Category: Podcast

Ep 236: How to Build a Legendary Speaking Career in 5 Years with Michelle Poler

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):
So a couple of years ago, I got a chance to speak at the global leadership summit, which is the large, one of the largest, if not the largest speaking events in the world. And then last year I was part of helping my friend, Jamie Kern, Lima, get to speak there. And she shared the stage with Michelle Poler, who you’re about to meet. And I have I’ve known of Michelle because she’s a very, very successful speaker. She is very loved and respected in our industry. Several of my friends like Jason Dorsey have met her and talked so highly about her and then shared the stage together a lot. And as I got to speak, I got to see her speak at GLS and we kind of became friends a little bit. And I just think she’s darling and has the coolest story. If you haven’t heard of her.
RV (01:39):
So she is kind of a, she’s the founder of a movement that’s called hello fears. She’s reached 70 million people with this movement. There’s, you know, she did a TEDx talk. She wrote a book called hello fears. She has spoken for huge companies, ESPN, Netflix, Microsoft. She’s been on the today show and featured in pretty much every major national media, but and he was, I just wanted to hear a little bit, I wanted you to get, to hear a little bit of her story of how she got started, and then maybe we’ll sneak a few tips from her about overcoming some of our fears and building our brands. So Michelle, welcome to the welcome to the show.
MP (02:20):
I was expecting some applause or something like
RV (02:25):
Dancing. We’re alive of it. You’d be dancing.
MP (02:28):
Yeah, exactly. I would be dancing, but I get the one.
RV (02:31):
Yeah, I love it. So you know, you’re from Venezuela, which I love that is wonderful. And, and I like have have a couple of friends from Venezuela is a, you are another one. Tell us how did this all get started? Because you were a little bit of a, I mean, this all started out of reluctance from you for, for you is how I interpreted it’s. Most people go, I want to become a speaker or be an author, and I’m going to write a book, but your whole story and start of your personal brand is like came from a completely different place.
MP (03:04):
Yeah, totally. I never in my life would have expected to be where I am today. Not even in my wildest dreams, because I had no idea that what I’m doing today was a thing was a possibility. So I didn’t grow up. Like you said, I’m from Venezuela. I didn’t grow up with speakers. Like never a speaker came to my school just to motivate us, you know, if there was a speaker, maybe it was like a mathematician or something like, you know, professionally in their area. And so I would, I had no, and then I didn’t, then I went to college for arts and there were no speakers also in my school that was in the United States when I moved here. I was 19 years old. I did my career here as an art director, graphic designer. And then I, you know, I, I worked at an agency, an advertising agency and they don’t invest that much.
MP (03:57):
I don’t want to you know, just, I guess, I don’t know every agency, but from what I’ve seen in advertising, they don’t invest normally that much in the personal growth of their employees. So there were no speakers in my agency when I was working there at YNR young and Rubicam. And so I was never exposed to this speakers. And when I moved to New York to do a master’s in branding at the school of visual arts, I, I was asked to do this 100 day project where we could choose anything we want to do for 100 days in a row. And it was like a series of exercises that we did that led me to understand that it was time for me to face my fears. That I’ve been a very fearful person, but mostly comfortable person my entire life, like I was achieving a lot of things. So I never really thought I need to get uncomfortable in order to
RV (04:52):
Cool assignment. It was a school assignment to do and do something for a hundred straight days.
MP (04:59):
Yeah, you can do anything. And you had to also share your project online day after day. Like it couldn’t be just something that you keep to yourself. It had to be somewhere on social media, you could decide where. And so I decided to use YouTube and face my fears. I decided to face one for your day, for 100 days, create a video for that and post that to YouTube. So it was such a big endeavor that even my professor was concerned. She’s like, I don’t think you should go this route. This is a lot of work and this is not even your thesis. And I was working full-time in advertising while I was doing my master’s. So I had too much in my hand and I still decided to go for it because I had a hunch. This project could change my life. I had no idea where this was going to lead, but in my mind, my goal at that point was to create a project where I could not only become of course, a braver person. Cause that was my main goal, but also where I could show all of my skills, my creativity, my design, my video editing my community building all of those skills. I wanted to put them into one big project. So then I could apply to jobs in branding showing this project that was like my goal, like the best that could happen for me was to get an amazing job maybe at Instagram or Google or YouTube, like a really cool brand. That was my, my intention.
RV (06:23):
I love that. So I didn’t piece that together that it was the college project and that you were you. Cause I noted. I mean, one of the things that I noticed, I was like, well, yeah, this is an amazing story, but the videos are amazing. And that’s because you were studying that one of the reasons, cause you were studying storytelling and visual design and editing. So that
MP (06:47):
I started editing videos for my honeymoon. Like when I got married, we bought a GoPro and I was like, I have to make the best video with this GoPro. So I learned from my brother who actually is a filmmaker. And he taught me everything. I know. So I was like, this is the perfect excuse for me to create one video a day. Cause I love video-making. And storytelling and branding and design and all of that. I just put it together and created this project called 100 days without fear that ended up leading me into speaking.
RV (07:22):
So you, you, how did it work? Like functionally, did you, did you live the hundred days and film it and then go back and edit it or did you live a day? Film it, edit it that night and post it.
MP (07:38):
Let me tell you what my schedule looked like. So I would go to work from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM at my agency. Okay. In New York. And then from there I would go to my class from 6:00 PM to like 10:00 PM. Right. And so I would have a few times during the day to face a fear, it would be either very early in the morning. Like for example, one day I cooked something very outside of my comfort zone with a lot of boiling oil that I was, it was scary for me. And then, or I could do the lunchtime. That was the most popular time for me to go face a fear. So I was in my agency working alongside with all my peers, like my teammates. And then I’m like, be right back. I’m going to touch a snake or something. And so I would like go really quick to like central park, hold a snake, okay.
MP (08:26):
Pay the guy $2, go back to my work, keep working. And then I would go back home. I Reverend 10, 11:00 PM. And I would have to edit a video of what I, or, or I would use the nighttime. For example, I went by myself to a bar at night. So I would, or comedy show that I ended up doing standup comedy. So I would use one of those three times during the day. And then I would go back home, edit the video. Then I would do homework for my next day or whatever. I have left for my job and I was not sleeping, but I was on a high courage and excitement and living life to the fullest.
RV (09:03):
Wow. So how long did it, how long does it take you to edit one of these videos?
MP (09:08):
It was around maybe an hour and a half. It was like three minute videos. But yeah, it takes, takes a long time just to put re choose to write music. I started all my videos doing stop motion. So the, so it would say like fear number one. And it would be things that move by that by itself. And then I’m like, okay, I’m done doing stop motion. It only lasted three days. I’m like, I need to, to be able to do this in a quicker way.
RV (09:34):
All right. And so, so you, you would shoot these experiences. Most of them were pretty short, like a few minutes and then you would just come and spend like a couple of hours every night editing it and then you would post it and then you’d just go back to work the next day for a hundred.
MP (09:48):
Yes. For a hundred days. And whenever I could impose, for example, like it was a really busy day or I ended up facing a few really late or when people started to worry, they’re like, are you okay? Did you die facing your fears? Cause I’m doing scary things every day and I’m like, I’m fine. I’m fine. I just went to like to get hypnotized. And I had no time to go, sorry. So one day I would post two videos or during the weekend I would try to face more than two fears. So I have a little bit more so during the week I have more time, it was insane, but it was the best time of our lives. And I say our lives because I did it with my husband. He supported me since the beginning. We didn’t have kids at the time. And so he was like, let’s do it. I want you to become a braver person. I want you to be a braver mom one day for my kids. So he fully supported me and he faced my fears with me.
RV (10:37):
That is so crazy. So then you just made a list. Did you make a list of a hundred first and said, okay, these are the a hundred I’m going to do. And then cause like, did you have to travel for some of them or were they all in New York?
MP (10:51):
I tried to keep all of them in New York and some of them were upstate. So I would have to rent a car, maybe spend a night, something like that. But that’s, and then if I had any trips along the way, for example, I went to the how conference, you know, the branding conference. It was part of the school that I was like the school trip. So I face a lot of fears there. I was like, oh, this is a networking event. Like what can I do that is outside of my comfort zone? And so the way that I did it is I built a list of 20 things and then I couldn’t come up with any ideas. I was like, what, how am I going to start a 100 day project if I can’t come up with more than 20 ideas.
MP (11:31):
So I put this on Facebook, this was in 2015. So Facebook was like my biggest social media at that time. And I had no following. I mean, I was no one. I just had family and friends like there as my friends on Facebook. And so I posted there saying, Hey, I’m going to start a project where I’m going to face 100 fears. Can you suggest some ideas? And I think that’s the best thing that I could have done just because I started building community without realizing it, basically all the people that commented there. I had like around 60 something comments or more, I don’t remember. Everybody that commented felt like they’re part of this project since the beginning. So every time I would go out and face a fear that they suggested, for example, somebody said, you should go crush your wedding. You should go post nude in front of a drawing class. I mean, things that I know that never crossed my mind, I was like, yeah, it’s insane. So I was like, Hey, I did what you suggested. Here’s the video. So they felt like, oh, that’s so cool. I suggested something. She actually did it. And now I’m part of this. So they were the first ones to share my project and rude for me. And it was a really good feeling cause I was not alone doing this.
RV (12:45):
And when did you get the sense that this was taking off or like blowing up or cause there’s, there’s also a Ted talk that happens in here. But is that after?
MP (12:55):
Yeah, so it was, you know, it was one comment from a friend from college that she never reached out to me. And while I was doing the project, one time she reached out and said, you know, your fears, like your videos are making me a braver person. I’m daring to do more things at work. After I see you face your fears. And she knew me from college. So she was like, I remember how fearful you are. So I’m very proud of you. Thank you for inspiring me. And that comment made me realize that this project had a lot of potential. So I was like, this should be out there more people should know about this. And then one day out of the blue day, 40 of the project, it was picked up by daily mail in the UK. And they reached out and they asked for permission to publish my videos on their website.
MP (13:42):
And I was like, heck yeah, you can publish my videos, whatever you want, do whatever you want with my videos. That will be amazing. And so they published that and minutes later it was all over. It was every single website was sharing this and then contacted me like Huffington post CNN, Fox, all of them were like, we want to face fears with you. So, because I was in New York, it was really easy to just you know, get together with them some place and then go face fierce together. And that was pretty cool. Cause then it was all over the media and a lot of people started following the project. So I went from like 150 followers to 30,000. Wow.
RV (14:23):
Wow. That is so cool. So at the start of a, at the end of a hundred days, how many followers did you have? Like 30,000.
MP (14:30):
Yeah. Around that people that were like so eager to see what was the next year. And they were all really worried. Like what’s going to happen after it. Cause they’re like, we’re loving this project. We don’t want it to end. And I was so exhausted. I was like, I need this project to end, but I can’t continue facing one fear a day is taking over my life. Of course, one of my fears was quitting my job. So I didn’t have a job for the last, maybe 35 years, which was really helpful because I have more time to do this. I also graduated from my program, so I had more time to do this. And then the last fear was to speak at Ted TEDx. And so I had more time to prepare for that. It was not on the day 100. It was like a few weeks later. Cause that’s the date that the, you know, the event was taking place. And then I had a lot of people that they expecting to see what happened next.
RV (15:21):
So did you reach out to Ted? Did they find you? What, how that happened?
MP (15:26):
So when I started this project, I put TEDx as my last fear. And then I got so like the imposter syndrome selling me. Who do you think you are? Of course, you’re not going to go get into Ted who, you know, they’re not going to accept whatever. And so I removed it and I was like, yeah, I’ll forget about that. And when the project went viral, I was like, maybe I should consider reaching out. Maybe they will listen because I am all over now. And I know the impact that this project is having on so many people. So my husband found out who the organizer was for TEDx Houston and he reached out and through LinkedIn and this guy responded and then he was like, I love your project. Yes. I want you on our stage, but are you from Texas or related to Texas in any way?
MP (16:16):
Cause we won local speakers and I was like, I’m not I would love to, but now I’m not. And then he’s like, I’m sorry. And then I wrote a huge email listing, all the reasons why I should be on his stage, even though I’m not from Texas. And two weeks later he wrote back saying, okay, Michelle you’re in. And I was not only in, I was one of the highlights of the day. And it was like a really amazing experience to see that you can get the things that you want if you dare to really go after them and ask for it and you know, be persistent. Huh?
RV (16:51):
I love the smell. And so I think, but in your, your Ted talk has several hundred thousand views
MP (16:57):
Almost like half a million.
RV (16:59):
Yeah. So, which is awesome. But I think one of the, one of the things is I think people go, oh, Michelle went viral and that’s how she started her career. Which in which in some ways is true based on what you’re saying, but it’s in some ways also not true. It wasn’t like you had millions of followers or 10 million views on a Ted talk or something. So how did you then kind of parlay it? Like as we kind of go, okay, now we move this at some point, the light bulb goes on in your head like, Hey, this could be my business. I should do this. And you, you leveraged off of that and you turned it into what is now a really phenomenal business.
MP (17:41):
Yeah. Yeah. So exactly. It’s what you’re saying. It’s not like I blew up and suddenly brands all over are me. It’s not like it was just a virality wave that I was able to like capitalize for like know how to really take advantage of that for my next stage. So the question I made myself is what exactly resonated with people about this project and how can I turn that into something bigger? And so we met Jason Dorsey, as you mentioned at the beginning of the podcast that day, he was speaking also at TEDx and he saw me and he’s like, Michelle, you should be gone a speaker at call me. And so we call him and he gave us the tips on how to start, basically build a website, build a demo reel, what’s your audience? What are your, your talking points, develop a 45 minute talk, things like that.
MP (18:35):
And so we started to work so hard on that. And then we started to pitch this talk to company. So I listed all of the friends that I have that work in different companies like corporations. For example, I have my, one of my best friends working at Google. One of my friends, someone that I know of actually works at Facebook at Netflix. So I started calling people, do you know anybody that works here or there? I wanted my resume to have like this amazing companies and logos that I admire so much. And we started pitching this, showing them my TEDx and then showing them what I recorded myself, presenting at Google and all of these different companies. And that’s how we started building the speaking business from the ground up.
RV (19:16):
And that, what year was that? What year was that?
MP (19:18):
2016.
RV (19:20):
I mean, that’s pretty crazy that from in the year 2016, you built like your first demo video. And then by the year 2021, you were speaking on the biggest, the biggest speaking stage in the world. I mean, five years, that’s pretty incredible.
MP (19:36):
It really exceeded our expectations. Like we never imagined this would go this far, this fast. And also for example, my husband was still working in finance when we started and he was helping me develop my presentation. He would practice, reach out to clients and bureaus and all of that, but he was still with his full-time job because I was not working. Like I was not making any money. And then one day he called an amazing person that represented or actually still represent brunette brown in the speaking industry. And he was like, Hey, I I’m trying to help out. My wife here develop a speaking business. This is her demo reel. This is her TEDx. What do you think it was at his job in his office having this phone call with this person called Michelle and she saw this and she was like, you should leave your job and represent your wife. And you both should work full time on this because Michelle has an amazing potential. I actually I’d love to help. So she started helping me also. And she’s still representing me today and that’s been one of the best things that happened in our lives. So my husband quit his job in finance and worked full time with me doing
RV (20:48):
This. And when you guys started, so you start this as like a little social project and you do a Ted talk, then you basically create a website, some program descriptions, you had a video editing, which is a huge, that’s a huge asset to have had it. And but then you basically just make a list of all these companies you want to speak at. And then you start calling friends and family and saying, Hey, do you know anyone who works at this company? And then you just said, they, you find out who books the meeting, and then you say, Hey, I’d like to come talk. Here’s my bio, here’s my program. And here’s my demo video. And that, and then, then that’s how you started.
MP (21:26):
Yeah, yeah. They would say, okay, I’m not in charge of this, but I know the person that organized an event last year, let me reach out. And then it would go from person to person until we find the right one. And then of course I started doing events for free for this companies. I wanted to build my resume and then they started hiring me back and paying my fee to, you know, to bring me back to all their different offices. That’s what I did with Google and all of the other companies. And I think it was just a lot of self-confidence that got me there. Like when you know that what you have has so much value and that is so unique and authentic and original, and that you’re the right person to be delivering this message and, and talking about this things and inspiring people, then I think, you know, you have half the battle won because you believe in yourself. And I actually have this sticker right here that I love that I created says, when you believe in yourself so much, you make others believe in you as well.
RV (22:24):
I love that. I love that. That w and, and so basically you just start calling on these companies, you start speaking for free, then they say, Hey, we’d love to have you come back and do something. And so then it’s like, what’s your fee. And then you have a fee and then you do that more. And people see you and they say, will you come speak at my thing? And I have a friend, and then you raise your fee and you just basically been in that cycle for like five years until you end up getting a call from the global leadership summit and say, Hey, will you come, will you come speak on, speak on our stage? And, and, and so you still book gigs and in primarily, you’ve also been very, very focused on keynotes, right? Like your core businesses. You’re a speaker.
MP (23:07):
Yeah. Actually when I started, I had so many ideas. I was like, I want to do merch. I want to do YouTube. I wanted to speak. And I also want to create a company. I want to do all these things. And then my husband is very strategic and that’s really good for me cause I’m all over the place. And I have so many ideas and I want to do them all, you know, typically like the creative personality. And I’m like, yeah, I could do this. I can do that. I could do that. But then he’s like, Michelle, let’s focus on the one thing that can help us leave our jobs and actually, you know, make a living out of this. So it’s not YouTube, it’s not merged. It’s not any of those things is speaking. So let’s do this, let’s focus on one thing. And then that’s lesson that I keep you know, putting into practice until today, every time that I’m going to commit to one project, it’s just one project at a time. And so by doing that, we were able to really get this beam to the next level. And once we were very comfortable with our new career as speakers, then I started also doing social media. I started, I wrote my book, hello fears and, and doing all the other things I did merge. And now I have a baby.
RV (24:18):
That’s the, I
MP (24:19):
Did the baby.
RV (24:21):
Yep. Once you have a baby that you, you won’t do much for five years. You’ll. You’ll, you’ll take care of that, that baby. That is so great. Well, so this has been awesome, Michelle. I, I, I, it’s so cool to just hear, hear your story about how this all happened. And you probably don’t realize this, but you’re reinforcing like every single thing that we teach to our clients and members in terms of how, how to go about doing this and on that, can we talk about fear for a second? Can we do like more of like a little coaching coaching session just for a minute. And by the way, the book is called, hello fears. If you, you didn’t pick that up, that’s the name of Michelle’s book? So on the topic of overcoming fear, this is something that I think personal brands have to face a lot because it’s like, oh yeah, I want to go speak for Google, but I’m scared.
RV (25:16):
They might not like me. I might not get ahold of them. They might reject me, or I might want to reach out to speakers, bureaus or literary agents, or I might want to get on television or even just get written up in some article and there’s fear there, or for a lot of our clients, it’s even just scary to get on camera and say, you know, I want to post a, a 62nd video, which sounds really simple, but, but you go, man, I can find a hundred reasons not to press record on my phone. So why do you think we have some of those fears? And, and obviously you had a little bit of the benefit of doing a hundred days of facing fears. And so you kind of rolled off of that momentum in this, but do you have any tips for people that are struggling with that kind of thing?
MP (26:01):
I think it’s so sad that the main reason why we don’t achieve our goals and our dreams is ourselves. Like it’s ourselves telling us for some reason, like we’re not worth it or it is not worth pursuing. So fear stops us for so many reasons, for example, and I, I talk about this also in my program. I’m like the first thing I tell people is fear stops us. Why? And so I give the example of when I wanted to lunch my online program, all the different reasons, for example, what if somebody else is already doing a program about branding and you know, why would they choose me? What if people think that I only want their money? What if I, all those what ifs, right? What if it’s not as good as people think? And then we listen to that and we stop ourselves from doing the things that we actually want to do. And if you ask me, what’s the main fear people have, what will you say? What do you think is the main fear people have
RV (26:55):
That they won’t be good enough?
MP (26:57):
I think the main fear people have is disappointing. Other people that’s one of the main things. And so we stopped doing so many things because we don’t want to be perceived as something we don’t want to disappoint other people. So and it’s such a shame because we need people’s value. We need their value. And for that, we need them to have the courage, to put their valley out there, to shut up like their imposter syndrome and all those ideas. And I can tell you a couple of things that are helpful, for example if your message can help three people, can you think of three people in your life that have asked for help in what, in the area that you teach? You can also help 3000 people. And what I mean by this is that if you know, more than other people, about a certain topic, you are qualified to do that.
MP (27:49):
That’s one of the main things that we tell ourselves, I am not qualified because for example, you want to talk about any topic like even parenting? No, there are some people with PhDs that talk about parenting. If you are a parent, you can talk about parenting to anybody that is not a parent because you know, more than people that are not parents do. Now I have a nine month old baby. I know more about babies then Michelle, a year ago. And I would’ve loved to hear this. Michelle talk about babies, you know, like, so if you do, if you know more than a group of people, you are qualified, that’s it, that’s the main thing. Yeah. You don’t need to be the best one, but it’s enough. And let me think and just try to think, well, the, the thing I teach everybody in my, in my talks that you heard is what’s the best that can happen seriously. If you dare, if you choose to go out and record that 60 minutes, 62nd video, what’s the best that can happen. What if that can lead you to accomplish those things that you’ve been wanting for so long, but you keep listening to all your excuses out there. And that is still focusing on the rewards is the main thing that will help us take action when we’re in that spot.
RV (29:02):
And, and, and it’s just that shifting it from what’s the worst thing that can happen, which is what most of us think about to, what’s the best thing that can happen. And in that moment, when you’re kind of like, Ooh, I want to do it, but I’m scared. This just like that, that one little shift is a catalyst for doing, for, for actually doing the thing that you want to do.
MP (29:24):
In my case, I promised myself that I was never going to allow my fears get in the way of my treats. That’s the simple, not as not so simple premise, I guess, or line thing that I promised myself. And so every time I want to accomplish something and I see, and I realize that my fear is the one thing getting in the way. That’s when I have to go out and do it and forget about my fear and think what’s the best that can happen and hope for the best. And most of the times, the only things you regret are the ones that you didn’t do.
RV (29:58):
And so the moment you, so you just kind of have like this mental alarm in your head that says, I want to do something, but I’m scared. And so whenever you feel that it’s like, okay, I have to do it now.
MP (30:10):
Oh yeah. Yeah. Because I see the world in two different, like in this context, every decision that you choose is either a comfort based decision or a growth based decision. So whenever we’re in front of any situation, you have two options. Are you choosing growth or are you choosing comfort? And it doesn’t look the same for everybody. So very personal thing. So you have to think which one is the scariest thing to do right now that most of the times is the growth option.
RV (30:44):
And then you just go for it.
MP (30:47):
You work on it, you work on yourself first. I think that’s the most important thing, working on yourself, working on your confidence and when you’re ready, then you go for it. But it is important to work on ourselves. People, sometimes they don’t want to go to therapy. They don’t want to learn new skills. They don’t want to work on themselves. And then they pray. They want to achieve certain things. I think it all works. It all starts with you.
RV (31:11):
Hmm. That’s interesting though. So you’re saying that like, Hey, okay, do you feel this fear? You want to do it? And then it’s, it’s not necessarily just go out, just jump in and do it. It’s like, okay, what, why do I need to learn in order to feel equipped to, to then go do that thing.
MP (31:28):
The imposter syndrome to be real, you don’t want to be an imposter. And so in order to delete, like raise the imposter syndrome from the equation, you actually need to become the person that you would admire, right? You can’t teach about finance and B being broke. You, you can teach about achieving your dreams. If you have not achieved your dreams. I think that first you have to become the person that you would admire. And then you can teach others about that. But also there’s part of ourselves, like our fear telling us that we’re never there and it’s never enough. You know, and that, yeah. So it always telling you, you need to read one more book. You need to do one more course. No, you have to stop. And also think, okay, I think I am at this point where I can teach people what I know. And you can’t just stay on the loop of doing another course, another book, because then you will never put everything you’ve learned into action.
RV (32:24):
Is there any, you have any tips for identifying the difference there between where you go, when am I just, when am I actually going? Okay, I’m equipping myself so that it’s not imposter syndrome versus I’m using it as something that we call creative avoidance. That’s a term for my first book where you’re like, you’re using it as a really a procrastination mechanism.
MP (32:49):
I think that I don’t like to compare myself with other people, but it’s okay to compare yourself with yourself. So maybe think about yourself a year ago. Where are you? Are you still kind of in the same or you, you say, whoa, I wish I could tell this things that I know now to my year ago, self, if there are some things that, you know, you’re like my, my one year ago, self would love to know this things. It would have made his life easier. Then I think Europe one where you can share what you know with other people is yes, you can always know more and you know read more and all that, but then you have to understand what and any it’s okay to start when you’re not ready. Right. That’s one of the things that, that people say, I love this quote from, I think Reed Hoffman that says if your first product doesn’t embarrass you, you launch too late.
MP (33:42):
I love it. I’m very much like I have an idea. I, if I feel I have what it takes, I started and I started trying it and then people will give you feedback. That’s also really valuable. So just maybe try it with a small group of people and see the result there, see the impact. And then you will see, yeah, definitely this is ready for a larger group. Or maybe I should work on it first because for example, my talk, my keynote presentation w the one that I started six years ago is very different from the one that I am giving today. But if I would have waited six years to make it perfect to launch it, you know, I would be nowhere. Cause I just needed all the feedback, all the things that went wrong, all those things to just build the perfect talk that I feel right now is at an amazing level where I’m so confident about this, but it took me six years to get here.
RV (34:34):
I love it. Well, the book is called, hello fears. This is Michelle Poler. You’ve been listening to Michelle. Where do you want people to go? If they want to like sync up with all the stuff you have going on,
MP (34:43):
I would love for them to join me on my community on Instagram. So hello fears on Instagram. That’s where you’ll find everything about me and we’ll just keep in touch. So just let me know that you listened to this podcast so we can connect there.
RV (34:57):
I love it. Well, we’ll link up. We’ll link up to that. As well as your website and the book and everything thanks for helping us overcome our fears. Thanks for modeling. It. It is inspiring and super helpful to actually like get inside your, your mind a little bit about how you push yourself past cause you had so much, so much experience doing it. So keep inspiring, keep doing what you do and we’re, we’re we’re pulling for you. We’re we’re fans. We believe in you. Thank you
MP (35:24):
So much. My pleasure to be here.

