Category: Podcast

Ep 210: Gaining Instant Attention with Mike Michalowicz

RV (00:07):
[Inaudible] Hey, brand Builder, Rory Vaden here.
RV (00:10):
Thank you so much for taking the time to check out this interview as always, it’s our honor to provide it to you for free and wanted to let you know there’s no big sales pitch or anything coming at the end. However, if you are someone who is looking to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and get to know you a little bit and hear about some of your dreams and visions and share with you a little bit about what we’re up to see if we might be a fit. So if you’re interested in a free strategy call with someone from our team, we would love to hear from you. You can do that at brand builders, group.com/pod call brand builders, group.com/pod call. We hope to talk to you soon. Well, my man, Mike Michalowicz is one of my favorite thinkers on entrepreneurship.
RV (01:00):
I, you probably have heard of his book profit first. He’s the best selling author of that book has got thousands of reviews on Amazon is very popular among the entire entrepreneurship community. He also has written several other books, clockwork fix this next. And he’s got a new book coming out at September of 2021. It’s called get different, which is what we’re going to talk about. But by age 35, Mike had founded and sold two different companies wanting to private equity, another to fortune 500 he’s a former small business columnist for the wall street journal. He was a make-over specialist on MSNBC and he travels the world speaking to entrepreneurs. He’s he? He is a speaker he’s on stages. We’ve met each other, gotten to know each other a little bit over the years. And I just think he is one of the most influential thinkers and thought leaders in the space of entrepreneurship. So Mike Michalowicz welcome to the show, man. I was in
MM (01:57):
The house. Yeah.
RV (02:00):
So get different is it what’s this is, this is the newest, you’ve got a nice, you’ve got a nice building brand, like a very consistent just body of work that you have done, which I love. So what’s, what’s get different. Why, why the need for this book? Why now?
MM (02:22):
So it’s the why I want to do is boil down what the essence of effective marketing is. And the reason is most small businesses are highly ineffective at marketing. Actually that’s the whole reason your business exists is because so many people, we can’t do it on our own, but what’s interesting is you know, this is kind of pre COVID with all the traveling that’s going on and starting to come back. But nothing like it was in 2019, is that when I go to events, I just ask people by show of hands, like an informal survey, what is your number one source of lead generation marketing cash lead flow. And I would say, raise your hand if this is the number one source word of mouth and like 90% of the hands go up. I like the whole survey is done with the first question and realized that most businesses are dependent upon their clients to do the marketing for them.
MM (03:18):
It’s a blessing. If your client wants to refer you business shows that they trust in your service. They think of you to a high enough degree to refer you. But at the same point, that means you’re at the whim of the customer to market for you. And so I said, what was the consequence of this? And consistently it’s these pendulum swings of too much opportunity for me to handle. And therefore we stopped doing service effectively, or we fumbled the sales process and we actually disappoint people, even in marketing and sales before they do business with us. And then the flip-flop side is no opportunity. We’re panicked. We have to start cutting costs. And as this kind of maniacal bipolar existence for business. So I wrote at different, I spent 10 years working on this. I’m in the research phases, extrapolating knowledge and stuff, but really in the last three years actively writing the formula and testing it and then writing the book and what it boils down to is a, a, we have responsibility to market like you, I, we, the listeners, if, if we have a offering that is of service for our clients, if our offering is better than the alternatives are considering competition doing it themselves, if what we offer is better, we have responsibility to market because if they don’t discover us, that’s going to be the client’s problem.
MM (04:41):
It’s, it’s admittedly our fault for not exposing our brand. So the first component is, is like, wow, people are afraid to market because we think it’s invasive. And the reframing is you must mark it because it’s the only way to be of service. Then I go through the elements of effective marketing and there’s, there’s these three key elements that if you miss any single one, your marketing is going to fumble. So that, that’s what the book’s about.
RV (05:04):
I love it. So maybe we’ll dance this into some of those three things, but the first thing is just going you know, word of mouth, isn’t predictable. It’s not scalable. It’s not controllable. There’s not a, there’s not a button that you can push or a lever that you can pull that says, bring me more clients. Right. And if you don’t have that, like if you don’t have that one button or that one lever, I feel that’s a pretty freaking scary place to operate. And you’re saying you think that, I mean, do you think most businesses, like the massive majority, the large majority, most som all, like, just kind of like how many people you think are living in that world.
MM (05:49):
Yeah. Yeah. So I’ll give you the shocking observation on buggy tobacco numbers. So the massive majority are highly ineffective and marketing, meaning they’re not doing any marketing whatsoever besides getting a referral from a customer which is not marketing in the first place. It’s this customers referring us out now, here, here’s the data that backs it. Over 98% of businesses are defined as small business in the U S so it’s only the, the very few that the mega corporations, the names recognize the Amazons and the Facebooks of the world are truly the exception. And others, 98% of small businesses 90% of them or thereabouts are micro enterprise, meaning they do less than a million dollars in revenue. So your company is Rory is the exception to most businesses. Most businesses are a handful of people. And the, the marketing is a kind of a shotgun or pot shot approach reactionary.
MM (06:50):
So we don’t have enough leads. Oh my gosh, why are clients referring us? We better do some marketing. Hey, I heard some potent rent. Someone ran Facebook ads in our industry and had great results to start running Facebook ads. So we go in, ill-prepared not understanding what the marketing is or how it works. And then when it fails to succeed, we’re like, oh, Facebook socks, no, we didn’t even understand the basic principles of how functions, but more importantly, we didn’t even know the basic functions of effective marketing. So it’s a very kind of knee-jerk reaction, which has no marketing at all. And sadly, that’s just the majority of business.
RV (07:23):
Yeah. Well, and it’s like, not only is the business vulnerable, the, the, you know, certainly the revenues vulnerable for the owner, but even the, the viability of that business. And so the job security of those people inside the business is a little, that feels, that feels pretty vulnerable. So what should small businesses be doing? Okay. So if they’re not, if they’re, if they don’t want to do that, or in addition, let’s say in addition to that, right. Cause you’re not saying word of mouth is bad. You’re not saying referrals.
MM (07:52):
I think it’s wonderful, but it’s Hey, right?
RV (07:55):
Yeah. Like what should we be doing if we’re not doing that?
MM (07:59):
Yeah. So if client referral is the icing, we need to be in a deliberate process. That’s the cake and what we first need to do. And we talked about this to some degree already is see that marketing is not a burden. It’s not to the client or prospect. Your targeting is not offensive. Marketing will either be ignored because it’s irrelevant or not seen. In fact, most cases it’s just not even seen. But when, and we’ve all been there, I, I need, you know, I’m, I’m so hungry. I need somebody to eat right now. I, gosh, I’m driving on the highway, going back to visit my Alma mater. Thank God for those marketing signs that say, you know, restaurant or diner this way. And that’s marketing because it’s satisfying a need. I have. If those signs didn’t exist, I wouldn’t find the restaurants. I wouldn’t know where they are.
MM (08:50):
Thank God for GPS has made. I can find it that way. So marketing satisfies need. And so we have to realize that marketing is a necessity, a responsibility that we also have because it serves clients. But then to market effectively, we have to go into these three elements that explained in the book. The first one is the acronym is called dad, dad. And the first one stands for differentiate marketing. Doesn’t get noticed once the same as everyone else’s. So you have to do something that is unique for your target audience. So for example, if my community of readers all get emails from other authors, all saying, you know, read my next book. Well, my message gets blurred into that. So I have to find a way to differentiate, to get noticed. And why is it so important is the human mind is wired to ignore what we expect and already qualified as irrelevant.
MM (09:48):
The classic example is, Hey friend, the first time I got, Hey, friend, email, Rory, I was like, who is this friend? Like, you know, it’s probably five, six years ago. I’m like, Hey friend. I’m like, oh my gosh, I have a friend called me friends. Like, which friend is this friendly friends? Like I told you, and as I was reading it, then I’m like, oh, this is not a real friend. This is a marketing message. That’s totally not applicable to me. Well, the next, Hey friend that came in a day or week later, I was like, Hey friend, last time was a marketing message. I read this, this one’s a marketing message. The third one, everyone, since the tens of thousands that got sent to me or hundreds, I don’t know what it is. I’ve never looked at one again because it’s habituated. Habituation is where our mind is designed to efficiently ignore stuff that is irrelevant.
MM (10:35):
And if you mark it and a common method that everyone else uses, you’re deemed irrelevant because it’s already known to be irrelevant. So stage one is do something different and don’t confuse different or outrageous. I’m not saying you’ve got to wear a bozo, the clown costume with those big floppy shoes. And you know, Wakawaka lapel and tell people to do business with you now will get noticed, but it may not pass some other tests. Just what is uncommon in your industry. Maybe you can take something from another industry introduced to your clients and there’ll be enough to awaken them. It’s like, if you and I were outside in your yard behind you there, and somebody squiggled on the ground, if it’s unexpected, we will take notice of it because we have to qualify it as a threat or opportunity.
RV (11:18):
Huh. Yeah. This is a kind of the concept of a pattern interrupt. Yes.
MM (11:24):
Right? What it is, it’s exactly what it is. So our mind, there’s a thing called the reticular formation. There’s a thing called reticular activating system that some people are familiar with. But reticular formation is this neural web that says the brainstem it’s job is to ignore 99.999. He goes on for a long time. Percent of the stimulus round is, and right now, where if you look around the that’s you’re at I look around mine. There’s stuff that could just draw our attention and go on for hours and hours as picked up this blue pen, I could look at it and say, well, you know who, why blue? First of all, who invented the word blue? Hello? You know, why is that rhyme with two? And whoever had the word and you know, it just goes on and on. It could just be endless consideration, but our minds are wired to ignore all the stimulus so that we can pay attention and gain value.
MM (12:11):
Hopefully the dialogue we’re having. So differentiate breaks the pattern and it works, but here’s the deal. It works for one 10th of a second. So I call us the blink test. If you do a deliberate blink now, as fast as you can, like your fastest blink ever, that’s still slower than how much consideration we put into something. Meaning as subconscious level, our mind can evaluate is something worth considering further or can it be flushed out in less than one 10th of a second? So differentiate gives you this one 10th of a second window, that gets you to the next part of our brain, which is the prefrontal cortex where conscious thought happens. And this part of our brain, the mind then says, okay, this guy know this got prioritized as something to consider that squiggly snake in the grass. Now I’m looking down at it.
MM (12:58):
I’m consciously considering this is this a snake. Does someone turn the hose on? It’s kind of flopping around what is this? Our brain is looking for three things, threat opportunity or ignorable. If there’s a threat, we’ll go into fight or flight or freeze. There’s other things, but we’ll, we’ll basically combat it. So you don’t want your marketing to be a threat. I can sell you, send you a mailing piece and say, you know, direct mail works so effectively when you put white powder in it, everyone pays attention. Yes. Yes. Everyone pays attention to the white powder coming out of the envelope, but it is a threat. I will go to jail. You know, you will call 9 1, 1. You will never want to receive or open that email, that message I sent. The next thing we go through, is this an opportunity? So by the
RV (13:37):
Way, on this one, so, you know, like people always, I was always confused. Cause I heard people say stuff like the first thing that people look at when you meet them is your hands. And so, you know, I heard someone say like, oh, that’s a reason why you should have, you know, get manicures or like take. And then I realized, I learned later that it’s like, no, they’re not inspecting your hands. Like, are they lotioned? They’re looking to see if you’re carrying a weapon. Like that’s what, when people say that, that’s what they mean is your brain is instantly calculating. Like, is, is there a, is there a threat? But even, but even that it’s, it’s almost like even a threat would be better than being ignored. People like to be like, you don’t, if, if you’re doing the same marketing as everyone else, you don’t even get that consideration. Like you don’t even make it to level two without the pattern interrupt. That’s correct. That’s correct.
MM (14:29):
A threat though. Causes problems down the marketing chain, but you’re right. Again, it guarantees attention. Like if you and I have a meeting, I said, Roy, we got to have serious conversation here. And I plopped down a gun. We’re gonna have a serious conversation. The thing is, you’re gonna punch me in the nose is the second. You get a chance. And take that gun away from me. So it causes conflict. The ignorable is a risk. Like if, if it’s, if we don’t see it, but once we get the attention of the prospect, if it’s not a threat, they will then say, is there an opportunity and an opportunity? Is there something that delivers value to me
RV (15:04):
By the way today is this attention, is that the D is differentiation, is this? And then the next
MM (15:09):
One is called attraction. Oh, okay. Yeah. So differentiate is stage one and it gets to the prefrontal cortex and the prefrontal cortex says, is this a threat run? Is it an opportunity consider or is it ignorable? And then it just, it qualifies it. Or it puts in the catalog to ignore in the future. If you get the opportunity at the differentiate level, you get forwarded on to the next step, which is attraction. Once I say, Hey Rory, I got I have someone that you got to meet wherever I get your attention. I got someone you gotta meet. Now I’ve positioned yourself for attraction. Attraction is where we go through the qualification process. Like, well, tell me about this person and why is this an opportunity? Our mind is now going into incremental segments of, should I continue this conversation? Is there a continuing value to me?
MM (15:57):
And yes, it plays out at multiple levels and we have a rapport. If I say someone you should meet. And that person is of no value to you. Since we have rapport, you may want to maintain that so we can maintain rapport, but the primary level is, are you going to derive direct benefit? And when I’m marketing, I have to show that very quickly, that direct benefit could be solving a problem. It can be entertaining you in some capacity, if we arming you for the future education it could be just a curiosity factor where you’re you keep people engaged in something as they learn more, as you kind of drip it out. The key to attraction is it happens in these millisecond increments also. So we’re, we’re looking to constantly stay engaged or dump out. And so our job during the attraction phase of our marketing is to keep people engaged.
MM (16:41):
The thing is the longer you try to maintain attraction, the less compelling it is to stay. And therefore people over time, if it’s not building a compelling argument, people are gonna drop out. So be concise and grow the compelling nature of it. So if it’s going to be long, make sure that keeps on building more and more interest engagement, not Dwayne waning, but growing. And then the final phase of effective marketing is the direct phase. So we differentiate to get attention, attract for engagement and then direct to compel the audience, to take a specific action. And is your, is your friend, our mutual friend, Don Miller says, you know, if you confuse, you lose and most people just kind of leave their clients or prospects in ambiguity. It’s like, w what do I do? I guess nothing. And they fade away. So here’s where we give them a specific action to take.
MM (17:33):
But the key for this is it needs to be reasonable. So say you’re in the market for a car and on the sorts of the sales guy and you come in and I’m like, Hey, we’re already nice to meet you. Give me a hundred thousand dollars. Now I’ll start searching for your dream car and wherever the distance difference is, I’ll it to you. You big? No, but what could happen is that you can come to the showroom and I say, Hey, Rory, would you be willing to give me your cell number? I will then text you pictures of the cars in our inventories. We discovered the cars to see if they match up with what you want. And we find the one and we can take the next step together. That may be much more reasonable action. And I have permission to market to you. So the direct stage for me, the person trying to do the sale, I want to move you or matriculate you as fast as I can toward the ultimate transaction by the car. And I need to balance that with you feeling safe at every step of the way. So that’s the three elements that
RV (18:26):
Huh. I love that. The, the, you said that last, that last line is, you said, I want to move you as fast as I can towards the transaction, but I need to be able to balance that, that you said an interesting phrase, you said with you feeling safe. Yeah. Why did you say that?
MM (18:48):
Yeah, because a threat is the trigger for avoidance or conflict. And so you’ll see every step of this, if the threat presents itself, transaction’s over. So if I differentiate, because I walk into the room with a gun, you’ll notice, but the transaction’s over. It’s about survival during the attract phase. I am putting threatening messages out there. If you don’t do this, I’m gonna destroy you. Now, I’m going to combat a situation at the very end, as I’m trying to direct you to take action. The second you feel threat, you know, you’re out you know, we’re, we’re like any other herd animal that the second that CA the antelope sniffs, a hunter it’s bolting. So I need to make sure that I’m moving you in reasonable substance, kind of the Goldilocks porridge. It needs to be just right, that you feel safe and comfortable taking that next step together that there’s trust building in these, these different interim transactions before the ultimate transaction. But also I need to do as quickly as possible
MM (19:42):
If I move so slowly,
MM (19:43):
We may never get to that transaction. You may be engaged in another marketing campaign or sales campaign. That’s moving into a transaction much faster, and I lose out. So I want to move you expeditiously to get to the transaction, but also reasonably so that you maintain a comfort level throughout.
RV (19:58):
Mm. Love it. Y’all I mean, that’s what I’m saying. Like these are so sharp and concise and understanding, you know, what I love about what you’re doing here, Mike is this book get different, is connecting the neuroscience of the brain into marketing strategy and the, and the fundamentals of marketing. So this has been so powerful. I think there are there’s, there are at least three ideas here that are going to stick with me for the longterm. Where do you want people to go? If they want to get, if they want to get a copy of the book or keep up with you and all, all the things you’re up to.
MM (20:38):
Yeah. I invite people to go to the one place, singular direct, right? Go to go get different.com. And the reason I invite people to go to site is if you want to get the book, there’s ways to get it through that site, all major retailers and so forth, but more importantly, there’s a resource link there. It has always different case studies. So we ran hundreds of companies through this, and we came up with these case studies. Some that you can apply immediately in your own business, out of the box marketing that is different, attractive, and gets results and case studies where you can just see how another company went through in the experience of implementing campaign like this. So it’s go get different.com.
RV (21:17):
We will put links to that. Go get different.com. I like the dad method. I like the dad model. Cause I’m dancing. That’s the stage of my life.
MM (21:29):
[Inaudible]
MM (21:29):
You’re saying at the end, any marketing you look at simply ask yourself, does data prove certain context is a little bit creepy when you’re older, but you
MM (21:36):
Know that doesn’t approve. We ain’t doing it.
RV (21:39):
I love it. I love it, man. Well, thanks for sharing your time and your wisdom and your insights. So sharp. I know we’ll see you again soon and we wish you the best. Thank you, brother.

