t afford the water, whatever. I never felt like I, that was us. Okay. Right. I never felt like that was us. I do know that we learned the value of a dollar very early. ’cause When we wanted something, we had to earn it. I can recall we went camping in Colorado Springs one time. I had saved up all my allowance for months to buy a fishing rod in a Rio. And I mean, I tell the story all the time that you and you and mom are over here on the side. And I’m standing on the dock. I got my fishing rod and my line in the water. I got a Pepsi in one hand and Cheetos in the other. And I hear, skip, skip, skip who? And a fish. Big, big old fish took my pole and Rod. And I stand up and I’m screaming and I’m crying to mom and she’s all, what? What’s going? I said, the fish just took my pole. And she says, well go get it. I’m like, how am I supposed to go get it? I’m diving in this lake. Like, I’m great
RV (37:22):
Advice, mom. Jump in the
RG (37:23):
Lake. Go get it. Go get it. Oh man. I was so, I was so heartbroken. I had saved up for the best reel, you know, forever. It was like, I mean, those are the kind of things that, that we have stories like that from, from our whole childhood. Like, I have stories that I remember that are, that if I say now just crack me up, they’re hilarious. But at the time they were like, you know, destroyed me, you know, type of thing. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, I don’t, I don’t think, you know, we always had, I don’t feel like we ever went hungry. I’m, I’m sure we were probably hungry, but I don’t feel like we ever went hungry, if that makes sense. Yeah. I don’t think we ever missed a meal. You and me, like we always had something to eat some soup or something. But we
RV (38:06):
Were on, we were on wic. We were
RG (38:07):
On wic. Yeah. Yeah. Which is, you know, it’s milk and butter and, and eggs and cheese I think is what it is. It’s like the essentials.
RV (38:15):
But that’s only till, I think mom said that that only was while, while I was under age too. Once I was like over age two. Yeah. It shuts off. So I,
RG (38:23):
I don’t, I, I guess I don’t know all that. Like, I don’t know the details of when that kicked in or not. I do remember, like, we grew up on mac and cheese. We grew up on ramen noodles. We grew up on the little, you know, Kool-Aid things that were 5 cents, they were little barrel that, that had juice in them. You know, they’re not even juice. I don’t know what they were, but taste like juice
RV (38:42):
Chemicals.
RG (38:43):
S they definitely chemicals, you know we grew up on tortillas, but you know, we
RV (38:48):
Call little one burritos. The
RG (38:49):
White, the white, the white man burrito. Right. We put cheese in the tortilla and melted cheese. And it was like, Hey, that was our burrito. Yeah. Didn’t have beans in it. Just had cheese and yeah.
RV (38:58):
We weren’t eating healthy because we were eating cheap. Which is unfortunate. ’cause That’s how a lot of families are like, when you don’t have money, it’s like you Yeah. It’s all crappy food that’s Yeah.
RG (39:07):
Afford. Yeah. Well that you’ll find that too, when you’re trying to get healthy. Right? Like, they don’t help you to get healthy. That’s for sure.
RV (39:13):
Yeah. It’s expensive. It’s hard to find. It takes forever to cook. Like yeah. Ram Well, I, I just, you know, if, if there’s somebody out there right now who’s listening, who’s just going through a tough time, like maybe, maybe they’re looking at a picture of themselves in the mirror going, that can’t be me. Or, you know, maybe they’re in a place where they don’t have a lot of money, you know, or they’re, you know, like one of your girls dealing with some type of a, of a, you know, an eating disorder. Like, you’ve come so far and, and we’ve come, I mean we’ve, we’ve, we’ve all come so far. What would you say to that person about what it takes to transform their life?
RG (40:07):
For me, people sometimes say think big, but for me it’s think, think simple. Don’t, don’t bite off the biggest piece of the apple first. Start off slow, but continue to do it every day. And eventually you’ll be done. You start off slow on that bottom step of that mountain. You didn’t think you could get to you, but you had to take a step to get it. We’ll, take one step, take two steps the next day, take three steps the next day. And before you know it, you’re at the top and you don’t even know how you got there. You don’t remember where, what it was like when you started. And then I’ve heard this lately a couple times, is get uncomfortable being uncomfortable, like to make a change of anything. It isn’t gonna be nice. It’s not gonna be comfortable. It’s not nothing worth doing is easy.
RG (41:05):
Like, that was the biggest thing for me is like understanding. Like, I’m going to get there eventually, but it isn’t gonna be easy and it isn’t gonna be in 30 days and it isn’t gonna be in 60 days. But I don’t care. I I, I have a date out here that I gotta get to. And if I just keep doing this every day, I’ll get to where I’m at. And if I have to reevaluate my goal when I get there, then I’ll reevaluate. But I’m not gonna reevaluate until I get there. There. And then though, you know it, you’re there. If it’s a financial situation, I mean, I, I would say I’m not the greatest financial person to be given financial advice, but you know, but it’s, for me, it’s like I start to think about more of like, what’s more important for my next payment, right?
RG (41:56):
Like, can I live without this so that I can get this? Yeah. That makes more sense. So I start to weigh things like that, you know, now as, as opposed to before when we grew up, like that was my big, that I think that is one of the big issues that I have is we didn’t have money. So now when I have money for something, I’m like, Hey, get it. Like my, I don’t want my kids to never have nothing that they don’t want. Like, that was hard for me. My my daughter, you know, she wanted a new bat. I’d go get her a new bat. She wanted a new glove. I’d go get her a new glove because I didn’t want her to feel like I fell, which was, I had good enough. Or I had, I had shoes on. Who knows what brand they were. Right. I had a shirt on.
RV (42:40):
I know they were from Payless. I know sure that was
RG (42:43):
Straight Payless.
RV (42:44):
Uhhuh
RG (42:47):
Yep. When they started like, making shoes that looked like Reebok pumps. I remember that day.
RG (43:44):
Like what am I doing that shows them that what I say, I mean, you know, and so for me, the bodybuilding thing I feel I’m like in my life is probably the one thing that I said I was gonna do that I did without a doubt. And you know, this, I mean, there’s a lot of things that I’ve wanted to do in my life and I’ll start and I stop because whatever it’s ’cause of whatever, the two things, I don’t the three things I’ve never stopped. I’ve been married to almost 24 years. I’ve got two kids. One’s getting, both of ’em will be seniors next year, one in college, one in high school, and I coach. And I’m lifting. Like, those are the things now to me that I’ll, I I’m not gonna stop. Right. And so, you know, if there’s anything in life that’s worth doing, it’s, it’s for your family. And you do whatever you can do. You do whatever you gotta do for your family.
RV (44:38):
Yeah. Well, I just want to thank you R like it’s not lost on me that the life that I have is much the result of many people who made sacrifices along the way and who invested in me. Many, many people starting first and foremost with you and mom. Like and that’s continued, that’s continued to this day. Like people constantly investing into me and, but I never, I never would got there if it weren’t for you. And I’m so grateful for the discipline. You know, and I, it’s like I joke about not, I mean, I kind of joke. I mean, I do, I joke about the fact that I don’t like camping. I don’t like manly stuff. You know, I don’t, I would rather get a man a manicure than I would go fishing a hundred times
RV (45:36):
If I have to be and it’s because of you, it’s because you beat the crap outta me,
RG (46:15):
Yeah. I have a great story I have to tell because it, it goes to that point. I remember coming home one day and you were at Ryan Elementary, this in Lafayette, and I came home and I don’t know, one of the neighbor girls came running up, your brother’s getting in a fight, your brother’s getting in a fight. And I’m like, what? So I tear off and I’m running across the street and I’m, it was my friends and you come walking back across the street and I’m like, what happened? And they’re like, Rory knocked him out.
RV (47:15):
Yeah. And I, I don’t, I, I, I don’t look for fights. I try actively to avoid fights, but like, and not just fights rejection, right? Heartbreak, setback, failure. People telling you you’re not good enough, you’re not smart enough, you’re, their skin’s the wrong color. Like you’re whatever. Like yeah. Those are, those are, those are things that I’ve endured and I know that you have and I know that people listening have and just, so anyway, so thank you for that. Y’all, if you want to know more about my brother and check out his journey and see what he’s up to with, with lifting and you can, you could go to Instagram and follow him at the Randy Gale GALE, the Randy Gale brother. I love you. Thank you. Thank you for this. And thank you for everything.
RG (48:04):
Thanks for the opportunity. And yeah, if any reviewer, your viewers have questions on Health Journey that they’re going through, hit me up. I’m always here to help. Like Rory says, you know, I’m always on watch.
RV (48:17):
I love it. I love you, bro.
RG (48:19):
All right, love you.
Ep 525: When Less Is More | Robin Robins Episode Recap
AJV (00:02):
I know that we’ve all bought into the idea that more is better at some point in our lives, personally or professionally, whether it’s more money more things, more accolades, more accomplishments more travels, more stuff, like more friends, more customers. Like I know for all of us that we suffer from the, I think I need more or I think I want more syndrome. At some point in our life, and maybe as you’re listening to this, you are suffering from the more syndrome right now. But this is actually a conversation about how you build more with less. And really specifically this is about how you build a better and bigger business on a smaller audience. And that’s what we wanna talk about. So there, there’s a couple of things that I wanna bring up. And a lot of this stems from an amazing conversation that I had with a phenomenal entrepreneur named Robin Robbins.
AJV (01:07):
And she’s another redhead located in Nashville, Tennessee. I was fortunate enough to be able to interview her on our podcast, the Influential Personal Brand podcast. Go listen to that episode. It is an NBA and entrepreneurial lessons. But there was something that she said in there that really got me thinking about this concept of less is more, right? Not more is more, but less is more. And she said in the interview, your company rides on the who internally and externally. And we’re gonna talk about that for just a couple of minutes. And I think this is a really important thing because I think a lot of times when we think about the who, we think about one or the other, we think about, you know, books like Start With Who, which is about like recruiting and hiring. And we think about cultural aspects of who we hire and how we build our team.
AJV (02:03):
And I think those are really important. In fact, we talked a lot about in this interview how hiring great leaders is how you grow your organization. It’s like you will only grow as fast as you grow your leaders, right? Because you, as the entrepreneur, the business owner, cannot do all the things, be all the things to all the people all the time and expect for you to grow. That’s why so many of us wonder why we started our businesses in the first place, right? Because there was this dream of time and, and margin and space and creativity and freedom. And then what actually happens is you are the person doing all the jobs and you don’t even get to do the thing that you like anymore. ’cause You started it because you were really good at this one thing, but now you’re trying to learn finance and accounting and billing and operations and customer service and all the things that you didn’t even want to do when you got into business.
AJV (02:55):
But that’s because you are not relying on the, the strength of a leader, right? And you don’t have to have tons of people in your organization to make them super, super impactful. But one of the best pieces of advice that I’ve ever got is hire great people, pay them very well, and expect a lot out of ’em, right? And I think that that’s, it’s a lot about a who, right? One great person, one a player, can do the work of three very average players. And I mean that, and I have seen that up and down and all around in my professional life. It’s like one A player literally can do the work of three C players, right? And some of that’s attitude, some of that’s experience, some of that’s determination. But a lot of it is really just work ethic. It’s like, how hard are you willing to work to figure out the thing versus relying on someone else to figure out the thing for you.
AJV (03:53):
And I think that’s a really important concept. If you’re in that position of like, Hey, I do wanna grow, I do wanna scale, then the first thing you need to do as you’re thinking about growth and scale in your business is going, do I have leaders that can help me get from where I am to where I wanna be? Because where you started won’t sustain you, right? And I think that’s a really important truth. It’s like, what got you here won’t get you there, right? That, that, that’s true, right? The, the sales, the operations, the staff that’s needed to go from zero to a million is very different than one to three, three to 10, 10 to 30, 30 to a hundred. That’s a completely different ballgame. It’s a completely different level of systems and operations, staff skills, experience, and most importantly, people, right?
AJV (04:45):
It is a different level of people. And so as we’re talking about this concept of your company rides on the who, there’s the internal components that, you know, do you have a players and are you paying them well enough that they’re not just a paycheck away? And do you expect a lot of them? Do they have growth potential? Do they like the culture? Do they like you, do you like them? Those are all things that when we talk about building an organization that hinges on great leaders and a lot of that is great leaders who can build great systems, right? It’s like you, you are the assistant until you hire the assistant to do the jobs that you’re currently doing, right? Because the thing is, is like somebody else will always be better at what you’re doing because they can be more dedicated and focused than you can as the business owner, you should be doing other things.
AJV (05:37):
And that’s getting clear on the money invested into quality people is worth it because it frees up your time to go do the next thing, whatever that may be. So there is this internal component of the who really matters. And a lot of the growth of a company is directly correlated to the quality of the leader, right? But then there’s this external component that we talked about in this interview that I thought was also really awesome, and I thought this was really important. And I’m actually looking at my notes from this, and I, I loved what she said. She said, this is Robin, Robin said this, get you get more customers when you get more specific and you can go listen to the interview. But she has built, built a multi eight figure business, I think somewhere in the 40, $45 million annual revenues, recurring revenue business.
AJV (06:32):
And what I love is that she shares this. She goes, there are very few people who can actually even buy what we offer. And I, I don’t quote me on this, go listen to the interview, but maybe 10,000. That’s it. So I think a part of it, she was like, we know anding about our customer, what they need, when they need it, what they can afford, what they’re trying to do, what size they are, how many people they have, what revenue they’re at. We know everything about them, and we have built our solution. So specifically catered to this small group of 10,000 people, she goes, we have built a, you know, $40 million business servicing a, a very even small fraction of that people, she was like, but our whole thing is we don’t have to have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of prospects to build an enormous business.
AJV (07:25):
We just need to get so clear, so specific that we are so dialed in on that niche specific audience that we can get bigger with a smaller audience, right? That’s because you can do more for that audience. It’s, versus it’s the difference between doing a little for a lot of people or doing a lot for a fewer amount of people. And in her case, it’s not super small, it’s still thousands. But I think that’s a really important concept because a, a lot of the more conversation that I hear in my world is I’m trying to get more followers, right? Specific on social media, or I’m trying to get more subscribers or I’m trying to get more leads and I’m trying to get more clients and, and people are kind of consumed with this idea of I need more. And I just wonder why, right?
AJV (08:16):
It’s like, do your current subscribers or current followers buy from you? I don’t know. Maybe they do, but I bet a lot of you get most of your business from word of mouth and referrals and your current customers. And I bet that if, if we all took a really deep hard look at who our audience is, we could all admit we don’t need millions, don’t even need hundreds of thousands, don’t even need tens of thousands. And most of us don’t even need thousands of people to go after, to build a very life sustaining, fulfilling life-giving business that’s making a positive impact on the people that you are around on your family. It, it could be generational change, and you could do that with dozens of clients. So more is not always better. Sometimes less is better. ’cause You can do more for those people when you have less clients.
AJV (09:10):
And so I just wanted to challenge everyone in this conversation of going, you can grow to a very large size business with a very small client demographic, and you’re able to do that because you know your client demographic so intimately, right? But there’s not just the external who factor. There’s the internal who factor, which is the, the cultural dynamics of you’re only gonna grow as fast as the leaders in your company, right? You and I love this whole thing, it’s like you can never, you know, grow faster than the systems that you put in place, right? And I think a lot of times when you do that is when you self implode, like when you grow faster than your systems and processes can manage, is when we see these have amazing potential companies implode right before our eyes because they couldn’t sustain the growth.
AJV (10:00):
They didn’t have the right systems, the right processes, nor the right leaders in place to do the thing. Don’t make the same mistake. Don’t don’t over romanticize growth, right? There, there is a, a power in boring organic growth, right? And nobody likes to talk about that because we wanna talk about how you went from zero to seven figures and the next six months. Like, but that’s not always good, right? Sometimes the boring organic
AJV (11:11):
More money, more followers more clients, more leads what have you just said? What can I do with less, right? What, what could I do with what I have? And instead of focusing on more people or more leads or more followers, what if you just said, no, I’m just gonna focus on serving the ones I have better. And it doesn’t have to be more or bigger. I just wanna do more and better for what I currently have. Because if we do a life changing service to the people we have, they will tell others about you, right? We talk about this all
AJV (11:52):
The time. The best form of marketing on the planet is a changed life. And that goes for clients and employees.
Ep 524: From Scrappy to Strategic: How to grow an 8 figure business with Robin Robins
AJV (00:00:02):
Hey everybody. Welcome to the influential Personal Brand podcast, AJ Vaden here. Really excited to introduce you guys to Robin Robbins. And she and I are fairly new to knowing each other, but Robin has known my husband and my co-host Roy Vaden for a very long time. And he has been singing her praises for years. And so the fact that we get to have her on this show today is really exciting. And before we formally introduce her, I want you guys to know why you should stick around today. And I think one of the things that most of our audience says at some point is, how do you go from, you know, where I am today to that dream company, whether that be a seven figure, eight figure, or nine figure entity. And I think today, the really the goal is to explore what it takes.
AJV (00:00:51):
What are the hard decisions you have to make? What are the choices you have to decide on along the way to help you go from where you are to where you wanna be on this venture, right? This ad venture of entrepreneurship. And so Robin is coming on the show today. Let me tell you just a tiny little bit about her. She is the CEO at Technology Marketing Toolkit. And what they do is develop highly effective marketing and sales strategies, very specifically to MSPs and managed service providers, if you don’t know what that term is. But I think one of the things that’s so amazing is that she has built an incredibly successful business for a very niche audience. And it’s one of the reasons that I wanted her to come on today, is talk about how do you succeed with less, right? And in this case a less
RR (00:01:52):
Thank you, aj. I appreciate you so much. I know I’ve gotta have you and Rory come speak to my audience ’cause I’ve just, you know, it’s, I just, I know. So you, the value you guys bring to people is amazing. And yeah, so I’m, I’m as much a fan of you guys as I, you know, maybe you are me. I, I appreciate that. Oh, we’re super. You guys do incredible work.
AJV (00:02:13):
And I told I told Robin before we hit record that, you know, Rory has been like, listen, y’all got to meet each other. I feel like you have the same personality, you got the same hair color. You guys have so much going on. And so I’m really excited to introduce you to the show. And, you know, one of the things, I just wanna share this quick story because I think this is a really powerful component of what a lot of people struggle with listening or not. And I asked Robin right before we hit record, Hey, I didn’t get a call to action A CTA for the show notes. Is there any sort of call to action that you want me to give? And she was bold enough to say, well, you know what? Not really. I don’t think a lot of your audience are managed service providers. And if you’re not an MSP, I don’t really want you
RR (00:03:00):
Clutter out. It sounds really hurtful when you say it that way.
AJV (00:03:03):
Clutter out my lead magnets. You know, but here’s, here’s why. I think that’s a really important story to tell. That is not what most people say. I have never once in the history of this show, which has now been running for six years with consistent two episodes every week, have anyone said, no, I don’t have a CTA for. And I think that’s significant because you have extreme clarity. Extreme clarity on who your avatar is, right? Yeah. And so let’s just start there for a second. ’cause I know most likely you didn’t start that way on day one, right? Right. And so what was the process? And you know, and this is, you know, for everyone listening, this is a conversation and entrepreneurship. But also Robin Robbins and her team who I know several people at her team really enjoy. Everyone I’ve met at her team, but they are really some of the best people in the world at doing what they do. And they do it for a whole bunch of people in a really specific and niche way. But also I think that in addition to entrepreneurship, for everyone who’s listening, it’s really clarity and courage is, I think, a part of like, the theme of this. And so how did you, over the course of what, 20 years now, determine that this micro niche audience is the one that you wanted to serve? How did that come about?
RR (00:04:23):
Yeah, I think, well, let me kind of go all the way back to how I even start in business. ’cause I always describe myself as a very unlikely, uneducated, and reluctant entrepreneur. You know, I didn’t start this going, I’m gonna build, you know, we’re, we’re probably gonna land somewhere around 44, 40 5 million this year. I never in a million years thought I’d have that going on with, you know, 130, 140. I, I lose track how many employees were, we’re hiring more. I, I walked into the lunch true store. I walked into the lunchroom, and we have two offices. And I, there was like someone standing there and I’m like, hi, who are you? Right?
RR (00:05:10):
But so
RR (00:05:52):
I’ve learned sales from, from early on. So I just started reaching out to people saying, Hey, I’m independent.
RR (00:06:44):
So I continued to look for a job. And but I started just like doing this consulting thing. And I didn’t know what it was. I just, you know, I didn’t, like, I had a website. I had to barter for a website. I didn’t have enough money to buy a website. So I bartered with, there was a web design company and I said, Hey, I’ll, they needed help, I think with like, some copywriting. And I said, Hey, I’ll, I’ll write copy if you’ll do my design, my website. So that was a barter, right? So, you know, I just started out like this. And then at that point when I said, I, I think I could do this, you know, my client base consisted of a shipping company, an MRI imaging center. I had a computer training school. I had a self test software, like a test prep software company.
RR (00:07:30):
I had, who else? Goodness. It’s like, it’s all over the map. You know, there was, oh, I had a Bijan who was a spiritual advisor, right? You know, I mean, it was like this eclectic, anybody who could fog a mirror, wave a dollar, I wanted you
RR (00:08:17):
Like for example, I tested doing digital pay per click lead generation and getting paid by the lead and, you know, across different, so that was like a specialization, not in a, not in a avatar customer, but a in a thing, right? And and then I started to test in different industries and stuff. And so one of the big breakthroughs that I had is there was a company, I had an association with company called CompTIA. And I learned strategic partnerships or JV partnerships from J Abraham. So that’s, I started reaching out to, to people who had big lists and saying, Hey, I’m really good lead generation marketing. I mean, mean, my pitch was a little better than this, but saying I’m really good. How about I do a free webinar for your audience on marketing lead generation? And CompTIA was one of the companies that said yes.
RR (00:09:03):
And I poured my heart soul into that and made it the best web. Well, it wasn’t even a webinar, it was a teleseminar. ’cause This is, you know,
AJV (00:09:56):
Prospect. Yeah,
RR (00:09:57):
Yeah, yeah. And, and stop comment commenting on my ad. ’cause You’re gonna get, you’re gonna just drive reaction to stupid people. ’cause You know what I mean?
RR (00:10:50):
I can provide a lot of engagement because people are very interested in sales and marketing. They were paying me to do this. So, so that’s how I got into this vertical. And there was a point, and that this is a true story. So I made a decision. I said, this is it. This is my industry. I’m gonna double down on it. I’m gonna go all in. And it took me, you know, that was like a, I got laid off like January of two, of two of 2002. And by the end of that year, I had incorporated technology marketing toolkit. And the reason for the name is technology marketing. I wanted that keyword at the time. Having keywords in your URL was like a big deal. And technology marketing was already taken. So I just slapped on toolkit and called it a day. So that’s the science behind the name. So anyway, so I, I, you know, I get started here and I started to fire my other customers and say, look, I’m, I can’t do this anymore. I gotta have all my effort and energy on this particular vertical.
AJV (00:11:43):
Can we pause right there for a second?
RR (00:11:45):
Yeah.
AJV (00:11:46):
Most people don’t do that. Yeah.
AJV (00:11:48):
At all. And I think it would be really helpful to understand, like, one, like what is it about you or the understanding, I think a lot of, you’ve already said it’s, it’s, you gotta go from scrappy to strategic. You did that pretty quickly. Mm-Hmm.
RR (00:12:21):
Yeah, I mean, it’s a mindset. So it is like, is this true story? Like I still wasn’t making a lot of money. I was still teaching fitness classes. I used to teach aerobics classes two, three times a day to pay the rent while I was trying to get the thing going. Right? Best shape of my life had shin splints that were from hell. But, you know I’m serious. It was like it, this, it was real. I mean, this is real story I’m not making up. And you know, I had, I had somebody who, you know, I talked to and they wanted to hire me as a consultant, weren’t an MSP. And I said, I’m sorry, I’m just not taking anybody who’s not an MSP at this time. And they said, oh, you are so full of it. You know? And they mailed me the check.
RR (00:12:58):
Anyway, so I, I mean, here I am, I’m barely making the rent. And I get a check. I’ll never forget, it was for $795. That’s what I was charging, like, on a monthly basis, right? And they mailed me this check, and I look at this check and I think, oh, you know, I could just go another month or whatever. And I was like, Nope. I, I put it back in the envelope, I mailed it back to the person and I said, sorry, I’m not taking you. And that’s a true story. And it wasn’t like I had a mentor or coach. I don’t know. I would, I’ve been in sales and I just know your company, the, the health, the profitability, your whole company rides on the who, who is the customer. And if you have a disease, dysfunctional, broke bad, wrong fit customer, your business can never succeed.
RR (00:13:52):
Ever. Like, ever. And so, like, you know, like I had a friend and I won’t mention the name just because I don’t wanna make, you know, it’s not a bad story, I just don’t wanna make ’em feel bad. But they were getting started in information marketing, you know, trying to be a guru and whatnot. And in this, and it was an attorney. And she comes to me and she’s like, Hey, you know, I’m selling, I’ve been selling this course for like, you know, 1995, whatever, some real cheap price, right? I’m selling this and I’m really struggling to sell. I’m trying to send people dah, dah, dah. She’s gonna, I said, stop. I said, the cheapest thing I sell is $2,000. The problem you have is you’re, you’re, you’re, you’re wearing yourself out trying to make a $20 sale to somebody who feels like $20 is a lot of money.
RR (00:14:39):
And that’s why you’re having all these other problems in your business. Like, go upstream. And, and it was like a light bulb went on because so many people teach, oh, we’ll just have the tripwire product or offer a service or whatever. And I did that too. And it, and there is a place for it. But I think at the same time, like as I’ve grown my business, you know, now today we went from selling like an info product, you know, for $500, $700 to where we sell now, two year, three year memberships. The cheapest being $24,000 total. I mean, a thousand dollars a month, that’s the cheapest all the way up, you know, to, to double that. And, and we, we sign on two year contract and we don’t do a money back guarantee. So like, that’s unheard of. But every time I have stepped up and taken a like harder stance on who I take as a customer, the more the business has grown.
RR (00:15:37):
Love that. And it’s, it’s, it doesn’t make sense lot. Like you sit there and you go, well, if you offer cheap products, you think you’d get more people. If you had a money back guarantee, you’re gonna get more customers. And you’re right. But you get the wrong ones. You get the ones who aren’t serious, the ones that are just gonna buy it. And then we used to have an, a massive, maybe you’ve seen this selling information products. We used to have a mass refund issue right after Thanksgiving because everybody would be like looking around and they’re sofa for two nickels to buy Christmas presents. And they would look on the shelf and they’d see my product there and they’d go, oh, wait a minute. That’s a money back guarantee. And they would call us and say, I want my money back. It doesn’t work. Or some of ’em were honest and just said, I need money for Christmas presents.
RR (00:16:17):
Right? Or I haven’t opened a thing, I haven’t used it, so I just wanna return it. And so those are not the people I want is customers. Yeah. So there’s, I, there’s a balance there. You know, when you’re just starting, you don’t wanna make it too difficult to be your customer, but at the same time, you don’t wanna hold onto that strategy forever. What gets you started might not sustain you. And you really gotta take a look at who is my customer? And I’m in a vertical, but I’m also just trying to get the top 15, 10% of this industry. Because I know 80% of the 80% is the Pareto principle. 80% are gonna be worthless, useless broke. I mean, if you look at the stats, only only 4% of companies, all companies in America ever break the million dollar mark. Only 4%. So that means, for the most part, 96% are worthless to you.
RR (00:17:09):
Right? I’m talking businesses, and I don’t mean worthless as human beings. I mean worthless, like from a standpoint of getting a cash check out of ’em, right? Then, only 0.4% ever get beyond the $10 million mark. And so you start to really see, you are dealing in tiny, tiny percentages. And the question is, do you want like a hundred percent of the bottom or do you want just like a 10% of the top of the cream? And so now it takes time. ’cause You gotta build a reputation. You gotta build a brand, which is what you guys teach a hundred percent. Everything you guys teach is, is spot on. I think what we’re talking about here is an emotional strength. Mm-Hmm.
RR (00:17:58):
I’m like, you gotta have a target customer profile, and you’ve got to make sure you don’t get shiny penny syndrome, where everybody comes at you like, oh, there’s a dollar over here. Oh, there’s $5 over here. Oh, there’s, because you start to water down and you’re not for somebody specifically. So I’m teaching this to an audience and this cute little couple come up, they’re a little, you know, married couple running an MSP probably under a million dollars in revenue, pretty small, nice, sweet people. And they say, Robin, you know, they come to me on break. And they’re like, intellectually, we know what you’re saying is true and right and correct, but we’re just scared because we’re trying to, you know, we’re, we’re barely making it as it is. And if we pick a particular customer, if we niche, then we’re gonna stop people from doing business with us.
RR (00:18:46):
And I said, okay, well, tell me a little bit about what’s been going on in the, in your business. It was like, this was a, in the fall of last year. And so it was like, you know, I said, tell me like this year, how many new, tell me about the lead flow. Where are you getting customers? And they kind of like, get this really sheepish look on their face and they look at each other and they go, well, we haven’t gotten any customers. And I say, well, who the hell are you trying to keep out then? Who cares? Like, you know, you can’t get worse, right? And they kind of laughed and they, and they realize, I’m like, you’ll find that you actually get more customers when you’re for somebody, specifically when I can say, here’s who my customer is, specifically from a demographic and a psychographic position.
RR (00:19:26):
I know you teach both of those things, right? So I don’t have to explain that to these people. But you know, when you really know, like one of the things that’s really important for me is I gotta have customers that have true, honest ambition. If they don’t have honest ambition to grow, to make more money, to serve more, to build enterprise value in their business, not just make more money. They are not of any use to me because I can’t scale that customer. They’re, they, I can make a quick buck on ’em, but I can’t build an asset. I can’t build enterprise value of my company if I get the wrong customer.
AJV (00:20:01):
You know? I love that. And it’s so interesting because we have this conversation often with our community as well at Brand Builders group. And I was actually on a call yesterday and I literally had this exact same conversation and I just asked this individual, who is your ideal speaking client? Like, if you were to tell me the perfect audience, who would it be? And she was like, well, women, any woman. And then she said, well, no, wait it could be women or you know what, just salespeople, anyone in sales. And then she was like, but you know, really it’s just anyone who believes in mental health. And I’m like, women in sales who believe in mental, no, no, no. Anyone like that. And I was like, so where do you find those people? And she was like, that’s just it. It’s, it’s anyone.