Ep 234: Selling with a Servant Heart with Jim Doyle

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):
If you’ve been listening to this show for any amount of time, you know, that the national speakers association has been a huge part of my journey was a huge part of my journey, especially early on as a speaker. And so I met Zig Ziglar and Brian Tracy, and so many you know, of my personal mentors and mark Sanborn, Eric Chester, David Avin. Well, there’s a group that NSA has called the million dollar speakers group that started a handful of years ago. And through that group, I got a chance, a we got a chance, AJ and I to meet a lot of the, the, the really sustainable businesses that have been run by speakers. So they were speakers that they turned their expertise into a business, and that’s the man you’re about to meet Jim Doyle. I met Jim through that group. We’ve been friends for a lot of years now at this point he’s run a multi-million dollar training company for years, and we’ve just known each other through that.
RV (01:47):
And I’ve always admired him and looked up to him. One of the things that he did recently is he did an Aesop with some of his team and sold some of the ownership of his company back to his own team members, which is really, really a wonderful way to leave a legacy and something that you just don’t hear that much about. But anyways Jim has a book that just came out, it’s called selling with a servant heart the 10 lessons on the path to joy and increased income. And another thing, if you’ve been listening for a while, you know, we almost never have people on here to talk about sales because we have a hard time finding people who we agree with and how they teach. And we’ve got some really, really specific philosophies around selling that are pretty rare, but Jim is one of the guys that over time we’ve really come to a door and endorsed and we, we endorse this book. And so anyways, I wanted you to get a chance to meet him and learn from him along alongside of me as I learned from him. So Jim, welcome to the show.
JD (02:54):
Thank you. I, I have to laugh, but you know, Brian, Tracy Zig Ziglar Jimbo, Like I’ve arrived at to be even in the same sentence with those guys who were just legends and impacted and thought so many people I’ll take it, but I don’t I don’t think by any stretch of the imagination, what those guys have done is amazing.
RV (03:20):
Well, and I tell you, but in all, in all, like just objectivity, it’s a rare, it is a rare speaker who builds a multi-million dollar enterprise that scales beyond themselves that lasts, you know, over a decade that that actually has a wealth building, a true wealth building component. That’s a transferable asset. That’s really incredible. And so Jim, I want you started really, you, you tell us, tell us what you do. Like tell us what the company is. Obviously the book is about selling out. I want to hear that, but kind of talk to us about like how you started your career and grew the training company. So,
JD (04:03):
So I was always in the media business and the radio and TV business and like many entrepreneurs. I went broke into a deal in the early nineties and I was like, okay, what the hell do I do now? But I had always loved training and speaking. So I started a company in 1992 called Jim Dolan associates, our 30th year, it’s now called jda.media. So this is our 30th year and over a period of time and over, and I really should have been cited over a period of time. You know, it became, I think the largest training company in the TV space, for sure. And I think one of the lessons I’ve learned in that process that maybe is helpful to folks that are trying to do that and try to build a business is the line there’s riches in niches.
JD (04:54):
I think if you look at many of the members of that billion dollar group who have built big sustainable businesses, I think about our friend Roxanne Emmerich, who’s done that in the banking space, who is the guy that we knew, who, who was the guru of nursing homes and senior living centers and somebody, those people you know, people who done it in financial services, bill gates on a subject of referrals who built big businesses by being more niched focused. And I think what that allows you to do is to provide more services than just a training experience. And then you move to the next company in the next marketplace, down the road. Now you can do coaching programs, online programs build more sustainable product businesses that give you more opportunities. So I think that’s one of the lessons that we learned there’s riches in niches.
RV (05:46):
Yeah, that that’s really true. I mean and, and, and some of those folks you get, it’s like, they’re not necessarily names you would recognize, like you might somebody who, you know, speaks in marinas full of people. But in terms of the, the equity value of an, of an asset in a company that’s, you know, survive without them, they are there they’re huge and valuable and provide extraordinary wealth to the founder. And then also, you know, that the people who come after them. So one of the things that I really think is cool about what you guys do. So, so you’re, you’re saying, when you say media and TV business, you’re in media sales, you’re, you’re training you, your niche is training like advertising sales reps at like a local TV station to call on local businesses to sell air like ad ad ad time. Yeah,
JD (06:37):
Yeah, absolutely. So they’re using the, the, the TV stations platform. And then now, today, increasingly using all of the digital platforms that are available that, that television station might’ve created or represents.
RV (06:50):
Interesting. And so these are these like, like, you know, whatever, like your local news for kind of a thing, or,
JD (06:58):
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we’ve, we’ve had clients in Nashville with clients and I think right now, 75 markets around the country. So you know, we’re able to go out and actually make sales calls side-by-side with their team members with just a whole file cabinet of ideas that we’ve learned from traveling all over the country. So we’re the, we’re the king of stolen ideas. We steal an idea, we steal an idea natural and sell it in Austin for a profit. And hopefully for the benefit of the business owner, that it gets some expertise that they might not have been able to get under normal circumstances.
RV (07:34):
And I think, and I said like tongue and cheek, but the, that is really rare. What you guys do is you not, I love this. You don’t only just teach people how to do it. You kind of do it alongside them. Like your, your team actually goes on sales calls with them, shows them in real time, like how to apply the concepts and the techniques you’re teaching. Yeah.
JD (07:55):
Yeah. So correct. And I’ll give you an example. I mean, you were kind enough to allow me to interview you for the book and, and ha as well. And you talked about something that was a big takeaway for me because it crystallized, you said it in a way that I didn’t, you know, made it clear when you talked about acute listening. So we teach as most, I think effective sales trainers teach as most business owners should probably embrace on a technique of, of doing a lot of diagnosis before you present ideas. And so when we go out on a sales call with a salesperson in a market their idea of listening, maybe three questions before they start talking about advertising, how’s your business? How’s the market right now? Oh, what are you doing for advertising? So the behavior that they model with our people is, you know, a 30, 40 minute conversation, that’s all about them, about the customer’s business, their challenges, their issues. Nobody wants to buy advertising, you know, almost they want to buy the things that advertising can do for them. You know, whether it’s solving a problem, dealing with a competitive threat, taking advantage of an opportunity in the marketplace. So, you know, that, that whole idea of understanding what the customer really wants is foundational to anybody who wants to be effective in sales, whether that’s a consultant, a business owner, or a salesperson at a TV station.
RV (09:20):
Yeah. And so the, I think that that’s super cool that you actually do the sales calls with them, to your point about the niches. That’s also like if you’re serving a vertical, you can do it. Like if you worked in that vertical for years, you know, it, you know, the game, you know, the people, you know, the lingo, the like all, all the, you know, the normal objections, et cetera, you can do that kind of depth of service that someone that just says, I teach sales training for everybody. It doesn’t mean it’s bad, but they can’t, they can’t do it to that level of detail.
JD (09:51):
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, th the more you know about the category, the know you, the more you also understand what the needs are in that category. So you can adapt, we’re create new products based upon what an opportunity is. That may be a new opportunity just in the last year caused by the pandemic. So I’m a big believer in going deep rather than wide you know, deeper rather than why that has at least served us. Well, of course, now I’m ready to book to go and go wider, but violating all my own advice. But but I think that, I think it’s served me well for a long time.
RV (10:24):
Well, and, and I, I would say, you know, so the way that we teach it, we call it, she hands wall. And I don’t know if you’ve ever heard us talk about this. We named this after Peter she hand who you probably know
JD (10:33):
Of course. Yeah.
RV (10:34):
W you know, we kind of took a, one of she hands models that he, he created for sort of like the corporate space. And we applied to personal branding saying that the way you break through the wall is by becoming known for one thing in one space. But then once you break through the wall, then you can expand into other things. After, after you have a team and you have money and you have resources and experience. And I think you’re, you’re a great example of that. So let’s talk about selling with a servant heart. There’s, there’s no shortage of books written about sales. Certainly not at this point. So why the need to write this? And what do you think is distinct or different about this philosophy compared to, you know, what other stuff people may have read or heard about sales?
JD (11:24):
So if you Google sales books and you look at the titles, it’s things like closing, winning, winning, winning you know, I, I gotta tell ya, I don’t think that great salespeople think about winning in the same way that maybe that’s the literature. And so I, I quite honestly get offended by a lot of what I read and, and one of them that I get, because we have a lot of great sales people, people who could be great, who are being taught, that this is the way to do it. And if you sell in that way, you know, maybe you’ll have some success, but I don’t believe that you’re going to find the joy that you can have in a long-term career in sales that you get, when you put your primary focus on serving people. You know, when I interviewed AIJ who, by the way you told me was the best sales person in your family. And one of the best you’ve ever seen,
RV (12:26):
She is to hand hands down. And I would, I’d say this, you know, separate of being my wife, like we work together, you know, for years, he is the best sales person hands down that I’ve ever seen.
JD (12:39):
And I would agree after having spent an hour on the phone interviewing her, but she said, you know, when you make your customer’s needs more important than your own needs. Well, in order to do that, you’ve got to believe that if it’s good for the customer, it’s ultimately going to be good for you, even though that might not be the case immediately, but if it’s good for the customer, it will ultimately be good for you. And so, and good. I mean, the first word of this book title is selling. This is not a relationship, or this is not a book to help you feel, you know, kinder in general. This is a book about being more effective in selling more effective at getting growing your business. But how do you grow your business? The more you serve, the more you get back and where you give the more you get back.
JD (13:26):
There’s a guy that I interviewed in the book Dave wall Dave if he was a, if he was an RV dealership, he’d probably be the biggest in the country. He sells these $2 million coaches, these beautiful motor home coaches, $2 million, $2 million. One of his customers who was an old client of mine said, you got to talk to this guy. And he S his customer said, this guy took a phone call from me. I didn’t, I had an issue with my coach. He took a phone call for me in the course of the conversation. I said, where are you? And he said, well, I’m on a family vacation in Argentina. And he was on a satellite phone somewhere in Argentina. And my friend said I was astounded. He took that call. So I asked Dave about it. And he said, I took you know, five minutes out of my time to help a customer.
JD (14:21):
Well, how has Dave one 60% of Dave wall’s business is repeat 60%. 30% of his business is referral. If you build relationships like Dave has you start every year at such a high level of productivity that you’re going to be an award winner. You’re going to be a high performance salesperson, all because you’ve got a commitment to customers. So you know, the idea that, you know, we’re going to win where they were going to close. You know, what I think selling is a lot more about the way you are as a person and a lot less about the words you use. And so that’s hopefully a focus of what I hope to accomplish by doing this book.
RV (15:06):
And that’s, that’s a really cool way to think about it. You know, like if you’re, if you’re just cold calling randomly every year, you start on zero with a whole bunch of people, you’ve got to cold call. If you’re, if you’re building relationships, then you come into that year, basically with an army of people that are helping generate leads for you, because they’ve all had this wonderful experience. That’s cool way of thinking about it.
JD (15:30):
I think it’s building relationships, but it’s also building trust, you know, the currency of relationships. I have a lot of salespeople that I like. I have a lot fewer that I trust and being trusted is the, is, is the pathway to really having deep, honest business conversations. But I was thinking about one of the biggest takeaways I had from doing this whole book. So I interviewed 35 people in all different industries. And so UNH we’re part of that group. And but I, I, I talked to the guy who had oversight ticket sales for the NBA and a mortgage broker who did probably 10 times the volume of a top performing mortgage broker. And as I reflected on all these conversations, one of the things I realized is man, there was a scary, real important it’s like to be trusted, has a lot of responsibility. I mean, you know, one of the guys that I interviewed said, you know, you can’t try with people’s money. You can’t try, you’ve got to do. And so there’s a responsibility of trust that. So it’s, it’s getting the relationship with trust, but then, you know, honoring that by being so good at the solutions you bring, that you continue to just build on that foundation.
RV (16:56):
Mm Hmm. Yeah. So, so what do you think to move, to move this tab to the tactical? Right. So if you buy into this sort of philosophically going, okay, you know, I’m building relationships, I’m earning trust, I’m doing what’s in my customer’s interest beyond, ultimately than what is just in my own. What are some of the things that should show up tactically? Or what are the things that we can do or say inside of, you know, how we prospect or how we qualify or ask questions? I mean, does it, what, what comes to mind in terms of the, the actual expression of how to do this in terms of selling with a servant’s heart?
JD (17:42):
That’s a, that’s a great question. I think that there are differences, but servant, heart sellers have in every part of the sales process I’ll give you Justin gurney was the guy that I talked about who oversaw ticket sales. He worked for the NBA national basketball association. So his job was to work with all 30 basketball teams to bring best practices on tickets and suite sales and, you know, the expensive sponsorship kinds of things. He said, the model has historically been a model of, you know, make a bunch of phone calls, you know, sit on the phone all day and call business owners where you probably gotten those calls from, you know, one of the international teams I’ve gotten them from the teams down at Sarasota. The Tampa teams are now that now they’ll make the phone calls slightly more sophisticated because the wait for the open, the email before you, then they then call you.
JD (18:37):
But it’s the a hundred calls a day kind of situation. He said, he found on every single team that there were outliers one or two people on a team, all of these 30 teams that did it differently, they focused on building a relationship. They spent a lot of time. If you want the specifics of tactics, we spent a lot of time, more time than any of their colleagues on, on learning about why you might use those tickets. What are the business issues that you’re trying to solve? What can an entertainment experience do to enhance your customer relationships and guess who were the top performers in every one of those teams? So fast forward a few years, Justin joins the New Jersey devils hockey team running their efforts and he tries to hire a team of outliers and he tries to hire a team and teach a culture that is very focused on diagnosis to your word and into acute listening, acute listening, really paying attention to what the answers are listening longer and in more focused than 95% of all the sellers do. That’s probably the number one skill that I think sets apart of servant heart sellers. Is that
RV (19:51):
Like the volume, the quantity of time for how long they’re listening?
JD (19:55):
Exactly. I think that most salespeople spend about 20% of their time listening and 70, 80% of their time pitching serve at heart sellers spend 70 to 80% of their time listening. And 20 to 30% of their time presenting, they can present for a lot less time because when they present a solution, they mail it. You know, it’s done really understanding what the customer’s issues are.
RV (20:22):
What are they listening for? I mean, yeah, like that’s, I guess that’s my biggest, like, so what w what are they listening for? Is it a, is it a standard set of questions they’re asking or
JD (20:35):
Well, I think that there’s going to be questions that an insurance salesperson might ask that a realtor wouldn’t or that a manufacturer, somebody selling manufacturing ask, but somebody else would, but the general principle to think about is I want to ask questions that have deep business conversations to try to uncover what is the customer potentially need, or how could they use the product that you sell in a way that solves their problems, not yours. You want to make a sale? That’s no problem. They want to, you know, solve a particular issue within, within their, their business. So, in, in Justin’s case, by having those kinds of conversations now they get to the pandemic where you think, you know, if you’re listening to this thing and you think your business had trouble, how’d you like to be a professional hockey team shut down.
JD (21:32):
Your building’s not even open. Nobody can come. At one point, I talked to him and they had no idea when they were going to even reopen. And yet they were still making sales and renewing deals because they were having the kind of conversations about how you could use that suite. They could use those tickets after the season started again. Other teams were laying off their people, the New Jersey devils kept theirs on and continued to find some impact. Now, come out the other side, who do you think is going to do the best? Who’s going to have the greatest impact. There are other specifics. I mean, one of the other specific things that I really took away from this is the idea that in your presentations, the servant heart sellers tend to teach and not sell.
JD (22:19):
So rather than here’s the greatest thing that you can do. They’ll spend a lot of time talking about what this product is going to do for your business. What is it going to, what is the problem it’s going to solve? I interviewed the only guy that I interviewed who had ever called on me. I interviewed him because he just impressed me so much, 25, 30 years ago. And he, he went on to oversee sales for arbitrage, which is a big radio company that did ratings for all radio stations in America. He said their most successful salespeople were people who started as trainers and then moved into sales. So customer would buy a product and they would train them how to use it. So when they moved into sales, that was their default. Here’s this new thing. Let me show you how this could make your station look good. And they had the highest performance across a whole sales staff from a bunch of people than people who were just coming in and trying to sell, teach, not sell, became something I really took away from the interviews that I thought was significant.
RV (23:27):
Yeah. That’s, that’s interesting. I mean, the other thing about the, I mean, yeah, that’s a powerful idea that you also kind of get the benefit of seeing what you do, being applied to people in real life, and then going to talk to a prospect. Like I was thinking about our, of strategists, how their, their conviction goes up when they actually come through the training or work with our clients and see how they apply it. And then they get to get, they get a sense of it. It helps them go out and have more conviction and clarity about what they’re selling to. And then to what you’re saying, it’s like, it’s more of a teacher’s heart than a commission breaths, salesperson kind of, kind of a thing.
JD (24:11):
Well, also also those stories not only help their own belief, but they conveyed correctly can also help their customers, their prospects.
RV (24:20):
So what are the things that you’ve you find? I mean, how do you think this applies specifically to personal brands? There’s, you know, we have, we have a one of our, one of our members only events is called pressure-free persuasion. And so there’s a time where we start talking about this sort of tactical one-on-one selling. But like, where do you think, like, even as you just look at your own career, you think back of going, here’s where I had to sell and learn how to sell in order to build the business that I have. You’ve got how do you think that this, like today, a lot of times when people think personal brands, it’s almost more like they think marketing, right? You’ve got, you’re doing videos and social media and funnels and writing books and, you know, even speaking from stage, but I would, those, those skillsets, I think, are pretty markedly different from the ability to have a one-on-one conversation with somebody and, you know, discuss their needs and eventually move them to make a decision and give you a credit card or send you a check. W so, so how do you think this applies, you know, sales still applies to personal brands?
JD (25:31):
Well, ultimately no matter how strong a brand I’ve built, I have to sit on a zoom call, be in front of a prospect or a potential client and have a one-on-one conversation. You know, if you, as you asked the question, I was thinking about you and I probably both had the experience of being with a lot of very successful speakers, very effective speakers guys who have built great personal brands, but when you spend time with them, one-on-one, they have a very, very hard time losing the spotlight. They have a very hard time not being onstage. So as a consequence, they tend to want to dominate the conversation. And, you know, I understand that probably guilty of that more than a few times myself, but it’s the opposite when you take your marketing. So my marketing is I’m out there, you know, here’s my content.
JD (26:33):
Here’s what I’ve tried to do. Here’s the messages that I’m sending out to the marketplace. Well, now somebody engages with me. I’ve got to just say, what are the issues that you’re trying accomplish? And I’ve got to, I’ve got to turn off my ego. That’s the hardest thing is turning off my ego, that desire to be special, that desire to be a star and really listen, listen acutely to what somebody is trying to accomplish. And then I can try to figure out, all right, what is it that I do that can best serve them?
RV (27:06):
You know, the part about this listening thing, which is crazy is you know, like the way I was taught on sales was just when you’re talking about it’s all a numbers game and you just like kiss, keep going no matter what. And you’re just burning through people and you know, kind of this, when they say this, you say this and, and you got to gear yourself up and you know, kind of like be, be persistent until they buy kind of a, kind of a conversation.
JD (27:36):
And they have, they have my money, got my money. I’m gonna get my money.
RV (27:40):
Yeah. Right. Yeah. They’re holding my money. I have to get my money out of their pockets. Yeah. The and that’s so hard, like it free for the sales person, like emotionally. It’s like, that’s a lot of pressure. What’s so crazy to me about asking questions is like, it’s so much easier. Like people tell you, rather than having to like gear yourself up and say, okay, I’m going to go spew a bunch of stuff at somebody and not shut up until they acquiesce. It’s like, I can sit back and do nothing while they tell me exactly what it is that they need. And they like lay out this roadmap for exactly what they need to hear and, and, and, and tell you how to like, make a sale.
JD (28:31):
Right. And if you, if you spend just 15 or 20 minutes on Google before you make that call looking at the business issues in that category tried to find out some of the competitive issues that are going on. So I did a few minutes on their website so that you can, so your questions are not just how’s business or what’s going on in your business, but rather lead to more in-depth business conversations. They’ll tell you everything. And they tell you everything because such few people do that. And that’s, that becomes a competitive advantage. You know, it’s interesting if we have this conversation that you know, I am more focused on listening or I’ve talked a lot about listening, but listening also has a, a partner. And that’s a good question. It’s you, you can’t just listen, you know, how, you know, did you watch the game?
JD (29:23):
What do you think about the Titans? You know, how’s your business? I mean, blahblahblahblahblah now I want to be able to engage in a business conversation. So w I, and when an organization does it, I know you have a ton of entrepreneurs who follow the podcast, follow your work. And I had a banker, you know, this is a banker who took this into his entire bank’s culture. Rather than call his people commercial lenders, they call them commercial bankers and they were instructed to have business conversations, train taught drilled to have business conversations with, with every prospect. Where do you see the future of your business? Do you have anybody identified who might be a buyer for this company down the road? They’re trying to look at the longer term business issues so that they can help this this business owner oriented business to that, and provide perhaps the capital to do all of those things. Unbelievable loyalty, less pressure on rates for, you know, borrowings, because I’ll pay a little bit more for that degree of service, if I’m trying to borrow money for something. And when the pandemic hit and this bank, landmark bank in Kansas could fulfill PPP loans in a hurry. When the big banks couldn’t do anything, they got hundreds of customers. We’re now extraordinarily loyal to the bank. So this is, these are, you know, this whole idea of, of asking good questions is a partner with listening, has to be.
RV (30:57):
And you’re the questions you’re trying to ask there are, how do you, how do you know what questions to ask? I mean, one is to do the research. It’s funny, you mentioned this. So one of the recent interviews we did with Sam Richter about, I don’t know if you know, Sam, all the customer intelligence and the online research stuff that he uses, which has been really
JD (31:15):
Good stuff. So,
RV (31:17):
So once that, you know, it’s kind of educating yourself on some of the industry dynamics, maybe the company dynamics, et cetera, what are the other triggers or, or things that we’re paying attention to, or how do we reverse engineer and come up with the right kind of questions.
JD (31:38):
I’m listening in every business conversation, obviously for opportunity for problems. So I’ll give you one specific technique. I learned this from a guy who was a producer on a 60 minutes type of interview show. And he said and this is, this goes to your comment in our interview about acute listen. He said, when they would do an interview, they would train reporters that after the person answered the question to not immediately jump in with another question, you said, pause, don’t fill up the space, nature, abhors, a vacuum. And most people will start speaking. And he said, we would get the most compelling soundbite, the most interesting piece, the less rehearsed idea after the pause. So people would have the rehearsed, but then they give you maybe something really honest. And if I hear that really honest bit of pain or problem, then you keep asking a few more questions to see, is this going to be something that might create an opportunity on it’s the understanding that whatever business you’re in the customer is not buying that they’re buying what that can do for their business, how they can solve a problem and, and, or take advantage of an opportunity.
JD (33:08):
So that’s the kind of listening that I have to be able to do to understand what are their needs.
RV (33:14):
I love it. I love it. Well, Jim Doyle is the author selling with a servant heart is the book long time friend. Check this out, Jim, where else do you want people to go? If they want to connect with you and learn, learn more about what you’re doing, and heck if you’re trying to sell some media stuff, you’re the guy for sure.
JD (33:34):
So LinkedIn Facebook, for sure. Love to connect with folks on LinkedIn. And the there was a specific website for the book which is servant selling book.com. Love to see people there. And I can’t tell you how grateful I am for the opportunity to do this. I have such admiration and respect for you and what you built. And so this is an honor for me. I I had the privilege of interviewing you when you brought out, take the stairs. And so I was thinking today, what an honor to get the to do the reverse, thank you for doing, for, for doing this.
RV (34:10):
Yeah, of course, man. It’s, it’s our pleasure. And you want over AIG AIG’s heart with your interview and then the, all, all the information about Maine and the lobsters and everything is just really, really, really, really wonderful.
JD (34:26):
So we still have to have lobsters on the coast of Maine
RV (34:29):
Sometimes. That’s right. Well, she is, she’s convinced that we are going there at some point soon, so I’m sure. We’ll see. I’m sure you’ll be, he’ll be the first, the first call would make
JD (34:40):
Thank you
RV (34:42):
All the best, my friend. Thanks

Ep 232: Sales Intelligence and Advanced Online Research Strategies with Sam Richter