Ep 208: How to be Funnier with Darren LaCroix

RV (00:07):
Hey, brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for taking the time to check out this interview as always, it’s our honor to provide it to you for free and wanted to let you know there’s no big sales pitch or anything coming at the end. However, if you are someone who is looking to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and get to know you a little bit and hear about some of your dreams and visions and share with you a little bit about what we’re up to see if we might be a fit. So if you’re interested in a free strategy call with someone from our team, we would love to hear from you. You can do that at brand builders, group.com/pod call brand builders, group.com/podcast. We hope to talk to you soon.
RV (00:54):
Well, if you go back to the very beginning of Rory Vaden speaking career, one of my mentors told me I needed to join Toastmasters, and that was how I would get stage time. And shortly after I joined Toastmasters, I learned about a contest called the world championship of public speaking. And one of the legends of Toastmasters who I then made my mentor is who you’re about to hear from today. His name’s Darren LaCroix. He was the 2001 world champion of public speaking for Toastmasters, but he was one of my personal mentors early in my career. In fact if you come to our world-class presentation craft event, and then I start talking about humor, I share the story of how I spent my last thousand dollars on buying a ticket to Darren’s class and then buying an airplane flight to go see him in California in a hotel.
RV (01:50):
It was like the last I had in my checking account as I was coming out of graduate school. And it was the best thing that I ever did. Darren’s training on humor, which is not the only thing he talks about. He teaches all sorts of things around presentations, mechanics, and business. And we’ll talk about stage time university and some of the other things that he’s got going on, but, but that commitment to come and spend a few days with him changed my entire career. And the things that I learned from Darren have stuck with me for years and years and years. And we’ve never actually made the time to go back and do an interview. And I saw him last week at the national speakers association. I said, buddy, we got to bring you on to share the secrets. So welcome to the show.
DL (02:32):
Hey, thrilled to be here. Rory and I, as I told you, before we even started, I am so proud of you and what you’ve done and what you’ve created. There’s nothing cooler to a mentor than seeing the students surpass the mentor. You have stolen the pebble from my hand.
RV (02:50):
Well, I really appreciate that, man. I you know, you and ed Tate and you know, Craig Valentine and Mark Brown, I mean, you guys were, I really learned the craft of speaking and specifically with you. And when I often tell your story, I, it most comes up just around humor because that was, that was the thing. Like for me, that seemed the most unrealistic. Like I knew when I said, if I’m going to win the world championship of public speaking, like you have to be funny. And I said, I’m not funny like that. So that was, that was like this big roadblock. And also to be a professional speaker. I was like, this is going to meet my biggest dilemma. Like my biggest barrier is that I’m not funny. And then I met you and you had gone through all of this work and this research of figuring out and making it, making it practical of going, actually, this is a skill it’s not, it’s not just talent. So do you still believe that? I know it’s been 20 years since
DL (03:59):
I believe it more than ever, you know, that’s the one thing you’re either born funny or you’re not, and that’s a, that’s a big myth. I remember when I first was working up the courage to ask a comedian for advice to go through this crazy thing. Cause I just like, you was not funny. I was quiet. I was shy. I had no business being on a stage and I just decided I was at such a low point in my life. I’ve got to just try it because I can’t live with the regret of wondering what if, and I asked this comedian, that was, he was a headliner, never been to a comedy show before. And I said, what do I need to do? And he asked me a question. He said, are you funny? I said, no. And he said, good. And I’m like, good.
DL (04:40):
What do you mean? Good? And he was the one that first explained that people who are the class clown, people are the naturally funny people. He said, that’s one skillset. He said, but if you handed them a microphone and put them in front of a group of 100 strangers, they couldn’t make them laugh. He said, but that skillset can be learned. You know, I turned into Scooby doo. I’m like, what? You know, he just handed me an ounce of hope. And as you know, just like I told you, number one, he said, go get the book. And I’m like book, there’s a book about standup comedy. And so, yeah, of course his books about everything, but I wasn’t thinking that way. And you and I both got the book by Judy Carter, stand up comedy, the book and going through the exercises. I realized comedians don’t want you to know that they actually go through a lot of work to get there. But what I learned was the structure of comedy, the structure of humor and that just like anything can be learned. And eventually I was able to find a way to make it work for me and my style.
RV (05:44):
Yeah. Well, and I, I did read that book as well as every other book that you recommended. Yeah. And then, and then wrote one. And, and I, I actually, after I went through all those, I, one of the reasons that I wrote, and this is, you know, Darren knows, but nobody else does because my very first book, people think take the stairs was my first book. Because we set the world up to be that way. It was my first traditionally published book and our team, you know, we did the huge bestseller launch and all that stuff. But I actually wrote a book called how to be funny, to make more money, which was a self published book before that Darren remembers, that was how I paid my bills in the early days. And I was disappointed with a lot of the books that I read because they weren’t as straightforward and practical.
RV (06:29):
They felt still artsy and not science-y. But when you taught it to me, I felt like, yeah, there’s there’s structure here. There’s a, there’s a, there’s a systematic process to the, to the, to the whole game of, of of comedy. So can you talk about what that is? You know, just like what, what, what is the premise like you even say that because you go, even the class clown, can’t grab a mic and suddenly make everybody laugh. I think that is that’s worth everybody knowing. And so when you dive in or you think about, okay, what is it then that makes an audience laugh and what is the work that comedians are doing that they don’t want us to know about as a part of like, you know, getting to that place.
DL (07:17):
Yeah. I have presenters and speakers come to me like I got to write a funny speech. How do I write a funny speech, especially in Toastmasters, around humorous speech contest time. And they’re like, what’s funny, what’s, what’s a subject. What’s a funny subject. I’m like, I don’t know. I don’t know your life. And just like you and I went through the Judy Carter book, she said, what are your flaws? What are your failures? So Craig Valentine. And I say, what are your failures, your flaws, and your first, your failures, your flaws and your first. So again, it’s understanding the process, a class clown. If you force them to go up on stage in front of a hundred strangers, what they would do is they’d go do movie quotes. They’d do characters, they’d rip off Robin Williams or Jerry Seinfeld. And they’d tell other people’s material.
DL (08:03):
Well, that’s, that’s illegal. It’s not right. And you would never get booked as a speaker or a comedian if you’re doing other people’s material. I remember in my early days of standup by Saara, I was studying Robin Williams, so much word for word and writing out his jokes. And I was doing an open mic night. I saw this guy go up for his very first time. And he was literally doing Robin Williams, word for word. And he bombed. And that was a whoa, it’s not just the words. It’s the character, it’s a persona. And it’s also coming from your life. You know, one of my first jokes written out of the Judy Carter book was what’s a failure. Well, my subway sandwich shop, you know, that was a huge failure. And then she walks you through a process and understanding the delivery part of it, the attitude part of it.
DL (08:53):
I think, you know, Rory, when people telling stories, whether they’re funny or not, but it’s that storytelling bringing it to the point of dialogue where we hear thoughts or their internal thoughts, or we hear the conversation. That’s where the vibrant emotion is. So I looked at my $60,000 debt and she said, okay, brag about it. I’m like what brag about it? And that’s not how normal people think. So if you’d agree with this, that funny people think differently than if we want to be funny, or we need to think the way funny people think. And what we’re saying is we’ve got to look at it the way they look at it. And that’s what you discovered. That’s what I discovered was there’s processes that comedians and humorous go through to create the humor. And then there’s still some testing and tweaking and testing and tweaking great jokes.
DL (09:50):
Aren’t written, they’re rewritten, great speeches. Aren’t written, they’re rewritten. But most people, when you see somebody on their own comedy special, or on one of the late night comedy shows or tonight show or something, you’re seeing the culmination of years and years of one little five minute routine, you don’t see the work. And I think that’s the thing. If you’re willing to put in the work, you could make something funny. You know, the fastest way would be to hire a humorous joke writer, but still you’ve got to own the material they’ve got to interview you. They’ve got to dig it out of you. And then you could have somebody quote, unquote, punch it up, but you still have to deliver it. And so the Judy Carter joke, as you know, my Mark Brown story, that wasn’t even in my championship speech. And mark said, Hey, you know, your speech is about failure.
DL (10:40):
We need a failure. And I’m like, oh well, I used to do this joke about my shop. And he said, go ahead and do it. And I delivered it right there in the board room. No one else is around. And I said, you know, I don’t want to brag, but I took a $60,000 debt. And in six short months I doubled that debt. And so, you know, but it’s a bragging about failing and without the structure and understanding from Judy Carter and going through the exercises like, but when you go through the exercises, what you’re doing is training your brain to look for those things. I mean, you know, you probably watch comedy now and after you learned it, you can see the joke coming. You can see the twist, you can see the punchline. Why? Because you’ve trained your brain to think in a funny way.
RV (11:27):
Yeah. And I, I think, you know, you’re, you’ve, you’ve mentioned a couple of components here that I want to draw out for everybody because you know, the way that I’ve kind of even teed up this conversation is the writing of the joke, right? Like, okay, how do you write the joke? But you’ve already touched on that. A huge part of it is the delivery of the joke and the persona. But then there’s this other part, which I P I think people overlook and even I overlooked for a really long time, which is that identifying the opportunity as the first, like the first key step is to identify, oh, there’s something funny here. And I think it’s like, if you could, it’s, if you can capture it, like, if you can set this alarm, like, ah, there’s something around it, and then you can run it through the mechanics of writing it.
RV (12:20):
And then you get enough stage time, which, you know, I’m surprised we’ve made it a few minutes into this conversation. And we haven’t talked about the Darren LaCroix mantra is stage time, stage, time, stage, time. I mean, that was the thing that was just drilled into my head and thousands of Toastmasters over years and years and years just hear Darren say stage time, stage, time, stage, time. Cause that’s the delivery part. Like you can’t learn the delivery part without just practicing, but coming back to identify, because I’d like to talk about writing and then maybe delivery a little bit as well. Now you, you said earlier, you know, your failures, your flaws and your first. That’s awesome. I’ve never heard you say that before. Where was, where was that? 20 years ago when I needed it. So are there any other tips you have around identifying the opportunity? Cause it’s, I think that’s kind of what, what, I didn’t know, which I do now, and you’re alluding to it is that there, nobody just sits down and goes and writes this brilliant line. Right? It’s, it’s a process that we take people through and if we can go, how do we, how do we identify? Is there anything else around like us noticing it? Yeah.
DL (13:32):
And I know your audience, there’s a lot of people who are presenters. There are entrepreneurs, there are coaches here listening. So one of the ways is if you can create some humor for your specific audience and we’re, we, I don’t know if you knew this early on. When I came from a stand-up comedy into keynote speaking, I basically had no speech. It was just, what is the humerus? So what I would do is I took my clean jokes and I turned them into corporate jokes. And then I was just, I didn’t have enough content for 45 minutes. So what I did is I overcompensated and I customized about them because I still had a day job. And I had a lot of time. Cause I wasn’t speaking that much. So what I would do, one of my secrets leading into what your question is, is I would always call up the clients.
DL (14:22):
And I would ask for 10 names of people who are being in the audience, not just the board of directors, I want the people on the ground, whatever that means in that organization or association. And I want to interview them. And what I ask them is what are your pet peeves? And then I’ll ask them, what are your frustrations? It’s pretty much the same question, but it actually kind of like jumps into a little different part of their brain because humor, okay. Different. Let me differentiate bringing comedy and humor. Comedy cuts down, humor, lifts up comedy. It cuts down means there’s a victim means where, you know, we’re making fun of someone. Well, you can’t really do that in the corporate world, unless it’s the competition. That’s, you know the exception then they’ll love you, but humor lifts up. So when we mean lifting up, what are we talking about?
DL (15:12):
Well, we’re talking about a release of tension. So finding the humor is where is the tension? Where is the tension in their lives? So if I’m talking to a bank, okay. At that bank, where is there tension? If I’m talking to entrepreneurs, where is there tension? Okay. So for entrepreneurs, it might be their employees or staff. If I’m talking to employees or staff, it might be the boss. So where is that frustration? So we need to find where the tension is in order to release it, find where it is order to release it. And then one of my favorite principles, I don’t know if I learned this before I worked with you or after, but I call it the registration desk principle. When I go to a convention or conference, when they’re live, I go to the registration desk and when no one’s around, I pull aside the people who are working the desk and I say, why are people complaining about because their complaints are their frustrations.
DL (16:07):
So I’m not looking for one rogue thing I’m looking for. What is that commonality? So just to give you a quick example, one, I was speaking to save international society for the advancement of value. Engineers still don’t know what that is, but that was, and it was in San Antonio, Texas, and you know, every convention and conference, there’s the tension of those people, the engineers, but there’s also the tension of the event. So I was asking them and at first they said, no. And then they said, well, yeah, everybody can’t find a, one of the meeting rooms HASI and the G. And I was like, oh, that’s interesting. Cause all the meeting rooms are in one area, but they had one more meeting room and it was way off the beaten path. So when I walked up there on stage, I said, you know, good morning, Hey, if you’re looking for HASI and the G and boom, okay.
DL (16:58):
Because it is the common frustration. It is top of mind, I got them. And then I just tagged it. I said, just go out the back door, go through the kitchen. It gets a laugh, go out to Crockett avenue, go about a mile and a half down. When you get to the Alamo, take a right. And they were just rolling, but I identified their tension and that would work anywhere else or would it I’m speaking at the Rio and I was speaking for contours express. These are owners, entrepreneurs, owners of a workout place that used to be, I don’t even know if they’re still in existence, but they were the, the competition to curves, you know? So a woman’s workout place and they’re all the owners and they’re here in Vegas at the Rio. If you know the Rio if you don’t know the Rio, there’s like one tall of rooms where all the rooms are.
DL (17:52):
And then the convention center, you’re going to walk a mile and a half down a hallway, take a right walk, another mile and a half, take a left, walk another it’s far. And so the cool thing about being a middle-aged bald guy is I blend in and nobody notices me before I go on stage. So I just go in and I’m listening, I’m listening. And I hear women. It was 99% women. I hear women in the hallway. They’re wearing their heels. They’re like, wow, this is a long walk. Oh my gosh, I should’ve wore my sneakers, dah, dah, dah, dah. And so I go up on stage and I say, Hey, welcome to the Rio. Isn’t it beautiful. And everybody claps. And I say, I don’t know if you know this or not, but Rio is actually a native American term, which stands for long flip and hall.
RV (18:40):
And in that moment, boom, boom.
DL (18:43):
He loved it. And you know, it won’t work in anywhere else unless there’s a similar frustration. So
RV (18:51):
Go ahead. Well, how do you, so, so I love this, cause this is, you could add this to your list of apps, right? You’ve got your first, your failures your, your flaws, your failures, your first, the frustrations. So like, so how do you write it now? What is one thing that you know, these are, these are such great examples. And in my experience, this is also true. That anything that is real-time in the moment, it’s like, it doesn’t even have to be funny. Like, all you have to do is mention Hacienda G it doesn’t matter how you get there. You just say HASI and to G you know, couldn’t find it. Like, it, it, it’s hilarious is that basically all there
DL (19:32):
Is it’s about them. Well, that is easy. That’s a first step. And the more you do it, but again, just like you, the more you study it, the more you can identify, but you also have to be careful that you’re not upsetting the event planner. You know, if you’re brought in as a speaker. So I always go and have a conversation with the person who paid me, not the person who works for the person who paid me and I run it by them just to make sure I said, look, they’re already upset. They can’t find Hacienda. G like, if I can relieve that tension, you’re going to get less complaints later on. If you don’t want me to bring that up, that’s fine. It’s your call. So I kind of run it by them. And usually they’re like, oh, please do something. Cause they’re complaining.
DL (20:16):
Anyway. So, but as you know, going through the books like that, what most people don’t know, but comedians do is that there are formulas. There are comedy formulas that we learn that you go through. So Rio is a native American term means long flip and hallway. Well, Robin Williams, believe it or not, even though he’s unbelievable at what he does, nobody was better at improv than him. And he would just, you know, fire things off like that photographic memory, but even used formulas when the formula works. So knowing the formula and then how you can take that frustration and pop it into a formula. So for example, Robin Williams had a joke that was a divorce coming from the Latin term, meaning to rip a man’s genitalia out through his wallet. But it’s the same exact formula. What’s the word. Okay. Rio. They were all in his divorce. And then you take the term and I call this, I didn’t invent the formula. I just noticed it. And I named it redefining the redefining formula. So I redefine a word named that the audience is aware of, but I redefine it tying into the frustration of the audience. Right. So that’s just one example, but knowing the formula, so first step is like, Hey, go and learn all the formulas and then you’ll start noticing patterns. Yeah.
RV (21:48):
Yeah. And, and, you know you teach the formulas, we teach them that we’ve come to. But you know, I think all of them, all of these formulas kind of come back to this one idea, which is around the, like basically predicting the brain predicts what it thinks it’s going to hear. And when you say something different than that, that’s kind of like, that’s kind of like the twist now, the thing that’s cool about the F the frustration part of this is like, you don’t even have to know the formula. You just have to, you just have to say it. Once, you know, once you know, the formulas, it’s super powerful because you can, you can, you can kind of like quickly fill in the blanks for things, but on, on that one, w would you say that half, half the battle, at least half the battle is just identifying, this is what everyone’s talking about. This is what they’re frustrated about it. And you just kind of like, bring it up. Yeah. Yeah.
DL (22:43):
That’s 80% of it. I would say because you’re, what’s top of mind set up and a punchline. So a setup is already in the mind of the audience. So what we’re looking for is what are they thinking about? What’s top of mind. Now, if I go back to a convention or a conference two years ago, of course, COVID, isn’t even on the radar screen now it’s top of mind, but now it’s also over done. You want to puke when you hear the word pivot, you’re like, oh yeah, that’s a brilliant idea. So, anyway, it’s knowing what’s top of mind, but again, asking the question. So frustrations change over time and going back to what you just said, the twist, the best analogy I’ve ever heard was George Carlin. He said, it’s like a train going down, a train track. You can see clearly and exactly where the train is going.
DL (23:31):
You see the tracks, you know, the train is going that way. We laugh when our mind is successfully tricked. We laugh when our mind is successfully tricked. And what that means is we laugh when the train is derailed. When we an expectation, what I say, the way I define it as a setup is creating an expectation. A punchline is changing that expectation. So in my championship speech, I talked about Dr. Goddard’s rocket launch, and I said, the rocket took off and it went vertically and I do a big motion, really enthusiastic. And then I say, landed in Auburn. So I create the expectation the rocket went far, but then I do a very matter of fact delivery that it landed in Auburn,
RV (24:18):
Right. Where it took off. Yeah. And that’s, I mean, there’s, there’s there, there’s so many great moments in that speech, which I think is that it’s on, is that on YouTube? Can you go just Google, Darren LaCroix, 2001 world championship speed is still, is still on there. So not, not all every year is up there, but certain ones are, and yours is one of them
DL (24:37):
For the rights to put it up there. Yeah.
RV (24:39):
It’s just, it’s it’s it is literally just classic. I mean, seeing the, the punchline after a punchline. The, the, the other thing that I wanted to talk about in terms of identifying slash writing is callbacks. So frustrations and callbacks to me have a very similar I guess like characteristic of one another, which is that you don’t really have to know the formula. You pretty much just have to comment on the thing and everybody laughs you know, that you got frustration. So can you, can you talk about what a callback is? Cause I think callbacks are one of the easiest ways to get laughs immediately, if you literally just know what it is and just like, you just gotta like flip the switch in your brain and go, okay, I need to be looking for callbacks. Can you, can you talk, talk us through the concept? Yeah. When
DL (25:34):
I get to a convention or a conference, I try to get there and spend a day with the people at the convention, just sitting there listening and observing. But what I’m looking for is what are those big emotional moment or what are the funny moments? Like if a speaker has a funny line and it’s lampshade, like I want to in my speech, see if I can hide it, but then bring up lampshade because it’s gotta be an automatic trigger. So a callback is literally calling back or referring back to a word or a moment. Now we don’t want to just call back to anything. We want to call back to either big emotion or big laughs. So I always, if I’m not able to be there a day ahead of time, I will literally walk around asking people, Hey, what was the funniest moment? What, what do you remember? And it’s looking for commonality, that’s the key I’m looking for commonality. If one person thought one thing was funny. That is not enough. We’re looking for that commonality. So, eh, I don’t know if you were there, but in 2002 I was speaking, I was doing ouch, my winning at the NSA convention from the main stage and it was in Arizona and they had this big opening pomp and circumstance and a guy’s riding in on a horse. Do you remember this
RV (26:57):
Guys? I don’t know if I was there.
DL (26:59):
Okay. Guys riding in on a horse, playing a banjo and it was a big pomp and circumstance opening. It was great. He was awesome. He was talented and the horse goes right up to the front of the stage and he’s playing his banjo well in the middle of the song, the horse poops, but he’s got, but he’s got a bucket on, but the horse overshoots the bucket. Oh. And now, and so yeah, it was a funny moment. It’s like, Hey, it’s a horse. That’s what horses do. So I got Michael on, I don’t know if you know, Michael on a pass world champion, ed Tate and a couple other people. And I sat down and I was like, okay, tomorrow morning, I’m speaking on this stage. How can I use that? How can I call back to that moment? So I’m looking at the opening of my speech.
DL (27:44):
And if you remember, I CA well, I came out and I follow my face in my winning speech. And I give Potter my speech intentionally from the stage. So I do it the same way. I always do it. And then I just go, is this where the horse did it? And it was an 11 second laugh. It was the biggest laugh I’ve probably ever got then people in NSA, still talk about that moment. I’m like, this was a setup from God, you know, like to be able to do my speech the next day, where I fall on my face and the horse pooped the night before and everybody, sorry, you know, that’s the thing is if everybody didn’t see it, it, wouldn’t be funny, really looking for that universal callback in that situation. So if there’s a speaker who talks about microphones and you know, the microphone fell in the toilet, you know, you want to, okay, how can I use it? How can I call back to that? So you look in the middle of your speech or maybe at the opening, how you can connect. Cause it’s taking that emotionally charged moment and tapping into the goodness, the good energy of that moment. So it’s one of the simplest, most powerful things that anyone can do. The callback.
RV (28:55):
Yeah. That’s and if, if I were to follow you, I would go, oh, Darren LaCroix laid off, fell on his face and was laying on stage. That would be an opportunity potentially for a call back. Like, I wouldn’t know exactly in that moment, just like you didn’t in about the horse, but you go, this is a big moment that everybody saw. Everybody will remember this moment. And so that’s where you identify, I love what you said. I did not know that backs, that backstory that you said, okay, you identified it. And then you grab some of your buddies and said, Hey, this happened, how could I use this? And again, it doesn’t have to be the, the beautiful part about both frustrations and callbacks is they have to be brilliantly written, like 90% of the game is just like mentioning it. And I, I love that. So I want to ask you about delivery too, but before we do that, so I got one last question about delivery. Darren, where should people go? I know we’ve had, this has been an awesome deep dive in, into the world of humor, but you teach storytelling stage mechanics, like all the components of also, you know, creating speeches, getting books for your first speeches. Where, where do you want to send people to, if they want to learn more about what you’re up to? Sure. Thanks for
DL (30:19):
Asking. If you want to know the top 10 mistakes speaking mistakes, I’ve been coaching for two decades all around the world, executives, speakers, coaches, and just go to be a sponge.com and it’s a free download. It’s a PDF and yes, you would get my newsletter. So if you want to just get the PDF and opt off, no worries. Just do it. And also the top 10 virtual mistakes. If you want to know about my [email protected],
RV (30:47):
I love that. So we’ll put a link there to be a sponge.com. You can download that. All right. So we talked about identifying a couple of tips on writing when it comes to delivery, what would you say is the, the, the biggest thing that you have to know or understand about delivering the moment like delivering the punchline? You know, the joke, the set up like just the, you know, standing on stage and saying, saying the bit.
DL (31:16):
Yeah, to me, the biggest thing is understanding the power of dialogue. You know, I had been a Toastmaster for seven years in four clubs work my butt off part-time professional, but it wasn’t until I met my coach, Mark Brown, where he showed me that I was telling my stories in the past tense. What I needed to do is bring the audience into the moment. In the first version of my speech, I told people about telling my parents, I wanted to be a comedian. He said, no, no, no. Bring us to the moment, let us hear it, which is dialogue. And then piggybacking on that, my delivery, like one of the places I stand out, every speaker has their skills as a coach and as a speaker and one of mine is character delivery. But what I do well is I convey the emotion, body language, not gesture.
DL (32:04):
A gesture is a rehearse body movement that has no emotional connection to the moment. So what I teach people to do is go watch a Pixar movie, but keep an eye on the eyes of the two dimensional character on stage, because they, the shape of the eye changes with the emotion of the character. When we’re delivering, we need to say it in dialogue, whether it’s internal or external, but we need to convey the emotion of the moment. And then the third biggest thing is we need to show a shift of emotion. So if the story, if we’re telling a story for business purposes, for entertainment purposes, the heart of the story, there’s a shift in emotion. So I always get people, identify the emotion at the beginning of the story and the emotion at the end of the story. And if there’s no change of emotion, that’s not the story.
DL (32:58):
You have the wrong part. There has to be some shift and at least one character. So to show that, you know, you can record yourself and go back and watch the recording shut off the sound and would, you know the emotion of the character. Now, you don’t, I’m animated, but that’s just me and my style. You’ve got to do it your way in your style. But when I went home to tell my parents, I want to be a comedian on stage. It was. So I was all excited. Imagine, you know, my parents’ reaction after stretching their budget to help me through college. And I go home and I walked in the door, mom, dad, I want to be a comedian.
DL (33:37):
I was met by silence. Ouch. So if you’re listening to the podcast, you couldn’t see my face change, but you probably heard it in my voice. Same thing. They’re connected. So I come in excited. So if I was to break down that story, just break down your story, look at your characters, name, each of the character and that one, there’s three characters, mom, dad, and Darren. And what’s their emotion at the beginning. Okay. Mine’s excited. Okay. Mom and dad, they don’t even talk, but they have a beginning emotion, which is they’re anticipating what their son’s going to say. They’re eager. They want to hear. And then boom, I asked that question and mine goes to shock. There’s Kosta, shocked and dismayed. So in that tiny little 17 second story, there’s a shift in at least one character. So if you you’ll be a better storyteller, if you can identify the beginning emotion, the end emotion and make sure you convey it through dialogue, using body language,
RV (34:34):
Love it. Love it, love it. Y’all this is just the beginning. There’s so much to explore here. Obviously we’ve been students of it, our whole career, myself, a J our team. There’s, there’s so much just in the mechanics of presentations that everybody thinks they’re a great speaker. When they, when they come to work with brand builders group, nobody said like, very few people are like, oh yeah, I need help with my speech. Everybody goes, oh, no, I got that part down. And it’s like, you have no idea. Like you have no idea the level of crafting, and it’s not just what Darren does or what we do. Like you said, it’s Robin Williams. It’s Jerry Seinfeld. It’s it is every like the greatest orators on the planet are that way, because they have worked at this. They’ve had stage time, stage, time, stage, time, they’ve been coached through it.
RV (35:25):
They, they, they work onlines, as Darren said, grade lines, aren’t written they’re rewritten. And anyways, Darren, thanks for giving us a little bit of insight into that today. And some practical things that we can do to, to be funnier. I’m so grateful for you, man. And the impact that you’ve had on my life our life, you know, and then yeah, now the, the hundreds of members inside a brand builders group that we’re trying to help, you know, go make a difference in the world through the stuff that you’ve taught us. And man, we just wish you the best. Thanks buddy.
DL (35:55):
Thanks for having me and congratulations on all your success.