AJV (00:20:47):
It’s, it’s everyone. And it was like this aha moment. And I’m like, okay,
RR (00:21:25):
And you can’t. Right? I was, I’m looking right now, there’s a, there’s another little story and I wanna, ’cause I wanna get the numbers right. But yeah, so I had a client that she calls me up very, very excited runs an MSP that’s in New York City now, a couple years ago, their New York state implemented a law that’s called the SHIELD Act. And the SHIELD Act is a legal requirement for businesses to protect data that they have from cyber crime, ransomware, et cetera. So what, you know, for example, you have to have good backups. You have to have proper cybersecurity protocols in place. And she, she’s her and her husband super excited. A lot of my, a lot of my it sounds like I have all women for customers, but I really don’t. But she’s like super excited and she’s like, Robin, we gotta create a campaign.
RR (00:22:16):
And I said, okay, great. Who are we targeting? And she goes, well, all small businesses in New York City or New York State, really? I said, okay, well you are kind of right outside New York. Can you service people outside of your geographic area? Well, maybe, but not really. So maybe if we just said New York City, I said, okay, well how many small businesses are in the New York City metropolitan area? And she said, that’s why I wanted to look. I did a search in her geographic area where she was, if I just went like a 45 minute to an hour drive from her location, there were 22,000 businesses in her in that area. And I said, okay, so what’s your budget to market to these 22,000? And she says, well, we might be able to swing a thousand bucks
RR (00:23:15):
No one’s gonna know you did it. But you, if that’s all you’re spending to get to 22,000, you gotta narrow this down because you can’t boil the ocean. Yeah. You know, it’s like a term, you can’t boil the ocean. So like, we gotta have, the other part you have to think about is you, I think Seth Godin uses this term is the smallest viable audience. And what that means is, you know, what’s an audience that you could legitimately serve that are the lowest hanging fruit, the highest probability, the, the, the right fit? And it’s gonna be small. And as your business grows and you have more people who can, who can you can sell to as you have more resources and finances and stuff like that, you know, you can, you can expand that. Now, like with us, we haven’t really expanded our niche.
RR (00:24:04):
My niche is only MSPs in North America or English speaking countries like Canada, the UK and Australia. Now, do we have clients everywhere else? Yes, we do. But they find us and they buy, but we don’t pursue them. So really our list is only about, there’s only about 27,000. I think I just looked at this number. It’s like 27,000, 28,000 total in my universe. Total. That’s not a very big universe, right? And so again, people say to me, well, you know, how do you grow this business if you narrow it down so much is because you’re hyper-specific, because your services that you have price elasticity, meaning you can charge more when you specialize. It’s easier to find people, it’s easier to get referrals, it’s easier to get strategic partners. Because when you really know, here’s who my people are and where they go, you just put a hundred percent of your efforts there and you get exponential returns versus just spreading it out wide and thin and hoping you hit the right person.
AJV (00:25:02):
You know, like one of the things that you just said that I think is really valuable is, you know, your name comes up in various conversations, just anyone we’re talking about memberships, technology, recurring revenue comes up in those spaces, which is where we live. And I think one of the things that, and what enables you to do when you decide like, this is my niche audience. I don’t need tens of thousands, like 20, 27,000 is what you said, right? Most people listening to this couldn’t serve 27,000 people if they wanted to. Most couldn’t serve a thousand if they wanted to. Most people are trying to serve dozens, maybe hundreds, but definitely not even in the thousands. But we’re trying to reach millions for some reason when we’re only trying to really serve dozens or hundreds. But what I heard you saying is that when you go super niche, you start to start to know everyone in the industry, right? And it’s like, and you start to become known in the industry because it’s a smaller community, which is thus makes it easier for you to do what you do really well and become known. Sure. Was that, is that fair?
RR (00:26:08):
Yeah. No, I mean, we have so active members. So we have clients and then we have members that are members of a peer group or a membership. We’re just, just, we’ll cross the 1500 mark of, so 1,500 people who are in a membership active customers. Our, our industry has gone over under massive m and a, right? So two trends that are going on a lot of mergers and acquisitions, we lose our best customers ’cause they get bought UN unfortunately I say unfortunately for us, I mean, I’m very happy for them, but they get bought and so they go away as a customer ’cause they just sold their business, right? So m and a and then there’s been a cropping up of a lot of newbies and they fail very quickly because this industry that we’re in has gotten more difficult to be, it’s more difficult to be an MSP today than it was 10 years ago.
RR (00:26:56):
Without a doubt. It costs more money, it’s more difficult to get customers, everything else. So, you know, we have about 1500 members in peer groups, which is the largest peer group in our industry. And we also, we have about, I’d say about 6,000 active clients and that have bought a program, have come to a seminar, have, have done something like that. So that’s not a lot like you think, I mean, the core of our revenue is coming from 1500 MSPs. Then we also do sponsorship, which kind of lays on top of that. So we’ll do about 10 million of our revenue this year. Nine 10 million is gonna be in sponsorship dollars for events that we, that we run. And there’s probably a list, our core sponsors, there’s about a hundred 150 core sponsors. And then we’re always kind of you know, leveraging like always trying to find new ones.
RR (00:27:47):
But, you know, that’s not, you know, that’s not massive. That’s not a massive list. That’s not a massive number of customers. It’s about just being very strategic and smart with what you’re offering. And again, like, so if you’re a guru, so think about it this way too. You know, you’re only gonna get a very tiny percentage of an audience to buy because most people are not interested in growing, making more money. I, I mean they’re just not like the nature of what we do, which is selling advice. There’s it, you, you are wired like you, you know, AJ you, me, everybody listening, you guys are wired differently ’cause you’re on this. Just the fact that you’re listening to this tells me a lot about you. That you’re ambitious, that you wanna grow, you wanna make more money that excites you. That does not excite the majority of people.
RR (00:28:37):
I mean, like, I, I listen to my, my, my salespeople make calls. I listen to their calls and they had this guy on. He’s like, I don’t know. He is under a million dollars in revenue. He is not setting the world on fire. And we’re like, Hey, we can, we got a program that can that is, that we can guarantee we’ll help you increase your sales, your profitability, get better customers. Indoor. It’s not like guesswork. We’ve been doing this for two decades. We’ve refined it, perfected it. I mean like it works. He’s like, you know, I’m good
AJV (00:29:47):
I love that. I think this is like some of the most important strategic advice that anyone could hear at any stage of your business. Because I know everyone is tempted to this and you said it’s earlier, it’s like this is more of a, an emotional dilemma. A hundred percent that you got to battle and fight as the business owner, as the entrepreneur, or even as the salesperson, right? ’cause You can just get diluted at any level. At any stage. And that would be like, my next question for you is like, how have you kept this ability to stay so focused and so niche as you’ve grown where you’re not doing the sales calls anymore and you have all of these layers. Like how have you been able to pass this down? So the team that is now selling on behalf of the company is being just as integrous to the quality of the customer as you would be.
RR (00:30:32):
Well, you never, I mean that, see, you say it’s just as, as as it would be for me. You’re not, that’s not gonna happen. So part of the realization is, you know, when you start hiring people, now I this whole saying of, oh, I’ll hire people that are smarter than you. You know, and then just get outta, well, look, if, so there’s so, like my web designers are smarter than me when it comes to designing a website. I don’t even know how to do it. My, you know, my marketing team who runs all the, the tech that, that does the backend when we do webinars and all that, like, I don’t know how to do that. They’re smarter than me on that stuff, right? But like, you get sales and marketing people, like, it’s gonna be very, very rare. And I do have some people on my team that are as good or better than me in certain aspects of marketing, right?
RR (00:31:22):
But the vast majority are not. And that’s okay. ’cause They don’t need to be as good as you now. They have to have integrity. I mean, we have it painted on our wall. The North Star is the attraction, the development, the retention of raving fan customers, right? So that’s on our, that’s not some BS that we put on a motivational poster. We really believe it. We really, so everybody’s gotta be bought into that. They gotta be bought into excellence, no drama, hard work, teamwork, all those things. But the reality is, as you grow your business, not every single person is going to be as good as you. And if you don’t, if you can’t accept that, you’re not going to grow. Okay. So I was at a I’ll, I’ll tell you. So I was at a mastermind meeting with Joe Polish. You might, you know
AJV (00:32:10):
Yeah. Genius network.
RR (00:32:11):
Yeah. Yeah. I was actually, I get the claim to fame. I was the one who gave him the idea. I was the first member. Right? Oh,
AJV (00:32:16):
That’s awesome.
RR (00:32:17):
Yeah. So anyway, so I was, it was, I don’t know if it was like, yeah, I don’t know if he called it Genius Network at the time, whatever. I was at a meeting where Joe, you know, and he had a guy, and I don’t remember the guy’s name. All I remember is he was the, he owned about a hundred franchise restaurants in like the, a Arizona area, right? And his, he was talking about what it takes to scale and grow. And he says, you know, and I’m gonna paraphrase what he said, but he says, you know, the problem is when you have one or two restaurants or three or four or five, he said, you’re still small enough where you can, you know, run over to the, the restaurant that has a plumbing leak and you can start putting towels on the floor or the bathroom’s not cleaned.
RR (00:33:03):
You can jump in there and get it cleaned. Or you can run behind the cash register and take care of that. Or you can. And he says, and that’s what drives you nuts, is the abil. You’re still small enough where you’re trying to keep your hand in everything. He said, when you get to a hundred franchises, you can’t, you cannot do that anymore. You have to depend on people. And you start running the business by the numbers. So you go, I remember I was saying, so I’m like, okay, so we only had like one sexual harassment lawsuit, so that’s good. ’cause That’s within the range. And we only food poison like five people. And that’s good. ’cause That’s within the acceptable, now I’m serious and everybody was laughing, but to us it would be horrible. Like you, like I are you kidding? That would tear.
RR (00:33:42):
Like, I don’t want that to happen to my employees. I don’t want that to my customers. But as you scale a company, if you, the bigger you get, the harder it is to re to maintain that same level of quality and integrity. Now you fight for it. You fight for it. You have, and the key to it though, and, and I’m telling you, I’ve just, it’s the key to it is the leaders you then hire, not the employees, but the leaders. Because the leader, you are the leader of your team right now. And you are the constraint. You know, a great leader frees up capacity for their people and their department and their co or their organization to expand. And what happens is, as you grow, and this has happened to me multiple times, someone who’s really good when you’re 20 million is no longer good when you’re 40 million it or somebody good when you’re at a million is no longer a good, when you’re at 2 million, you have doubled the size of your org.
RR (00:34:36):
And what happens is we have good people, and sometimes we feel very loyal to them. But there’s a thing called the pita principle. And you, you’ve, you, your org outgrows their capacity or their pro their their pro. You try to promote ’em. But they’re, yeah, they’re, it’s beyond their skillset, right? They, you know, and, and so some people can grow with you and others can’t. Now if they’re good people, you retain them, but you put ’em in different seats if you can, right? Because great people are very hard to come by. And you want that, that loyalty is important. But I think also to grow an organization, the only way you’re going to do it is by hiring great leaders who lead your sales team, who lead your marketing efforts, who lead your operations, who lead your financial ser the financial services, the person who you know, leads hr.
RR (00:35:26):
Like, that is the only way you grow. And as you grow, unfortunately, you’re gonna have to swap out leaders because very, very, very few people can stay with you long term. Now, I have a couple like Jeff Johnson who works with me. Jeff’s president of the company. Jeff’s been with me forever. He has stepped up and scaled as we’ve grown the company. He’s matured, he’s grown. Nicole, she’s matured, she’s grown. She’s my COO. So there are, there, there are those people. So there, I’m not saying it’s impossible, but there are a lot of leaders I’ve hired that had that you just have to fire ’em because a bad leader in an organization can destroy your organization. So to grow, and this was a lesson that took me a long time to learn. ’cause I didn’t like hiring people. I don’t consider myself a great leader of people.
RR (00:36:08):
I’m a very good sales person. I’m a great copywriter. I’m a great marketer. I great at strategy, but hiring leaders and running an org is a different skill. And I’m aware of my shortcoming. So I have to hire people that are great at those things because, and then step back, not step away because I’m still very involved. I’m still watching what’s going on. I’m looking at the numbers I’m looking at. I see there’s this, oh, well you hire someone, you abdicate No, no, no, no, no, no. Yeah. You micromanage until they, you, you’re riding lockstep with them for months, a year before you can really start to step away. And they have earned your trust that, see, this is like, that’s another, you can’t just hire someone and look the other way and say, give ’em the two part training of good luck and hang in there.
RR (00:36:55):
It doesn’t happen. You know, because then you, next thing you know, the whole department’s blowing up and you look and you go, what the hell? We’ve drifted so far from our vision, from our core values, from our like, and now you got, now you got real collateral damage. And that’s happened to me on several occasions. So I’ve learned it. And if you’re gonna grow an org yeah, you, you, well, you have to decide that you want to grow. And then it’s about hiring those leaders on the team that will grow those divisions for you.
AJV (00:37:23):
No, I love that. You know, as you were talking, I was at, I was at a recent mastermind trading, and Craig Rochelle was one of the speakers. And you know, he’s a, he’s an author, but is, you know, he’s the lead pastor at Life Church, which is now like the largest multi-campus church in the world, I believe. And like, one of the things that he said is he said, you can have control or you can have growth, you cannot have both. Right? And it’s like, there is a part of this and it’s just what you just said, it’s like you never expect that they will do it as good as you or like you, they can be better than you in some areas and you’re better than them in some areas. But this whole idea of you’re gonna be the one doing all the interviews and all the things he is like, you can do that and not grow.
RR (00:38:07):
That’s, well, I mean, I think you can still have control. I mean that’s, I would disagree. I I know what he’s saying. His intention is if, like, if I wanna grow the sales department, I have to hire a sales leader who can recruit on, design the onboarding, do the training, do the daily coaching, do the looking at the list, do the day-to-day stuff to run that org. I cannot do that and be CEO That’s two different, it’s two more than full-time jobs. I can’t do both. So from that per that perspective, that kind of control, yes, you have to give up the work of doing these things, but you should still have some control and maintain and insights into what’s going on. You gotta maintain control from the standpoint of the strategy. Mm-Hmm. You know, ’cause someone said to me the other day, they’re like, well, are you that kind of person where you know, you, you know, you, where you, you don’t let, you don’t let anyone do anything outside of the ideas that you have.
RR (00:39:03):
And I said, well, well, no, I’m open to new ideas, but I believe in you imitate before you innovate. Mm-Hmm.
RR (00:39:45):
He was like emailing people. He is making these promises that there was no, they, they were like unethical. ’cause They’re not things that we provide and could get us in legal trouble. So it, so I, my my mistake is I let too much control Mm-Hmm.
RR (00:40:32):
You can’t do every job. I get that. But you still need to maintain an understanding because somebody in your billing department could be doing something that could be destroying relationships, putting you in legal trouble churning customers. And it’s just because you’re not, you say, well, you don’t have control. Right? But you don’t have visuals on it. So I, I just wanna be really clear. There’s, I i, I get really crazy when people are just like, well no, you just hire smarter people than you and get outta their way’s. Not exactly how, you know. Yes, but not exactly like that. Yeah.
AJV (00:41:07):
I’m laughing because I now know, right? When Rory says, oh my gosh, y’all are like the same person. I now know why
RR (00:42:04):
No, that is your job as ceo. Your job is to say, here’s who our customer is. Here’s what our services are, here’s what our brand promises, here’s what our core values are. Here’s how we’re gonna make money in this thing. Like you’ve gotta create your financial model. Here’s who we’re gonna have on the team. Here’s who we’re not gonna have on the team. And set standards and make sure those standards are met. So you think about like your children now, you know, it’s not exactly the same. ’cause Children kind of mature, you know, at, at, at an age. Employees mature faster, let’s say. But you know, like as your child grows, you wanna step back a little bit and let them learn to tire their shoes and let them learn how to cook something. Like, I’m like, I’m freaking out. Like my, the rule in my house with my girls, you know, and they’re old enough, they’re 10 and 14 is they’re not allowed to cook anything when we’re not there.
RR (00:42:54):
‘Cause Sometimes like I’ll walk the dog, like I’ll leave them for a little bit. I’ll walk the dog down the street, come back. Right? No cooking of anything if my, if I’m not here, right. You know, so you, you step back and you give them, you have to give them freedom to grow and learn, but you don’t like, like not get involved in their lives. You know? I mean that’s like, you still have to maintain control. Who are they hanging out with? What are they eating? What are they reading? What are they watching on, on digital? Like if you don’t maintain control of the, of their phones. Mm-Hmm.
RR (00:43:42):
And I can trust you to make good decisions and trust that you know what to do. It’s not to say that they won’t make mistakes, it’s just a matter of like, it’s not fair to your team to throw ’em into the wild and expect them to somehow know how to produce a result with no leadership, no training. No guidance, no resources. No, you, I mean, it’s the biggest complaint I hear. We have marketing managers that come to us in our program or salespeople and they’re like, Hey Robin, can you help me out? I don’t, what do I do? And I’m like, well, what’s your job description? Like, what were you hired to do? No idea. So how are you measured? How do you know you’re doing a good job? No idea. I’m like, well, how do you get paid? And they’re like, you know, it’s like I’m serious.
RR (00:44:25):
Like they have someone hired ’em and they put, gave ’em like a stamp of saying, okay, you’re in marketing. Here’s Robin’s program. Go implement it. And it’s just, that’s not leadership. Mm-Hmm.
RR (00:45:09):
You know, we’re like, I don’t just like, I didn’t just abdicate say, okay, have a good day, you know, figure it out. Go out. She’s my, my chief revenue officer. But so, but it’s gonna take a year for her to really, I have to be with her. ’cause I know the history. I know where the bodies are buried. I know what we’ve tried in the past that worked in, didn’t work. And so even somebody who’s a very high protein, high level person still needs this CEO leader to be there and, and walk with them. Right? And I know I can step away very quick quickly ’cause I trust her. I think she’s got high integrity, she’s got a lot of experience. She’s grown things in the past. She’s bringing ideas and strategies I haven’t thought about. But even then I don’t just go, okay, well here’s your salary and go, go get it. I still have to mean a control over what’s going on in the org.
AJV (00:45:53):
Yeah. And I think that’s really insightful of even when you make the hire doesn’t mean the other person takes over. Like, you’re gonna be with them on that journey through the process. And I, I couldn’t agree more. And I think one of the things is like, these are like true lessons and, and high level entrepreneurship. This is a difference between six figures to seven figures, seven figures to eight figures, eight figures to nine figures is understanding the balance of some of these things. Now I’ve got one last quick question for you. And then our time is almost up. You’ve been doing, you’ve been doing this 20 years, right? Almost same avatar the whole time. Super similar business model. I know it’s changed and evolved a little bit over the course of time. As you look back over the last 20 years, if there was one lesson as an entrepreneur, as a business owner, as a leader, however you wanna, you know, title that if there was one lesson that you’re like, I don’t care if these listeners take away anything else, as long as you hear this, this is what I want you to hear as we’re wrapping up,
RR (00:46:53):
No pressure. Like, you know, just take the Bible and can you boil it down to a single tweet? ’cause Yeah,
AJV (00:46:58):
That’s it. You,
RR (00:46:59):
That’s, you know, eternal salvation if you know this one lesson. Yeah.
RR (00:47:09):
You know, I, it’s, it’s so hard ’cause there’s so many things that I would say I think, you know, looking back, I, I wish I had trusted my gut more and had more confidence in what I thought was right versus being afraid or scared of what people would say. ’cause My gut has never been wrong. What that sense you get about a person or a deal or something like that. I just wish I could go back and say, trust your gut. Stand your ground. You’re, you, you know, it’s, you’re doing the right thing. And I think also in that, from that kind of a, a branch to that is there’s very, very few mistakes you can’t recover from. So even when things look absolutely like the worst you get, you make a hire that just nearly destroys your company. I had a period in my life AJ, where I it was early on I had about seven employees and in a period of under a month, or I mean under a year, sorry.
RR (00:48:16):
I had like five or six of ’em turnover. I had to fire one, I had to fire a bunch of ’em. I, and I had two. One of ’em stole my client list and went to a competitor and there was a lawsuit. And then they, they sued me for defamation, which was just frivolous. It was just kind of a bargaining chip to get me to stop chasing them. I had another employee who left and and was trashing me and like, just flat out lies on social media. And I had, another one I found was stealing money from me. I found another one that I, it just on and on like that all goes on. I had a very, a high profile client go south on me as well. Where that, again, this was very weird. Like this was a very low integrity person in what they did.
RR (00:49:02):
I’ll just leave it at that. So I have this massive turnover. I have this very high profile client going south on me. I found out I had had melanoma all in one year. All in one. I found out I had melanoma. Which, you know, and then on the end of the tail of that, after I, ’cause that was when I decided I wanted to have kids. I wasn’t sure I wanted to have kids. And I said to my husband before I went into the surgery, if I come out and I’m okay. ’cause We were, they were concerned. It had metastasized. And I said, I wanna have a family. And like literally three months afterwards, I get pregnant. I have a miscarriage. This is all happening in like a nine, 10 month period. Right. and I was, that was like the lowest of low I’ve ever been.
RR (00:49:49):
And, you know, I wish I could go back and tell myself, girl, you got this. Like, all this is bad. But in the end it’s all gonna work out, I promise you. But I couldn’t see it at the time. And, you know, I have a renewed faith in God and I wish I could go back and tell myself, he is your savior and he will, he will protect you. ’cause He was there. I just didn’t see him. Sorry, get emotional. ’cause It’s like that important. But I, I think it’s, you know, for all of you, I think there’s nothing that’s going to happen that you make a mistake. Like, I hired the wrong people. I trusted the wrong client. I made some bad decisions. That’s, that’s what it was. I mean, all that happened was my fault. I mean, I even went in tanning bed.
RR (00:50:33):
So the me melanoma, who the hell knows it was my fault, right? So it was all like things I had done. But I think just to trust your gut and know that in the end, if you just keep doing the right thing, you work hard, you take care of people, you do what’s necessary, not what’s expedient, not what’s easy, not the shortcuts. If you keep it, it, it, it will all, it will work out. And just have that confidence. ’cause You’re gonna get beat up. You’re gonna get your butt handed to you multiple times. You’re gonna make all kinds of mistakes. You’re gonna get people who, who rip you off and it’s going to anger you. And I’m telling you it’s not worth it. Like to go, I’ll show them, I’ll sue them. And then you get embroiled in it. Like I’m telling you guys, like, it’s, I think the thing for me is just keep doing what you’re doing, doing the right thing and it will work out. But trust your gut more. ’cause There was, there were signs and I just ignored those signs about the people that I had in my life at the time. And I was kind of afraid to make, make a stance or I was afraid to fire them, or I was afraid to say, no, I’m not doing that. Or I was afraid to say what need to be said. And I think going back, I should have, I should have done that more and then had just had faith in, in, in God that it, it will work out.
AJV (00:51:50):
You know what? I bet you’re not afraid to do those things anymore,
RR (00:51:54):
RR (00:52:34):
And I gotta remind myself, you know, there’s people around me that I gotta just be a little kinder with a little. And it’s, I gotta be very hyper aware of it because that’s not the mode that I’m used to. And that’s really it. Other than that, if I, if you serve people, I don’t focus on competition. I’ve got a ton of it. I’ve got people who copy me. You’re all gonna have copy. You know, it’s, it’s all gonna be okay.
RR (00:53:16):
I hope I’m probably telling you way more than you need. But, you know, one of the things I never, when I started my business, I never wanted to be an influencer. Like, I never wanted to be the one on stage the guru. Like, I, I did it because I saw it as a means to selling stuff, not as a means. Because I like to be on stage. I’m, and I mean this sincerely, if I was never on stage again, wouldn’t hurt my feelings. I don’t mind doing it. But it’s not like my favorite thing in the world, right? I just, I’m kind of neutral about it. In fact, I’d rather be behind the scenes than on stage if I had, if I had my, my preference, right? But, you know, so much of your business gets wrapped up in your ego because you go, well, hey, I don’t have a million followers on Instagram and YouTube and Facebook and all these things.
RR (00:54:02):
And we see these people who are doing amazing. I’m not taking away from ’em. I mean, they have these millions of views for a reason. They’re, they have incredible, incredible messages and stuff. And I’m not, I’m not, I don’t mean this in a jealous way. What I mean, it is, you can get caught up in that and feel like, you know, what, if I’m not relevant anymore, what am I gonna do if this thing doesn’t work out? Like, I’ve gotta be, I gotta be more popular. I gotta be get more likes. I gotta get more clicks. I gotta get more. I, if I don’t, I’m a failure. Right? And I started having those feelings quite a bit and it was, it made me nervous. ’cause I felt like the business kind of rose on that. Right? And, and again, I think my faith in God, just coming back to that is that is an earthly prize that, you know what?
RR (00:54:46):
I don’t need to get wrapped up in that. I just need to take care of people. I need to work hard. I need to do the right thing. And it’s okay if I’m not the most popular YouTuber or Facebook person or whatever, and not to get wrapped up in that too much. You know, because I, I can tell you this, I know a lot of very wealthy successful people that you all never heard of. Yeah. I mean, I know of billionaires and multimillionaires, none of you have ever heard of running an IT business, running a software company that you guys, if I said it, you would never know who the heck I’m talking about. Right? So it’s possible to run a great business without having all these fans, followers. Now I’m not, again, I’m not, please don’t misunderstand me. They’re important. Totally.
AJV (00:55:30):
I totally agree with you though. Okay. So
RR (00:55:31):
I’m just saying like for your spirit, I just don’t get too caught up where you feel like you’re failure if you’re not as popular. ’cause You look at my YouTube channel, you look at my Facebook, you’re like, I get like three people liking it. That’s it.
AJV (00:55:42):
I mean, I’m definitely not all that different. I mean, we run a personal brand strategy firm and I’m like, well, don’t go look at mine because that’s like, I’ve never had roughly more than what I have right now. It’s 10,000 followers. And like one of my personal mantras is that you do not have to have millions of followers to make millions of dollars, and you do not have to make millions of dollars to make a massive and eternal impact. Right. And it’s like a
RR (00:56:05):
Hundred percent. That’s what I’m saying, what you’re saying. Yep, a hundred percent.
AJV (00:56:07):
And you know, and I love what you said, and it’s like I’ve been reading a lot through the Old Testament right now, and we’ll kind of like, I know wrap in this, but it’s like, one of the things that I’ve been, I’ve been holding on to is like, just like gold where we are refined through the fire, right? And it’s like nobody looks back and says, oh my gosh, that success, that victory, it defined me. I learned everything I know. And I had this victorious thing that happened. It’s like nobody says that. I look back and go, like that valley, that challenge, that horrendous year, that awful relationship that, you know, that bankruptcy thing, it’s like we grow through the crap, right? Mm-Hmm.
RR (00:56:49):
Yeah. I mean, it’s the fertilizer of life. Right? Exactly. You know what I mean? You just,
AJV (00:56:53):
And knowing that it’s like, and I love what you said, it’s like, man, if you just don’t give up, you just
RR (00:56:59):
Give, just, you know, get more. I, I think it was Ed Ette said this, we just had edit what, you know, and I know he’s, he’s a client, you some stuff. Yeah. Yeah. And he said, you know, don’t get your ego wrapped up in your results. Get it wrapped up in your intention. And I love that because that’s what I’m really, you know, if your intention is to do good in the world and to help others and, you know, get wrapped up in doing that and providing real value to people. And you know, the other thing is, is learn business too, guys. You know, I, you know, the other thing is if I could go back and say to myself, you know, you can build an actual, like a company with actual enterprise value that is sellable. Not just a company that makes money.
RR (00:57:39):
‘Cause In the beginning, I’ll tell you, I wasted the first, I’d say the first 12 years I just was making money and it was more money than I ever made. And I thought, this is great, you know? And as I started to evolve and grow my business, I started to realize, hey, you know, I had to learn how to run a, a legit business, not this kind of lifestyle thing. And, and if you ever wanna run a lifestyle thing that’s, that’s up to you. I’m just saying like and then as like in my industry, ’cause mergers and acquisitions is such a big deal, I had to bring in several, what I call experts and residents on m and a and enterprise value and financials. And so I started surrounding myself with people that are not like branding and marketing, but that are like, here’s how you read a p and l.
RR (00:58:23):
Mm-Hmm,
AJV (00:59:06):
Ah, this is so good. I mean, I literally took three pages of notes,
AJV (00:59:48):
I think that’s so, so, so, so good. And then the third thing that I wrote down, and you said it in the very early, it’s like you gotta know from when you’re going scrappy to strategic, right? Mm-Hmm
RR (01:00:18):
Share it with your mssp if you outsource your IT support, that’s who I want. Woo. Woo. That’s
AJV (01:00:24):
Know where your audience is. That’s what you need to
RR (01:00:27):
Know here. They probably don’t even have one, so that’s fine. But
AJV (01:00:29):
Yeah. You know, I think this, it’s, so this is one of those conversations that really, it’s like this is, this is a conversation 20 years in the making. And if you guys haven’t realized like you just got a masterclass in entrepreneurship, I would encourage you to go back and listen to it. And then also stay tuned for the recap episode that I will do next. Robin, thank you so much. Everyone else, we will see you next time on the influential personal brand.
Ep 522: How to Get Your Own TV Show with Ryan Serhant
RV (00:06):
Welcome to the Influential Personal Brand podcast. This is the place where we help mission-driven messengers, just like you learn how to build and monetize your personal brand. My name is Rory Vaden, and I’m the co-founder of Brand Builders Group, a hall of fame speaker, and New York Times bestselling author. And this show is to help experts learn how to become more wealthy and well-known. I know you’re gonna love it. Thanks for being here. Let’s get started. You are about to get backstage access to one of the biggest personal brands in the world. Not only one of the biggest personal brands, but somebody who I admire and respect for how he’s turned his personal brand into an actual scalable business with enterprise value. Something extremely rare that we see. And this is my pal a a brambles group client. Now, Ryan Serhant. And if you don’t know Ryan, you will he’s, he’s quite possibly the most famous real estate agent in the world.