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):
Well, it was by special request that I was hunting out a specific man for a specific job to talk about a specific topic that I wanted for you. And that is my friend, Sam Richter. I’ve known Sam for a lot of years. We just kind of been casual friends through the speaking profession. He is in the national speakers hall of fame and he is one of the top rated keynote speakers in the world. And he’s a CSP he’s written books. He is the but when I think of Sam, I, I think specifically of like a very deep expertise on a topic sales intelligence. And so I want to, I remember seeing him the first time and it just blew my mind the first time I heard him talk and I know that he teaches companies how to do this for big, big money. And so I was like, I wonder if we could call it a favor and have him come on the podcast and talk about some of these things. So Sam, welcome to the show.
SR (01:54):
Well, thank you, Rory. And you know, I love what you do. The sales intelligence is really how to find information on other people. So you can be relevant. It’s basically the modern day version of Dale Carnegie. You know, Carnegie said the sweetest sound language language is the sound of someone’s name. And I believe with all the information that we have access to at our fingertips, the sweetest sound in English language is the sound of someone’s name based on what do they care about? Well, the flip side of sales intelligence, or I guess another way of saying it is ethically spying on people and ethically using it to help them. Well, the flip side of that is personal branding. It’s assuming people are spying on you and as you know, better than most everybody’s spying on us. And I’m not just talking like the government or anything like that. I’m talking about prospective employees, current employees, certainly prospective customers bankers, funders, they’re all, you know, spying on us or searching us. How do you control what they find? And that’s what you speak about. So you know, our messages are incredibly complimentary to each other.
RV (02:59):
Yeah. And I, I, I think everybody has heard of Google clear clearly. But I don’t think people understand, like the average person goes right to Google types in something real quick. It’s usually three words or less, and that’s how they use it. 99% of the time when I heard you speak, it blew my mind that it’s like, there is so much power in understanding how to use Google.
SR (03:31):
And w as, as some, as a personal brand, there’s all these things that we need to find, right? Like we want to find potential events. We can speak at, we wanna find potential podcasts. We could be on, we need to find literary agents or publishers or, or we need to sign a virtual assistant or a graphic designer or video editor or, you know, on and on and on. And I think we’re under utilizing, you know, Google specifically. And I guess is that that’s primarily the tool we’re talking about here, right. Is, is, is advanced Google searches. Let’s Google, it’s also social media, LinkedIn, Twitter. It’s also in Mo but most people don’t know and I’ll kind of shock them with this. Google actually gets to a very small percentage of the free and publicly accessible internet. The rest is what we call the invisible web, know the invisible web.
SR (04:20):
You you’ve probably heard of the deep web or the dark web that’s where bad guys hang out. And that makes up even an incredibly tiny percentage of the invisible web. So that 95% of the free and publicly accessible internet is just websites. That for whatever reason, Google can’t vacuum up. And so there’s a lot of those kinds of websites when, I mean, by vacuum up, if you think of Google as like nothing more than a big vacuum cleaner, cause that’s kind of what it is. It just goes around and finds websites with words on the page. You, you it sees those websites flips on the vacuum. Cleaner sucks up the word stores, the words and the Google vacuum cleaner bag or the database you go into Google and type one or two, three words. There’s a human being sitting in the background. It’s basically Google saying, where do those three words appear most often now the challenge now Google is awesome.
SR (05:06):
Right? And we know that that the channel and its algorithms are amazing. The challenges let’s say I go in and type in the word speaker, well do I mean professional speaker or Bose stereo speaker again, Google is pretty good. He said, probably knows what you’ve searched on in the past and knows what websites you’ve looked at. So it’s probably going to give you the, the, the right information. And you know, it’s, it’s job is to do that. But remember, the Google is not, Google is a search engine, but they’re not a search engine company. They’re an advertising company, meaning they want you to get really good results, but they wouldn’t mind if you clicked on an ad once in a while. So what I teach is how to really refine those results, whether it’s on Google or the invisible web using mathematical algorithms. And then I also teach and build tools that automate that. Yeah. So
RV (05:57):
Let’s talk about the [inaudible]. What does that mean? You know, like when I hear, I could use an algorithm, I’m like, I don’t, I don’t know. I don’t, you know, algorithms use me, don’t use the algorithms. So tell me about what does that mean to have an algorithm that you use on Google?
SR (06:14):
It’s just a fancy way of saying it’s a simple mathematical equation. So for example, let’s use that one. I just gave, I go into Google. I type in speaker and I get a bunch of results on stereo speakers. A very simple switch is to go back into speaker and then type in the minus sign and attach that to the word stereos, the minus sign needs to touch the S in the word stereo. Now every result you’re going to get, we’ll have the word speaker in it, but if any of those results have the word stereo in it, those results won’t show up. And I can do that about 30 times. So I can start out with a super broad search term and in seconds, get down to the information that we care about. Another simple trick is using quotation marks. Now, if you go into Google and type in Karen Jane Anderson, as an example, we’ll, you’ll get some really good results.
SR (07:06):
Probably the first page of results will be Karen Jane Anderson, but you’ll also get close to a million results because you’re also going to get every website that has the word. Karen has the word Jane, and has the word Anderson. So if there’s a webpage that has Karen Johnson, Jane Smith, bill Anderson on the same webpage, you’re going to get that result. A simple thing like using quotation marks. When you put a word, a job title, name of a person, name of a company, or even a phrase like digital reputation management or a phrase like a personal branding. If you put that in quotation marks, you’ll treat the words within quotation marks as a single entity. So those two tricks alone, the minus sign in quotation marks will probably save you an hour a day. Oh. And by the way, it not only works in Google. Those techniques will work in social media, the work when you’re searching your email, you know, how many times, if you’ve gone in your email, oh, where’s that email I sent to Rory, where is it textual work, or even your network drive. Where’s that presentation I sent to the widget corporation. You can go in and put widget corporation within quotation marks. You’ll get better results.
RV (08:17):
Interesting. So this is this is your you’re referring to Boolean logic, right?
SR (08:23):
Yep. That’s very correct. Yep. And then there’s other things beyond bullying, but in general, that’s correct. So,
RV (08:29):
So what is w what is Boolean logic? Like? What does that mean and how many, how many elements are considered part of it? Cause this is what you’re talking about is, is a really big deal. It was like, you know, the problem with Google is that it searches like this gigantic universe. And so finding, and for most of our clients, they wouldn’t be searching for speakers. It’s more like they’re searching for events that have speakers, right. And so if you said, you know, insurance association speakers, I mean, who knows what comes up, but if it could have stuff like you’re saying, like, you know, musical stuff because of the
SR (09:06):
Right, right. So bullying actually is from a 19th century mathematician, a guy named George Boole and the first modern use of a bully and George bull is kind of credited with, for lack of better term coming up with the zeros and the ones. So 19th century, the mathematical patterns that make technology work. Now, the, the beauty of really great technology is it’s intuitive, right? I fire up Google, I type into words, results, just show up. That’s kind of the problem, a really good technology. I type into words, results to show up. So I never really learned for lack of a better term, the good stuff, and the good stuff is the Boolean or reading the manual. The good news is it’s very easy. Just most people don’t do it. And frankly, most people don’t need to do it. It’s really when you’re, when you’re wanting to laser focus, a search where you might need that information.
SR (09:55):
So for example, if I wanted to find the meeting planner at the here, here would be a good one, the meeting planner at the speaker association, but not the national speakers association, the stereo speakers association, I’m making this up. I don’t know if there is, there probably is a stereo speaker association, you know, high fidelity stereo speaker, but that’s where you use these combinations of quotation marks and minus signs plus signs. There’s other bunch of other ones as well to really refine your results again, you’re going to do just fine typing words into Google. It’s, it’s really more when you want to, Hey, I really want to laser focus my results into something specific where you need these techniques. Okay.
RV (10:39):
And so is it primarily like, are the, are the big ones, quotation signs plus signs and minus signs?
SR (10:47):
Yes. There’s lots of others if we want to get really technical. So for example if you think of how people save a word document on their computer, well, most people use fairly logical titles for their documents. So for example, if I was saving a document, I might call that document widget corporation proposal. Well, you can actually limit your search to just titles of webpages, just like you might do when you’re searching for a word document. The nice thing about web pages is they’re usually titled something that’s very logical because that’s how you get higher up in search engines. And so for example, you can use a Boolean term called entitle, I N T I T L E and then the colon, those two dots in title. So for our listeners, let’s say I wanted to find a list of associations in the medical industry, right?
SR (11:45):
I could go into Google and type in medical association and I’ll get some good results. Also get a bunch of junk, or I can say entitle medical title association, meaning the only results that are allowed to appear are, were our results with the word medical as part of the title of the document, or excuse me, an association as the title of the document. Now I can also use quotation marks. So that exact phrase has to be in the title. So in title, colon medical association, put medical association within quotation marks, and it will pull up that exact result, that exact phrase, medical association, as the title of the document.
RV (12:26):
And can you also search by you? Can you search Google? This was one of the things that I remember was you can search for file types. What are all the file types that you can search into Google and how do you find them? And, and, and, and by the way, when you say invisible web is this, like, these are things that people store on the internet, but are not things that you would get to by like going to their website and clicking through their menu, or is invisible web
SR (12:56):
Well, there’s, there’s, there’s, I guess there’s two definitions that I use for the invisible web. The first definition are websites that for whatever reason, Google can’t back you up, I’ll give you an example. There are many websites that you have to create a, a login to access Facebook as an example. So Facebook, you can access some Facebook pages via Google book, but in general, you have to have a free Facebook username and password. Well, Google can’t create the username and password, and frankly, if you could find it, everything you wanted via Google search, there’d be no reason to have a Facebook account, right? So that would be an example, it’s the free and publicly accessible internet, but you have to have a username and password to get in it, not once you’re in it. Many times, Facebook, unfortunately, is not one of them, but many times you can use the same Boolean techniques to search once you’re inside that website.
SR (13:49):
So again, Facebook, as an example, if we think of every picture, every post as a page on the internet, well, I don’t know the number, but it would have to be trillions of pages that are on the invisible web. So you couldn’t access those via Google. You’d have to log in to access those. Now, there are, that’s one definition of the invisible one. The other definition is I’ll just give you, is my personal definition. Anything past page two on Google search results is invisible. Meaning no one’s ever going to find it, which is where you come in, really on, on reputation, right? And personal branding is to make sure that you show up number one. That’s why people should be getting interviewed should be you know, doing speeches. So they show up high up in Google search results, because if you’re on page two or three on Google search results, it may as well be in the invisible web cause no, one’s going to find you sure.
SR (14:40):
Getting back to your question as it relates to documents. Well, there are trillions of documents that people post online, right? It could be Excel spreadsheets or PowerPoints, and you can find those by using what’s called a file type colon search in Google. So file type colon PPT, or file type colon. PPTX, we’ll find PowerPoint documents. Now, why do we care? Because I could go in and type in Rory Vaden within quotation marks file type colon PPT, or file type Poland PPTX. And if there’s any PowerPoints that ever been posted out there about you or featuring you they’ll show up, including that one time where you were the, you know, you were cornered, right? You were sitting there after you gave your speech standing ovation, someone in the back said, this was awesome. Can we get a copy of the slides? And the, and the event planner stood up and says, yes, we’ll be posting his slides online on our super-duper James Bond, you know CIA NSA protected website, which of course wasn’t protected at all because we can find it, you know? So that’s where, that’s where you can find those kinds of document.
RV (15:48):
Well, and some of that’s like you know, the other time where I think about using this as like w w women to your words, sales intelligence. So there there’s one part of it is how do I find a list of people to contact that would be hyper relevant to what I do to where there’s such, you know, they’re going to know me or a lot of the people I know, et cetera. The other thing is, you know, maybe I get a, I get a lead to be like a, hold on an event to go speak at. And I get a meeting with them and I want to go, how can I customize my presentation, either my sales presentation or my actual presentation to prepare. And so you can find, I mean, you can find all tore, all sorts of internal power points and meeting notes and stuff like that.
SR (16:36):
Absolutely. And that, that level of customization is really, what’s going to differentiate you from your competition, from those who go out to, as I like to say, they wing it. Or they, you know, in, in Aurora, you and I have both seen this before where the speaker gets up and Hey, it’s so great to be a part of. And there’s a pause. They look down the financial industry in, because yesterday they did the exact same speech for the automotive industry the day before that the medical device industry. So that level of customization is so important. A couple of quote, unquote, invisible websites. And they’re invisible because Google doesn’t know they exist because I created them and I don’t let Google know they exist. One is a news search engine called you got the news.com that’s Y O U G O T T H E N E w S.
SR (17:22):
You got the news.com, which will pull up not only Google search results, but it will pull up local newspapers, trade journals, industry journals. So for example, when I did it, you got the new search on you, Rory. Well, I clicked on the regular news, which would be Google news. I think about if I recall maybe 12 articles showed up, but when I clicked on the more news button, and now that features again, local newspapers, trade journals, industry articles, thousands of articles showed up. And there’s also a tab on there for press releases, social media posts, blog posts, again for prayer, preparing for it, whether it’s preparing for a sales call or customizing your presentation, use something like you got the news five minutes before the meeting, frankly, five minutes before you step on stage, you’re going to massively impress the number of times where I’ve done that five minutes before I go on stage.
SR (18:12):
And I get up in the first words out of my mouth are instead of saying, Hey, thank you St. Louis it’s Hey, congratulations. Many of you might not even know, but your company just won a fortune, you know, fortune best places to work or something like that. That massively differentiates. Another one is a site I built called. You got research, Y O U G O T research.com. And that one will specifically find a credible objective research, white papers on different trends, survey results, but every single result is a PDF file. Why a PDF file? Because I found in doing Google searching, oftentimes when I’m searching for reports, all I get are places that want to sell me the report. In this example, I actually get the report. I get the PDF file, and there are things I teach on what to do with PDF files and, and how you can use those in sales, but, but for preparing for a speech, it’s great stuff.
RV (19:06):
Well, that’s funny. Yeah. So we are this Wednesday releasing our trends in personal branding, national research study, it’s a PDF. It will live on a, on a hidden URL of which it will be behind the gated. We’re not selling it, we’re giving it away for free, but it will be behind a gated page.
SR (19:24):
And we won’t be able to find that we won’t be able to get behind the gated page, but if somebody downloads your document and then post it on their server, then we’d be able to find it
RV (19:34):
Interesting of which surely they would mean somebody in the world that might, might do that. Yeah. So that just means like, and you’re saying that you got research.com is like, if I’m trying to research a subject of any kind, then I’m going and just saying, show me all kind of like statistically valid research studies and
SR (19:54):
Yeah, I’ve, I’ve I’ve modified it. So there’s different buttons. So one would be trend reports. So that would be research reports that talk about trends and other ones, survey results. So specifically dealing with survey results and there’s overlap between the two market outlooks, and then there’s even a button in there that it’s called. I think it’s industry statistics. I don’t have it in front of me, but that actually minds the invisible website, the department of labor. So for example, if you went in and typed in construction and then click the click that button, it will pull up all the latest statistics as it relates to types of employees, how much money they make, how many employees they are in that industry, again, help you, whether it’s doing business planning or whether it’s preparing for a presentation, just get you that information, credible objective information in seconds. Again, could you do it on your own? Absolutely. But knowing these and knowing where to look, I think can save you potentially hundreds of hours per year.
RV (20:53):
I mean, yeah. I mean talk about like podcast topics or blog topics or book, you know, site having. I mean, I think I’ve had incredible information to site in an actual book or something that is like, it needs to be statistically like sound. That kind of thing is really is, is huge. So that in that case, those tools that you built, they are just layered on top of Google.
SR (21:18):
That’s correct. It’s sitting on top of Google and I’m adding a 30 to 50 word Boolean algorithm. All you’ve got to do is type in, let’s say you want a trend report. You just type in construction. If that’s the industry, you care about trend reports, there’s a pull down menu that allows you to search by by date range. So you choose past a year typing construction, click trend reports in a 50 word algorithms going to be running in the background. Now here’s another little trick for you to finding PowerPoint documents. So that would be file type colon PPT or PPTX, here’s where there’s a great one. You know, it’s kind of one of those sayings when people talk about writing or jokes or something like that, right? Like everything that’s already been written or everything that already could be written has already been written by somebody in some shape or form.
SR (22:04):
What I mean by that is and I, for those of you with kids in the audience, this can help a lot with their homework because my kids would never call me. When they’ve got a research report due in college you know, they’ve known about it for three weeks. They happened to call me for hours before it’s due. That would never happen. Right? So here’s a little trick you go in and you search for a PowerPoint document on your topic. So let’s say your topic is a, you’re doing a report or again, in, in, in using our, our examples here, maybe you’re going to be speaking in the automotive industry. So whether it’s doing a report or you’re speaking in the automotive industry, go into Google type in say, automated automotive trends. And then now here’s a little trick or, or in all upper case proceeding or right after the, or if you type an or an uppercase a space before and after the, or not lowercase, but uppercase or you’ll get either or so you expand your search.
SR (23:00):
So I might type in automotive or excuse me, automotive trends or, or an all upper case issues, file type colon, PPT, X I’m telling Google, go find me a PowerPoint document. Only PowerPoint documents with the word automotive, with the word trends or the word issues somewhere inside that PowerPoint. Now, if I want to refine it even further, I can say in title automotive trends or issues, file type colon, PPTX a bunch of PowerPoints will appear now, how is this a huge time saver? You click on a few and you see, you try to find other people’s data. Now you’re not going to plagiarize. You’re not going to their PowerPoint, but in the lower right or left corner, what do we all do if we’re decent and we’re ethical at what we do, we put our source for the data, you know, a widget, a widget corporation, 2020 study, right?
SR (23:59):
You’re going to find that in the lower right corner of PowerPoint life, we’re going to grab the name of the source, go back into Google, paste that in, put it within quotation marks. Now we’re going to go find the original source of that data. So it was a little complex. What I just described much easier if we were on zoom and I was showing you, but, but hopefully people get it because what I’m doing is I’m looking at somebody else’s PowerPoint presentation, not to steal their content, but to see what data sources did they use. Now, I’m going to go back into Google finding the original data source. Well, heck I’ve just saved myself three hours of research.
RV (24:35):
Ah, yeah. I feel like that happens a lot too where people will cite it, but then sometimes people will say things and they’ve never actually liked the one I think of as the like statistics you hear about how much of the workforce is disengaged. Like so many people use that and it’s like a Gallup survey. Yeah. Most of the people who use that have never actually read the actual exactly. And being able to kind of like add the context and see the full report is a super powerful and, and on the topic of reports, I guess if you’re looking at PDFs, you could also pull up people’s annual reports. Now, if they’re public companies they’re available anyways. But even if you’re certain, certain private companies might have versions of their annual reports posted online.
SR (25:20):
Absolutely. So, you know, file type colon PDF, or file type colon doc or docx would be word documents XL would be XLS or XL SX. So what kind of Excel spreadsheets are out there? All, everything from budgets to member lists, attendee lists all sorts of different types. And it really it’s, you know, it’s kind of a science and an art. So the science is the plus the minus the quotes, the file type, the entitles, there’s a bunch more as well. And the art is kind of knowing when to use it. So you just try different things until something shows up that you like.
RV (25:56):
Yeah. So, but if I wanted to, let’s say that I had a you know, I wanted to get more speaking gigs and I wanted to go, like, I need all of the associations, you know, I want to get all the, you know, whatever the financial, financial advisors and like associations. So I could just theoretically say, you know, I might go on and do something like in title, financial associations file type, colon dot XLS.
SR (26:30):
Yeah. You could do that. But what I would also recommend is, is that a phrase I like to use is think like the author. So if I wanted to find a list of associations that paid speakers and I was creating that list. So if I’m the author of that list, what words would I put in there? Now, the obvious ones would be all association lists. No, here’s kind of a backdoor way of doing it. So already let’s say I want to find a, a list of more places, more associations that would hire Rory Vaden. Well, what I might do is pull up, pull up my past client list and say, Hey, I’m going to type in three associations who paid me in the past, you know, the medical association, the automotive Otis association, and the banking association put, put the name of the association in quotes file type colon PDF.
SR (27:25):
All right. So what I’m saying is those three associations have to be in the PDF file, but then I’m going to do something a little bit different. I’m also going to add the phrase member directory. So I’ll put that in quotes or, or an all uppercase membership directory, but that in quotes or a, or an all uppercase attendee list, what I’m looking for is a PDF document where all three of those associations have appeared. The concept being is if there’s a list of great associations out there, if those three aren’t in it, it’s not a good list, but if those three are in it, it’s probably a really good list. So it’s kind of, again, that phrase, thinking like the author. Well, if I was creating a list of great associations for it to be any good, what three associations would have to be in their search for those, instead of just searching for the phrase association lists,
RV (28:17):
I need the Sam Richter keynote past keynote client fee range, greater than X type dot XLS file. That’s I mean, this is amazing. These are free searches. These are free Boolean logic is all free. Theoretically, you could just go to Google and start messing around with plus minus file type. In, in title,
SR (28:45):
All in quotes you know, all in text in URL. I mean, there’s a bunch of them, but you know, the key is it. You don’t have to get too fancy. I mean, it, I guarantee if you just start using quotation marks and minus signs, just forget all the rest of it. Quotation marks and minus signs. You’ll save yourself two hours a day
RV (29:05):
And the minus sign, does it have to be, yes, there’s a minus sign and then a space, or does it have to be,
SR (29:09):
And the minus sign must touch the word that you want to remove. Now, if you want to remove a phrase. So if I wanted to remove a stereo speaker, I’d put stereo speaker within quotes, and then the minus sign would touch the first quote. Got it.
RV (29:24):
I got it. The other way that we can do this is you actually have a tool. Well, you, you also build a bunch of tools. You build, you build them for different industries, where you basically take, how does this work? You basically take, you create your own user interface. Cause some your searches will use 30 parts of Boolean logic that are all in this query, but you build a custom graphic user interface where you can just go type stuff in, and then it’ll run all the searches for you. It’s basically as if you were sitting there like personally doing this.
SR (29:57):
Correct. So what I, what I do in, in the industries in which I speak, you know, my kind of stake in the ground is, is very high content. So obviously entertaining, motivational those kinds of, you know, we’ve got to do that. But also very high context. And kind of my, what I like to say is, is, you know, hire me and the learning and most of most important, the implementation or the execution of what I share, doesn’t have to stop once the ovation subsides. So I produce what’s called a sales Intel engine for just about every industry in which I speak in a sales intelligence. So I’ll, I’ll interview my prospects. And I’ll say, you know, who, who are the types of companies that you call on? What are the types of decision-makers? Why does somebody buy from you? Why somebody buys might be, I call that a sales trigger what’s going on in their life, where they need you today.
SR (30:45):
And then I will build Boolean algorithms and, you know, it could be 20 to 50 different words. And then I’ll add a button on top of that, if you will. So instead of somebody having to type the 30 to 50 word bullying algorithm, let’s say that they sell to electronic electrical engineers. So instead of having to search the 30 to 50 or typing the 30 to 50 word algorithm to find electrical engineers, I just have a field that says location. They type in Dallas, there’s a button that says electrical engineers, they click on the button and it’ll instantly pull up all the electrical engineers in Dallas.
RV (31:20):
So you can even search, you can narrow searches by location. I mean, you can narrow your search by anything with Google.
SR (31:25):
Yup. Yup. But that, but that’s a very specific bull. I wouldn’t even want to try to explain it to you. Cause it’s, it’s pretty complex in terms of being able to yes, you could type in Dallas, but to do, to, to literally get the city of Dallas is a pretty long equation.
RV (31:46):
Interesting. So where do you go to, how do we go learn about these? So you said you, you call them sales, Intel and engines, and you built them. You have built these for different verticals for different industries. Yeah.
SR (31:59):
Yeah. And I, I, I build them all the time and I have a holding page for lack of better term of my catalog where after I do them for a company, I’ll say, Hey, I wonder if anybody else would want something like this. And I’ll S I’ll take out some of the personal things related to that company then make it available on an industry basis. So I’ve got a webpage. My catalog is Intel engine, I N T E L. And then engine is spelled weird. N G I N. So I N T E L N G I n.com. And that will have, I think right now there’s probably a dozen engines on there. I’ve got about three dozen more that I still need to frankly, build their landing page and put them on there. But in general, I mean, you’ll go there, you’ll see ones for the conveyor belt industry for the electronics industry, for the speaker industry. And then there’s a general one that’s called the premium engine. That just kind of is all things to all people for financial advisors. I’ve got a really powerful one. So those are the kinds of engines I’ve developed.
RV (32:58):
Hmm. Fascinating. So then we don’t have to actually know any of this stuff. We can just, whatever, pay us little monthly fee and then just like type in the filters and it’ll deal, pull it all up. And then it just sends us to Google and just says, here, here’s exactly what you need.
SR (33:14):
Yeah. It’s just designed to save you time and, and hopefully help you find information that you might not even have other known otherwise, knowing that existed now, inside the engines, I also search other other search engines and other databases beyond Google. Google is the primary one. I’d say 80% of the results will show up in Google, but the 20% I’m also searching other other if you recall earlier, invisible websites.
RV (33:39):
Interesting. Yeah. Well, I mean, I just, you know, I think about if I had to do a book launch and I wanted to grab a list of book reviewers or media writers or podcast hosts, or I wanted to grab, you know, a bunch of associations or I wanted a list of a membership directory of everybody in this industry that, you know, the way my mind would normally go about that is hire a VA, giving them parameters and let them go search for hours and hours and hours. But if I just search for file type like a membership directory and the right things like that, probably all those things, those things that I’m looking for have likely been compiled by somebody somewhere. And if I know how to do the Boolean logic, I can like go right to it. If it’s, if it’s on the web somewhere.
SR (34:25):
Yeah. If it’s on the web. Now the challenge today, especially in today’s world with certainly a lot of these member directories and attendee list show up, you still have to be careful because as you know, again, depending on what statistic you read, who knows which one’s right, but a good percentage, 30 to 40% of people have left their jobs or will leave their jobs either in the past year or the next year, whatever that number is. I don’t know. And so that means that a lot of those lists may no longer be valid. That’s why I also use LinkedIn. A lot of these techniques, you know, the same bullying techniques you can use within LinkedIn, but theoretically people keep their LinkedIn profiles up to date. So that’s why I like LinkedIn. So for example, I could go into LinkedIn and in the main search forum, I’ll type in book reviewer. Now, if I type in book reviewer with no quotation marks, I’ll get book reviewers, but I’ll also get anybody who’s. Any, I’ll get a music, I’ll get a music reviewer, who’s read a book. So book reviewer within quotation marks will tell LinkedIn only find that exact phrase.
RV (35:29):
Yeah. That’s so powerful and simple. So all right. So Intel and Intel engine, but without the ease and engine, right? The Intel engine.com. So that’s where you could go to check out one of these. I want to look at, I want to look at the speaker one, cause I want to use it and maybe we can do a deal or something with, for sure, for brand builders members. I want to talk to AJC. Maybe we can buy this for every, all of our members and provide it. Cause this is pretty, pretty powerful stuff. And where else do you want people to go Sam? Or if they want to connect with you and learn more about what you’re up to
SR (36:01):
Just go to Sam richter.com. Sam, R I C H T E r.com or frankly Rory, if if you can’t find it, just go to Google type in my name with, or without quotation marks. That’s my business card. I mean, if you couldn’t find me that way, don’t listen to anything I have to say, because I’ve also had to learn the, the flip side of this. Right. So if I’m going to teach how to find people, I better be able to be found. Yeah,
RV (36:25):
Absolutely. Well, Sam, so cool, man. I’ll always pick up so many tactical like tips of like, oh, that’s so, so good. And appreciate you being willing to share here. And as always brother, we wish you the best.
SR (36:37):
Thank you. You too. Keep up your great work. It’s so needed in today’s world and I’m just super excited for all that. You’ve accomplished. Congratulations. Thanks buddy.

Ep 230: Playing the Long Game with Dorie Clark

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):
Well, Dorie Clark is someone that I have known about for years. We’ve kind of been friends and acquaintances and hung out here and there. And I just think she’s delightful and wonderful and extremely intelligent. And so she has a new book that is coming out called the long game how to be a longterm thinker in a short term world. It was a wall street journal bestseller. It came out a few weeks ago. She had a fantastic launch. We’re in a little author mastermind group together. And so most recently we, we reconnected around that, but she also teaches at duke university. She’s a contributor, a long-time contributor to Harvard business review. She’s been featured in all of this major media and was also awarded one of the top 50 business thinkers in the world by thinkers 50, which is an extremely prestigious award and group to be a part of. And anyways, she’s cool. And she’s here Dory. Good to see you,
DC (01:53):
Rory. It’s so terrific to get to spend time with you. Thank you.
RV (01:56):
Yeah. So your first book reinventing, you was kind of like more about personal branding specific. That’s like very much in our, you know, the world that we live in these days. Tell us about the long game and you know, how would you describe this in a, in a phrase and then you know, let’s just kind of, I want to dive in around there.
DC (02:21):
Well, the, the phrase that I would use to describe the long game is it is applying the lens of strategic thinking to your own life and your own career. And the way I actually see it tying in with my previous work and with personal brand in general, is that in many ways, the inspiration for the book came from the coaching clients that I worked with in the people, in my orbit. And we’d be having a session, they’d be updating me, they’d say, okay, I did this, I did this. And at a certain point in almost every session, there’d be this pause and then say, so what now, what next? And they’d be looking for the next thing. They, what they kind of wanted me to tell them was like, oh, go all in on tech talk. That’s the thing do that big or what, you know, whatever the thing might be.
DC (03:10):
And I often felt really like the bad guy when I was talking with him because so often my advice was the thing to do is like, keep doing the thing you’re already doing. And I realized that when it comes to professionals that are passionate about getting their ideas out there, getting their message heard on one hand, we know that there is not some sort of magic bullet that will do it for us. And on the other hand simultaneously, we still kind of want one. And so, yeah, why not? So I wanted to write a book to really hopefully be a bit of a framework for people about the hard part of patients, because for a long time, if you are doing the work, if you’re really pushing to get your ideas out there to get better known and to build your brand, it’s a process that usually takes awhile and it can feel at various points in the journey as you know, really demoralizing, it feels like, oh, is this working? Oh, why is it taking so long? But that is what we have to muscle through to get to the other side. And I really wanted to encourage people to be able to do that so that good people didn’t give up too soon.
RV (04:22):
How long, how long does it take? Right. So if you know, I think about Malcolm, Malcolm Gladwell, you know, popularizing the 10,000 hour rule, right. Or a lot of times what we, we almost describe brand builders group is going, like, we often position ourselves as telling people, Hey, we’re not the people that are gonna like say, you know, you’re going to make six figures in the next 30 days. We’re the people saying we’re going to take something that would normally take 20 years and get you there. And six, like, but how long? And I know that’s a, that’s a kind of a broad question because the answer is it probably, it depends, but how would you answer that question? Like how long do I have to work at doing the right things? Even though I’m not seeing immediate results right away. And I’m like slogging away going okay. If I, if I do things the right way and I add value to the world and I keep trucking along here, like, okay, what when, like when do we actually start to turn the corner and see the, see some of the like big traction?
DC (05:28):
Yeah. Yeah. I love, I love the question. Worry. Cause you’re exactly right. Like everybody knows that it’s not overnight. We’re like, yeah, yeah, we get it. Okay. Not overnight, but nobody tells you what not overnight means. Like, is it like two nights?
RV (05:43):
I’m good for two weeks. So yeah. I, I don’t, I’m not overnight success. No problem. But two weeks later I’ve been doing this for two weeks Dory, like, and I don’t have a million downloads. Like why don’t I have a million downloads? It’s been 14 days.
DC (05:57):
That’s right. Well, I do, I do have an answer because on one hand, of course, you know, as you say, the caveat is yes. You know, conditions may vary for people, but also people want to know. And one of the things that I have had the benefit of over time is not only going through this process in my own journey, but now working with tons of people, I have this online course in community that I run it’s 600 plus people have been through. So there’s a real sense of sort of a cross section with longitudinal perspective. So I’ve gotten to see a lot of times what it looks like and where people get hung up up and how long things take. And so I’m curious to hear your answer, but my answer when people ask me this question is that typically, if you are, if you were putting in a you know, a strong effort, I say that it usually takes between two and three years to show almost any results. Like let’s be clear. And I then say, it will take about five years to show demonstrable results. Now the good news is that by the time you get to around five years, you have actually put in enough work, you’ve created a significant competitive moat between you and other people. That is a real headstart that differentiates you from the competition. But you know, most people are not willing to do it because you know, they’re at 18 months or whatever, and they’re like, this sucks and we gotta keep pushing. So how do you answer that?
RV (07:31):
Well, I mean the, the way that I would answer is, is more of a, more of the concept of it takes as long as it takes. Like, if you’re doing something that you really care about, if it’s really about impact, you just got to commit to say, I’m going to do this for the rest of my life. And sooner or later it’s going to work. Like I think about you and I also speak a lot. And I think that was a very first time we met was maybe at social media marketing world at Jay Baer is one of my best friends. I know you guys, I’m pretty sure he’s who introduced us. And
DC (08:04):
It was NSA actually
RV (08:06):
Through Jess. It was the NSA. Anyways. So as the speaker world, I tell this story sometimes, cause I, I remember going to NSA and I was 20 something years old. And the first time I was at NSA they, they have this hall of fame award, right. That they give out to people and it was amazing. And, and, and there was a speaker that, that I knew and had heard before that he was honored by being in getting inducted. And I think a lot of people would go, oh, well, that’s amazing. Like it’s a far off goal. The thought I had in my head literally at like 22 was like, oh yeah, I’m going to be inducted into the hall of fame someday. But I didn’t, I didn’t know when, and I didn’t be like, I’m going to do it in two years or five years or, or, or 10 years.
RV (08:54):
But I literally thought I’m 20 years old. I’m going to do this the rest of my life. So even if I suck, like it’s 50 years from now, even if I suck, like after 50 years, I’m probably going to get this award at some point. So I love it. It’s like, if you’re really doing the thing you love, if you’re really doing the thing you got, you’re committing your life to, and you go, I’m going to play the long game because this is the thing that matters to me. It’s not vanity or money. It’s like, it’s like your calling then. You know, it ended up, it ended up taking me like 17, I guess, 16 years. So I was, I got inducted in 2018. So it took a minute, but it did happen. But I, I like your five-year answer. I mean, in, in terms of a practical answer, I, I like your five-year answer because like, you’re not going to change your life completely. Typically in a year or two. Now we had a, we’ve had a client, we helped to get a viral Ted talk. She got 3 million views in a year and it has made a pretty substantial change, but it’s still at this point, you know, now we’re like two or three years in, it’s still mostly a trajectory change the fruits of that really. Aren’t, she’s going to start reaping here in the next 2, 3, 2, 3, 5 years. I think your five-year answer is a good one.
DC (10:21):
Yeah. Thank you. And I, and I appreciate what you said, Rory, because one of the ways, I mean, you know, always the question right, is okay. If you’re going to slog through something for two or three or five years, how can you keep yourself motivated when it feels so long? And when you’re not typically in the early stages getting much positive reinforcement,
RV (10:40):
How do you keep yourself motivated Dory for five years when you’re slogging through this crap Fest of just getting punched in the face. And it’s like, I’m putting 70 hours in. I got three views on my YouTube channel. I got eight downloads of my podcast. I’m speaking for free. Or, you know, I’m an entrepreneur and I’m working 80 hours a week. And I still feel like I’m doing everything. How do you keep yourself motivated Dorie Clark?
DC (11:04):
Well, I think one, one of the ways that we can answer this is to, to choose activities that we’re doing, that we can nonetheless derive a short-term payoff from even as we’re pursuing the longer goal. It’s, you know, we can think of it as winning, even if we lose meaning, you know, hopefully the long-term will pay off that’s, that’s the goal. That’s the thing we’re all after, but let’s pretend it doesn’t for some reason, how can we make sure that the time we spend is not time that we are wasting? And so just as one example, let’s say that somebody has decided, all right, I’m going to start a podcast. And the goal is that they want to establish themselves as a recognized expert in their field. And they, you know, maybe they want to have something that one day becomes a huge podcast and they could get advertising revenue and things like that.
DC (11:56):
That’s, longer-term, that’s harder, but in the short term, the value of a podcast or a blog or video series or whatever you choose choose your methodology is that you could be using that in the here and now to connect with other prominent people in your fields. You could be connecting with potential clients. You are using it as a lever for relationship building, which is something that presumably you want to be doing anyway. And so at the end of those five years, even if you don’t have, you know, iTunes, top 10 podcast or something, you have a heck of a lot better network. You have a lot more business prospects, more people know who you are and know what your name is. And that is something that is going to be valuable no matter what the long-term outcome is.
RV (12:44):
Yeah, I will. I mean, I love that you and I were catching up on our personal story of when we exited our last company and starting over. And it was like, all we had was our reputation. We didn’t have the followers, we didn’t have the client list. We didn’t have our email, we had nothing. But what we had was a bunch of people that we’d met, that we had helped here and there along the way with stuff. And that made a really, really big difference. And I love that winning, even if you lose idea, the other thing about this I want to see your thoughts about this, because I think it’s funny how let’s use YouTube. So my car we’ve been slogging through YouTube. That’s a good real life example. Like I think our new YouTube channel, I think we’ve been doing a video every week and we’re on like, I don’t know all coming up.
RV (13:32):
I think maybe on two years and our video, we’re still getting maybe like a couple hundred video views. And it’s like, we’ve been doing this for two years. We got a couple of hundred views. And I think what people often forget is you go, you look at, you know, XYZ, some other person, right. You know, grab whoever Tony Robbins and you go, Tony posted a video and they get million views. I got 200 views. And yet we forget that if you were standing in front of a room of 200 people that were live for most of us, that would get our heart rate pumping like even 50, you know, or a hundred. But we go, ah, you know, my, you know, my Instagram video got a hundred views and it’s like, if there were those a hundred people were standing in front of you, you’d be jacked. And I think we lose that perspective digitally. Sometimes
DC (14:25):
I think that’s a really right on observation. I mean, sometimes people who are not authors will ask me, are you doing a book tour? And the, you know, the first thing of course is like, well, hashtag COVID no, not really. I mean, it was hard enough to even get a place to have a launch party in New York because like a lot of the bookstores have stopped doing events. So are, you know, hopefully will get better and that we’ll get back to normal. But, but even regardless of that you know, publishers are very, very hesitant to pay people, you know, pay for people to do that now. And you can understand why, because if you were to travel all around, you know, the planes and the hotels and the trains, and you’re going to different cities, if you did a bookstore event and it had 50 people in it, or 75 people that would be a path to bookstore, it would be like, wow, this is so huge. This is so amazing. Meanwhile, if you stay at home, even like literally the worst podcast has 50 people that listened to it. And so thinking about just how we deploy and leverage our time digitally, it’s a, it’s a really big difference.
RV (15:39):
Yeah. I love that. I love that. So what are all the ways that we play the long game? Okay. So I know that that’s the premise, which I love, we’re totally aligned on that. I mean, I think you go, okay, choose activities that you can win. Even if you lose what are like the other places or prac practical kind of like expressions of which the long game plays out. I mean, we’ve kind of used the content marketing example here, right? Like YouTube being, or doing podcasts or something, where else in our business and our brand is this really, this concept matter.
DC (16:20):
Well, one area that I talk about in the long game, Rory is actually applying a concept that many of your listeners may be familiar with in a slightly different context to our own lives. And that is the concept of 20% time, which Google has really popularized. And the idea for people who are not familiar with it is that Google employees are encouraged to spend up to 20% of their time working on, you could call them speculative activities or experimental activities that are outside their typical job description. And, you know, a worthy caveat here is that even though technically, you know, oh yeah, you can do that. It’s actually a very small percentage of Google employees who do do that because the, there there’s always such a lure of the short term, you know, people are like, oh, how could I possibly do that? I have so many emails to answer.
DC (17:10):
You know, it’s always easier to just do the thing at hand to tend to the urgent, but there is real power. I think for all of us, whether you work inside a company, whether you are self-employed, whatever your circumstance is, number one, we have to realize nobody is going to hand us experimental time. We have to, we have to carve that out and protect it for ourselves. And number two, I think it is one of the most valuable things that we can do because, and, you know, if 20% sounds outrageous, fine, make it 5%, make it 10%, whatever you can do. But we all know, you know, if anybody, with the most rudimentary knowledge of investing principles has heard, it’s a good idea to diversify your portfolio. Don’t put all your bets on one, on one, you know, square, don’t put all your money in one stock.
DC (17:58):
Well, similarly we tend in our professional lives to do exactly that. And it’s great while it’s great. And then if the market changes, if there’s disruption, if there’s some kind of a, an alteration in circumstances, it can actually be devastating. And so making sure that we are actively carving out space to learn new things, meet new people, develop new skills and new interests is actually the kind of hedge in our life portfolio that we need to protect our downside and also give us an opportunity for potential upside in ways that we can’t quite imagine yet.
RV (18:36):
Hmm. Yeah. That’s, it’s interesting. There is that I think it’s in the year, I want to say the year 1969, Charles Hummel wrote that essay, the tyranny of the urgent and just constantly pulled to whatever is short term and right in front of our face, which doesn’t require as much of the, the creative thinking or even just like the, the freedom to kind of daydream a little bit. I wanted to ask you like, to the point of strategic planning, you described this to me when we were chatting as the long game is a little bit of like the strategic, the kind of strategic planning that companies would do, applying that to your own personal life. Can you talk about that a little more? And what, what does that mean? And actually like how, like what actions or what behaviors would we engage upon to do that kind of strategic planning for our own life?
DC (19:40):
Yeah, absolutely. Well, you know, it’s interesting because a lot of the folks that I work with, I mean, they’re, they’re smart, you know, educated professionals and it’s, it’s almost second nature in their day jobs to be doing strategic planning for their business, right? Oh, that’s what we do. We come up with the 10 year plan, the 20 year plan, the one year plan, the five-year plan and then you execute against it. We are very familiar with that, but what I have often seen is that the things that are intuitive to us in our business, we often fail to make the parallel and turn the mirror on ourselves to realize, oh, wait, I should probably be doing something similar for myself. And so at a really basic level, it’s, it’s asking ourselves questions like are the daily actions that I am taking lining up to put me in the direction of where I would actually like my life to go.
DC (20:37):
That’s one important question. Another one that I find useful is asking ourselves as often as we can, what are the things that I can do today that would make tomorrow easier or better and tomorrow, you know, could be literally tomorrow. I mean let’s, but, but it also can be this sort of endless tomorrow. I mean, if we take, if we take a sort of a clear example, like physical health, of course, if you’re 40, you, the 80 year old you is going to be grateful that you worked out and that you took care of yourself, that, you know, there, there’s no doubt that that is going to be a helpful thing for the longterm in the moment we know you’re busy in the moment, it’s hard. But if we literally bring it back, okay. You know, so yes, that’s a thing I can do that I’ll be grateful for in the long tomorrow, but in the short tomorrow, maybe it’s something as simple as laying out your gym clothes. So it’s the first thing you see on your dresser in the morning, so that you’re predisposed to go to the gym instead of mucking around in the morning and reading the paper and wasting time. And then suddenly you, you ran out of time and it, and you have to go to your work calls. So it’s, it’s just thinking through that alignment between today and where you want to go.
RV (21:55):
Yeah. I like that a lot. And I think one of the places that people seem to struggle is figuring out the long-term it’s like seeing the picture, but the older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve become convicted that the single like greatest difference probably between people who end up with an amazing life and those who end up with just like whatever is, they think long-term and most people don’t, they’re not good at thinking long-term, they’re actually, they’re not that great at figuring out, like, what do I want to be? Who do I, what do I want to do? Who do I want to be? Why do I want to have because I think it’s like, if you nail that, if you get, if you’re somehow clear on that, then it becomes more naturally obvious that it’s like, well, I’m doing a bunch of stuff. That’s taken me this other, this wrong direction and it’s not lined up.
RV (22:58):
Do you have any tips for people that are going like, gosh, I just, yeah. I don’t know. Like I think about you know, any small business owner and even any big business, a lot of big businesses just run off doing a hundred things that they’ve always been doing and nobody’s actually going, like, what do we want to be in in 10 years? So think applying that kind of strategic thinking to our personal life, do you have any hints or tips or ideas for like determining what your long game should be or clarifying what your vision or purpose is?
DC (23:30):
Yeah. I have a couple of thoughts, Rory. I mean the first one is I always like to ask my clients, who are you jealous of? And I like this question, because so often we think of jealousy as this terrible thing. Like, no, I’m not jealous of anyone jealous. He’s awful. I wouldn’t do that. But the truth is sometimes, you know, we read about people, we hear about people, they could be folks in your life. They could be people that, you know, you are just, well-known in your field and there’s a piece of you that it’s like, oh man, I wish I could do that. Or, oh, how do you get that? And that is actually, you know, you know, of course we don’t want to be riven by jealousy, but it’s actually, I think in many ways, a trail of breadcrumbs, because there’s something in there that you admire, there’s something in there that resonates with you.
DC (24:21):
And if we are thoughtful about asking the questions and saying, well, well, what is it that appeals is it that you want to live in the same place that he lives? Is it that you like the manner in which she’s working and you’d like to have a schedule like that? Is it that you would like to also write for a particular publication? Like, what is it that is sort of sticking with you where it’s like, oh yeah, that you can actually begin to explore that and create a sort of wishlist and reverse engineer it for yourself. So that’s, that’s one way I think we can begin to get at it. And you know, the other way, the other thing that I’ll just mention is I think we’re a lot of people get hung up sometimes is they feel like they have to choose quote unquote, the right goals.
DC (25:06):
They’re like, what if I chose the wrong goal? And I just like, I’m S I’m a fan of like lowering the bar. I’m like, okay, you chose the wrong goal. Like who cares? It’s okay. Change it. Like, that’s really okay. You know, the, the point is we monitor things enough. I mean, you don’t want to be working 20 years toward the wrong goal. And you know, suddenly you’re like, oh, I never bargained for this. But if you choose something that is a goal, you work toward it and you reach a certain point where you say, gosh, you know, this doesn’t seem right anymore. I didn’t realize it would be like this, or, oh, wow. There’s been a huge market change. And this is no longer a good idea. That’s the moment where you can pivot. And it is okay. The work is not wasted. You have been working towards something that is a relative of where you want to go. The question is now we can fine tune it a little bit. So I think if we hold the goals lightly, it, hopefully it takes the pressure off a little bit.
RV (26:00):
Yeah. I love that. The jealousy thing is, is interesting, right? Because it’s it is such as seen as such a negative, but then you go there, something in that that speaks to you, it calls, it calls to you almost in the way that like if you were going to build a house, you would drive down the street and you go, Ooh, I don’t like that house. Ooh. But I love that house. If I were going to build the house, I’d want my house to look like that. Like, it kind of just speaks to your tastes until your desires and probably to like the, the, the divine design of what your life is supposed to really be. That’s really, really cool. And then, yeah, we can actually direction. Let go, just because you set the goal doesn’t mean it has to be your goal for 50 years.
RV (26:48):
You could, you could change it. That’s that is really, really good. Well don’t worry. This has been a delight. I just, I love your insights. And I’ve always just enjoyed just kind of being in your presence. And obviously the book is called the long game. If you want to pick up a copy of it, it’ll be around for a long time. You can go get that anywhere. The subtitle is how to be a longterm thinker in a short term world. Where else Dory, do you want people to go if they want to like connect up with you and what you got going on.
DC (27:21):
Thank you so much. It’s awesome to get to hang out with you here. And if folks are interested in these concepts about long-term thinking and how to apply it in your life, in addition to checking out the book, the long game, there’s a free long game, strategic thinking self-assessment that you can download it’s at Dorie clark.com/the long game. And of course if folks want to check out other stuff, including 700 free articles that I’ve written over the years for places like Harvard business review and fast company, you can go to Dorie clark.com.
RV (27:52):
Love it. Well, we will link up to all of that Dorie, thank you for your encouragement. And for the perspective of this, this has been super insightful and tactical as well. And we wish you all the best in your journey from here.
DC (28:06):
Thanks, Rory.