Ep 206: How to be a Better Writer with John David Mann

RV (00:07):
Hey, brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for taking the time to check out this interview as always, it’s our honor to provide it to you for free and wanted to let you know there’s no big sales pitch or anything coming at the end. However, if you are someone who is looking to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and get to know you a little bit and hear about some of your dreams and visions and share with you a little bit about what we’re up to see if we might be a fit. So if you’re interested in a free strategy call with someone from our team, we would love to hear from you. You can do that at brand builders, group.com/pod call brand builders, group.com/pod call. We hope to talk to you soon.
RV (00:54):
I would consider my first major media appearance ever to have been in an outlet called networking times magazine. And I got, I want to say I was maybe 22 years old when I got a full, like three page spread story that was written about me. That was huge because it was huge for my confidence. We got some great reach out of the article, and then we included screenshots of that article in the book proposal that we ended up using to get our, our first book deal for take the stairs. Well that the writer of that article is the man that you are about to meet today. His name is John David Mann, and so we had been friends literally since the beginning of my career. And then he Koa, he he’s written about 30 books. They’ve been translated into 35 languages. They’ve sold millions of copies.
RV (01:50):
I still to this day, my, my favorite book and John has written so many since then, but the go giver is my favorite book. He coauthored that with my friend Bob Burg, and that book has just been one of the top five books of all time for me that I’ve ever read. John’s written several fables and just released his first fiction book, which is pretty fascinating. We’ll hear about that. And he also has a new ebook out that’s exclusively only as an ebook called how to write good or at least good, or, and so anyways, my old friend is really great to have you, I can’t wait to pick your brain on some of the writing secrets. Thanks for making time for us.
JDM (02:39):
It’s great. It’s a cliche to say, but it has been too long, but the time is just right. So yeah, good to be here. Good to see you.
RV (02:46):
And I feel like, you know, we, we kind of have touched base every couple years for now, like 20 years and it’s like a few, a few years ago by, and then it’s like, you got a new book or we’re doing something and you know, tell me about so I want to hear just about the fiction book quickly. I mean, I wanna, I wanna understand your writing process, or maybe you can merge these together. What I’m really interested in knowing you know, this podcast is all for personal brands. A lot of what we talk about is digital marketing and branding and positioning and messaging. And we actually don’t talk that much about writing, like at its true core, writing a story, creating content, and you’ve done this non-fiction, you’ve done fables now you’ve done fiction. And I, you know, my only goal today is to try to like steal all your secrets about your writing process for F to get, to get those out of you for free. But you, you just did your first fiction book. So I’m curious, how, why did you do that? How is that different from the other stuff that you have done and like, what are some of the lessons that have come out out of that experience? Yeah.
JDM (03:56):
You know, it’s in the course of all these books, you know, as you know, this, there’s been a lot of different kinds of books. I’ve written a handful of memoirs, which is interesting. It’s like basically telling somebody else, tell me your story and I will make it into a book. And so when you read a memoir, your you’re, you’re taking an existing story. That’s reality that really happened to this person. Right. But you’re still trying to find the story in it. So in a sense, you’re taking that person’s story and you’re rewriting it as you’re not making stuff up, but you’re choosing stuff. You’re framing stuff. It’s like making a biopic. If you’re a movie director. Right. And you’re going to write about, you know Freddie mercury are going to write about you know, Gandhi or whoever you’re gonna write about what events do you choose?
JDM (04:42):
How do you string them together? So you’re fashioning a story and you know, about writing in general. My belief is that no matter what you’re writing, whether you’re writing somebody else’s memoir or a straight non-fiction book, like some of the books I’ve done that are sort of business nonfiction, concept books, or a parable, a fable clearly, or a novel like this was, it just came out or Hey, if you’re writing a blog post or you’re writing a Facebook post or a LinkedIn article, or you’re writing a promotional piece, you’re telling a story, you’ve got a beginning, middle and end. You’re, you’re creating an arc, you’re creating some suspense, you’re creating some interests, you’re creating some intrigue and you’re answering some questions or at least you’re posing some questions. It’s all kind of the same thing. I mean, they’re really different, really different forms, but there’s this, there’s this basic sort of storytelling, DNA imprint.
JDM (05:41):
We’ve all got inside us, huddled around a campfire or huddled around, you know, in a cave however long ago hearing about the saber tooth tiger that one of us killed. We’ve all still kind of got this. Tell me what happened next gene in us. And that’s what expresses itself in story in any medium. So yeah, the novel was wild and completely different experience in one sense. You know, as I think it was telling you before we started that, that I feel like I’ve been climbing these lovely little Hills for 15 years. And all of a sudden I’m like with an oxygen mask on the top of Mount Everest, climbing this novel, say, how do I get up here? And how do I get down, especially how do I get down without breaking my neck? Cause 400 plus page novel. That sounds, that’s a thriller on top of it, which means you can’t let up the tension for a moment. You can’t let it dispense for a moment. You can’t let up the pace for him keeping someone’s attention. So they’re turning pages for 460 pages. It’s a whole different challenge and a whole different world than writing the golden giver which has to do the same thing. But in this little tiny form, it’s like the Go-Giver is like a miniature.
RV (07:00):
I know in a lot of your books are so short, like, like the fables there, you can sit down and read them in one sitting like 400 pages is it’s totally different.
JDM (07:10):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s totally different. By the way, out of all the writing I’ve done, I’ve come to a point where the two things I love to do most are the, are the fables and the novels. So it’s, that’s like, that’s, that’s my, that’s my career, Catherine. I love those parables. I love taking a life message or, or a life principle and spinning that into a story that feels real, that feels compelling, you know, about people that you care come to care about. And if a parable, you know, I say it in the book, how to write good. I say a parables are really easy to write poorly.
RV (07:50):
Yeah. I mean that, like, to me, it freaks me out because you know, I just think the power of a parable, like I think of AIJ. So my wife my business partner, this, our CEO of brand builders group, she, you know, she always makes fun of me for reading boring business books. She calls them boring business books. And, and she loves, she loves fables cause she gets hooked on the story and she, you know, she, she loves to read fiction. And so the, her, her favorite, you know, books, business books are fables and some of mine are too, you know, I think of like the five dysfunctions of a team from pat Lensioni. And then of course you guys did a whole bunch in the, in the Go-Giver series. But like, so can you so here’s my question. Here’s what I don’t think I’m very good at. And I think a lot of people aren’t good at both in writing and speaking is how do you create suspense? Like you just mentioned that for 400 pages, you can’t let off the gas for a second. How do you, like, what is suspense? How do you create it? And then like, how do you know how to write it?
JDM (09:07):
Yeah, I think that’s, that’s a great question. And I think that you know, contact kind of thinking, I’m kind of framing my, my thoughts in the parable space at the moment, because there’s the Go-Giver books. I had the opportunity to write the sequel to who moved my cheese, which was a experience on the other end of the spectrum, right? Cause steal fear. The novel is like 450 page thriller about a serial killer on an aircraft carrier at a wholly different thing who moved my cheese is written at the level of a child it’s Spencer Johnson wrote children’s books. And, and he actually wrote literally children’s books in addition to his adult books. And so to write in the style of Spencer Johnson and write a SQL to who moved my cheese, it’s called out of the maze, was like, I had to, you know, put your brain into that, into that container.
JDM (10:00):
But there’s still suspense in there. And the suspense of the Go-Giver because there’s, you know, in the Go-Giver for those of you who haven’t read it, there’s this character called the connector and you don’t know who he is. And there’s this character called the Friday guests and you don’t know who he is and Joe has got this problem and you can’t imagine how he’s going to solve it. And there, there are these various questions that you don’t really see how they’re going to resolve themselves, but they do the, the, the requirement for the ending of a great mystery or a great suspense novel. Even the book, I would say like the Go-Giver requirement is that when you reach the end, you go, wow, I never saw that coming. And yet the moment you see it, you go, of course, that had to happen. It has to be inevitable, but a complete surprise at the same time, if it’s a surprise and you go, like Yvette came out of left field, I have no idea how that happened.
JDM (10:58):
That’s not fair. You broke the rules of the game. It has to be believable and inevitable and yet I didn’t see it coming. So, you know, actually our lives are like that. I mean, my marriage is like that. I’m, I’m married to my best friend, this amazing woman. And I meeting her was a complete surprise. It’s not something I ever could have planned, you know, writing the Go-Giver with Bob Berg was a complete surprise. It wasn’t something I sought. I’m getting off topic there, but so how do you create suspense? It’s kind of the opposite of giving a lecture or, or lecturing in the worst sense. You’re lecturing in the sense of, of just talking at people. Obviously if you give a great public talk, you don’t do this. You tell stories in a great public talk, but when you’re just lecturing at people, when you’re just telling people something, when you’re just talking at, let’s say you’re mansplaining, I’ll use current terminology.
JDM (11:58):
Like that’s, that’s this awful form of communication where you’re not listening. You’re just talking. Suspense is created by questions. What creates suspenses you pose questions. And not only do you not know the answer, but you can’t even imagine what the answer is. Like, where is this going? Like, where did that come from? What, you know, the classic thriller is kind of a, who done it, you know who somebody’s got dead, it’s murder in there. So who, who killed the person, but you don’t need murder to have mystery. There’s mystery in the seven habits of highly effective people, because the moment you see the title, you go, wow, what are those? How well does Stephen Covey unwrap those, those seven habits? The stories he tells that reveal them. It’s not a super suspenseful book, but he unwraps beautifully. So suspense is about setting up a question and then unwrapping the answer piece by piece in a way that every little morsel is delicious and every little morsel leaves you wanting more. That’s I don’t know if that’s a good way of describing it, but that’s the best way I can think of. I
RV (13:16):
Know. Well, I know it’s, it’s, it’s just hard, you know, I think of storytelling and there’s like so many things, it’s this beautiful blend of both science and art, right? Like there’s structure, there’s a lot of structure to it. And I think you know, a lot of it is artistic even, even to hear you describe it, I mean, to go, okay, I know I need to create an ending that is inevitable, but unpredictable, I’m gonna, that’s how I captured what you were saying. Right. It’s it’s like, of course it had to end that way, but I didn’t see that coming. And then you go, okay, I have to create questions along the way. And so, you know, do you just create questions through characters or like what, what if it is a non-fiction type of writing? I mean, obviously if it’s a parable, which I, which maybe is what you’re saying, like, you you’ve really come around to enjoying payables and novels, because you’ve got, I presume that you’ve got these characters and these kinds of dynamics that can create questions without just kind of posing. Well, I was on a, I was on a mission to understand, you know, the answer to this problem. And so I spent five years researching it and here’s what I found is that, that kind of thing. Yeah.
JDM (14:28):
And if you look at I mean, if you look at great non-fiction writing and I’ll give you an example Malcolm Gladwell, you take a book by blink or, or a book, the tipping point, or, you know, he’s got so many of these that are there along the same lines where they take the hero of the story is not a person. The hero of a story is a concept. It’s like an idea, like the tipping point, it’s how little things make a big impact. That isn’t the exact word, but something like that. Right? So he takes an idea and he unwraps it, using a lot of stories. He does exactly what you do when you’re on stage or what any good speaker does when you’re on stage. You have an idea you want to convey to your audience and you convey it by, by stringing stories together, little vignettes from your life or other, other people’s lives.
JDM (15:19):
Because when you can, you can, you can frame a principle around real people or real characters. It comes to life for people. So Aesop could have said, you know, if you’re slow and steady, if you’re careful what you’re doing, you’re gonna, you’re going to get there sooner, but people will go. Yeah, actually, that’s great. So instead he creates this hair and this tortoise, and now you go, well, who’s going to win the race. I think the hair is going to win. It’s obvious. Right. But it must be not him, but it must be the tortoise because he’s the slow one. But how is that going to work? You know, it’s like, it’s interesting. Suddenly that’s an example of a story at the parables in the Bible, in the new Testament are great examples of teaching tools, teaching stories that are, that, that make principles come to life with characters.
JDM (16:01):
But so back to your question for me, the answer is, yes, you said, do you create these questions through characters? I do. I do. I set up, you know, for me, whether I’m writing a novel or a parable, there’s a basic idea of kind of the setup. Like when Bob and I started working on the Go-Giver, he already had the title. We kind of knew the point of the story. Not kind of, we knew the point of the story. The point of the story was if you put your focus on others, more than yourself, on what you can provide in value, as opposed to what you can get in a value in any situation, your life will be better. That was the point, oh, we could have done the Go-Giver in a sentence and then a sentence. Yeah, that’s it. The point of my novel steal fear is a disgrace Navy seal stocks, a serial killer on an aircraft carrier in the middle of the Pacific ocean.
JDM (17:12):
And obviously you figure the point is going to be, he gets caught. We think, we hope you can kind of tell the story in a sentence. But then you, you create these characters and then you, you just breathe enough life into them so that they feel real. And then you see what happens and you start asking the questions like, well, what happens when he goes here? What happens when he goes there? Joe is beginning of the Go-Giver has a problem. What’s his problem. He’s in a business he’s frustrated. What’s, you’re frustrated about. I don’t know. We didn’t know. So you start asking questions. The beauty of, of doing that in both a parable and a novel is that I, the writer don’t necessarily know the answers. It’s like, I work to figure out what the answers are. I work to follow the story and see where’s this going? And so when, when the reader, when you, the reader start to follow the breadcrumbs from page to page, I was doing the same thing. You were a few months, I didn’t know either when
RV (18:17):
You have the whole arc mapped out, like you kind of know the ultimate destination, like you’re saying like the premise that he will have the book, right? Like you kind of know, okay, this is the very end. And then you kind of go, okay, let’s, here’s a couple of characters. And then, and then you just kind of like day by day, you go, what if this happened? What if that happened? Like how, how would these people interact? That’s right,
JDM (18:38):
Exactly what feels right. What seems, and I’ll give you a great example. There’s, you know, the Go-Giver has several books in the parable series and by the way, there’s a fourth one coming. We’ve got the, give her a leader that Go-Giver influencer, which I want to talk about for a sec. Cause it is an example. And then in the spring, we’re going to have the Go-Giver marriage, which my wife and my wife and I co-wrote this one. So we’re excited about that. But in the Go-Giver influencer, the third book, the basic premise of the book is it’s about seeing other people’s points of view. It’s like we could have called it. The Go-Giver negotiator. It’s about people who see things differently, turning an argument into a resolution, turning an opposition into an Alliance. That’s the basic thesis of the book. And so we start out with two characters who are in a tough negotiation and they’re basically opponents.
JDM (19:30):
And we knew that by the end of the book, there was going to be some really cool resolution that neither of them saw coming, but which would totally work. And the thing of it was neither of, neither of us saw it coming either. Like we didn’t know what that resolution was going to be. So it’s like we set up the situation, is it, I wonder how this is going to resolve. We knew what was going to happen at the end was going to resolve how, you know, we were discovering it in the process. So I think there’s, you mentioned earlier, there’s a balancing act. You have sort of the science and the art. There’s, there’s a structure side to writing and there’s kind of a flow side to writing and you’ll hear writers debate about whether you should use an outline or not. They call them plotters versus pantsers, plotters figure out a plot first.
JDM (20:21):
This is what James Patterson does figure out a plot. And then you kind of write the story. Pantsers like writing by the seat of your pants. Pantsers just start at page one and go, Stephen King says he’s a pantser. And I think this debate is a little specious because I really think that if you look got inside their brains, everyone’s doing a little bit of both or a mix of both. I know for me, I always have an outline, but it isn’t where it starts. This is by the way, true for a novel, a parable, it’s true for a blog post. It’s true for an article I’m going to write, I’ll have an outline, but I don’t, it’s not where I start. I start with just like an idea, a concept, a situation, a character, a piece of dialogue, whatever, from something that just as a spark and it’s always going back and forth between taking just random ideas and spontaneous writing stuff and kind of molding it into a structure and then taking the structure and saying, yeah, but then what happens over here? And then messing up again? So I go back and forth between structure and flow. I even have two different places in my, in my room where I, where I do it. I’m sitting at my structure place in my desk and over there in the corner, I can’t get over there in the corner. I have my overstuffed chair, which is where I sit with a pad of paper and a pen and just make stuff up. And I have no idea what’s coming.
RV (21:55):
So how do you get, how do you, well, maybe talk, talk to us about characters, right? Like how do you develop a character? Cause I, you know, like I’ve started watching I’ve started paying attention to this a lot in recent years because one of the things I realized is like, gosh, I have to become a better storyteller. Like to what you’re saying. I’ve realized if I want to get my points across more effectively, I have to become a better storyteller, which actually for me has been frustrating. Like I love the boring, just give me the information. Like I, and it’s hard because as a consumer, I actually do like that, but it’s, I think it’s very rare. Like people, they have to be engaged and entertained and you know, if you just deliver the punchline, it’s not punchy. If there isn’t that suspense or that conflict along the way, it doesn’t sink in. And then so I’m like, well, crap. I have to like, learn how to do this thing. I’m not naturally good at it. And I don’t really love, or didn’t really, I didn’t really love storytelling. And so, you know, like I think of, I think of one of our favorite shows as modern family. I mean, it is, it is our favorite show. We’ve watched it. Have you ever, have you ever seen the show
JDM (23:01):
Completely? Totally. Yes.
RV (23:03):
So we have seen every single episode in every season, every one of them we have seen at least at least six or seven times every single episode. And you know what I realized finally, after years now of watching the show is going, oh, there is a formula to this, which is basically each episode. They start with these characters who have very salient features. So each character has very distinct features. And then every episode they basically say, okay, what if we put these three characters together in these two characters together and these ones, and then go, what would happen if these extreme personalities got paired up in these different arrangements? And then I, and I kind of feel like, oh, that I think that maybe is how they’re, how they’re writing like a chemistry set. Yeah. Like I’m mixing these things together, but you know, so how do you develop characters? Where do you come up with these, you know, ideas? And if you’re just, you know, if you’re doing it, if you’re a pantser and you’re just kinda like letting it flow, how do you do it to where it doesn’t suck and isn’t boring. Yeah.
JDM (24:09):
So for me, by the way, I’m much more structure oriented than, than, than, you know, flow oriented. It’s kind of a very methodical nature. I come at it like a composer and I S you know, I was a composer before I was a writer and classical music was my training, my upbringing. And so I think like, like, you know, a symphonic composer which is a very structural thing. So a couple things about, about characters. First thing I want to say is the fact that you said you’re naturally suck at this is awesome. Because if, if you, if you come to something from a place of nothing naturally inclined to do it, you can become so great. Like, I’ll give you an example. I, I started doing these military books with Brandon Webb, my Navy seal friend. I know nothing about the military. It’s like writing a book in German when I don’t speak German.
JDM (24:57):
And I have to learn the language just to write the book. But, you know, there’s, there’s no one who loves the English language, like somebody who was brought up somewhere else who learns it as their second language. That was my dad’s case. He came from Germany and he like, no, he loved English, like no native American, whatever love. So that’s the first thing I don’t come up with these characters automatically. I’m not, I don’t consider myself a gifted at this naturally, like Stephen King just kind of shakes his arms and colorful characters, spill out. I’m not like that. So I’ll start out with a character, with a character. And by the way, one of my writing teachers says that before you start a novel, you spend weeks and weeks and weeks writing character profiles, where like you ask all these questions, you answer them all, and you, and you come to know this character, like better than, you know, your brother.
JDM (25:50):
Then you start the novel. I tried and I couldn’t really do it. And interesting when I S when I start a character, when I create a character, he’s kind of a, like a stereotype or a caricature at first. So like, you know, Joe and Pindar Joe is this, you know, struggling young business guy. And Pindar is this wise old mentor or in my novel, there’s this captain, the ship captain who a jerk he’s, he’s, he’s a, he’s an. And it was, it would have been so easy to make him like a cartoon villain.
JDM (26:28):
So then what I do is I do something very much like what you do in real life. I used to run a sales organization, and I had people who were terrified and making cold calls and terrified and making sales calls. And they would say, when I get, and they would say, when I get in the phone, it’s like, you know, I freeze up because I feel like, I don’t know. I I’ve got all this stuff, I want to say, but it feels can, that feels hollow. And so my thing was, when you get on the phone, ask yourself the question, who is this person I’m talking to? Yeah, you got your product or your service. You got your stuff, you got your pad, or you’ve got your, your, you know, all of that. That’s already in your head. So just let that go for a moment, ask the question, who is this person I’m talking to?
JDM (27:16):
Not like, what do they need so I can sell them. But just who are they? I’m just curious, be curious about the person and not, you can’t grill them like third degree. Where did you come from? Where’d you grow up? How many siblings do you have? But just be curious. That’s what it’s like with a character. Curiously, these characters, this guy is, is a jerk of a leader. He’s an aircraft carrier captain that is terrible leader. He doesn’t have any sympathy of risk people. He doesn’t talk to his people. No one really looks up to them. They just do, because they have to go that’s the position, but they don’t naturally because they think all things is a jerk. Okay. What is he most worried about? What concerns him most, when a problem comes up, how does he react? It’s like, I just get curious about asking questions and you see just like popping up little detail tales about somebody, the way they, the way they respond, the way they say certain, like catchphrases will come out or certain ways of talking will come out.
JDM (28:24):
And they start to come to life. It’s I still find it challenging for me. It’s not something I, I I’m, I come to naturally, so I have to work at it, which is good, because that means I have to make it happen. You know, that’s true with, with everything, right? Whether it’s a parable or it’s a novel or, or anything else, or for that matter, if I’m writing a like a principal, like I’m writing a blog post about, you know, leadership. Well, I say to them said, give me an example of that. I try to think of an event that’s happened in my life that somehow reflects that. And I think of the people in that event, I always ask myself questions. What does that look like when it actually happens? So that’s, you know, that’s, that’s kinda where it’s at in the novel.
JDM (29:13):
There are a lot of things that happen. There’s a lot of situations or characters. They were vaguely echoes of real characters and real just because that’s, you know, that’s where I went there. Well, I dipped into to start to make it the life. You’ll hear film actors, talk about how, in order to play this role, they had to excess this memory of their own, his own experience. Like in order to play this greeting father, they had to access when their dog died and how sad they were. And I used to think that’s so pretentious. That’s like actors speaking, Hollywood actors. That’s how they talk. But I, as a writer, I started realizing that’s really true. You know, when you want to write somebody, who’s grieving, you go find a place in your life where you’ve grieved and you remember that, and it kind of opens that door for you. And so I think the, the real skill to answer your question about where characters come from, it’s empathy, it’s all empathy. You tap your empathy. And that’s where I think stories and characters kind of that’s the wellspring that they come out of.
RV (30:23):
Wow. That is so good. That is so, so powerful. I think suspense, plot lines, being curious, characters, you know, coming from empathy really, really great stuff, John, I I just admire so much what you do and, and you’re truly an artist in the way. You’ve been able to apply it across so many different things. Where do you want people to go? Okay, you mentioned this book how to write good or at least good, or which is a, is an ebook that you have, or, you know, where, where do you want people, if they want to connect with you or people who are aspiring writers or just wanting to be better at the craft of writing how can they learn more about you?
JDM (31:06):
Yeah, it’s funny because the book itself grew out of podcasts and interviews, just like this conversations like this, where people would ask questions about writing and I’d come up with an answer and say, oh, I should write that down. I only meant to do a little like 12, 14, 18 page, little sort of ebook article. And it turned into a full fledged book. So I hear it is masquerading as a physical book. I’m doing it right now, as you said, just as an, as an ebook, it’s a free download on my website. I imagine someday I’ll really publish it. And it’ll be, it become a a real boy like Pinocchio, but right now there’s a new book that you can buy. You can get free on my site, which is just my name, John David mann.com. And you go to Johnny batman.com and you’ll see up there, you know, ebook free ebook, whatever that’s, that’s, that’s what this is. I love
RV (31:54):
That. I love that so much. Well, you know, thank you for the work that you put into this because your, your characters are delightful. And they’re everything that you just described there they’re dynamic. They are real, they are multi-dimensional, they, they are people that we have all met in real life, which makes sense, because there, there are people that you have met they’re based on those, and, you know, specifically the way that you weave a tale into you, you can take one simple principle. That is a sentence like it literally could be a tweet. And from that you extrapolate this, this beautiful, wonderful, entertaining, uplifting, curious page, turning, sorry, that’s just such a bit more, it’s just such a more enriching way to get to that destination and a more effective one too, you know? And so we really appreciate your work and we appreciate you very much sharing several of your secrets here with us for free.
JDM (32:56):
I certainly appreciate it too. I love being here. And I have to say, you know, in the balance between telling a story versus teaching a principle, either paranormal, you’re always doing both. It’s a tricky balance because in my mind, the story, the story has to always lead story has to be king because the principal only works with the story as king. I got to the end of steel, fear, the novel, and turned around, looked back and realized that it was teaching a leadership principle. It’s like, it’s a parable, it’s a leadership, parable disguised as a crime novel. My parable, my parable, I have it’s, you know, w we’ll never die, I guess. It’s like they don’t go away.
RV (33:32):
That is awesome. That’s awesome. Well, we wish you the best, my friend. Thanks for being here. And thanks for your support after all these years. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We’ll do it again. A couple of years away.