RV (01:07):
So he became really popular while selling some of the \most expensive properties in Manhattan and, you know, New York and other areas, two celebrities. And he was the TV star of the two time Emmy nominated series, million Dollar Listing on Bravo. He since has had multiple TV shows, and he has another one coming out soon on Netflix. But he’s also, more importantly the CEO of Serhant, which is a tech forward real estate brokerage known for really cutting edge innovation. Extravagant listing listings, a full service media production company. And also he has basically like a whole nother half, which does digital education which is a, is a platform that has more than 14,000 members in 110 countries. And all of these things together have led to Ryan accumulating a personal brand with more than three, 4 million plus followers on social media. He’s the bestselling author of multiple books. And you know, he writes columns for Forbes and other places and has just really done a phenomenal job of turning a personal brand into a huge business. And so we invited him on the show to say, Hey, could we hear some of those secrets? So, Ryan, welcome to the show, man.
RS (02:28):
Thank you. I appreciate it. I was, was like, man, when is it? When’s the intro gonna end? We have so much to talk about
RV (02:33):
RS (02:34):
Intro, so much
RV (02:35):
Information. Well, you’ve done a lot of, you’ve done so many things like that. Doesn’t even scratch the surface of, of it. But let’s start by the most recent thing, which is what brought us together was your book brand. It like Sirhan. Tell us about brand it like Sirhan, why did you write that book? It’s the third book in a trilogy. So let’s start there and then we can kind of go backwards.
RS (02:58):
Sure. You know, the book yeah. Just came out it and thank you for all your help, by the way. Really appreciate it. It definitely stands alone, you know, for people who want to go and build a brand in 20, 24 and beyond, right? It is, it is very, very tactical. No fluff. You wanna build a brand from scratch that’s personal. So a personal brand, or you wanna build a product brand and it has everything you need to know from, you know, social channels to working with pr. It has our whole, what we call our Sir Amp brand strategy system, which I can get into. But it’s, it’s really, really great. And I, you know, I wrote it because I couldn’t, I, again, I couldn’t find something like it, you know, there’s, there’s branding books that are old, you know, that talk a lot about newspapers and radio.
RS (03:44):
But it’s just a, it’s a different world now, right? And everything moves incredibly, incredibly fast as part of a, a trilogy, right? I wrote my, my first book in 2018 called Sell It Like Sirhan. We did a TV show about it for Bravo where I was like helping people sell wine and sell body and bikini waxing memberships and all this kind of stuff,
RV (04:20):
Sell it. Do
RS (04:21):
Super exciting com. Sell it.com. That, so that’s been super exciting. So that was just, that was sales tools, right? That’s what was that book? Was the sales tool belt. Like, if you’ve never sold anything, you don’t classify yourself as a salesperson. You hate salespeople, you hate selling, whatever. If you wanna control your own life, you wanna be an entrepreneur, a gig worker, you wanted to have a side hustle. You wanna sell real estate, sell cars, sell software, whatever. Read this, it is your, it’s your Bible. And I followed that up with my second book, big Money Energy, which, which really was, Hey, okay, I gave you all the tools. But if you don’t have the confidence to use them, then it’s gonna be a great tool belt that sits in your closet. So how can you start acting and carrying yourself, like the you of the future, you know, where you want to get to two years from today.
RS (05:08):
So be that person today. And so how do you do that? And so I looked at those two books and it was the sales skills, you need the confidence to use them. But then if no one knows what you’re selling, it doesn’t matter how confident you are, it doesn’t matter how many tools you have in your Jewel belt, you’re never gonna sell anything to anybody. So how do you, how do you create awareness? How do you cut through attention? How do you, how do you really build right, a brand both for yourself or for a product. And that’s where branded like Shanz comes into play. Yep. Spent the last two years writing it and putting it together.
RV (05:43):
So one, one of the things, I mean, you’ve done masterfully is PR and specifically, I, I can, can you share with us the story of like, how did, how did you get on tv? How does it work? Like, how does it even work to get a show with Bravo or Netflix? Because you’ve done that not just once, multiple times. You got your new Netflix show coming out in June. Yeah. And like, that’s, very few people have been able to do that. So like, did you just call them or like send a submission or show up to a casting call or what?
RS (06:22):
Well, the first time I was ever on TV was on a soap opera. So I, I trained to be an actor for a long time my whole life. Like, I was terrible at sports, but I liked being on stage. And so I did theater since I was a little kid and made like little home movies and all that. I went to college, I was a double major in English literature, so writing books and and theater, right? So, so performance. And I moved to New York City in 2006 to do theater. My dream was Broadway. That was my dream to be on stage or Broadway. You know, if TV or film worked out, that would be awesome. But I didn’t wanna move to California. It was the other end of the country. I’d never even been there before. And so I was like, you know, I’ve been to New York City before. I know people in New York, I’ll go make that happen. And I promptly ran out of all my money. And because when you go to theater school, they, which
RV (07:12):
Probably took a few days, right? Like in New York, you anyone can burn through like a lot of money pretty quickly,
RS (07:17):
All of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I had like, I had what I thought was like five years of savings, and I was out of it in less than two years. And I made some money along the way, like I did some regional theater and made some money. I did a soap opera called As The World Turns, which isn’t Around anymore. And Oh, nice. Yeah. Made some money from that and for a while. And then, and then it just basically was down to my last couple thousand dollars. And, you know, the classic, how am I gonna eat? How am I gonna pay rent? Do I go become a bartender, a waiter? What do I do? And a friend said, get into real estate is the same thing. You know, I was great at improv, so I would do improv classes and you know, your acting classes really are about breathing, right?
RS (07:55):
They’re about listening. They’re about, you know, morphing into this conversation and that conversation. It’s about using your voice. And selling is the same exact thing. Memorize information. You meet strangers and you play an improv game, right? And so he’s like, listen, get your real estate license. Rent Apartments. New York City is tens of thousands of rental apartments and rental agents. You can make, you can make, you know, you can make a thousand dollars a day, you can make a hundred grand a year. You know, no one knows what to do. The city is all upside down. It’s crazy. So do that. So I got my license the day Lehman Brothers files for bankruptcy in 2008, and everyone gets outta the business, but I already had no money. So I was like par for the course. I just thought the business was really, really hard.
RS (08:44):
And I, I kind of, you know, it was real estate was my survi survival job. I had no intention of being a real estate agent or a broker or salesman. I had all the intention of buying time. It’s like all if I rent an apartment a month, and if I can make my rent and pay for food and incidentals, which was about $2,000 a month, I could stay in New York and not have to move home to Colorado where my parents were at the time. And so what, you’re from Colorado? I didn’t know that. I’m from Colorado. I’m from, well, I’m from Texas. I grew up outside Boston. We moved a lot as a little kid, but when I, when I graduated high school, my parents sold our house in Boston and moved to Colorado. So if I were to go home, you know, at that time, I would’ve moved home to Colorado to live with my parents.
RS (09:29):
Gotcha. And so I, you know, I did my first rental deal. It was like, huh, wow, okay, so if I just work, I can make money
RS (10:10):
And so a lot of salespeople get into sales and they, you know, 90% of them churn out because the rejection is just too hard and they just don’t wanna deal with it. For me, like my whole life had been rejection. So I was, I was kind of fine with it. I didn’t bank on anybody or anything ever. I just knew I was gonna bet on myself. ’cause That’s why I moved to New York in the first place. And so then I started doing sales, and I got my first sales commission check of like a couple thousand dollars. It was like, holy moly. And I actually liked it. I liked touching base with people. I liked seeing apartments all day. I liked running around, and I was totally fine working for free. Amazing. Because, you know, in, in, in sales, your, your success is your client’s success, right?
RS (10:48):
Amen. And so I then I built, and a little over a year later, there was a casting call that got put out for the New York version of a show called A Million Dollar Listing, which had been on the air for a couple years in Los Angeles on Bravo. And so I saw that and was like, oh, that’d be so weird,
RS (11:38):
And then a couple months later, they called me back and they were like, Hey, we’re doing a Skype interview. We wanna get to know you better. And they whittled it down to a couple hundred at that point, and then, then they whittled it down to 16 people to, to find the final agents that would be on that show. And they, they, they flew a, a whole production crew in from Los Angeles and said, we’re gonna follow all 16 of you around New York City for half a day. Show us what your day’s like. Show us how you operate, what do you do? And I made sure that that half day was the craziest half day in the history of real estate in New York City. Nice. Because I had just got into the business. I was like, a half day in my life, I’ll post some ads on the internet, I’ll get a bagel.
RS (12:19):
And so I didn’t want it to be that. And so I made sure it was, it was worth watching. And then they cast us, you know? Wow. And so out of obscurity. So then we did Million Dollar Listing. It premiered in 2012 and ran for 10 years. And from that we did spinoff shows. I did a, my wedding was a spinoff show. My, my renovation of my home was a spinoff show Sell, like Sirhan was a spinoff show. And then, you know, I saw the world change during that experience, right? Like we, when we started listing first came out like two to 3 million people would tune in live every week, right? There was no Netflix, Netflix was DVDs. There was no video, there was no Instagram in 2012, right? There was no Instagram. There was, YouTube was like reruns of Kevin Bacon’s movies and scenes, like, it was, it was just a different, different world
RS (13:06):
And then Instagram comes out, right? So social becomes a thing. The heyday of reality TV kind of really kicks off 2013 to like 2016, Netflix moves to streaming, house of Cards comes out, reality TV explodes everywhere. And people’s attention starts being grabbed, you know? And I saw that like 20 16, 17 really 17, 18, 19 ratings started going down for all TV shows because YouTube became a real thing, right? The next generation didn’t need, didn’t, they weren’t watching TV anymore. Everyone was just watching. So as you had wifi, they had all the entertainment they need. And then TikTok hit and everything really changed. So it’s like, okay, so one day cable TV isn’t gonna exist anymore. And so I need to plan for my next, my next step. I built a whole career and a whole business on the back of a reality TV show.
RS (13:56):
What’s next for me? So I started my own company in 2020 called Sirhan. We do real estate brokerage services, education services, and we have a production company. So we do media services. And I created a pitch reel, right? Where I took a couple of my camera guys and we created a reel, and I pitched it around, and we took it to Netflix, we took it to HBO Max, we took it to Peacock, we took it to Amazon Prime, we took it to Hulu. And we got offers from almost all of them. But Netflix was, was the strongest. And they already had a, a world built, right? They already had a viewership that understood reality real estate. And they had the biggest global audience. And so for my business, even though those other networks are fun, and they’re cool, like, I wanna make sure that someone in India, Japan, Brazil, you know globally would have the opportunity to come in, into contact with our brand. And so we chose Netflix. We shot it all last year, and it comes out in a couple months.
RV (14:56):
Dude,
RS (14:56):
That, that’s a really long answer to your super
RV (14:58):
Simple. Yeah. That, but that, I mean, that’s, that’s so powerful. I mean, I love how God uses your, you know, backstory and pulls it all together, right? Like one, one of the things that we always say is your most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were. And like, there you are not making it as an actor, starting with real estate. And then all of a sudden with a casting call of 3000 people who is more qualified to know exactly what those people need and, and to make, you know, something worth watching. When, when you say you pitched it, okay, like in, in 2020, you say, we, we created a pitch reel, and then we took it around to Yeah. Peacock, et cetera. What does that mean exactly? Who are you taking it to? How do you take it to them? What, like, how do you find these people? I mean, I assume it’s somewhat of a referrals and prospecting game, like anything, but is it basically like, yeah. Do you hire a showrunner and they like, take your pitch deck and show it to producers? Or how does that work? The
RS (15:57):
Show, the showrunner came later once the show got picked up, because there was no show to run prior to that, that was a whole separate process. You know, I had been on TV previously. Yeah. So I had the, the, the, I was in a fortunate position where, you know, I had a great agent at UTA, you know, agents are are good people, right? They can get business done. So I had a great agent at UTA that I kind of brainstormed with for a bit. The production company that I worked with World of Wonder based in LA that did Million Dollar Listing and all my spinoff shows with me on Bravo. Were down to try something new with me. So it’s like, this is gonna be different. I’m not, I don’t wanna make million dollar listing again for the new world.
RS (16:35):
Like, I wanna do something that kind of redefines the genre a bit, and it’s gonna be weird. Maybe it won’t, maybe it won’t work. I have no idea. And they said, okay, well, so we made, we made our first reel, like on our own, so that we weren’t really spending tons of money and wasting it. And then my agent and World of Wonder, the production company, set up the meetings because that’s all they do, right? That’s what their jobs are. It’s like, if you’re like, all right, how do I go buy a house in New York? You find a good agent and you say, this is what I want. The agent has all the relationships and has doing, been doing this for 10 years, and they set up those appointments, they know exactly who to talk to, and they don’t waste any time. So we did our Zoom, or it was like our Zoom tour, right?
RS (17:11):
Where we would send our little reel over and they would watch it, and then we would, we would talk about it on those, on those pitches. Like, Hey, here’s the vision. So you just saw five minutes of kind of like a taste of what we’re looking at, which was our company in New York, our building in soho that I’m standing in right now. Kind of our crazy cast of characters and, and really helping define what the universe would look like, because I think the most successful TV shows create, create a World, right? They create a universe that really grabs the viewer, and then you have to hook and release, right? So how are you hooking people and then giving them a cliffhanger and then releasing them, and then giving them a hook, giving ’em a cliffhanger, and then releasing them. And so there’s, there’s kind of an algorithm that you look at when you’re telling story long form.
RS (17:58):
I mean, short form too, for sure, but also long form. And so then we walked the Netflix executives, the HOO Max executives, Hulu Peacock, Amazon Prime. Amazon gave us a great offer, a great one. And they were super, super bullish. And the only reason I didn’t go with Amazon, and that was a tough, I remember that, like that summer which was summer of 22, when, when we kind of got the green light. These, these things take forever, by the way. I remember like going back and forth and just saying, what do we do? Who do we go with? Like, how do I, like, it’s such a big decision. How do I choose? And the way we did it was like, all right, well why, why am I doing this? I don’t, I don’t care about being famous. I don’t care about selling toasters. Like we, our business is the most important. What’s gonna be the most entertaining? ’cause We’re gonna make the same show regardless of the network. But what’s gonna be best for business? And we just looked, we’re like, all right, so we got a client. Did you
RV (18:57):
Say you, you do want it to be most entertaining, or you’re saying you didn’t care about?
RS (19:01):
No, we want it to, we just two, you want it to be entertaining, but we know what’s gonna be entertaining. ’cause We know how to make great tv, but we also want it to be great for the business, otherwise it’s a waste of time. Right? So like, like, I don’t wanna spend all this time, all this effort, effort and go make a TV show and have it sit in a box, right? Would sure. Super entertaining in that box. Or it’s,
RV (19:18):
Or it’s a distraction that pulls you away from the business. But if you can make them aligned, all of a sudden one is like jet fuel for the other.
RS (19:25):
Yeah. So, exactly. So we really, we looked at it, and so then we, I was like, okay, well where are our clients right now coming from, you know, that are using us? You know, and they were across Asia, south America, India, different parts of Europe. Like we had a buyer in Croatia. And I just went to all of them and I said, Hey, do you watch Netflix, Amazon, or where do you see tv? Every single one of them said they had Netflix. Whoa. And it just, that was just the differentiator. I was like, I, I gotta be in front of people in Croatia, Sao Paulo, Patagonia, you know, India, et cetera. And New York is a big, it’s, it’s a very New York show. It’s gritty, you know, it’s tough. It feels very New York and, and around the world. New York’s an interesting place for people to see, like, it’s just a wild, it’s wild little island that we have here.
RV (20:18):
But you’re deliberately going after, I mean, multiple times, just this, you’ve said about the importance of the international audience. Mm-Hmm.
RS (20:40):
So New York is where we dominate in real estate. So, you know, I’m based in New York City. I live in New York. There’s enough real estate here to go around. It’s a big part of our business. But our brand has, has grown pretty globally now. And so we want to take as much advantage of it, of it as we possibly can. So sell it.com right now has, we have members in 128 countries, you know, most of which I’ve never even been to. And so if we’re gonna create a TV show and spend two years making it like it is a significant amount of work and really put the time and effort behind it, then I wanna make sure that it has the biggest opportunity possible. You know? And, and that’s why really, like what’s the best platform to be on? Like when it was cable TV only, then you’re like, you, you really run the risk of, okay, well a lot of people are gonna see it, but if it’s not any good, it’ll go off the air pretty quickly. Streaming’s actually kind of worse, because if it’s not good, that thumbnail goes away real fast, right? That algorithm just starts showing you more things to keep you in the platform. Like Netflix is just, you know, is a social media app, basically, right? They wanna keep you in there, hook you in. Don’t, don’t leave us, don’t go to Amazon. Don’t go to Hulu. Right. Stay, stay.
RV (21:57):
Yeah. It’s, but it’s amazing just to even hear your brain of how far ahead you’re thinking, like the patience it takes to pursue a TV show, knowing it could take two years to get a deal, two years to film it, then it finally gets out and at any moment they could drop you. Right? They can pull the thumbnail down. That’s super, super powerful. So, so like talk to me about, now a lot of reality TV shows, stars, we, we actually have a lot of brand builders, clients, like a fair number who were on the Bachelor or were an NFL player or like, yeah. You know, a lot of people have been on TV or they’ve had their minute of fame and then the moment the thing goes away, they struggle to monetize, they struggle to keep the momentum going. You didn’t do that. Like, you have gotten bigger and bigger. Like everything has sort of snowballed and even, even small business owners. I think that’s the thing is going, how do you turn your personal brand into a business? How do you scale it past you? What are the things that you’ve done internally? How do you think strategically about sort of scale and enterprise value and making it extend beyond the person of Ryan?
RS (23:13):
So I’m always thinking at minimum 12 months out, all the work that I’m doing today is not to the benefit of Ryan tomorrow. It’s to the benefit of Ryan in April of 2025. Like, that’s all the work we’re doing today. Like March was across our businesses. March was our biggest revenue month in company history, right? And it’s because of the work that we did a year ago, you know, and it’s really important for me always to remind our employees of that because they’re like, oh, oh, we can take time off. I’m like, well, well, no, no, because all the work you’ve done from the past year got us to today. Now imagine what could happen if we even dialed that down even further, where we’re gonna be a year from for now. So you’re always working for future. You like that is, that’s my world.
RS (24:00):
That’s the world I live in. Nothing is for me today, like I go to the gym this morning, it has no effect on my body today. Right? Am I more mentally aware? Sure. Right. But I’m doing it for my long-term health so that Ryan, next year, two years from now, Ryan, who’s 80, can look back and say, Hey, thanks
RS (24:46):
They were assistants on the business. It was like, so how do I, how do I scale sales when I’m the, when I’m, when I’m, when I’m kind of selling is myself, right? Because the apartments are there, the houses are there, but I’m really selling is using Ryan to go to those houses or to sell those houses. Totally. Like what is, what’s scalable that way? So lemme build a brand. Let me focus a lot on talking about Serhant and not just Ryan Serhant. I have a funky last name. It is check. And so not a lot of people have it so I could use it, right? Because it’s every time someone mispronounces it and says Sirhan or Ser Ann or Seacrest, it’s great. Right? It just means they’re thinking. And so, and that was a big part of creating early on, because I didn’t start, so I didn’t start Serhant until 2020, but I knew I was going to eventually, which is why I wrote sell it like Serhant in 2018.
RS (25:36):
I mean, we started writing it in 2016, so like, kind of four years ahead of time. And then with the brand, right? Our brand strategy system, that brand it, like Serhant the book really goes into is three phases. So it’s core identity, consistent content, and then amplification or, or shouting it from the mountaintop. And so I did those exercises, like what is the core identity of, of, of Sirhan in, in as much as how it’s different from Ryan, right? So like, what’s Ryan? And then what is Sirhan? Now let’s create consistent content around Sirhan being separate from Ryan. Let’s build a production arm that is just pushing out the product brand and focusing on those product successes in that kind of third period, which is the, the amplification. So let’s make sure that there are, there are publications that are just pushing the brand, and then let’s align ourselves with other successful people under the Samp brand so that they have their own personal brands, but they’re using Sirhan to power them.
RS (26:36):
That’s gonna help us over time, slowly build that brand away from just me. And the first year, it definitely didn’t work. Killed me. Second year, it definitely didn’t work. Still killed me. Third year, it was like, huh, all right, so it’s working. And we started expanding. So it was like, what is, what, what do I do in North Carolina? Like, what is sur in these different states and markets? Like, I’m not there. How does this work? And so it started working and then this year we’re really kind of off to the, off to the races. That’s kind of high level. Fifth year. Fifth year
RV (27:09):
In
RS (27:10):
The fifth, well, 2020, we didn’t start, we weren’t legal until like January, 2021. So all 21, 22, 23. So it took a three fiscal years. And so we’re at the beginning of 2024, so we’re like into our fourth year.
RV (27:21):
Yeah. And I would say like that, that, it’s so interesting to hear that it’s, it’s great to have that on a story because that’s what it we see for a new personal brand. Like if they don’t have a TV show or something pop, like even just a business in general, like the first two years suck. The third year you kind of start to see momentum year four and five, it starts to take off and you can see the light, and then it’s like by year 10 you’re going, I am unfairly paid. I’m getting unfair rewards for all the work as you said that you put in. Yeah. So I wanna point y’all back. So brand like Sirhan, there’s this three part system. It’s all in the book brand. It like Sirhan, so you guys can go get it. Ryan, where do you want people to go to learn? Obviously they can buy brand it like Sirhan anywhere, but like where should people go if they want to connect you with you and follow up? And
RS (28:10):
At, at Ryan Sirhan, anywhere the book is brand it like Sirhan, you can get that anywhere. Books are sold. You go to the website brand it like serhant.com to check it out for sales training, you can go to sell it.com. As of 46 minutes ago,
RV (28:32):
Really, really cool. The, the last question I have for you, man, is I, I know that there’s had to have been some, some dark nights and some heavy moments. You, you do have a lot of jobs, a lot of pressure, a lot of things weighing on you. You got family, right? You got daughter, you got married. And in those moments where inevitably you come across a little bit of feeling overwhelmed, a little bit of feeling that pressure days when things fall apart, people quit, you know, customer’s unhappy. The dream you thought was gonna happen starts to look like it’s falling apart. Like, what do you do to keep yourself going in those, those moments specifically in case someone listening right now happens to be in one of those?
RS (29:17):
So I tell myself always right? Because it nothing is bad forever. Time heals all wounds. You have great days, you have awful days. The greatest day I’ve ever had, I haven’t even lived it yet, you know, and reminding myself of that is a, is a kick in the butt to get outta bed and to actually go and do the thing. Because maybe that’s today. Like maybe today is the greatest day I’ve ever had. Like, that could be awesome on the sales side, you know, I am, I am, you know, I sell lots of things all day long. You know, the greatest deal I’ve ever done. I haven’t even done it yet. Hmm. You know, like I remember when we started the company and it was summer 2020 in New York City. Lockdown not allowed to go outside. There’s swat, there’s bodies in Central Park.
RS (30:10):
You turn on the tv, there’s a death clicker, okay? The George Floyd riots happen in June. It’s a really, really bad time for our country. It was really, really tough. Everything, all sales stopped for me. All real estate sales in New York City were dead. Every deal I had went into immediate litigation, it was the worst. I, any, any money I had that was like in the stock market, the stock market sold off 10,000 points, right? It was just brutal. And I’m like, I’m going to start my own company right now. I was also in the middle of renovating my house right at that point, which is a cash heavy operation. And I just had my first baby. So it, you know, it was a lot. And I was like, man, all I gotta do is just every day’s a new day. Like every day’s a new day.
RS (30:57):
The greatest day I’ve ever lived, I haven’t even lived it yet. The greatest deal I’ve ever done. I haven’t even done it yet. I just got, I just gotta push forward. And you know what? Everything’s gonna be okay eventually. It always is no matter what, unless we get hit by a comet and we’re the dinosaurs and it’s over forever. And then if that happens, then again, who cares? I just gotta keep it moving. And when things are bad, this is when you should build, because you can’t get these moments back. Like when things are great, of course you’re gonna start your own company like every other idiot, right? When things are bad, everyone’s so scared. So go, go do it. Go build. And so we just buckled down and I looked at it with a glass half full. It’s like, all right, so covid happened.
RS (31:38):
Everything sucks. Well, it looks like I just got the spring and summer markets for free. Like, when am I ever gonna get all this time that I don’t have to work? Like, I don’t, I’m not showing because I’m not on pod. Like I wasn’t do we know everything was shut down. Filming was shut down, everything was shut down. This is insane. Like, if I wanted to go start a business today, I’d be like, I need six months of quiet. I just gotta buckle down and just go do it. I’m never gonna get that again. So boom, glass half full. Awesome. You know, what else? Awesome. Everyone’s expectations are gonna be so low. I don’t have to go that crazy.
RS (32:27):
And they’re like, are you crazy? Are you sick? Do you have long covid? You know? And they were like, you should do a test. Are you wearing gloves right now? I’m like, no, we’re building for the future that everything’s gonna be okay. It’s like, man, if I could do one deal, if I did like a $20 million sale when we kicked off the company, that would just be like the greatest thing ever. And we started the company a couple months later, I sold a house in Palm Beach for $140 million. Whoa. And the whole world changed. The market changed overnight, right? And it’s been a rocket ship ever since. And so the greatest day you’ve ever had, you haven’t even lived it yet, you know,
RV (33:12):
Man. I love that. I love that. Well, brother, thank you for making a little bit of time for us. We’ll link to of course, book and everything. And it’s been, it’s been an honor to get to know you a little bit. I love the way that your mind works and and the heart and, and the energy. I mean, big money, energy, like, talk about the enthusiasm that you have all day, every day and you bring to so much stuff. I mean, it’s legendary. And so to have some insight into what you’re doing behind the scenes with these three books and just to get to meet you a little bit, I really, really appreciate it, brother. And we’ll be following you. Thanks ma’am. We, we wish you the best.
Ep 520: Using AI to Increase Human Connection with Matt Fornito
AJV (00:02):
Hey, everybody, and welcome to the Influential Personal Brand podcast, AJ Vaden here, one of your co-hosts. And today I have a friend and a fellow BBG member that is our guest on the show today. And I’m so excited to introduce you guys to Matt Ferdo. We actually just had Matt come speak to our internal group at Brand Builders Group, all on the topic of ai, which, you know, that’s what we’re talking about today if you clicked on this episode. But before we get into this conversation of ai, I wanted to let you know why I invited Matt on the show, because we’ve had several other people in and out the last two years talking about ai. But I think one of the things that’s really interesting is, you know, Matt’s the founder of the AI Advisory Group. But one of the things that I recently learned is like, I think one of the things that our team, and I, and I had Matt on the show, because I know if our team struggles with it, and if we struggle with it, you likely struggle with it, which means your team struggle with it is they hear lots about it, they know lots about it, they test different things, but it really hasn’t become a routine way of creating efficiencies in the business, right?
AJV (01:14):
And so the conversation that I wanna have today is like, well, one, we’re gonna talk about what does the future look like with this? And not in a, a job scarcity mindset. That’s not what we’re talking about, how everyone’s jobs are being eliminated, because I don’t really believe that. But it’s more of like, Hey, how can we use these, these tools that are at our disposal to create efficiencies in the lives of our team members and our lives and daily routine tasks that seem to overwhelm us? Because if I hear one more entrepreneur tell me, there’s just not enough hours in the day, right? We, we’ve all said it. I’ve said it, I probably said it last week. And at the same token, it’s like, are we using the things all around us to help improve our schedules and daily lives? And so in having a conversation with Matt a few months ago, I was like, you know what?
AJV (02:01):
It’s time to bring this conversation back to the table, not on just what is the future gonna look like and sales and marketing, but more of like, how can we use this to better our daily lives, right? How do we become more efficient, thus more effective without having to add three, four, or five more working hours to our day every day? So if you were listening to this, that’s the conversation around AI that we’re gonna have today. Now I mentioned this earlier. Matt is the founder of the AI Advisory Group. He’s also been speaking and acting little known fact for more than three decades, 30 years. He’s also led leadership thought leadership C two o round tables different events. He’s on podcasts. He’s had new out news outlets like the CIO and CDO magazines. And I know him personally. So I know that the value that he’s gonna bring today is gonna be so helpful for anyone who is in business, no matter what your role is, entrepreneur, business owner, salesperson in marketing, operations or those, someone aspiring to do any of those things. So without further ado, Matt, welcome to the show,
MF (03:12):
And thank you so much for having me. Thank you for the, the kind words. And it was you know, an honor to have you approach me because when you actually said, you know, we would love to have you come speak internally, that’s the most important thing, right? That transformative mindset of how do we actually start moving the needle and how do we get to a place where we can create a competitive mode and be people first, AI driven to enable everyone in the organization to be more effective, more efficient, and spend more time doing the things they love.
AJV (03:42):
Yeah. And that’s really the conversation around this that I love. ’cause I, I love because I, I, you know, I’m just not one of those people who’s gonna look at anything as the, you know, glass is half empty, gloom and doom. This is gonna, you know, take over the need for humans. It’s like, nah, I don’t, I just, I just don’t believe that, right? I think that as a human species, we’re also, we’re always gonna be needed. So I think there is, if we, if we just can all agree on that for a second, then there’s a lot of power and how we can use some of these tools. So here’s my first question for you and I wanna help our audience get to know you a little bit. But before we talk about how you got into AI in the first place, what I would really love to hear from you, for everyone who’s listening, is when it comes to personal branding, right? This is a podcast all about building an influential personal brand. A lot of that is tied to, you know, the mi the mindset of entrepreneurship. But how does AI benefit you when you consider all the different things of building a personal brand and being an entrepreneur? Like, how, how does AI benefit you if you’re that person?
MF (04:47):
Well, and we, we can get into my, my backstory as to why this even came to fruition. But I think the, the reality is I wanted to create a lifestyle brand where everyone that’s a part of the team could actually have good and strong work-life balance. And that meant how do we do more with less? How do we use technology to our benefit? And so there’s me and one other person that are running the organization, and then we have former Fortune 500 CDOs on the team. And for us, it’s let’s eat our own dog food. What do we need to do? Where do we spend so much time? Where do we waste time where we could be having more efficient productivity, or we could be having more meaningful relationships? And so for, and like two examples on that of what we’ve built out.