Ep 228: Create Funnier Presentations with David Glickman

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 (00:55):
Well, my journey to become a speaker has been a, a fun one through lots of different twists and turns. And one of those things was having to learn how to be funny because I was not funny. And one of the people that I learned from in that journey is the man that you’re about to meet his name is David Glickman. I first attended one of his trainings. Oh gosh, I was in my twenties. And it was one of the most transformative pieces of my entire career. David and I now are kind of colleagues and we’ve known each other for years. He’s in the professional speaking hall of fame and he is kind of known for corporate customized comedy. But before he was in the speaking business, he was in show business and he worked with Steve Martin, Ellen degenerate. He appeared on evening at the improv.
RV (01:47):
He owned a chain of comedy clubs. And he’s just a funny dude and I’ve learned so much from him. And I actually recently we hired him because one of the things that he does is he owns a company that helps people write funnier speeches. And so I had a new bit that I was working on for a new audience. So it was a brand new piece of material and I wanted to get David’s eyes on it in his input. So he is continues even to this day to be one of my personal speech coaches, specifically in the realm of comedy. So I figured you got to meet David, we got to have him on, so welcome to the show.
DG (02:24):
Well, Rory, thanks so much. It’s oh, and again, you and I have known each other for probably close to two decades here, but but it’s great to see you evolve and you know, your humor has grown. I watch you now and I just go, ah, you got it. You, you know, you understand how important humor is to, to what we do for success here.
RV (02:44):
Totally. And, and it’s amazing. I, I I’ll say like, I, sometimes I’m genuinely amazed at how much of a skill this is and looking back at where I started to go, you know, if someone hires me do a speech, now they’re laughing their butts off. And I go, man, that is not who I was like, I did not know how to do that. And I think that’s, you know, the first thing I wanted to talk about is you really believe that humor can be learned to some extent, right? I mean, do you, do you, do you still feel that way? Do you feel more that way than you did 15 years ago? Or do you
DG (03:23):
No, I, I, no, I, I truly believe it’s a skill that can be learned. It can be refined. And it’s funny when we talk about humor, it, it, it’s almost like a dissecting a frog while they still alive. It’s just, you know, it’s, it’s people will listen and say, oh, well, that sounds very, very cut and dry. Well, the science of humor is cut and dry. It is, but yes, absolutely. You can learn it. And and as you’ve experienced, as you learn some of these tricks and techniques, you’ve just learned how to think. Funny.
RV (03:58):
Yeah. So w what does that mean? All right. So let’s, let’s dive into that for a second. So what does it mean to think funny? Like, why do we laugh? Or, or like, what are there’s different techniques here that apply, but like fundamentally, what do you, what are you trying to do that causes someone to laugh?
DG (04:21):
You’re trying to do something. That’s a surprise, something they’re not expecting. I’ll give you an example here. So I’m going to go back about 10 years, Rory that’s when you wrote your New York times bestselling book which was take the stairs. Everybody remembers
DG (04:38):
Copying seven steps to a trading, true success, but, okay. So let’s fast forward 10 years. You’ve learned through many of your clients. Not everybody has the same work ethic as Rory Vaden. So your new book for 2021 would be take the escalator seven less steps to achieving true success. Now, those who are just listening to the podcast on the video version of this, we’re actually showing a book. That’s a parody of Rory’s original book. So what we’ve done is just we’ve taken something that was already existing, and we’ve tweaked a word we’ve tweaked something by tweaking the original of something just a little bit, whether it’s a rhyme, whether it’s a letter I once spoke at a conference where the theme was together we’re better, but it was for the American wastewater association. And I said, oh, the original theme was supposed to be together. We’re wetter. You know, I just changed one word and it became funny. So to, to your question, it’s looking at words, looking at themes and how can we adjust, adapt them?
RV (05:51):
Hmm. Yeah, the surprise. I mean, I guess in one word you could say surprised that you’ll hear misdirection or, you know, you’re saying tweak, but like take the stairs, you know, as established as a theme. And then, you know, you kind of do that, that play and you’re it. And you think that’s basically what all of, all of humor comes down to is sort of this like element of surprise.
DG (06:13):
Right. But there there’s surprises. Step two, step one is observation. It’s looking it’s, it’s, it’s seeing. And again, I know this sounds kind of cut and dry, but the research that’s involved in any kind of, of, of making something funny is, is important. You have to kind of know the bigger picture, if that makes sense to, to be able to switch and adapt and adjust. Now, again, we’re talking primarily on customized humor, Rory for evergreen humor, you don’t need as much research. What I worked on for you was evergreen. That story will work anywhere anytime, hopefully for the next 10 years. Do you know what I’m saying? So there’s two types of humor, evergreen humor, and customized humor.
RV (07:04):
What’s the difference? What are,
DG (07:07):
Yeah. Evergreen should work all the time. There are comedians out there who have an act who they haven’t changed one word of it in 20 years. That’s evergreen. That means that humor. And again, for most speakers, professional speakers or professional business folks, if they create a presentation, they don’t have to necessarily change it. The humor that’s in there that’s crafted will work forever, but the customized humor is often funnier. If, if that makes sense, because it’s of the moment people are hearing it just about them in that moment. And it’s like, we’re all in on the secret together. We’re all in on this because only we know what that particular joke.
RV (07:55):
It’s like a inside. It’s like a big inside joke basically,
DG (07:58):
Right? Exactly.
RV (08:00):
A whole audience. Well, and I think what what’s super powerful is going so like for most of our clients and most not all of our clients are trying to be professional speakers. In fact, I would say even most of our members and clients, they’re just speaking as a marketing vehicle to like, to, you know, to, for people to find out about their service or their product or whatever it is that they offer. And it’s wonderful when you can have evergreen humor, because you have like signature stories about your life and your, whatever that you tell all the time. And once you have that down, then you kind of have like this sort of baseline of entertainment. And then the customized stuff is kind of like where you can have more fun and you can experiment. And I do think that’s part of what your magic like your secret sauce is customized. So talk, let’s dive in on the customized humor a bit. How do you even approach this? Because writing a joke is frigging scary by itself, but then going, okay, how do I write a new joke? Like a new thing that I’ve never tried out before. And I may never do again and go, but I’m going to try this because I think it’ll be funny this one time for this one audience, how do you, like, how do you even start with that?
DG (09:24):
And first of all, I want, I want to just, I’m going to back up to one thing you said there were, you saved, try it one time. If it’s a line you can use multiple times, one time is not always enough to get the reaction you want to test its efficacy. If it’s going to be funny now, if it’s the American wastewater association and that’s the only time you’re in front of them, then yeah. The, the water joke might be the only time. But to your, to your question, how do you figure out what’s funny, again, it goes back to the research. I always ask the same exact questions and looking at who the audience are. And again, for your clients, maybe who their prospects are, what are their pain points? What keeps them up at night? What are their frustrations?
DG (10:10):
And then you, you look at that and see, okay, how can I possibly find something about them that twists it? I call it the comment on the comment. If you ever look at a football game, you’ve got, you typically have two people broadcasting the game, the play by play guy and the color commentary guy. The play by play guy is the guy doing the content. The colored commentary is the funny line. In other words, here, I’ll give you, I’ll give you an example. I just wrote this for a client last week, he had a line in his presentation where he said by a show of hands who here is a multi-tasker and people would raise their hand. And then he’d go on to talk about multitasking. Well, the funny comment on the comment that I added was he says, by show of hands who hears a multi-tasker well, a really good multi-tasker could raise both hands and still be texting.
DG (11:08):
So that was the funny line. And it got a big laugh. He said, he told me later, you know, comment on the comment. It again, if your, if your audience Rory goes in, trying to be funny first, they’re going to be frustrated. They need to come up with their content. First, their sales presentation, first, their website. First don’t put the pressure of trying to be funny first, then look at it for how could we tweak this? What could we comment? What’s funny, what word could we change? What word is in our name of our company that could now be a funny acronym?
RV (11:46):
Yeah. Well, and so we, and we would, we would tell them, like, you know, we kind of think of it as baking a cake and you first got to get like the core ingredients in place, which is your content. And then you put the icing on, which is kind of like your stories. And then when you get to like the fancy frosting and the sprinkles, that’s more of like what the, what the, what the humor is. But what’s really cool about what you’re saying is even though, even though it’s kind of scary the idea of writing a joke and then writing a custom joke, that is this one time, what feels pretty safe and predictable to me is the idea of going, yeah, but if they’re frustrated about it, if this annoys them, if they’re angry about this, or if this is the thing, driving everyone nuts, it’s pretty safe.
RV (12:34):
It’s a pretty safe bet to go. Even if I can just find a creative way to bring it up, they’re going to laugh. And even if they don’t laugh, they’re going to feel special. They’re going to be like, oh, look at, look at what you, what you, what, you know, but it’s, it’s just the frustrations. So that’s, that’s weird to me. Like, why is it that things that are frustrating make us laugh? It’s kind of seems almost opposite. Like you go, if, if this is the thing that frustrates us, I wouldn’t want to bring that up.
DG (13:05):
Knowledging it you’re, you’re, you’re talking about what everybody is experiencing and the same thing works for a sales call, or, you know, if there’s a dentist and, and he, or she has prospective patients, you know, you, you, you then make, do you make note of the tooth pain and then you come up with something clever in your marketing materials to that. The way I look at it is, you know, we, we do business with people that we like. We like people that make us laugh. It’s this natural progression. So every opportunity you can have to add, the humor is going to just build your brand that much better.
RV (13:49):
Yeah. And, and the growing, just like to use the dentist example, you know, is to put yourself. So it’s one thing, if I’m a speaker and I am coming to speak at an event, and I’m sending them a pre-program questionnaire, I’m doing, going to their website, or I’m doing interviews, and I’m saying, Hey, what are the things that frustrate you? But if I’m a dentist, I don’t have to ask. I know I already know, because I hear it every day. It’s just kind of thinking, like, I think this is huge. That step one is observation. As you’re going ask yourself, what are they scared of? What are they afraid of? What is annoying to them? And then, and then basically just find it, find a clever way to, to bring it up. Is that, is that
DG (14:33):
Yeah. Okay. So your, your example there of the, of the dentist I did a punch up for a gentleman who consults in the dental industry not too long ago. And I don’t know how we got to it. He had something in his original content that drove my idea because I was thinking of, well, what frustrates your prospects and their eventual clients. And we came up with something where it says on the website the tooth, you can handle the tooth. And we had the picture from a few good not a few good men, the the Jack Nicholson one. So by doing, instead of the truth, the tooth, you know, this becomes now something very funny on the website. You can handle the tooth and tooth is italicized. Again, as you and I sit here, maybe not hilarious, but for the person looking at it, who’s thinking about their tooth. That hurts. Bam. We, you know, we’ve, we’ve hit, we’ve hit a nerve, no pun intended.
RV (15:32):
Well, and yeah, just for everyone to know, like the reason why it’s not funny to hear two people talking about comedy is because there’s no surprise. Surprise is the whole element of laughter. And when you, when you’re sitting here listening to it, that’s what makes comedians so amazing is like, it’s one thing when you’re in a business presentation, like for all of us, we actually don’t have to be that good because no, one’s expecting us to be funny. Like you come in as a, as a speaker, as a financial advisor, as an accountant and attorney as like, like no one expects you to be funny. It’s different. When you tell people you’re a comedian, they they’re sitting there expecting you to make them laugh, which is way harder. So it’s a, we have a little bit of it easier. This is like you know, almost like just a little covert operation for, for most of us. And people will laugh because they’re not expecting it. And so the bar is set a little bit lower. Okay. So you first observed, so I liked that. I get that, that feels doable. And, and by observe and research, I’m just going, like, what are their pains? What are their annoyances? What are their frustrations? And then what’s, and then what’s next.
DG (16:45):
Well, the, and you, you look at it. There, I mean, again, there are certain tricks and techniques the rule of three, I mean, that’s an old comedy route, a rule where you, you list three things in a row, the first two normal. And the third one is the surprise. It’s the, you know, the, the derailment, the, you know, the one you’re not expecting again, most of your listeners are just listening to this. They can’t see I don’t have a lot of hair, so my three might be. I remember when I first started, I had dreams, I had hopes I had hair, you know, boom, boom, switch like that. So that’s a rule of three. Here’s a stupid one, but it works. Odd numbers are funnier than even numbers. Rory, I have no idea why, but I have tested this. I have road tested. This a seven is funnier than a six. I don’t know. I don’t know why planned mispronunciations, if there’s a word in your, you know, your audience’s a vernacular in their, in their industry that is hard to pronounce, perhaps you pretend to mispronounce it twice. And then the third time you give a synonym. So you might say something like, they know there’s an old colloquium, there’s an old colloquium. There’s an old saying that sometimes would it be okay, so you, boom, boom, switch like that.
RV (18:16):
Yep. Well, and even that is kind of, it comes back to that frustration concept is it’s like, it’s this annoyance the of saying the word colloquialism is so difficult, it’s so difficult. And you’re, you’re like commenting on the thing that frustrates them, which is exactly what comedians, that’s, what stand up c’mon comedians do. And it’s nonstop, right? They’re telling jokes about being married. They’re telling jokes about their kids, about going to the airport, about paying their taxes about like, and all they’re doing is commenting on the things that frustrate us somehow, which is it’s amazing how simple that is.
DG (18:53):
It really is. And I have yet to come across an industry. I mean, I I’ve either spoken to or punched up, you know presentations in a myriad of industries. And I’m yet to find one industry that doesn’t have at least top 10 frustrations. I mean, I’m, I’m on a, I’m on a call tonight with a group of pharmacy students to get my research done for a presentation for pharmacy. So I’m gonna you know, just ask them, you know, tell me everything that’s frustrating too. I’ll, I’ll get 40 things and I will then turn those, what we should do is do a part two. I should come in, you know, in another podcast and tell you here’s where the 40 things that were frustrating. And here’s what I found funny in them or how we made it funny.
RV (19:41):
And, but the, the essence of that is going, what is sort of a surprising way I can bring that up or like a natural way to kind of bring it into the presentation? Yeah,
DG (19:51):
Yeah. I mean, and again, it’s hard to explain it without you know, without a concrete examples. So again, if for argument’s sake like going back to the customization, if you’re in a venue, if you’re doing a sales pitch or a speech in a room that is freezing, you know, like you know, there’s just, you know, the, everybody is sweaters and this and that. You’d acknowledge it by saying something like, I’m not sure if the folks at this hotel know, but there is a brand new invention it’s called a thermostat or something like that. Again, you kind of soft and then boom hit. Now. We’re not trying to make people comedians, you know, that’s, that’s not sure that that is not the goal here at all. It is just to find those moments of levity and the way I always look at humor, it’s like an EKG. In other words, you’re talking, you know, normal, normal content laugh, normal, normal content laugh. And that these moments of humor should be as, as much as possible throughout your entire, you know whether it be your website, your pitch, your, your speech, your presentation, whatever that might be.
RV (21:07):
So other than frustration. So I get that one. And, and again, like, even though you’re saying it helps to have a specific example, but it would be like, okay, let’s pretend for a second. If you were a standup comedian and you were going to write a set or a bit on marriage, the very first thing you would do is go, what frustrates people about marriage, right. And it’s like, whatever my wife is telling me, always what to do, or my husband is in spends forever in the bathroom. Or is that the, is that the best place to look or are there, are there other places additionally, that you look or do you kind of focus on frustrations as like that’s the, that’s the, the safe, go-to
DG (21:47):
Easiest thing, because it’s the commonality of everyone. If you were doing something on marriage and you, and again, you just give the example, let’s say of the bathroom. And again, this, this isn’t anything like I would say for a corporate audience necessarily, but and again, I’m just riffing here, but something like you know, my, my wife says you know put the seat down. But you know, she only has to remind me about 117 times per day. You know, it’s exaggerates exaggeration, you know, normally it’s a once or twice, you know, but the, it’s the exaggeration of that watched comics, study comics, all those books, but your, your listeners can’t see it, but there’s hundreds of books behind me. Every single one of them is either a biography or an autobiography of a comic or a textbook on humor. And you learn, you observe, you watch.
RV (22:42):
Yeah. Exaggeration is is is a core part of this, but like, even on social media there you know, th there was one that is like you know, all these mommy blogs, like mommy accounts and stuff. And there was one that I saw that was like this, that said, I birthed a baby and less time than it takes my husband to take a poop. Right. And it’s like, so they’re, they’re taking a frustration, then they’re acknowledging it, and then they’re exaggerating it. And it it’s almost like you observe it, you acknowledge it, and then you exaggerate it.
DG (23:18):
Yeah. That’s, I mean, you, you kind of nailed it on the, on the head there. I mean, that is, that’s really it, but at one word of caution, though, especially for folks who are not used to using humor, you do have to just make sure that your humor is appropriate and relevant. That’s where some newbies get into trouble sometimes. My mantra is when in doubt, leave it out. You know, if you’re, if you’re, if you’re the least hesitant, oh, good. This offend somebody, you know, and that, and that, that bar keeps, you know, changing on what, what might be appropriate and what might not be. So I, I wanna make sure we put that in the podcast today that when in doubt do leave it out.
RV (24:04):
Yeah. I mean, that, that’s really huge because that’s the one time it can backfire is, which is one of the reasons why self-deprecating humor is so wonderful because you’re just like, you’re less likely to offend someone you’re less likely to like, run into a I mean, they just, they tend to be a little bit more forgiving when you’re, when you’re talking about yourself, like your hair joke, right. If you call someone else bald, that’s more dangerous than if you you know, use it. You’re like on yourself.
DG (24:36):
And also there’s, there’s a misconception out there that that humor, that tragedy plus time equals humor. People always, oh, you can’t talk about something bad now, you know, in the news, but you can talk about it later tragedy plus time equals humor. That’s not always true. There are certain things that are topical that just you know, I speak a lot in the healthcare world and I’m yet to write one joke about COVID, you know, I’ll write things on the periphery of it, but the disease itself, you, you, you know, you can’t poke fun at it. So again, again, watching your subject matter it just, you know, you just wanted to be very careful.
RV (25:21):
So news topics is another great place to look, right? Cause you know, like when you say observe it, there’s a couple things that jump out to me, you know, the safe one is like self-deprecating stuff, which has also ever evergreen as you describe it. But it’s like if I come out in shorts, which I don’t, but if I did, everybody would notice that I have skinny legs. That’d be like every single person would notice it. And so I could acknowledge it, exaggerate it. Like if I just go, what are people thinking? When they look at me, that’s observe it. Then I come out and acknowledge it. And I say, you may notice that, you know, my legs are, you know, make, make flamingos jealous or something like that. Right. So the, the, so you’ve got that, then you’ve got sort of the customized just frustrations, but then another place to, it seems like to pick up some good humor is in inside of pop culture. Now you you’re talking about COVID is like a bad example, which I would agree, right? Like that’s not a laughing matter and it, you know, it, it, it certainly wouldn’t be for at least a very long while. But, but there’s certain things in pop culture that you can get away with you.
DG (26:32):
Oh, absolutely. Pop culture. I, I subscribed to entertainment weekly, not so much because I want to, you know you know, read, you know, all, all the nuances. I want to go big picture. I want to see what shows are the most popular, what movies, what podcasts. So I can drop in a reference to Ted lasso. And 80% of my audience is going to know if I say, well, I’m not going to go all Ted lasso on you here with some homespun wisdom dropping in just a pop culture, reference, you know, the audience. He said, Ted lasso like that. And to your point earlier, it doesn’t have to be as funny because you’re perceived as in the know. And a lot of times when I would hit a town I would look in the local news. You know, whether it’s online or some, some towns even still have hard copies of newspapers. It’s pretty cool. But I’d look at the local news and see, you know, okay, let’s say there’s a restaurant that’s closing. So let’s say it’s called the spaghetti barn. So everyone knows the spaghetti barn closed in, you know, Cincinnati. So I might open by saying, well, your, your, your meeting planners have been so, so kind to me, they gave me a free dinner for 10 at the spaghetti bar and everybody
RV (28:03):
Goes nuts.
DG (28:04):
Yeah. They gave me something of no value. So again, that little bit of research have you ever had Sam Richter on as a guest on your podcast? I don’t know if you’ve had,
RV (28:14):
Oh man. I don’t know that. I don’t think we have, but I, we should, because he’s a genius. He’s a great speaker, but he’s got some great systems and stuff I’ve learned. I’ve learned some cool stuff from him over the years.
DG (28:25):
Yeah. Cause he’s the master at learning research of research you know finding stuff that you can then, you know, make funny. I use a questionnaire and I’m great at interviewing. I look at my own programs. I do probably 80% of my time is spent researching you know, and, and tweaking and writing and then presenting it’s the easy part.
RV (28:53):
Gosh. Yeah. And when you’re, when you’re back to the pop culture things, you’re really just looking at headlines cause it’s gotta be a big enough, which makes it easier for you research wise, because if it’s not a major headline, not enough of the people in the audience will know it. But if it’s a, if it’s a major headline, it’s pretty safe to think that like everybody’s going to know it. And it almost feels like the more recent something is and the more relevant or like customized it is. The more forgiving the audience will be in terms of how funny it has to be. But it’s like, if you’re talking about the spaghetti barn, if that just happened, you know, last week and everybody knows about it and it’s hyper specific to town, that’s even funnier somehow than what’s going on in the political election that everybody knows about.
DG (29:49):
Absolutely. And, and just, just again, another little caveat there I never do political humor or write political humor. It it’s just become, unfortunately, just too risky. Because in any given audience or any given prospects 50 up potential, 50% of that prospects, you know, or, or audience will not agree with whatever that humor might be. So, you know, the late night talk show guys, you know, th th you know, they certainly show, you know, what their thinking is, but for those of us in business, my opinion is that you can’t show it. For, for the purposes of humor, you, you just
RV (30:35):
It’s a mixed, a mixed audience,
DG (30:38):
Right. So I do look for current things, pop culture things, but I’m very cautious to steer clear of the you know, there’s, and there’s great political humor that you could use, but it’s, it’s risky.
RV (30:52):
Yeah. So I guess you’d say any, anything that’s super controversial or emotionally charged is best to just kind of stay away from it. It’s more, but it’s, but it’s more like the lighthearted things like Ted last was a great, a great example. Our pastor this last Sunday made a reference to Ted lasso. And everybody went nuts just because he said Ted lasso in church.
DG (31:13):
Yeah, exactly. That. Or if you just look at again entertainment weekly or in any kind of pop culture kind of thing, you know, we’ll just give you those high level things. My point on it is you don’t have to necessarily know it, let, let the you know, the, the other, you know, pop culture writers do all the heavy lifting for you. Although I started watching Ted lasso and it is funny and it is,
RV (31:39):
Yeah, it’s great. It’s super, it’s, it’s, it’s super cute. We, we love it because J doesn’t like to watch any shows that have violence or drama or sickness or anything, she only like shows that make her laugh. So we’ve been, we’ve been all into.
DG (31:55):
And, and that’s a great example. So something like the Ted lasso, the dialogue in there, what you’re laughing at most of the time are those comments on the comment, you know, it’s, it’s the storylines being driven. We’ll call that the content, or, you know, in your listeners world, that might be their sales presentation. But what you laugh at are those comments on the common Ted lasso, we’ll make some remark that is hilarious based on what just happened or what just was said, if that makes
RV (32:27):
It’s kind of that, like, that analogy used earlier of like, you’re basically a commentator, like I’m comedian is basically a giant commentator on life. It’s like, here’s everything we all go through and they’re like, just commenting on it. Right.
DG (32:42):
And then another thing, if, if your listeners can find something that works in a humor vein and can put it early on in their presentation, there’s a thing called a callback. And I think you you’ve talked about that before in other podcasts, a callback is where you bring back that thing that got the laugh again for you. No more lamps.
RV (33:04):
Yeah. So yeah, we, we haven’t talked, we haven’t we teach callbacks in our in our world-class presentation crafted event, but we actually haven’t talked about it on the podcast. So take a sec. Cause, cause here’s, you know, part of what I’m hoping people see, and this is something that I’ve learned from you and others is like, you don’t have to just like sit down and think of a joke. It’s there’s these places that it comes from and you go, what are self-deprecating things I could bring up? What are frustrations that people have what’s going on in pop culture. And then callbacks is another easy place to look for for humor. And it’s like, it’s a lay-down right.
DG (33:46):
So there there’s a piece I do in my own presentation about I use a funny prop it’s a, it’s a restaurant pager, like where you’re waiting for a table. And again, your listeners won’t see this, but anyone watching the video it’s hard to see because of the lighting there, but I have a little one it’s actually an ad specialty, put my name on it. So early on in the program, I get a huge laugh on my tables, ready, my tables, ready to go. The, the premise is that I carry my own with me, you know, my own restaurant pager. And it gets a huge, huge lamp. Well, what I do Rory is, and then I put the blinking one in my pocket. And then later on, you know, there, there are, I think, three other moments in the speech where I got my tables ready, my tables ready. And again, out of context right now, it’s not that funny in the moment. It’s hilarious. Cause we’ve called back to a laugh again. That they’re all kind of in, on, in, on the secret there.
RV (34:47):
Yeah. All you have to do, what’s amazing about callbacks is it literally doesn’t even have to be a, a setup or a punchline or any, like, all you have to do is say the thing that made people laugh earlier. The other thing that’s really clever for using callbacks is it, it doesn’t have to be a callback to your own stuff. It can be a callback to the speaker who was right before you, or earlier that morning, people go bananas over that.
DG (35:11):
They think you’re so much more clever than you might have snarly.
RV (35:17):
That’s why I’m in it. That’s why I’m interested in. That’s why I like, I like it. We’ll lose her.
DG (35:22):
Those are all tricks and techniques that will work. If I’m, if I’m speaking in a morning program, if there’s a general session speakers before me, I always go in the day before, you know, assuming my schedule can, can make that happen, to watch every other general session speaker. I do a, you know, a wrap-up of every other one who’s gone on before me. And again, it’s just acknowledging certain things they said. And then I comment on their comment, not my comment, like you said, I comment on their comment. So even if you have a business professional who might be following other sales presentations, you know, you, you know what your competitors are selling, what their bullet parts are, bullet points, excuse me, are, you can chew, you can gently make fun of your competitors. You know if I’m working for a T-Mobile and I, and I’m pitching against Verizon, you know, Verizon says they have great coverage, you know? Yeah. In, in zip code 3 7, 9 1 9, you know, again, I mean, again, I’m just riffing here, but you know, poking fun, gentle fun at your competitor and the prospects will laugh. Hmm.
RV (36:33):
Yeah. That’s and hecklers actually I’ve noticed are another place that you can get call backs to. Sometimes someone will say something out funny from the audience, some of the best lines I’ve ever written came from something I said, and a heckler said something and everybody laughed and I wrote it down and I’m like, thanks for that gift. I’ll I’ll add that myself next time. Because if it, if it worked in that moment, it’ll it’ll work again. Well this is awesome, David, and, and, and a couple of things you all, so you can tell by listening there, there’s, there’s, there’s a science to this and an art. There is there’s skill. A lot of this is experience. And I would tell you listening that w if you can have some evergreen content, like, for example, your backstory and almost every presentation you give at some point, you’re going to tell people about who you are, where you came from.
RV (37:31):
I think having your own little mini kind of semi stand-up comedy routine about your backstory. If you could work on that one little bit, you can use it in pretty much every presentation you give for the rest of your life. And it doesn’t have to be Ellen degenerate kind of funny. It can be two or three little chuckles that just give you confidence and break the ice and, and, you know, help you feel comfortable before you move into your speech or your podcast interview, or your sales presentation, or your internal company meeting. And if you struggle with this, David David can help you. So he’s, he’s one of our trusted vendor partners. So if you email us, if you go, Hey, I want some help writing this, just send an email to info at brand builders, group.com and put funnier speeches in the subject line. So email info at brand builders, group.com put funnier speeches in the subject line. And then we’ll connect you with David. Of course you can go find him, you know, on your own, but we’ll, we’ll connect you with him. And you know, he’ll talk with you to see if, if, if you’re someone he can help and hopefully he can help you because if David can’t help, you know, but
DG (38:46):
I think I can, I have worked with, with other business professionals, who’ve dealt with counting law and, and some of the most, you know, you would think dry subject. I believe that every topic, every industry has room for humor. I really do
RV (39:06):
Totally. And I like, I really am taking away. One of the big things from this conversation is don’t, don’t do it in a mean way. Don’t, don’t do it in a risky way. Don’t offend people. You don’t have to there’s enough light, safe, common frustrations that we all have. There’s enough pop culture references. There’s enough callbacks. There’s a there’s enough little quirks of everyday life that you can just observe it, acknowledge it, exaggerate it, and, you know, get a chuckle and have a great day for everybody. So David is thanks so much for coming on the show, man, and as always, thanks for your, for your mentorship and counsel and yeah.
DG (39:46):
Oh my pleasure. Thank you so much. It was a great to be with you today.