Ep 204: How to Start a Keynote Speaking Career with Shep Hyken

RV (00:07):
Hey, brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for taking the time to check out this interview as always, it’s our honor to provide it to you for free and wanted to let you know there’s no big sales pitch or anything coming at the end. However, if you are someone who is looking to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and get to know you a little bit and hear about some of your dreams and visions and share with you a little bit about what we’re up to see if we might be a fit. So if you’re interested in a free strategy call with someone from our team, we would love to hear from you. You can do that at brand builders, group.com/pod call brand builders, group.com/pod call. We hope to talk to you soon. I love
RV (00:55):
When I get to introduce, to introduce you to some of my long lifetime or career long friends, and that’s what we get to do today with Shep Hyken Shep is one of those people who is amazing. And he truly is out there as a leader in his niche and his vertical and this entire industry. And a lot of people say, they’re speakers. And I know if they’re really speakers by whether or not I speak on the same stages with them. If I lose events to them, if I say, who did you have last year? And Shep is one of those guys where it’s like, oh yeah, we’ve had Shep. We’ve had him. We loved him. He’s here next year. Dah, dah, dah, dah. So he is a, in the professional speaking hall of fame. He is also a New York times and wall street journal, bestselling author.
RV (01:40):
He is a customer service and customer experience expert. And this is the author of several books moments of magic to a loyal customer, the cult of the customer several others. And anyways, we’re his here gonna share some war stories about how do you actually build a real speaking career? How do you, how do you actually sell, write and sell books? And and then also I think, how do we create a better customer experience as speakers, authors, coaches, financial advisers, small business owners, let’s call it for our customers. So anyway, Shep, welcome to the show, man.
SH (02:17):
Hey man, it is so great to be here, Rory. You’re awesome. I’ve known you for, I’ve known you for years. Many, many years. I was a kid. I was like, you were in the program when I first met, you know, you were running.
RV (02:31):
I was a volunteer that I was, I was, I was I think the first year I met you, I was the chair of the youth program because Eric Chester was like, you know, leading the thing or sometimes I got volunteered through it. But anyways man. Yeah. It’s, it’s great. So, and I would love to hear about your start to little bit. I think that would be helpful. You know, people hear these terms, New York times, best-selling author hall of fame speaker. Right. And it’s like, well, It happens overnight, right? Yeah.
SH (03:00):
It takes 20 years for it to happen overnight, but it happens. Yeah.
RV (03:04):
So how did you get, how did You get started? Like how did you get your first gigs? Like what did you charge? And you know, like in the very beginning, how did it come together?
SH (03:13):
I’m going to tell you everything, nothing will be held back. I’m going to speak a hundred percent from experience, no opinion. I want to give you data and information and if it works for you fine or not fine, if it doesn’t, but it worked for me or if it didn’t work for me, I’ll tell you that as well. So I’ve been doing this for quite a while. I don’t have gray hair that you can see, but 1983 was the year that I started my business less than a year out of college. And what had happened is go back gosh, 10 years, even before I graduated college, I was about 12. I started a birthday party magic show business. And from there I grew into working in nightclubs and eventually corporate events and other types of private parties, maybe for adult parties. But the point is, is I had a background in performing.
SH (03:59):
Now. All that meant is when I saw a couple of motivational speakers shortly, like I say, less than a year out of college, I thought I could do that. I, I, I don’t stage before. I, I, I, I think I could do that now. I just have to something I have to write about something and I don’t know what it’s going to be yet. And, and so understand that my parents taught me some great customer service skills when I was younger, like saying thank you, calling people up and asking them how they liked the show and getting specific feedback to make the show better. And I had no idea that was all about customer appreciation, process improvement, getting feedback, but that those are tenants of customer service. So I saw Zig Ziglar and Tom Hopkins and we all made, I hope most of us know who they are Zig since passed away, but Tom’s actually out there still kicking.
SH (04:46):
And I bought two items that night. I bought a set of audio cassette tapes and some of your audiences too young to know what that is. And there were eight of them. It was called see with the top, it was total motivation goal setting. I also bought a book how to master the art of selling. And I believe it’s still available today. And I read that book in about three days and I listened to those tapes over and over again, over the next maybe three, four or five days, I was immersing myself in Zig Ziglar and Tom Hopkins. And I went to the bookstore and I bought every, I went and I said, what am I interested in? I bought like three or four books in the entire, the entire bookstore business section was maybe six feet. It’s one shelf. That was it. There wasn’t racks and racks of books.
SH (05:32):
And I was drawn to the customer service experience books. So that’s how I decided I wanted to do this. And that’s how I, I kind of chose my topic at 22. You’re like early twenties, actually 22. When I saw them, I might, I did had just turned 23 when I started my business. Okay. And when I graduated college, I was asked to go to work for the family business, which they own gas stations and they own I mean, it was a small chain of station, so it was kind of a cool job. And I would go from station to station, a little dirty, getting, doing audits, going out in the, you know, checking the tanks and all that with the meter stick anyway base that was in June when I started full-time and in September they said, Hey, we’re selling the company.
SH (06:18):
I went, what am I supposed to do now? So I stayed with it for a short time as they won some things down. But that was it. I mean, a few months later I’m without a job, but that’s okay. I mean, I never really thought anything of it. I just thought this is all part of life and this is what you have to do. So when I went to the bookstore, I’m attracted to like in search of excellence from Tom Peters. And I believe Waterman is his name. And then I saw a couple of books by Ron Zemsky and Carl Albrecht on customer service. So I bought these books, read them. I said, this is it. And how am I going to get clients? And this is to your point, this is how I really got started. I went to the bookstore, I mean, to the magazine store.
SH (06:55):
And I bought every magazine. That was a business magazine, which was like, you know, there weren’t that many, I can’t remember what they were business. We, whenever they were, if they had a full page ad, I thought they’re big enough to be selling something. They probably got a Salesforce. Then maybe they need a speaker. And always the phone number was never the right phone number, take it to headquarters. It was like a call center. I went to the library. There was no internet back then. Remember you wouldn’t remember, you weren’t even born back then,
RV (07:25):
Were you? I was born in 82. So I was [inaudible]. I’ve
Speaker 5 (07:32):
Been in business almost as long as you are. That’s
RV (07:35):
Right. That’s right.
SH (07:38):
Anyway, I tore out all the full page ads. I went to the library and they had these directories. Some of them were on microfiche. Some of them were actually in big volumes of books that I can open up and find out who the current president C you know, executive VP of marketing, you know, all of the salespeople
RV (07:56):
To get clients, but you looked at it as like they’re advertising for, for them to become a client of yours. I love this. So you look them up and you’re like, this company must have some money. And so you, and so you look up their contact information every day and you could
SH (08:11):
See their sales and, and it was, you know, so I went to these directories and I made this list. I call it the target 100 and I made a list of a hundred companies. And I said and by the way, it took me, I don’t know, month and a half to go through. Because even though I said, I’m going to make 20 calls a day. You might only reach two or three people. And there was voicemail. There was no email. It was just, it was, it was, and I put everything in little file cards and I had my little tickler file and
RV (08:40):
CRM,
SH (08:41):
Like, yeah. So there wasn’t such a thing as CRM. Now I did get my first computer. One of my clients was Epson EPS. When they make printer, they also made computers and I, the guy wanted me to do a regional sales. So I went and did the meeting in exchange for expenses and a computer. And I remember my, my first database was floppy disks. All of the A’s were on this disc. The B’s were on this, this, this, oh, wow. Yeah. And so
RV (09:12):
Sorry. So you just called these people up and, and you said, you just said, Hey, I’m a speaker. And you just said, I’m a speaker. I speak on customer experience. And, and, and then you just, and they said, what’s your fee. And you just gave him some number and that’s how you start
SH (09:29):
It. And I don’t mind, you know, I share, I would tell you, I would share my number. It was $500 for a speech. And my goal was in 1983. Remember I’m only 22, just turning 23 if at the end of the year. So this is about, I would say the official start date of my business was I mean, I ramped up a little bit. I had everything ready to go, but August 1st was doors open. Yeah. And so for the next five months, my goal was to get at least two speeches. That would be a thousand dollars a month. I remember my living expenses with apartment and utilities room and board was about 11 or 1200 bucks a month. I had some money in the bank, not a lot. I said, but if I could make a thousand a month, I can make it through this year.
SH (10:12):
If I could make 2000 a month by next year, I’m in the profit zone. And I wanted to double every year. So I learned this from Zig. I created a ten-year plan from age 23, the age 32. Okay. And I hit that plan at around age. I’m going to say right around age 30 or so, I hit my mark five or six years. Yeah, well maybe more like eight, eight years, but it took eight years to where I’m ma so I had a thousand, 2,004,000, so 4,000 and then 8,000. And so it’s like, then I got a hundred thousand gross than a hundred thousand net. And then eventually my goal was a quarter of a million a year in income. And then when I hit that, I had to reset my goals. So that took me to age just under age 40. So now I had a goal for my next decade of my life.
SH (11:01):
And by the time I hit age 40, my goals were starting to change from 100% financial to lifestyle mixed with financial. I even had my wife tell me one day, chef, you’re doing really well. You’re working so hard. You’re never home. And one day you’re going to come home and nobody’s going to be here. The house will be empty. There will be no furniture and you will be on your own. And that was a big eye-opening, you know, whoa. I need to get some balance in my life because I was churning and burning. And but the part I was burning was my life was my personal
RV (11:36):
And all of this just comes from basically finding people that have meetings, contacting them, letting them know that you’re available to speak on X topic, which has not changed. Like it has not changed in 50 years. It’s, it’s, it’s the same thing now where you doing some speeches for free early on?
SH (11:58):
I, you know, I $500. It’s almost for free. Yeah. But, but I would do anything. I mean, it wouldn’t
RV (12:05):
Be considered that today, but back then, I mean, 500 bucks was still like $500,
SH (12:10):
Like making 1200 or 1500.
RV (12:12):
I mean, it’s still something. Yeah.
SH (12:14):
Yeah. And so yeah, the short answer is yes, I would do free. So between 1983 and 1988, I was really rogue on my own, no support. Nobody told me what to do about anything I had. I had found Dottie Walters, which is a name from the past, which you may or may not know. She was very involved in the national speakers association. She had a speakers bureau and she had a directory of other speaker bureaus. And somehow another, I came across her publication. So I bought her book. And so I was learning about the industry, but I was really out on my own, but in 88 I joined the national speakers association. And this is a, this is definitely a plug for NSA national speakers association in that even if you’re a coach, a consultant, even an accountant or a lawyer, if you go with the idea that all you’re going to do is learn how speakers market themselves. It’s the exact same way that every what I would call entrepreneurial and for lack of a better term, I’ll call it a practice type of business would market themselves. Yeah. There’s a lot of advantage there. Right. Anyway. And I would
RV (13:20):
Say too, when we, we S we talk about this a lot, that both, whether you’re cause a lot of our clients are financial advisors, they are accountants, they’re lawyers, they’re chiropractors, they’re whatever is that. And, and as a speaker cause, cause, cause our story about how we started would be very similar. We called out of the phone book, the yellow pages phone book, and we went and spoke for free. But even to this day, the fastest way to take, we tell, we say to clients the fastest way to go from being a stranger to a lifelong fan is a one hour presentation. And so if you just go deliver, I mean, in financial services, they call this the like dinner seminars they’ve been doing that for decades. It’s still work.
SH (14:04):
It does. And you know what, if so over the years a transition from me making those calls to my assistant, making most of those calls doing nothing, the only people I would talk to is if it was set up in advance is an appointment to talk to someone. Not because I’m a that was just seemed to be like, it’s hard to not know because
RV (14:24):
You’re a prima Donna, even though you are, but that’s not why
Speaker 5 (14:28):
You did it that way. It’s not because it’s
SH (14:30):
The same way. Right? It’s positioning you, you know, the guy who’s groveling for money is probably not the expert you want to hire well and it saves you time. Yeah. And, and you know, it was, it was efficient by the way, in the beginning, when I didn’t have an assistant, I just doing this on my own. I would be really, really busy and then nothing. So what did I do here? And that nothing time I would get back the phone and smile and dial, and then I get really busy again. And then when that war wore off, because I couldn’t make phone calls and it was really hard to, to stay and do calls from on the road compared to what you do today. You can’t, we didn’t have a cell phone back then. So anyway, what happened over time is yes. I transitioned to my assistant making most of those calls today.
SH (15:13):
It’s a little different. I mean, my business today is tons of word of mouth. I am, I don’t consider myself just a speaker. If you ask me on the airplane, what I do for a living, I’m not going to say I’m a professional speaker who, you know, but we can get, well, what did you say? I w well, I would ask you a question. Have you ever walked away from a business or gotten off the phone and you thought, wow, that was an incredible experience. That was amazing. Those people are just unbelievable. And of course, you’re going to say, yeah, I go, well, that’s what I help my clients achieve. And it begs for how do you do that? And I said, well I actually write books and hundreds of articles on customer service and experience and companies hire me either to speak at their events, industry events, corporate events, or my trainers go out and deliver training. We have online on demand, virtual video based training, you know? So then we get into the how tos, but we want to set up like, yeah, I totally understand what that concept is before we get into how I do it. But I love that guy. That’s a cool, I love
RV (16:14):
That of going to the average person on an airplane. If you say a speaker, they go, oh, that’s cool. And they would be like, I can never hire you. I don’t know anyone who needs like, but if you go this amazing customer experience and they would go, you should work with my friend. Cause they S they suck. Or you, you would like these people because they really like, you know, customer experience. That’s great winds up
SH (16:35):
A conversation as opposed to a, because sometimes, oh, I’m a professional speaker. Okay. I don’t even know exactly what that is, but it sounds good. And I’m just going to start reading my book again. And by the way, I prefer if they would read their book and that just all
RV (16:49):
You have to do is tell them you’re a pastor or you sell insurance. Or if you say like, Hey, I, I raised money for political foundation. Then they stopped talking
SH (16:58):
To you. There you go. And we won’t say which one, if we can find out who they love, then we go the opposite direction, no matter who it is. So I can be conservative. I can be liberal, whatever it takes to get them to leave me alone. So, but all kidding aside today I’d even said it, you know, we’re coming out of the pandemic, right? And we need to spend more time doing the direct interaction we need to get back in front of our clients. That’s not going to happen by hoping the phone’s going to ring. It’s going to happen because we’re emailing more. We’re going on. Linkedin. We’re finding people that whose titles and their companies match up with my criteria. We’re asking them, Hey, we’re just connecting with people that you think would be interested in my content, you know, or you and I were talking about our annual reports that we’ve created from studies, by looking at different parts of the population.
SH (17:52):
Mine is on customer service and experience. So last year we created the achieving customer amazement report. And we went out and did a study of a thousand consumers, you know, weighted to the census of the U S and we’ve got great insights. That’s what we send to our potential clients. They go, wow, this is pretty interesting. What would you like to talk about it and how it applies to your business? No charge. I would just like to learn what you do. You learn what I do, and maybe we work together. Maybe we don’t, it doesn’t matter, but we’re all friends when it’s over. And the LinkedIn is the new telephone. And it’s great because it seems like the response, first of all, you can send out a lot more queries through LinkedIn or, or make more potential connections. The percentage of getting responses are much higher, you know, based on the effort you put in, I might make a hundred calls in a week.
SH (18:40):
And I’m lucky if I talked to 10 or 12 people, and I’m lucky if it goes 12 people, maybe one of them, maybe two could be interested. And if I can amass a group of about 20 people that might turn into one or two speeches of those people that are really interested. So I actually had, at one point we tracked every number and that’s so important to track what works and what doesn’t work. So as I learned from going to the national speakers association conferences, when I make those calls, there are certain questions that I want to ask that qualify them for me. Now, I got to know my industry pretty well. So I would ask, do you hire professional speakers? And if they say, no, what’s a professional speaker, then we know they’ve not paid for one. I’m happy to explain it to them, but I’m very quick to get off the phone because I don’t want to make a two-step process in the sale. I don’t want to convince them they need to spend money and then convince them it’s me. They need to spend, I just want to find out if they go, yeah, we’ve hired speakers. Well, tell me who you’ve hired. And sometimes they’ll tell me, well, we brought in our best customers. Well, that’s not a professional speaker, but if they say, yeah, we brought in Rory Vaden, or we brought in, you know Scott McCain or Jay Baer, all my friends, I knew
RV (19:52):
Awesome. They got at least 500 bucks. If they’re bringing, if they’re pulling in those guys, they got at least 500 bucks,
SH (19:59):
Right? So, I mean, the time I got to NSA, true story, I was charging a thousand to $1,200 a speech in 1988. And when I joined NSA. So you remember I did magic as a background. I was still doing some magic shows, but I said to myself, as long as they’ll pay me the same thing as it is to speak, I’m happy to do that magic show. So for a thousand dollars, that’s a great gig for a magician. But as my fees started to go up, not a lot of people willing to pay a thousand bucks for a magic show. So I, when I joined NSA, I found a mentor. His name was Phil Wexler, still around, just as birthday, the other day, same as mine and Phil. I went and we did it. I recommended him for some speeches. And he said he was going to send me a commission.
SH (20:45):
And he owed me quite a bit of money. And it isn’t like he owed me money, but he would have paid me that money. But I said, before you write the check and send it to me, would you keep it? But I want a day of your time. I flew out to San Diego. I spent an entire day with him. And when I came back, I tripled my fee. I said, no more magic shows. And I became laser focused on just what I wanted to be hired to do. Now, could that have happened a year or two earlier? Sure. But it doesn’t matter. I was doing pretty well. Anyway. I was booking 150 dates a year. Things were good and I was making a thousand, 1200 bucks a speech. So I went up to 3,500 and never looked back. It was a little scary right away because I lost all of these clients that were used to paying me lower amounts of money.
SH (21:30):
But with by the middle to three quarters of the end of the year, I was making a gross wise as much I’d made the following year. And of course, you know, now we’re, we’re in that sequence. So it worked out real well. But the point is, that’s what I did to get started today. It’s, it’s content marketing. I really think of myself more of a media company than I do a professional speaker. And I do have a business versus a practice. Now, the speaking is like a practice. If I don’t speak, I’m not getting paid, but I’ve got trainers out there delivering my content. We’ve got influencer activity where I’m hired for several months to tweet, write articles. You know, we’ve got all kinds of, I have seven different streams of income that help offset, you know, areas that might get hit hard by a pandemic or by an economic downturn. Yeah.
RV (22:25):
Well, and I think it’s just an interesting shift in general. Like, you start out going, Hey, I want to be a speaker and you, you and I have this in common. I think there’s less and less people today. Maybe not, maybe that’s not right to say, but it’s not like, oh, I want to be a speaker anyways, you and I started going, I want to be a speaker. And then it kind of has it evolves to more of like, I’m not marketing myself as a speaker, I’m marketing my expertise of which I can deliver that to you in a variety of different mechanisms or mediums or, or outlets. And do you think that’s a necessary evolution that that happens or do you think there’s power in just going, Hey, if you want to be a speaker, just market yourself as a speaker, go knock that down. And just, that is what, you know, that’s what you deliver and that’s, that’s the only thing you do.
SH (23:16):
So a great question. And I think the answer really lies in what you want and where you are in your career. If you are an executive who worked as a high level executive fortune 100 company, and you’re at about age 55 or 60 and ready to hang it up whoever that executive is, he, or she might say, I had a lot of experience. People are willing to pay a lot for that. I’m done with the corporate world. I’m going to just go out. And this is kind of like my retirement you career, then it’s okay to have that practice. And I’m totally cool with that. You may be in that world where you’re, this is what you love more than anything. And I say, go for what you love. And if you can make a living at what you love and you actually have stability in it.
SH (24:00):
Great. What concerned me is that I know we’re not invincible, so you always have to worry about, am I properly insured either through life insurance, health insurance, you know, business interruptions, insurance, that kind of thing. But you also need to realize that, you know, you’re not in control of, you know, a pandemic shut people down for a year. You know, I know people that had the leave, the speaking business because they never did. I thought they were successful, but they didn’t save anything. And they weren’t prepared for a downturn. Well, maybe they think, oh, how long could it last two or three months? I was kind of thinking we’d be back in March. Oh, well you backed by September. Right? I didn’t realize it would be September 20, 22, right. Or whatever it is when he went. But anyway, I digress. So to your point, the question is where do you want to go first, 2000 nine 11, 2001.
SH (24:55):
Was it, was it? Yeah. And when nine 11 hit nine 11, 2001. Yep. Yeah. So in December of that year, I’d already signed up to spend the weekend with needle Cobain. We all know Nieto in this, our industry, he’s a guru. And one of the exercises he had us do is an amusement park exercise. And he says, draw your business. Like it’s an amusement park. Now I started in 1983. This is 17, 18 years later. Right. My amusement park, I thought of it in terms of like six flags. There’s that big stage, the main stage where they had that show. And then as you walked out, there’s a gift shop kind of like even going to a Disney, you know, going on the ride and then you have the little gift shop. And then my amusement park had nothing else around it that was in the parking lot.
SH (25:38):
But then I looked to the guy next to me and he was drawing an attraction here in the corner. And another one, I go, what is that? He goes, this is a mastermind group that I put together of my top clients. This over here is a membership group. I created that has, you know, 500 members that are paying me X number of dollars a month. And he had these four or five attractions. And I looked to the guy next to me, same kind of thing I want, okay, what are they doing? They’re bulletproofing themselves from having this as part of their business being wiped out because they have other areas. So I quickly pivoted, if you will, I hate that word because like you turned your back, but I was flexible. That’s the word I showed flexibility. And that I said, I know what I’ll do.
SH (26:20):
I’m going to create a training program from my speaking. By that time I’d written no, maybe two, three books. And so I went to a course designer. I found a freelancer and for about 3000 bucks, maybe 3,500 bucks a week, much more than that. They wrote my training for a two hour, half day full day and gave me ideas for multiple day programs. And then I went out and did my first full day training program. I hated it. It was like, I got to talk for a little bit. Then I have to let them work. And then I got to listen to a lot more that keynoter. But the brilliant thing was I started hiring other people to deliver this content because it was written with the idea that a person who could just pick up a facilitator guide, study it and go do it if they knew what they were doing.
SH (27:04):
And that started the second phase of my business because we were in my mind, one terrorist attack away from the annihilation of being of going to a hotel to have a big meeting, because nobody was going to put their sales people on an airplane or send them to a hotel where, you know, somebody could detonate a bomb and wipe out their company. And I know that sounds morbid, but that was the way I was thinking one terrorist attack away from the end of my business. But as a trainer, I could send trainers to their offices. They could have a training room and my people could train their people. And that’s really what started the expansion of my business. So I, you know, what’s right. It just depends what you want to do, but realize as you get into business, you know, Rory asked me how many people I have working for me,
RV (27:51):
How many people you have working for you about half of them.
SH (27:56):
But seriously, when you want to get into doing this, you start to hire other people and you can hire freelancers, but you’re still hiring a force. And you want to try to, you have to keep motivated. You have to meet. It’s a totally different game. I enjoy that game. It’s fun to me. So that’s where I am today. We’ve evolved to I have seven ways that I make money speaking, sending out trainers on demand, video based training selling books when they come out, by the way, new book coming out, I’ll be back how to get your customers to come back again and again that’s book sales influencer role where companies now hire me just to have me tweet about them, write articles about them, because I’m considered a thought leader in my space after all these years sponsorship, if you go to my YouTube channel, you might see a little ad sponsored by whoever the company is. It’s sponsoring me that month. And we have them sponsor my blog, my YouTube channel, my podcast, et cetera, et cetera. And, and so we’ve got packages for that is that six. And then, oh, number seven is special projects. Like we’ll do special video projects or consulting type projects for companies. So interesting, but it started with
RV (29:07):
One, it started really as a speaker at the speech. And then, and then you, you expanded and turn that expertise into something else. Wow.
SH (29:15):
Well I love
RV (29:18):
That ship. I mean, this is, this is super interesting and I think powerful for anybody out there, you know, going okay, how do you get started? Cause to me, you know, you did this in 1983. You know, I would, I would say for me, I did this really, I feel like between 2006 and 2000 and, and maybe 12, 2 13, and there’s not that much difference. And there’s not that much difference from today. It’s like, you got to find some people who need what you have, let them know you have it and then do a really good job delivering it. And like was pretty much that’s all there is. And then you just do it over and over again. And then at some point you get other people to do it, to do that, to do all of those same parts. Yeah. If you want to, if you want to go that route. So it, I think it’s, it’s super encouraging. And yeah. I wonder where do you want people to go ship if they want to connect with you or like learn more of what you’re up to?
SH (30:17):
Sure. Go to hike and.com pretty easy. H Y K N. There’s lots of free resources. You know, I give away pretty much everything I have. From there you can find my YouTube channel, but it’s, you know, I have 600 videos on YouTube. People watch him chairman meetings. My goal is the more you give, the more you get, they come back and give you information, you know, book you to, to share their information.
RV (30:42):
Well, and I’m, I’m curious to know, okay, so what is you? We didn’t really get into the customer experience stuff too, too much. But what would you say is one great customer service tip that personal brands could do immediately just to like, whether it’s love on their clients or love on their team or like when you go, okay. When I think of like all the speakers, coaches, consultants, practices out there, this is like a small business tip that you go, oh my gosh, like, this is a, you could just do this right away and it’ll make a, make a huge difference in your, your expense.
SH (31:17):
Well, I’m going to give you three. One is kind of strategic and this must always happen. One is a bigger project and one is something you can do right away. And I’ll do them quickly recognize that every interaction that you have with the customers, an opportunity for them to form an impression about you. So manage that interaction. It’s called the moment of truth. I can go on and on about that one, but you get the ideas. You need to see what every interaction is now. That’s number one. Number two is how do you look for those interactions? Create a journey map of every interaction that your clients would have of you from the time they might see something in a website, search on Google to get to your website, how they get to you, you know, do they reach out to you via email phone and the whole plot, the entire process, all the way to where they book you, and then what happens after the booking or what happens, where they buy you or after the sale. And so that’s number two. And that journey, map process is going to take awhile because you think you got it. And then you’re gonna find more and more and more, every little tiny interaction counts. And number three, just return people’s emails and phone calls immediately. And you’ll see what a difference that makes you can do that. Starting this moment.
RV (32:29):
Huh. That’s funny. That’s a big one for AIG. She’s super big on responsiveness. Just even you let them know, Hey, I’ll get to you. Like I saw your email, I’ll get to it tomorrow. Like yeah.
SH (32:40):
You know, it’s holiday weekend. I’ll call you first thing Tuesday or Wednesday or whatever it is. Yeah. Which
RV (32:45):
Is interesting. Cause like, you know, I think of all the people we hire that are vendors, contractors for the house, for the business. And it’s like, the number one thing is like, are they staying in communication with us? So that’s really great. Well, hyken.com. Y’all we’ll put a link to that. You can follow him, get a lots of awe. I mean his, his depth of knowledge and expertise around the customer experience, you can see a super powerful chef. Thanks for sharing. What I think is probably the, not so often shared story about how you got started in this career and have built everything that you’ve become, man. We wish you all the best.
SH (33:17):
Thank you, sir. Great to be here.