MF (05:34):
One is a just an inbound prospecting engine. For those that reach out to me, we have an entire automation process that determines where does someone fit in the lifecycle in their maturity as well as are they an ideal customer? Because if they’re an ideal customer, then we wanna get a meeting set. And getting to that point has now all been automated, and that saves us about 30 hours per week just with that, just for one person, right? So if you have a sales team if you have a marketing team that’s highly multiplicative, and the same token in regards to me talking with a lot of boards of directors and c-suite, you need to do a lot of research to be prepared for those types of meetings, right? You can’t just wing it. And so we’ve created a, using LLMs, we’ve created a sales brief, like that goes right next to the calendar event. So we know everything that’s going on with the company in the news, based on their website the person that I’m meeting with, or the groups of people that I’m meeting with, and they’re likely pain points so that I can build a stronger, more trusting relationship faster. And I used AI to help augment doing that, but it was AI as a enablement tool, not AI as a replacement tool.
AJV (06:46):
Yeah, I, I, I love that term. It’s an enablement tool, not an a replacement tool, but those are two really good tangible things for everyone listening, if you didn’t pick up on that, is just, I mean, I’ve had these conversations with people, even in the brand builders group membership community of going, I just don’t have enough time to take all these calls myself anymore. And it’s like, well, tell me about the calls that you’re taking. It’s like every single discovery call. And what I hear you saying, it’s like, Nope, there’s opportunities for, you know, technology automation and some AI integration of, well, how do we help expedite that process so that every discovery call has actually already been qualified so that you’re actually taking the calls that you should be taking, routing the other ones in different directions. And then also research, right? The amounts of information that’s required to help keep you up to date that is exhaustive
AJV (07:41):
And so you know, just, I think those, those are really helpful tangible ways of like, in everyday interactions, both on a sales front and just like an operational front of like, man, like kind of need to be in the know to some degree of what’s happening in my space, in the market, in the economy. It’s like, to what degree everyone is different. But if you don’t wanna get consumed in the deep, dark, black hole that is news and media, then how can we use this to gimme the things I need to know that are pertinent to my role, my industry, my space without getting consumed in the masses? So I think those are two really great things right there.
MF (08:19):
Yeah. And that’s a great point, is that there’s so much noise in the industry today that people wonder where the heck do I start? And, and how do I actually create meaningful impact? And, you know, I spoke as to what we’re personally doing because we want to eat our own dog food so that we can evangelize that out as proof that you can use ai. The reality is that especially for entrepreneurs, unless you’re going for VC or PE funding, you have a lot of things on your plate. You have a lot of manual things that you do day in and day out, and it’s time consuming. My calendar’s booked in 15 minute blocks with task and I shouldn’t maybe use technology pitches. But reclaim AI is one I do use because it automates putting the task into empty slots on your calendar in regards to what needs to be done, right? But what we look to do, what was that
AJV (09:09):
Again? Say that one for so they can hear it.
MF (09:11):
Sure. It’s reclaim.ai, and so they’re a, they do task inhabit automation. So if we have a meeting set some or, or a meeting after this somebody wants to book, they can book that and the task will automatically get moved. So that way you’re not trying to figure out what to do, which takes a lot of cognitive load, right? Of trying to figure out like, what’s important, what should I focus on? What fires do I need to put out? Instead, you can go, okay, I know what’s important because I’ve already put it into my calendar and I can focus on the things that matter.
AJV (09:42):
Yeah. And I think those are like the, the subtle tools that we all should just, even if you choose not to use ’em, be aware of ’em, because right now it’s whether you’re doing it or you’re paying for someone else to do it, regardless of how that’s happening, this is an idea of something you could automate and repurpose that person’s time into something that’s more significant. Yeah. Right. Not, you know, what you said, not replace them but replace the task, right? Yep. What else could they be doing if they weren’t doing this very simple thing, right? A hundred
MF (10:14):
Percent.
AJV (10:15):
How did you get into this? Right? And I know we kind of, you know, jumped right in, but I, I do think it’s important for people to understand, you know, regardless of what you may think, it’s like AI isn’t entirely brand spanking new, right? Sure. It’s been an evolution process. And so how long did you, how long ago did you start using a AI in your life? How’d you get into it? What led you to here?
MF (10:40):
Yeah, I mean, so AI started the, we’ll say the majority of models started in the 1950s, right? And there’s been two winters that were general only due to compute, and I’m nerdy now, it’s not too much, but I, I love this space. And when I was in school, took through regular elementary, middle high school, through university, and even into my PhD, I took every, like, quantitative course because math had a, a, a beauty, a pattern, right? The same way that as a musician, I could look at that. And when I was finishing my master’s about to start my PhD my advisor and I actually had we’ll say difference of opinions because I was doing a lot of work with the, the Office of International Research Education Development, working with Third World like NGOs to help third world countries be more efficient and productive.
MF (11:32):
And one of the things that we found out in doing that research was that when looking at really small villages, the entire population only trusted the village chief. And so if they didn’t actually get the buy-in those NGOs, didn’t get the buy-in from the village chief, and nobody was going to do anything that was said. And, and so looking at, like, this was called social network analysis, but looking at these types of things was really, really important to me because it’s like the internal mechanisms of our attitudes, behaviors, cognitions and values are at least supported or proxied by data. And so it means that we can use data to help enable and improve behavioral change. And there’s so many ways that we can do that. We’re talking on the organizational level, but there’s also the, the personal level. There’s also the, the coaching level, there’s the therapy level.
MF (12:22):
And so when I was in my PhD, I left after my master’s was actually recruited out as a data scientist. I think it was one of the first data science titles out there. ’cause That came into fruition in 20 10, 20 11 officially. And and so I went to now Defunct Sports Authority and basically rolled up to the CEO and CMO and and then was a data scientist for quite a few years building important models. And sometimes like that impetus of feeling or thinking you’re important ’cause you’re helping drive change wasn’t always true either. Like the CEO of Dish had me build out all of these models for this 15 do billion dollars of spend that he had. And and it was for and FCC spectrum auction. And then the day of, he told me he’s just gonna go on his gut and that that hurts, right?
MF (13:13):
To hear like, you’ve spent months and months working on this, you know, it’s good. You’re proud of your work, and it wasn’t leveraged. And that painted a picture to me that we’re seeing in industry today, that 80 to 90% of AI models never make it into production. And a lot of that had to do with the tools and technologies of the past. But as I moved further, I had a, a data science consulting firm. I was very, very fortunate that some Nvidia leaders had seen me keynote and event back in 2015. And they brought my firm on one of seven service delivery partners worldwide for them. And then after a few years of running that, where I was working a hundred, 120 hours a week and killing myself and losing friends and family I, I knew I needed to back out of that.
MF (13:57):
And fortunately, they actually asked if I would join what’s called the VAR solution Integrator space. And so for those guys, they sell hardware, they sell software, and they have like implementation and managed services. And they asked me to build an AI practice for their top partner. And I thought, this is actually great because we can look at this at a system level of like, what is going on with the organization? And instead of focusing on like one little use case, what are we actually trying to do here holistically? And then figure out what you actually need from hardware, from software and from services. And so the, the company I was at as well as the next company, we ended up being number one and number three globally in sales worldwide with Nvidia top five, with like Dell, HPE, Cisco, along with a lot of the SaaS software companies.
MF (14:40):
And because for me it was about how do we enable people to have a strategic roadmap on where they want to go and how do we help drive and implement change? Because what I was really seeing was that people are still stuck in the mindset of the past of let’s be transactional, let’s focus on one small thing and let’s focus on technology. But the reality is, the gaps today are really in regards to people and processes. If you don’t have people that trust ai, that trust data, that want to leverage it to improve their lives, they’re never going to use it. And the same thing with processes. If you’re not assessing your ecosystem and identifying where are the gaps? Where are we spending so much time today that we could potentially automate a workflow or use AI for then what are we doing? And so, you know, we did a great job at those two companies.
MF (15:33):
The sales teams were absolutely phenomenal. And I still had a, a, a small last hint of an ego and and I said, I want to have a chief data officer role. So I took a role at a Goldman Sachs back company, and after six months the CEO and I decided to part ways. And it wasn’t that like either of us was wrong or that we didn’t respect one another or trust one another. It was that they wanted to build a platform with lots of dashboards and lots of data that people could try to like decipher. And I wanted to minimize everything so that we could actually implement behavior change. Because if you have a hundred metrics, yeah, nothing’s going to change. But if you have three things that you know are your weaknesses that you focus on, you’re going to exponentially improve those and see exponential growth within your company. And so that’s what really ultimately led to me creating the AI advisory group. We have fractional Yeah, go ahead.
AJV (16:31):
Because I think that’s, that what you just said is, I think, so valuable because I think so many times people go, they hear things like, data is your, is the new competitive advantage, or, you know, there there’s so many sayings like that, and I don’t disagree with that. Like I think data is vitally important. In fact, if you looked at our dashboards you’d throw up, they’re overwhelming. We have so many. And I think that’s sometimes the challenge. It’s like to even sit and review all of the dashboards could easily take hours daily. Mm-Hmm,
MF (17:17):
Well first you have to assess where your company is and where you think the weaknesses or gaps are, right? And so like if let’s just pick the, the sales side example, the, the BDRs SDRs make phone calls for, right? And and so you could potentially measure the number of phone calls, but that’s a proxy for everything because ultimately you’re just trying to get to conversions, right? You want customers to buy. And so maybe increasing phone calls will lead to that and, and very likely it will with diminishing returns. But what if marketing could better target the ICP and drive the right customers already into that funnel? Then you’re gonna see higher conversion rates. And then if you have processes for your sales reps that are systematic, so you can identify, do some people have weaknesses in a demo or do they not ask the right question?
MF (18:10):
Then you should see higher conversions on a per person level. And so being able to just like wonder where you’re struggling or where you have inefficiencies, where the gaps are, where you think that there’s problems, you as a subject matter expert, that’s what’s really important, right? It’s kind of the same thing. Whether you heard this in high school or college or not, was that ice cream and murders are highly correlated. So if you buy ice cream, you’re more likely to murder. But that’s correlational, not causational. It’s that summertime increases the likelihood that people are outdoors and increases the heat, which increases like frustration and angst. And so people buy more ice cream in the summer but there’s also a higher propensity for murders. And so like, if you’re not a subject matter expert and you just look at data and say, oh, these things are connected, then you could really be making uninformed decisions. But if you bring subject matter experts in that really understand sales, understand marketing, understand product or operations, finance, et cetera then you can identify like, where can we use data to help identify if our perspective is correct or if we have gaps in our thinking,
AJV (19:21):
Okay, this is so good, so we’re just gonna use me as a case study, for example. ’cause I think this is a really great tangible way that I haven’t even thought of how to use AI and data. And so I’d love to hear your thoughts as, you know, as people are listening to this going, wait, what? So one of the things that I heard you say is, and I, and I agree, it’s like, you know, I come from a sales background, which is why my ears pricked up. When you use that example of, you know, I was always told from, from the very beginnings of my sales career make more, make more calls, make more calls, work the numbers, work the numbers. And it’s like, and to some degree, yeah, like, you know, the numbers work themselves out. The more calls you make, naturally more sales you make, but not necessarily in a percentage base, right?
AJV (20:08):
Mm-Hmm.
MF (20:47):
With sales and marketing? Yeah. Well, so I, I think that what we’re seeing today, especially around the and I guess let’s clarify real quick for the audience on ai. AI has been created as this umbrella term now, right? Generally people use it now in regards to gen ai, gener generative AI like chat, GBT but there’s also the computer vision, deep learning, like self-driving cars. There’s machine learning, like what is the value of my house based on, you know, location, number of bedrooms, bathrooms, and but then there’s also even like basic things like rule base, right? Like if then statements. And and so when thinking about it for marketing, that’s been the we’ll say inflection area that people are using chat, GPT and or, or, or any of them, right? I, I, I have all of them.
MF (21:40):
And so I don’t just want say that chat, GP t’s the one because I love perplexity ai Claude’s very good emini is moving up. And so it, it doesn’t matter what flavor you choose, and you should probably play around with different ones to see what really resonates. But what’s really, really important is that and then I’ll get into your que actual question, is that the majority of material has been scraped from the web, right? And people tend to have, you know, repeat other people’s thinking. And so if you just use the base version of chat, GBT or any of the LLMs, then you’re going to get a very basic output, right? It’s not going to reflect your identity, your company’s brand identity. And so what’s really, really important is that you have to basically create an agent or a bot or an input prompt that really specifies on like who you are and what you’re trying to accomplish and how you want that done.
MF (22:36):
It’s my create framework, which we won’t go into today, and that will ultimately lead into better outputs. And so from the marketing side, we’re certainly seeing that as help me create an email campaign or help me with SEO optimization of my website. And we’re not really seeing it in regards to how do we increase more of the machine learning structure data? How do we increase conversion rates? How do we make sure we’re targeting the right ICP? So our cost per dollar cost per acquisition is much lower, right? And that’s where we need to go is augmenting the gen AI aspects of those campaigns with like feeding that language in into structured data model to say, oh, okay, when we use these terms, we get much higher conversions, right? And that’s like the nuance that we aren’t really tackling or organizations aren’t tackling today.
MF (23:28):
From the sales side, you can start rudimentarily at let’s look at all of our historic conversations, right? And say, what do I need to say next to progress this deal along? Because we want, you may not be able to read through, you know, tens, hundreds, thousands of emails and texts and brand scripts over the co over the course of a prospect, but it’s very, very easy for a large language model to do that. And so, because the, we’ll say foundationally, what you really want is to have these models help make decisions based on large chunks of data that you can’t really leverage. And so because that way you get faster time to value, you get more we’ll say a higher propensity or likelihood that you get to spend more time with that prospect, and Lord knows that you definitely increase conversion rates, the more time you actually spend talking with someone and messaging back and forth.
AJV (24:32):
Hmm. Yeah. That’s, so I think that’s so good. ’cause That’s like, yeah, it’s like, I think tons of people talk about, you know, chat GTP, chat GPT in terms of writing email copy or marketing copy or a landing page, but I haven’t heard anyone really talk about how are we using it to make sure that we increase conversion, that we’re targeting the right people in the right way, that allow us to have more targeted conversations, better conversations, longer conversations with our ideal prospect. So I think that’s really insightful for anyone who’s listening of going like, Hey, it’s one thing to generate a lot of calls or any calls. Yeah, it’s a whole nother thing to generate calls with your ideal prospect, right? And I think that’s a very big deal of, Hey, if we’re gonna be on the call, let’s make sure it’s with the right person talking about the right thing.
AJV (25:25):
So how can we be more targeted upfront? I think that’s really helpful. The other thing as you were talking made me think about is in terms of using like large chunks of data, like one of the things that we ask, you know, our, you know, sales director is, Hey, I want you auditing calls every month as spot checks. Yeah. And it’s a very time consuming, lengthy commitment, but I’m always like, where’s your report? Where’s your report? What’d you do? What’d you do? Right?
AJV (26:10):
And it’s like, I’m constantly kind of battling like, where, where are we supposed to find time to do that with everything else we’re doing? And what I also hear is like, well, there’s the potential of using, you know, recording transcripts, uploading those and using the right prompts in GPT to give initial rounds of evaluations that just shortens maybe perhaps the time in review so that there’s highlights that are pulled out so then I can spend more time in conversation training versus, versus all the time just listening. So I think about it when I used to have a team, it’s like I would spend an hour listening to the call in order to only get like 10 to 15 minutes of feedback. Whereas if I have 10 to 15 minutes of review and 45 minutes on training and feedback, how different would the outcome be?
MF (26:58):
Well, and, and when I was at revenue io was where I was the chief data officer, right? And that’s what we were doing was it had embedded sales coaching from a botter agent that says, okay, you’re monologuing too long, or you’re talking too fast. But those transcripts would also populate into the platform. And so, you know, it was really just at the time, it was the video and the transcript, right? Like Fathom has, right? But where I think we can go in the market is twofold. One is a, an individual can say, how did I do on this call? Maybe that’s according to medic or med pick framework or Challenger, whatever the heck you’re using. But is there anything I could have done better? Right? And it’s the same thing even for your, your team, right? Are they are they coaching effectively? But then you can also look long. So a, a sales coach then could like go in and see, you know, the weaknesses or strengths of that individual call, but then we could take that further and go, let’s look on a individual level across all of their calls and feed all of that in at one time and say, what patterns does this individual need work on? Right? What are, what are the problems that they consistently have because we know that’s going to move the needle if they fix those major problems.
AJV (28:14):
How would you do that?
MF (28:17):
You just feed all of the transcripts in from all of their calls
AJV (28:20):
All at the same time. Mm-Hmm.
MF (28:21):
AJV (28:22):
Say, this is why I’m just going mind blown
MF (28:25):
And mind, mind, mind you, like like chat GPT, they have something called token limits. So chat, GPT can’t do all of them, but there’s other ones that can
AJV (28:35):
Like, so what would be some, so that’s another great question is let’s talk about some of the, the tools and platforms that you have found that are highly helpful, effective and, and just user friendly, I would say. So or the novice out there, right? Who’s listening, who’s going like, okay, okay, like, maybe I could see some really good value. It’s like, and I think about the number of, you know, not to harp on this topic, sales teams that I’ve been a part of training where it’s like, part of my job was to just sit in call centers all day long doing call audits and reviews. And it’s like, I know my time could have been more efficient if there had been tools like this, you know, 10 years ago, and that was my job. But so what are some of these platforms and tools that you highly recommend?
MF (29:22):
So I guess we’ll start in a few different areas, and I might have to pull up a tab on mine, that’s the other ones that I use. So on, on that sales side, you have like revenue io, chorus.ai, and gong, and all of those are like rev ops sales type coaching, right? So if you have a team, those are all very valid, useful tools to leverage in that playground. When we talk about like task automation, we use you know, Asana as our project manager and task manager, and then we feed those into reclaim AI so that we don’t have to make decisions on what the heck we’re doing each day. It’s automatically prioritized and scheduled into our calendar. Outside of that, you know, I think there’s, there’s also like the, the we’ll say crawl, walk, run approach with technology. And so beautiful AI is a phenomenal like PowerPoint type creator.
MF (30:17):
And and so very intuitive, very easy to use. If you’re better with technology, I’d say go to Canva. If you’re very, very good with technology, then you go to like the Adobe suite, right? And so, you know, there’s, there’s more of a threshold to learn those types of things. The PowerPoint creators today are not good
MF (31:03):
And so we’re not there yet in regards to that. In regards to art creation, mid journey is probably the defacto standard. There’s also stable diffusion, and they are not good at creating like frameworks, right? And so if we’re talking about brand builders clients you’re going to have to manually create those, sorry. Canva has tons of great designs and Vato element has lots of great designs. So you can use those and then fill out your own process or framework. But in regards to automatically creating those, we’re not there yet either. But in regards to, you want, you want a picture of a, a monkey astronaut eating a banana on top of a spaceship, it can do that, right? And so if, like, if you want something like that for a blog post, it’s, it’s phenomenal, right? If you want something to really resonate visually, you can do that.
MF (31:56):
And I, I have pheno like art, I could have never created, I was a musician and a singer growing up, but you know, I could doodle but I could not go further than that. And so to see things come to life that, like you envision in your head, and maybe it’s not quite the vision you have, but like to see that come to fruition is so invigorating because the same thing with there’s there’s two music creator studios out there right now for generative music, and they’re getting better and better every single day. And like, they can’t, I can’t extract it. I don’t know if this shows up, but my like soundboard like, like I can’t extract it into Ableton, which is another not AI tool. It’s a sound mixing tool. I can’t extract it into there and have all the different instruments, right? But we’re likely going to get there in the next year. And that means that if you are a producer or want to be a musician, but maybe you can never play an instrument or you couldn’t mix now, you’ll be able to do that. And that, like, that really resonates with me that people will be able to like really help build up their own creative side as opposed to us just trying to say, rewrite this email for me.
AJV (33:07):
Yeah. You know what’s so interesting is like, I live in Nashville, Tennessee, so clearly I have at least a couple of friends that are singer songwriters. But one of my friends is a very good singer songwriter, and I was having lunch with her the other day, and she was talking about how there’s several artists now that only wanna hear songs and their voices. So she’s able to take all of her songs that she’s writing, use ai to use their voices. So when they hear the song, they’re like, this is how it would sound if I was singing it. And she goes, the effectiveness of that is mind blowingly successful when they go, man, I like the way I sound singing that
AJV (34:06):
So I thought that was like a very cool use case of something that’s not taking anything away from what she’s not replacing. It’s enabling her to enhance what she’s doing for someone else. And, and as you were talking about like mid journey and stuff, like, one of the things that we toyed around with, and this is just like a, a tangible customer service or customer experience case study for anyone who’s like, well, how do I use some of these if like, it’s not gonna do graphics for me, or it’s not gonna do PowerPoints? And it’s like, no, but so if you think about it in a customer experience environment, like one of the things that we’re trying to do is, you know, during different life moments and these could be personal professional, but you know, we help a lot of people with book launches.
AJV (34:50):
And so, you know, it’s like, well, we’ll use different AI tools of them holding their own book that hasn’t even been created yet. Yeah. You know, or like somebody’s going through a really, you know, hard personal times and we’ll put them in what they would look like as a superhero, right? With like an encouraging note and message. So upload their picture and say, turn this into a superhero. And just you, you know, those are just like little, little ways that you could use some of this in a customer experience way where it takes minutes, minutes, literally minutes, no money of going, you said you joined Brand elders group ’cause you wanted to write that book. We’re so excited to be a part of the journey, and then we include the picture of them with their book. That hasn’t even happened yet, right? So I think it’s like part of, of it, it’s gonna require all of us to use our human brain to go, how do I use this to make it work for whatever I do? And I think a lot of people struggle with a lot of what I struggle with, which is, okay, I don’t have a lot of time to go learn all of these different platforms. ’cause Already it’s like I jotted down, you listed like nine, I’m like, already, that’s like, I don’t have time to learn all those, right? And so I would be,
MF (36:03):
Which which, which we could say like a simplified way of approaching that is going to any of the chat GBT or LLMs and saying, I’m trying to use generative AI to accomplish X task. Are there any tools or name the tools that can do that? Right? And then you at least have a short list of like, what you’re trying to accomplish. Because the, the biggest issue with technology today outside of nothing talking to one another, is that people are trying to round peg square hole. Yeah. But it’s like, you should figure out what your problem is first instead of trying to find a cool tool that maybe can solve one or two of your problems. Oh.
AJV (36:33):
So that’s good. So just use these generative AI tools to figure out what generative AI tools you should use
MF (36:42):
And with what you said too, you know, thinking about I’ve known Gigi since I think oh 6, 0 7. And and, and you know, he was always so keen on wow experiences and I think he was only at a hundred countries instead of every country in the world when we first met. And, and that wow experience thing really resonated with me because I worked at Disney, I worked at Target, which emulated Disney and that aspect of caring about the customer, putting them first, but delivering something that’s a little more impactful than anyone else would do, really, really stands out. Right? And I had a a client of mine who one of their sales reps, this was 15, 20 years ago now, but he would take somebody’s LinkedIn headshot, he would send it to Japan, they would make a bobblehead, he would get it sent to the, like the CEO’s office and ask for a meeting. And he had about a 95% conversion rate in regards to getting a meeting scheduled. And it’s because nobody does that, right? They just send out these campaigns to 40,000 people and hope that they get some hits. But people are tired of that. They really want, like, I wanna feel special, I want people I work with who feel special and we treat them special.
AJV (37:59):
Hmm. Yeah. And this is a way you can do it in a really short amount of time without a lot of cost because that’s so prohibitive in some ways. But it’s like, man, you could do the similar things that really do make that impact without, you know, all the added costs with just using some creativity. The other, the other thing that I think would be, you know, really interesting, and you mentioned this earlier, and I wanna kind of come back to it. ’cause I think collectively what I, I wanna have this conversation be around is things that are universally applicable. And I think that universally everyone struggles with time management. I don’t care who you are, right? It’s like we struggle with the amount of things that we add to our plate, whether that’s our fault or whatever. I hear people say stuff like, you know, the the B word, right?
AJV (38:44):
I, I try not to say it the busy word. I think that a lot of people go, there’s just not enough hours in the day. And it’s like, well, yeah, I can see that, except for maybe you’re just doing too many tasks that you shouldn’t be doing
MF (39:39):
Ai. Yep.
AJV (39:40):
Oh, ai, right? See, that’s why I’m asking
MF (40:05):
Yeah, I mean, I, I think I almost want to take a step back, right? Because with what we do with the AI advisor group is most people go right to tactics and they don’t take a step back and start at strategy, right? And so then you’re always putting out fires, you’re always chasing shiny objects, and it becomes really problematic and it happens with executives along with everyone down the line. And so for me, just so
AJV (40:30):
You know, I completely understand because everyone comes to us and wants to build the funnel, build the website, and I’m like, you don’t even know what your business is. We, we, we can’t do that
MF (40:42):
And so coming from that perspective is like, you know, to the point of that my calendar’s fully booked with tasks this week from like 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM But if I just said and, and go back to like Pareto’s principle of the, the 20% rule leading to 80% of outputs and that’s largely due to a severe concussion I had that lasted 10 months. I could take away my task manager and just go, these are the five things that are most important. And it goes back to a story on Warren Buffett talking to his pilot, whether it’s real or false. And Pilot said, I want to be rich like you. Can you teach me how to be rich and be successful? Warren Buffett says, sure, write a list of the, the 50 things that you’re trying to accomplish. And he writes 50 things down and he goes, okay cut that down to 20 and he cuts it down to 20.
MF (41:39):
He goes, okay, cut it down to 10. And he cuts it down again. He says, okay, cut it down to five. And he goes, this is hard. Like, I don’t know what’s important. He goes, you gotta cut it down to five. And he cuts it down to five. And he says, if you focus on anything outside of this, it’s a distraction and noise. It’s not leading to the outcomes that you want. And so one of the things that I want to push or sh share with the audience is that don’t be busy for busy’s sake. Make sure you are doing things that actually move the needle that lead to the life that you want to have that lead to the company you want to have. And so these tools are going to either be an enabler of that and make sure we’re more efficient and productive, or you’re going to be an additional noise that just makes us check off more checklist, but we don’t actually drive innovation or success.
MF (42:36):
And I want to ensure that people are thinking of this in the right way because it’s not just AI and automation are great and amazing, and I, and I strongly believe it’s true, I’m already at 50 hours saved per week. Personally, we’re likely going to have 120 to 200 hours per employee saved, right? Which is a three to five x multiplier. But that means we’re doing that because we wanna focus on the things that are important. And if you’re filling your calendar with things that aren’t just to stay busy or appear busy, then you’re not approaching it the right way.
AJV (43:09):
Well, that is such a better answer than the question that I ask
MF (44:06):
And I just read a report yesterday that said 90% of all executives, not just entrepreneurs 90% of executives spend an hour or less on strategy a month. And that’s mind blowing to me, right? To not take the time to ensure that you’re going in the right direction and focusing on what’s important. It’s why so many companies struggle. Like they, they don’t do that. They don’t look at product market fit. They don’t identify an ICP, like all the things that actually matter. And brand builders covers all of it. So thank you guys on top. But if you’re not doing the basics, then you don’t know who your customer is, you don’t know their pains, needs and wants, then who are you selling to and why are you trying to create a product or service offering or someone that you’ve never even talked to or don’t understand?
AJV (44:49):
Mm-Hmm.
MF (45:23):
Well, and, and I think it’s a great point. I, I know I shared it with your team, but the, like PRCV of pain, repetition, cost, and value, it’s like, yes. So you need to identify what are pains, right? Not what’s interesting or cool ’cause that’s the shiny object syndrome, but what are actual pains and is it repetitive? Right? The, I mean, I talked with my COO yesterday and I’m like, oh, this kind of stinks. And he goes, oh, well we could automate that. But it’s probably gonna be really complex. And I go, yeah, let’s not, it, it takes me, it was literally in regards to actually just putting task into Asana, right? We actually built it out so you could just do it in Slack. So it’s really technically easier. I was looking for an, I was considering an easier way to do it, but I’m like, if I map out the actual task that I might need to do for the day at the end of the day or whatever I need to accomplish, it takes me maybe two to five minutes, right?
MF (46:15):
Like, we don’t need to automate that. That’s not a big pain. But if we talk about 30 to 60 minutes of researching each prospect and we look at that over the course of a year, that’s hundreds of hours saved, right? That’s, that’s meaningful. And that’s where I want people to look at, like what does it actually cost to build this? And what’s the actual value? And then you can really ascertain is this worthwhile to pursue? Is it just something that, okay, I’ll do it, whatever. It’s obnoxious. And ensuring too that we don’t end up filling that extra time with more noise and more just ask. But we focus on what’s actually meaningful, which usually means a better product, a better service, more customer engagement and interactions, more engagements with your team to build a strong culture that’s aligned. All of those things are what really create a fantastic business and everything else is noise.
AJV (47:07):
Mm. So, so good. Matt, this has been so helpful, so awesome in so many different ways. If people wanna stay in touch with you, get to know about more about you and your company, where should they go?
MF (47:19):
We can do two ways. We’ll do, my email is Matt for Nito, F-O-R-N-I-T-O, at the a i a g.com. And and otherwise if you want to reach me on LinkedIn I certainly post a ton of content on psychology, ai, business and leadership. And so feel free to connect with me on there, happy to chat with anyone.
AJV (47:41):
And we will put those as just Matt for Nito as the LinkedIn name. We’ll put that in the show notes and the fact that you gave out your email address email address, I’m flabbergasted
MF (47:56):
That we have a little bit of that
AJV (48:00):
Thank you so much. And the fact that you would even give your email addresses super kind and generous. So if you’ve got questions curious about what he does, how he integrates into companies, how he helps them streamline operations with AI and strategy email him. He just gave it to you so clearly he’s got a plan for handling all that. But then check him out on LinkedIn posting all kinds of good content. Matt, thank you so much for being on the show. Appreciate you so much. And everybody else, stay tuned for the recap episode, which will be coming up next on the influential personal brand.
MF (48:35):
Thanks, AJ
Ep 518: How to Build a Huge YouTube Channel with Sean Cannell
RV (00:02):
There’s people that I learned from, and then there’s people that I do life with. And Sean Cannell is someone that is both of those. I like to think anyways this man is so brilliant and he is touched by God. And I really believe that he is somebody worth following, not only professionally but personally. And the more I’ve gotten to know him, the more that I have loved him and believed in him, and also learned from him. He is without a doubt, one of the world’s leading authorities on YouTube strategy growing with video. He is the og, like one of the OGs in this space. He’s the CEO of Think Media, the host of the Think Media podcast. His mission is to help 10,000 purpose-driven people, create a full-time living with YouTube. Right? It’s a very clear, specific niche. Sean’s YouTube channels have over two and a half million subscribers.