Ep 226: How To Find Your Big Idea with Jeff Goins

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):
Real artists don’t starve. That is a philosophy that I believe in that is the title of my good friend, Jeff Goins book. One of his books, he’s written five books. I believe he also wrote the art of work and he is a true writer, a pure love, amazing, talented, gifted writer, which I admire because I write because it’s necessary to speak and do the other things we do. But he is he [email protected]. He’s been featured in psychology today, entrepreneur Forbes. He lives here in Nashville, so I’ve known him for years now. At this point, we just kind of like grew up in the, in the business together. And he’s just one of the coolest dudes and he spends a lot of time with manuscripts, ones that he’s writing. He’s helping a lot of other people write their own manuscripts these days. And one of the things that he told me recently was we don’t let people write bad books and I love that. And that’s what we’re talking about. So we have Jeff Goins here, who I brought on for free consulting and writing advice for me. I’m going to take advantage of it. You’re welcome to listen in to the conversation. Jeff, welcome to the show, buddy.
JG (02:11):
Rory, happy to be here. I am looking at your backyard, which looks like a painting. And I’m remembering a time when you had a dinner party when I didn’t know where the door to your house was. And I came through that backdrop. I’m like, is this where we go anyway? Happy to be here. Love that house. Yeah.
RV (02:30):
You been to the real, you’ve been to the real Veda and Villa. You’ve been to the real. You’ve been to the real spot, man. Is that the name? Vaden Villa. Yeah. We call it Vaden Villa and that cause if we ever put it on the market in Nashville, it’s like, I think we could probably sell it for like 10 times over asking price,
JG (02:48):
Right? Yeah. Dave Ramsey’s house is on the market. You could probably get something similar.
RV (02:52):
Yeah. We can sell ours and buy one of Dave’s garage bays. Exactly. Well, buddy. So I want to talk about writing an awesome book. And first of all, like let’s talk about the, the, the, the ideation process. You said, you said something. We were G jibber, John, before we got started here. And you said that good ideas make bad books. Why do you say that? What does that mean?
JG (03:28):
Everybody’s got an idea for a book and they think that idea is pretty good and I wouldn’t disagree with them. And the problem is that a good idea is not good enough. Good ideas are average. They are taken for granted. What most people call a good idea is a somewhat obvious observation about something true in the world. That thing could be your story. This is where a lot of people get stuck. They have something significant happened to them. They beat cancer, they lost 200 pounds. They you know built a business, whatever. And, and they think the story in itself because it’s so significant to them. And they talk to a handful of friends. I go, yeah, like they can see that it’s significant to the person that it happened to. And so their friends often encourage them. Right? If you have friends who are not professional writers, encouraging you to write a book, which is what I hear, 90% of all my friends say, you know, I need to do this.
JG (04:23):
90% of people are saying that they’ve got a good idea and their friends are telling them that’s not enough. And I’m not here to dissuade anybody. I’m here to challenge you to write something that people would pay attention to. And you can go do that. That this is what most people do is they have a good idea. Their friends were not professional writers, right? Who are unqualified. Right. Think about this for a second. Nobody thinks about this, but just because your friends. Yeah. All my friends, I’m pretty good at swimming. So I should become an Olympian Olympians. Do they know what it takes? Writing a book is as you know, Rory Vaden and a limpic act, it’s hard. Lots of people want to do it. Most people who start don’t finish it. And I want to help people finish their books. But I also have a commitment to the book itself, to the world of books, to the Pantheon of literature, that we’re not gonna let more bad books go out into the world because it’s easy to put a book into the world that is relatively easy.
JG (05:17):
I could write something on Microsoft word today, upload it to kdp.amazon.com and it would be published in a day or two. And so the fact that that opportunity exists is one amazing. And two, it should feel, we should feel a burden of responsibility. Any time something becomes dramatically easier. We should take a moment and stop and go. Just because I can do this doesn’t mean I should. And if I’m going to do this, I want to do it well. So everybody starts with a good idea and good ideas are average. They’re ordinary and ordinary ideas get forgotten. The book itself could be great. You know, they often are good books, but that is not enough to get people talking in the way that you so, like what makes that an idea? Yeah.
RV (06:08):
I thought I love this. Like what you just said, ordinary ideas get forgotten. Like that’s very sobering. And you know, like, I mean, you can see that just on any social media posts, right. You post it and it just immediately buried, like buried, gone disappears. So like if good ideas make bad books. Yes. What are the ideas that make great books? How the, how the heck do we find them or make them
JG (06:32):
The idea is not to be better than good it’s to find your interesting edge. So the opposite of good is not great. It’s interesting. Ordinary ideas, good ideas. What I call a good ideas, an ordinary idea, really the sky is blue. People should be nice. You know, littering causes pollution, right? These are obvious ideas. They’re not untrue. They’re not even bad ideas. They’re just boring. And the way that you change people’s minds that you change the world as you change people’s minds. And the way that you change people’s minds is you introduce enough novelty to them that they remember it. So consider a spectrum on one end of the spectrum, you have ordinary, that’s boring, ordinary ideas get forgotten. And the other end of the spectrum, you have absurd, absurd ideas, get rejected somewhere in between ordinary and absurd, as interesting and interesting is always more like towards absurd than you think it should be.
JG (07:33):
Right? And so one of the things that I experienced in my own writing and in working with other people on their book ideas, and we have to start at the idea because as Ryan holiday told me years ago, when I hired him to help me market real artists, don’t starve. He said, as soon he goes, I’ve got to work on the book while you’re writing it. I said, what? No, no, no marketing happens after you write the book. And he talks more about this in perennial seller. If you want, if those listening along what to read more about it, but he said something I never forgot. He said, once the book is written, the marketing is over. And there’s some truth to that. I would imagine in the work that you guys do where, you know, you can’t you can’t put lipstick on a pig, right?
JG (08:12):
There’s that’s Ogilvy quote, good marketing makes a bad product fail faster. You’ve got to be able to innovate the thing. So we want to do stuff that’s interesting and interesting. I define as 80%, same, 20% different, you know, this, this, that Don Miller StoryBrand same but different concepts. You want, you want it to be something that people go, oh yeah, a business book or a memoir. I know how those are, you know, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. But here’s the 20% difference. Here’s the thing, because we know it works like books are a 500 plus year old technology and they really haven’t changed that much. They they’re they’re words on a page, that’s it. Right. And instead of using paper, sometimes we use screens, but it’s still the same thing. Or you read it into a microphone, but it’s just words. Right. And so the technology hasn’t really changed that much. So you don’t want to mess with it too much. You know, I remember when people want to do like video books and all kinds of crazy, crazy multimedia things, and it didn’t really work. And here we are 30 plus years into the internet and books still are books. And so 80%, same, 20% different find something that everybody’s saying and then add some novelty to it, make it interesting. Change it up.
RV (09:29):
How do you do that? Right. Cause that’s like a, there’s like a delicate balance that you’re talking about here. There is. If it’s too unfamiliar, I can’t understand it. I can’t get my mind wrapped around it. I don’t know, word that
JG (09:43):
We call that absurd.
RV (09:44):
Okay. If it’s too much the same, it’s like, okay, I’ve already heard it. This is nothing new. This is same old thing, regurgitated. This sounds like this person or that person or whatever. So how do you, you know, I almost kind of visualize this as like, I’m, I’m looking for, I’m looking for the goldmine. Like where do I dig? Like where do I go on? This is the, this is the part where I can nuance it.
JG (10:11):
Yep. It’s like cooking and interesting newness. Novelty is like salt. And, and if you’ve ever cooked, insulted your own food or, or gotten a meal, you know, at a restaurant or that somebody cooked for you and, and, and added a little bit of salt, I was like, this is, this is kind of better. Right. And added a little intro. This is kind of better. And then he had too much in there. Like now, now all I taste is the salt. Novelty is like salt. As soon as you can taste, it there’s too much. Right. So it is like, it is kind of an intuitive feeling thing. It is a thing that as somebody who’s been doing online marketing for 20 plus years, it’s a thing that I have a knack for, which is why people hire me to do it. But anybody can do it.
JG (10:59):
If, if you can become aware enough of what that line is. And the way I do that is I start with category. What is this thing? Right. You have to start with category. If people tell me nobody’s ever written a book like this before I go, well, that’s a problem, right? Nobody, nobody can, we can’t wrap your head around it. Right. And, and so the phrase is, it’s like this, but different like that. Right. Same but different. So take the hunger games. For example, you know, the hunger games is like the running man which was a short story that Stephen King wrote in the eighties. And it was turned into a movie with Arnold Schwartzenegger classic, amazing, terrible eighties movie that you should definitely go watch. And it’s awesome. Yeah. The running man is a story about a bunch of convicts in the future who fight have a battle to the death on public television and people watch them do this.
JG (11:59):
And of course that’s a rehash of the gladiator story, not just the movie, but the actual, the people who lived in fought, you know, 2000 years ago in the, in the Roman Coliseum. Right? And so there’s a historian that says nothing is new will. Duran says nothing is new except arrangement and real artists. Don’t start by talking about the concept of borrowing ideas, stealing like an artist as Austin Kleon would say, how do you, how do you take an idea that’s already been done before and do it better? You take something old and you make it new. So you start with category. That’s 80%. If you’re going to write a business book, 80% of what you do is going to be kind of what everybody has done. It’s probably going to be about 200 to 250 pages. You’re going to have some success quotes in there. It’s going to have like easy approachable language, some illustrations these days that might have some science backed studies. Cause that’s really popular now that’s, that’s the boring, you’ve got to be boring before you can be interesting. Cause you’ve got to meet people’s expectations. Yeah.
RV (13:04):
As you, as you talk this out, like as I just think about myself, cause you know, one of the things that we tell our members all the time is this quote that I love from Larry Winget, which is find your uniqueness and exploited in the service of others. And we really love this concept of find your uniqueness. But then when I tell the story of take the stairs, I say, well, you know, the take the stairs book more or less as a book about hard work, which is like the most unoriginal on unique, it’s normal. I mean, classically right in the 80% now we call it discipline. We call it overcoming procrastination. So we, we, we try to take it through that lens. And then, you know, the metaphor of doing things you don’t want to do is a subtle distinction versus just doing something that’s hard. Is that kind of like what you’re talking about?
JG (13:52):
I was thinking to take the stairs and my my belief, my contention is that before someone buys the book, the idea has to spread people by the idea of the book before they buy the book itself, they have to, because they’re hearing people talk, you can’t read a book, you can’t test drive. You can’t really test drive a book, you read a sample or something, but most people hear enough. People talk about a book that they go, oh, well, I guess I’m going to check out that book everybody’s talking about. Right. and you had it baked into the title. Right? You’ve got the, that, that classic you know, success quote, is that your record? Is that somebody else’s quote, right? Like you know, you’ve got a,
RV (14:39):
About the rent is due every day. Yeah. I popularized it. It’s a, it’s a twist on something I heard in college, but I, I definitely popularized that made it public.
JG (14:51):
What’s the vote against I don’t, but
RV (14:53):
Success is never owned. It’s rented. And the rent is due every
JG (14:56):
Day. Yeah. And then you’ve got the metaphor of like, I’m going to go out of my way to do something hard every day I take the stairs versus the elevator. So the metaphor is baked into the title and that’s the obstacle is the way is another example of that. It doesn’t, it doesn’t always happen that way. But if you can bake the big idea, that’s, that’s an 80, 20 same, but different shifts people go. Wow. That’s amazing. And so you start with a category. So what I would recommend if, if you’re writing, take the stairs today. Okay. Right. Go find at least five best-selling popular business books.
RV (15:32):
Abbott’s yeah. Like just habits. There’s, there’s been, there’s been a bunch. In fact, there’s a bunch that is sell way better than take the stairs. And I’m like, crap. What is different is because they nailed, they nailed it. And somehow we missed
JG (15:47):
And it’s, and it’s basically the same idea, a different approach, right? Like atomic habits, once it’s that’s tiny habits, it’s one small change. A 1% change. Every single day is better than massive change, you know, infrequently. So read five popular business books, see what they all agree with too. What they all say, ah, they all say, you’ve got to work hard. You’ve got to do this and you’ve got to do that. Okay, cool. Got it. Say that. Cause that’s, that’s what works. So it’s not like you can say like we’re not going to work hard cause people won’t believe that that’ll seem absurd and then find a 20% difference. That’s your uniqueness, something unique, some flare that you can add to it. Ryan holiday has done this really well with the subject of stoicism. He’s taken something old and made it new again.
JG (16:34):
But he’s using modern stories, not just a bunch of like 2000 year old Roman dead guys. Right. And so that’s, that’s how it works. Category. Start with a category, find out what they all have in common, intentionally break, a rule or two to kind of stand out. Right. There’s a scene in Braveheart where the Nobles finally join William Wallace and, and he goes, all right, let’s go. You know? And he tells the, he tells the Nobles, cause they’re on horses. Nobody else on horses. Cause they have horses. Right. And he says, here’s what I want you to do. I want you to go. I want you to go, go hard. Right. Go out and like go into the, the, the, the forest over there. We’re gonna, we’re gonna go this way. And we’re gonna, we’re gonna meet the English and you go that way. And they don’t, they’re confused.
JG (17:20):
And then one of them goes, oh, they think we run away. And he goes, exactly. And then I want you to flank them. Right? Come in on the side, like a flank is when somebody comes out and then you come in on the side, you attack them on the side. Completely takes them off guard. So they do that and they win the battle. That’s what a big idea is. It’s going, you think I’m going here then fly, right? Like I hit your heart and you go, whoa. And the brain loves a little bit of cognitive dissonance, a little bit of like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That can’t be true. Is true. That might be true. And there’s 80% safety. There’s like, yeah, it’s packaged in a lot of safety cause too much novelty. A friend of mine is a neuroscientist says, you know, you really throw anything more than a three to 5% daily change in terms of habits, attitudes, et cetera, is too much in your brain. Your soul, your whole nervous system actually shut down. If you try to change too quickly, which is a whole other conversation. But the point is enough change just like enough little change, enough knowledge. It’s like inception, right? Where you inject a little tiny idea that changes everything. That’s a big idea.
RV (18:29):
And then you’re finding that you’re you’re you’re so that’s what we’re looking for. We’re looking for that 20% twists, novelty change, adaptation, flank, whatever you want to call it, but does it have to be true? And is it making it better or is it just different or can it be
JG (18:58):
It’s different? It doesn’t have to be true. You know, have to be honest, you can lie and get a lot of people to believe you and you will be interesting for awhile and false ideas eventually get found out. So I don’t recommend it, but the truth is that I, that an idea doesn’t have to be true for it to be interesting. It just doesn’t, you know, there, there are plenty of memes and urban tales or been fables that spread that are not true. Right. But they spread for awhile. And, and so we liked them. I think it was that book by the Heath brothers made to stick with the opening story is about that like internet story of the like guy going on a date and waking up in a bathtub full of ice. And his liver has been removed. Remember that story forever ago. And they said, this story is not true, but it spread like crazy Y and they kind of break it down. So I would say it’s like a good idea as a true idea. And most people think like the truth will set you free and it may set you free, but it doesn’t necessarily make for great marketing. You know, if, if people can pardon my saying that what makes for great marketing and let’s just go to Jesus for a second, because Jesus said the truth will set you free is
RV (20:12):
For you to burst into flames right now. Just keep going. Well, Jesus,
JG (20:16):
He’s this, didn’t this and all great political religious and thought leaders do this. They go, everybody thinks X, but what I, but what’s actually true is Y you have heard this. Now I tell you this, you have heard eye for eye tooth for tooth. Now I tell you love your enemy. Those are big ideas. Those are interesting ideas. What does he do starts with the familiar, familiar, and then add some novelty to it. So if you don’t remember anything else, remember the phrase everybody thinks X, but what’s actually true is why everybody thinks that success is just something that happens to lucky people or everybody thinks that you know, like once you get to a certain level of success, you don’t have to keep trying. But the truth is it’s a daily battle or, you know, whatever that would be the big idea of take the stairs. And then the last thing that I would add is there are tropes that you can use to do this better. And that’s a trope. There’s a literary trope is like, bring it,
RV (21:18):
Bring it down and not a trope. Definitely.
JG (21:23):
Trope a trope is something that just works. It’s a, it’s a tactic. So for example writers talk about tropes in writing fiction telling stories because, because fiction stories are, are formulaic. You know, if you’ve ever read Robert McKee’s book story or save the cat that’s a trope, save the cat as a trope. And, and the, the trope is if you want people to like your hero, you have to get them to do something noble within the first 20 minutes of the movie. So, you know, Rocky is just kind of this, like, you know kind of dumb, you know, Italian guy in Philadelphia and you see him like doing nice things for his neighbors saying hello to the nice guy, et cetera. This works even with like antihero stories, like you know, the godfather or like breaking bad, Walter White in the first episode you see, he’s this hardworking science teacher, who’s got a disabled son and you like him.
JG (22:29):
Cause he’s, he’s kinda, he’s just trying really hard. And that’s the, that’s the excruciating thing about that show is this guy gets progressively worse and worse. He is a villain and there’s part of you that still rooting for him. So that’s a trope. And when we think about big ideas, things that just work there are, there are just the formulas. Everyone thinks X, but what’s actually true is Y and then some skins that you can put on that would be like old, as new, old is new is stoicism. Old is new, is any like I dunno, church that says Hey, we’re doing things the way they did in the new Testament 2000 years ago. And we assume that just because something’s old, it’s authoritative, right. But you see this all the time. Ah, th this is you know, I paleo, right?
JG (23:18):
Like this is how the caveman ate. Well, like didn’t, they live to like age 40. Why are we doing caveman? Did it? It’s good. Right. We just, it, it doesn’t make sense. And it doesn’t need to. It’s interesting. So oldest new, good is bad or bad is good. Would be another one. Malcolm Gladwell’s book, David and Goliath, all of Malcolm Gladwell’s books do this, but David and Goliath is about why strength is weakness and weaknesses. Strength. That’s good as bad, bad as good. We think strength is good. Well, sometimes it’s not good. And the ketogenic diet would be an example of that. You know, you and I are roughly the same age, I think. And I remember growing up in the eighties and nineties being told that fat was bad, low fat diet, no fat. Like you were reading the labels, looking for fat, don’t eat fat.
JG (24:00):
Now you have, it’s actually old as new cause it’s, it’s a version of Atkins, right? But a different take on it. And it’s like, Hey, this thing that you were told was bad fat. We want you to eat as much of that as you possibly can. And so the ketogenic diet became popular, not just not because of the science, but because an entire generation of people were told something was bad. And now they’re being told it’s good. And this, the backing of it, this is, this is being predictably. Irrational. People are predictably irrational, the quote, Dan Arielli the, the, the rationale behind it, the science convinces you of something you already emotionally want to be true. So good is bad. Bad is good, biggest, small, smallest, big, anything that appears to be one way and as some. And there’s another way these are, these are tactics and books that work well. Another one would be chaos is organized, right? Chaos disorder. What appears to be frenetic and crazy and chaotic actually has a hidden organizational structure to it. That is the, that is the plot to every mystery movie. Every ocean’s 11 movie you know, like w what’s going to happen, what’s going to happen. There’s the plan that goes completely wrong. And by the end of it, you realize this was George Clooney’s plan all along. And so these are, these are tactics that, that work well. So, you know,
RV (25:20):
That’s how you’re digging in. And that’s what you’re looking for. You’re just kind of going like, okay, where is the, where is the repositioning or the, the re-imagining of the 80%? Yeah. Yeah. It’s almost like a punchline. I mean, in comedy, right? That’s how I teach to teach the psychology of laughter is your, you want to get the audience thinking something, and then you twist. And that’s where the that’s where the laugh happens.
JG (25:46):
That’s this, that’s the same thing. The science of comedy is interesting because it’s about surprising people, but when you delightfully surprised somebody, they laugh. When, when the surprise goes in another direction, they cry, right? So comedy and tragedy are the same thing. The result is just different. Ken Davis, a comedian, I think, you know, Ken told me one time, here’s how you tell a joke. You you get a table and you put a tablecloth on the table and, and you set the table, you put plates and some silverware and a napkin and a glass and another glass. And then you pull the table cloth. Right? That’s I tell a joke. That’s how you get an idea to spread a joke is actually just an idea. That’s, that’s a funny idea. That’s spreading, right? Like a really good joke. You remember, and you tell other people and they laugh too, if you told it. Right. And so a big idea is that you set the table, that’s 80%, and then you pull the tablecloth, you change the game. And so then one of the ways that you changed the game is you just say, what you think is big as actually small, or what you think is small is actually big. That’s the idea of the tipping point. People think that big things lead to big change. No, no, no little things lead to big change. Oh, wow. Right. Good. As bad, bad as good chaos has order orders, chaos and so on.
RV (27:02):
Yeah. Fascinating stuff. Okay. So so now that, so what I hear you saying here is that, you know, writing a great book, much of writing a great book is, is nailing this core premise, this, this big idea, this, this twist. And then after that, like, I guess once you’re clear about that, then you’re just kind of like extrapolating that out into a, like a fairly systematic presentation of that.
JG (27:33):
Yeah. And, and to be fair, I mean, this is probably not all books. It’s a lot of books, I think, but the kind of books that I’m interested in working on the kind of books that I want to write, and I want to work on with other people are big idea. Non-Fiction books that can be memoir, personal, develop business, whatever, but they’re going to change the way people think about something. Because if you change the way people think about a given topic, you, you change the world. I’m not trying to like change the world, but I want to add, you know, something good to it. And this is, this is where we’re trying to do that. So yeah, you would come up with the big idea because without the big idea your book dies, it just does. That’s, that’s, that’s the thing that we’re dealing with these days is nobody’s going to the library or Barnes and noble and pulling your book off of a shelf and buying it out of curiosity.
JG (28:21):
And if, and if they do, that’s like maybe one to 2% of your sales. And so you want it to have some backbone. You want it to have some gravitas and S and some umph to it. And so you’ve got to start with the idea, and then you, front-load the book with the big idea. You don’t, you don’t get to page 204 and go, oh, here’s the thing that I want everybody to remember. And I want you to write a good book, and I want the whole thing to be good, and I don’t want it to be fluff, but you front-load with the big idea. And then the rest of the book should illustrate that idea. And you can illustrate it narratively through an arc format. Meaning every idea is building on itself. And you’re telling a story, or even like a Malcolm Gladwell story.
JG (29:01):
These are or Malcolm Gladwell book. These are, there’s a narrative arc to the book itself. And there’s some big payoff at the end. There’s an initial big idea. Then there’s a bunch of little stories. And then there’s like, it feels like it feels theatrical, or it’s like a movie and you go, oh, wow. That’s, that’s what all this means. Or it’s modular start with the big idea and then module by module by module illustrate it. So if I, if I’m writing the tipping point you know, little things lead to big change and I’m writing it modularly, every chapter is a module in that as if you were almost like teaching a course on it. So, okay. Little thing, number one, looks this little thing. Number two, looks like this little thing. Number three, looks like that. And that’s how you would do that.
RV (29:48):
That’s fascinating. I, this is so cool and interesting. And like the formula that we used for my Ted talk you know, we did this big ordeal about why my second book title sucked. Cause we called it procrastinating on purpose, but we call it the Ted talk, how to multiply time. And my talk went viral. And is this twist that you, you know, you don’t manage time, you multiply that you multiply time.
JG (30:19):
Yeah. Yeah. That’s it. And can I pick on that idea from it? Yeah. So we’re everybody thinks X, but what’s actually true is Y so everybody thinks you manage time. And the truth is you blank time. This is where most people get stuck, because the way that you come up with an interesting idea is you don’t just come up with the opposite of the thing that you just said. So everybody thinks you manage time, but you don’t. Well that’s what do you mean you don’t? Why not? That’s, that’s an interesting enough. The interesting, the 20% has to sound absurd. Right. But it’s just a little piece of it. So it can sound absurd because it’s been in case in a lot of normalcy, if that makes sense. And so everybody actually managed time, but the truth is like, I’ve heard you manage energy, right? Like, I’ve heard that before, but you took that one step farther into the stratosphere and you go, you multiply time. Well, that’s absurd where you can’t multiply time. Time is time. And that’s what makes it so interesting is it’s absurd.
RV (31:13):
The next part is actually not that you manage time, the X is you think you can’t create time. Oh my God, actually you can multiply time. And the way that we say is that as you go, well, you can’t create time inside of one day, but that’s why the way you multiply time is by spending time on things today that create more time tomorrow. And it is possible to multiply time if you think out into the future. So it fits that for me. But anyways, it’s like
JG (31:40):
And I would say to your credit, cause I read that book you’re not just, it’s not just some vague esoteric idea that you’re trying to get people to agree with you. It’s, it’s a kind of absurd idea, at least in theory. And then you have all these. I remember still, like you said something, he said something like, you know, most people think it takes like, like twice as much time to train somebody to do something for you. And the fact is it takes how much
RV (32:06):
30, 30 X, we call it the third, the 30 eggs. But if you spend, but even if you spend 30 times, the amount of time it took you to do at once is what you should spend training someone to do it. But then even over the course of a year, it’s like a 733% return on that
JG (32:24):
Time. So what I found interesting about the book is you had all these super practical research, like you’ve done all this stuff, research, backed ideas. You’re like, Hey, here’s how this works. That’s how that works. You start with an absurd idea and then it’s in case then a lot of practicality, like you have to prove your idea. And if you can’t prove your idea, then you just have some crazy idea. And what we want is a big idea that has some grounding to it. You go, no, no, no. See, this is how this works. Then you’ve got something that will spread. Hmm.
RV (32:52):
Yeah. well my friend where this is, this is so stimulated Jeff, like it’s so cool. And a fascinating and fun. Where should people go if they want to learn about you? You’re obviously one of our preferred vendors at brand builders group that we recommend for folks. And so if you’re one of our members, you can just go in your portal and request an introduction to Jeff. We’ll make it happen for you. But like in terms of people following you and staying connected, like what’s the best way to do that.
JG (33:23):
Sure. You mentioned my website, [inaudible] dot com. You can go there and find stuff about me if this is stimulating to you. And, and you think you have a big idea for a book feel free to email me and send me your big idea. And it shouldn’t be eight paragraphs long. It should be a sentence or two. And I would challenge you to think, what is the category? Where are you starting? How are you going to add some novelty? And if you’d like feedback on your idea, I do this on every podcast these days. Cause I really do care about better ideas going out into the world because better ideas make a better world. And I want the ideas to be true and good, but I also want them to be interesting because most good ideas die before they have the chance to make the impact that they want.
JG (34:05):
So if you want to share your idea, feel free to email me [email protected] and the formula that I would encourage you to use is everybody thinks X, but what’s actually true is Y and use Rory’s example of you know, everybody thinks that you can’t create time, but the truth is you can multiply it like you want to get like that’s what makes it such a good idea? Such an interesting idea is that the second part is surprising. Wait, like multiply, like you can’t just create time. You can actually multiply it. You can get more of this thing that we all kind of feel is a finite resource. That’s powerful. And I want everybody to have a big idea like that and to not start writing until they do, because otherwise it’s a slog and you need the energy of a powerful idea that you think is going to change the world in order to get, to get through the really difficult parts and process of writing a book. So feel free to email that to me, Jeff, at Goins writer.com, G O I N S writer.com.
RV (35:04):
I love that better ideas make a better world. I’m grateful that there’s people like you, that care about the quality of the ideas and the shaping them. And in a weird way, I feel like the more, no more noise that’s out there and the easier that it is, it’s, it’s starting to get a point where everything looks like noise. That if you have a really sharp idea, people are keen to notice it quickly. And so we appreciate your work. Brother we’ll stay connected. We wish you
JG (35:31):
All the best. Sounds good. Thanks for sharing.