Ep 202: How to Hire Great Contractors with Hanson Cheng

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

Ep 200: How To Get A $10 Million Business Valuation with Kevin Kruse

RV (00:02):
I’m excited to introduce you to one of my quote unquote, real entrepreneur friends. I, today I use that, you know, air quotes just because, you know, personal brands and information marketing. I, I love, I mean, it’s my, my life it’s been our life. But I, I kind of think of it as distinctly different from most entrepreneurs, which are people who, you know, build a widget or a service or something that is not built around the person that has a true enterprise value. And we, we often don’t get to hear from a lot of those people. And so the reason that I brought on Kevin, so who you’re about to meet Kevin Cruz is a long time friend of mine. I mean, at this point we’ve probably known each other closer to 10 years and just kind of been in the circle. So as a personal brand, he’s very successful.
RV (00:54):
He is a New York times bestselling author of nine books. One of his books is called unlimited clients. He wrote one called 15 secrets. Successful people know about time management, which is really when I think our paths really kind of crossed. And then he wrote one called great leaders, have no rules. So he understands personal branding, but as an entrepreneur or an executive he was a co-founder at a company called Connexa, which went IPO, initial public offering. And then eventually got acquired by IPM IBM. He’s also had other companies, a company called ACI, a company called Axiom professional health learning a company just those companies also were acquired. And today he is the founder and the CEO of lead X, which is fascinating. It is an AI powered platform. So artificial intelligence that helps companies scale leadership behaviors and employee engagement. So he knows a lot about SAS software as a service. He knows a lot about personal branding, knows a lot about entrepreneurship. And anyways, I just felt like you got to hear some of the wisdom from Kevin Cruz. So buddy, welcome to the show.
KK (02:07):
Thanks for having me. I’m looking forward to chatting. I have no idea what you’re going to ask me, which is going to make this even more fun. Well, yeah,
RV (02:14):
I mean, I think, you know, I, I was mentioned to you before the show that brain builders group, we’ve got our curriculum and it’s divided into four phases. And our fourth phase is, is, is all really built around what we call eight figure entrepreneur, which is scaling a personal brand into a business and to a real business. And, and I guess my first question would be around that, which is what do you think? Personal brands, people who build personal brands either don’t know or don’t understand, or don’t see when it comes to building an actual business with enterprise value, like, what are they not aware of? And, and you know, that like how do, how do they not think, or how do they think differently than how kind of like a traditional entrepreneur might think?
KK (03:08):
Yeah. And I don’t know it’s a great starting place. And, and I don’t think of it as as a traditional entrepreneur that there’s different kinds of entrepreneurs. I think, I think it’s just, what are you focused on? What do you want? What I mean by that is I think a fundamental question and, and Roy, this is a journey I went on, you know, I, a fundamental question, when you decide to go into business for yourself, is, are you looking to be like a solo practitioner or do you want employees? Because that is a big thing, right? There are, are, do you want to be selling and delivering the work? So, and having a lifestyle, quote, unquote lifestyle business, and you make a ton of money doing that. If you get your brand to the right level and provide a lot of value, or do you want to build a business and it could be a small business, a five person business, a 50 person business that’s a big first question.
KK (03:57):
And if you decide, I don’t want to just be a consultant or a coach, I want to have a consulting practice. I want a coaching practice that gives you some scale. And that decision alone gives you the flexibility in that it’s rare for someone to buy a one person business. Because if that one person gets hit by a bolt of lightning, then you’ve lost the value. You’ve lost the business. But if I’ve built a 10 person coaching company, a 10 person consulting company, there is something there that even if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, there’s nine other coaches and the revenue will keep flowing in. So that’s a big decision. That’s a big wealth multiplier. And I did that the first few businesses when I, when I was younger. But then I saw the power of SAS software and SAS software. The valuations are incredibly different. So if you took a, a $1 million consulting company,
RV (04:58):
Yeah. Let’s talk about valuations for a second and just assume like ticket from the beginning, like, assume someone’s listening. Like they’re going, Hey, I used to be an employee. I started a personal brand. I’ve never even had the conversation about what a multiple is, or even though, or how, how it works, right? Yes.
KK (05:15):
Right. Okay. So if some, if someone, if I want to come along and buy your company, the fundamental question is, you know, what’s it worth, what’s a fair amount and everybody sort of who does this, they’re sort of rules of thumb about it. And, and there are times when valuations, the price of your company, the valuation is lower. Other times it’s higher. Like right now, valuations are very high historically. But kind of a rule is if it’s a service business, you’re going to get your company is going to get valued on a multiple of your profits. So if you’re making, if you have a million dollar, I’m just making round numbers. If you have a million dollar business with a hundred dollars in profit every year, I might come along and I’ll say, I’m going to give you,
RV (06:02):
Hold on a second. So Jessie, you’re saying a million dollar revenue per a hundred thousand in profits. So that’s a 10% profit margin,
KK (06:09):
10% profit margin. And I’m just using round numbers. Sure. I would say to you, I’m going to give you a multiple, a multiplier on that profit. Now it might be seven times the profit. It might be 10 times the profit. If I really like you and you’re growing, maybe I’ll give you 12 times that profit, but you’re basically going to take that hundred thousand dollars of profit and multiply it. Let’s say by 10 and your, your business is worth a million dollars. Okay. So on a service business, they’re viewed as no, there’s nothing wrong with them, but okay. They’re going to probably grow a little more slowly. And they’re complicated because at the end of the day, you’re selling hours. So if I’m going to double the size of the business, I need to double the number of hours I’m selling and delivering.
RV (06:56):
Like that’s the widget. The widget is an hour of somebody’s time.
KK (07:00):
Beautiful, right? Yes. That’s, that’s the widget. Now let’s, let’s say though, that you can figure out how to package your value into something that people will pay a subscription for. And it might be an app. It might be a piece of software that’s traditionally what it, what it is, but the entire world is moving to a subscription economy. We can go down that rabbit hole later, but let’s say now, but you’ll see
RV (07:30):
That with Disney plus. And like, everybody’s gone from like rent a movie at blockbuster to Netflix and Disney, moving to Disney plus and discovery plus, and they’re all there. Everyone’s doing that.
KK (07:41):
Everyone’s doing that. And it used to be when I was selling software connects in the early days, we would go to a company and say, Hey, give us a million dollars. And we’ll put this on your servers. You’re going to pay us 1,000,001 time. And there might be a maintenance fee, a service fee. But like you own that instance of the software by selling a subscription. I say, you know what, you’re only going to have to pay us $200,000, but you pay us year after year after year. And so it’s smaller upfront and you get all the upgrades, you get all the service, but you’re kind of locked in over time. And so back to that valuation, let’s take the same million dollar company with a hundred thousand dollar profit. So the numbers are the same in the business, but if it’s a subscription business, all of a sudden the valuation is a multiple off your revenue, not your profit.
KK (08:30):
So I’m going to say like right now, multiply the multiples on a, a, a SAS business, a small SAS business. It’s going to be 10 to 30 times revenue. So if you’ve got your million dollar company there and it’s SAS, I’m going to look at it. Now, look, if it’s like, if I say, ah, I don’t, I don’t trust the leadership. I think Rory’s going to quit on, or he’s not as good as he thinks he is. Or they’ve got some problems here or they’ve got a big competitor that they’re feeling pressure, or maybe they’re just not growing that much. All right. Maybe I’m going to value at one times revenue. So you’re back down the worst case scenario, a million dollars more than likely, I’m going to say, wow, you’re a, you’re a smart thinking entrepreneur who made this SAS business, you’re growing faster than a service business and your profit margins are going to get higher because you’re not selling hours. Once you build the widget, you can sell it over and over and over again. So I’m going to give you to you know, anywhere from, from 20 to 30 times revenue. So if you have a $1 million SAS business ballpark, you’re going to get 10 million to $30 million valuation on that business today now.
RV (09:48):
And if I have a service-based business that does a million dollars in revenue, then I might only get a few hundred thousand, maybe half a million or a million bucks would be 10, multiple, a 10, multiple on a hundred thousand in profit. If I got a 10 multiple of EBITDA on a service-based business, a service-based business to an a million in revenue might be worth a million dollars. A SAS business, doing a million in revenue might be 10 to 30. It’s 20,
KK (10:16):
$30 million. Today is the valuation of that business. That’s how high is that? So it’s assumed that the S that the whole world like software is eating the world. SAS is eating software. So the assumption is if you’re selling a million dollars today and did nothing, the market is going to demand more of that SAS. And again, like if we’re selling time, I’ve got to sell that same time. And this is, I mean, let me just, let’s just talk real world. Back when I had a dozen service professionals, we would build custom training programs for Pfizer pharmaceuticals. Okay, great. We’d land a million dollar project. You’re saying you actually did this. You had, this was one of my businesses in, when I was 25 to 30 years old. This was one of the businesses I sold.
RV (11:06):
You got 12 people on your team and build a custom training program,
KK (11:11):
Right? So we go to Pfizer. We say, Hey, let’s, let’s build some workshops and some training, and we’ll go teach all your reps about sales and leadership and all this. And we get a million dollar contract. Wow. That’s fantastic. Well, what happens January of the next year? Rory I’m back at zero again. So just to get the same level, I got to go back to Pfizer or a new company and say, Hey, do you want a million more dollars worth of workshops? You got to sell it to them all over again, but now what do I do today? I go to fight. Well, I won’t, I won’t say we go to Pfizer. I go to Northwestern mutual. So world’s largest a life insurance company, financial service company. I say to them, don’t give me a million dollars for give me hundreds of thousands of dollars for this leadership app for this subscription. And you’re going to give it to me year after year after year. And they say, okay, and now suddenly I’ve got that 20 multiple, because my leadership training is through a subscription model. It’s not through Kevin showing up in front of the classroom, guiding them through because I’m selling my time.
RV (12:21):
Yeah. Now when you talk about subscriptions revenue, okay, so you have like service revenue, which is this one-time revenue subscription revenue is I’m paying on repeat, but inside of subscription revenue, like coaching, like you can sell a coaching program that subscription revenue is that multiple higher, lower, or the same than like a software subscription revenue.
KK (12:44):
Great question. So, five years ago, it wouldn’t have counted as subscription. Like it had to be softer. People be like, ah, that’s still, even though you’re subscribing, you’re still selling hours. We don’t believe that today you will get credit for that subscription service revenue. If, if you can show that the clients are buying more every single year. So if you sell a subscription to Kevin and I don’t renew, they’re gonna be like, eh, that’s, that’s not really subscription. He’s not keeping it going beyond six months, 12 months. But if you say, you know what, Kevin gave me whatever, $5,000 for consulting services, you know, in 2021. And then in 2022, he gave me 6,000. It was so good. He wanted to keep it up, but he, he elevated to the next level, you know, the 2 0 1 level course. And the year after that, he escalated to 3 0 1.
KK (13:40):
You will get credit for that revenue today, but they are, they want to see negative churn. So churn is a term about when you lose your customers. So if I have a hundred customers, you know, at the start of the year, at the end of the year, I’ve only got 80. I churned 20% of them. Well, they want to see as you start the year of the a hundred customers. And at the end of the year, you’ve got the same hundred and they’re giving you more money at the end of the year than the beginning of the year. So it’s all about are, is it follow the dollar? So it doesn’t have to be software, but software so powerful, but even if it’s not software, are the clients renewing and expanding renew.
RV (14:21):
And you think that service based subscription revenue, let’s say it has negative churn. You think it would get, this could get a similar multiple as a software revenue. They are Roy,
KK (14:35):
Let me, we’ll just, I’ll just say it. So the giant company out there called better up many coaches will have heard of them or be part of the better up platform. Okay. They have been raising hundreds of millions of dollars. They just latest hire was prince Harry. And they’re raising it out of Silicon valley as a tech company, even though they’re selling ours. Now they have a little app that kind of tracks the sessions. I’m sure, you know, there’s, there’s other platforms out there that do that. And the reason why, and for, for years, many of us traditional software SAS are like, how are they pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes? Like this is crazy. And it turns out, I mean, the there’s so much money in the markets that better up is getting valuations. Maybe not as pure as a true software company, but, but like a SAS. I mean, it’s like, Hey, they’re custom, they’re adding customers. Those customers are buying more this year, over last year. There’s a little bit of a tech component. Boom. Let’s give them that 10 to 30 multiple. So
RV (15:44):
That’s amazing. That’s, that’s really, really fascinating. You know, because, so, so, all right. So let me ask you this. When the role of personal brand, you’ve done SAS, you’ve done subscription revenue. What, where’s the real opportunity for personal brands to develop subscription revenue? Like, what are, if you just said, let’s only talk subscription revenue for personal brands, what are different ways they could pull that together? And like, how might that actually look in real life?
KK (16:21):
Yeah. So I think in real life, I mean, you know, so I’ve, I’ve started over several times in the last, you know, 30 plus years, including, you know like when I did the 15 secrets book, I wasn’t known as a time and productivity expert. You were, I mean, other people were, I wasn’t. But when I launched that book, I said, all right, well, you know, let me spend a couple of years earning my, keep, you know, in, in this area, you know, royalties, coaching, keynotes then you start by, then you start adding on, right? So you do the, the the group coaching programs. So that’s the easiest thing. Hey, you’re going to give me now the traditional model is you give me, you know, $2,000, you’re going to get all this online, digital video content. Plus every week you’re going to hop on the phone with me, we’ll have a live group session, and you’re going to go into a Facebook group forever.
KK (17:15):
Okay. That’s a good start. But if you’re buying more time in the values in those videos, you don’t have to deliver it all yourself. But instead of it being, give me $2,000 and you get this eight week program, give me X thousand dollars and you’re in the monthly forever program. And in fact, I don’t know if if you follow him, but a lot of coaches out there know Brendon Burchard who has a pretty big brand, right? And his high performance academy is big and he’s look, he’s successful. He’s got a, of people would like to have his brand and his books in his full workshops. He’s launching an app. I called the growth app or something like that right now. Yeah. So a growth day growth day. There you go. So even someone as successful as, at that level, they realize, wow, all this money I’m making by scaling my personal brand and delivering and all the ways he delivers the ultimate way to scale is get someone to build an app that people will pay for month after month after month. Now, I think a bigger question, Rory is if I can, everybody should do this. Who’s going to be serious about this space. You know, you’re not just buying a talk. You’re not just buying a book. You’re not just buying a two month program. You’re subscribing the way I would to Fitbit or Peloton or something like that. This, you know, this is your ongoing fitness program for the topic of X, you know, whatever your, your expertise is.
RV (18:47):
So let’s talk about apps because on the, on the one hand, it’s like, great. Let’s, let’s build an app and get a million dollars in revenue and sell it for 10 million, no big deal. Like that sounds great. Let’s can we let’s do it this weekend? What do we do this afternoon? Grab a beer. The reality. Okay. Talk to us about the reality of, of apps. You had to go there. You had to say reality. How do we, how do you build one? What does it take? How much does it cost? Where do you find the people? What’s the w w like, give us a, give us a reality check. Cause, cause I mean, literally you’re saying build an app, get a million dollars of, of, you know, ARR annual recurring revenue, and that you might be able to sell that thing for 10 to 20 to 30 million bucks. That seems like a pretty good plan. Talk to us about the actual roadblock it takes to get there. Okay.
KK (19:41):
So let me, let me give you real data, but then, then start with a smaller version of it. So as an example, roughly if Lalit X app is doing a million dollars in annual recurring revenue today, and we are getting valued at around $20 million, what did it take to build that million dollar app? Well, it has taken me four years and about $4 million of investment into building that app. Wow. A million dollars of revenue that I’ve spent four years and a lot of investment putting into that’s one way looking at wow. He spent 4 million and he’s only doing a million a year, the other way, look at his, he spent 4 million in four years and just got a valuation of $20 million. So there’s another, you know, there’s the upside to it. Where do you get that startup capital? I didn’t start on day one with 4 million.
KK (20:33):
So in my case, you know, I was able to self-fund for awhile, but I went to friends and family angel investors and got enough money to do this. Right. Like I I’ve done this before. So it was like, Hey, I’m going to hire a software engineer. I’m going to hire a software designer. I’m going to hire, you know, there’s going to be a small team and we’re going to put a million in and every year and let’s raise that first million and grow. Now, that’s not the way I started doing things 30 years ago though. And I think the easiest thing to, first of all, it’s cheaper than ever before to launch software, right? So it’s whether you’re, you’re buying developers, you know, off of Upwork or whatever it is, whether you’re renting server space on AWS, it is easier and cheaper than ever before to do this.
KK (21:27):
It doesn’t mean it’s cheap and easy. It’s cheaper and easier than ever before. And you know, one of the things that I did with lead ex learning from experiences, I went out and got a technical co-founder, you know, so I Lucas Carlson is my CTO. And there’s different ways you can structure those deals, but you know, you can, if you have money, you can hire an engineer or a couple of engineers to do it. You can outsource to a small firm to build your app, although like outsourcing anything, pros and cons cheap and easy, and you turn on, but like they screw it up or they go out of business and there goes,
RV (22:03):
They ghost you like the, the biggest, the biggest pain on this is getting reliable kelp and people to be responsive and hit deadlines and show up and do what they say they’re going to do. I mean, that’s the 1%,
KK (22:20):
If you’re working with individual contractors, they just, there’s often a reason why their individual contractors, you know, the reason why they’re not employed by somebody. And again, like I learned that the hard way I lost a lot of money and more important, lost time by going to like, Hey, you know, here, I’m a F I’m a full service app developer in whatever country around the world for $2,000, I can build drive. Hey, sounds great. Go. And it’s horrible. It’s terrible. There’s no responsiveness. You’ll spend a lot more going to a small company, maybe one in, you know, in your state or in your country that is geographically, you know, nearby, but they’re going to be more reliable. They’re not going to disappear or ghost you. So it’s not Rory, what I want to say is, first of all, any anyone out there who already has like, they’re already well into six figures, they have a small consulting firm.
KK (23:14):
They should have a digital transformation, subscription strategy in place. Like if I was running a five person consulting firm or coaching firm, I would say, okay, we’re not gonna do this overnight, but how are we going to launch an app one year from today? Like you just have to do it now, if you’re a one person personal brand, you know and you want to do that, your app doesn’t have to do everything. You know? W what is it you want the app to do? Is it just gonna deliver videos? Is it gonna be a little financial calculator? Is it going to be a way for you to give them messages every morning? There’s a lot of different things you could do, and you just add to it, iterate it, make it better, make it better, and then you’ll, you’ll grow it.
RV (23:54):
Huh. And then in terms of app, like what do, what do I need to know as a non-technical person about the language? You know, like what programming languages do they write in? What skills do I have to ask them if they have like, cause you know, I think most entrepreneurs are not the coder that like you’re saying, you, you bring in at, it helps to bring in a technical partner. But like, I mean, is that basically it is going, Hey, you got to have someone that’s a technical partner.
KK (24:28):
Well, no, well you need to either have a technical partner or hire your technical partner, you know, as an outsider. And now I am not technical. So I don’t know, like, I, I don’t know enough about any of those things you asked about to like, maybe I should, you know, but to me what’s most important is not just having the general vision, like, Hey vendor, Hey freelancer. I’m a, I’m a coach in this area and I want to make an app. Like the more you can describe it in detail, the user opens it up and they’re going to see a picture of me or they’re going to open it up and it’s going to ask them to enter their goal, or they’re going to open it up and they’re going to inter there are three strengths, like whatever you need to translate, the big picture into what does the user do when they open the app?
KK (25:22):
That’s what you need to do. And then a good partner will sketch it. Like in, you know, they call it like wireframes templates though. They’ll mock it up before they code it. So then you would say to them, all right. So I’ve told you the use case, you know, I’m a, I’m a fitness coach and I specialize in working with busy executives over age 50. So I want them to be able to put in their, their weight and their fitness goal. And then I want them to look at exercises and have a meal plan. All right. Great. Well specifically, what do you want? Go down, down, down, and then your partner should give you almost like a set of slides or PowerPoint. Okay. Here’s when you open the app, it looks like this and it might be a sketch. It might be placeholders. It might be a stock image, not a picture of Rory on there, but then you’re going to say, oh no I didn’t mean that.
KK (26:18):
I meant this over here. You almost design it on paper before they then design it in, you know, in real life. And the only other key I would say is, is iterate. Keep the loops very short. You know, we, it used to be when I was doing e-learning software, we would work on quarterly releases and people thought that was fast. So every 90 we tell our clients, Hey, over the weekend, we’re going to release this new version. Here’s, what’s new in it. We do releases every week now. So it might be, Hey, let’s add a disc assessment and boom. Now that’s the release of this week. Next week, it’s going to be a new performance report. It’s going to be a new set of nudges or whatever it might be. So just think about, it’s not like you design it and someone’s going to deliver it a year from now.
KK (27:07):
No, you tell your partner, here’s my design. And I want, I want a delivery that I can actually a minimum viable product, an MVP, a minimum viable product. I want an MVP in 30 days. And then they can say, well, what you’ve asked for is too much. And then you say, okay, well what can you do in 30 days? And then boom, they deliver it. And you give them feedback, add a new feature and they deliver it again in 30 days. So it’s more about iteration and, and, and never stopping. You know, it’s always, it’s always improving.
RV (27:37):
And then when do you go for revenue? I mean, do you just like right out of the gate as soon as you can. And do you do, is it like a dollar trial? Is it free for 30 days? I mean, or is it just kind of like you try all of it and see what, see what actually gets people to sign up?
KK (27:54):
Yeah, so great questions. I think, you know, th the sooner you can get real potential customers using it the better. So if you have to give it away for free or give it for free to your current customers, the better like you need real world, Guinea pigs using it, reporting bugs, giving you feedback. So you always want to think of them as like an advisory council. You’ve got your 12 target market users who are always going to have it for free and give you feedback in return for giving you feedback. Then the, the bigger question, it’s a business model thing. And so like with lead ex, when we launched four years ago, I had this vision, Rory that everybody loves leadership as much as I do. And if you look on Forbes, there’s millions of people following their leadership channel. If you look on LinkedIn, there’s tens of millions of people following the leadership, you know, channels.
KK (28:48):
I thought, oh, this is great books. As we know, you know, tons of people buying leadership books, let’s release a leadership app to consumers and let’s do a freemium model. So, Hey, go download this for free, play with it for a month, give us $20 a month like LinkedIn, and you’ll love it. And they don’t show up. They didn’t show up. And LinkedIn did not build LinkedIn initially on consumer subscriptions. So we pivoted and said, you know, who pays a lot of money for leadership development, big companies, you know, Roy, you think about how many people write keynote speaker checks, big keynote speaker checks. It’s not small businesses. It’s not individuals, it’s big companies for their annual event. Like they invest in leadership. They investing in culture and associations. And so we pivoted, and that was my Connexity’s. It’s like, why, why was I trying to think I was the B2C just because I was selling books and doing that stuff.
KK (29:45):
So when you’re selling to an enterprise customer, a big fortune 500 fortune, 1000 company that freemium and stuff, doesn’t, it goes away. Now it’s calling up a director of leadership development or wellness, or a head of VP of sales, you know, wherever you’re in is and saying, Hey, we got this solution. That’s going to transform your culture, your skills, et cetera. Why don’t we do a short pilot to see if it really is as good as I’m telling you it is. And then if you like it, you’re going to write a big check for a year’s worth of usage. And so I’m not against B to C for other people like that. It’s just, wasn’t my background and not my passion. My personal and now corporate mission is to spark the next 100 million leaders around the world. That’s a big number. I’m not going to do that with my books, my articles, my speeches. And I thought I could do it with B-to-C. And we have a free B to C version Rory, but that’s the real way to do it is to get companies, you know, that already have a hundred thousand employees around the world to give it their, to give it to large organizations.
RV (30:56):
Got it, got it. This has been so fascinating, Kevin, like, so it just I just, this is exactly what I hope for this unique blend of someone who really deeply understands personal branding and who really knows e-learning and who knows SAS and who knows entrepreneurship business valuations coming together. Because I mean, look, there’s, it’s no accident. Y’all wide brand builders group is a monthly coaching program. Like it’s, it’s no, it’s, it’s, it’s no secret why we do this. And coaching is something that we have a lot of experience doing and, you know, we’ve, we’ve received some of the benefits of, of some of what you’re talking about. Now, the app thing that that’s a, that’s a new venture, and I’m literally going to have to go have a conversation with AIJ and I’m going to be like, listen to this interview with Kevin, because now we need to hire 15 programmers. And we’re going to spend $10 million in the next couple years because Kevin said it was good idea. And and then if it doesn’t work ominous complainant on you, Kevin, where do you want people to go? If they want to connect with you? I mean, you, you write for, you written for so many online publications, you’ve got your books. Where should people go to connect with you?
KK (32:20):
Here’s what I’d say. If anyone is at all interested in leadership type personal development, just go to your favorite app store type lead X, Lea D X. You can download the free app and check it out. If you’re interested in my thoughts on personal branding, go to master your personal brand.com and you can download a tip. I run the lead X leadership podcast. We’ve got about 400 episodes. People can dive in and just email me [email protected]. And I’m happy to connect with anyone.
RV (32:53):
I love it. Well, we’ll link all that up in the show notes, man. Thanks for your wisdom. And just for sharing so openly about what you’re up to and what you’ve learned. I mean, just super duper valuable. I’ve always trusted you. I’ve always admired you and always just been grateful for our friendship. So keep going, man. We, we, we wish you the best and you know, I just, all I want is a ride in the private jet. That’s all I’m saying. I appreciate the opportunity, Rory. All right. See you, man.

Ep 198: Creating Distinction in Your Personal Brand with Scott Mckain

RV (00:02):
You can’t have a podcast and business about personal branding and finding your uniqueness and positioning without at some point interviewing Scott McCain. This man is a legend in our space. He is owns I think the word distinction this is something he spent his career studying and talking about. He’s a personal friend of mine. I very much consider him a mentor. I’ve known him for years. He is is the globally recognized authority on distinction and, and really how to stand out in a hyper competitive market, how to separate yourself from the crowd. So much of what we talk about with she hands wall and finding your uniqueness. And Scott has worked with apple and SAP and BMW and Merrill Lynch, and Cisco. These are the kinds of companies that are hiring him to help them create more distinction. He’s in two hall of fames, he’s in the professional speaking hall of fame, which I share with him. And then he is in the sales and marketing hall of fame as well. He appears in major media outlets all across the country USA today, New York times. And his most recent book is called iconic. How organizations and leaders attain, sustain, and regain the ultimate level of distinction, which Forbes called a top 10 business book. Scott McCain, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the show.
SM (01:30):
I’ve got to make sure to play that introduction for my wife. Just so maybe I’m going to borrow the best Rory. I tell you, man, I’m just sitting here with goosebumps. It is so great to be your friend. It is so great to be your guest. I really appreciate it. Thank you.
RV (01:45):
You’re so welcome, buddy. You’re you are genius. I quote you all the time in so many places with, with, with full attribution. I learned this from,
SM (01:54):
I do the same with you. My friends,
RV (01:57):
There’s so many things, but here’s a personal thing that I don’t know if you even know this, but those people who’ve been following me for years know that when we launched the take the stairs book, we did a bus tour. And that was a huge part about how we hit the New York times. And that happened because of a conversation that you and I had at lunch at an NSA meeting, we peeled off her lunch. And you told me about how you did your bus tour, and then we freaking did it and it worked. And you know, that’s just one of many things that we can point to in our life to say, because of Scott McCain.
SM (02:30):
Oh, you are okay. Well, it’s a blast. I think the other thing is, I don’t know how musicians do it, their entire lives. I was thrilled to do it for the tour, right. I mean, the tour was great, but how they do that for, you know, I’m buddies with the Oak Ridge boys and, and, you know, the, the newest guy in the group has been in the group for 46 years. So the new guy, and he’s been there 46 years and they are on a bus every week, or they’ll not with COVID, but they’re back out and I’m like, how do you guys do this? It’s just, it’s incredible. But again, it is the commitment to the craft, which is different in different businesses and industries. But so I’m just so thrilled for your success. And I I just sit back and see all of the things that you are, not only that you’ve done, but it, you were doing that’s, that’s what really matters. I mean, you, you you’ve attained such significant success and you continue to inspire and inform and lead you rock. Thanks.
RV (03:31):
We are you know, we’re fascinated by your topic and another person that we quote one of your best friends, Larry Winget, we, we say all the time find your uniqueness and exploited in the service of others. And we talk about Peter Xi Han and breaking through what we have named as she Hans wall, which is really breaking through from becoming unknown to, to becoming known, which is really a result of uniqueness, distinction originality being the expert on one thing. And so I guess my first question is just what’s what are the problems of being indistinct? Like what are the problems of similarity and you know, cause there’s some good things about being similar people understand you. I mean, if I were a financial advisor, a real estate agent people get it. I mean, so there’s some good things, but what are the, what are the problems? If you don’t have distinction, what do you have?
SM (04:29):
You know, Roy, when you stood that what popped into my head is because I’m also friends with your beautiful bride and you guys know my wife, Tammy, I will bet dollars to donuts when you proposed, just as, when I proposed to Tammy, I did not get down on one knee and say, honey, will you marry me? You’re exactly like every other woman I’ve ever dated, not a strong strategy in the history of business, regardless of what field you’re in, no customer, no client has ever left an encounter and said, I love doing business with them. They’re exactly like everybody else. We’re attracted, not for our similarities. We’re attracted for our uniqueness. And if customers cannot see a difference between you see, I think many times we’re misled by it by our training, by our thinking. And we think the customers choose us and that’s not a complete way of looking at it. Customers choose us instead of all of the other alternatives out there in the marketplace. And so if they don’t see a distinguishing factor between you and your competitor, then it’s going to come down to price or some other area that’s outside of our control, which is the last thing that we want is we try to take the long view in business about, you know, how do we get repeat business? How do we inspire referral business? You know, none of that comes from being exactly like everybody.
RV (05:59):
Yeah. I mean, I, I think gosh, that’s a really interesting way of thinking about it in the parallel of, of marriage, you know, is of, of your uniqueness. So I feel like a big part of your career, you built upon these four cornerstones of distinction. I’ve interviewed you on them before as relates to business, but we’ve never had this conversation in the context of personal branding, which obviously you understand that you are one, but can you just rattle off for people who just never met you before rattle off the four cornerstones of distinction? And then, you know, I’d love to kind of talk through how those apply to personal brands, because I know most of the work that you do is kind of in the corporate world, people hiring you to speak and consult and do that kind of thing. But I mean, do they, and then I guess, do they apply? I feel pretty confident they do, but you know, so just rip through those.
SM (06:52):
Well, the first one I think in many ways is tough, was stolen and that’s clarity. It’s not only being precise about what we are, it’s being as exact about what we are not. And that’s, what’s really hard, I think, particularly in creating a personal brand because when it comes to a company you know, they can say, oh, well, we don’t make those products because we make the product. But a personal brand, I think is, is a little bit more difficult to attain that we can come back to that. Then the second one is creativity. And, and I learned a lot from research I did in, in your home area, there in Nashville from interviewing songwriters. Because when I, when I started researching this, I thought that I thought the creativity would come first. You know, Hey, think outside the box, all of those things we think about innovation, but I interviewed 15 songwriters and to a person, everyone said, you got to get clear before you can get creative.
SM (07:44):
And the reason we say think outside the box is because we haven’t defined the box to begin with. Right? So creativity is the second aspect. What’s our unique twist on that. Third is communication. And what that really means is narrative. It’s understanding the principles of story and how we can communicate through narrative in a way that emotionally connects us. And, and you’ve done some pioneering work on generational differences as well. Rory and, and, and one of the things that really strikes me is that a great story appeals to every generation. So as, as we try to communicate our brand story, so that it’s appealing in the marketplace, not just a one segment, but to all segments, having a great story as a part of that. And then the fourth and final one is a customer or client experience focus. What does it feel like to experience our brand? W we, we, we think a lot about customer service to the customer experience, but a focus on it means that everything we do is how has this brand, that we’re trying to create, going to impact those that we seek influence. So it’s clarity, creativity, communication, customer experience. It’s fun.
RV (08:58):
So I love that. And clarity to me is the most important, like I agree with all of that. It’s, it’s, it’s it’s basically, you know, we have, we have in our curriculum, we have four phases and each phase has three courses. So we have 12 courses in our curriculum. The entire first one is just dedicated to trying to help people get clear on this. And you mentioned, you mentioned that it’s harder for personal brands, so why do you think it’s harder and how do we get clear on what our personal brand is about? Because I think the struggle is that humans are multi-dimensional right. We have many different passions. I mean, you’re passionate about music. You’re, you’ve got all of these different things you, you know about. You’ve been in business long enough. You’ve had your own business long enough to know a lot about a lot of different things. And yet you’ve been very consistent your entire career of like, you know, I, I am the guy, I am the guy on distinction. So how do we get clear?
SM (10:02):
Well, and you nailed it. I mean, it’s, it’s harder because we are multi-dimensional. And the other part is it seems to be safer to have more offerings, right? I mean, if, if, if I do all of these things, then there’s a range of things that people can choose from. And, and that will open up more opportunity for, for me and my business is what we assume, but instead it’s, it’s exactly the, it’s exactly the opposite. You know, I, I use the old story sometimes about how we shoot down planes in, in times of battle in world war two, what they would do is fill the skies with ammunition. It was called flack, and they would just shoot an abundance of ammunition into the air. So what technically actually happened is we didn’t shoot down their plane. The enemy’s plane ran into ammunition because they just threw so much up there, but these planes would run into the ammunition.
SM (10:59):
Well, now, as we know, it’s, it’s incredibly precisely targeted, and I think that’s a good analogy for what we need to think about in terms of business. But I’ll tell you that there comes to be a point when, when I first started my speaking career, I kind of did the motivational humor, customer service, kind of generic thing. And I went through a personal situation that caused me to reevaluate my business. And honestly, I was trying to look at how do I stand out from everybody else in the crowd? And I couldn’t find anything you know, there, there were a couple of books out trout wrote one called differentiator die. There were, there were a few things out there, but nothing really how to stand out. I, by the way, let me throw in real quick, the reason I use the term distinction instead of differentiation, is that merely being different doesn’t mean that’s going to have traction in the marketplace.
SM (11:53):
You know, if I slap every customer in the face, I’m different, but it doesn’t mean they’re, you know, they’re going to relate to what I’m talking about. So I’m talking about distinction, having a meaningful difference. That that really means something to the people that you’re hoping to connect with. So, you know, I went through that personal tragedy and I’m looking through and how do I stand out? I started researching it and really want to, I you’re taking me back to really one of the toughest points in my life because a speakers bureau that I did a lot of business with bookmobile lot called and said, for goodness sakes, we don’t get any calls asking for distinction, speeches, will you please go back and talk about customer service? And at that point I had to make a decision. And and, and it was the best decision, one of the best decisions of my life, but it was really hard to make it that time because it’s almost like they were dangling this checkout here. If you just, if you just get away from what you’ve said, your clarity is, if you just don’t do what you’re talking about, here’s, here’s a check and I turned it down. And I think that is what builds a brand. Had I accepted that, see, one of the things I find is that when people say, oh yeah, I’m that too. That’s when they lose the clarity, that really creates your brand in the marketplace.
RV (13:16):
Yeah. I mean, you know, you said this earlier about it’s being clear on who you are and also clear on who you’re not. And yeah, AIJ and I had spent so much time doing sales training for corporations in our former business. That when, when we started brand builders group, we were very clear that we don’t do branding for companies at all. We do personal brand strategy, exclusively for individuals. Now, every individual works at a company, but we don’t do the company strategy. It’s the face of an individual. And that every time that we have taken something where someone said, Hey, can you just like do this project for our company? It’s like, it doesn’t, it just, it just creates so much conflict and extra work. And it’s just like, it’s just not what we do. And so I think, like you’re saying, it’s just, it feels safer to offer more things. And it also like, inevitably there’s a time where someone’s going to dangle money in front of your face and you have to say, no, that’s not what we do. That’s hard.
SM (14:20):
It’s really hard. Yeah. And I’m really glad you said that because I think sometimes people think that folks like you and me advise that, but we really don’t know how difficult it is. Right. Because it’s really hard to say no. And the smaller the businesses, I think the harder it is to say no, but it’s one of the best things that you can do. And you mentioned my pal, Larry Winget earlier your friend as well. And you know, Larry says to be really successful, you’ve got to get really good at saying no. And I think truer words have never been spoken. We want to say yes to everything. And I, I, I think we sometimes confuse saying yes and making a customer experience go well, as opposed to saying yes to all of these things that will dilute our differentiation. And so you don’t want to dilute the distinction that you’re trying to create in the marketplace because Hey, no one is loyal to a generic. I mean, w we have a mutual buddy mark Sanborn, and mark talks to me all the time about this latest IPA that he’s trying, or yeah, he’s totally into craft beers. And, and mark and I were talking about, I remember those, maybe they’re still there. I haven’t seen him for a while. At least white cans in the grocery store with just black block lettering said, beer,
RV (15:39):
Chips, whatever
SM (15:42):
Nobody brags about. Yeah, I have that beer, but they do want to talk about this IPA that they’ve found it’s brewed in Maine on the ocean somewhere. And again, that kind of gets to another one of the cornerstones. I’m getting a little ahead of myself here, but you know, you like the IPA or you like the business. That’s got a story.
RV (16:04):
Yeah. I mean, that’s, that’s really true. So you, you also talk about the five factors of iconic performance and going towards the idea of how do we find this distinction, and then how does that, how does that distinction manifest itself? Like in our, in our actual business, in the customer experience and the things that happen every day,
SM (16:29):
You know, what happened is I had written the book on distinction and Fairmont hotels became a really good client. And they, they went through a really cool process about, you know, what, what, what is distinctive housekeeping? You know, what, what’s the distinctive front desk? How do we, how do we take everything that touches the customer and, and even things that don’t, and what would that look like? So they went through this process, they had great success with it. And I’m having Brett first with the CEO of the Fairmont Scottsdale princess, wonderful guy named Jack Miller. And he said, man, we went through the distinction thing. Now, what do we do? I didn’t have an answer. I realized I’d written a book about how to create distinction, but, but not one how to take it to the highest level of distinction and not what, how to sustain it once you get it or how you regain it once you, you know, if you’d lose it.
SM (17:28):
And so I started studying it. It’s kind of a difficult definition, but distinction means you stand out in your field. You know, if you’re a financial advisor in Las Vegas where I live, or in Nashville where you are, you’re the go-to advisor that, that people are referring that’s distinction. You are at the top of your field, in your industry. Yet. We also know that there are businesses that transcend their industry, you know, and they’re the Annapolis. One of the case studies they use in the book, iconic is St. Elmo’s steakhouse. It’s not just the, I mean, they have higher gross revenue than Tavern on the green, in New York city. They’re one of the most successful restaurants in America. So it’s not just that, they’re the best of the restaurants, man. If you’ve got a car dealership in Indianapolis, you want to run your car dealership like St. Elmo’s runs their restaurant. That’s iconic when you’ve reached that level. And so as I studied iconic businesses, I mean, the old cliche is like Southwest airlines and apple and, you know, Starbucks and all those, but even more so regionally, locally the iconic businesses that, that a business that every business in that particular community respected, I found a really five factors. And, and the first one was they play offense. You know, I’m a sports fan and we always say defense wins championships. Yeah.
RV (18:55):
People say that all the time.
SM (18:57):
So I looked at the numbers and more top off offensive teams have won the super bowl, the top defensive teams, more top rated offensive teams. And one of the playoff games in the NFL, then the defensive teams look at what’s happening in the NBA right now. It’s running gun, man. The way you’re successful is firing up a three-pointer not by clamping down on defense, like it was 20 years ago. So, so what I found was that iconic individuals and I kind of like organizations,
RV (19:26):
You know, my high school basketball coach right now is having an aneurysm listening to this because that DCS you’re just you’re attack the fabric. The fabric of the philosophy of it’s been around for some people for a really long time, I’m drawing
SM (19:42):
A blank. Oh, where did he sign up? There? There was a high school coach and he’s, this will be his first year coaching division one colleagues. And I’m drawing a blank on where he is, but he always goes for it on fourth down. They don’t even have a punter on the team. If it’s, if it’s fourth at eight on the two yard line, they go for it, you know, on their two yard line, they still go for it. They always go for it on fourth down. And the S and, and he just says, look at the data. The data shows that the benefit of playing offense and, and pushing the ball is always greater than defense. Now, can you apply that in a business situation? And here’s what the CEO of, of that Fairmont grouped pill me later on. He said, I realized that every moment I was playing defense against the competition wasted a moment, I could be innovating to make them irrelevant.
SM (20:42):
Say that again, every moment I was playing defense against the wasted a moment, I could be innovating to make them erupt, irrelevant. Wow. I just thought, well, when he said that I’m writing that down, man, I got to get that. So, I mean, when we think about whether it’s the clue and Hey, look, I know that speakers use the same examples a lot. Well, there’s a reason for that. It’s not because we’re lazy. It’s because, so it’s so breathtakingly difficult to do. There are so few universal examples that, that you can use, but, you know, Steve jobs didn’t sit around worried about what Microsoft was doing, you know, and, and, and when we use that in our personal brand, as an example, when we play off offense, then it becomes really remarkable what, what we can achieve, because then others, you know, our competition, their natural reaction will be to play defense against us, which puts us in the driver’s
RV (21:44):
Seat. So when you, when you, like, I know you work with companies, but like, cause cause I really buy into this. AIG does as well. We we’ve, we have said consistently that it’s like we don’t care about what other people are doing. Like our philosophy is not even, it’s not even differentiate from what other people are doing. It’s find your uniqueness and exploited in the service of others is what Larry says. It’s like, do the thing that you do. And then it makes other people or other customers irrelevant. And it’s like, but, but the thing I think is people struggle so much with figuring out what is the thing that they can do that no one else can do. What is the thing that they do that is truly distinct or unique. And H how do you help people find what that is?
SM (22:37):
What a great question. And it’s one that’s often overlooked. Jeff Bezos said your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room. Well, that creates an inherent problem. It, it means we’re not in the room when people are saying what our brand is. So what’s the second best thing that you can do. And so few of us do this and it’s it’s was part of my journey to try to create distinction for my speaking business. And that is, I went to the people that were booking me for speeches. I went to speakers bureaus, and I said, when you recommend me, what do you say?
SM (23:16):
And far and away, the answer at that time was a good speaker and a nice guy. Now, they thought that was great. And I realized, that’s the kiss of death, man. I mean, you know, apple is not planning their next corporate event saying, Hey, what we need, the keynote is a really nice person, but they want it. They want somebody that’s known for something. And it’s the same thing. Whether I’m picking a financial advisor or a grocery store or a, any kind of personal service or a speaker or whatever might be, there has to be something that they say. So one of two things is going to happen either. Number one, you’re going to find out that you’re thought of as a generic, Eric, you know, good at what you do and a nice person. And there’s nothing wrong with that. You know, I want to be good at what I do and I choose to be nice, but, but there has to be something more than that. Second is, if what they’re saying is precise and specific, then there’s your biggest clue. You know, about what people are saying about you, that’s what your brand is. And then at that point you’ve reached a crossroad. Are you going to exploit that? And, and as, as you say, and as Larry says, we may exploit in the best part of the term, you know, it’s not bad exploitation.
SM (24:34):
Yeah. And making the most of everything we have. And, and so is that the area that you, that you want to be known for, well then how can we ramp up what we’re doing? So we accentuate that if that’s not the areas, here’s the other aspect. It’s always tougher to reposition and to position, if I’m starting new and I’m trying to position, I have to create a memorable message that that will strike you. And that you’re going to retain to reposition. I got to get you to forget about everything you thought about me in the past, and now start thinking about me in a new way. So if you need to reposition your personal brand, you have to begin by thinking, okay, how do I, how do I come up with a message that’s so compelling? Not only will it be memorable in the marketplace that I want to succeed in it, but it will get those people to stop saying what they been saying about me and start saying, this that’s difficult. But if you don’t understand that principle, you can’t begin on the road to achieve it.
RV (25:42):
Yeah. And then to your point about clarity as a cornerstone, I think that is just super like, that’s the first thing is too many of us never even asked the question. What do I want people to say about me? What are they saying about me? And how do I, you know, change? How do I change those or align those? And we just kind of go out and we’re just like reactive to whatever shows up and whoever will hire us for this or that or anything. And we’re just like, I’ll take it. I’ll take it. I’ll take it versus going, no, this is who I’m going to be. And I’m going to drive this. I’m going to drive this space. But you know, I think it’s, I think, you know, asking your customers, asking the people who have hired you, why have you hired me?
RV (26:26):
What, what is it about me? I mean, that’s a great place to start because like you’re saying either, they’ll tell you, this is why, and this is what makes you unique, or they’ll say no specific reason, which means you’re not really unique. But then after that, do you effectively, just at some point, just decide you go, hell, I’m going to be, I’m going to be the guy known for this, and then you just own it. And you just drive it. I mean, is it that simple as you just go, what do you want to be known for pick it, own it and drive it? I mean, is that it?
SM (26:59):
Yes. I wish I wish I had a workup flex answer to that. But the decision is that I think in some ways the toughest part, because it’s defining what you are, but it’s also saying I’m, I, I have the intestinal fortitude, you know, I, I have the drive and the determination that I’m going to leave these other things behind. And I think that’s one of the most important things, Rory and establishing a personal brand. It’s it’s, it’s what UNH have done. I mean, when, when you said, this is who we are, but you also said, this is who we are. Not that decision, every, everything it’s like a tree. I mean, everything grew up from that planting from the, that decision that you made. And, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s just remarkable the, the power of that decision that it gives you in your life, because it, you know, once you, once you’ve made that decision, then other decisions become more clear. Now it’s a challenge to make them, right. I mean, it’s a, it’s a challenge to, to turn down that check as we were talking earlier. But boy, when you’ve got that initial clarity, then the other decisions that you need to make, tend to become a little bit more apparent.
RV (28:17):
That is so good. Y’all most of this is a matter of just making the decision and then just driving it. I love it. Scott McCain, the book is called iconic. We put of course links to the book and to Scott on our site, Scott, where do you want people to go? If they want to follow them, follow you more, or learn more about what you’re up to.
SM (28:41):
W w where are you? One of the things that folks might do is just go to Scott mccain.com. It talks about, you know, the, the resources we have, the courses that we offer. For example, you got a course that teaches how to tell a more distinctive story, how to create distinction. You’ll find links for everything right there. And it’s M C K a I N a. So Scott mccain.com and that’ll send everybody there, Scott
RV (29:04):
Mccain, I encourage you all to follow him. And this is Scott is one of the smartest people I’ve met. He’s one of the people that we have learned from so much just about these concepts that, you know, have, have shaped our life and are shaping many of your lives by way of following us and listening to what we’re doing. So, buddy, thank you for the work you’ve done. Thank you for your being here and just your support in our life. We’re so grateful for you,
SM (29:30):
The world of you and everybody there. So thank you so much where I, I appreciate it so much, and it’s always great being a part of anything with you. So thank you.