RV (00:55):
His videos have been viewed 150 million plus times. He has been featured in a number of places as one of the top YouTubers. He has an event this year. He, he does an event every few years he’s had Alex Hermo come, he’s had Dave Ramsey come. He is got Cody Sanchez come in this year. Like Gary Vaynerchuk, a main, this guy owns his space. It’s such a great example. And so I thought, this is crazy. We have to have him on to hear his story and also for me to get some free YouTube strategy coaching at the same time. So, Sean, welcome to the show, brother.
SC (01:32):
Rory. So grateful to be here and to be hanging out with you and your community and so grateful for you in general throughout the years, your frameworks, your knowledge, your insights have really shaped my career and been such a blessing to me. You be guesting on our podcast has been a huge blessing to our community, and so super grateful to be able to hang out with you today. Yeah.
RV (01:53):
Well, thanks brother. And I wanna, I want to hear the story of how you got started. You were, it was, this is your youth pastor and I want to just hear like, when did you get into the YouTube game? How did you get into the YouTube game? Why did you get into the YouTube game? Because I know that it was not back then what it is now and what it’s becoming.
SC (02:15):
Yeah, so for me, I actually got started in video in 2003, volunteering at my local church. And what had happened, I actually got expelled from Christian High School. I went very prodigal and partying and doing raves and rave drugs and all this stuff. And, and eventually I kind of hit rock bottom. So I went to Bible college for a year. Never would’ve thought I would wanted to do that, but I want, I knew I needed to do something different and get out of kind of a toxic friend group and a toxic cycle. Wow. Study the Bible for myself. And so when I came home, I didn’t want to get into trouble. I think about the biblical story of David being on his porch, seeing Bathsheba naked when he should have been at war. And knowing that lesson, I was like, let me just, let me just get busy and do something.
SC (03:00):
So sight unseen, my parents actually went to a new church and I had never been there, but during, before summer started, I called ahead and was like, can you see if they have an internship? And they didn’t. But they made a spot for me in the youth ministry, like, okay, somebody wants to come and work for free. And so I volunteered at a youth ministry that had like eight kids at it an hour north of Seattle. And the youth pastor handed me a video camera, Canon HV 30 with mini DV tapes. Nice. and Adobe Premier, like 1.0 on a bunch of cd r CD rom, you know, and a very slow computer old school. And so this is 2003, you know, 20 years ago that I start doing video. And of course, Roy, these videos are terrible. You know, people are, they, they wanna start creating content.
SC (03:45):
Like, what if my first videos are bad? They will be like, what if my first videos are embarrassing? That’s part of the process. Like for me, I was doing it before social platforms even existed, but I was learning discipline because I made a video announcement video every single week for the youth ministry that’s like 52 videos a year. So I was like, you have a weekly podcast, like a weekly show. Like I was doing that before social and kind of doing the repetitions. And then in 2007, so weird. ’cause Again, churches are usually 10 years behind. And not only that, we were not, we’re in a rural church, we weren’t in like a cool hip, like cutting edge. But our pastor went to a few cool conferences and he learned about Twitter, started thinking more about social media. So we actually started a mini reality show, like a behind the scenes vlog.
SC (04:34):
Again, it was just terrible. But we shot, so we started a YouTube channel in 2007 and started posting content, and not even really the sermons necessarily, because there was like a time limit and you’d have to chop them up. There was a 15 minute time limit on YouTube at the time. Mm. And we just started posting random videos. And so fast forward to today, I’ve been doing video for 20 years, YouTube for 17 years. And my journey took me on all kinds of paths of starting my own freelance business, wedding videos, hip hop music videos, videos for like the YMCA helping pastors and leaders that were authors and speakers being their channel managers, filming videos for them, helping them on social media. Eventually going to Vegas to be a director of communications, doing some paid ads, helping a pastor named Benny Perez kind of on his personal brand plus the church brand.
SC (05:25):
And so I clocked not just 10,000 hours, probably 30,000 hours Wow. In just video and everything about it and YouTube and social platforms between 2003 and about 2015 when I launched out to start our company today. So growth was pretty rapid, but it’s one of those things where like how deep the foundation is compared to once you start building the tower, how deep the roots go, and to how tall and strong the tree is. So all this leadership, teamwork lessons, mistakes I made really positioned us for the company of about 30 people, multimillion dollar budget, running big events. All of that was really in the local church and in small business over the years.
RV (06:08):
That’s awesome, man. What, what, what a ride. So like, so YouTube Secrets that’s the book that you wrote was like, again, like just one of the mainstays in that space is sold, you know, into the six figures of copies sold. Everybody wants to create, right? They wanna start, where do we start? How do we start, what do we doing wrong? What do we need to know? Like what, you know, how much does the camera matter like today? And, and actually even before that, I wanna address the, is it too late to start, right? Because you started in 2003, really like 2016, 17, got into it. And I think it’s like, I even have this fear on YouTube, right? Like, I’ve been speaking, I’ve been writing books, we’ve been building companies, but like, I still really haven’t started on YouTube. Like, I have put some stuff up there, but like, I haven’t really focused on YouTube and you know, I have to admit, like even myself, I struggle with like, eh, is it like, you know, all the, all the, you know, stars have already come and hit like, did I miss the wave?
RV (07:17):
Or like, talk to me about that.
SC (07:20):
Yeah. Well it’s not too late and I’ve got data to back it up. One Goldman Sachs research talked about the creator economy that’s bigger than YouTube, but that specifically speaks to these social platforms. And many listening to this probably wouldn’t even fit inside of the creator economy, although there’s a lot of overlap. ’cause In the creator economy, it would be the businesses like Adobe and Cap Cut providing software. And it would be creators who are kind of the new breed of self-employed entrepreneurs that make money directly off these platforms, right? What happens is business owners like yourself, small business owners, personal brands that are maybe authors and speakers, they wouldn’t really get lumped into that. But eventually they think, okay, what about, what if I start creating content, not just to promote my offers and get leads and prospects, but also to get a new revenue stream that in and of itself, building my influence could amplify what I’m already doing, but create new opportunities.
SC (08:17):
So the creator economy, that’s sort of what we’re trying to define there. And Goldman Sachs research said that in the next three years, it’s gonna double that. The total addressable market wow, is about 250 billion. And it’s gonna be a half a trillion industry by 2027. So we see number one, a massive expansion. Two, we actually see the users and consumption of YouTube continuing to go up right now. So if we look at the dictionary definition of saturation, it’s actually impossible for YouTube to be saturated so long as it’s still expanding. Now at some point in the arc of anything, there might be it flat lines plus more people keep expanding and how much content’s being created. And there’s maybe a crossover, but that has not happened. And as we see technology still go around the world, new people are still joining the internet every day.
SC (09:05):
Youtube is getting becoming more global. The internet’s becoming more global. Internet speeds are going up and adoption of the platform overall, it just continues to expand. We’re still in that right now. So it’s still a good time to ride that expansion wave. There’s also some fascinating data about baby boomers and Gen X. It’s something like 80% of baby baby boomers are watching YouTube. Wow. I think that shouldn’t that’s crazy and it shouldn’t surprise us. ’cause If you think it’s free and smart TVs are now common and affordable, so you can turn on YouTube and follow things you’re interested in and watch video podcasts or history shows or learn solve problems. And so, and then that just trickles down the, the, the core audience is gonna be that 25 to 35. But look at the numbers for baby boomers. It’s basically all generations. And again, as more people get used to the utility, even of YouTube video podcasts are there, you know, if we take a slight side quest on video podcasts, YouTube is the number one podcasting platform.
SC (10:05):
It’s bigger than Apple and Spotify. It has been more podcasts are consumed on YouTube. They just added RSS feeds. Youtube, Google Podcast is absorbed into YouTube music. And now when you do a video podcast, go YouTube music is making a play at Spotify and making a play at Apple and owned by Google, this company is not gonna slow down or not go for the absolute cutthroat attack of every other brand and platform if we think about these platform wars. But all that to say is betting on YouTube is a really good bet and it’s still a good time to get in. Let’s talk about some of the cons, Rory, from my perspective and what I’m seeing with the data is there is rising competition and there’s a lot of competition. Yeah. And competition is highest for mediocre content. And competition is highest for low effort content.
SC (11:00):
So getting into YouTube is, I would argue not for the faint of heart. We’re living in a world now where just throwing some stuff out there is not gonna bring a, a great return. There was a time where maybe some lower effort content because of supply and demand could actually be helpful. But you, you, I think you gotta take it seriously and people are upping their game. I’m not saying it’s out of reach for people just starting. I’m not saying that you need any necessarily fancy equipment, but you do need strategy, you need a plan. And it’s gonna, it’s gonna take some level of energy. And I would say it’s gonna take energy from the principal person, the key person, the idea that, Hey, can I just outsource YouTube to somebody you should hire or, or delegate or leverage ai. But it’s just gonna take, I think it’s gonna take some thought and strategy.
SC (11:57):
So it’s it’s like the biblical passage of Jesus said, Hey, count the cost before building the tower. You know, it’s like reverse engineering. And, and that would be my next thing to say to you. Say, what do you do next? I think you asked some questions. Does it appeal to you to, to have a YouTube channel? Do you wanna be Oprah? Like legitimately, like, not if you catch my meaning. Like do you wanna show, do you, do you like the idea of having actually a video podcast? Do you, not just a podcast, but being on video and interviewing people. Do you, like, would you wanna have a solo show and for the love of serving people in that format or the love of creating content, I’d say that’s a really good first foundation. Yes, there’s maybe other ambitions I’d, I would love to have a show impact people change lives.
SC (12:48):
I do actually, I do. I don’t want you to force me on video. Anybody can improve and get better on camera and whatnot. And I, if you’re afraid, I’m not saying that’s a sign you shouldn’t do it. But if you look ahead a few years and say, man, I think that’s something I would enjoy doing, and I think I would love to do that, and I want to change people in that video format, and let’s go bigger than YouTube. I, I just recently talked to Dave Ramsey about, he’s like, we’re platform agnostic. We, we just wanna change lives. We were on radio, now we’re on video, we’re happy to be there, but we’re on Rumble, we’re on YouTube, we’re on x Elon’s taking X seriously. Amazon Prime has got offerings. So I would actually just go bigger. Do you want a show? Do you want to be in the video game?
SC (13:34):
Because if you do, then there’s massive opportunity. Youtube is a foundation and a pillar. But once you create these video assets, there’s a lot of distribution opportunities. And if you would say yes then because it’s not too late, it’s not gonna be easy. But it is possible. And one of the biggest mistakes I think people make is they, they look at it as a tactic. Like, I want to get some leads, maybe some more sales. I’m on other platforms. Can I kick it to my team to chop up some stuff of me and get a little stuff? It’s not that that couldn’t produce some results. I think it’s gonna work best for the person who actually doesn’t treat it as a tactic, but in a way they treat it as a lifestyle, like content creation as a lifestyle and a habit. That’s not always easy.
SC (14:18):
I don’t always love doing it, but it’s something I enjoy. I, I, I love doing what I do. I enjoy my video podcast probably most of all. And there’s stressful weeks, but I look forward to it. And I want to change lives and I want to craft that content and I want to shoot great interviews and I want the results and the money is great too. And all that is great too. But I would do it anyways. And if, if that sparks, if you’re listening to this and that kind of gets a little fire in you, then I would say dive in because there’s massive opportunity to be seized right now. Te tell me then.
RV (14:49):
So I love that and I thi I I can, I can vouch for it doesn’t really take off as a dabbling thing. Like the, the days of dabbling on it and having it take off. I think those days are pretty well past us. Because, because because there are so many people on there that are taking it serious, right? Yes. And, and we’ve been just basically dabbling in social media in general. ’cause We’ve been building the company and now we’re starting to take like Instagram serious and we’re seeing results and, and is realizing to go, okay, like, you know, what if we took YouTube more serious? ’cause It could be the flagship and Instagram can roll, roll more out of that. So if, if I wanna step in and I go, yeah, I do wanna show, I I do wanna impact people, I’m fine with this being a part of my lifestyle.
RV (15:35):
Like I, it’s not something I just wanna like do for a season, but like I go, I think it would be fun. And, and, but knowing I have to take it serious, like I love what you said about the, you know, the competition is highest for the mediocre low effort content. So what do I need to focus on to go, all right, if you’re gonna step in and play, like if I’m gonna get on the field and really like, be in the game, what’s the, what, what is re what’s, what’s the requirement? Like what’s the price of admission to, to, what does that look like in terms of equipment? I need to have team strategy, frequency of posting, length of content, you know. Yeah. That kind of stuff.
SC (16:22):
Well, interestingly enough, I think step one is to go really deep in your content and really dial in who you are in your messaging. Let’s assume that stuff is dialed in. But that would be found like things like classic business principles, like a USP, what is your unique selling position? The powerful aspects of a personal brand are also amplifying your unique anyways. So starting to think through. So you start thinking through, is this gonna be a personal brand channel first and last name? Is this gonna be a channel that has a clear niche cooking with Karen, name plus niche? Is it gonna be kind, kind of a media company? Think media is the name of my channel. I coach a lot of real estate agents. And so sometimes it’s their brokerage. I think the personal brand is much more powerful. Or is, is it, is it living in Nashville? Nashville,
RV (17:17):
Yeah. Lack living in Nashville.
SC (17:18):
Yeah. That living in Nashville is an option or your personal name and, and then Sean Cannell, Nashville real estate tips, different things. So I think kind of getting clear and then of course getting clear on what is it you’re trying to achieve. And in some cases that that amount of clarity already is in a way all you need. Then you add a smartphone to it, a content schedule, and start creating content. Meaning if you are a local real estate agent, the amount of opportunity still in a 2024 world is, is shocking because it’s about executions. It’s not a lot of people that are either A, doing it, B doing it consistently A doing it at all, B doing it consistently. So I think there, that’s, that’s thing one, I think. Then what do you start with? I think in, you know, I think for everyone who’s listening to this that wants to get in the video game, I think you start with vertical video really, because it’s, it’s, at least if you are like, I don’t really, I’m not comfortable on camera yet.
SC (18:18):
I I don’t really know what to say yet. I think especially for educators, people that solve problems, entrepreneurs that listen to this, I would say, what are the top 10 to 20 most asked questions and should ask questions on you YouTube though. You’re saying like a vertical video on frequently asked questions? Well, yeah, and then I would, I would so let’s, again, let’s work out the real estate thing. So is now a good time to buy a house? So I’d pop in your car, I hope you already have a GPS holder on your, on your vent for your phone, a little phone holder. ’cause You know, pop your phone up there. You could buy a $20 mic off of Amazon, but even if you don’t, you can film anywhere. But your cart is such a good a, when you close the door, it makes such great audio.
SC (19:01):
If you got like a cool moon roof or something, you gotta look to it. And you sit there and you look at the camera, hit record. Is now a good time to buy a house or not? Here’s three things to consider if you’re thinking about buying a house and deliver that content. Be brief, be bright, be fun and be done. Keep it under 60 seconds. Rory. The power of this for everybody listening, ’cause I know I’m the YouTube guide, but now I’m gonna take that vertical video asset and I’m going to, on my YouTube channel, upload it as a YouTube short, but I’m also gonna upload that as an Instagram reel. Sure. I’ll probably throw it on TikTok so long as you know, until it’s fully banned. And then I’ll throw it over on, when I put it on Instagram, it’s gonna be connected to my Facebook fan page.
SC (19:43):
And, and as meta it just auto posts over there. I think cap cut is my favorite app and software. It’s very user friendly. It’s worth 10 bucks a year or whatever to pay. It has great captions. If you wanna put a little what we’re using, yeah, if you wanna put a headline on it or something that’s kind of a hook point, the white bars or whatever at the top it says is, is now a good time to buy a house in Nashville? Question mark. And then you’re delivering the content so you can spice it up a little bit and just get comfortable. You’re on break, you’re in between meetings, film that in your car, edit it on your phone, start distributing it to the platforms. The reason I, there’s multiple reasons I’d say doing that. The, the ROI that could start coming your way from all the platforms, dms, conversation, sales leads is extremely high.
SC (20:33):
Probably higher, not on YouTube at first because YouTube is a longer game and it’s a marathon and not a sprint. But one of the other reasons I want you to do this is just because of getting the reps in, of communicating. Whenever you’re inspired that you have a client conversation or a conversation that you’re like, man, that’d make a great video, film that and, and start building your content creation muscles. Because as soon as we step into horizon, horizontal, longer form content, you asked how long? Eight minutes, 10 minutes, 12 minutes. If you want a secret that is publicly observable, you can see that some of the top entertainment YouTubers like Ryan Trahan or Mr. Beast, their videos are 24 minutes. That’s not by accident. It’s because people, YouTube wants time on platform. So if a video is good and entertaining and holds attention and is longer, it will out.
SC (21:24):
24 minutes is better than 12 because it’s keeping people on the platform longer. The algorithm will push it further for that very reason. Getting stuck in that could derail listeners. ’cause We’re getting very technical now. Well then I need to force it to 24. It’s not what I’m saying. Eight’s fine. But as soon as you get into horizontal, if we, if we look at a Cody Sanchez or Alex Hermo, you gotta admit, these are some in entrepreneur space, these are people we’re competing with and they’ve got staffs teams, explosions, creative hooks, openers, B roll, and longer form if you want that real professional edge, couple thousand bucks, you know, a thousand to get a can. Some light. Yeah. 2000 to build like a nice setup. What the pros are using, they’re spending five or 6,000. And what the pros are doing in the entrepreneur space is hiring a shredder at some point.
SC (22:20):
Usually someone in person that’s a producer, shooter, editor, if their team is lean, that would mean not just a videographer, but if, if you could get it all in one. Somebody who also kind of like, is like, Hey, let’s shoot the intro again. We want to grab attention, let’s hit that hook, right? Hey, let’s make sure we get everything and has a little creative edge. And if they’re producer, shooter, editor, they’re kind of thinking concept to completion, they might also edit it, upload it. If there was a dream hire, it would be somebody that you could pay 60, 70, 80,000 a year. And over time, perhaps you know, a hundred grand, but it’d be worth it to kind of maybe one other admin person to be that generator that puts out that high qual quality content for you. So someone says, Sean, I don’t have the money.
SC (23:03):
Well then do it yourself. But then it’s the learning curve is of course you learn to edit your video shoot cameras. We have a lot, we have a whole free college called Think Media on YouTube that will train you in all of that. So you can solve the problem from either direction. And one little tip there too is you might involve someone in the vision and say, Hey, listen, I’m gonna give you half the, the channel revenue for so long as you work for me. As you help me build this and maybe cast some incentive and some vision, like that day one it’s zero and day a hundred, it’s probably still zero. But if they’re bought in, then you could grow together. And this would go all the way back to like, you wanna build a content empire, you know, you want to build you, you see the power of personal brand Elon Musk, you see the power of personal brand Warren Buffet. You see the power. And so you’re like, I wanna build Cody Sanchez. I wanna build a personal brand. And YouTube is perhaps the greatest place to do it. But those that are doing it at a high level are are putting out high quality content with, you know, thousands of dollars of year.
RV (24:02):
Yeah. They’re not doing it accidentally. And it is that way. Like it, you know, it it, it blows my mind. Like, you know, when people, people ask me all the time, can they, can I get ’em on Lewis’ show or Ed’s show? And it’s like what they’re looking at more than anything is their YouTube followers, right? Mm-Hmm
SC (25:01):
That’s just something I would pitch to the individual if you wanted to growth hack it more and get them to have buy-in. Yeah, there’s a few agencies that do channel management. There’s individuals that do channel management. You’re just wrestling with the tension. The same for paid ads. Do you bring a paid ads person in-house, a media buyer? Or do you work with an agency? Pros and cons and maybe one thing is right on one season and one or the other and you might back and forth, who knows? So generally if I would say building your own media team would be ideal but if you found the right agency that would, that would work too. What you start looking at is the, the YouTube pipeline. In fact, what is actually fascinating was Patrick Ben-David recently revealed his like, podcast workflow. I’ll come back to it when you ask the next question ’cause you’ll probably be fascinated, but, and by the way, I wanna hear that it’s like how many staff members it is?
SC (26:01):
I’ll, I’ll look it up. It’s like, it’s like 10 positions. Wow. And so what you start thinking about is you start going back to, okay somebody at the start is definitely gonna wear a lot of hats. And if it’s just you at the start, you’re wearing all the hats. And the idea of YouTube would be let’s, let’s break it down. Who’s, who’s the shooter? You set the camera up, you could just at least get the lighting right? I can, I’m in my home office, I can create content by myself. I’m the shot composition. I set the lighting up here. I’ve got, you know, these details. I think about the details and the bit, a lot of stuff that would stress people out. So I’m the shooter, I also am the researcher. So I would research not just plan out my podcast, but I’m good at research.
SC (26:45):
I’ll pull up different articles. I’m pulling that in. I’ll outline my video. I’m doing a paid brand real deal right now. So it’s a scripted video. The script is getting approved by the brand you are then the talent on camera, once it’s captured, are you then the editor, you’ve got, you edit it all together. And is it just basic editing that is becoming easier even with ai? Or is it next level editing? Then once the video is exported, you upload it and now it needs to be optimized. So you have the title. It’s many top YouTubers are famous for not just taking their thumbnails seriously, but paying hundreds or even thousands of dollars for one thumbnail. You can find circles on Twitter x of full-time thumbnail designers that just get hired by top YouTubers that just create insane thumbnails. We’re talking about a very small piece of real estate, you know, like a very, but thumbnails being that serious.
SC (27:38):
So you can also do pretty good thumbnails with Canva templates, but are you gonna learn that and tweak those and get some photography done if you’re in the thumbnail? So then it’s a thumbnail. It’s writing a great title, similar to like a blog headline or an email subject headline. You want people to click, you wanna describe it. You maybe want some search based aspects to it. You want some human psychology based aspects to it. You wanna optimize the description, not so much because that’s gonna move the needle on the video itself. It’s the content itself that’s really gonna perform. But you want the call to actions to be right. If you’re driving business results, you want clickable link above the fold in the description. And then understanding how YouTube works. You maybe put in a playlist, you got an end card on the video. You, you don’t just make one video, you create a series.
SC (28:24):
So as the video ends, the way you communicate leads into other videos. And then you want a pipeline. So that, that, that somewhat simplistic overview of the steps can quickly break down into, you know, on our team we have Slack and monday.com and we do things like, we probably debate certain titles. We’ll write 10 to 20 to 30. Wow. And we debate ’em and we vote on ’em and we might switch them later. I interviewed Graham Stefan, who’s is pretty known for being a one man shop. He’s added a few people since then, but he likes to, he’s actually hired an editor and gone back to editing himself. He researches for about three hours. He writes a script for about a day. He then films it for three, four hours. He then edits him himself. He does outsource the thumbnail. He’s pre-written a few titles, and he is pulling hundreds of thousands of views. Personal finance, niche. He’s got some help selling brand deals, working with agencies. So I know you’re listening to this. Someone’s like, okay, I, I I was pumped. I did want to be Oprah, but I don’t know if I want to be like, like, so it, it’s, it gets real pretty
RV (29:33):
Fast. Oprah had a team. I mean, it’s there, there’s like, it, it’s helpful to see this because I think it’s, doing all this stuff is not wasting time. What’s wasting time is dabbling without doing this stuff, thinking it is gonna work. Mm-Hmm. And then it doesn’t. That’s what’s wasting time. Like either doing this stuff and knowing you have to do it and creating a plan and getting it done, or deciding, yeah, I’m not gonna do any of this. Both of those are good decisions. The the crappy decision, I think is like dipping your toe into it and then not really like having any sort of strategy.
SC (30:06):
If you’re in the mediocre middle, you’d be frustrated because you’re, you’re still taking time, but the results aren’t there. And then committing to it for a long enough time to get the flywheel effect going. Okay, so I found it. So here’s how to structure your podcast team from Patrick. Be David. Nine roles. According to him, executive producer oversees the entire production, sets the strategic direction of the content, and manages the budget. Podcast producer hand handles the day-to-day operations, coordinates with guests manage schedules, ensures these episode aligns with your vision. He’s sometimes having two, three people on. He just had Candace Owens and Chris Cuomo like, I think on an episode. So they have a, and that’s three a week, three episodes, like they’re pumping out shows and big numbers now, hundreds of thousands of concurrence on and when they live stream, the show number three, technical producer, audio engineer, responsible for the technical quality of the product they handle. Recording, mixing, sound editing, videographer, cinematographer captures high quality video responsible for camera operation, lighting and onset capture video editor edits the video content, integrates visuals and ensures the fi o product is polished and engaging. Copywriter and content writer develops scripts, interview questions and promotional content for each episode. Diary of a CEO split tests. A hundred thumbnails per episode. Three different phases with 25 quotes that are pulled out.
RV (31:25):
Again, they split test what? They split test how many thumbs? A
SC (31:28):
Hundred different thumbnails per episode. What? So Steve Bartlett, right? Diary of a CEO. And they have a research group that deeply gets into the psychology of not just the interview questions. They should ask a particular guest that’ll most resonate with the audience, but also how to front load those. So, ’cause YouTube, and I’ve, I know I’ve talked to Lewis, we’ve mastermind around YouTube about changing the whole front of his show compared to old school where like, welcome to the podcast, to like cutting to the chase. No fluff at the beginning, like cutting right into it at his level. You also start thinking maybe a little difference between the audio and the video, even though it’s a video podcast. But this whole copywriter content writer is a luxury, by the way, at number six here. But developing scripts, interview questions, promotional content for each episode.
SC (32:21):
Number seven, graphic designer creates visuals for the podcast, thumbnails, social media graphics. Once the episode’s out there is something about YouTube itself being where you’re gonna get the most views. ’cause The algorithm makes it take off. But then we also will do using like ManyChat, a custom vertical video. Comment the word podcast, DM people the link, get some more juice around it. That’s only on Instagram though. That’s not YouTube. That’s only on Instagram. But just thinking like the graphic designer. Really the only graphics you need is the actual thumbnail. But social media graphics might be promoting carousel post or something like carousel. There’s a community tab, which is a lot of people don’t know about on YouTube. It’s like a feed number eight distribution specialist. Digital marketing manager distributes the podcast across various platforms, handles SEO marketing strategies and audio. It’s growth. And number nine, social media coordinator engages with the audience on social platforms, promotes new episodes and builds community around the podcast.
SC (33:16):
Rory, that’s not where we’re at. That was just Pbds list that he shared with me. There’s nine staff positions, but he is an a one podcast now with hundreds of millions of views. That’s not an exaggeration. Over a hundred million views a month across the PBD podcast, the Valuetainment clips. And then you chop it up. I mean, you, you start getting to, I think it was a billion in two months ’cause TikTok clips are going viral and other clips because a video podcast can be chopped up. So that’s a lot. I I think we were already, I knocked the wind out of our listeners, including myself, and now we just, that was total knockout, you know, but this, thinking about that is what people are scaling up to. What I would say is an interesting story is, you know, you’re very familiar with Ramsey and we were just there.
SC (34:04):
Mm-Hmm.
SC (34:56):
Like if you had, and that this list doesn’t say you need that, you need a person who definitely can manage the three cameras. So all that to say is Kyle shoots or sets up the studio, sets up the lighting, sets up the camera, sets up the audio, sets up backup audio. ’cause We have had audio crash before and, and then kicks, uploads it online and sends it out. And I would say I’m the executive producer, I’m the podcast producer. I have an assistant to book people, but like I I also do solo rounds. So I oversee the entire production. I, you know, set the strategic direction. So all that to say is hybriding. That process is, you can start super lean and mean. You could shoot a sh a we’re on Zoom. I mean, what are we talking about? Like, we’re on Zoom. You could record this, kick this to an editor. You can start a lean process. And I think you should, I think 99% of people listening to this, putting a video podcast on YouTube and keeping it super lean at the start is smart. And then thinking about how do you scale it up? And then how do you let your team also start with the greatest level of simplicity, but then challenge yourself to get 1% better with every upload. The last thing I’ll add is I was talking to like hala to, to ha right? Who is, is yeah,
RV (36:15):
We just had her on the show a couple like fairly recently.
SC (36:18):
Yeah. And, and, and she had kind of like her video podcast on YouTube. And one of the big pivots she made was investing and having her team really chop up a powerful hook bump bubu this quote, no, no, no, this cliffhanger, a little bit of b-roll. A little bit of the stock market arrows going down. A little bit of drama. And, and that would be one of those. So even this episode recorded on Zoom recorded simply, you could just upload it. You hooked it at the beginning. If you’re as an interviewer, you could also realize I’m just starting when I start, so I need to hook it at the beginning. I’m gonna like, I’ll do that a lot of times. Like I’ll pre-write three or four bullets. And so you could keep it lean and, and do best practices and get traction. But what I would say is then over time, no reason why you can’t start doing better hooks.
SC (37:09):
And like maybe at month six month 10 little monetization coming in. How do we improve the show? Eventually you build a new house, rent a studio batch, produce four episodes in person, intermix those into things. You don’t have to go from zero to a hundred, nor do I think you would even have the, the character infrastructure, the technical infrastructure to become a diary of a CEO or PBD podcast overnight. They didn’t, they had to grow into it. But I think start simple and, and scale up as you go. And, and there’s a lot that goes into it for a world class level.
RV (37:44):
Yeah. Yeah. I mean it’s, this is, it’s it’s a lot, but it’s like, this is starting a business. It’s, it’s a show. Like, just like you start a business as a solopreneur. You’re doing the marketing, you’re doing the sales, you’re doing the delivery, you’re doing the customer service, you do the accounting, and then you hire a person to help part-time, and then you reinvest to the next person the next. It’s like, I think that’s the menta the mindset of going, like, you’re starting a show, you’re not Mm-Hmm.
SC (38:40):
Yeah. So thanks again for having me. I think I’m Sean Cannel, your Guide to Building a Profitable YouTube channel. And you can Google me anywhere. S-E-A-N-C-A-N-N-E-L-L think media. But we also do have a free class and I think we sent you a link to that you could share with people. So if you wanna look over my shoulder and spend an hour together and we can, I’ll share as much as I can here specifically around that optimization stuff, specifically around some really tactical stuff you say, I wanna get into YouTube, I’d love to know how to jumpstart simply then we had to have a free hour long masterclass that we could link to. I’d say that’s the best next step for people that are wanting to explore this. To watch.