Ep 224: How To Get One Million Followers with Brendan Kane

Speaker 1 (00:05):
[Inaudible]
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 (00:53):
So I straight up overnight manifested 1 million followers. And some of you are out there like trying to get a million followers. I manifested it. I literally like went to bed thinking, ah, what, what do I need to do to get a million followers? And the next day, the next afternoon, I got 1 million followers. It wasn’t 1 million followers on social media. Someone dropped this book off at my house the next day, true story, 1 million followers by Brendan Kane. And so I read the book 1 million followers. I’ve read it, cover to cover. You’re about to meet Brendan. We’ve kind of hang out in some of the same circles we’ve never met in person though. This is our first time interacting. He has a new book called hook point, how to stand out in a three second world. And he’s worked with a lot of celebrities. He’s worked with Rihanna and people like that. Taylor swift and for years, like at MTV working like helping with that. And some of my other friends, I know Vishen from mind valley and people you would recognize, but kind of like his personal claim to fame was that he built a million followers in 30 days. So anyways, I’m just really excited to meet him in person and introduce him to y’all. Cause you might not, you may not know him or maybe you do, but anyways, Brendan, welcome to the show.
BK (02:21):
Thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure to connect with you and everybody listening to this.
RV (02:25):
Yeah, man. So how do you get a million followers? I mean, that’s the name of the book? That’s like what you did and you know, just to kind of dive in to that as, as a, as a starting point, like if you had to sum it all up in a couple sentences, how do you, how do you do it?
BK (02:44):
Well, I mean, in a very simple high level is you create a piece of content. You put it in front of somebody and that motivates them to click the follow button. That is the simple way to do it. Now it’s not necessarily because there’s a lot of nuance that comes into specifically the content side of things. There’s many different ways that you can do it. You can do it through paid acquisition, through paid advertising distribution of content, through other channels or influencers giveaways. You can do it that way, or you can do it purely through the content and playing to what the algorithms are looking for and get mass reach because the algorithms deem your content is playing to the goals that they’ve set for us. We’ve done it every single way. We’ve tested every single way we continue to test every single way. But first and foremost, it comes down to what is the piece of content that is going to motivate or inspire somebody to be like, I need to go and follow this account.
RV (03:51):
Yeah. Well you, that’s interesting just in and of itself, you kind of lifts it off like four big buckets there paid influencers, giveaways and organic. And like when I think about my personal journey, like we had we had six figure followings and then we sold our accounts when we sold our company back in 2018 and actually had to start over in 2018. And most of the followers that we have now are from influencers. They have come from just our network appearing on other people’s shows. We’ve never done a giveaway. We do do organic. We’ve never done paid. So let’s talk about paid. If you had, let’s just say, let’s say you had $20,000 and I say, okay, I’m gonna just go. I’m going to put $20,000 aside sheerly with the objective of growing my reach and growing my following. How would you spend that 20 grand?
BK (04:55):
It depends on the business. So it’s a, it’s a great question. And the, the first place that I always start when working with a client is really understanding the fundamental goals because there’s, there’s a lot of people out there that will think, okay, if I get 10,000 more followers, a hundred thousand, a million followers, my business is going to take off. I’m going to sell a bunch of product, my profit margins, going to go through the roof. I’m not going to sit here and say that that never happens, but it’s a longer term play like building an audience is a longer term play for the business. So if, if it was a business to be like, I need leads, I need revenue. I need to generate profit. Then we’re going to take that $20,000 in and work on lead gen campaigns or conversion-based campaigns to drive that revenue, drive that profit that can then be reinvested in the growth because is it as effective if you sell a product and correlate that purchaser into a follower versus going after a follower?
BK (05:57):
No, but does it happen? Yes. Like if you sell a lot of product through paid acquisition, it will lead to followers. If your product really resonates with you with if your brand does now let’s just put that aside. That’s the first step that I take now, if we’re just like, no, we’ve got our revenue, we’ve got our lead gen campaigns. We’ve got all of that set up. I just want to go after followers. Then it heavily dictates the platform that you’re going on. But one of the most successful ways that we found and you’ve alluded to it, cause you did it organically is if you have other people sharing your content on their channels, that will lead to follow our growth. It’s all a distribution model is like, how can I get my content distributed in other channels that will lead back to mine?
BK (06:52):
And there’s several different ways. Like you said, organically, I do interviews on podcasts or I’m friends with influencers or work with influencers and they talk about me in their posts or they have me on their podcast or they talking about me on their stories. That’s one way of doing it a second way of doing it. One of the successful ways with Instagram is meme accounts, you know, accounts that are all around a specific niche, like there’s meme accounts around quotes, like the good quote or inspirational pages, like note for me, there’s one’s around food or fitness and things like that. And that whole ecosystem is built off of selling advertising, quote unquote, like a shout out on their accounts to correlate back to the followers. So if you don’t have those influencer connections, meme accounts are kind of that next best thing.
BK (07:39):
The next best tactic that you can do, you can leverage the paid advertising networks, but we haven’t really see seen a high enough conversion rate to warrant the spend behind that. I’m not saying that I haven’t heard of people having success with it. We’ve tested extensively ourselves. Facebook super easy to use those platforms for follower acquisition. The other platforms, not so much, but I think at the, at the high level we look at just, how do you get your content distributed across? And I’ll look, let’s look at some larger examples is like you look at the rock. For example, who I think is still like the most followed person on Instagram, people will say, well, he grew that completely organically. No, he didn’t. Every movie he’s in that marketing budget for that movie is a hundred million dollar plus he was in the WWE for years.
BK (08:31):
The, that that company, you know, spends tens of millions of dollars to market their people. Or if he follow tennis recently a young girl, an 18 year old girl won the us open. She went from, I think like a hundred or 200,000 followers to 2 million followers in a two week span. Wow. Because of that distribution of her being on television there was another breakdown that I saw a guy hit a million sub sub subscribers on YouTube. He did a collaboration with Mr. Beast. So if you want to just think about generating followers at a high level, it’s all about how can I get my content distributed in front of the audience that I want and making sure that, that story or that connection to that content that they’re seeing will correlate back to them saying, well, I want to follow this account.
BK (09:22):
So it’s like what I learned early on in the movie industry when I first started is go where the traffic is. Don’t start it from scratch. And even the, the, the core social platforms we’re talking about were built this way. So YouTube was sold for $1.7 billion. And I think it was under 24 months. How did they do that? Well, the predominant player at the time was my space and my space didn’t have a video player. So YouTube had created one of the first embeddable YouTube players. So people that had my space profiles would see their friend upload a video to YouTube or take a movie trailer or something, put it on their profile. And then when you saw your friend had one, you would click the YouTube logo. Cause you’re like, I want one. So that’s how YouTube scaled their traffic so quickly is harnessing the traffic of a different source. The same principles apply to growing a social following. And as we mentioned, there’s many different ways that you can get your content in front of people, but it’s all about how do we get our content, our brand, our message out to where the traffic is and then drive it back to follow our account. What,
RV (10:31):
Yeah, that is such a simple, but powerful concept is interesting. And so when I said, if I was going to put money into it, your thought would be not going promote your page or take a piece of content and like boost it or run it as an ad on Facebook or Instagram. But your thought would be to go, where can I find like a meme account more, more like you’re paying an influencer or you’re paying whatever you can, whoever that person, more like a brand deal rather than running it as advertising. How do you find those? Not, not, how do you find those accounts and then how do you contact them and like get their rates and pricing and stuff.
BK (11:16):
Yeah. Finding them is just searching like one of the greatest assets in the reasons that we’re successful that I find other people don’t do is we are constantly doing research. Like I’ve been in the social media space since 2005 and still to this day, me and my team are always passing, references back and forth, looking at content, looking at content creators. And if you do that, it’s pretty easy to find like you just search. Like if you’re a fitness instructor, go into Instagram, go into Facebook type in fitness, see what type of accounts come up that are driven. Again, it’s not an influencer. It’s not a brand. It’s an account all about that. Or like travel. There’s a lot of travel based ones. Like beautiful destinations is a perfect example of a meme account around travel. So it’s, it takes a little bit of time, but it’s pretty easy to find if you’re actually looking for it.
BK (12:11):
And then most of these companies, even influencers themselves, they’ll have an email for business opportunities, contact us email, or you can direct message them and you can straight out ask them like, what does it cost to work with you? So it’s not super difficult to find it takes some time, but I recommend that if you’re spending any dollar, don’t go with the first person you find, you know, it’s like, actually do your research, do your due diligence of who works. And then always test don’t, don’t spend all of your money with one account until they’ve proven themselves with you. And it’s the same with like in 1 million followers, as you remember. I interviewed a friend of mine who is the chief growth officer for a company called fab fit fun. They reached a billion dollar valuation in a matter of a few years.
BK (13:00):
And it was all through paid acquisition and they’ve tested over 10,000 influencers. The last time I talked to him, it’s probably well over that. And the thing is that, that they know the model they have written on the walls is we love low CPAs. So that’s their benchmark is they love low cost per acquisition. So everything that they do is benchmarked across that. And that goes again to influencers is like they would test and constantly test these influencers. They wouldn’t put all their money into Kim Kardashians. They would test to see who’s generating the content who’s generating the, the reach, the engagement and that, that key KPI that we’re going after, same principles apply here is you test and you iterate to find what is the best growth mechanism for hitting our key KPI in this case, we’re talking about social followers. Interesting. And so there was actually, before you move on, it was interesting.
BK (13:55):
I was watching a video last night and I haven’t seen the show, but squid game and Netflix is the hot commodity. And I think it was Colin and Samir was doing a breakdown of it. And they said that one of the actors is now at 19.6 million followers off of that shell vans, which the key characters are watching their sales are up 7000%. So again, it just goes back. And the thing that I want to engrain in everybody’s head is go where the traffic is, harness it to your ability. But just because you go where the traffic is, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to correlate if the content is not there. Like for example, if squid game was no good, if the show sucked, would that actor have hit all those followers? Would vans have that increase in sales? No. So just because you get on Netflix, just because you get on a meme account or if you’ve ever run a paid ad, just because you’re getting in front of doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to correlate to the action if the content is not designed properly.
RV (15:01):
Yeah. So I want to talk about the content, but on the topic of dollars, I mean, this is, I think, I mean, there’s so many takeaways. I mean, I’ve got like just all these pages, all these pages that are earmarked in here, but you know, like one of the, I mean, you hear about it a lot, but something, it seems like you’ve done as you just kind of split tests. And so like in my mind, I’m thinking, okay, if I’m going to go target like a meme account, not only do I want to do a lighter budget with them, I probably want to test that piece of content organically on my own place, put some money behind it to see how it responds and cold traffic, even just like whatever few hundred bucks or something, and then try to show up and could play the hits basically like give them the best, the, the, the the best stuff that I already know performs, and then just basically use them to throw gasoline on the fire. Yeah.
BK (15:52):
Yeah. I mean, I wouldn’t put, so the way that I would approach that is see how it performs organically. If it’s not performing organically putting paid behind it. And we can talk about the algorithms if you want, but you’re basically training the algorithms that your content is not good. So I would rely heavily on the organic and your best performing organic ones, because I know people like Jay Shetty prince EA even a Gary V they have built massive audiences off the distribution of their content. However, their content performs well, so well organically that when a meme account takes it, and I’m not, you know, most of these people will do kind of like share for share deals or distribution deals, or like in your case, just friends, reposting content their content is designed so well that it’ll perform. So let me give you an example, like there’s, there is a, a meme account called the good quote, and I don’t know what they’re at followers wise.
BK (16:52):
Now they gotta be over 20 million, but I know prince EA and Jay Shetty have a relationship with them. I don’t believe it’s paid, but the good coat will post their content because it’s valuable content. And by the good quote, posting their content that can lead to 25 to 50,000 followers off a single post. However, if you, and we’ve tested with them, if you have a non-optimized piece of content that goes to a good quote or any meme account of that size, and it’s not designed properly, especially from an organic perspective, even if you’re posting it on an account of that size, it may lead to like 500 followers or less. So again, it comes back to how, how good is the content designed to a play, to the reach of what the algorithms are looking for? And then designed in a way that’s like, this person is really fascinating. This person is really interesting. I need to follow them and consume more of their.
RV (17:51):
Now, when you say that, like, people like prince EA and whoever that they have, they have built their followings based on distribution. That’s what you’re saying is that basically they either, you know, their content performs well organically, and then they either build organic relationships with influencers, like what I’m talking about, or they will be able, they’ll just pay to have their content displayed somewhere where there’s a lot of traffic.
BK (18:20):
Yeah. Well, I’m not going to say that Jason,
RV (18:24):
It’s not those two people specifically. Right. But just conceptually.
BK (18:27):
Yeah. And listen, their content is so dialed in that they’re getting organic reach, which is leading to your followers. They’re like the best content creator. So, but they also understand the power of distribution of content on other channels that just fuels that growth even further. Again, going back to the analogy of like the rock, the rock started on the WWE, the wrestling Federation. So that was one channel. And then he’s like, okay, this is interesting, but I want to diversify my brand. So then he was in movies and then he was on magazines. Then he was on television shows. It’s, it’s syndicating out that reach, which keeps amplifying that brand. You know, it keeps amplifying and going in these different directions. It’s not just pigeonholing yourself into one distribution outlet, being your own channel. It’s going to all of the different audiences and driving it back to you yourself.
RV (19:24):
I love it. I love it. So you you’ve mentioned the content, obviously the, which is normally where we, we probably should, you know, start the conversation. I think what’s awesome is you go, yeah, you post it organically. If it’s a winner organically, then it should perform some somewhere else. Is there, is there anything, cause I do want to talk about hook point. I’m fascinated. I think it’s a wonderful title and concept, but on, on the topic of content is there any thing that you feel like we, I mean, I know there’s a lot, you’ve got to say about this and people could obviously get the books, but on content design specifically, is there anything you think that we should know that we maybe haven’t heard somewhere else or you think people overlook?
BK (20:08):
Yeah. And this is one of the core focuses of how we work with people today is working with solo premiers all the way up to companies that are doing 30 billion a year in revenue. We find that that most people are struggling to achieve success with social, whether it’s paid or organic or struggling to break through to the next level is they’re lacking process. And we have a viral content engineering process. That’s backed by over 50 billion views, organically, we’ve generated hundreds of millions of followers for our clients using it and billions in revenue. And that is the biggest thing is most people are just designing content in a vacuum. They’ll basically, you know, set brand guidelines and ideate off of that. Or they’ll just come up with ideas that they like without actually having a process of how to engineer virality. And there’s a lot of misinformation in the market today, mainly because a lot of it has been outdated.
BK (21:11):
So you’ll hear a lot about consistency, frequency, hashtags, time of day, all of those things to drive growth. And yes, was there a point in time in social media that that stuff worked? Yes. but it really doesn’t work as well anymore if your contents not dialed in. And the reason is the amount of people on social media. So we, I remember when I first started in this space you know, Friendster was kind of on the fringe, but MySpace was the big player. And I remember when MySpace hit a million users were like, oh my God, that’s a ton of people using this social media platform. And this was like 2005, 2006. You fast forward to today, there’s 3.9, 6 billion people on social media. And there’s hundreds of billions of pieces of content seated on these platforms every single day. So we went from a million people on MySpace to 3.9, 6 billion people producing hundreds of billions of pieces of content every single day.
BK (22:16):
So what does that mean? I mean, there’s only when you open up any of these apps, no matter which one, they can only see you. One piece of content at a time. It’s not like they can see you a million pieces of content for you to choose from. So the algorithms, and there’s a lot of conversation around the algorithms, what they are. There’s a lot of demonization. There’s a lot of myths about it. Like one of the biggest myths about algorithms. They’re there to get their suppressing, your reach, to get you to pay for it. And it’s completely false because then that means nobody would go viral organically. If that was the case, the algorithms have one job and one job only to keep people on the platform longer because the longer you stay on the platform, the more ads they can serve you. In addition, that means they’re having a better experience and it takes your attention away from the other social platforms.
BK (23:04):
So these algorithms have billions and billions of pieces of content to choose from to keep you on the platform longer. So that’s where people are really struggling is, and I’ve seen it across the board. I’ve seen people generate purely organic followers and have suppressed reach. And I’ve seen people that have generated purely off of paid and are going viral. So I’ve seen it across the board that the most important thing is the content is the content playing to what the algorithms are looking for, which is holding people’s attention. I’ll give you an example. As I’ve, we’re launching a magazine called viral content engineering, and I was interviewing a friend of mine that just hit 20 million followers on Tik TOK. And his name is Alex stamp. You should look him up. He’s amazing. And we were doing an analysis of his, of his content.
BK (23:56):
We looked at his highest viewed video, which was 90 million views. And we looked at another video that was 5 million views, which is kind of like the 5 million, three to 5 million is his average. The 90 million view, the retention was 28 seconds average. The 5 million was 21 seconds. So we’re talking about a seven second differential that made up 85 million views and performance. Wow. That’s the world that we’re, we’re living in. That’s, it’s, it’s just a cutthroat world based upon the amount of content that’s published out there. So that’s where it’s really having a solid process to follow in creating content is critical so that you’re not relying on luck.
RV (24:38):
Yeah. So basically you’re talking about a structure and a process for ideated shooting, editing content that just holding people’s attention for as long as possible. And in this case it’s it’s that, that, that extreme like seven seconds can make a massive, massive difference. But that’s really, it’s really the game. It’s not even necessarily to make good content. It’s just to make content that holds people’s attention, which doesn’t necessarily have to be
BK (25:10):
Good. I don’t know that. I agree with that. I would say that to hold people’s attention, there has to be something that’s good about it because of the, because of the amount of choice that we have in terms of content. Because if the content is not good, I know that there’s 50 other pieces of content I can find. And I would say the best content creators in the world that hold attention are doing a good job, but that doesn’t mean it has to be high production value. Doesn’t have to be a motion picture, but the storytelling technique is, is good. Like I can give you some examples is like the Dodo is an amazing account. It’s all about pets and rescuing pets and things. And most of it’s found footage, or if they’re doing interviews at zoom interviews, the quality of the production is low, but the storytelling is amazing.
BK (26:00):
Like it really connects with your heartstrings about these animals and these rescues and things like that. Another thing is like the top YouTube is used. What’s called the Jenga effect, which is if you’ve ever played Jenga, you know that you have all these blocks stacked up on a table. And with each one, you pull out your closer to the outcome, which is the whole thing falling. But with each block that has pulled out the tension built, you know, what the outcome is, but the tension keeps rising. So an example of it is there’s a YouTuber. That’s amazing named Graham Stephan. And he teaches like millennials about financing. And he did a video. His number one video, I think is about how he got a Tesla for $76. And you watch that video. He doesn’t reveal the math of how he actually did it until like eight or nine minutes in. But that doesn’t mean that he’s filling it with fluff, just to rig the system. He has a storytelling technique that kind of ebbs and flows and builds that tension to the eventual outcome. Mr. Beast, one of the top YouTubers in the world does the same thing is you look at his crazy stunts and you think, oh, it’s just a crazy stunt pulling people in, but it’s not. It’s a storytelling that builds to the ultimate outcome that you came in for,
RV (27:14):
Man. Yeah, that is, that is fascinating. Okay. I, we have to spend a few minutes on hook point. This is, this is what you’re talking about now. So you hear people say this all the time. What’s the, like, what’s the hook, what’s the hook. But they say that in music, what’s the hook. Like they say that, or the cover of a book title, like what’s the hook? What the heck is the hook? Like when people say that, like, what do they mean? And what, what is a hook?
BK (27:40):
So for us, there’s three key pillars to a successful hook point. So first is like, how do you grab that attention? How do you stop the scroll? How do you earn the click? Because without that, in the world that we live in with those billions of competing messages, people are going to move on because there’s so much choice. So your first job as a brand, as a marketer with any piece of content you’re creating, whether it’s organic or paid is how are you stopping the scroll? How are you earning the click? How are you getting that email open? Because without that, you’re never going to get to your store. You will never get to retaining the audience’s attention. So you get completely lost in the noise. And that’s the first signal to an algorithm that your content is not going to retain attention, because if they see people’s filling, plants are not clicking, they’re automatically suppressing reach.
BK (28:28):
The second part is once you have the attention, how do you hold it? Because we don’t, you know, clickbait is kind of gone in a way that the algorithms have picked up on it. I’m not going to say that there’s nobody that’s that successful with it, but the algorithms and even the auctions too, are looking at your ability to hold that attention, because all the attention to the world with no substance doesn’t mean anything. So how compelling is your story to maintain that attention? And then third and finally is how are you monetizing that attention? How does it play to the overall growth of your company of your brand? Now that doesn’t mean that every piece of content has to sell something, but there has to be an underlying foundation and monetization strategy to make it sustainable because otherwise you’re going to burn out or you’re not going to have the time or the resources or the money to keep reinvesting in it. So again, the way that we look at a hook point is a holistic picture is how do we grab attention, hold attention to that, monetize that attention.
RV (29:30):
And in terms of stopping the scroll, grabbing attention like you mentioned clickbait, right? So that would be the sort of like the lowest form of it. I mean, how do we stop the scroll? I mean, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s one thing. And I’d like to you to think specifically about like experts here. A lot of our audiences experts, if you’re an entertainer, it’s, you know, I think it is a little bit different if you’re, you know, you’re showing a cat hanging up the side of a building that grabs our attention, or if you’re a news channel, you’ve got some scary statistic or something
BK (30:05):
That grabs our attention. But if you’re just a, an expert trying to like teach people how to, you know, save money on their taxes or, you know, a lawyer trying to do, you know, just talk about your business or an author, something, how do you grab the attention without like, what are the ways to really capture attention without kind of the you know, kind of, I guess, spamming this kind of things. Well, the first place you have to do is you have to start with research. You have to identify the patterns of what people are talking about of your subject, and also identify the patterns of what’s happening in content. So let’s break down both of those first understanding what and how people are saying about your subject in your specific niche, because the minute somebody sees something and they think that they already know what you’re going to say, they’re moving on.
BK (30:55):
Even though you may have a completely different spin on it. It’s like if you’re a meditation teacher and you, you say in the first three seconds, meditation is the key to content or success or whatever. And I think, okay, I already know that I’m moving on. I’m not giving it a second thought. So identifying the patterns of what everybody else is saying so that you can break those patterns and stand out. Secondarily, you have to understand that people are scrolling through social media. So they just watch LeBron James dunk, a basketball, they watch the squid games trailer. They watch Kevin Hart tell a joke. Now your piece of content comes up. So understanding how do I break that pattern of all these things that they’ve said already? So that is the fundamental core of where you start now, there’s nuance details for each specific sector or industry that you can play with. But in order to design an effective hook point, you have to identify the patterns so that you can break them. And that’s where most people are going wrong with it.
RV (32:00):
And that’s what I heard you say as both the pattern of what other people are saying on your topic and the overall pattern in the way that content is being presented by anybody, which is, which is interesting. It’s like even a video on certain platforms a couple of years ago. Just the fact there was a video would be a pattern interrupt. And today it’s, it’s not at all. Cause we all, we all are used to seeing content that way in the feed. Phenomenal stuff. Brandon, where do you want people to go? This, this was awesome, man. Like I you’re really, really brilliant and just have a real natural mind for this. And I love it cause I don’t find it to be something we’re pretty good at making money, but I don’t think we’re as naturally good as the Martha marketing pieces. And I love this. So where do you want people to go if they want to learn more and connect with you?
BK (32:49):
Yeah. If they want to learn more about the process, they can go to hook point.com. There’s a video that breaks down what we talked about in more detail. And there’s a deck that they can download for free, or they can schedule, call with our team, or if they want to check out the books for hook point, they can buy it anywhere. Or if you go to book dot hook point.com, there’s additional there’s additional ad-ons there or book that 1 million followers.com. But I think like really, if you, if you were intrigued, you want to dive in a little bit deeper, start with hook point.com. Cause there’s a lot of free information there that people can dig into.
RV (33:24):
I love it, man. Well, we will, we will put a a link there. Fascinating, absolutely fascinating stuff, practical stuff. And just a lot of fun I think in breaking this down and I definitely, I definitely recommend it obviously. That’s why we had Brendan on the show and thanks, man, for the gift of your, your wisdom and spending some time with us, we wish you the best.
BK (33:44):
Yeah. Thanks for having me. It was true. Pleasure to connect with you and everybody listening to this