Ep 196: Fueling Your Own Creativity, Innovation, and Productivity with Juliet Funt

RV (00:07):
You friends that I have that are scary, smart, super intelligent Juliet Funt is one of those friends I’ve known her for years, basically met her as a kid running around at the national speakers association when I was like in my early twenties. And she is one of the best speakers in the world. And I’ve shared some of the biggest, some of the biggest stages that I’ve ever been on. She has been there too, and we’ve kind of hung out, you know, my second book hung out a little bit in some of her space. She has a concept called white space, which is really about helping people just kind of reclaim their, their strategic pauses and thinking time and giving, giving them the time to sort of have more, a bit of margin and a, a bit of breadth in their daily life, so that we can be more creative and more productive. And so we’ve hung out a little bit in some of those circles and she’s just kind of an expert on, you know, managing all this busy-ness and overwhelm. And she got a great book deal. I’ll leave it at that. She got a very wonderful book deal with a major publisher, which we maybe we’ll talk a little bit about some, because she’s fresh done with turning in the manuscript for a real massive project. And anyways, Juliet, it’s great to have you welcome back
JF (01:29):
To I’m so thrilled to be here.
RV (01:31):
Yeah. So the new book is called a minute to think it is, and we all need to us talk to us about what is white space submitted to think what, what is all of this? And, and why does it matter?
JF (01:45):
The, there is this need for oxygen in the system of our days, and we needed it before the pandemic, but boy, howdy. I can’t even imagine a time in history that we needed it more. And that, that oxygen is really the foundational metaphor. It’s kind of, if you imagine you’re building a fire and you took paper and pine needles and logs, and you stack them all up and you tried to light it, nothing would happen. But if you added one critical ingredient of space, everything would beautifully ignite. And we are the same in our work is the same. And our creativity is the same. And yet we don’t have that oxygen. There’s no oxygen to feed the fire.
RV (02:21):
Mm. That is such a beautiful, distinct, sharp, accurate metaphor. There’s just, there’s no space. I mean, in the concept white space, of course, you’re referring to like calendar eyes, like you’re talking about counter space, everything is crammed together. And, and it feels like, especially with COVID like you used to like walk down the hall to a meeting and at least have 10 seconds to like walk down the hall to the next meeting. And now it’s like one zoom is over and the next zoom is starting. There’s like, literally not a breath right before we’re just running to the next thing.
JF (02:57):
The tactic we’ve discussed is if you can’t get a bio break, you just wait for a really chatty person and then you can mute P and returned before they, before you, you have to double check the mute, but that’s sometimes the only respite to get to get a second. And it’s so inhumane to begin with, but it’s also so unproductive. It’s so unproductive to take people that you’ve worked to find and hire and head hunt in these genius pieces of talent, and then put them in a deoxygenated environment where they’re just going to shrivel. It’s a, it’s a lot.
RV (03:28):
I mean, so why is that? Like, why, why is it so unproductive? I mean, a lot of the people listening are pretty hard driving, you know, entrepreneurs, solopreneurs practitioners. Is that really true? I mean, I don’t know that everyone takes that as truth to go, like, you know, maximize every second of every day. And it’s kind of like some of, some of us, that’s kind of how we got to where we are. Right. And so you’re saying, well, Hey, you should, you know but I think the oxygen metaphor is so good, but like, I guess what, what gives you so much confidence or like to go like, Hey, that’s not actually productive. Like at some point that caps out,
JF (04:09):
First of all, we can look into, I know you have a lot of entrepreneurs, solopreneurs authors, writers authors, speakers, but first you, if you start with the corporate heck a heck hole, if there’s a appropriate way to say that, of course work that there, there, there is the easiest place to quantify the problem. So when you ask employees, what part of their work feels wasteful and meaningless, and like, it’s just a drain on their entire lives. They will report 20 to 30% of the tasks that they touch are stupid. And if you take those 20 to 30% of those illogical, unnecessary nonsense tasks, and you quantify them based on the salary value of that human being per hour, you can actually come up with a distinct number. It’s a million dollars for every 50 people annually is spent on work that has no value.
RV (04:57):
Whoa, say that again?
JF (05:00):
Yeah. I’ll give you even a visual. It’s a million for $51 million for every 50 employees. But that means, think of it as if you took 12 out of every 50 people and just let them eat Doritos and play video games all day long. And that was their entire contribution. That’s the level of waste.
RV (05:15):
That’s the job that I want right there. Retos and play videos and the crash. Yeah. The rest of you suckers are cranking out the work and getting stuff done. 12 out of 50 people just not doing anything
JF (05:30):
So that, and that wasteful that willingness to let that much waste in the system comes from the fact that we worship activity and not productivity, and that they are two different things that just because we’re moving and checking boxes and doing doesn’t mean we’re actually producing, building, creating something of value. So that common misperception is the seat of the corporate example. Then you move to all of us, the speakers, the the people who are just working it, yes, we have to work incredibly hard to get where we’re going. But little sips of thoughtful time are necessary to make sure that we’re not working. Blisteringly hard in the wrong direction. In order to, if you take a moment to reflect on where you’d like to go, what’s your highest value? What is the most important thing that I can touch next? These critical junctures of thoughtfulness change the nature and the trajectory of the work that you do do so that it’s not just mania heading in any direction that you, that your head that you’re pointed.
RV (06:28):
And I think that’s actually a pretty accurate description of personal brands. It’s kind of mania, right? It’s like, I’m on Instagram, I’m on Snapchat. I’m doing my podcast. I’m like trying to do a speaking gig. I’m working on a webinar, I’m building a funnel, I’m writing email copy. I’m doing my group, my, my graphic design. I’m updating my press kit, like, right. Like, and, and, and so are you saying to work less, like, is that the, is that the goal here is to, is to do less work less?
JF (06:58):
No. For, for those corporate people I’m talking about, we want to remove that wasteful work, but I’m not talking specifically about working less. Although I do think that there are fascinating framings being put out now by people like Michael Hyatt, who’s entire giant teams on a six hour day and finding it exactly as effective as an eight hour day was. So there, there are interesting people playing in the work less space, but that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that without the ability to pause in between the activities of what you do, you can’t oxygenate those efforts correctly. So let me, let me walk you through what it looks like in real life. When you finish writing the pot there, script for your blog, and then you’re going to move to checking your new headshots. And then you’re going to check to w oh, your Instagram feed.
JF (07:42):
If you’re jumping from one to the other, to the other, you don’t have time to do a few things. There’s no time to digest the lessons or reflections from what you just did. And there’s no time to plan appropriately to be spectacularly. Excellent. In the next thing that you pick up, there’s no time to shift your mind from human being interactive on Monaco mode to deep creative work mode. When we don’t have transition time. And the, those little spaces open up the day and they infuse it with thoughtfulness, creativity, purposefulness, they allow us to catch ourselves before mistakes, like answering too fast to an email or responding too fast to a question. This habit of thoughtfulness, interlaced affects everything.
RV (08:27):
Yeah. So you’re not this isn’t like a, you know, take a six month sabbatical yoga retreat every year. And like, do that really? You’re saying thought, I love that, that last phrase, you said thoughtfulness interlaced throughout the day. You know, and I was thinking about it makes the first thing that came to my mind was that, so a brand builders group, we’re a classic example of this. Like we started growing really fast, got a marketing team. And then the marketing team went off in a thousand directions and everyone started doing stuff. We literally got less results with like 20 people in marketing than we used to get with two. Because everyone was like, they just start, they were just competing for, they were just competing for priorities. Nothing was actually going forward. It was all like going sideways. And then we’re like, okay, we’re going to do one launch a month. There’s only one thing that we do every month. Because even if you only do one thing a month, you’re not actually doing one thing a month, you’re doing that thing. But you’re optimizing the thing that you did the month before. And you’re preparing for the thing that is coming next. And we had no space and time before that, cause it was just a constant like race. And you’re saying that happens all the time, low value,
JF (09:51):
Quantity work. If you think of that phrase, it’s not something that you want to be producing as a company, but many of us are generating low value, quantity work. And one of my favorite metaphors for this as if I, I spoke to a mole scientist once who studies moles, little, the little burying kind of critter, and what they do in mole land is they don’t have any specific direction that they dig, but they dig very, very fervently for the entire day. So they just put their little paws up and they just go in any direction. They happen to be digging and then they give it their all. And they really work hard all day long, but that’s, we don’t want to be moles. We don’t want to be randomly going in any direction. We want to be purposeful and thoughtful. So it just a minute ago, you and I were talking in prep about I’m four weeks away from book launch, the craziest starting, the, the opportunities are raining down.
JF (10:45):
Should I be writing to clients? Should I be on podcasts, should be, I’d be writing special print media. And I took a minute and we got slow. And we said, what? I said, what is the one thing? What are the two or three things? And just that deceleration will kick in your own wisdom. It’s just a matter of getting off the speed for a minute to say, oh right, wait a minute. I’m just realizing that I just prepped 400 emails on a project that I’m not really invested in, but I’m just getting off on the sending, sending, sending, sending, sending. And if we take a minute to think before that you can avert all that work.
RV (11:22):
Yeah. I wonder how much of it is like, it’s really weird. There’s like because on the one hand it’s overwhelming and exhausting and daunting and all of those things. But on the other hand, it’s almost like we do this busy-ness as a defense mechanism from having to like stop and really go is what I’m doing really matter. Is this really smart? Do I really even enjoy the thing that I’m doing? And it, it feels like we do that. It’s almost like we’re addicted to moving fast. Cause it like prevents us from having to sit with our thoughts
JF (12:03):
And deep work is really scary. So the Cal Newport style deep work where we go in and we create things that are like one gorgeous piece of sushi. That’s sitting on a platter that’s so rich and so flavorful that you don’t need anything with it. That that’s just spectacular. That kind of work to produce tight. Gorgeous, rich work is really hard. And it’s really lonely. If you’re into any degree in extroverted person, you like relational tasks, I write to you and marketing writes to me and sales writes to marketing and I chat with you and I’m on zoom with you. So all of that relational stuff, factors in to what we miss when we try, try to slow things down and do quieter work. So there are a lot of addictive and habitual and adrenaline based reasons that we avoid it. But sometimes that’s where the gold is.
RV (12:54):
Talk to me about that when it comes to writing your book, because this is the world that you’ve been living in here for the last several months is like you go from being this incredibly successful speaker and you got this training company and you’re working with major companies. And you know, like when I’d say I’ll Dulia to speaking at events, I mean, she’s, she’s doing events where there’s 10,000 people in the room. There’s there’s 85,000, a hundred half a million people watching live 7,500 in a room, 30,000 watching on a live stream, a big time stuff. You go from doing all that to be like, Hey, your manuscript’s due in four months. And now you are, this is that’s exactly what you just went through, right? Like how was that experience for you?
JF (13:40):
That’s why I didn’t write a book for 20 years because know, being alone. I don’t like that. Just me and the empty word document is a terrifying place. I will clean the kitchen. I will check social. I will research orthodontic things that my children need. I’ll do anything to try to avoid being in that scary, lonely place of just me and the paper. But the way that it worked for me was when the moment was ready, the right agent and the right message and it all kind of crystallized. And then I had to figure out what the writing process was going to be for an extroverted person who was scared of the quiet. And what worked for me was always writing on retreat. My writing style was that for a year and a half, I went away one day a week and wrote, and there was no email, no children, no husband, no same environment, nothing I’d go to a hotel or I’d go somewhere else. And I would be alone with the book and that kind of compartmentalization has always worked really wonderfully for me. And it worked really, really well for this.
RV (14:45):
So, so I want to talk about the editing process. So I love that and I, I right. The same way except both of my books I wrote in a week. So I do it. I just, I like disappear from the world for like seven days. And just, it’s like a, it’s like a what do they call it? When you like binge like a ranger, like a bender, it’s like a binder. It’s like a writing bender that and, and cause it’s the same way. It’s like the only way I can really like get focused is to like be, you know, just to remove from everything. But then you actually get the book written and people are always, people are always off when they talk to me because they’re like, I just got my, I just finished my manuscript and I go, congratulations.
RV (15:35):
You’re 20% of the way done from having an hour towards having that actual book. Oh, so true. They’re so mad at because it’s like, I think writing is one of those things you can hear. It’s you know, Mitch Hedberg used to describe pancake. Do you know who Mitch Hedberg is? No. Oh my gosh. He’s one of my favorite comedians. He died of a drug overdose, which is sad, but he was really brilliant. And he used to say, it’s like pancakes at the beginning, they’re all warm and fluffy. And then by the end, you’re just fricking sick of them, like writing the same way. Like you’re like, oh, this is so exciting. I’m writing my book. And then, and then it’s just like, then you have to edit. And you’re like, I’m so sick of this. I want to read. So talk to you about the
JF (16:23):
Editing. How about when you’re done, I’ll go back to that. But how about when you’re done editing and you finally get done with these sticky cold pancakes and then they go now, the next year of your life is going to be being on podcasts, repeating back the same pancakes for the rest of your career. It’s very difficult. The funny thing about the editing process was how unprepared underprepared I was for what exactly was going to happen. So I’m with a major publisher. Okay.
RV (16:49):
For the editing pro you were under prepared for the editing process
JF (16:53):
Completely because so Harper Collins is our publisher. I have a wonderful, wonderful publisher named Hollis. And on the day of January 1st, when we turned in the book, we had a party because the book was dead and I turned it in. It was finished. And then they send back around about a month later and you sit down and go, oh my God, there’s two days of work in copy editing and checking all this stuff in this round to read it again. And then you send back all those changes. Then they send back another round over the course of three or four months. They sent back round after round on the third round, after being on retreat, intensely editing round one and round two of what I thought was a completed manuscript. I sent back 290 changes on the third round. So some of that is just my own perfectionistic tendencies and how much I care about this particular book, being a spectacularly unique and beautiful book, but it’s not done when you think it’s done.
JF (17:45):
You think it’s done when you turn it in? It, it isn’t even done until the day that the printers rip it out of their hands and say, we have to have this now, or we’re going to miss the deadline. You just keep tweaking it. And then as I told you, before smart people start to say things that you wish you’d written in it, and now it’s finished and you go, oh my gosh. If I just had that conversation with Joel, before we locked the manuscript, I would have completely changed a, B or C. And I’m prepared for that to just keep going.
RV (18:14):
I mean, this is, what’s crazy too about a book, right? Is like, you go through this, you know, and it’s, it’s a lifetime to build a platform. Then you give a proposal, you get an agent, you get a deal, you do the manuscript. There’s 75,000 edits. Then you’re just exhausted. Like you ran a hundred mile race and they’re like, congratulations. You’ve reached the starting line, which is now you’re going to do your book promotion for the next eight, eight months. And then at the end of it, all you sell the thing for $22 and 50 95 cents. Meanwhile, you could throw your iPhone on record a video course and sell it for 500 bucks by this afternoon. And that’s, but that’s what I think makes books so beautiful and still so relevant and so important. It’s it’s the work that you do. It’s the, the amount of space and oxygen that, that went into building this beautiful thing and over and over and refining it.
JF (19:09):
It’s a lot of great things. I mean, it is a, if you got a decent advance, you’re going to be very old and gray before you even see a dollar of that 22. So that’s another thing is this is the most free work I’ve ever done in my career over the last three, three years on this book. But the beautiful thing about writing a book is it takes content that is in a raw form and it causes you to sit with that content and tweak it and play with it and marinated and step away from it and come back to it. And the end of it, you open it up almost as if you hadn’t been part of the process and you say, this is wonderful. And it, it comes to fruition like a child growing into him, you know, like a boy growing into a man there’s this day where you look at and go, wow, I have goosebumps right now telling you the story of getting goosebumps about looking at it, because you think now it’s ready. It works. It’s clean, it’s easy. Maybe it’s enjoyable. And wow. It came together and that’s, that’s a Mo the most thrilling, creative process that I’ve ever been involved in. And that has nothing to do with whether it’s sells or makes me famous or makes a dollar from here.
JF (20:16):
And this,
RV (20:18):
Everything you just described, the beauty of that, which we’ve in the context of this conversation, been talking about in these, what we would call and take the stairs harvest season of focus, but it’s almost like white space in a minute to think it’s almost like you get a little bit of that in everything you do. If you just breathe for a second, you kind of infuse that same level of creativity, wonder and innovation into your entire day. Just like little bits of it. Time,
JF (20:54):
If you have the habit of the pause inside your bones, what happens is that it naturally shows up for you without trying. So on those writing days, I would write or edit for 12 hours. But if I happen to catch out of the corner of my eye, a pretty sunset while I was writing, or if I happened to notice that my hands were really enjoying the warmth of my tea cup while I was holding it, it would be second nature for me to pause and go with that, go with that for a minute. If I was writing and I had a little grain of an idea in some critical voice at all, that’s silly or not worth it. My habit of the pause would tell me to stop and hang with it for a minute before dismissing it. And so what happens is once the pause becomes your practice, it comes to you naturally like breathing and you get the sense of pausing going, going pausing. I definitely believe that there are harvest seasons. I believe that balance is like the stock market and, and it goes up and it goes down. And right now I’m in a book launch. And not as balanced as I am in other times, but if you can think of it as an interlacing, just a beautiful sign curve of go stop, go stop, go stop. I believe that you’ll be stronger, longer and better in the work that you do.
RV (22:08):
That is marvelous. So w the, book’s called a minute to think where do you want people to go to read about it? Find out about it, connect with you,
JF (22:19):
Juliet funt.com is where you can get the book. Hopefully that you’ll share with your team, because we have a very, very strong impetus for people to discuss this work together. So it comes to life. When you say, I think, what do you think about this? And how can you apply it and what feels safe in the world of busy-ness to take pauses? It’s a wonderful thing. And they’re, they can also take something called the busy-ness test, which is a quiz that any of your listeners can go to to understand where are the most pernicious thieves of their own time, and where do they come from and how they can stop them uniquely for them?
RV (22:51):
Love it. Well, we’ll link up to Juliet funt.com and also the book a minute to think it is called, check it out, profound, powerful, insightful both accelerating and decelerating to your life at the same time. Really, really a magic Joel. I’ve read through the entire manuscript. I absolutely love it. Fully endorsed this book, check it out. Juliet, thank you for making time for us. And we wish you the best. Always. Great. Thanks.