RV (39:21):
Yeah. Why don’t we do this? So we’ll, we’ll link to [email protected] slash think media brand builders group.com/think media. And then we will make sure that that tags and re we will get that redirected over to Sean’s place where you can watch that masterclass and go just through some of the tactics. I mean the, the, the part that’s powerful here is like, like anything, excellence is never an accident, right? This isn’t an accident, but it’s doable. And I think the other part, it’s been super clarifying for me to be like, yeah, it’s not saturated. ’cause It’s still expanding. Mm-Hmm.
RV (40:16):
And that is really hitting me hard as we have this conversation to go. You would never ask that, right? It, it, and you, you would also never say like, is, are Mexican restaurants too saturated? Like, well, if I had Mexican one day, I’m gonna have it again and again and again in different, I wanna try different restaurants. Like, so I think if you’re making, if you’re making good food and you’re making good content, there’s always gonna be a market for it if you do it right. And if, you know, if you follow some simple steps, like, yeah, there’s a number of things, but they’re all fairly simple. Like, you’re gonna, you’re gonna win. So, and and Sean is one of the guys that I’m looking to, to help, help us figure out how to do that. And I think you should too. So brother, thank you for being here. Thanks for what you do and, and how you do it in the world and what you stand for. We believe in you. I’m so honored to be your buddy and yeah, keep kicking butt man.
SC (41:10):
Rory, I appreciate you so much and thank you so much for having me on the podcast.
Ep 516: Why Everyone Is In Sales with Dr. Cindy
AJV (00:01):
Hey everybody, and welcome to the Influential Personal Brand podcast, AJ Vaden here. And I’m so excited to introduce you guys to a, a newer friend of mine. We got connected through a mutual friend of ours, but I’m most excited to introduce you to our guest today because we share a similar passion of sales. And what we’re gonna talk about today and why you need to stick around is why you are in sales, even if you don’t know it, and why you need to also become passionate about sales. No matter what your role is, no matter what your job is, no matter if your customer facing or internal facing, you’re a solopreneur, entrepreneur, small business owner, executive, or anything in between that I didn’t mention, having sales skills is one of the most important skill that you can have in life. And so we’re gonna talk about why that is.
AJV (00:54):
How do you develop ’em? How do you use ’em, and why these are important to you. And if none of that sounded appealing enough for you to stick around to the very end, then how about this? Knowing how to be great at sales is what makes you a great entrepreneur. It’s also what makes you a great parent. It’s what makes you a great negotiator, which if you are a parent, you know, is a very important skill set to have. So, like I said, these are life skills. And so we’re gonna jump right in. I’m gonna formally introduce you to Dr. Cindy, who is a two times bestselling author. She’s got two books on sales and we’re gonna put all of these in the show notes for you. But her first book is, every Job is a Sales Job, how To Use The Art of Selling to Win At Work.
AJV (01:38):
Her second and most recent is Sell Yourself How to Create, live and Sell a powerful personal Brand, which is part of why I wanted to have her on the show here today. She is also the CEO of Orange Leaf Consulting. She also has her doctorate in organizational communication. So this, these are, these aren’t just thoughts and ideas, like this is backed by tons of research and time and experience and expertise. And I could probably go on and on but I wanna jump in and actually do this interview. So before I get carried away with talking about you, let’s talk to you. So, Dr. Cindy, welcome to the show.
Dr. C (02:17):
Thank you so much for having me, aj. It is a pleasure to be here.
AJV (02:21):
Yes. And one of the things that I wanna do that I think is just really helpful is to help our idio, our idiots, our audience, get to know you a little bit and why sales has become such a part of your life. So like, where did that come from? How did you get into this and how did, how did you get to where you are today?
Dr. C (02:42):
Dr. C (03:30):
I just didn’t call it sales. Hmm. And I literally struck me and I went, wait a second. I have a PhD in communication, and I was never taught this, and I went to good schools. And it was like, why wasn’t this part of the curricula? And so that took me on a totally different journey. Started my company, my first company, orange Leaf Consulting, started writing books. And so, I know you guys believe in this too, is like you deliver to the person that you were like, you’re literally solving the problem that you had. So now I write books for my 20-year-old self
AJV (04:05):
Love that. So tell me what, what happened? Like, what was that kind of like revelation moment when you realized, wait, I’ve been doing this my whole life, I just never knew it was sales. Like, what was that?
Dr. C (04:19):
So I remember I was actually having to go and do what they called the pitch right at the, at the day and time. And I’m like, Ooh, pitch. It just sounds awful. Like the word sounds bad. And what I was preparing, what I was realizing is all I was doing was listing all the problems that I had come up with in the conversations with a prospective client and how I could solve them. And I went, wait a second. All I’m doing is helping them with a need that they have. Why are we even calling this a pitch? I’m not pitching them anything. I’m inviting them to this list of solutions that are literally gonna make their life and their company better. Hold on. Like, hold the phone,
Dr. C (05:10):
I was calling it negotiation. I was calling it persuasion. I was calling it convincing, I was calling it inviting. And I went, okay, I have to change the script on this. So I believe that sales is a life skill, not a business skill. And I am on a mission to help people to embrace their inner 5-year-old. As I say, you know, we’re all, we were all five. You have got littles, so you understand they’re the best salespeople on the planet. So it’s really just getting back to those innate sales skills that you already have, and then knowing how to use them to get more of what you want and help more people.
AJV (05:44):
Ugh, I love that. And you know, not to go too sidetracked for a second, but you know, I’ve been in sales my whole life. I consider myself the number one job I still have today, E even as like CEO is to sell, right? That recruiting, selling, interview, selling, retaining, selling client acquisition, selling vendor negotiations, selling contract, negotiate. Like the list goes on and on. It’s like even as a CEO, I feel like still, like the number one thing that I’m trying to hone on a constant basis is this concept of sales IE communication. But where I find it’s the most valuable at this current stage of my life is in my parenting. Like legitimately
AJV (06:42):
Like, like their, their, their per, their persistence is, it’s impressive. It’s impressive. And I tease all the time, I’m like, how can I transfer this level of persistence to like our sales team, like to our, our business development team, this, this level of, there’s no shame in how many times you ask or how repeated the ask is. And I think I, I, I love what you said, it’s like, how do we get all back to that inner 5-year-old? And as I have a 5-year-old, it’s like he knows what he wants and he knows how long it’s gonna take before I crumble, right? And it’s about 45 minutes, and I’m like, fine, you can have it, whatever’s, whatever. But it’s like there something hap along happens along the way, clearly, where we don’t do that anymore. And probably for most of us, just like you had, and I’ve even had these feelings before of like, I don’t wanna be seen as a salesperson.
AJV (07:34):
There’s this negative connotation with the word sales, with the concept of selling. And I would love to just kind of unpack that for a second of where did that come from? Where does that happen? Because I feel like most people would all agree that you did not grow up saying one day I wanna be a salesperson
Dr. C (08:15):
So I always joke with people and I say, you know, nobody dresses like a salesperson for Halloween, right?
Dr. C (09:13):
And I would argue even those people don’t wanna be those people, right?
AJV (10:40):
Yeah. So let’s talk about that for a second. What are the sales that we’re all making every day that we don’t realize are sales?
Dr. C (10:48):
So first one is, if you’ve got kids
AJV (11:55):
Oh, I love, like, even even the non-verbal exchanges. And I love that concept too, is that sales is just an exchange of trust. Right? And I, I love that concept because it really does take away some of the ickiness that we feel. And, and I know, I bet most of you listening would agree with this. It’s like when you’ve had a great sales interchange, it’s like, I love it. I love when I’m like, man, that was a great sales presentation. ’cause I feel good about it, right? I feel good about the person. I’m entrusting. I feel good about the person I’m paying. I feel good about the product or service I’m receiving. The, the entire experience was positive. And part of it is like, when it’s really good, it’s like, yeah, I want my money to go to you. That was great. And I think sometimes when I’m annoyed, it’s like I’m almost more mad that I have to give the bad sales experience.
AJV (12:49):
I have to give that person my money, even though I need the thing. I’m like, I do not want you to get paid for this. ’cause That was so bad. Like, and regardless if that’s good or bad, like a lot of my mentality is around like, I do not want to pay you it, it’s a, it’s a you thing even when I need it. Because I’m like, that was so, so bad, so bad. Yeah. And the opposite happens too, where it’s like, man, that was amazing. ’cause You know what? It just felt, it felt natural. And that’s how it, it should, right? And we have those daily exchanges every day. It’s like you know, it doesn’t matter if you’re carrying boxes or a stroller or whatever, it’s, yeah. It’s like those nonverbal exchanges happen. Those are like micro sales throughout your day. And so this whole concept of, you know, we’re selling all day long without even knowing it. How do we come more aware of these things? ’cause I know like one of the things you talk about how like sales skills are life skills, right? So it’s like, I think a part of that is the awareness that, okay, guys, we’re already in sales and our marriages and our friendships and our parenting and our jobs and our, our social interactions, like there, there’s a sale always happening. So how do we kind of reframe how we see that, become aware of it and then ultimately embrace it?
Dr. C (14:13):
So I think it’s kind of like the blue car syndrome where, you know, once you buy a blue car, you start noticing blue cars everywhere,
Dr. C (15:00):
That was a sale. They sold you on coming back and they sold you on being an advocate for them because you left feeling so good. You wanna go tell other people. So when you start to think of sales as that, you start recognizing it differently. But I do believe that it’s good to have a plan. I’m a planner, I’m a hyper planner, I’m a to-do list gal. It’s just my jam. But I think when you have a plan for the things that you want to occur, you’re gonna seek the opportunity to sell, to get closer to it. Mm-Hmm. So for example, take a personal one. You’re looking for a new sitter, okay? You’re gonna be hyper aware when you hear other parents talking about their sitters and you’re gonna jump in and have a conversation. It’s just because you had that plan in place. If you’re an entrepreneur and you’re looking for a website designer, you’re still seeking that. And then you’re gonna find an opportunity to have a sales exchange to somebody either send you a referral or you’re able to sell your way into getting that person to work with you. And by the way, even when you’re hiring a vendor, you’re selling them just as much as they’re selling you. And I think we forget that as well. So I think that once you know what you’re looking for and you have a goal and a plan in place, those sales moments start revealing themselves differently.
AJV (16:22):
So, and, and I love that. And it’s like, what would you say? Like, as I’m thinking of, you know, I’m just thinking of like the, the micro example of just the team that we have here at Brand Builders Group. We have client facing team members, we have non-client facing team members, we have a leadership team. We, we got all types, we got vendors, contractors, all the things, right? And so if I were to kind of pinpoint what are some of like the universal sales skills that every person, no matter what your role is, no matter what your job is, whatever your daily things are, like, what would you say that you’ve identified as some of like the universal sales skills that we as just humans need to develop to be better communicators?
Dr. C (17:04):
So the first one is, is your authenticity of who you are, your own personal brand, and who you are bringing yourself to the, to the world and what your superpowers are In that as well, you get to know people based on their own superpowers. You’re the person I’m gonna go to because I know you’re gonna get the job done fast. You’re the one I’m gonna go to because I know that you can take it and run with it and make it happen. You start to sell into that, right? So that’s the first one is knowing your own personal brand and being really authentic because that’s how you build trust with those around you. I, I say this all the time. Nobody does this life alone. Show me a person that did it by themselves. And I’m gonna show you 14 people that helped ’em along the way,
Dr. C (17:44):
And so it’s recognizing how you’re creating those exchanges of trust so that you can get closer to what you need in your role, whether it’s client facing or behind the scenes, whether you’re in a support position or you’re an independent contractor, it doesn’t matter. You’re selling those exchanges of trust so that you can get your project, your job done, get closer to your goals. That’s the first one. Second universal one is you have to ask
AJV (18:23):
So true.
Dr. C (18:24):
You have to know what you’re asking for and you have to be clear because if you’ve built that trust, people wanna help you. You wanna go back and reward that behavior. You want to support people, but they don’t know how to support you. So you have to invite them in
AJV (18:41):
I mean, just, I don’t wanna like derail your thought train here ’cause I wanna hear the rest, but it’s so interesting because we are in the process right now of, of building a new home and I’ve been interviewing lots of different things. And anyhow, I’ve been having this interchange back and forth via email, and I’m not exaggerating. Literally this morning I had to send an email. So like what’s the next step? Like how do
Dr. C (19:41):
Awful. And so, and so, actually, funny enough, that’s the third piece is you have to follow up. It’s on you to be the one to f So the fact that you had to follow up like that makes me so upset because it’s like you had that person right there ready and you didn’t ask and you didn’t follow up. And so the key to think about it is you as the person selling, are doing 90% of the lift. Mm-Hmm.
AJV (20:43):
Yeah. And I think that’s a, I mean, just telling people, right? It’s like asking and then telling people what to do. And that’s one of the things that I’ve always said, it’s like for most people, they just need to be told what to do, right? Click here, write this, say this. Right? It’s like, like even me sometimes I’m like, I don’t want to have to think in this process that that’s why you’re here. Right? Yeah. I don’t wanna have to go through all of that. I just want you to do it, which is why I’m gonna give you my money, right? And so if I’m often left to my own vices, I just, I I I’m gonna, I’m gonna forget, right? It’s not anything other than as soon as this interaction, this exchange is over, I’m off to my other set of 99 things that I’ve gotta do. And if I didn’t have clear instructions from you on what is the next step and when is the deadline and when I’m, you know, like all the things Mm-Hmm.
Dr. C (21:40):
Yeah.
AJV (21:41):
And so
Dr. C (21:41):
I think entrepreneurs, yeah. Oh, I’m sorry, say that again.
AJV (21:44):
I was like, just, just the whole idea of like, don’t forget to ask and then don’t forget to tell ’em what to do and then follow up. Yeah. I think that that’s,
Dr. C (21:53):
It’s so hard for entrepreneurs too, I think when they’re building their brand and when they’re getting themselves out there because they have this feeling that, but everybody knows what I do. Everybody knows that I wrote a book, everybody knows I wanna be a keynote speaker. Everybody knows these things. But did you make it easy for them to help, you know, if you’ve got a friend that’s, you know, part of an association and when you wanna go speak there, do they have your speaker bio? Do they know the topics? Can they literally deliver it to the education committee with an open line email that says, Hey, I’m so and so and I speak on engineering and here’s what it is. You know, make it super easy for those people around you to be able to sell for you as well. And that, that’s another piece too, where I think we have to recognize we’re not just selling ourselves, but others are selling for us and with us.
Dr. C (22:44):
And so they need to know your network needs to know what they’re supposed to be doing as well. And advocating and saying, you do a great job, or you give good service, is sort of like, yeah, you, you made it into the game,
AJV (23:20):
Yeah. And it’s, again, back to left to their own devices. It’s like, who knows what people say, right? Yeah. And it’s like, we’ve got to go, this is how you introduce me. This is, this is the story I want you to tell. And as you were talking, you got me thinking about this, this asking thing because I think as you were talking about, I had like said to you gotta ask like, you, you gotta do it. Why don’t people do that? Like what, what what have you found is the hesitation, the lack of awareness whether it be fear or just sometimes complete unawareness or lack of training. But there, there’s a huge amount of people who even self-identify a salespeople that their hardest thing is the ask.
Dr. C (24:07):
It’s so true. And I think it’s a couple of things. I think you mentioned a few of them, which is they don’t know that, you know, there’s this assumption that, but you know what I do? Of course, you know what I do. Like why wouldn’t you, you know, use my services or come to my restaurant? So that’s one. Second one is they don’t know how to ask. So that’s a lack of training. And the third one is, and we all know it, it’s the fear of no. And it’s that fear of, if you tell me no, my entire world is going to crumble aj, it’s gonna be awful and nothing’s ever gonna happen,
Dr. C (24:49):
You get to understand why it’s no. Was your pitch bad? Did you not do a good job of understanding their needs? Did you not do a good job of differentiating yourself? Were you unclear on what the path was going to be that was gonna make their life better after the sale? Were you unclear in your ask? You know, there’s a lot of things that go into that. But the key is, if you’re not focused as the salesperson on what’s on the other side of the sale, then the no feels like, oh, I’m gonna crumble. Hmm. You gotta be focused on what happens past that for them and for you. And if it’s a no, it’s a gift because you also get to decide whether you’re gonna keep chasing them or not. And I have this conversation literally at least once a week with anybody we’re coaching about stop falling in love with people’s potential
AJV (26:03):
Yeah. And so, yeah, so I wanna dive into that deeper too, because I totally agree with you. And, and as someone who has spent the last 20 years in sales in some capacity, like, one of the things that I definitely in the early days I, I loved hearing, let me think about it. Or maybe because I was like, there’s hope, there’s hope,
AJV (26:58):
I’m not exaggerating. And me and my three business partners, we divided ’em up and they gave me WX, y, and Z of the alphabet. I didn’t know any better. So we’ll just say that was a gift. The naivete was a gift of this horrible set of letters. And one of the things I just remember, it’s like about eight or nine months in, it was like, I, I’m an obsessive OCD user of color coding and outlook and purple meant follow up. And I would have all these like micro 15 minute segments of like, and I, and here’s what I started to realize. I was like, I have no time to do anything else. All I’m doing is following up. And then I would just move it three months ahead, move it three months ahead. And so finally I started realizing these maybes aren’t aren’t so good after all.
AJV (27:43):
And it was like probably like a year, year and a half into my sales career. And I was like, no, actually no really is a gift. No is a gift that allows me the permission to move on and not get caught up in this emotional thing of, man, I have been following up with you with dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. And it’s like, no, I don’t have to do that anymore. I just need to go find someone who would say yes. But I was so consumed with following up with the maybes that I was never actually doing a great job at finding the people who were a great fit. And when you realize that nos are not rejection their protection, and it’s like, hey, it’s like if you’re gonna spend all your time with people who are actually never even gonna get back to you you’re never able to actually serve the people who need what you have, who want what you have that you can build relationships with, friendships with, because you’re just stuck in this email cycle that actually is going nowhere.
AJV (28:39):
And so there is a lot of power in what you said of no being a gift, so that you can move on. And what I’d love to hear from you, and I, and I bet what a lot of people struggle with is what needs to happen in our brains for no to become a gift? ’cause There is this fear of rejection, there is this fear of no, and, and honestly for most of us, it, it’s what stops us from ever starting. And so I would love to just kind of hear your thoughts as we’re kind of like, you know, approaching almost the end of our conversation. I think this is one of the most powerful things that can really help people embrace this concept of, well, how do we overcome this fear of no.
Dr. C (29:22):
So the first thing is I really believe that a full pipeline will set you free. Hmm. So it’s about not falling in love with the 10 prospects, but falling in love with the entire yellow pages of X, Y, Z, not page 72
Dr. C (30:12):
Mm-Hmm,
Dr. C (31:07):
We don’t know what’s happening in their world. We don’t know why. The answer’s no unless we find out. But it’s not about you. It’s actually about them and about what’s going on with them. And so when you let that go, then it actually frees you up to go and seek the people. You can help more impactfully. Because remember, if you stay in that moment of no and push them, that becomes the icky sale. We don’t wanna be them. So that’s kind of freeing in that regard where it’s like, okay, that’s a no. Let me understand. Thank you so much for your time. Appreciate you, and you move on to somebody that you really want to help and wants your help. And I think if you reframe it that way, it’s great. And then this is something I do at my workshops where I always ask the group, I’m like, okay, who’s ever been told no in your life?
Dr. C (31:55):
And, you know, every hand goes up and I think y’all survived. Yay. You didn’t melt still here, like
AJV (32:41):
No, I love that. And I, I love what you said too, is that a full pipeline will set you free. It’s like when you have so many people to get to next, this one is not as, you know, life consuming. Right? And I think that’s a huge, and I think that’s a really important element. Like we brought earlier there’s 7 billion people on planet Earth, roughly 365 ish million people in the United States. There’s lots of people to call
AJV (33:45):
And I love what you said too about this whole idea of like, no is research. And it’s like the more nos you get, the more research you have, the more answers you have, the better you can equip yourself to cover it next time. And those are just like mindset shifts that are so powerful, no matter again, what your role is, customer service, sales, leadership, executive team, parent, whatever. Of like, yeah, like every one of those is research. So I love that. This has been so helpful. And I’ve got one last question that I wanna dive into and then I’ll let you go before we run out of time completely. You talk about this whole thing of the like unofficial sale. And I’d love for you just to kinda like, share with everyone, like, what is the unofficial sale?
Dr. C (34:31):
So the unofficial sale is the one that you’re making every single day, but you’re not even realizing you’re doing it. I call it kind of the, hey, by the way, sale. And it is that nonverbal exchange a lot of times, but it’s also the one where it’s so natural for you and it’s such an opportunity for both people to get something out of it that it just feels right. You have these all day every day where it’s, you know, you’re negotiating who’s gonna pick up the littles or who’s gonna feed the dog? Who’s gonna take the dog out? Who’s gonna do the laundry? That’s the home piece. At work. It’s the same thing. It’s the, you’re gonna make the copies and you’re actually gonna go ahead and send that email and you’re gonna do this. It’s that quick exchange where it’s just so casual. But look at it as a sales win.
Dr. C (35:17):
Because the more you start identifying those as a sales win, it builds your confidence of a sales person. I believe every job is a sales job. I believe you have to sell yourself. They’re not just the names of books like I really do believe this, but embrace your inner five-year-old and recognize that these casual sales are also your opportunity to truly sell yourself. So for example, let’s say that you’re at a community barbecue block party and somebody is talking about needing your services. If you’re not ready to bring that up in that moment and you’re not ready with what you wanna say to differentiate yourself, they cannot become an advocate for you. Mm-Hmm.
AJV (36:10):
Oh, I love that. Be ready. Never know. Be ready.
Dr. C (36:14):
You,
AJV (36:14):
You’re gonna run into that next potential client. And I do, I believe that’s so true. It’s like inline at Starbucks grocery store, t-ball game. It’s like, be ready and be aware. And I want those kind of concepts of the unofficial sale. And this is one, I feel like this whole time I’ve been having flashbacks to like all my different sales experiences, and I love these conversations. ’cause I feel like most people who are listening would not consider themselves salespeople. And that is something that I hope as you’re listening today, you leave this going, no, I am a salesperson and I need to embrace that. I need to learn it. I need to, you know, educate myself and I need to become aware of all of these sales moments that are around me every single day. And so I thought this was an amazing conversation. I hope that people continue this conversation. So, Dr. Cindy, if people wanna connect with you, follow you buy your books, where should they go
Dr. C (37:12):
For cindy.com, D-R-C-I-N-D y.com or orange leaf consulting.com and I’m on all the social media platforms at one St. Lady of Sales, and I love to hear how people take this and do something with it. My favorite thing in the morning is when I get up and I see social media and somebody says, I heard you on this podcast, or I read this part of your book and I did this and it worked. And I love that. So I want to hear those success stories that just, it fuels the mission more of helping more and more people. And when you become a salesperson, guess what? You’re gonna help somebody else to become a salesperson too. And I think that’s the way we bring our amazing superpowers to the world, is we help elevate each other.
AJV (37:53):
Amen. I could not agree more. I’ll put all of those links in the show notes. Dr. Cindy, so amazing having you. So many golden nuggets, so thoroughly enjoyed this conversation and you guys heard it. Learn more, stay in touch with her. Go to dr cindy.com, follow her on socials, check out more and embrace that inner sales person that is already within you. We’ll see you next time on the Influential Personal Brand. Bye guys.
Ep 514: The Science of Persuasive Presentations with Terri Sjodin
RV (00:02):
Well, it’s always an honor when I get to bring to you someone who is a friend, a longtime friend, and someone that I’m a fan of, someone who I would consider a mentor and a coach, somebody that I’ve learned from for years and years and years. And that’s what’s gonna happen today. We have TerriSjodin actually Terri and I both share a history with the National Speakers Association, and she also, like me, she was inducted into the CPAE, the Council Peers of Award award for Excellence, which is the National Speakers Association Professional Speaking Hall of Fame. For 25 years, she has worked as the founder of SHO Dean Communications. She specializes in public speaking sales training. It’s a consulting firm, and she’s a New York Times bestselling author. She’s been featured on the Today Show, Bloomberg, CNN, and just lots of other major, you know, talk shows, TV, radio also has become really popular as a LinkedIn learning instructor. And she has a new book out called Presentation Ready. Improve your Sales Presentation Outcomes and Avoid the 12 Most Common Mistakes. Terri, welcome to the show, friend. Thank you,
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Rory. I adore you. Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity. It’s fun,
RV (01:18):
So, one of the things that we were talking about is this book in a sense is a little bit more academic, I guess we’ll say, than some of your other books. So talk us through what, how the academics land, why the academics land, and exactly what was some of the research that went into putting this together?
Speaker 2 (01:40):
Oh, I love it. Thank you for asking. So yes I’m going on almost 30 years now as a full-time professional speaker and trainer. Come on,
RV (01:49):
Come on. 30 years, full-time. We need to get you a watch or something, man.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
I, I know. It’s crazy. And, you know, and I think as you and I talk about the evolution of a speaking career, you know, each piece builds on the next piece. And so you can grow and expand in a variety of different ways. My emphasis has always been in the area of public speaking and persuasive presentation skills. And the first book that kind of put me on the map, if you will, was called Sales Speak, which addressed the nine biggest sales presentation mistakes that professionals make. So fast forward, as we’re rolling into 2019, I’m like, wow, you know, we’re, we’re coming up on almost 20 year anniversary of that book. It would be wonderful to do a deep dive research study and do a formal study and ask, are these still the, the most common mistakes? And if so, why? And if not, why not?
Speaker 2 (02:42):
So I reached out to a colleague of mine who’s the head of the communications department at San Diego State University, full confession, my alma mater. And she said, yo, this would be really interesting to do a joint venture as an alumni pairing with faculty and students at the campus. So we ran the first phase of the study, and it was focused on a specific question. Does making a sales presentation mistake matter? Does it cost someone a win or a deal or an opportunity? And we did it using a formal Qualtrics platform. Again, almost 2,500 professionals participated in the study, and we garnered all of the content from people who only sold a product service or cause, meaning that their livelihood depended on their ability to build and deliver a persuasive presentation. And my promise was, if we were gonna do this kind of research, then there should be no research about us without us, all of it should come from salespeople. So that was really the underpinning of where the research came from. And then the findings of course, evolved over time.
RV (03:47):
Mm-Hmm,
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Yeah, great question. So yes we found, we were able to verify that the nine mistakes were still playing out. There were three new additional mistakes that added to the list and what was really painful and, and shows, you know, it’s just about resilience. And you and I can talk about this, but, you know, so we were really excited. We launched the first phase of the results report on March 5th, 2020, and it was amazing for all of two weeks,
RV (05:18):
Hybrid or in person, doesn’t matter.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
Did not matter. All the 12 mistakes still played out.
RV (05:25):
Fascinating. So which one, which one of the original nine do you think is most applicable to personal brands? Right. So, so, you know, anyone who’s speaker, author, coach, or a, a lot of professional service providers listen to this, right? Chiropractors, doctors, lawyers, anyone using their personal brand to like, grow their business, direct sales real estate, mortgage,
Speaker 2 (05:55):
All of
RV (05:55):
It.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
So so I believe, and very passionately in the power of the spoken word, no email, text message, or viral video will ever replace it. One, human being speaking to another in real time can shift everything. So to your point, whether somebody sells or promotes a product, a service, or a cause, wherever they are, they, they made up the body of these research participants. And there were actually three mistakes that rose to the top, regardless of gender, regardless of generation, regardless of how many people, how many years of experience people had. So the number three biggest mistake that most people self-confessed, which was also in phase one, was that most people had a tendency to conclude at the end of a presentation, but they did not close. They didn’t have an ask the number two biggest mistake that most people,
RV (06:56):
People, sec, hold on a second. Can I just wanna double tap on that and zoom in there on that one. So what’s the difference between concluding and closing?
Speaker 2 (07:03):
I love that question. So a conclusion as a wrap up, right? A close is your specific call to action. What do you want people to do as a result of the message? So what you’ll notice is when somebody’s giving a presentation, they might say, okay, so do you have any questions? And the listener will say, Nope. And you’ll say, great. Okay, thank you so much. So if there’s anything we can do, like, don’t, you know, please let us know. Call us. Call us. Isn’t a close, A close is an action step. What do you want the people to do as a result of the message? So a simpler, easier line, and we can get into that
RV (07:58):
So you’re, and you’re for a dec you’re asking them to make a decision in some regard also. Yeah. Right.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
Whether you’re asking them to set up the next appointment time, whether you’re asking them to make a commitment to give you a referral or asking them to make a decision right then and there to say yes and move forward. Cut a check, sign the contract. Mm-Hmm.
RV (08:20):
Speaker 2 (08:44):
It’s horrifying. And, and we, I mean, I work with some incredible people and they’ll say, oh my gosh, I’m alu, I’m not a closer. Oh, don’t,
RV (08:54):
Don’t concluder. Don’t be a concluder, don’t a con. Okay. All right. What was, what was the second most
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Number two biggest sales presentation mistake that people self confess? Remember, these are be based on self-identification. Okay. is that they are far too informative in nature rather than persuasive. They data dump. Mm. Overly informative versus persuasive.
RV (09:16):
So
Speaker 2 (09:17):
There’s a lot of reasons for that. Like, the biggest one is there’s no risk in being informative. We don’t hear, no, we don’t get pushback while we’re being informative. And it’s like, somewhere along the line, people started feeling like, I know maybe if I just give enough information to people, then they’ll just be able to sell themselves. And, and that’s lovely. But that’s, that’s not how adult decision making processing works. So
RV (09:39):
So how does it work then? Like what, so I think I know what informative looks like. I’m basically just spewing in information and facts and you know, ideas at you.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
Yes. Data dumping is part of that overly informative phase. But okay, so I’ll get really academic here. In communication, there are three types of presentations, informative, persuasive, and ceremonial. An informative presentation by design is supposed to be unbiased. It’s supposed to tell all sides of the story. It’s supposed to be cooperative versus competitive, and it’s sole purpose is to promote learning. That’s why you’re there. So unless you’re going out into the field and you’re like, hi, Brett, all the material of all my competitors, because I just wanted you to see everything that’s out there, and you can pick anyone you want to, because quite frankly I’m not attached to the outcome. It doesn’t matter to me. I’m not gonna profit. I’m not gonna do any, like, I’m just here to be a philanthropist of information. I mean, if you, that’s the only way that you’re really authentically informative.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
A persuasive presentation by design has intent. It means that you want somebody to do something as a result of the message. And if you are working on promoting your personal brand, if you are selling a product, a service, or a cause, you are very intentional. You want them to work with you, you want them to work with your company, you want them to do it now. So I, I’m trying to help people to just love that, like own it and love it and roll around in it. And sometimes people say, Terry, are, are you selling me? I’m like, yes. That’s what I do. Like no one’s shocked, right?