Ep 222: Secrets of Growing a Social Media Following with Jasmine Star

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):
Oh my gosh. I am so excited to introduce you to Lee legitimately. This is my favorite bio point about Jasmine star is that she is one of my favorite people to follow personally on social media. I love her content. It’s so practical. It’s fun. It’s inspiring. You can just tell that she is one of you, a mission-driven messenger, and she just has become one of the most influential creative entrepreneurs in, in the world. She started as a photographer. She dropped out of law school, picked up a camera, was doing her photography business and has just since grown this huge personal brand. I got to meet her a few years ago. When I was with Louis at his mastermind event, she was there and then we kinda lost touch. And now all of a sudden we’re like seeing each other three times here in a matter of two weeks. And her most recent project is something called social curator. This is a subscription that is for business owners to help them do social media marketing and keep up with all the trends that are happening, understand how to do it right. And I’m hoping that’s a little bit of a preview of what we’re going to get today. So Jasmine, welcome to the show.
JS (02:04):
I am so happy to be here and right, lest you forget, we did not lose touch. Your girl was creeping from a distance. We are just now happy that I can creep openly. So now, you know, I’m creeping on you openly as opposed to privately. I’m happy. I’m happy to be here. Thank you.
RV (02:18):
Yeah. Well, and, and I know, and so AIJ, so my wife business partner, our CEO, you guys shared the stage at Amanda tresses event for faster way, and Amanda’s a close friend of ours. And and you and I are speaking at Christy Wright’s event here in a few weeks, and it’s just awesome. All good. It’s weird to say, I feel kind of weird to say this, but like, I’m, I’m so proud of you. Like, I, I love that you’re winning. I love when good people win. I feel like a lot of times, not always the good people win, but you’re like doing it the right way and,ly winning. And so yeah, so I have to share us your shares your ways.
JS (03:00):
Oh, well, okay. Well, before we get, before we get to the ways, cause I’m like, you set that bar really high. You set that bar like Olympic level high. Let me lower it a little bit. I have to say that one of the things and part of the reason why I still feel such a closeness to you and to your business and an affinity for what it is that you teach is when you had started this podcast, you had said, oh, and we with Lewis one that is like an aspirational model. I hope that one day you’re in a podcast like, well, when we were a Jasmine, when you become just your first name, you know, you’ve made it. It’s kinda like when we were Louis, everybody knows it was like Lewis house. Like
JS (03:42):
There you go. You know, very few can get to that singular letter like Oprah. But oftentimes I feel your presence when I really do talk to a business owners, because one of the things, I was a member of Lewis house mastermind, which is where you and I met. And one of the things amongst many that I had learned, and you had an hour presentation and I just had a book full of notes, but one of the things that just has stuck with me for years since that point is what I believed you call. At least I attributed to every time I say this, I’m like, well, Rory Vaden calls it the five X role. And it was one of the things that you had said is when you are teaching somebody to do something, you do, it will take them five times as long to do it, which was such a profound thing.
JS (04:24):
Because when our paths first crossed three years ago, we had like two people on our team. And now we have upwards of 23 and it’s always going back to man. It is really, you got to slow down before you speed up. And so I always think to myself, if it takes me X to do this thing, it’s going to teach me and take somebody else at five X. So let’s build that into our plan. And it’s just given us so much permission to slow down before we speed up. So thank you friends for that legacy.
RV (04:51):
Well, and you nailed the word, so that permission. So for those of you that are listening. So this is from my second book procrastinate on purpose five permissions to multiply time which was what my Ted talk was based on. And that word is permission like it is. So this is the delegate chapter you’re talking about. And we, we call it the per the permission of imperfect and granting someone else. The permission of imperfect allows you to free yourself. Which I think is interesting. So that conversation is about time. And one of the things that we learned when we were studying and putting that together was that 80% done right by someone else is always better than a hundred percent done right by you.
JS (05:33):
Oh, hold on, hold on. We need to slow that down that you need to say that again for the people in the back, because you say it because it’s just your truth and you know it, but oftentimes it’s like, Rory, like, say that again, say it just to me, I’m sure your audience is like, he says it all the time. Listen, I need to hear it. in Rory’s voice so that it sits in the back of the crevices of my mind. Please
RV (05:54):
I’ll say it. And then I want to segue to why saying it again. So 80% done right by someone else is always better than a hundred percent done right by you. And we call it the permission of imperfect and it’s it’s it’s the struggle is what got you here as a performer, won’t get you there as a leader because you got here by perfection and being good and crushing it and doing everything neatly and tightly in organized. But when you become a leader, it’s not about doing things yourself. It’s about getting other people to do. And so you have to grant yourself some imperfect. When I hear you talk about getting on camera and doing reels, that same emotional permission of imperfection is something that I’ve learned from you is just like, it’s the same thing where you go, you’ve got to give up that feeling of control and being perfect so that you can create I mean, I feel like that’s a big part of your message. [inaudible]
JS (07:00):
A hundred percent, a hundred percent. If I, if, if we can just get down to that, like I’ve often said, if I could write you a permission slip, I would, in fact, I’m telling you why I have no, I’m not writing a book right now. I have no plans. I’m not pitching. So if people are listening, I was like, I’m an agent. No, no, no. I don’t need to get the DMS. I’m nowhere near that. I know the title of my book. I know the purpose of my book. I am not ready to be a vessel for the book, but let me just tell you that what I know to be, to be certain is on the very last page, I am going to have a template for a permission slip, and people are going to write their name in, and they’re going to write the thing that they want permission to do.
JS (07:39):
Now, I don’t care what you do with that piece of paper. You can put it on your fridge. You can put on a wall, you could take a picture of it. It could be a screensaver because oftentimes we are looking for people to give us permission. When the only people who can give us permission is ourselves. But sometimes it’s nice to hear it from somebody else. I asked you Rory to repeat it back to me because that message is something I needed to hear this week. And I’m going to keep on replaying it because 80% perfect by somebody else is better than a hundred percent perfect by me. And that’s the thing I needed to hear. So yes, and amen. That’s where we started this conversation. We are hitting the ground running. I don’t even know if people, I don’t know if people’s hearts are prepared. People need to prepare their hearts for the heat that the Jay star and Roy are bringing in
RV (08:27):
And let it be done. When you get off this call, you’re just going to have to shorten your Instagram handle to J-star this is happening. So can you tell us about the early days? That’s one of my favorite things about this show is, you know, people are listening and it’s you know, they see, they see you and frankly go, holy moly, like this, this woman’s awesome. She’s crushing it. She’s up. People should make money, like tons of followers and stuff. And one of the things we want this show to be is tell me how it was when nobody was there. Tell me how it was when you posted a video. And there weren’t hundreds of thousands of people. And there weren’t views, like, take us back to how you got started and like, what did you do? And, and how did you feel? And like, how did, how did this come about for you?
JS (09:18):
Well, before I answer, I actually do want to call something out and it’s like very, very, very clear. And it is my truth is that for every person who says, wow, she’s crushing it, she’s doing a great job. I know there’s about three. Who’s like, she’s a hot mess. She’s not that talented. She’s not saying anything new. That’s not a great idea. In fact, a couple of weeks ago, I was accidentally BCC on an email where somebody said, oh yes, yes. Not that innovative. I’ve seen better in reference to the thing that I was working on. And I’m like, I sat on it. Right. I sat on it and I was like, should I say something? Am I going to be a petty, Betty? And I let it go then, and then said, person asked for a favor. I agreed to the favor. I shared my insight and advice.
JS (10:08):
And I also sent a screen grab. And I just said, I saw it, but we’re still cool. But the best thing that you could do in our relationship moving forward is if you tell me directly and this person agreed this person, so let’s just start there, right. Because I don’t wake up and be like, oh my God, it’s so great on social. Everybody loves me. Everybody sees I’m crushing it. No, there are more people who do not like what I do. And to that, I say yes. And amen. I would rather be disliked for a hundred percent of who I am than to be liked for a carbon copy of who people think I need to be. So thank you for you thinking I’m doing great. Thank you for being a champion of who I am. But I also realize there’s a ton of people who don’t like me, but I would rather have somebody not like me or entirely like me being lukewarm.
JS (11:00):
Having lukewarm followers is not my cup of tea. That’s never the thing I would want to do. One of two things. And this goes back to building a brand. I want to attract, or I want to repel. If I am not doing one of those two things, I’m doing a disservice to my brand, into the experience. I really believe with all my heart that a personal brand goes farther with a small group of people who wildly believe in the mission and the ethos and who you are. Then a lot of people are kind of like cool, forgettable, not sure I care enough to have an opinion. And so I know that it might be a little counter opposite or a little intuitive. So as I get into like origin stories, like, please know, I don’t think I’m the best thing since like flour tortillas. That’s not the case.
JS (11:39):
I just do my thing. And if some people like it great and have others, don’t, it’s equally as great. So I so one of the things as we kind of started building things out was I am the, of an immigrant I’m first-generation Latina first generation college student first-generation post-grad. I went to UCLA law school on a full academic scholarship, and I’m also first generation law school dropout. My mom had brain cancer and she had a relapse when I was in my first year of law school. And it really brought to the surface asking a big question of why, what am I doing? And I believed that getting a degree or having multiple letters after my name would be the ticket out of the body of would be a way for my family to move from one socioeconomic level to another. But I never asked if that was the thing I was supposed to be doing.
JS (12:30):
And so in combination with my mom’s relapse and culmination being me being wildly unhappy, and in combination with me having my first bout with depression, I was like, I’m unhappy. And this isn’t working. And when I gave myself again and let’s talk about permission is I couldn’t give myself the permission to truly ask what it is I was supposed to do, because that’s not, when you do, when you’re a daughter of an immigrant, like you see your parents do whatever it takes to put food on the table. And so all of a sudden it felt very luxurious for me. Like, let me punch suffocate. What makes me happy? It’s a very American notion what makes me happy? And that’s all the thing that my parents wanted, but I felt like the weight and the responsibility being the eldest of five children. And again, it was a story I’m telling myself.
JS (13:11):
So then we’re sitting at dinner and my husband has the conversation and says, well, what do you want to do? And it was the first time in my entire life where I’m like, what do I want to do? And I vocalized that I wanted to be a photographer. And he said, great, but you don’t own a camera like that might help. So decide to get a camera. And the thing that I realized as most people starting, any, anything, this is the conversation happens in 2005. I get a camera 2006. Okay. I get my first gig paid gig late 2006. And then 2007 is when I file a DBA, like 2007 is my first year of business. And I was terrible. I was terrible. I wasn’t even bad. It was like, so my daddy is the pastor of a church in east Los Angeles. And so, you know, you’re really bad when parishioners of the church don’t even want you to shoot their photos for free.
JS (14:08):
Like, you gotta, you gotta be real bad. I was like, yo, they’ll look, God, like, you know, it’s like, there’s like, where’s the nepotism here. So you know, that’s the case. But the thing that I started to do, which was very new at the time was to share what I was learning. And a lot of people who were seasoned in the industry, if they happen to see the content that I was putting out. And by this time there wasn’t social media, it was just putting out on a blog. I was putting out the blog on my journey, what I was doing, what I was learning, the pitfalls and the struggles and people who are seasoned, who happened to see that would be like, well, that’s a stupid idea. Nobody like nobody cares where you’re going on vacation or nobody cares what you’re shooting, sweetheart.
JS (14:42):
Why don’t you just get a camera and get some practice? And number one, I agree with the sentiment, but what happened was the climate of the way that businesses were being built was wildly changing. And the thing that I understood early on as a result of putting stuff out imperfectly, was that people were buying a highly emotional pro service wedding photography, which is the thing that I was doing, having no idea of the intellectual property or the talent that it took to create the thing that we did. So photographers want to lead with the camera, the gear, the awards, the studio, the albums, the flash, and then along comes somebody and breaks the paradigm of listen. You’re selling something that people really don’t understand. If I could sell on emotion, that somebody would invest with me as the photographer, in addition to the photography, the game shifted.
JS (15:29):
That’s what I started to do. So I was writing blog posts when nobody were reading blogs, I started getting on Twitter early days of Twitter. And I’m just like, let me just see what I can do here. And I realized that what was happening on the blog was unidirectional conversation. I was writing about what I was doing and people would come and read, but it was coming to me. Very little dialogue. Twitter changed the game in that the dialogue became two-way. And I started realizing that I can create experiences. Having somebody have an affinity toward me or the thing that I was creating simply by responding. Now, this is not, I was having a two-way conversation because my work was so good or my business savvy was so impeccable. It was truly, people started caring about what I was producing simply because I cared about them.
JS (16:11):
So I learned that in 2009, 2010, and that has been foundational when it comes to building a brand on social and on the next big thing, people are like, oh, well Jasmine’s about Instagram. And I was like, yes, but I was about blogging heavily. I was getting 25,000 unique views a day before social media came around and I started realizing, okay, I’m going to start building a hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter. And then all of a sudden Facebook came around and I did the same with hundreds of thousands on Facebook. So you tell me the next thing I need to do. So worry. If you were to tell me Jasmine, to build a personal brand, you need a ride to donkeys and a clown suit and be whistling to kazoo. Watch me buy a kazoo. I will do whatever it takes to make somebody feel something about me. And I’m less concerned about being perfect. The most talented, the most qualified or the richest that’s in me. And I could be wrong to me. A foundation of a brand is what somebody says about you when you’re not in the room. And the way that you buttress, what people say is about caring about them first, before you want them to care about you.
RV (17:06):
Yeah, that was so good. Although I do think J star could be a kazoo.
JS (17:13):
Why don’t we, why don’t we for every person that leaves a review for the podcast, we send a little J star kazoo
RV (17:19):
Is blown up a Shopify store, J star. Cause yeah, so, well, I mean, that’s the irony of the whole personal brand. Like even the, even the, even the name, personal brand, it’s like, it makes you think it’s about you. And it’s like, it’s not about like the more you, the irony is, the more you care about yourself, the more you’re worried about what other people think. The more you’re trying to put out perfect content for you, like the less effective, it feels like it’s such a great paradox. Yes.
JS (17:54):
A thousand percent, a thousand percent. Like you have a stronger personal brand when people have an opinion about you. Like you have a stronger personal brand when people feel like you are never above taking the time that you have to respond to a question or comment. Now, do I think that you need to respond to every comment in every DM? Well, it depends on your bandwidth, but as long as you know, you’re walking in integrity that you’re doing as much as you can, however you can, than anybody else can’t expect enough. And people feel it, people do feel it.
RV (18:24):
Yeah. So I want to talk about the platforms for a second. Cause, cause you know, the principle here is the same and I think brand builders group operates more in principles that we do in tactics. Like we’re where frankly, we’ve never been that strong at like the keeping up. We’re not moving fast enough. I think a lot of times to keep up with some of the tactics and algorithms and things like that. But the, you went from blogging to Twitter, to Facebook, Instagram, these
JS (18:53):
Youtube in the middle, the YouTube in the middle and then Snapchat and Pinterest and clubhouse.
RV (18:58):
Are you still doing all of them? Like, so are you still doing all them? Is there one that you’re hanging out in and you know, people talk about all the platforms are different. Do you feel like they’re really different or is there, are there principles that make them the same and then kind of like, where are you now? Like where do you see this going?
JS (19:17):
So they’re, they’re different enough. And that’s the thing that I really want to put like a little, a little bit of a pin in is that I am not choosing a platform based on where I want to be. In fact, my preferred platform is not where my customer is now, but I do believe it’s where my customer will be in the future where I, if I have free time to spend on social, I’m going to tech talk. I just think it’s fascinating. I think the algorithm is spot on. I think that they serve content. So it almost feels like, you know, you like lift your head up and you’re like, where did two hours ago? And you know that they’ve hit on something when you hear that quite often from a lot of its users. And so am I still active on Facebook?
JS (19:56):
Yes. Am I still active on YouTube? Yes. Am I still active on Twitter? Yes. Do I have a Pinterest strategy? Yes. Am I still blogging? Yes. Am I on Instagram? Yes. But oftentimes we talk about like having a pillar strategy. So it’s quite often and I have a podcast, the Jasmine star show. So we have two pieces of anchor content. It might come in the form of a long form blog post or the form of a podcast. And then based on the topics of the blog post or the podcast, we then can create subsidiaries for each of our social platforms because Facebook, you can get a little bit more long form than people are used to normally reading on Instagram. So what we can do is we create like our primary, our primary platform. And that for me were our customers for social curator are right now is Instagram.
JS (20:37):
That’s where they’re spending. Most of their time, my focus is on Instagram. And then we have like a, like a tailwind from there. So it’s like a week and four hours later that post slightly different copy. So that it’s tailored for the Facebook group, Facebook users. And it feels native. So anything that at mentions or hashtags that existed on Instagram, they’re not going to be pushed over automatically to Facebook. We have to contextualize the content that we have. And then another four hours later, we’ll be putting that out on LinkedIn. If we created a video and like an IETV that is edited in a vertical format. So it feels native to the platform, but then it’ll also be edited in a horizontal format so that when we put it on YouTube, where we put it on Facebook, it feels native to it. So I don’t think that I am like, so all-knowing to create and choose a platform. I am just saying the more that the social curator content exists on these platforms, the higher likelihood it is to find a customer. Now I know that sounds wildly overwhelming to a lot of people, but I’ve been doing it now a decade. So I can think, I think
RV (21:38):
Content on the team. Yes,
JS (21:41):
But it’s not for my personal brand. That’s where social security that’s for social security. The vast, yeah, the vast majority. Definitely. So are
RV (21:48):
You editing all that? You’re not, I
JS (21:50):
Don’t edit, I don’t edit videos. I have a videographer, but when it comes to creating reels, I am creating reels. When it comes to recording podcasts, I’m recording the podcast. We do have a podcast producer, but it’s like, for us, it’s like, I’m doing like intro, body outro and we don’t have any ads. So it’s, we try to keep it as streamlined as possible. We want to work smarter, not harder. Now having said all of that, if somebody is listening and immediately hears, this says, this is so not for me. Great. It pushed you. Remember, I only want to attract a repel. So if I’m repelling you in situate, let me see if I can bring you back into the fold with one thing. Can you choose just one platform? And it’s not the platform that you really like, because you might just love Instagram, but if you know your customers on Facebook groups, okay, then you separate your time with where you want to consume versus where you want to create. And once you’ve chosen, where you want to create on the platform that you think is most inclined where your dream customer actually exists, then your strategy is just to focus on that platform and crazy enough. And just test me on this. The more that you’ve become familiar with one platform, the easier it is to scale when you go to a second, but right now resist the temptation to create for all platforms and always focus on one, build out the strategy, see what’s working and see if you can duplicate it on a secondary platform.
RV (23:01):
Yeah. And to what you’re saying, cause we, we teach something called the content diamond, which is a very, you know, similar kind of thing where you’re just taking one piece of content and, and fractionalizing, if you have the team, you have the capacity, you can do it. So it’s not that you’re creating unique content for each platform. It’s that you’re contextualizing the content you have for each platform.
JS (23:24):
Correct? Correct. And whereas right now, you know, Instagram is heavily indexing on Instagram reels. Well, there was a time where I was testing, repurposing the reels onto Facebook and it just didn’t work. That was just like the views weren’t there. It just sat, there was a really low engagement. And so what I took from that, and which is very clear is that people on Facebook are not about, so when I’m posting a reel, I will not be repurposing it on to Facebook. I might repurpose a real on Facebook stories because it disappears after 24 hours and a real on Facebook stories looks a little bit more native to that platform, which is fine. But what would go in its place would be something entirely else. That’s going to be serving the Facebook audience in a way that they deem most valuable.
RV (24:07):
And so how do you know, like you’re, you’re you you’ve said a couple of times like go where your audience is, by the way, you know my personal brand, when we exited our former in 2018, we had to start over from scratch all our social media, zero podcast, zero email database back on zero. So it’s been interesting building it from 2018 on versus when we had originally started back in 2008, but our team kind of runs, we run the content diamond on my stuff, but what AIG does, we’re just now starting to build AIG has been built in most of the companies, just the CEO, like she’s really been focused on the company. We’re starting to build out her personal brand, but what she’s been doing in the interim is exactly what you said. She consumes on Instagram, but she creates for LinkedIn.
JS (24:54):
Oh, I was going to say that I was like, y’all know, you guys are on LinkedIn. Like that’s, you know that that’s your platform easily. Yeah.
RV (25:00):
And she has a lot of traction there and you know, she just like has a lot of that background that like B2B. So she, she does it. But when you say go where your audience is in terms of where do you create for, are you doing that based on demographic data of who the users are? Are you doing that based on UTM tracking based on who’s clicking through and coming into funnels and buying, is there some other measure? Like how do you, like you’re saying your, your audience right now is on Instagram, but you’re not, you’re not saying that’s because you like to be on Instagram yourself necessarily. So how are you coming up with that answer?
JS (25:39):
So we know that our dream customer is 33 years old and she lives in Manhattan beach and she has two boys aged three and five and she drives a white and black range Rover. And her husband is a lawyer and they met in college. We also know that she was raised on a goat farm in Ohio, California, which is where she developed her craft at creating goats milk soap, which he started selling in Manhattan beach farmer’s market, where she came across a buyer from anthropology who really liked her product. And then she just realized that if she wanted to create a business, you can no longer have a hobby disguised as a business, but to actually create a business. And at this point in time where she’s looking at, how does she create the marketing resources and building brand resources online. And that is how our paths intersect
RV (26:21):
And you’re, and you’re, you’re saying she’s on Instagram.
JS (26:24):
That in order to determine with the platform you should be creating on, you must first and foremost know who your customer is, because if your customer is 33 years old with two kids in an affluent area and educated at this point in time, she’s on Instagram. Now, if you’re creating resources for millennials and it’s a printed tea shop, despite what people say, Snapchat is alive and well, I would over-index on Snapchat. If I was creating that type of content, I would also go over to TechTalk. Now, if my target demo is a 49 year old professional male or female who has expendable income to invest in like my business, coaching, marketing resources, whatever the case may be, I’d be on LinkedIn. So again, part of why people have a difficult time choosing the platform is they need to first and foremost clearly identify who they’re selling to. And then you could just simply look at the analytics, where are those people at? And then you go there.
RV (27:19):
Yeah, yeah. Got it. How do you make money from all this? Like so you put in all this work and you never sell on social media. Like it’s all this value you just don’t, you know, like where does the money happen? Like because if you just go online, you make reels of like five reasons you should, you know, buy my program, right? Like, no, one’s going to watch that. So how do you, how do you make that transition from I’m providing value and adding content to I’m converting a customer and collecting money. Cause mama has got to pay the bills.
JS (27:59):
So it’s not a one size fits all answer, but what I can say, and you and I had a conversation earlier today, and so forgive me for repeating, but I firmly believe that a strong entrepreneur does three things in their business. They build a brand, they market their business and they get sales. That’s like, that’s sort of the three. I mean, obviously there’s a lot of minutia and nuance in that, but those are the three main pillars. Social media is so good at building brand, giving somebody an emotional response to who you are or what it is you sell. The more that you give a K the more that you give away content, when you share your insight, your resources, how you’re set apart, bringing people on your journey. That’s all brand-building. What is somebody saying about you when you’re not in the room? AKA, when are they sending a post to one of their friends who says, you really got to check out this brewery guy?
RV (28:41):
That’s the litmus test right there when they, when they send their best friend. And they’re like, thank God to see this. That’s like,
JS (28:47):
But that’s brand. Now when somebody is getting somebody else to co-sign that brand experience, they’re going to get to your page. And once they scroll past two or three posts, you’re now marketing. You are then there to set somebody up to educate them on what it is you do. That’s marketing. You’re not selling at this point in time. You’re just talking about the benefits of drug testimonials. Talked about insights. You talk about how it is that you do what you do when you talk about this diamond thing. I’m so intrigued. One thing that I could do a heck of a lot better job is like owning frameworks. They’re like the five X role I member. Now. I’m like he’s diamond ring fraction. You know his content. And here I would like, we have pillars either way. We can definitely get better at that, but that’s marketing.
JS (29:25):
Now, if you will, you’ll be hard pressed to, for me to be creating a lot of content selling social curator. What we try to do is to create multiple funnels of getting people in by giving value. We know that our conversions are quite high because far before that they have typically been on our list or in a funnel for more than four months. Now let’s pause here. Social curator is $49 a month. For some people that’s like blink away money for other business owners. That’s a considerable chunk of money each month. However, if it took on average four months to convert somebody new on the list or in the funnel to actually a paying subscriber, how much more longer will it take for somebody to convert somebody at a $500 price point, a $5,000 price point of $50,000 price point. A lot of the misconceptions when it comes to I’m doing this work and I’m not getting sales.
JS (30:16):
And I’m like, yeah, how much is your product or service? The more expensive it is the longer the gestation period will be to convert them strictly on the back of social, which is why whenever I get a DM and someone says, Jasmine, I really want to learn how to build a brand. I’m not using my two thumbs to be like, well, first things first make like one, you’re not paying me for consulting. So what I want to do is I need a list of top 10 frequently asked questions. And then I created a free resource. That number one serves the heck out of them. Number two gives them such high valuable content. And number three empowers me to build trust. And when somebody says, Hey, Jasmine, I’m really wanting to build a personal brand. What I do is like, I’m so happy you’re here. Let me give you a download link to a free brand building guide.
JS (30:54):
I dropped the link for them when someone’s like Jasmine, I’m having a difficult time with Instagram rules here. Here’s a link of a resource that I created. Step-By-Step on how for you to do that. Jasmine, I really need an Instagram marketing guide. Got that for you. So what I’m doing is list building in my DMS because having somebody a paid to click from an Instagram post is so, so, so, so, so highly unlikely and largely happens for lower ticket items. And I’m telling you that as a monthly subscription for $49, the push to click to buy is so low. We have to do is cultivate. Give trust, gives so much value that they believe when they hand over their credit card, they’re going to be getting a five or 10 X return based on if that’s what I got for free. Imagine when I get on the inside,
RV (31:35):
That’s that’s so convicting to hear you say that to just your level, going, even for me to get someone, to pull their credit card out for 49 bucks a month, it’s hard. Like people, people have, you know, they have 25 people show up for one webinar and no one buys and they go, this stuff doesn’t work. And it’s like, no, like it takes trust. It’s trust. You have to build trust. And oh yeah.
JS (32:00):
So Roy, if we, if we tap there for a second, you have just said 25 people come on a, on a webinar. Now, if you’re converting on a webinar, I tip my hat to you. That’s hard. That’s where the gangsters play because you’re giving your heart and soul. And you’re speaking for 35 to 47 minutes before you get into a pitch. And then you sit and you hear crickets. And even though you had 25 people to show up for the webinar, you know, by the time you started pitching about four to 5% of them just completely clicked away. And they’re just waiting to get to that free Q and a, and then you’re like giving your last breath and you don’t see anything conversion. Now we have to say that none of that was in a void. It doesn’t exist in a vacuum. That’s just their inception point.
JS (32:40):
When I teach a webinar where we will get on average 30,000 people to sign up and around 3000 people will convert. You think I’m crying or bemoaning about the 27,000? I say, no, you might’ve said no, but I don’t hear no. What I hear is not yet. My objective is to come back and out, serve you so that you’re like me. I tried, I tried and I couldn’t resist giving her my credit card for the 27,000. I just want to be like, thank you for coming to the party. We’re just getting started. I think that that approaches so much of a better cause it keeps you going and it gives you a reason every day to get up and out serve,
RV (33:11):
Hey man, that is what we’re going to land the plane. Jasmine, where should people go to learn about you and social curator and everything? Your,
JS (33:20):
I appreciate you so much and all social platforms, you can find [email protected].
RV (33:28):
Huh. It will be J star, but not yet. [inaudible]
JS (33:33):
Let’s build on, let’s go and get that URL like J star kazoos let’s let’s make it happen on Shopify.
RV (33:39):
I love it. Well thanks for encouraging and just, just the honesty here and just keep doing what you’re doing. Like you’re, you’re inspiring people and yeah, like just keep winning because you inspire me. I know you inspire ha and so many people, it just it just get it’s tactical and all that, but it also gives you hope that you don’t have to be a shyster to do this. Like you don’t have to be someone that’s Hocking your stuff and pitching your stuff and making wild claims and you don’t have to use flashing yellow boxes all the time. And like, you can just out serve people and just love on them and build, build trust. And it still, it still, it comes around. So.
JS (34:27):
Oh yes. And amen. I thank you. I thank you. A thousand times over.

Ep 220: Using Quantum Physics to Build Your Brain and Your Brand with Mark Victor Hansen & Crystal Dwyer Hansen