Ep 194: How to Dominate Your Niche with Chester Elton

RV (00:02):
I’m so excited to introduce to a long time friend and mentor of mine named Chester Elton. We haven’t actually talked for years, but early in my career, I talked to Chester several times. AJ and I talked several times with jester and he’s been a huge encouragement to me. And he’s a great example. Him and his business partner, Adrian of, of owning and dominating a space. Specifically when it comes to workplace culture, these guys have created the space they’ve owned it. They have data from over a 1 million working adults. Chester is the co-founder of a company called fine mojo, which is a global assessment company. He is the author of multiple New York times and wall street journal best-selling books including all in the carrot principle, leading with gratitude, and then their newest one anxiety at work between all their books. Adrian Gosick is his writing partner’s name. Their books have been translated into 30 languages and have sold over one and a half million copies. Chester has been on the today show 60 minutes. He appears in major media all over the globe and it’s just a really, really amazing guy. And so you’ve got to learn, gotta hear some wisdom direct from the source. So gesture, thanks for being here, man.
CE (01:24):
Well, Rory listen, first and foremost. Thanks for inviting me. It’s always great to reconnect with old friends and, and thank you for those kind words. You know, I, I look at the work that you and AIJ have done the stories that you’ve shared your ups and downs. You know, you’re never down, you’re never out, you’re always taking the stairs, see what I did there. And and I, I just love your spirit and the way AJ building your family and building your career. So a delight to be here with you today. Yeah.
RV (01:52):
You know, this is this is a funny fact that people probably don’t know, but one of the most influential ways you’ve been most influential in our life is you told us directly, we need to start making children. And that conversation stuck with us. So emphatic, like in our mind, because you were like, you have to have kids, you’re going to love it. It’s great. The world needs more children from people like you guys and just you know, so thank you for that. Cause I think last time we talked, I don’t think I had kids. You,
CE (02:25):
You did not. So I’m so glad that you took my advice. You know, it is interesting and it’s so easy to get caught up in, you know, what you’re doing and you and AJ, I love what you do. There’s nothing wrong with that. That sometimes you put aside some of the things that really make life rich and important than meaningful, and certainly that has to do with raising a family. And, and I know you love being the dad, you got two kids now, you guys are doing your part so good for you.
RV (02:52):
Yeah, well, we’re doing it. And you know nowadays we’re trying to help people build and monetize personal brand, which of course, you know, met, made for an obvious conversation with you. I know that anxiety at work, you said is your 14th book. And you know, one of the things that we’re always trying to help people do is figure out their uniqueness and find a space that they can own. And I feel like you and Adrian have always been so consistent and you know, owning the culture space, but also data. Like when I think of you, another part of your brand that really speaks to me is just like research and, and science and and the data component of it. I wanted to get your thoughts on how do you, how do you approach a research project? Like for the average person who isn’t, you know, you’ve got this long background in researcher and now you have your own assessment company. Like how do you set about you know, just kind of putting your mind around the idea of conducting research and what counts as research and, you know, how do you just, you know, think about it.
CE (03:59):
Yeah. A great question. You know, we early on figured out that the data gives you all kinds of credibility, right? And so Willis towers, Watson graciously gave us access to their database and international database on employee engagement. And that’s a very rich area to mine. As you recall, we started our, our writing careers around recognition in the workplace. We wrote, you know, the character principle and, and a carrot a day. And the daily, you can have guys for a long, a long time. Yeah, absolutely. In fact, if you, if you Google carrot guys, we, we, we pop up. And so recognition was the space where we really, you know, cut our teeth and then it became very obvious to us that it wasn’t the recognition space that we were really in. It was really the culture space because we never met a great leader, a great team or a great culture that didn’t celebrate their successes.
CE (04:58):
And so we transitioned from being, you know strictly recognition to being culture and our landmark book. There was the all in how the best managers create a culture of belief that drives big results. And that really gave us a bigger canvas to paint on. And that’s where we started getting recognized, recognizes, you know, as leadership gurus and culture gurus with, with with the global gurus list actually, and HR lists and, and on and on because of the research, it wasn’t a feeling. It wasn’t like, oh, this looks or sounds right. It was rock solid data. And when your database gets, you know, over a million, which is way more than you need as you well know it gives you that credibility. Now, what we also wanted to do was say, okay, well, what proprietary you know, insights can we have?
CE (05:49):
And so we developed our own assessment called the motivators assessment. If you’ve taken like strength finders, that’s what you’re good at, or Myers-Briggs, that’s who you are. The motivators assessment, we felt sort of filled in the gap between who I am, what I’m good at and tell me what I’m passionate about. And that’s that Venn diagram that if I know who I am, I know what my strengths are. And I can marry that with my passions. Boy, that’s productivity, that’s joy coming to work and all the things associated with it. So that gave us some proprietary insights. And then as we, as we started to publish more and more around teams and leadership leading with gratitude was a book. Our timing was impeccable, Roy, our, we, we launched that book in, in, in March of 2000. We bought every available front of store space at airports because that’s where people buy business books.
CE (06:42):
We even said, if you buy this book, we’ll give you a pair of gratitude socks, because this book will knock your socks off. And literally two weeks later you couldn’t find, you know, a mouse in an airport. And while this is in March of 2020. Yes. And so, and yet, and yet the timing was also good because it was a time where people needed to step back and say, I know what I’m losing. What am I grateful for? And it gave us a great opportunity to get out there with leaders and cultures and saying, yes, I understand that you can’t do a lot of the things that you used to do before. I understand that life is more difficult in homeschooling and so on. And yet in all of this, what are we grateful for? So it gave us a wonderful opportunity to take a deep dive into an emotional connection, to gratitude and leading with gratitude.
CE (07:31):
And we have some wonderful stories and partners, well, our publisher at the time and still is our publisher Harper business. Adrian and his son had been working on a father, son project around anxiety. Anthony constant. His son had suffered from severe anxiety since a little kid. One of my sons also at that happened and took the project to Harper business. And they said, well, this isn’t, you know, you have no credibility in the self-help section. This is a business book. People are suffering from anxiety at work, like never before. So you wouldn’t normally publish a book every year. A book is a big project. Well with COVID not traveling, not speaking, we had the time we cranked it out very quickly. And this is by far Rory our most important book. Our favorite book is leading with gratitude. Our most important book is anxiety at work because it is so mission-driven because it fits neatly under that umbrella of culture. You can’t have a high-performance culture. You can’t be a high-performing person if you’re suffering from severe anxiety. So the two married up so nicely, and we’ve, we’ve, we’ve had a lot of fun and a lot of success. So did you start
RV (08:41):
In assess, did you do how did you build, did you build assessment around the anxiety work to create, like, or did you pull it out of the motivators assessment? Is that where you pulled the data out of
CE (08:54):
Excellent question and wonderful insights? You’ve clearly asked a lot of questions before Rory you’re, you’re good at this. But what happened is with the database and we’ve had over a hundred thousand people take the motivators assessment is we were able to parse out generational differences. What were the generational differences in motivation? And then as we looked at the really current and timely research around who is suffering the most from anxiety at work, it was obvious that for, and I’ll give you some numbers just really quick in, in 2018, about 18% of employees referenced some kind of severe anxiety in the workplace. So one in five, basically by 2020, the middle of 2020 that had jumped to 30% overall. When you look though at millennials and gen Z, you know, early twenties to early thirties, it was over 40%. It was 42%.
CE (09:50):
On top of that, you took specifically millennials and gen Z 75% said that they had left a job recently due to a mental health episode. So really the number one issue in the workplace generationally, we were able to see those insights through our motivators assessments about what matters to you. It’s it’s family it’s impact. It’s learning coupled with outside data that said, this group suffers more than any other. And it was really remarkable confluence of, of data stories, interviews, and then tools to deal with, how do I reduce my anxiety in the workplace?
RV (10:29):
Interesting. How did you build the motivators assessment? Like what, what’s the, what did you do? I mean, obviously you go, Hey, let’s build our own assessment. You kind of figure out this space, you go, Hey, there’s a test that does this. There’s a test that does this. We would like to have a test that does this. And then what do you do after that?
CE (10:48):
Well, you go find people that build amazing assessments. And that’s what we did. We, we contacted gene graves and Travis Bradberry who produced the emotional intelligence 2.0 assessment. And you’ll love the conversation. And this is, you know, building your personal brand, right? When you’re building your personal brand, what is your niche? Where it can, as you say, where can you dominate? And then what makes you different than everybody else? And of course, having proprietary data does that in a brilliant way. And so you’ll love the conversation though. So we called up Jane and Travis and we said, Hey, we’ve got this idea. And you know, it’d be identifying people’s passions. It’s, you know what motivates me, put your passions to work. We self-published the book around that and all the training and so on it. And they said, yeah, yeah. So we wait two or three conversations and it was not an inexpensive proposition.
CE (11:39):
I mean, if you want to do it well and have a third-party vetted and have it be a valid assessment, you’ve it takes time. It, and you want experts in of course, experts are expensive. So they, it came down to this and you’ll love this Rory because you know, it really does come down to personal relationships and everything you do, right. They said, okay, well, we have three criteria as to whether it will take a project on. And they are, these said, first is, is it interesting work for us? So think about that. They said, we get approached all the time to do stuff like this. So first and foremost, will it be challenging? And will it be interesting for us to create this assessment? And the answer to that is yes. Secondly, is we have to ask the question, will it help people like, will it be helpful?
CE (12:26):
Well, it helped change the world to make it a little better place. And as we think about what you want to do and how we could put this together, the answer to that question is, yes, the answer, the third question is by far the most important, and it’s this, do we like you because you’re going to spend a lot of time together. Right? And if we don’t like you, it just will not be worth it. So luckily they check the third box as well. And it took us about a year and a half to develop it. We had a third-party vetted, did all kinds of alpha and beta testing. And yeah. Now we’ve got this wonderful assessment that gives us incredible insights, generationally industry gender and so on.
RV (13:07):
I love that. I mean, I think that it, thank you for sharing that because it’s really helpful to go, you know, for me to sit down and create an assessment that passes all the likes, statistical validity and probabilities and margin of error and all that is like super intimidating, but to go, oh, like anything, you pay some money, you hire, you hire the person and you go out and you get it. You make an investment and you get it done. And then you have this proprietary proprietary thing. So I, I love that. And I love what you’re saying about how proprietary proprietary data helps you dominate. So you create this assessment, you’re measuring a bunch of people are taking it. You’re drawing insights from that too. You’re drawing insights from that to create the books. How do you actually sell the books once you have them? Because it’s like, I feel like everyone that talks about books, it’s really about how to get the book, deal, how to come up with the idea, how to write the book, how to publish the book, but nobody ever talks about like, what do you actually do that sells books? Like that gets a lot of people to buy. I mean, you sold one and a half million books. Like how do you do that? Yeah.
CE (14:22):
Yeah. Yeah. I think we’re actually about 1.7 these days. I’ll tell you, you say, how do you sell a million books? You sell them one at a time. You really do. It’s really interesting, you know, back to the personal brand, then we’ll circle back to how do you sell books? It’s really interesting. Like you say, you know, you just don’t go create an assessment by yourself. You, you find experts. You know, you live in Nashville. I live in Jersey, in Jersey. There’s a that look, I know a guy who knows a guy, right? You get your network. I know a guy who knows a guy who can, can do that for you. You know what I’m saying? And so you do your surround yourself with really good and really smart people. It’s the same thing in publishing, you know given that we’ve written 14 books now, we’ve, we’ve made every mistake humanly possible, and we’ve actually helped about a dozen people get published.
CE (15:13):
And so you do your surround yourself with great people. I’ll tell you a really interesting story about leading with gratitude. We always hire a personal editor to edit our books. As, as you know, we put the concept together, we’d go to the publishers. They buy the idea. They buy the marketing plan. Not only do they need to love the concept, they need to love, how are you going to go to market? In other words, they can print it. They can get you a distribution. They’ve got a PR team that can help you, you know, get on the various podcast and get on various shows. And so it’s really up to you as the authors to sell the books. And so what does your network look like? So, you know, we’ve got 625,000 followers on LinkedIn. We’ve got an internal newsletter where we have just under a hundred thousand subscribers within LinkedIn.
CE (15:58):
We write business books. So we place our bet on LinkedIn. If you’re a different kind of author, you might play place your bet on Instagram or Facebook or whatever the point is is that, you know, find your community, build that brand in the community, build your reputation and then build your followership so that when you put stuff out, people will view it. It’s, it’s so interesting that when you build your brand first off, and we did this with an ad agency in New York years and years ago, when we were writing all our books with, with carrots in the title said, what is your noble cause? You know, what is it that really is going to bring people to you? Is it, you know, breast cancer awareness, right? Is it autism? What is it? And for ours was creating great, you know, great cultures where people were excited to come to work, where they believed what they did mattered.
CE (16:50):
They made a difference. And when they made a difference, it was noticed and celebrated. It was that simple. And it was great. That’s a noble cause. Then the second piece is, are you, are you the spokesperson or the spokes in our case, there’s two of us. And are you likable and never underestimate likable? You know, are you really emotionally connected to your cause? Do people want to hear from you? Do they trust you? Do they like you? And so we were able to check that box, you know, Andrea and I both, you know, very passionate about what we do. We’re also passionate about taking what you learned in the workplace, into your personal lives, to your families, making families stronger and community stronger. So this that check the box. The third one was really interesting. They said, do you have a symbol that people can rally around?
CE (17:40):
And you think about, you know, breast cancer awareness, it’s the pink ribbon. And then how that has manifested itself, when you can get the world’s toughest athletes, NFL football players wearing pink cleats, you’ve arrived. Right? And it was very identifiable. And so for us, it was the symbol of the carrot, which we continue to use in our work. And so on. It’s very simple. The carrot is that is the positive reward for, for all your hard work. We even created a little mascot. And that was the fourth thing. Do you have a mascot? A nice to have, not a must have. And so we have Garrett the carrot. So wherever we go and we engage people, we, we, we, we give them a carrot or, or a small reward. Well, as you build that brand and you build that network and that followership, then it becomes easier for you to say.
CE (18:26):
And by the way, if you understand the data, if you listen to the stories, which are the case studies, that data gives you credibility, the stories are what people remember. Then here are the tools and you find the tools in our books. So you’re going to want to buy the book. So, you know, you, you build your followership with your podcast, with your newsletter, with your followership on whatever platform makes sense. You start making lists, you get known as an authority in your space. You build that marketing machine and it makes it easier to sell books. It’s a lot of work because selling books, as you know, that’s hard work.
RV (19:04):
And is the, is the assessment, how does the do people, is the assessment free? Does it come with the book? Is it cause like some of them you have to buy the book and it comes with the assessment is, is like how do you do it?
CE (19:16):
Yeah, we’ve done all of the above. A very, we first published the book called what motivates me, put your passions to work in the code was in the book very much like StrengthFinders and emotional intelligence, 2.0 later, we actually pulled the book from the market because it was, it was cannibalizing our training somewhat. And then it was simply online. It’s a digital version. It’s very, very scalable. We had the the culture works, which was our training company. We’ve now moved to strictly a data company, which is fine mojo. And there is a freemium model. So you can go on and you can take the assessment and we’ll give you a part of the data. If you want the whole report, you pay a small fee to get that. And then the work that we’ve really discovered is very helpful with the motivators assessment is in building strong teams as a team leader.
CE (20:03):
I understand my motivators. Then I understand the individual motivators. If each person on my team and each team member understands their motivators as well. Now, it becomes really interesting when you start to bleed into other platforms and distribution models, we’re working on a very interesting platform right now on can we tie a platform where leaders can come in, adjust their behaviors, do very specific things, log that online, to reduce anxiety, to build stronger teams. And we’re hoping to launch that at the end of end of July. Well, that’s where you’re making a huge difference. And that’s where you’re using your data and your insights to then change behaviors for the better to create better workplaces, stronger teams, better leaders. Yeah. I love
RV (20:52):
That. So I want to ask you a little deep dive about LinkedIn, because you guys do dominate. I mean, you dominate on LinkedIn which you know, is really smart for what you’re saying. It’s like, this is where my audience is and you know, and I feel like, you know, you’re more there like then on Instagram, right? So it’s like, oh, sure. Yeah. You know, you go follow what you’re doing on LinkedIn. And you’re like, oh my gosh, these people are celebrities on Instagram. Not as much your audience, isn’t there to the same extent. So how do you, how have you done that on LinkedIn? Like, I’m, I’m curious specifically about what has worked well for you on LinkedIn.
CE (21:31):
Well, yeah. And, you know, cause you grew up in sales and I grew up in sales. You have to place your bed. You know, if you’re trying to be too many things to too many people, you end up being nothing to everybody. Right. And so it became very clear for us that, you know, LinkedIn was the place where business people go and we write business books. So it was a bit of a no brainer early on in LinkedIn. Again, this is, you know, surrounding yourself with really good people. So I had a very, a very good friend who worked at LinkedIn here in New York. And he literally, we go to the same church and he came up to him and he said, you know, I love your books. I love all the carrots stuff and everything. He says, you know, I’m at LinkedIn, they’re starting an influencers program and you should be an influencer.
CE (22:11):
So we got in very early, you know, when there were only a few hundred, then it went to be, you know, over a thousand and then they paired it back. Which was really interesting if you weren’t, if you weren’t using your LinkedIn influencer platform over a certain period of time, they, they pulled it. Which makes sense. You know, if you’re not, if you’re not going to use it, why bother? Why bother? And that was a huge break for us. Now you have to be invited to be an influencer. You can make yourself aware it’s an invitation. So again, if, if you say, oh great, I for example, I had an author contact and she said, well, I would love to be an influencer. Can you introduce me? I said, yes, I can understand. It’s an invitation. And as I look at your profile, you have 1500, or maybe she has 2,500 followers.
CE (22:59):
I go, that’s not influencer status. You know, you’re not going to become an influencer. If you have 1500 followers, you know, half a million is probably, well, probably 250,000, but you get, the idea is you have to have a certain amount of gravitas. And then that influencer program was a huge boon to us because as they would start to pilot new programs, they would go to their influencers. First, when they started to do newsletters, they said, we want you to do a newsletter. Is it crate? What is that? How do you do that? Right. So they’ve coached you through it. And they said, the great thing about a newsletter is when you post something, it goes to your followers, right? And to a fraction of your followers, really a newsletter goes to your followers inbox because they subscribed to it. They asked for it. And we started with a newsletter once a month.
CE (23:51):
And I think we ended up, you know, early on with like 1500 subscribers. And then every month we would publish, they would grow. And then they suggested that we go to twice a month. I think once a week is too much. I mean, I, I want to hear from my wife at least every week, but for me, you know, every week. And so we went to twice a week, well, we just passed the year benchmarks. So we had what we went to twice a week and that we have like 18 newsletters. We’re just under a hundred thousand subscribers where our message goes right to their inbox. They encouraged us to do a podcast, which we do with anxiety at work, wonderful guests. They said, we’re doing a LinkedIn live. We’d like to do a LinkedIn live show. We did, we have a LinkedIn live show every Thursday on leading with gratitude that then we turn into a podcast.
CE (24:42):
And so, you know, it’s, it’s layer upon layer upon layer as you build it up. So we’ve got our followership, we’ve got our newsletter, we’ve got our LinkedIn live show. We’ve got our podcasts. I started a really just goofy thing where when COVID started, I just post a photograph every day of something I’m grateful for. And it’s amazing, you know, you get 30,000 hits on that and depending what it is, and, and I’m probably like you I’ll post something and it’ll, it’ll go phenomenally well and go, well, what was it about that that made it great. And I can never figure it out. You know, I’ll write this article for our newsletter. And I think that is genius. Like Cheshire, you know, you’re gonna love it. You know, there was a viral for sure, there’s a Pulitzer. There’s gonna probably be a movie deal, you know?
CE (25:30):
And, and, and nobody, and it doesn’t resonate. And then you’ll, you’ll do something. I’ll take you 10 minutes to write and you put it and people go nuts. So the, the point that I’m making there is so much of it is trial and error. The thing is to really be consistent. So, I mean, every day I’m posting some little photograph every two weeks, we’ve got a newsletter every week. We’ve got a LinkedIn live show every week we’re dropping on our podcast. And, and that’s what you get to do a lot of places. Now, as my friend from Texas would say, it’s a long road to a small house, circling back to how do you sell books? Often it takes four to five hits for somebody to say, yeah, I’ll buy that book unless it’s your friend that says, you know what, Roy, you got to buy this book and say, great, I’ll buy. Other than that, you know, they’ve got to hear about it on a podcast. They see it posted in the newsletter. You’re doing an interview on another podcast. You’re getting, you know, on and on. It’s about four or five hits. That’s why you’ve gotta be in so many places. And that’s why, what you put out has to be quality work again, why we hire internal editors to make sure that not only are we, are we on message, the product that we’re putting out is world-class.
RV (26:43):
Hmm. Gosh, that’s so good. It’s such a good, such a good reminder of, of just the reality of, of, of what it takes. Thank you for this gesture. Where do you want people to go if to learn about you guys and your work clearly you’re on LinkedIn.
CE (27:01):
That part’s easy. Yeah. you know, LinkedIn is, is where you can find us all over the place it goes to get on.com is our website with our latest podcast, wherever you get your podcasts, anxiety at work, I highly recommend it. You know, the thing, the reason we’re so passionate about this particular subject and why I really encourage people to go there is that only one in 10 employees feel comfortable talking about anxiety to their bosses. It’s the number one issue in the workplace. And if you can’t talk about it, you can’t solve it. Do you know what I mean? We’ve got to create safer places. So I really would recommend that you listen to the podcast. So many leaders, many of them entrepreneurs who you would never think of had a bad day in their lives have suffered from severe anxiety. And by them sharing their stories, it makes it safe for you to share your story and to build not just a better place to work, but to build a better life. So LinkedIn gods to can hilton.com our podcast, sign up for our LinkedIn newsletter. It’s all real positive stuff and listen to Rory Vaden and whatever he does or whatever he says, just do it because he’s a great advocate for not just building better brands, but building better lives and always a pleasure to be with
RV (28:16):
You, right? Oh, I’ll, I’ll always a pleasure. My, my brother is good to see you and we’ll be watching closely and we wish you the best. Thanks so much. Take care and be well.