RV (11:28):
How do you get past that fear part? Like, I, I think, like you said, you know, are you selling me? Yes. I think a lot of people would say, are you selling me? No, no. I don’t, don’t think of me as a salesperson. I’m not selling. I don’t wanna sell to you. Oh, no,
Speaker 2 (11:40):
I, I I own it. I love it. How do you, I
RV (11:42):
I know that you do. How do you coach? I I know that you do, how do you wrap your mind around that? Or how do you help other people wrap their mind around that? Like, I don’t wanna be thought of as a pushy salesperson,
Speaker 2 (11:58):
And, and I love the, that you put the emphasis on pushy Look I believe in the power of the sales professional. We move commerce. Nothing happens until somebody sells something, but we do, we shrink from it. And so I think what makes this book different and what makes this conversation different is, you know, my, my training is in academic focus. I was on the speech and debate teams in high school and in college, and I use debate strategy in a selling environment so that I can apply persuasive arguments to move a transaction forward. I don’t think it has to be hard sell. I don’t think you have to have a negative connotation of what a salesperson is. I think you can craft a beautiful, elegant, persuasive message and move people towards action without being hard sell. So to kind of circle back to your question, how do you get them to lean into owning being a sales professional?
Speaker 2 (12:56):
And I think if you, if you own it and you believe in it, then it’s a lot easier to have that conviction. Somebody asked me, okay, Terry, in all the research that you’ve been doing, what’s the hardest product to sell? And I’m like, the hardest product to sell is the one you don’t believe in. Mm. You know? So if you, if you believe in, in yourself and the services that you offer, then the bigger question that I’m trying to help people with is, you can’t just give people a laundry list of the things that you do. You have to construct a logical, persuasive case to move them towards action. And so there is a clean process. Again, I don’t use any weird, crazy manipulative closing tactics. I use strategies that are based on logic and evidence and social proof. And I think that when you give people those tools, they can feel better about being persuasive and being, and crafting a compelling message. They’re like, woo. Like I hear all the time people going, woo, I, oh, I wish I would’ve known this 20 years ago. Like, I, it freaks me out to think how much money I must have left on the table. But once you give them, then they’re liberated. And I just try to teach people to fish so that they can go and do it on their own.
RV (14:06):
How do you close, like how do you, we were talking about that just a moment ago too. Like, do you like, like if, if you had to give someone like, you know, a five minute crash course on closing you gave us that question earlier, which I think was, do you wanna move forward? Something like, something to that? Yeah. Would you
Speaker 2 (14:27):
Like to move forward?
RV (14:29):
Is that at the end of that? Is it as simple as that? It’s like one, here’s one, just one question. Boom, that’s a close.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
Well, yes or no, but
Speaker 2 (15:19):
So when you, and, and it starts with, you know, did you create an awakening? What are the needs steps? How do you address satisfaction, visualization and change? It’s called Monroe’s motivated sequence. And it’s really based on a human being’s a authentic way to make a decision so that they feel good about it. And so it’s really kind of a very big topic to address right here, but it goes back to the number one mistake you have to prepare. You have to block it. Just like anything, you wouldn’t just, you know, throw content up on your website and think, oh, yeah, that’s gonna be compelling. You don’t just you know, if you’re creating a brochure or you’re creating your demo video, or you’re creating your narrative on your website, whatever it is, if you always have that persuasive mindset and you use this pattern, then you’ll think to yourself, okay, what’s the awakening? What’s the need step? What’s the satisfaction step? The visualization step, and then the action step. And with that consistency, you get the outcomes that you’re looking for.
RV (16:26):
Say those again. It’s a, just the five. It’s awakening.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
Awakening, need, satisfaction, visualization, and action.
RV (16:35):
Uhhuh,
Speaker 2 (16:36):
So when somebody comes to me and they say, okay, Terry, will you watch me, watch me? I’ll say, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I, I listen to their whole talk, and then I’m asking myself, did they create some sort of awakening in my mind? Like, people think that the attention step is about having a pithy quote or maybe some statistic or some dramatic story, but that’s not what a listener needs in a buying situation. I’m not saying that you can’t use those things, but they should create an awakening. The listeners should go, wow, you know, I’ve heard this before, but the way you’re saying it, it’s landing in my mind in a different way. And now I’m curious, you know, that that awakening curiosity step is what helps you to convert someone who maybe didn’t even initially want to be there.
Speaker 2 (17:27):
So you have to make them intrigued and inspired to want to move forward, and you wanna do it in a way that makes you feel good about it. So that’s that whole essence. And that kind of weaves into the second part of the book. So the first part of the book is focused on how do you build your persuasive case? Okay? The second part of the book is focused on creativity and how do you really bring that message to life? How do you drive connection storytelling, all of those elements, timing, how do you use time effectively? And then the third piece is everybody’s favorite part, right?
Speaker 2 (18:14):
Like there are four mistakes that fall under case four that fall under creativity and four that fall under delivery. And I confess, you know, Rory, I have personally made every single one of these 12 mistakes, and that’s why I know they’re so costly. In the 5,000 participants that were in the study, there was really only one human that said, I don’t make any mistakes.
RV (19:27):
Okay?
Speaker 2 (19:28):
The number one mistake that people noticed in others is that that talk was boring. Boring, boring.
RV (19:33):
Uhhuh
Speaker 2 (19:36):
So don’t you think that’s interesting that most people self-identify as being overly informative, but other people are boring.
RV (19:43):
Call it boring. Yep.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
It’s like, yeah. So we say that in
RV (19:46):
Communication. Sorry, break it theory. Sorry. To to a sweetheart. Yeah. Boring. You’re boring. We’re sleep over, we’re sleeping,
Speaker 2 (19:52):
Right? Yeah. And that’s, that is the, the, that was where things really got super crazy interesting was because we did a, a comparison of what people self-identified with what they noticed in others. And you, what you just said, Rory in instinctively is what really hit it on the head. We don’t tell people, you don’t tell someone, oh, you know, I, I thought that was really good, but you’re boring. We don’t tell people, you know, you, you have all kinds of weird, strange body language and gesturing when you speak. We don’t tell people, did you know that you say or like, or, you know, every other word. Hmm. We don’t say to people, oh, you know what, you use so many industry acronyms and I had no idea what you were talking about. I don’t, we don’t tell people. So what was fascinating is what people self-identified versus what they called out in others. And in those observations, you know, that’s where we get the learnings.
RV (20:54):
Well, and here’s something I would just say for those, if you’re listening and you are a professional speaker wanting to like, get more gigs or get higher fees, or if you’re aspiring, if you’re not getting gigs, that is people telling you you’re boring
Speaker 2 (21:42):
Alright. And let’s take it even to your, your seasoned pros that are on the call. You know, we have a burden to evolve our content. Mm-Hmm.
RV (22:56):
Taylor Swift. Swift, our rocket ship, swift Taylor Swift man era’s to her, even though she’s young. She’s, she’s reinvented so many times. I’m a Taylor, I’m a swifty. I’m a swifty. I’m in court.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
Who isn’t? How can you not admire that woman? I
RV (23:09):
Mean, yeah, you got, you may not like her, but you gotta respect her. I mean, there’s, there’s lots of people like that in the world where I go, I don’t, I mean, I happen to like Taylor Swift, but like, there’s other people where I go, I don’t like this person at all,
Speaker 2 (24:18):
It isn’t, and it’s not going back. So yes, there’s a whole chapter that’s dedicated to technology and demonstration failures, and they can take place in either a virtual or hybrid environment. I think one of the opportunities in virtual is, is the reach. I mean, you can really yeah. Meet with decision makers in a variety of different locations all at the same time. I mean, from a sales perspective, again, I’m asking people to put their, their sales hats on, but we used to say, oh gosh, it’s so challenging. ’cause Now you can’t just walk into their office and meet with that person. That’s true. There is a limitation to that. However, the opportunity is you can schedule a virtual call and meet with multiple decision makers in, on multiple continents Yeah. And accomplish more in a shorter period of time. And you save not only time, but you can save a great deal of money. And so there is an efficiency when you schedule it correctly. The downside is the time factor. We know that the amount of time you’re given in a virtual or hybrid environment is significantly reduced. You get maybe 30 minutes and then you get a really hard stop. Right? Like we, what is the hard stop? We never used to get this hard stop factor. Yeah.
RV (25:38):
Well, it’s like I have another meeting in two 10 seconds, not, yeah. I need to walk down the hall and drive in my car and there’s flex. It’s like, no, it’s, it’s right now I have to go. Yeah. That’s interesting.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
It’s so just like we were talking before about winging it, we can see that in virtual calls or in hybrid calls, that winging at issue is a huge problem. You cannot just jump on a call and wing it. When you have really strict time parameters, you have to kind of block the time and then you have to try to rein it in if it starts to go sideways. Right? I mean, we’ve all had those moments where, you know, someone on the call will take you down a path that’s gonna pull you off your agenda. So you have to have an awareness like, okay, this thing’s gonna close in like five minutes. Yeah. So what do I need to accomplish before we hit that hard stop? Mm-Hmm.
RV (26:34):
Can’t, you wind it down and sort of land the plane gracefully.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
Yeah. And then the secondary factor is one of the biggest mistakes within this chapter is this
RV (26:44):
Is mistake number 11. So it’s techno technology and demonstration failures. That’s what you’re talking about here.
Speaker 2 (26:51):
Exactly. And the hybrid environment. So you might be with five or six people in front of you, but you could have five or six people offline. And navigating that hybrid opportunity is tricky. Especially if you’re doing, let’s say for your speaker colleagues, you know, how often are they speaking in front of a live audience and then they have participants. You could have a hundred fifty, two hundred fifty people offline in a hybrid. Yeah. The number, guess what the number one complaint is? They ignore the virtual or speaker.
RV (27:24):
They ignore the virtual.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
They ignore the virtual Mm-Hmm.
RV (27:33):
The problem. Even if there’s, we’ve done events where we’ve had events for clients, like with Ed Millet’s event, there were 400 people in the room, there were 16,000 watching online. And we still naturally default to playing to the people who are right in front of us. Even though it’s like there’s 16,000 people. It’s like, it’s, it’s just, it’s, it is hard to, it’s hard to do that. It’s hard to play to both. It
Speaker 2 (27:57):
Is. And so that’s why I really committed this book, because there’s these things that you and I, we know, but I say this all the time. I was just with Brandon Steiner and he said, you know, Terry, I, I know this stuff. And I said, Brandon, it’s not that you don’t know, it’s what you do. What I’m fixing is a lot of times not things that you don’t know but you’re not doing. Yeah. And how do you integrate what you know into your behaviors on a consistent basis so that you can get the outcomes that you want? And I think it’s, I think it’s really fun.
RV (28:29):
I love it. I love it. So presentation ready. Improve your sales presentation outcomes. Avoid the 12 most common mistakes. Terry is one of the best trainers in the world on presentations, persuasive presentations specifically including speaking skills, sales skills, and check this book out. Y’all go, go get it. I promise you’ll love it. Terry’s a pro. Any, Terry, where else should people go? If you want, if you want them to sync up and connect with you.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
Oh my gosh. Please visit my website. You can just go to teri sine.com. That’s T-E-R-R-I-S-J-O-D-I n.com. You can access all the information about presentation ready. It’s available in bookstores worldwide, Barnes and Noble, Amazon, all of the above. And I do have a newsletter. If you would like to receive a complimentary copy of each of the three research study reports, you can just visit my website. You can download the research summary reports, and you’ll see the data that really underpins all of the content that’s in the book and subscribe to the newsletter.
RV (29:36):
Really cool. Really cool. Of course we’ll link to that in the show [email protected] slash podcast. Terry, thank you for this. Thanks for being here, friend. And I wish you all the best.
Speaker 2 (29:48):
I adore you. Keep doing all your magic. Roy. You’re such a star and I’m honored to be your friend. And thank you for having me on your show. It’s a privilege.
Ep 512: From Income to Impact: How to Make the Most Out of Your Gifts with Victoria Jackson
AJV (00:01):
Hey, everybody, welcome to the Influential Personal Brand, and that is the perfect title of a podcast for the interview that I get to do today with the one and only Victoria Jackson. When we talk about influence, this is a woman who has immense influence, and I am so honored to get to know you personally and to get to know your story. And I also, to get to be the one to interview today, I snatched this away from Rory so that I got to lead the interview today. But before I launch into this episode, for everyone who is listening who maybe is new to the name Victoria Jackson, let me give you a little bit of the background. And if I were to read all of her accomplishments and accolades, it would take up the entire podcast. So I’m going to give you some of what I consider the biggest highlights that stand out to me.
AJV (00:57):
So here are some of the things that you need to know about Victoria Jackson. First and foremost, I think this is first and foremost to me. She is the mother of three awesome kids and her and her husband, bill, how long have you guys been married? 32 years. So to me, like those are some of the best and biggest accomplishments. But she is also the founder and CEO of the global brand and infomercial giant Victoria Jackson Cosmetics. And I think this is phenomenal because Victoria was a part of revolutionizing and dominating the entire beauty industry with her no makeup, makeup, which is just relaunched. And I wanna talk about this later. It’s actually, if you’re watching the video today, I am wearing no makeup makeup, and I love it, and I could go on and on about it. But as a huge part of this entire way that she launched this makeup, she was a really, truly a pioneer with being the first to market a cosmetics line on TV with more than 11 international infomercials.
AJV (02:03):
And so she had a 10 year run on QVC with Victoria Jackson’s cosmetic, with more than 600 beauty products, generating a billion dollars in sales. That’s a BA billion dollars in sales, and I love that story, but I think some of the things that, that make up who you are are just as significant as, as, as a teen Victoria survived a sexual assault, and she has gone on to reach out and empower women of in so many different ways around the world. And then in 2008 her daughter was diagnosed with N mo Neuromyelitis Optica and was shared that they, she only had four years to live. And so Victoria, along with her husband, bill, went on to found the Guthy Jackson Charitable Foundation which has raised an unbelievable amount of money to fund research to help find a cure for this disease.
AJV (03:04):
She was nominated as the National Women into the National Women’s Hall of Fame for this work. And then she was also at the Vatican, at the Vatican accepted as the Pontifical Key Advocacy Award for her personal work in trying to overcome and understand the rare autoimmune autoimmune diseases that are in the world. She has funded a series of documentaries. She’s the author of five books. She has a brand new book coming up that we’re gonna talk about later. And she has relaunching this makeup line Woman. I do not know how you have time to do all of these things. So without further ado, everyone and Victoria, thank you so much for being on the show. We’re so excited to have you. So welcome.
VJ (03:48):
Thank you for having me, aj. Yeah, it’s definitely, I, I like to keep myself busy and, you know, I think I was just, you know, born ready. I, I don’t know, a friend of mine said, I’m born ready. Like, I feel like I was just born ready to, ready to go and take on all the challenges, and then just be a doer, you know, and always really there to help and support women and people. I’ve been a Goodwill ambassador in so many different ways.
AJV (04:16):
Ryan, what I love too, is like, you truly are so humble about all of it, and it, it’s, it would be easy for you not to be humble about all of it, but you are. And so I kind of wanna just help the audience get to know you just a little bit. And so can you just tell everyone a little bit of the story of how did you get into the world of makeup? And I mean, I know the backstory, and so just pull out some of the highlights, because I think it’s a really phenomenal story because I think a lot of the people who are listening to this are trying to figure out like, what’s my next thing and how do I go from where I am to where I wanna be? And you have done that exceptionally well.
VJ (04:57):
Well, there, you know, it’s, I think my least favorite question always was when people would go, well, what do you wanna do when you grow up? Or What are you thinking about doing? And I actually, I didn’t know. I didn’t as you mentioned, you know, I had an unfortunate kind of start in life in a, in a few different ways, but one in which really prevented me from graduating high school, from going to college. I was a victim of the Pillowcase Rapist in California when I was 17. And up to that point, I was always a little bit of a, of a nervous Nelly and had anxiety. And, you know I don’t know that I knew where I was going in life. I had a very tumultuous, unstable upbringing, parents kind of getting divorced and, you know, just really not kind of always being able to find my feet.
VJ (05:47):
But one thing I did find my feet with and my hands was I liked doing makeup. I liked taking, having my friends come over and doing makeovers on them. And even though my technique really was something that I had to perfect over time, it was just something that I liked doing. I liked, you know, I, I’ve always had a good eye and wanted to work to, you know, show people how they could look better. And I realized through many, many years of doing this that when you look better, you feel better. And when you feel better, it allows you to go on in life to have more success, or, you know, just feeling good about yourself opens up the door to so many things. So I just started one foot in front of the other, started doing makeovers for friends and put together a makeup kit. And that was the beginning
AJV (06:37):
Mean, but to go from doing makeovers on friends Mm-Hmm.
VJ (07:00):
Well, I think for me, it’s all about perseverance. I, in one of my books, I, I wrote and I opened up in The Power of Rare, which is a book I wrote on Cure and, and helping find cure for disease, and how to put a blueprint together for that. But I write that perseverance is where the God swell. I think that what I can do, and what I will always do is stay the course that I persevere, that even though everybody told me, you know, nobody’s gonna be able to buy your, your products. I sold them on television that nobody was gonna buy makeup on tv. That women need to see them and touch them and feel them in person. I’ve always taken the No and turned that around and said, well, I don’t know about that. You know, I, I, I think I can do it, and here’s how.
VJ (07:45):
So it’s just that sense of perseverance, of this constant, this resilience that just makes me move forward no matter what. And I think that’s the takeaway most people get when they look at, you know, the breadth and the depth of, of my career. And what I’ve done is that I just, I never give up as all the people that, you know, you talk to and your listeners, all the aspiring entrepreneurs out there, you just have to keep going. You. so even though I’m saying, oh, I started by putting a kit together and doing my friends, it really was, everything was one step to the next step, to the next step. And even the book that I’ve written now, we all worry now what Ta-da. It’s really the, it’s the step by step of how to zoom out, how to get perspective, how to just take that next step. And a lot of it, you know, we think of, oh, you know, it’s so basic, but it’s, the basics really are the stepping stones that get you there. It’s just doing it, you know, it’s doing the work, and it’s not easy, and you gotta just keep moving forward. Even when everybody tells you, you know, it may not lead to that pot of gold. Everybody’s pot of gold is different.
AJV (09:04):
Hmm. I love that. Curious, I don’t know if I know this timeline from the first day that you started, like professionally doing makeup, so we’ll say beyond just doing makeovers, but like, when you were actually doing professional makeup to when you actually had, like, success with these infomercials, how long was that timeline?
VJ (09:28):
Oh, that was 13 years. So people think, oh, overnight success. Yeah. I was doing I was doing makeovers for 13 years. I was working in the, you know, editorial space, so I was doing everything, A lot of the ads that you see a lot of at the time magazine covers, album covers. I did about 200 album covers. I would do people magazine covers. So many kind of, and that time is invaluable because during those 13 years, I could see, well, what kind of products do women respond to? I came up with during that time what I became known for, and still to this day, hence product number two, no makeup, makeup. That was really something that I came up with in the eighties. And think about that in the eighties, everybody’s wearing like the shoulder pads and like, you know, heavy glam makeup. I’m doing no makeup makeup. So I was completely going contrary to what was happening at the time. But it was very much, and you see how timeless things can be still holds true to this day. I mean, you have it on, you look beautiful. I want women to just not look like they have a lot of makeup on, but just feel like themselves, not use it as a mask or war paint. And so that 13 years gave me that chance to perfect my, really became my signature of no makeup makeup.
AJV (10:52):
You know, I love that because I think most people listening, no offense to anyone, don’t get offended. We’re trying to skip all that time. Yeah. We’re, we’re trying to skip the hard work. We’re trying to skip the hard years, the research years, and we’re going, why isn’t this working? And the truth is, is you’ve been doing it six months or a year. I saw this quote on Instagram a few days ago, and it just really stuck out to me, and it said, you don’t have the patience to build your business in three years, but somehow you found the patience to work for somebody else for 40.
VJ (11:26):
Yeah.
AJV (11:27):
And I think that kind of sums it up. It’s like, good take time and nothing is wasted,
VJ (11:34):
You know? And I mean, honestly, it, those are the kinds of things you have to think about. You know, being an entrepreneur and being in that, there is a little bit in that secret sauce is you have to be somebody. There are some people that they, they want that security and that comfort of working for somebody else for 40 years. And that’s okay. That’s okay. Because when you’re kind of, you know, cutting that tie and you’re going out solo and you’re doing your thing and you’re, you’re, you’re flying on your own, that’s scary. And that’s not easy to do. So you really have to have those hard talks with yourself to see, I’m the first to encourage it, but I never shame anyone for deciding, Hey, yeah, you know what, I’ve got the good job that I like, or the comfort or the things that I’m familiar with, and no, that’s okay.
VJ (12:22):
But that’s, that isn’t my, you know, spirit. I am that little warrior that is always sort of from the beginning, gotta explore and do, and, you know, figure it out. And sure, it’s a lot easier now at this point in my life as I’m getting ready to wait for it, I turned 70 you know, I’ve had a lot of life experience and all of that has really led me to where I am now to be able to tell my story and try to encourage people and look back at all the things that I’ve done and, and, you know, pay it forward.
AJV (13:00):
Yeah. And, and first of all, I hope I look like you do when I turn 70. You look amazing. But I think also one of the things that you just said is one of the reasons I really wanted to have you on the show, because this is about, you know, building an influential personal brand, and not for the sake of fame or notoriety, but for, for doing good and making a positive impact in the world. And in many cases, you can do that without money. And in some cases there are opportunities for people in, in your case, like you had this a abundant mental abundance mentality of going, I have the money. How can I do good with it? And one of the things that I love is this idea of like taking your income and turning it into impact. And I think that’s one of the things that you’ve done so extraordinarily well with the success of all that you’ve done in business, you were able to take that and also do some really amazing things with you know, this charitable funding, trying to find cures for rare disease.
AJV (14:05):
So here, here are the questions I have, because a lot of people in our community, in our audience impact is really what they’re after. They, they have good sustainable businesses and they’re going, but I, I just, I know there’s more from me than just, you know, the revenue and p and l statements. Like, I, there is something in me that wants to do good. And I know that there was, you know, kind of this life altering moment in your, you know, life in 2008 when your daughter got diagnosed, but there was also something else in you that goes, no, I have the funds. I’m gonna do something about it. Because I think a lot of us have funds that we’re not doing something with. So can you talk a little bit about like, what’s the path of turning your, your income into impact?
VJ (14:50):
Well, I think you have to start earlier on the path. When I did that, as I was even in my makeup career, I was going to the jails, right? So even when I didn’t have money, I was thinking, what ev what else, what other skillset do I have that can feel like I can add value, that I can do something when I didn’t have money? So I went to the jails for 20 years, and I had a look better, feel better program for women that were in jail. So I was already thinking about and wanting to give back. And even in my makeup skillset, I was doing makeovers at the hospital for patients. So, you know, I was always already thinking and geared that way. So when my daughter was diagnosed in 2008, it was really, okay, I’m gonna, you know, as a mom, I’m gonna find a cure for my daughter.
VJ (15:42):
I don’t know what that’s gonna look like. As I said, I didn’t graduate high school, I didn’t go to college, and now I’m in the world of a very complex autoimmune disease, NMO neuromyelitis optica, which really manifests in very much looks like in misdiagnosis and ms. People think it’s ms, they’re very similar. And so how am I gonna learn about this, do this? And I started from that place. And then very quickly as my daughter and I were going through this very, very difficult time, she said to me like, you know, this isn’t just about us anymore. And then I realized it wasn’t for, and we, fortunately due to our business and my husband’s success and business, we put in $80 million of our own money. We never raised money. We actually put in our own money. And that was something, you know, and, and we’re still doing that 15 years later, we’re still putting in money for a foundation that is now changed the entire landscape.
VJ (16:44):
And I recommend for anybody out there who’s suffering with, you know, any kind of a, whether it’s a, a tough diagnosis or how to go about looking at what we did, our story Ally and I, is called saving each other. And it’s what I call my momi, really our story. And then the Power of Rare, which is the blueprint of how did we actually take this money and get drugs made, because now we have four therapies and my daughter is, you know, is stable at this point in time. So it’s kind of, I took that same thinking from my makeup days because it was very much about, here’s the makeup and then here’s how to, it’s very much like, here’s the foundation, here’s our story, and then here’s how to, how to do it. So really from like almost foundation to, to foundation. So it’s always been for me about giving back an impact and purpose and taking a lot of leaps of faith along the way.
AJV (17:45):
Yeah, I love that. And I think that’s probably where I think a lot, lot of people are struggling of finding the balance of like, okay, I want this to be about impact, and I need it to be about income. I have to make money at the same time. But, and I love what you said, it’s like there’s, and there’s a million ways to get back with your gifts and talents. It doesn’t require money, but how do you figure out what those gifts and talents are and put them to good use?
VJ (18:14):
Yeah. You just gotta get scrappy and think about it, you know, like, what’s going on in your local community and what, and what can you do? I think the world being as nutty as it is now, and as you know, divisive and polarizing, all the things that are going on, I, it’s so important to get back to community and to thinking about what can we do to support each other? You know, where is that kindness that we can really can put into every day something that we’re thinking not just about ourselves, but others? I think that, and, and that just, you never know when you’re doing that, what doors open where that leads you because so much of it is you, you just don’t know. Like, if somebody would’ve told me while I was doing makeup and trying to figure that whole part of my life out, that cut to the next part of my life, I’d be actually working to cure rare autoimmune disease. I would’ve never believed it. Or that I’d be at the Vatican receiving an award from the Pope, or that Gloria Steinem would be inducting me into the hall of, like, all those things would’ve never even entered into my consciousness. And yet, they’ve all, they’ve all been a, an amazing part of my life that I’ll always, you know, look back on and go, wow, how did that all happen? But life unfolds in a way, and if we just keep doing the work and showing up.
AJV (19:37):
Yeah. And I, I mean, I think that’s like the heart of so much of your message. It’s like, show up, do the work, keep going. What’s the best next step? Yeah. And I think a huge part of how you’ve been able to give back a lot of, you know, you’ve written five books. Mm-Hmm,
VJ (20:27):
You know what, it’s also, it’s all part of that sharing. There’s that, I just have this very, if I can do it, you know, because I come from a place of low self-esteem, I still am constantly working on that, which people go, really? But yes. So it’s always the, well, oh, look, if I could do it, you can do it. And here’s how, like, I, I did this, so you can do this too, and here’s how I’m gonna just show you what I did, and you, you know, take what works for you and, you know, leave the rest. And so that’s always been it. The first book was a, it was called redefining Beauty. It was a beauty book. The second book was Make Up Your Life. So again, it was the, the how to of the book, redefining beauty and then Make Up Your Life was, why does it all matter?
VJ (21:12):
How does looking better feeling better change? Then, you know, the third book was saving Each Other, which was really when my life changed and our story. And then the fourth book was, and here again, is the how to and now this book is really all about, you know, I’ve been, at this point in my life, as I said, I’ve always been filled with anxiety and a warrior, and, but I’ve also been a, a warrior. So the book originally was Warrior to Warrior, but I’ve, there was a few titles with that. But I also liked the universality of like, we all worry, you know, worry is, we talk about stress and anxiety, but you kind of start with worry. Worry is what you like water. And it, all of a sudden now it has become the stress, the anxiety. So I think you’re gonna hear a lot more about worry.
VJ (22:02):
And it’s kind of, now what do we do about that? So it was important to me to share my experiences. What do you worry about? I worry about everything. I’m a black belt warrior,
VJ (22:54):
And men, I have Jay Shetty in there as well. But Maria Shriver, Chris Jenner, okay. We think about the Kardashians. So what are, you know, what are they worrying about or what’s going on? Chris Jenner, you know, very religious, you know, what, how does she start her day with, you know, faith every day? You know, how does she bring her family together? Gloria Steiner, Jane Fonda, what does she worry about? There’s so many interesting things that I was learning from what women, not only worry about, but how they navigate it. So I wanted to put all that together. And again, it’s my offering to people out there on how in a, in a world of a time where there’s so much we worry about just because you have a lot of money doesn’t mean you don’t worry, you know? I, my life is fantastic. I mean, I am so blessed and so lucky, and at the same time, we’ve worked really hard and I make sure to give back, but there’s still worry, you know?
AJV (23:59):
Yeah, I know. I mean, I think, I, I agree with you. It’s a universal, doesn’t matter how much or how little you have there is worry, right? Yeah, yeah. Whatever it is, right? The, the magnitude of the worries are different with each stage of life, but we all, we all do that. So I’m curious to know a little bit about your writing process, because so many people who are listening to this podcast, they do have a calling on their life like you have where it’s like, I, I feel called to put this on paper and, and turn it into a book. And so I would love to hear from you. It’s like, how did you go about deciding what the book should be about? And I think if I recall, you hand write, right?
VJ (24:47):
I hand write. I mean, I’m so old school that is part of being, being old. I’m old school. I like, you know, I have my little pad of paper and I just write stream of consciousness thought I talk I’ll talk it out into a, you know, a recorder. And I just did the audio version. This is the first time on this book that I actually did the audio version. And I have to say that was an experience in itself as well, reading it all back to yourself. Because a lot of times when I’m writing, you know, you’re not, I’m not always reading it back as much as I, as I think I am, until I’ve really finished the book. And I was like, wow. But you know, it’s just a very, it’s, I think writing a book is really tough. It’s really frustrating for me at times.