Ep 192: How to Be an Amazing Show Host with Ken Coleman

RV (00:02):
Well, long before Ken Coleman was a Dave Ramsey personality. He and I were friends. He hosted a talk show in Atlanta and my appearing on his show as a regular guest was one of my first ever gigs like a regular recurring guest. And it’s amazing to see how Ken’s career has grown. He truly is like one of America’s number one, you know, like the number one career coach or one of the top career coaches, he is the bestselling author of a book called the proximity principle. And he hosts a nationally syndicated radio show now called the Ken Coleman show. And so he has been hosting. He also has, you know, he hosted the, the Rams, a YouTube channel. Now he has his own YouTube show. He hosts a lot of the events for entree leadership, the summit master series and all of these different events that they do. And he’s just an amazing guy and it’s been awesome to see how his career has evolved. His personal brand, at least, you know, as, as I perceive, it is really around helping people find purpose at work. And, and, you know, he’s got a new book coming out later this fall or around seven seven stages for how, how to really do that. And so anyways, I’m excited to bring Ken to the show. You haven’t talked to him in a while, buddy. It’s good to see you.
KC (01:30):
Good to see you. I feel like you couldn’t be any more of a beautiful serene setting behind you. There is. That is that real people need to know
RV (01:39):
It is that’s our, that is our back. That’s our backyard.
KC (01:42):
You have to finish the interview by running out and jumping in the pool so that we can see that that would be great.
RV (01:47):
So here’s the thing. So that’s the backyard, but I am in the basement. So it is a picture. It is, it is actually, it is a picture of the backyard. And then we just put it on a green screen. So it’s a little bit
Speaker 3 (02:03):
Magic of show business. I love it. Let me feel like I’m outside because I’m seeing it behind me, but I love it. So,
RV (02:11):
Buddy, can you just kind of catch us up on I mean, I thought it would be fun to talk to you specifically one, cause we’ve just been friends for years, but about hosting specifically. And I know you know, I was with Dave a couple of weeks ago. He told me that you had the interview with George W. Bush coming up. I know that you’ve done thousands of interviews on some of the biggest stages in the world. And and, and tell me about like the, tell me about the Ken Coleman show. Like what’s going on with what’s going on with that, where where’s it at now?
KC (02:45):
Yeah, so it’s very exciting. We’re now approaching 80 stations in national syndication. That’s just traditional talk radio. We’re also on Sirius XM live each day, Monday through Friday, I lead into the Dave Ramsey show. Of course we podcast that each day. So we have a daily podcast and because it is a, in my mind, it’ll always be, I’m an old school radio guy. So to me, it’s a radio show first, you know, now podcasts has become a part of our nomenclature, you know, in the United States for sure, and around the world. And so we take that live radio show and we, we put it out as a podcast because it is a color driven show. I do teach each day and give out great, you know, personal growth content and relevant data and stuff. That’s in the news that affects people that are trying to work on purpose and do what they were created to do, to make the contribution that they were created to make.
KC (03:42):
But we, you know, we do it on YouTube as well. So we have a different format on YouTube for that YouTube Bonnie’s cause it’s very different viewer and engagement habits there. So we’re all the platforms. But simply put, we are helping people discover what they were created to do, and then come up with a plan to make that purpose in your work or reality is based on this premise. We believe that everybody, every man and woman was created to fill a unique role in their work, that means that they are needed and it means they need to do it because somebody out there is relying on them, needs them to show up and be their best. There is a view of work. Roy, you know, this, there’s a view of work. That is, that is this cultural view that says that I work to live.
KC (04:31):
In other words, I work to get a paycheck. And then that paycheck allows me to take care of my basic needs. If there’s a little bit left over, we can make some memories with it. And so that’s pretty much the dominant view of work in the world. And I’m trying to put on a different set of glasses for people and say that you live to work. Now when some people hear that they’re like, Ooh, gross, right? That’s workoholism, it’s your identity. They’re all in place. Now what that means is, is that you were in fact created. I just believe that. So whether you’re a person of faith or not, I wouldn’t argue with anybody for two seconds over that, but I would say that you were created to work. If I substitute the word workout and put contribute, then it go, the yuckiness goes away and somebody goes, oh, that’s right.
KC (05:22):
Created to contribute. See, because the most confused person I’ve ever talked to on the phone or in person would say, can, I don’t know what I want to do. I just want to help people. Right? Most confused person will say that Y Aurora, you know, this, you’re a student of personal growth. You understand this. We all long to make a difference. We can just say it simply as that. So when we say created a contribute, created a work, I don’t think you can separate who you are personally from who you’re supposed to be professionally, meaning your worth is not in how you make your worth is not in your accolades, but, but you, but you get tremendous significance out of the contribution you make in work. So that’s the overriding philosophy of the Ken Coleman show. And so that’s what we’re doing.
KC (06:10):
We’ve got people that are calling in who don’t know what they want to do with their life. We’ve got people that are calling in that know what they want to do, but they don’t know how to get there. We’ve got people who call it, know what they want to do. They know how to get there and Roy, but they won’t do it because they’re scared to death. I get that too. Or they’re held back by financial or relationship issues. And then we have people who are on the path and they’re just trying to get promoted. They want to move up the ladder. They want that next wrong. And so I’m, I’m their coach. Well it starts out every phone call and the counselor first. Then I put on the coach hat and then I put on the cheerleader hat.
RV (06:43):
So I want to talk about that for a second because working with callers you know, when, when I think of hosting, there’s kind of two things I want to, hopefully we can get into one is working with callers. The other is preparing for like expert interviews, so to speak. But on the, on the working with callers which also could be, you know, in a live audience, you know, you’re engaging from stage with somebody, somebody out in the seats. It’s a, it’s a real skill set. And what’s amazing about terrestrial radio. Like I remember when I used to host a terrestrial radio show way back in the day, it’s such a short time, like you only have, how long is it? How long is an entire segment with with a guest? You don’t ask that a few minutes, right?
KC (07:26):
Yeah. Well, you you’re traditionally in an hour, you’re most radio clocks. You’re going to have at most an eight to 10 minute segment. So you might have a couple of eight minutes segments and you might have one 10 minute segment, but but yeah. And, and then you got at most, you know, six minutes with somebody you’re right. I mean, you have to, you have to,
RV (07:48):
That’s so hard. I mean, coaching calls usually are like an hour. I mean, and you’re having to do it in six minutes. So like, what are some of the, what are what’s some of your thought process? Because well, in, in, in, in, in here’s the, here’s the other thing that I’m, that I’m thinking about with you, right? Like, like I’m going, when you’re on a radio show, you’re trying to listen to the caller, you’re trying to get to the point, you’re trying to help them. And you’re also trying to make it quasi entertaining for the people who are listening in on the conversation. Like, how do you, what’s going on in your head when you’re working with a color like that? Yeah. That’s a really
KC (08:31):
Good question. And the reason that question is so good is because you can’t focus on those last two things. Oh, those last two things happen organically, which was well, so, so you got, so you got to coach them quickly, but you also got to be caused by entertaining. So it starts with though you got to listen to the caller. So you said, listen to the caller, give them the advice, coach them, but also make it quasi entertaining. Right? Right. That’s the way you worded it. So it starts with, you’ve got to really, really listen. And I’ve got the benefit of a call screener. So, you know, you get some of your clients who are thinking, Hey, maybe I want to do a call and podcast because what makes our show unique in the space that we’re in is that I’m one of the few, if, if only that are dominated by real live calls and by the way, not knocking anybody who does it this way.
KC (09:20):
Cause for some of your clients, it probably would be good to have somebody call them ahead of time, get some type of a worksheet and figure out what the issue is. Then they schedule a call to me. I think that’s cheating. If you really want to grow, you really want to grow as a thought leader. And as a content provider, put yourself on the high wire of taking calls live with no previous knowledge. So all I have when I’m taking a live call is I’ll see will from Kalamazoo, Michigan. And I’ll have one line that my associate producer will kind of say general direction of the call got two job opportunities deciding that’s all I know. And so what happens is, is I must listen. And now I’ve got a call screener who coaches that caller who’s nervous because it’s live right. And it’s a national show.
KC (10:08):
So coaches indigo get to your question pretty quickly. Be super specific. Ken will take over from there. So when they call in you, you have to listen. Not so much as to what they’re saying, but how they’re saying, like, so you, you can’t just listen to the question. Hey, Ken I got two job opportunities, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I need your help. You listen for their emotion. You listen for little clues and this happens over time. You don’t get this right away, but over time you realize that basically you’re getting the same five to seven questions every day. Just details. Details are different. And so what happens is you must listen. What is the real question? They may ask me this question, but they’re really asking me this question. Okay. So an example would be, instead of them, they’re not asking me they’re really not asking me which job they should take.
KC (11:09):
What they’re really asking me is, am I an idiot for wanting to take this other job because it’s less money. But it’s gonna eventually get where I want to go. The other one is on paper. It’s just a much better job. But this one over here, the heart’s telling me it’s right, is get the best payoff, little bit of risk. You see what I’m saying? So the question behind the question. So when I’m listening to the question, I’m trying to figure out what are they really asking? And many times I’ll just come right at him and go, well, what’s going on here? And so my job is to respond quickly with a scalpel. And the scalpel is the question. And from years and years and years of doing expert interviews with big name people and all this kind of stuff, and trying to develop conversation for an audience to get something from I’ve learned how to ask a question that goes about three levels deeper.
KC (12:00):
So the magic is listening for the real question, the emotion, the challenge, the desire, that’s what you’re listening for. And then you ask questions to get deeper to that and uncover it, not just for the caller to now answer your question full circle, but to uncover it for the listening audience and when the listening audience sees and hears that happening, it’s the theater of the mind because it’s radio or podcasts. So they’re picturing what I look like, the picture and what that person looks like. You can’t help it. And so that becomes entertaining when you uncover somebody and turn somebody’s light bulb on that’s entertaining as hell,
RV (12:37):
Man. So you’re just so basically it’s just, you’re focused on serving that one person and by virtue of doing that, it’ll be entertaining and engaging for the, for the listener. I like that. So that’s, that’s let me
KC (12:50):
Add one thing to that. You must serve the caller, but in serving the caller, you’re talking to the general audience too. You see what I’m saying? You’re taking, so I’m answering Will’s question, but as I’m teaching, I’m going and folks, Will’s not the only one, some of you out there right now are feeling the same way you drop in little moments like that. So it goes from Will’s application to their situation. They apply it, however they would, but they’re voyeuristically engaging, and that is entertaining to people.
RV (13:21):
Huh. And so you actually will step you’ll use language that kind of steps out of the conversation with you and will to kind of connect to the listener
KC (13:29):
And say yeah, sometimes I’ll apply it to everybody, but other times I’m just going to go deep with will and I’m going to go, will you feeling doubt? Why, what are you doubting? And by going really deep with him, everybody else in the audience, that’s listening to us, dealing with some doubt, they totally apply it to them.
RV (13:46):
So, so how do you go deep in six minutes? Like, so you
KC (13:51):
Have to listen to it. And I mean, I know you’re a busy guy, but you’d have to listen to it to really break that down the way I do it is again, I’m approaching 5,000 calls now in four years, live on the air. And so the repetitions, I know what I’m hearing. I, I mean, within 30 seconds, I usually know what’s really going on. And so your diamond did it dig, dig with questions and it seems
RV (14:16):
Like you’re really driving towards the emotion. Almost like it’s, it’s going, they’re asking whatever they’re asking. But the real issue is how are they feeling underneath the surface? And if you can, if you can get, if you can get them to open up about the emotions that they’re feeling, then we’re having a meaningful conversation. I must uncover their heart.
KC (14:40):
I’m all about uncovering their heart. I mean, I joke around with my wife about this, you know, but I don’t say this often publicly because it could sound cheesy, but I I’m in the business. I had a lady call today and she had two options. One was stay where she currently is where she’s crying once or twice a week. At the end of the day, she’s killing it. She’s making 180 grand. She’s really good at it. Loves the people there, but the job is stressing her out. She’s on the verge of burnout. And then she’s got this other opportunity where she’ll make 150 it’ll keep her on the same career path, keep her on the ladder. But it’s gonna be way less stressful. She may make 30 grand less and she’s called me. And instead of me telling her what I think, I just walk her through a series of questions and I get her to tell me, I said, I know what you should do cause I can hear it.
KC (15:29):
But I want you to tell us what are you leaning towards? Because I think your head’s telling you one thing and your heart’s telling you another is that right? And she goes, she starts giggling. And I’ve, I’ve had that call a hundred times where it’s a wrestling match between the head and the heart. So, but I got to get the color to tell me the voice of the head and then the voice of the heart. And then I go, before you called me, which way were you leaning? And she said, kid, I was 75%, one way, 75%. The other way I said, that’s impossible. She starts laughing again. I said, what’s your heart telling you to do? She goes, take the other job. And I go, what did you think I was going to say, she goes, you were going to tell me to follow my heart. She’s going to listen to my show long enough to know what I’m going to tell her, see the heart and the head should be in alignment, but it should always be the heart driving and the head joining.
RV (16:21):
And did I hear you say that you want them, there’s this wrestling match of the head and the heart and you want them to speak out both. What’s your head telling you and what’s your heart telling you? You try to get them to say them both out loud.
KC (16:37):
Absolutely do. And that’s for the audience. They think it’s for them, but it’s really audience because I want the audience to catch up and, and, and not just to follow along, but to see the exercise itself because that’s what we need to do. You and I have both been in a situations where we’ve been torn and we’ll speak to somebody that we know and we trust. And they’ll just however they do it. Maybe not as intentional as that, but they get us to that point where we go, I got to trust my heart here. My heart’s telling me this. I’m overthinking it up here. This is what the heart says is right. I’m going to go do it. And so then my head gets in alignment, but the problem is our brains are these logic machines. And that’s a wonderful thing from our creator, the greatest logic processor in the world, the greatest supercomputer of all times the brain.
KC (17:22):
But the problem is, is that I’ve been relearning this you and I’ve grown up in a world that kind of says our thoughts drive our feelings. I’m now totally reversing that and rethinking that and relearning that it’s our emotions that drive our thoughts. So when I have the emotion of fear, then my thoughts are going to all be about fear. And that drives my actions. So I’ve got to get my heart settled. And when I get my emotions in heart settled, then I can think better. And that’s, that’s that alignment. So when we’re talking about doing something that you love, these people call, they know ahead of time, they just want me to give them permission, right? Yep. Anyway, I just did with lots of questions. You’d be surprised how quick you can get to the hardest something with about the first of all, a really good question.
KC (18:12):
And then when somebody starts talking around it, see it’s my show and I’m in charge. So we’re all polite, real life. I’ll just stop and go stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. You didn’t answer my question. Let me ask it again. I’ve had people say kid. I say, what, what would you do? If, if, if money wasn’t an object and you couldn’t fail and you didn’t have to commit to the rest of your life, what would you do? I don’t know. I don’t remember the first time I did this almost threw up on my desk. It was in a moment. Okay. It was very Tony Robbins. I’ve watched Tony. I’ve studied Tony. And I remember the first time somebody said that to me and I let them right to the edge and they went, I don’t know. And in that moment I was like, okay, I can redirect, give them some advice and put them on hold and move on.
KC (18:54):
And in the moment were, I just went. That’s not true. You know, because while I was setting you up, but I’m going to do it again so that you can hear yourself one more time. I want you to see the thoughts. I asked you. If you could do something tomorrow where you knew you couldn’t fail, you absolutely loved it. And you have to commit to the rest of your life. What would you do? And I know that while I said that the second time, the same thought that you came up with the first time rolled through your head, you couldn’t help it. It popped up. And you’re not telling me because you’re scared or you’re doubtful now. No more excuses say it. And dude, I was totally terrified. I was like, if, if this person locks up on me, I don’t have a place to return to.
KC (19:36):
And would you believe it? That they said it blurted it out? Just like that. Now I’ve done that many, many times because here’s what I’ve learned. I’ve learned that when I create that vision for people, those word pictures, right? I say, what would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? What would you do if you knew you’d love it? What would you do if you didn’t, you have to commit to it. It’s just as fun work adventure, like no risk. It’s impossible for a human. Not to have some thoughts. All I’m doing is taking them on a little journey. And so you got to trust that the thoughts are there and then you gotta make them say it.
RV (20:11):
Yeah. I remember when I was getting radio Koshin they used to call that the slap where you kind of confront, you kind of can respond to the call or directly and kind of go, no, you’re not being honest. You’re like, there’s a, there’s something very powerful about that kind of moment of conflict where you, you force them to reconcile the truth that they’re like you said, they’re so afraid. They can’t even say it. That’s powerful. So let’s shift the conversation. That’s awesome, man. I love this. So I want to shift the conversation to the expert. I mean, you got to interview George Bush. Like it’s gotta be a little bit intimidating. I mean, I, I know, I mean, at this point, I know you’ve interviewed so many people, the different podcasts that you’ve hosted, the different radio shows and stuff. How do you prepare for an interview with,
KC (21:09):
You know? Yeah. All right. So I want to address the first thing. And, and when I, when I give you, I’m going to give you all my secret sauce, all right? I’m not, I can charge a lot of money for this, but I’m not intimidated. And there’s two reasons why I’m not intimidated. One is preparation and two is experience. Preparation is everything. And I’m about ready to give you the secret sauce of how I prepare an interview like this, to do it in front of thousands of people. Plus, you know, a former head of state, but I’ve said this many times, relentless preparation leads to reflexive performance. I’m going to say it again. Don’t you? Any of you steal that because I see it on social. I’m going to bust you. Relentless preparation leads to reflexive performance. The reason the great quarterbacks like Tom Brady or Bret farmer, John Elway Joe Montana, you could plug in the names, Dan Marino, we Marvel at how they can lead a team from the one yard line down to a touchdown with less than a minute, less than two minutes to go.
KC (22:08):
No time outs. We Marvel at that. Except what we fail to think about is they’ve practiced that two minute drill hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times. Number one, number two, they’ve watched film. They know what the other team’s two-minute defense looks like. They know their place. They know wherever it’s supposed to go. So when they’re out there, they’re moving on instinct. Brett Farve is not this chess player out there. All of a sudden where he’s out thinking everybody know he’s instinctively reacting. He knows where his primary, secondary, third check downs. He knows he’s done it. And he knows how to get out of bounds. You know the thing. So these guys they’re relentlessly prepared so that they can reflexively perform. There’s no brain going on out there. It’s just all instinct. All right. So that’s the first thing. Secondly the experience that I’ve had, I’ve done so many interviews that at this point, while I’m honored to sit across from George W. Bush or Condoleezza rice, or Mark Burnett, or you name it. Okay. Jim Collins, Malcolm Gladwell, whatever those
RV (23:12):
It’s true. You got to interview Rory Vaden one time for like, that’s it, man,
KC (23:17):
That’s it? So the issue is, is that they’re experts in their bigger deal than me, for sure. But they’re still a human being. And in that moment, for whatever reason, they’ve submitted to a conversation with me. So I’m in charge. So I might as well act like I’m in charge because I’m in charge. Now how much charge I take is up to me. So I’ve learned that they’re just a human and they’re sitting there and most of them have never been interviewed really, really well. So if you really prepare, use the process, I’m about ready to unveil. Then you’re going to find that they’re going, this is enjoyable. This dude, this gal, they came prepared. They’re teasing me up. This is enjoyable. All right. So here’s the process. First thing I do, there are questions that I ask before I write the interview and writing the interview is the most important part of the interview.
KC (24:07):
One of the mistakes that a lot of people make is they get up there and have a general idea where they want to go, but they haven’t really thought through the process. They haven’t thought through the journey. They’re taking the audience on, because remember this isn’t about you as the interviewer, okay? Some of your clients are big brands and they become known as interviewers, big freaking deal. Okay? It’s not about you. It’s about the audience. And if you want to get praised for being an interviewer, well, you’re only going to do that when you generate and produce a great conversation. So most people get into this stuff and they’re kind of prepared and then they get nervous or they get caught up in the moment. Oh gosh, I’m talking to Georgia, a Bush and they get tongue tied. They don’t know where to go.
KC (24:48):
Or he takes them one direction. And they’re too busy looking at their next question, cause they’re not prepared. And they miss a nugget. That should be a rabbit trail that you go down. Hmm. The best part of of interviews are the parts you don’t plan. But the only way you can discover that, realize it in the moment Roy is because you’re so prepared that you can listen to the full answer. And when George Abbey gets George, w Bush gets done, you go, oh, here’s my next question. It’s right there. I’m already prepared. I glance at it. And I go, so here’s the process. First thing you do before you write the interview, you ask yourself, what does the audience want to know? That’s the first question. What does the audience want you to think about your audience? If you have a podcast or you’re at a leadership event, like I was at a leadership event, there’s 3000 leaders out there.
KC (25:38):
So what does the audience want to know? They have come to this event and what they want to know is something that will help them lead better. Right? You can just general as you want to make it. What do they want to know? Second question is, what do they need to know? Now? This is where we get more specific. So what does the audience want to know? Well, they want to know how to be a better leader, right? How to grow their company, whatever. What do they need to know? Well, now this is where you, as the interview, get a chance to shape the conversation to go. They want to be a better leader. They want to grow their company. So what do they need to be able to do that? Right? So if somebody comes in and they want to lose weight and they meet with a nutritionist and Tricia goes, okay, they want to lose weight or they want to get a, they want to lower their blood, blood cholesterol, whatever.
KC (26:24):
Well, okay. Now what do they need to know to be able to achieve the one? Okay. So that’s the, so you start writing these things down. Well, they need to know about leading in crisis. They need to know how to lead in collaboration. They need to know how to lead in conflict. Okay. Those are three separate buckets right there that I just went, oh, that’s what they need to know. Well, I’ve got a president of United States who can speak to those things. And that leads to your third question. What can my guest, through their experience and expertise? How can they meet those two needs? What they want to know and what they need to know. So what does the audience want to know? What do they need to know? And then, well, how can my guest meet those two needs? That’s where you start. And so what that starts to do is give you themes, conflict, collaboration, crisis, whatever.
KC (27:13):
So you start to get these themes and go, okay. Again, some themes. I’m just writing this stuff down on the paper. This is what I do core Rory, I’m sorry. I don’t know why I keep calling you. Corey. I just got with a marketing guy named Corey in our billing. It’s a Freudian slip. So, so I’m writing all this down, all these topics. So once I get my bank of topics, then I say, what’s the last question I want to ask. So I write the very last question first, right? First, first question I write is the last question. Why do you know why I do that? What do you think it is? What’s the reason. Hm.
RV (27:50):
I don’t know. Maybe that’s just what they’re going to remember.
KC (27:52):
Well, that’s where we’re ending. So, you know, it’s how you close a talk. So I want to know, where am I taking the audience? So this is what most interviews never do. That’s why you weren’t able to answer. I put you on the spot because I don’t know anybody that thinks this way, but it works for me because I want to know, where am I taking the audience at the end of an hour conversation with George W. Bush, where am I taking them? Where are we going to finish? So once I know where I’m going to finish, that’s the story arc. So now I go, where do I want to start? And then what’s the rest of the journey looked like that takes me here. Or else you’re just going to have this Papa shot style interview where it’s not connected. I like for the interview to start here and make sense organically as it gets to the end point where I’m leaving the audience.
KC (28:45):
This is the final word they’re going to hear from this guest. And I think that’s the way you write a good interview. So I write the last question first. Then I write the first question. Second, I’ll give you some more tips on this. I always try to ask a icebreaker, very personal question. That could be fun or a very significant to them personally, early on. The reason I like to do that is because if you really do your homework and you dig deep and you ask them a question from their past, that’s very significant to them. Number one, you unlock their heart in the first question. They’re like, oh yeah. So the first question I asked Condoleezza rice, okay. This is the most decorated woman, arguably in us history. Okay. besides vice president Harris, who’s now the first female president. So, you know, Condoleeza, rice, big time, big time.
KC (29:37):
And most people don’t realize that she was competitive ice skater when she was in her early teens. So the first question I asked her was about ice skating. Most people in the audience were like, what where’s he going with this? She lit up big smile on her face, started talking about all the hours, why she loved it. And so I introduced a different Condi rice to the audience, number one, but more importantly, I established rapport with her. Cause she’s looking at me going, all right, man, you did your homework. You showed up, you, you know something about me. You’re not asking me the general question. And so she w she leaned in, she warmed up to me. We had rapport and Mrs. Thing, I think thing I did with George W. Bush, I started the interview, will my publicist sitting here. I started off by going, Hey, before we start talking leadership tell us what you’re up to now.
KC (30:26):
I knew he was going to talk about painting. Cause he just released his third pamphlet. I knew it was going to ask him about painting his wife, Laura. Cause he’s got a hilarious story on it. And so our first five minutes was hilarious. I’m talking about learning how to paint and paint and his wife and she hated it and making sure he threw it away. And the audience was roaring with laughter and he and I are having a blast. And I haven’t even asked him a leadership question yet, but I had established rapport. So that’s, you know, that’s my process. That’s a little bit of how I get into it so that people feel like they’re eavesdropping in on a real conversation. Then it’s no longer, I can’t believe Ken Coleman’s up there talking to George W. Bush. People are largely ignoring me because I’m not hemming and hawing over my question. I’m this guy who’s having the time of his life having a conversation and you’re getting a watch me do it. You’re not even focused on me. You’re focused on the present, which is what should be a great interviewer makes the interview about the guests because they’re so smooth, so prepared and leading somebody, not just the audience, but the guests you’re leading the audience and the guests at the same time.
RV (31:40):
Love it. That is, those are that’s so great. Can like that is I really love that idea of asking, writing the last question first and just realizing no matter how this goes, that we need to end up here. And and that is so true when people share an intimate detail about their life. It, it opens, it’s just, it’s disarming, it knocks down walls and it creates the rapport. So powerful. Well, man, I, I, I knew that you would have secrets on how to do these interviews and you’ve been so generous and this is so helpful. Where do people, where do you want people to go to learn about you? And I mean, obviously you’ve got the Ken Coleman show, we’ll put links to the proximity principle book on on our blog post about this. Where else would you, would you direct people?
KC (32:30):
I’d love your audience to connect with me on Instagram at Ken Coleman. If I can ever add any value to your audience, I love what you’re doing. I love connecting with other influencers and best practices and encouraging each other. Ken coleman.com is the website where you can learn anything and get connected with anything I’m doing. And of course the Ken Coleman show, you know, if you want to learn how to dig into people’s hearts in six or seven minutes, give it a listen. It’s a daily podcast. And once you get tired of it, you don’t have to listen to it anymore, but you can steal some trade secrets and, and listen, it’s just cuts at the plate, man. You know, it’s just, it’s just being willing to suck and put yourself out there and learn how to do that. And it, over time you, you get really good at it. If you just keep showing up.
RV (33:21):
Yeah. Well for sure, I mean, you you’ve been, you’ve been doing this for a long time. It’s great to see you growing what’s what’s your favorite interview question someone has ever asked you?
KC (33:38):
Favorite interview question someone has asked me man, that’s a tough one a lot. And so I’m trying to think.
RV (33:48):
Or do you have a favorite question that you’ve asked somebody?
KC (33:57):
I, I think the favorite interview question I ever asked of somebody was with coach cave, legendary hall of fame coach for duke. Who’s one of my favorite coaches. So it was it was an unbelievable honor and I prepared that interview and I asked him my favorite question I’ve ever asked, cause it was so personal, but also I thought what he did with it was really fun. And I felt like he was going to crush it. I asked him how he, how he led different point guards. You know? So, you know, in basketball, the point guard, at least back in the day, you know, the Tommy Amaker is the, the Johnny doc is the Bobby Hurley’s and coach K was done for these great point guards. And in the question I said, you know, Tommy, Amaker very different than Bobby Hurley both led your team.
KC (34:49):
And one graduates and the other comes in, how did you lead them differently? And you get this big, old smile on his face. Like that was a freaking awesome question. And he was like, I love that. And he said, he said that that’s that’s really, really good. And, and so he told me, and so he, he began to go into how he led Tommy was much more intentional and much more structured because Tommy wanted to know which play to run in the timeout, draw it out. And Tommy was going to run it perfectly. He said, I’d draw plays, but I’d make suggestions to Bobby Hurley. Cause Bobby Hurley was an instinctive leader. He goes, and I knew that I draw play up, but if Bobby didn’t see it, he just run his own plane, make it up. And he goes, I was okay with that.
KC (35:31):
And I had to learn more control, more intentionality with one leader, less allow him freedom. That’s a fantastic, fantastic answer. So I’ll tell you that was probably my favorite question. I think people have asked me before. What’s the, I think probably most favorite question is what’s the challenge. What’s the greatest challenge of, of being a thought leader and somebody who’s been given a really large platform like Dave Ramsey placed me here. This is the real question that God and Dave Ramsey they’re the hands along with others that poured into me, but they’re the hands that have put me in this position. And I got asked that question recently. How do you handle that? And what’s the greatest challenge, cause this is fun. What you and I get to do is fun to pour into people and see their light bulbs go on every day. It’s really, that’s a juice. That’s hard to get tired of it. So that was a good question. That was a really interesting, because most people don’t associate challenge, you know, personal challenges with what we get to do. And I thought that was a really thoughtful question.
RV (36:39):
Yeah. Well I love that. And that, that, that question that you asked coach K is such a great example where, you know, it was not only led to a great insight, but you tapped into an intimate place for him in his life that he was like,
KC (36:57):
That’s the key, that’s the key. You know, when you’re interviewing somebody like Malcolm Gladwell, like don’t ask him about 10,000 hours or something he’s been interviewed on 50,000 times, you know asking him, you know, what he admires most about distance runners. Does he see himself in them? Like that’s gonna like mocking level. The guy loves runners. He runs for, for his health, but he’s also a geek out super fan of these long distance runners. Ask him about something that he’s juiced about and then it’s game on, man.
RV (37:38):
I love it. I love it. Well, Ken Coleman, one of the greatest hosts of our time sharing secrets right here, stop and in full transparent disclosure. Buddy, I’m so grateful for you. You’ve been such an encouragement to me, keep going. And we wish you all the best
KC (37:57):
I will, man. Appreciate you. You’ve always been so kind and I got to get over there to that pool. You and I need to be in big, giant rubber ducky floats.
RV (38:05):
Do it, man. See you brother.