VJ (25:34):
I, I struggle with it. I’m lucky. I’ve had, I can never take full credit. I have people that have helped me in my writing because I’m very insecure in that I grammatically will think, oh wait, do I need to put a a period here at the end of this sentence? Or should that be a comma? Or, you know, I can get so stuck on the stupid little things. That it’s been helpful for me when I’ve been able to sit with somebody and go like, okay, these are the big points of what I really wanna say and get across. And again, it’s just doing it. It’s just doing it. Like, I could use, I could have used that as an excuse. Well, you know, I’m not really good at writing dah dah, dah. You have people that support you or help you, or, you know, it takes me longer than most people to write a book, but I still manage to put out five of them. Versus there’s a lot of people that talk about it, think about it, never do it. Yeah. You just gotta,
AJV (26:31):
Yeah. And I love that. ’cause It’s like, and I love that you hand write, like, I think that’s incredible. And I think that’s just a testament for everyone listening. It’s like, there’s no right way to write a book, talk it out on audio hand, write it in a notebook, work with a coach, have a ghost writer, hire an editor. Like whatever it is, just do it.
VJ (26:53):
Just do it. And then make sure it’s true to you. You know? I mean, that’s when I felt really good was when I was reading back the book and I went, this is absolutely true to me. This is, this is honest, this is true. This is real, this is helpful. This is what I want to impart to people. So that’s really important. ’cause I genuinely care.
AJV (27:16):
Yeah, I know you do. Why, why a book on worry. So what was it about this particular topic that compelled you to write a whole book about it?
VJ (27:27):
Because that’s been the theme of my life.
AJV (28:55):
That’s good. Who would you say for everyone’s listening, like who would you say this book is really for?
VJ (29:03):
I think it’s for everybody. I really do. You know, you look at these books now that are out like the anxious generation and with where we are in social media, I mean, everybody’s affected one way or another. I mean, young people are, are worrying about everything to do with their friends and how they look and you know, there’s so much that young people now, and it, because of social media, which I didn’t grow up with the way it is now, I think it’s just, there’s so much more anxiety and stress. So even if they’re not sitting down and reading every page of my book you know, there’s something that they’ll be able to take away from, like, something that’s actually doable. So is do we really know too many people that are, you know, short of like little kids that are not worried or stressed or anxious these days?
VJ (29:53):
Sadly, I, I don’t, you know, I’ve got little grandkids. So at six and eight, I hope they’re not dealing with too much anxiety. But when you read this, these books now that are so much, it starts pretty early. So I, I write something just like I do my makeup. You know, people always say, well, who’s your, what’s your makeup geared for? What? It’s a, oh, you’ve got skin. I am, this is your makeup. You know, I mean, I’m, I’m not putting it at a over 40 person. I’m not, you know, I like the idea of no makeup makeup for everybody to just look natural and look like themselves. So I think more universally, I guess is what I’m saying, ultimately.
AJV (30:35):
Well, I do believe, you know, worry is a universal problem. We all struggle with. Like, I could probably make a list of at least 10 things that I’ve worried about today Yeah. Since I woke up just a few hours ago. And so one quick thing about the book, and then I would like to talk about no makeup makeup in the last few minutes that we have. But if you were to say, if you consider yourself somebody who really struggles from worry, like if there was one thing from the book that you’re like, I don’t care if you don’t get anything else from this book, if you just left with this one thing I know it would help you, what would it be?
VJ (31:09):
It’s taking action that even in the face of worry, even in the face of your massive anxiety, that you still have to do something to take that next step. So to me, you know, yes, it’s okay to fall apart and be stressed out and have that moment, but you have to then like not sit in that. You have to take that walk in nature or make that phone call. You’re afraid of, you know, everything that, there’s that saying, you know, everything is amazing. That’s on the other side of fear. It’s, it’s really working to get to that other side of fear and to get anywhere close to that other side of those amazing things that can be on the other side, you’ve gotta just take the next step. So it’s just doing something, whatever it is, when you’re in that moment of like paralysis and you’re worried to the point of not being able to do that, you’ve gotta just do something. And sometimes that’s just walking outside and, you know, going around the block, something to shake it up. I know it sounds so basic. You’re like, that’s it, Victoria. It’s like, yeah, sometimes that’s it. Because in that moment you clear your head enough to sort of let the next thing in and the next thing and the next
AJV (32:28):
Thing. Hmm. That’s good. Quick personal question. Is there anything that you can say like, Hey, this is something that I fear, fear that I haven’t yet done that I know I need to do to take action on?
VJ (32:44):
Yeah, I mean, for me, travel has always been sort of my like little bugaboo. Like I don’t love a lot of movement. And I say this as a person who’s moving all the time, probably like going to some exotic traveling will be what I’ve gotta sort of go, okay, you can do it. I didn’t fly for so many years 35 years, I didn’t, I didn’t fly as a result of claustrophobia. And I still struggle with that. So I think for me, that will be my continued kind of, you know, eat, love, pray moment of going out, you know, in the wild and, and just wherever that is, just out of my comfort zone.
AJV (33:30):
Hmm. Yeah, I asked because I, you know, I was just sitting here thinking as you were talking about like, what are the things that I know I need to take action on, but there’s some amount of worry or fear that is preventing me to move forward. And I just know that if you struggle with that, if I struggle with that, everyone’s listening, we all struggle with something like that. And, you know, Rory and I have had these conversations in our house a lot here lately. And I think one of the things that we fear is like, man, like how much of what we really think should we share? You know? And I think there’s a real fear of not wanting to come across as judgmental, but also feeling compelled to, to share an alternative view or one that maybe isn’t as popular or as common. And I think there’s a lot of that fear of cancel culture, which has a lot of people who have thoughts and opinions afraid to talk.
VJ (34:31):
Yeah, no, it’s, it’s very, it’s very real. It’s all part of what creates the, the stress and the anxiety is ’cause people are afraid to just be themselves. But I think that there’s a way to do it if you do it with kindness, where the problem is there’s so many people that are doing it you know, with so much hate or bitterness or, you know, anger and, you know, that’s always hard. And then, so then other people are afraid to just say anything because of the afraid of the judgment. You know, I’ve always tried to be as authentic and real and you know, I’ll, I may have opinions that other people don’t like and they’re just mine and it’s like, take it or leave it. And I’m very, you know, if people are not like doing harm to somebody else, and some people politically believe this and some people believe that, and somebody was pro-abortion, somebody’s pro-life, like, you know you know, I just take it all in and, you know, you try to have conversations as civilly as you can and listen to other people. You know, there’s that level of respect at times that we’ve all lost a little bit. And I think you just have to get back to that and and not worry so much about not being able to just have conversation and be yourself. I think that’s important. You hate to lose that because that’s kind of really where the magic is because that’s where we’re authentic to who we are.
AJV (35:57):
Totally agree. And, and back to, it’s like we all have worry at some level. So what are we gonna do about it? So again, we all worry now what coming to a bookshelf near you very, very soon. Again, I’ll put the show notes or the link in the show notes, but you can pre-order it now on Amazon. Pick up a copy, buy one for yourself, buy one for a friend. And before we go, I also wanna talk about this relaunch of Yeah, no makeup, makeup. And as I mentioned earlier, I am wearing it today and I love it. I think it’s amazing. One, I love that it’s in a little compact and it’s so creamy. ’cause I’m usually putting my makeup on, on the go
VJ (36:45):
You know, for me, I mean, I love look at being, I was always in a, in the lab creating product. As I said, I made about 600 and it’s really fun working with color and pigments and coming up with a great product. So I am a formulator at heart. I love it. And my foundation, when I first launched No makeup makeup many years ago, was my hero product, my number one product. And so I wanted to bring it back, but bring it back in a new clean vegan, like, just an amazing formula. I was not gonna launch anything until I had like, what I thought is the perfect foundation. That’s what this is. It comes in 13 shades. And I, I love it. I mean, it’s so easy for me to sell it because I’m like, I love it. I think since I’ve launched, just in the last month, we’ve had two returns. I mean, like, people love it. So that’s what I wanted to just get back into kind of back where I started the whole no makeup makeup and I own the trademark. I trademarked that in the eighties. So it’s just a message that’s still true. It’s timeless. So I wanted to make a, just a fantastic product and I’ve done that and it’s no makeup makeup.com and people can check it out and yeah, I love it.
AJV (38:00):
Well, you know, that’s the thing about building something that’s evergreen and timeless, and now it’s getting introduced to a whole new generation of people like me who wasn’t wearing makeup in the eighties. And and a again, I think one of the things that I love is just a great reminder for all of us is that, you know, it’s never too late to start and it’s never too late to restart. And that’s so much of what I love about you. It’s like, I mean, if I can do it, why not? We can figure it out.
VJ (38:36):
Why not? And I mean, even in makeup, you know, it’s sort of like, it’s, it’s pretty easy. Like this comes with a brush and it’s start at your jawline, match your color. You’re, you’re in, it’s, it’s makeup. If you don’t like how something looks, you wash it off. Like I, I try to get women off the, the hurdle of, you know, they get so in their head sometimes, not just women. And we get stuck that even when I was doing my makeup for so many years, which with this how to, it was just like, here’s, here’s how you do it. And it doesn’t matter. Like, people go, well what if, do I need to start with my eyes first? And then my lips, I’m like, at the end of the day, we just care how it looks like when it’s all done. So I just wanna create products that make you feel good and look good and look like yourself and not wear a mask. So there’ll be other products that follow this, but right now it’s no makeup, makeup, just the foundation for beautiful skin. Well,
AJV (39:29):
I can attest. It’s feels good on, looks good on, I think the feel of makeup is really important to me. And this, it doesn’t feel like I have anything on. I really love it. And I, what I love too is that, you know, this whole idea of like, people think all the time I have to create something new. Yeah. And it’s like, no, you don’t. Yeah. You can just take something that already had and just make it better. Make
VJ (39:57):
Better, improve it. Yeah. That’s the good thing. You know, technology’s changed and I took what was an original formula and I just improved it, you know, manyfold. So, and you look beautiful.
AJV (40:09):
Thank you. And I think for everyone listening, it’s like when you think, oh, I have to write this whole new book, or I have to build this whole thing. No, you don’t. You just, you can take what you have and revise it and it’s taking
VJ (40:21):
That next step. It’s just, it’s just, it’s just doing it. You know? It’s, there’s talking about it’s great, but then you just gotta, you just gotta do it. And it’s always work. So you gotta just be ready to do the work. And and that’s honestly, like I said, it’s, it’s simple, it’s basic, but and people are, are listening, trying to always find what are the magic words you’re gonna say? Sometimes it’s just, you gotta get uncomfortable. You gotta do it. And you gotta work to find what’s on that other side of, for me, fear. Mm-Hmm.
AJV (40:59):
All right. Last question. And I know that we’re running out of time here, but you mentioned this earlier, that you’re about to turn 70. Yes. And so I wanna know what’s next for you. Like,
VJ (41:12):
You know what, that’s the great part. I don’t know. Who knows? Who knows? Maybe you, and I’ll be talking in five years, 10 years, and you’ll go, you did what
AJV (42:15):
And I love the, the mystery and the adventure and all of that. ’cause The truth is, if we had never put out what we were doing, our paths would’ve never crossed. Yeah. And you just, you just never know. But you gotta put it out there. You gotta do the work. And I love too of going just enjoy the beautiful mystery of just not knowing, but do the work, keep moving and enjoy the ride.
VJ (42:39):
Yeah, exactly.
AJV (42:41):
Victoria, thank you so much for coming on. And everyone just one more time. Her book is coming out very soon, September 3rd, pre-order now on Amazon. We all worry now what? And her makeup as relaunched now available [email protected] and at Victoria. If anyone wants to just follow you personally, where’s the best place to send them?
VJ (43:07):
Oh my gosh. Probably Instagram. You can, you know, the original original Victoria Jackson, I believe is where we’re, I’m so not in the world of social media. You’ll all help me as we go along on this journey. But yes, you’ll be able to follow me. Okay,
AJV (43:23):
Well that’s what’s next for Victoria Social Media. That’s it.
VJ (43:28):
AJV (43:31):
I’ll put the handle the official Victoria Jackson. I’ll put that in the show notes. Thank you so much. Loved having you on today. Love getting to see you and talk to you and everyone else. Stay tuned for the recap, which will be coming up next. And we’ll see you next time on the influential personal brand.
Ep 510: Conquer the Chaos with Clate Mask
RV (00:02):
Well, today you’re gonna hear from someone who is a dear friend of mine. His name is Clate Mask and Clate’s product, his company, his life mission, has radically changed my life, our lives, our business. He is a huge part of what has made Brand Builders Group successful, although many of you don’t realize the role that he has because it’s so behind the scenes but it is so critical to everything we do, and you’re gonna hear about that. How is that possible? Well, clay is the CEO and the co-founder of Keep, which is the world’s leading business automation software. It is round a hundred million dollar company. It’s a SA software as a service, a SaaS company. And it is the business automation tool that AJ and I have used to now build six different multimillion dollar businesses, two of which have become eight figures including Brand Builders Group, which has gone from zero to eight figures in five years.
RV (01:00):
The reason why that has happened, a huge part of why that has happened is because we have built our businesses on kes platform. We use Keap to automate our marketing, to automate our sales pipeline, to automate our customer experience, to automate our customer service, to automate our onboarding, our recruiting, our hiring, our our interviewing. We automate our payments, we automate our collections. We automate so many parts of our business. We automate so many parts of our content marketing and our podcast production, and virtually all of them are, can connected back through this software. And so much so that we have been building a custom version of that software called Instant Automation Toolkit, which has been over coming up on five years in development. And we’re just about to release it. And so I thought, Hey, you need to meet this man. The man that was you know, one of the original visionaries of the whole marketing and business automation space. And Clay is also a New York Times bestselling author. He is a multi Inc. 5,000, you know, CEO. He is an award-winning entrepreneur. And he has a book that just came out called Conquer the Chaos. And we’re gonna talk about exactly what that means. And part of what Clate has done is build an amazing personal life in addition to an amazing business. And so we’re gonna talk about how to not only automate your business, but also win in your personal life at the same time. So Clate, welcome to the show, my brother.
CM (02:33):
Hey, thank you Roy. That was a heck of an intro. I appreciate you
RV (02:36):
CM (03:32):
You bet. You know, we, we’ve worked with entrepreneurs for over 20 years helping them to achieve their, their goals and dreams. And, you know, when everybody gets into business, they have this, this dream of freedom. They’ve got this view of what things are gonna be like
RV (04:37):
No one, no one, no one puts on their vision board systems
CM (04:45):
Exactly. Exactly. And, and frankly, you know, we, as you know, we built up Infusionsoft as the leader in marketing automation that was about doing all of the marketing and sales stuff. But what we, what we learned over the over time was, it’s one thing to grow your top line revenue. It’s a very different thing to have your bottom line take home pay bank account, and more importantly, totally your time and the sense of control and the freedom that you actually feel in the business. I mean, you, you and I both know this, I’m sure a lot of listeners are hearing this, it is crazy how many people get to a certain revenue mark in their business. Seven figures is a real, is a real common one. People think, man, I’m gonna get to that seven figure mark and now, you know, think I’m gonna have, there’s this sense of what they’re going to have in terms of bottom line, take home pay, time, freedom, control. Mm-Hmm.
RV (06:04):
Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s funny, I, I love the pivot that you guys made from Infusionsoft is marketing automation to keep, is business automation. ’cause That really is true about us. Like, even our stories, like we are not, honestly, we, we’ve never really been the best marketers in the world. Like we’ve never had millions of followers. We’ve just made millions of dollars. Mm-Hmm.
RV (06:58):
Like, you’re just Right. You’re the, you’re adding more customers, more disorganization, more problems, more complexity, more challenges. It’s like you really need to have the backend tight and, and, and cleaned up. So I love where you guys made that pivot from marketing automation as Infusionsoft to business automation is key. ’cause It really is, I think your, your, your bread and butter now, you talk about six keys in the book. Okay. Yeah. So, so, so conquer the chaos. WW walk us through a couple of those. Yeah. Because I, I think, you know, to me your message is really clear, how do I conquer chaos and achieve freedom through business automation? Right. Right.
CM (07:45):
That’s it in a nutshell. Yep. So, so
RV (07:47):
Walk us through then, like kind of the six, you know, kind of keys of, of how to actually execute that.
CM (07:53):
Yeah, you bet. The, the keys are actually, so the, the book is Conquer Cast, the Six Keys to Success for Entrepreneurs. And the first three keys are actually personal. And the second three are business with automation being, you know, the crucial show. You know, kind of the crux of it. But the reason I wrote it that way is because after more than two decades of working with entrepreneurs very closely and seeing, seeing what their lives look like as they, and
RV (08:16):
How many customers have you guys had?
CM (08:18):
We, we’ve got over 200,000 users of our software. We’ve got over 20,000 businesses using the software. And over the years we’ve probably worked with 50,000, you know, so, so we’ve
RV (08:29):
Worked 50,000 entrepreneurs. Like you, when you say I’ve worked with entrepreneurs, it’s not like, oh, I’ve spent time around a couple of ’em. Like it’s
CM (08:35):
No, and it’s working closely with them, seeing very closely their business, getting to know them. I mean, the number of mastermind groups and, and conferences and coaching, coaching meetings. I mean, you, I’ve, I’ve worked so closely with entrepreneurs and what I see over and over and over is something that just compelled me to write the personal part of the book. Because what I see is the business becomes so dominant that, that their, their lives get out of whack. And they, over time, they subtly and gradually make trade-offs in favor of the business that cost them what they care about the most in the end. And so, you know, when you see people’s financial family health, you know, when you see those things really melt down and, and some of the most, you know, very, very well known entrepreneurs that, you know, I, you know, people would know if I said their names and I see them closely, and I see them as clients and friends, and, and then I see it over and over and over with small businesses everywhere.
CM (09:38):
And I’ve, I’ve experienced it, I call it the dark side of entrepreneurship. And it is that it’s not just the, the, the struggles of entrepreneurship, it’s actually also when the business is very successful and the way that it dominates the life of the individual. So the first three keys are the personal keys, and they are actually about conquering the chaos inside getting your, getting your per getting personal life. Right. Because when I say the six keys to success for entrepreneurs, I define success right at the beginning of the book, let’s get on the same page what we mean by, by entrepreneurial success. And I say it’s balanced growth in your business and personal life that produces freedom. And if you’re, if you don’t get that balanced part, right you know, I’ve seen a lot of people who are really excited about their business goals and achieving them, and, and then they end up having great regrets. And I just think that’s a travesty. And I don’t
RV (10:30):
I think, I think a really good point that people probably don’t realize is that even if your business is successful, it can be a catalyst for your personal life failing. Yes. Like, I don’t, I don’t think people equate that. Right. So just to sort of underscore that point is to go, man, it’s hard to make a business successful. And even if you pull that off, like it could, that it could, it could work against you in your personal life and, and they don’t have to though.
CM (11:00):
That’s right. If you’re intentional about it and you set it up. So the three, the three, the first three keys are personal and it’s mindset, vision for your life and rhythm of execution, mindset, vision, rhythm. When you put the, when you get the mindset right from the beginning, get the vision straight. Now the business fits into your life vision. I’m not talking about the business vision here. I’m talking about the life vision. Now the business fits into the vision. And then a, you know, how do you execute that in a way that works for your business, your life, your, your personal life in all areas? So that’s, I feel very passionate about that because I’ve spent so much time working with entrepreneurs and seeing the pitfalls of it and experience it personally, real, you know, recognizing and kind of flirting with that dark side and understanding how challenging that can be.
CM (11:42):
And when you get the, the business keys, right? The business keys are strategy, automation, and leadership. When you get the business keys right, it dramatically improves the personal side and fuels your life vision. And when you get the life vision right, and you have your rhythm of execution going, it dramatically improves your business so that you’re not getting burned out, overwhelmed, redlining at work. So that’s, those are the six keys. You know, the, you said it really well. The, the summary of it though is how do you go from chaos to freedom through automation? And, you know, I I start with the personal side to make sure we’re not automating and making a business successful that doesn’t fit into the bigger picture of the entrepreneur’s life.
RV (12:20):
Yeah. Well, and I, I mean, I, you know, I, I can appreciate, ’cause you know, you’re the CEO of, of, of, of, of a, a company that sells automation software, which by the way, I am on the board of, you all should know that. Right? So this is, this is something that I, I have joined the board of, and I’m, I am a proud member of it, and I feel honored and lucky to, to, to be a part of it because I do believe in it. But I really appreciate that you don’t just go like, oh, automation is the only thing. Like the book’s not about automation. It’s going no, there’s the mindset, there’s the whole personal life, there’s strategy leadership. Like, and, and also, you know, there’s other, like, there’s other parts of this, and I think sometimes people, sometimes people probably errantly go, Ooh, I bought the automation tool, now my business is just gonna work on magic.
RV (13:05):
And it’s like, no, like, get the strategy right. Like
CM (14:17):
You bet. Well, there was the early days when you know, the, when, when we were just trying to get the business going. And then there was a season where I, I I talk about the dark side, where we had kinda lost control investors, board members, you know, lot, lots of things had happened and I was considering leaving at that point. So, which, which of those two do you want me to tell is
RV (14:37):
That Well, I, I, I want, I want, it could be the, it could be the first one too, but, but I wanted, the startup story is powerful, but it’s, it’s really the second one that I, I, I wanted to hear because, and this is to to you, to the thing you said earlier. You guys were very successful. You were very big. You brought on, you know, a lot of money from really smart people and, and you had a lot of things going. And even then you had a challenging season. And when you were, you were, you were thinking about leaving the company and your wife said something to you, and it always stuck with me. And I’m going like, oh my gosh, every entrepreneur needs to hear, hear this story. ’cause I, I think what she said was so wise.
CM (15:17):
Yeah. So here’s, here’s what happened. I’ll give the, the, the background for people to understand. And those who know Infusionsoft and know keep may, may appreciate this, but you know, we built Infusionsoft as the leader in marketing automation, and we got to a point where we, we really wanted to go down market. You know, we heard, we heard the cries of Confusionsoft from people who, you know, like, oh, it’s too complicated for me. And a lot of that came from solopreneurs. You know, 90% of the small business market is solopreneurs who they really don’t have the problem of chaos the way that we solve it. You know, they don’t, they don’t have a lot going on yet where things are slipping through the cracks. Instead, they’re trying to kind of figure out, well, what should their marketing be? And they’re trying to figure out who, who is their customer?
CM (16:00):
What is their offering? And that’s a different thing. If you don’t, you don’t necessarily need automation when you don’t yet have a business that’s bringing in customers. So we mistakenly tried to go down market to appease those folks. Now, by the way, in all, in all fairness, we also needed to do some things to simplify the user experience of our software. And we’ve done that. And, you know, that that was a, a, that was the fruitful part of what we did. But the, the, the not so fruitful part of what we did is we tried to go down market to serve those solopreneurs, and it really hurt the business. We were really struggling like crazy. And so we, we tried to bring in some people from the outside that could help lead, lead the, the operations. These were, you know, smart Silicon Valley folks, and the board became enamored with them. And shoot, I was too initially. And, and after some time I recognized, well, this isn’t working. And the board said, no, no, no, let them keep doing their thing. And I became sort of a figurehead of the company, but the whole company was being operated by the COO and I wasn’t allowed to make any changes. And it was incredibly frustrating. And it went on for almost four years.
RV (17:09):
Wow. Because this is your baby. This is your blood sweat. Yeah. You bootstrapped it. I mean, you guys bootstrapped like the first seven, 8 million in revenue, right?
CM (17:16):
That’s exactly right. Bootstrapped seven or 8 million. Then we brought on investors and, and I, and I appreciate, you know, I appreciate the investors and I appreciate all the learnings and, but we got to a point where I was very, very frustrated and, and frankly, you know, just to be candid, I was bitter and I was angry, and I wasn’t taking accountability for where we were. I was, I was pretty upset. And about three years into that ordeal I told Charise, I can’t do it anymore. I just can’t, I I can’t keep doing this, watching the company struggle like crazy and not being able to do what I think needs to be done, and I’m just done. And she said, you know, and I was, and I was angry with the board. I was angry with the, the, the new management team that had come in and she said, look, if you wanna quit, quit, but don’t do it when you’re mad. And I, boom,
RV (18:09):
There,
CM (18:10):
RV (18:10):
Boom. I mean, that is a, that is a wisdom bomb right there. You can say it again. Say it again.
CM (18:19):
If you wanna quit, quit. But don’t do it when you’re mad.
RV (18:22):
Oh, man, that’s so good.
CM (18:24):
And what it did, was it, you know, I, the, the, the funny thing was, I, I kind of, and I’d been, I’d been kind of living in this place where half the time I felt like quitting and half the time I was being threatened to be fired by the board. And so it was just such a tricky place to be. It’s so hard to describe it. But what happened when she said that to me was that I began to really be conscious of how I was showing up and how, you know, how my, how my emotions about the situation were affecting things. And then I went to work on that, and I went and I started working with my coach again. And he helped me see my part in the whole situation and helped me to take accountability for things. He helped me to be grateful, you know, because most situ, and, and I, I, when he first said, you gotta get, you gotta start, get, becoming more grateful for your board.
CM (19:15):
Mm-Hmm. And I looked at him like, are you freaking kidding me? Like, do you realize what I’m going through
RV (20:23):
I mean, that’s just so good. I mean, that’s when you go like, man, you know, God, God put a strong, faithful, wise woman in your life. And, and I think that’s the other thing is like, people don’t realize, like to this conversation, it’s like your personal life and your, and your own mindset. Like to, to the chapter, the, the first of your six keys, like your mindset, it matters. It matters tremendously. Yes. I want to ask you a little bit about rhythm. Okay. Because to me, automation sort of naturally follows rhythm. Yeah. If it’s like, if, if I can figure out a rhythm, then I can automate it, and then it’s like, then it’s magic. ’cause Now, now there’s a tool in place. Yeah. How do you, how do you find your rhythm? Especially when it’s like, you know, it’s clunky in the early years, it’s totally clunky. And, and then, I mean, you got six, six kids, is it six,
CM (21:17):
Six kids and six, six grandkids.
RV (21:19):
I mean, you got six kids, six grandkids. You’re like build, building this company. Like you’re also building, you’re a personal brand and writing books and stuff. You go, how do you find that rhythm in both the business and your personal life?
CM (21:33):
Yeah. You know what this is, this is one of the things that I’m most passionate about because I discovered it on the bus, on the business side first. And we, you know, if you’re familiar with the concepts in mastering the Rockefeller habits that Vern Harnish, Vern Harnish teaches some of the other some of the other great thought leaders that helped us learn these things were people like Jim Collins e even some of the things from Michael Gerber early on, we, we, we basically used a number of different consultants and thought leaders to create a rhythm of how we set our strategy and execute our strategy in the business. And in, in a nutshell, it was getting the, the strategy plan clear, and then having a daily, monthly, weekly, quarterly, annual, three year long-term approach. So you get the long-term vision, and then you work it all the way back to where what you’re doing each day ladders into your goals for the long-term.
CM (22:33):
And we, we started doing that 20 years ago you know, from near like like in year one of the business. And I loved it. And then I started learning some similar principles on the personal side and began doing coaching with, with personal coaches Dan Sullivan at Strategic Coach devouring all kinds of things from different people like like Michael Hyatt and others that you, that, that speak and teach on this stuff. And I started to put a personal rhythm in place that sort of mirrored my business rhythm. And, and as I began to execute that many years ago, I found that it was, it was magic, you know, especially for entrepreneurs who tend to be a little A DHD, if you don’t create some kind of a rhythm, it can become, you know, just the game of the latest distraction, you know, this shiny object.
CM (23:28):
And so getting that rhythm in place. But, but the real art of it though, and the reason why I call it the rhythm of execution, is that it’s not a rut. It’s not a fixed routine. Sometimes those, those words can get, get, you know, routine can get used interchangeably, but rhythm has, it’s got magic to it. It’s got, it’s got art to it, it’s got joy to it. And so the rhythm of execution is about setting up your life vision and then executing it to a, a, a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual long-term sort of execution cadence. But it’s not rote. It’s not it’s not you know, if you just turn it into complete ha habitual autopilot, that doesn’t quite work. So rhythm is the right way to think of it. And you know, in a nutshell, I have a very beautiful morning experience. You know, I call it my Morning mastery. And I have a weekly evaluation process and a quarterly retreat. And those three, I call those three things, the three, the three transformative habits. You look at any, any person’s morning routine, weekly evaluation, planning, intentionality approach, and a quarterly rhythm that connects their short term to their long term. You look at someone’s practices around those three things, and I believe it’s almost as good as a crystal ball to their future.
RV (24:51):
Man. I love it. I love it. Well, y’all, I, I, you know, this just a, a sample of clay. He’s, you could tell he’s such a brilliant guy, and I, I’m, I’m so inspired by him and what he stands for, the way they run the company, obviously him and his personal life, and his wife. I’m a huge fan of his wife, even though we’ve never met just because, but because of her, her counsel. We’re gonna be telling y’all more about Instant Automation Toolkit. If you wanna, if you want to get a preview of that or you wanna learn about that, you can go to brand builders group.com/automation, brand builders group.com/automation. On, in terms of Clay’s book, the book is called Conquer the Chaos, right? Six Keys to Helping Entrepreneurs Succeed or, or, sorry, six keys to Success for Entrepreneurs. You got it. Is there anything else, you know, clay, that you would, would direct people or that you wanna leave people with?
CM (25:46):
Yeah, you can go to conquer the Chaos book.com, and there’s a bunch of free resources on there. And then obviously, you know, if you’re interested in getting through the chaos, the real trick is you’ve gotta understand your strategy behind it. And you can either do a consulting session, you know, with someone who can help you map your business and strategize and do that. You know, we do that at Keap, or in a better scenario, you work with someone like Rory who’s got the strategy all set up for you, and you can go implement that. That’s a, a, a better way than having to sort of recreate it yourself. So, you know, I love what you guys have created with Instant Automation Toolkit. I think it’s a great place for people to go to get resources to learn more about how to automate their business. And then the book conquer the cast book.com.
RV (26:32):
I love it. Well, clay man, thank you for what you do. I mean, it’s, it’s interesting to hear the hard parts of some of your, your story, and I think that’s so encouraging for all the entrepreneurs who are, are listening because look at, look at the difference that Clay has made, and his wife and his family, and the, the fact that they’ve been able to survive it, the tool that they’ve created in the world and their team, and all the sacrifices their team has made. And, and there’s tens of thousands of business owners like me and aj who have had our lives transformed by the sacrifices that they have made. And so, your work matters. Your small business matters, and it, it, it, it, it cascades and makes an impact in clay. That’s certainly true for you, man. So we love you. We’re praying for you. We believe in you. And thanks for being here. Thanks, Roy. Great to be with you.