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):
Well, what a special treat for me today to get to introduce you to a married couple who I’m meeting as a couple, really for the first time, mark Victor Hansen, who I actually met years ago at the national speakers association, I was of course mentored by the late Zig Ziglar personally for several years. And mark was there. Jack Canfield was there. There was a lot of legends and mark is best known probably for being the co-author of the chicken soup for the soul series, which has sold get this over 500 million books worldwide. And today we’re joined by his wife, crystal Dwyer Hanson, who I’m just meeting for the first time. She is also an international speaker. She’s a consultant, obviously an author. She co-authored this book that we’re going to talk about, but crystal is amazing. She is a researcher in specifically in the, in the area of neuroscience, epigenetics, quantum physics, and she’s really just kind of an expert overall in the, in the general field of human potential. She knows a lot about nutrition and overall health. And so we’re going to call on some of her scientific knowledge to talk about the conversation of today, which is based on their new book. Their book is called, ask the bridge from your dreams to your destiny. We’ll put links to the book in the show notes, which you can check out and anyways, mark and crystal, so great to have you. Thanks for being here
MVH (02:28):
To be with you. Thanks for inviting us. This will be great. Fun.
RV (02:32):
Yeah. So first of all, so this book about asking I, it spoke to me personally. Okay. So when you guys sent the manuscript over and I start going through it, I found that I even at, you know, my stage in life or career I still struggle with asking and I think I have spent much of my life struggling with asking was raised by a single mom. We were very poor when I was young. We grew up with, with almost nothing. We were never homeless, but we were pretty close a couple of times. And I don’t know if it comes from that background or just the world at large, but I find that not only me, but a lot of people in the world struggle with asking. And so I just wanted to kind of like ask you why this book, why now, what was kind of the, what was kind of the mission on your heart for you know, letting this out into the world right now,
MVH (03:34):
What happens is we traveled to 80 countries, talk to some 7 million people loved every minute and met great, wonderful people. But the difference between somebody, the little successful and vastly successful, we discovered is one thing only the ability to ask to GEP what they want. So what we decided to do is write a book that would be chicken soup on steroids. If you don’t mind, my goal is to sell a billion books. I’ve asked myself, how do you do that? And so we said, well, we’ll do a book that, that transcends every chicken soup was magnificent. Wonderful, still doing great, but we’re learning that you got to add free levels of asking, ask yourself, ask others, ask God, and alluding to what you said is that we’ll talk about the seven roadblocks to asking that, that behooves, everyone to look at in the mirror. So they say, wait, that’s me, I’m stuck here, here, here, and here. And if I transcend that I can go fulfill my destiny because we believe last line is a God coded each and every one of us at birth with a destiny. That’s great. And most of us get so distracted in life that we don’t fulfill our destiny.
RV (04:38):
Hmm. Yeah. I, one of the lines I love this is later in, in the, well it’s, it’s, it’s after the prologue, but it says that basically like our destiny has already been created and our job is to, to, to unlock it and to find it. And I, I thought that was, I thought that was super good. I mean, so crystal coming from your vantage point, you know, I imagine this is, this is connected directly to some neuroscience here in terms of w why, and, and I’d love to talk about the seven roadblocks to asking because it, most of the people listening here are personal brands have some sites of some type they’re they’re a speaker asking to get booked for a fee. They’re an author asking for a book deal. They’re a coach asking for a client, or, you know, asking, you know, the spouse or God for more abundance in their life. But this is something we really struggle with. And you guys talk about these, these seven, seven roadblocks. So what’s some of the kind of like science part of this,
CDH (05:36):
Right? So I, it’s such a good question where there’s so much to it, but I think we all come to this earth feeling this inner calling, because we are all seated with this destiny. But then life starts to happen. Experiences happen, we get shut down and our brains are designed to store those experiences just in efficiency, right? So, so we haven’t had an experience, a negative experience. That’s attached to emotions, emotions create chemistry, the chemistry, the chemistry really cascades through our entire body. So our body remembers those things remembers when someone rejected us remembered when someone said, you’ll never do that, you know, and all these things happen suddenly we feel like we’re not good enough. So then we stop asking, we S we hold back. We don’t, you know, every time there’s an opportunity presented we, we want to do it, but then there’s some inner programming that’s stopping us.
CDH (06:30):
And it’s interesting because the S the science, we looked at the studies show that everyone going into this study had this belief that if they ask someone for help information advice, or just assistance, you know, in accomplishing something or getting something done that the perception was that they would be perceived to be stupid ignorant or just pushy and annoying. Right. And the truth of it is the studies revealed that none of that’s true, that if we’re just willing to put ourselves out there and ask another human being for something there’s an 80% more likely chance that they will help us if they can. And, but, but the other part of the study revealed it. They’re not people don’t just insert themselves into your life if you need help. So if you just sit there thinking, right, thinking that someone’s just going to come and somehow help you, it’s not going to happen.
CDH (07:23):
You have to be invited, right? People have to be invited into your life. And there are also studies that show when you really personalize that invitation, even when it came to they did an interesting study where people stood by and watched this woman get killed right. In, in New York, this was years ago. Right. And, and like, why didn’t anybody intervene? Cause no one asked specifically, but the further studies that they did, they, they, they determined that if you call out someone very specifically like, Hey you in the red jacket and black hair, I need your help. When we personalize our requests, people immediately feel bound to us. And so that’s, it’s so interesting in human psychology, you know, the psychology of asking, but like mark mentioned we identified the seven roadblocks to asking and mark and I found that every single person that we’ve met or talked to carries at least one, if not more of these roadblocks, sometimes all of these roadblocks at one time in our lives. Right. And I’ll just go through them really quickly. But those are unworthiness. Doubt, fear, pattern, paralysis, naivety disconnection. What do I miss? Excuses. Yes. Excuses. Yeah. And we can go deeper into each of these because each one is so important for us to understand. And it’s funny when we start going through them, everybody goes, oh, that’s me. I’ve I’ve stopped myself before.
RV (08:51):
Yeah. There were some, there were some almost gut wrenching stories that you share in the book around you know, somebody who gets divorced, I think maybe it was your uncle or somebody uncle and they got divorced and they never let go of it. And they carried, they, they, they held on to that, just despair and discouragement. And they had too much pride to sort of ask for help, ask for forgiveness. Or I think mark shares the story of dropping somebody off at the airport or something. And they just, they missed their flight because they, they never asked, they don’t know how to ask. And it’s like, it’s crazy. The lengths of like the amount of pain we will allow ourselves to endure because we are willing to embrace the level of humility. It re is required to ask for help. Like, is that which of the roadblocks is that? Or is that just like all of them?
MVH (09:50):
Well, the one on excuses is my brother had been way older than me. He was at some levels my role model, but he came down to visit us right after his wife had died. And he’d been in Alaska panning for gold and goofing off. And then, you know, I had to get up at four 30 to get him to a six o’clock flight, got him to our airport here in Phoenix, Arizona. We live in Scottsdale. I said, big brother, you need any help? Getting to the thinkers. I traveled a quarter million miles for 44 years, as you know, Rhonda Wolf speaking every day. And I thought everybody had airport protocol down and I didn’t realize it. And I get called late in the afternoon. I called his daughter, Jodie. And I said, Jodie, how’s dad doing your dad do. He said, didn’t, you know, he’s been in the airport 13 hours since you dropped him off.
MVH (10:32):
Excuse me, I get goosebumps telling you that. Could I go, what did I do wrong? Didn’t you know, the dad was dragged through the airport, by his wife, Priscilla, who is a love. We just adored both of them, but here’s a guy with a photographic memory. Here’s a guy, who’s got everything going, right. And so I wrote in this story, seven things you could have done. He could have asked me, I would have taken it to the gate. Right? I know protocols out. He could have asked to purple coat at our airport. We have purple coats to help you enter. There are 24 7 all kinds of stuff he could have done, but instead he sent messages, playing and ended up getting pneumonia and dying a little bit after it, it just, to me, it’s heart wrenching because I’ve got excuses. I can’t do it because I’m black. I’m too tall. I’m too short. I’m I got white supremacy problem. I got blah, blah, blah. You can have anything you want. There’s an excuse. But you got excuses in life where you got results and I’ve chosen and crystals chosen to have results. And we want everyone to go for positive, happy, healthy party. Well-Being results that manifest and source everyone and hurt Noah.
RV (11:34):
Huh. Yeah. You know, when you were talking crystal, this is so interesting. When you, you said this, I’ve never heard somebody referenced like a study about how if you ask people, you know, are like 80% more likely to help you. But if you don’t ask, they don’t just insert themselves. And that’s me, like, I never offer unsolicited advice to anybody. Like, it’s one of my rules. Like, but if somebody asks me, I’m like, oh yeah, I can, I can tell you how to become a New York times bestseller. I could tell you how to, you know, do you know, build a speaking career. I can tell you like all these things, but if, if no one asked me, I never just say, Hey, did you think about doing this? And now I’m realizing in my own life, how many times have I walked past someone who knows like the back of their hand, exactly what to do that could help me. And I never, I just, I missed it because I didn’t stop and ask them.
CDH (12:28):
Right. It’s such a good question. And it’s true. We don’t, as human beings, we will not impose ourselves upon someone else. Unless I ask now what you just said about walking past someone that really goes to the naivete roadblock. And that’s a really important one for people. And we don’t realize it. I tell the story in the book of our Filipino helper, who we, my girls were born 16 months apart. She’d come every day and help us and cook these amazing meals. And one day she shows up with this fruit and cut it up on a plate and hands it to me, this juicy orange fruit and I bit into it. Milda what is this? This is phenomenal. She goes, it’s mango. And I go mango, where did you get mango? I’m thinking she imported it from the Philippines. Right? She goes, I got it at the grocery store.
CDH (13:13):
And I’m like, these are the grocery store. How did I not know the best fruit in the world? I thought I was so worldly. You know, I traveled all over the world. I’ve been to Europe somehow. I missed the mangoes, but it made me think about what you’re just talking about. How many times do I pass by some person that could really be my greatest advocate and my next best friend or someone whom I could help with something. Right. And I don’t even wonder, I’m not even curious about that person or that opportunity or that business or that thing. It’s just because I’m naive. I don’t I’m so I’m naive. I grew up in, in Idaho where we have a lot of potatoes, but no mangoes. So part of our, that is one of the huge roadblocks is just our own naivete. We’re in our own little box, in our own little subjective experience.
CDH (13:59):
So it’s important to come out of that. And I have a tendency to be more curious. It’s part of that asking journey, wonder curiosity, inquiring about things, looking at people and experiences and opportunities with more questions in our minds, right? What is that? Who is that? I wonder what they do. I wonder what, what, you know, nuggets they might share. I wonder what wisdom they might have. Every person you encounter could be something or someone very important to your journey. But we get stuck in our lane and as entrepreneurs, we’re like, no, I’ve got my to-do list. I need to do this, this, this, we could be missing the greatest thing. So it’s important to look at that, that curiosity piece is something we talk about at the beginning of the book, because you know, as children, we come into this world as these kind of uncorrupted askers, right?
CDH (14:54):
We want to know everything we want to know. Cool. When, where, why, how right. And we’re also not afraid to ask for what we want. We’re not pretty much not afraid to ask for anything. And then depending on how we were parented, you know, stop asking so many questions, I’m tired of hearing from you, you know, or just what happened in our school years. You know, we got rejected by friends or the teachers said, stop basking, put your hand down. I haven’t called on you. You know, and your business experiences, your, your ideas and opinions. Aren’t valued. You start to shut down, you start to shut down and shut down and shut down. And that beautiful inborn, natural ability to ask it’s crushed out of us. And until we realize that that’s happened and look at our own roadblocks and, and start to open up our awareness and determined that we’re going to get rid of those roadblocks and rekindle that inside of ourselves, things won’t change for us.
CDH (15:47):
We have to use this ability to ask to move ourselves forward in life. That’s why we, you know, the subtitle of our book is the bridge from your dreams to your destiny, because we all come into this life like seated with these, these abilities, this innate ability and, and the things that we’re supposed to do. And then, you know, until we start, if, if we don’t keep asking and keep moving forward on that bridge, we’ll get shut down. We’ll get detoured. And so this journey into what mark and I call becoming a master asker is, is one of the most important journeys you’ll take in your overall success in life. And that’s not just for your career. It’s for your health and wellness for your relationships. The same thing applies relationships, get shut down because we’re not asking the right questions of ourselves. Remember it’s the three channels through which task, ask yourself, ask others and ask God. And I’d like to go into the, ask yourself part a little bit more to where I, because that’s really important.
RV (16:48):
Sure. Well, yeah, so I mean, I, I, I want to hear about that. And I also, as I’m looking at these, these seven roadblocks to asking again, and you talk about unworthiness, naivety, doubt, excuses, fear, pattern, paralysis, and disconnection. The, as I look at my own life, I think Mo the one that affects me the most is, is that I guess would be under fear. I fear imposing on other people. I mean, there’s a part of it. I certainly fear rejection. Right. But it’s more of like, even that it’s more like, I fear making someone uncomfortable for hat, for them having to reject me, like, even that is a burden to carry or that you know, why, why should they go out of their way to, to, you know, to have to help me. So in the spirit of free coaching live on the podcast, what would you tell Rory Vaden who struggles with that, that portion of, of, of this. And is there something I need to be asking myself to what you’re saying crystal about like, why I have that road,
CDH (17:55):
Right. So if you think about what you’re actually doing, Rora, you’re replaying your past. Okay. Cause you’re imagining that you’re, you’re imposing on somebody. You’re, you’re imagining that it’s going to bother them. So that’s probably coming from something that happened in your past where, you know, you felt like you bothered somebody or somebody shut you down or something, because honestly, if you think about it, you have no idea what they’re really going to feel, think, or, or say or believe about, about what you’re requesting. But it’s almost like at some level of your subconscious mind, you’ve already pictured the outcome. And so, you know, in the world of quantum physics, right, what we imagine is what we get truly. I mean, quantum physics summed up in one sentence is what you expect is what you’re going to get. If you want to know what you’re thinking right now, if you want to know what your thought programming is right now, look around at your life.
CDH (18:51):
That is the evidence, that’s the residue of what your actual thought programming is. And so you might go, Hey, I kind of liked my life, but I’d like to, these are the things I could improve on. So I have more work to do, or I might go, oh my gosh, really? Is this what I’m creating? Is this what’s going on inside of my mind? Because it is. And it goes on at the subconscious level. So you really have to start with that clean slate and start asking yourself, there are all kinds of questions in the book, you know the holding up the mirror questions, but it’s really starting. We say there are three critical phases of asking yourself to really start doing the self examination. And that is where am I now? So it’s really like looking at your life and saying, what do I have here? Do I like it? Is it working? What’s missing. Where am I at? Where am I?
CDH (19:40):
Where am I right now in my life? Like, where am I now in my life? Is it good? Is it, do I like it? Is that what I wanted to create? Start examining that all the little sub questions that comment or come under that, where am I right now in my life? And do I like it? Or do I want something different? Then the second phase, right, is where do I want to be in my greatest nth degree of my greatest career? My greatest ends degree of my greatest relationships, right? This is where you have to unleash your dreams, because if you’re just imagining little things, you know, mediocre things that that’s what you’re going to get. So you have to let yourself go into that place. Like where do I really want to be in my life right now? You know? And, and obviously things happen on this planet in a little bit of a delay, which is good because it gives you time to really sculpt your leg. But ask those questions from, from your imagination, imagine yourself on the stage of your mind and say, you know, who do I want to be in my greatest career? And then ask those questions backwards. Like, who am I talking to everyday? How are they responding? What services and products and I sharing and why are people, why do they like them? Why do they like what I’m sharing? What is it about?
RV (20:54):
So scary. Like, I don’t know why, but it’s like, it’s so scary to even sit there in silence with no one else around to even to even acknowledge that this is what I would want for my life. Like, and there’s a line that you say in the book and this is like another fear, I think. Cause you know, like for the most part I look around my life, me and AIG, we’ve built everything together and I go our lives pretty freaking awesome. And it is everything I imagined and it came a lot faster than I thought it would. But then it almost is like, I, you know, I think I’ve kind of stopped doing this to some extent. It’s kind of like I did this for a long time and part of it is going, it’s like, you know, what else do I need more?
RV (21:41):
But, but this is what you wrote. It said the perfection of our being causes us to want things or move at an even higher experience of life. We’re always evolving and wanting more want is a spirit jabbing you in the consciousness to move you to a better place, a higher level of expression. We always want more than what we’ve got. This isn’t necessarily just to have it, but to experience the growth within ourselves, we’re created to expand and grow. But it’s so scary, like to sit there and go, I actually want like to even dream and imagine this is terrifying.
MVH (22:20):
So, so let me talk to that. First of all, we’re saying by the end of the book, that same thing, you’re not a human being, you’re a human becoming. And what you said is that at some levels, I’m just reiterating back to you as I’ve heard it, that you sort of plateaued out because you dreamt it, you achieved it, achieved it faster than you thought you would. What we’re saying is you got it. Remember three things, ask yourself, ask others, ask God. And when you’re asking yourself, it’s a little, it’s a little sense of self that’s, stifling and Steichen is stopping it. So when you’ve got to go to this God who God sends us out and say, Hey, wait a second. If I Rory was doing my absolute slam dunk best, how am I going to positively affect this many people over this amount of time?
MVH (23:03):
And the question we have at the end of the book from, from a friend of ours, you know, Dr. Peter Diamandis, who’s wonderful. He’s got his own accolades, but he said, what are you going to do positively do affect 1 billion people during this decade. And that’s a giant question, but once you do it, like we’re going to sell, I will blow past a billion books, ask the bridge from your dreams, your destiny, cause Ron schedule. And we’re doing more than anyone ever thought we could do. And they said, nobody could do that. And I got a lot of critics, but the point we’re saying about this book, because now we’ve had it out a while, is it everyone that’s getting it? It has super successful fathers. Read it and go, they wake up the wife and say, you got to read this first story, fable and McKayla.
MVH (23:40):
And then they read it to their teenage kid or other teenage kid read it. So what we’ve discovered, don’t get one of these books, ask the bridge from your dreams. You’re definitely get two and go over it with your spouse or spouse equivalent, your mastermind partner, your business partner, your church, Harper, temple, Afro mosque partner, whoever it is. And you’re going to break through because everyone needs a mastermind partner for those who are watching one and one equals power of 11. And this is what Christ said, the kingdom of heaven is within and go out. Two of you can accomplish it. One of you can move a thousand. Two of you can move 10,000. Well, what if we really have that mind using God’s mind looking at our thing, then we’re invincible. In this story we have, as you know, is, is I studied in India as you know, and mother Theresa picks up this untouchable who had leprosy.
MVH (24:32):
And so Christ in his eyes went to the head of the Archbishop and said, I’m going to start. The ladies of charity said, how much you got, you said three sentences. You can’t do that. So no we’ve gotten 3 cents. I can do anything. And obviously she did monstrously, powerful, wonderful, impactful things. And what I’m saying to you and everyone listening, every author, we, all those of us that can think there’s only a few percentage. What we need to do is help the other 4 billion people that aren’t in the equation out of 8 billion people. And you have to monster challenge. What we’re saying. The only tool that works is ask God gave human beings. Only three things you gave is curiosity. And the ability to ask an imagination, to transcend our limitation and, and have new materialization. If that’s what we want.
RV (25:16):
I mean, it’s funny how, you know, the, there’s such a connection to the divine here, right? Because if you go, if you believe, if I just believe in myself, then it seems like, oh, this thing that I’m dreaming of is so impossible so far away. And like, my life is definitely evidence of that. Like from where I started as a kid to right now is like, it would, there’s no way, like it’s so far, but you go, but it’s nothing for God. Like it’s easy. Like it’s not, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s a snap of a finger. And, and yet the doubt that we experience, I think is so connected to we’re placing that trust inside of ourself and evaluating our ask compared to what we’re capable of versus the ask compared to what God’s capable of and like the divine calling on our life, which is, you know, you write a lot about that and kind of filing your calling and, and live in your, your your purpose.
RV (26:13):
So, so one great thing is it’s funny because we haven’t really talked about the authors and speakers at all through this whole conversation. Mostly I’ve used this, this as a chance for free coaching, which I don’t apologize for. But they for people who have the dream of, you know, writing a book that sells a million copies, or, you know, in your case, you’re, you’re aiming at a billion copies now and you’ve sold 500 million. So like what are some of the things that you think that authors and speakers and entrepreneurs, you know, this is anyone professional service providers. You know, people who listen to our show executives, they’re, they’re usually like driven individuals. They’re, they’re what we call mission-driven messengers. That’s our audience. What are some of the things you think they need to, to really ask for or prepare themselves for, to, to access that calling inside of their life?
MVH (27:14):
So three things. One is I love him to get a copy of asks. So they start asking themselves bigger, better, stronger, healthier questions. Number two is I finished a book called you have a book and you’re not liking to read it in three is I’d like them to go to they can go to reception of mark, Victor Hansen. If they come to us, we want everyone to write a book. If they’ve written a book, we want to help them sell that book and market it. And we’ve got a multiplicity of ways. We’ve got everything from, you know, 12 videos online at, at Hansen institute.com to if they can’t write in 95% of people can’t write something. Anyone wants to read. We will go with them at mark Victor Hansen library, which is a brand new company we’ve just started. That is, that’s why we say good reception of work, the grants.com because we don’t need another website up for another couple of weeks, but we are going to help everybody catapult themselves to greatness because we’re finding markets. Most people can’t see their market for, you know, I was doing up to 250 talks a year. So I respectfully understand it. I see markets, nobody else sees, and there are more markets now than ever before. And we’ve got to go in crystal. I’d like to have her add to that.
CDH (28:21):
Well, I would just say for everybody, it all starts with a vision. So whatever you’re doing is going to have to start with the vision. And the more clear you get about your vision, the better it’s going to be, the more you’re going to manifest that vision. And the only way to get clear with your own vision is to spend time with yourself. It’s that ask yourself part, because that is the reflective journey, right? So sitting with yourself, asking, you know, where am I now? Where do I want to be? And what specific action steps do I need to take to get there? Because as you start asking yourself, and then you start to sculpt your own vision and your sculpt, your vision, you start with your vision, but then you sculpt your vision by asking the right questions. You know, what does it look like?
CDH (29:04):
What does it feel like? What am I doing? And all of a sudden you get a really clear, beautiful sculpted vision of what you want. And then when you start to get that, you’re going to start to get ideas. You’re going to start to think of a plan that you never thought of before, because here’s the other part of the science story. When you ask yourself a question, a different part of your brain lights up, and it’s the part of your brain that does critical thinking. Okay. So all of a sudden, just by asking yourself the right questions, you’re suddenly your brain is a better resource to you. Okay? So it goes to work for you. And the minute your brain goes to work on the visions, then start to connect at the quantum level. Okay? Because people don’t realize this, but your energy light field is, goes like three meters beyond you.
CDH (29:51):
And it, especially, it gets bigger when you’re envisioning something with a positive emotion. So the more you can envision and sculpture vision with a positive emotion feel what it feels like when you’re already that person be that person before you’re that person in the real world, right? Because your energy field gets bigger. And all of a sudden the quantum field starts to connect this isn’t whoop. This is absolute proven science. And it’s really actually where science is now meeting spirituality. It’s the sciences, meaning everything. Jesus talked about. The, you know, the kingdom of heaven is within all of the things, all of these scriptures you know, it’s basically you get to create the life you want. You’re created in the creator’s image. What does that mean? You are, you are created to create things. And we do that starting with our imagination and our emotional energy, the emotional energy is important.
CDH (30:46):
So it’s just very important to get quiet with yourself. Use this book as a guide. It will really, really help you. And more questions will come to you in sculpting your vision and really taking it forward. You will. I know I’m excited. I get excited for people because of the feedback that we get. I mean, it’s really life changing and the fable of McKayla that mark just mentioned. It’s really every woman in every man’s story because it’s, it’s a fictional story that, that I ended up writing mark and I were going to go back and forth on it. And I just started writing and it just flowed out of me cause I’m McKayla has these dreams. And I I’ve been blessed not to have these like dreams that have really guided me in my life. So I kind of, you know, made McKayla’s dreams a little bit similar to some of the dreams I’ve had, but anyhow, she gets guidance.
CDH (31:34):
She’s, McKayla’s basically lost everything. Her, her life every day is about moving heavy rocks from one place to another, literally. And then she has this dream she’s taken up by this being and he admonishes her to ask and never stop asking and little by little as she starts to wonder as she starts to look around her miserable life. Start to wonder, start to be curious, start to inquire, start to ask about people. Start to ask questions of people. Start to ask questions of herself. Her life changes 180 degrees by the end of her story is a completely different person, living a completely different life. And that is exactly what can happen to every single person. Listening. If you’re willing to take that inner journey and start asking,
RV (32:26):
I love it. Well, we will put a link to those URLs that you’ve mentioned. Mark. Obviously we’ll link up to the book again. We want to get in is called ask the bridge from your dreams to your destiny. You’ve been listening to mark Victor Hansen and Dwyer Hanson. One last question, just curious, who asked who on the first date between the two of you?
MVH (32:50):
Great long story. And I don’t know, we have time, but it was great. I was at Walker one-on-one. Her mother had sent her there. We were in a BIP room and I had a throng of people around me and somebody spilled red wine on her white pants. I rushed over to her, grabbed her hand and said, I know exactly where the club soda is. Let me take you there. And then I asked her, I said, look, it’s about nine 30 at night. It’s a little late. But if you don’t mind, if you’re hungry and she’s, I haven’t eaten. I said, me either, I got to take you off property because a thousand people that are here want to have two minutes of my time and we won’t get to talk. So I took her to the best restaurant in Hollywood and there was like 50 people lined up and I go, oh my gosh, I’m never going to get in with a hundred dollars bill.
MVH (33:29):
This isn’t going to work. So we walked up and because for those of you just listening and not getting to view, I’m sorry, but my wife has a radiant beauty. And she, her, she just emanates out wisdom and the guy looks at her and says, okay, who is she thinking? She’s a movie star and cause reteach questions. I always answer a question with a question. Everyone listening knows that. I say you don’t recognize her now is mine’s steroids. And I’m just goofing with a guy. The guy says, okay, I give up who is she? I said, now we’re Danish descent. Each of us. I said, my parents came from Denmark and said I give up who is she? I said, goofy goofing. I said, she’s a queen of Denmark. He said, no, she’s not negative. Oh my God. She is. And he asked the question, who are you?
MVH (34:13):
I said, well, who travels with the queen? Oh my God, you’re the king. Hold on one second. And then like that, we had a table. And not only that, we had the best table, 50 feet away. We get right in there and we have the top chef serving us. And we just felt indefatigably in love. I mean, we just resonated. I mean, I wrote it, but I had written 267 things I needed in my, be a woman. He attributes the characteristics or qualities of values or virtues. And I said, you never cross it out. I got the milk, eggs and butter. You write down victory in purple. And before we got married, I never pulled her what all those were, but she hit all of them. It’d be monogamous. We had to have exactly the same value spiritual. And she had to want to travel with me if we each had kids, which we did, our kids had to love each other. And, and you know, it’s going to be an eternal match. And it, we were two hearts and became one soul that it went from soulmate to twin flames. So it’s like I told you a second ago, it’s a long story, but it has been a more magnificent journey than I could ever have imagined.
RV (35:14):
Yeah. Well, that’s so great. And it is such a powerful book and a powerful concept. It’s really causes you to stop and reflect in a really deep way. And thank you for your time. We wish you the best. Everyone listening, go out and ask and you shall receive. Thank you so much, guys.
MVH (35:33):
Thanks for your loved every minute.

Ep 218: Optimizing Your Amazon Book Sales with Naren Aryal

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):
Well the man you’re about to meet was introduced to me by a good friend, a trusted long-time friend. And then I just found out that Naren and I are both DU alumni. So we both went to the university of Denver and his name is Naren Aryal and he is the CEO of a company called amplify publishing and also mascot books, which are hybrid publishers. They do a lot in the nonfiction space and we’re going to talk about what hybrid publishing is and when does it make sense for people and you know, just kind of like how it works, but Naren is someone that we’ve started recommending to our clients if, if they are in the space of looking for kind of like hybrid publishing, but he’s got degrees obviously from the university of Denver, but also from Virginia tech. And he, it’s just really cool to that. He’s also a lawyers by, you know, so he’s got that training and background and he’s the author of a book called how to sell a crap load of books. So that is something that we all care about and there, and I had a conversation a while back and we started diving into some Amazon stuff that he was sharing with me that I had never heard before that I thought was super fascinating. So anyways, Naren welcome to the show. Hey,
NA (02:09):
Thank you, Rory. Great to be here. And yes, my book is how to sell a crap load of books and it underscores the importance of a, a catchy title. So there you have it. Yeah.
RV (02:20):
Yeah. Well, so I want to start with the conversation about hybrid publishing and what is that exactly? Cause I think when people think of publishing, they understand traditional publishing and like, okay, you know, literary agents and book deals and flying to New York and, you know, Simon and Schuster and penguin random house. And there’s that. And then they also understand self publishing, which is you go Amazon create space or whatever, or just like printing a book off at Kinko’s and you know, you’re an author, what is hybrid publishing and how is it kind of different from those two things?
NA (02:57):
Great question. So hybrid publishing is a hybrid between the two options that you just mentioned. And specifically what that means is we create and there are other companies that do this other than amplify. We create books that are on par in terms of editorial quality and book packaging, and provide our authors the experience that they would otherwise get from a large publishing house in terms of marketing and distribution under a slightly different model maybe not slightly the model is, are authors contribute to production related costs, but in exchange the author since they’re contributing to production related costs get the lion’s share of royalty split. So in our case, it’s 85% to the author and 15% to us as a distribution fee, which is typically just inverted from the splits that you’ll see at a large traditional house.
RV (03:57):
Yeah, so the author’s keeping 85%. You guys are getting 15%, which has a pretty spot on with the inverse of how it would work with traditional, but then they’re covering some costs out of pocket upfront where you wouldn’t normally have that with a traditional publishing. So they’re just covering the cost of like getting the manuscript edited, getting it printed, like what are all the, what are the costs here that we’re talking about?
NA (04:21):
Sure. So the costs are editorial. So sometimes we’ll work with folks that need a ghostwriter. Sometimes we’ll work with folks that give us a fully edited manuscript. So there’s editorial, anything from, or I needed coaching to various levels of editing to proofreading. So editorial is one bucket and then the other bucket is design related. So cover design, interior design. And then the other piece of it is production publishing related costs. So, you know printing of books we do eBooks and we do audio books. And then the last piece of it is warehousing and distribution. So you know, we, we have a fulfillment center from which where we ship books to retailers, invoice them collect. So the author doesn’t have to really worry themselves about that piece of it. And I said the last one, but there’s, there’s one other, we also offer a host of marketing book, launch, author platform development related services, and those are on a LA carte basis because, you know, some folks have PR folks that they’ve worked with before, some people have a social media or a website developers.
NA (05:34):
So whatever the project requires, we can sort of backfill and offer those services as well.
RV (05:40):
Got it. Yeah. Well that, even that in and of itself is pretty educational just to be just even knowing, like, what does it take to write a book? You got editorial design publishing, warehousing and distribution marketing, and then you know, in like platform development. And I think a lot of people don’t even realize those are like the big buckets. And so then and then now with hybrid publishing, you’re saying that you can get some of the kinds of things. Like, I, I think, you know, when you think of self publishing, obviously you’re covering all the costs, you’re keeping all the royalties. But you also are not getting any of the distribution. Like you almost never see a self published book on an, a, on an airport bookstand or in, you know, Barnes and noble or, you know, featured on I mean it never, almost always never on a bestseller list or something even because they’re not like index properly. So talk to us about how does distribution work and why do you need a hybrid publisher or a traditional publisher to do that? Like, why doesn’t that happen with self published books and sort of what’s the advantage of having that kind of distribution?
NA (06:53):
Yeah. So let me say this first about self publishing. I’m a big fan of self publishing today more than ever authors are successful at self publishing. The problem is today more than ever authors are self-publishing. So there’s just a glut of content out there, and it’s just very difficult to get any sort of traction in terms of a marketing and distribution specific to your question about distribution. Most self-publishing authors go by means called print on demand. So if a retailer is interested in a book and they learned that it’s print on demand they just won’t carry it. That’s just the bottom line. And so we don’t do print on demand. We publish some number of books, print, some number of books, and we use the distributors that Barnes and noble for example, uses to get stock into their store.
NA (07:42):
And we do so under you know, terms that are per industry standard. So for example, you know, we use Ingram as one of our distributors. Everyone knows Ingram. And if a Barnes and noble wants to bring in a book, they’ll go look at Ingram’s database and they’ll see, oh yeah, we can get it directly from anger. Might have to go through a publisher and author. It just makes makes it easier. There’s less resistance to going through normal channels. And, and that’s, you know, that’s the advantage of working through somebody like us is we’ve got those channels established. We got relationships with book buyers and you know, our books are, as they say, sold, wherever books are sold. You know, just because you may have a deal with a large publishing house, you know, the chances are shelf space is still limited and it’s growing more limited by the month. And so, you know, you just have to be creative in terms of where your book is being seen by your potential readers. And, and we really try to have a strategy for each and every title that we work on to soy.
RV (08:45):
And when you say book buyers, okay. So you say there’s relationships with the distributors like Ingram, which makes, which makes sense to me to go, okay. If, if I hope if I have a bookstore, whether it’s Amazon or Books-A-Million, or it’s a local bookstore, it’s just easier for me to source all the titles. I want to carry in my store from one place versus 50 or a hundred different places. So that’s, that makes sense as to go, okay, I go to Ingram and say, Hey, these are the titles I want, or we’re selling books in these kinds of categories. Can we, what do you have in that category? W when you say the term book buyer, that’s a funny term who are you talking about when you say we have relationship with book buyers?
NA (09:29):
So places like Barnes and noble, you know, they have buyers for specific categories. And, and so if you can, you know, get your book in front of those buyers. Sure. It would, it’s available via Ingram, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily going to get consideration. So if you can somehow get your book in front of a a person that is making a buying decision that’s always better than not. There’s no guarantees that that will result in your book being at Barnes and noble coast to coast from day one, that’s unlikely. But it definitely does help the odds.
RV (10:01):
Yeah. So in other words, you know, the contacts at these places, Books-A-Million Hudson, whatever, like whoever like Eve the, the bookstores and then independent, even independent bookstores.
NA (10:17):
Yeah. We’ve been doing this a long time. So this is our 19th year in business. So, you know, you just get to know folks, right? I mean, you mentioned Hudson news. We have two, three books there right now on the, in the airport market that that’s a little different in that it’s a pay to play it’s, co-op marketing dollars that, that we need to spend, but, you know, we know those folks and we also know, you know, the, the, the iconic, independent bookstores across the country as well. You know, those help, if you got, have a good content that is going to drive traffic into a store that’s a prerequisite, but having those relationships really helps as well.
RV (10:57):
And so you’re just helping, you’re helping the books that you publish, like your authors actually get Barnes and noble to say, yeah, I want to carry that, that title at our store on our website. And that’s what you’re talking about. If you’re self published author, your book probably isn’t even carried by Ingram. And if it is, there’s nobody at Ingram calling on, Books-A-Million saying, Hey, you should put X number of, of these copies in your inventory.
NA (11:25):
Yeah, that’s right. And I don’t want to make it seem like it’s easy because there are far more books being published than there is a space. It’s not easy, but there, it’s more likely if you, if you have a partner that has some relationship.
RV (11:43):
Yeah. Okay. Of course. Yeah. So I love that that’s super helpful. I just, I think, you know, I noticed that people like you are in the industry, almost like for someone who’s not in the industry, we don’t even understand like the basic flow of like how these things work and all the different people that are involved in the supply chain of actually getting a book on a shelf. So that’s, that’s super helpful. Now, one of the things that’s fascinating to me is whether you’re a traditionally published author which we have been twice, like our two biggest books were both traditionally published, but a lot of people don’t know this. We also are self published author early in our career. We really several self published titles. And then what y’all do is hybrid publishing one of the places or at the end of the day, no matter how you publish, a lot of the sales are coming through Amazon. And in most cases, and you were sharing some ideas with me about things that you can do to kind of optimize your, your books representation, or, you know, just presentation on, on Amazon, which I think applies whether you’re self hybrid or traditionally published. Yeah,
NA (12:58):
For sure. It’s critical.
RV (13:00):
So, so can you talk us through some of those just ideas of like cause like for me I’ve never even like paid attention to it really. I just kind of let my publisher throw up whatever they throw up there. And I’m not even sure how much access or control I have. I know that some of our brand builders group clients, you know, when they self publish, they got full control to go in there and like change, copy and do different things. What are, what are some of the biggest things that authors should be paying attention to in terms of optimizing their Amazon profile?
NA (13:31):
Yeah. Great question. So it really is a sales pitch opportunity. Getting somebody to your Amazon book page is important. That doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to convert that somebody into a buyer. And so there’s some things that you can do to increase the likelihood of that happening. First you mentioned copy you know, you have to write to your potential reader, you have to write copy that is going to make your potential reader hit that little buy now button. So clear and concise copy need to speak to why this is important for your target audience. If you have testimonials, you should put them in the copy. And then, so that’s on the, on the copy. There’s some beyond that. We like to really spend a lot of time thinking about the categories where the book appears.
NA (14:22):
And there’s a real science to that. So, you know, Amazon will give you a three for hardcovers three categories, and these are genres sub-genres sub sub genres. And so what we like to do is come up with two that makes sense that are closely aligned to the book’s content. And then we like to come up with a third one that is you know, maybe somewhat ever reach in terms of the alignment between the books, content and the category. And we do it, we did that with the third because maybe it’s less competitive. So you just have to keep in mind how many titles there are, and I’ll give you an example, right? We have done many, many leadership books or know presently. We’re doing a lot of diversity and inclusion titles. So some of those categories are just filled right now with some, you know, big titles.
NA (15:11):
And so, you know, your ability to get to rise on the best seller list on those subcategories is just a little bit harder. Whereas if you pick a third that is less crowded you know, your likelihood of getting a orange or yellow ribbon that says Amazon bestseller is increased. So those are some things to keep in mind in terms of the listing itself. And then the other thing that you and I talked about is Amazon ad words Amazon ad words are a fantastic tool. I will say that generally advertising for a book is not something that works. And, you know, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll routinely talk to older authors who recall advertising in the classifieds in the New York times, for example, and, and they’ll say how effective that was. And so that doesn’t work of course today. But what does work is advertising on Amazon? And so there’s a couple of suggestions that we’ve got in terms of Amazon clicks pay-per-click campaigns. So,
RV (16:11):
So, so basically what you’re saying is Amazon has its own self-contained universe for running ads just throughout their website. Their banner ads have images of their various products, similar, similar to how a Facebook has its own ecosystem for that Facebook and Instagram, and similar to how Google ad words would have like Google and YouTube areas. Amazon has its own. Amazon is its own universe for running ads, and you can just buy that placement.
NA (16:42):
Yeah, that’s right. And so how it works is two ways people go on on Amazon and search for books, right? And so let’s say you have a book on leadership or remote work. This this is applicable to a project that we’re doing right now. We do a lot of post pandemic, remote leadership type books. And so if you go on Amazon right now and type in, you know managing remotely it’s likely that one or two of our books will show up as books that follow into the guidelines that you’ve typed in. So that’s one way, and you’d be surprised how effective this is. The other way is let’s say there’s a remote leadership bestseller national bestseller, and we know the title. And so what we could do is we, if we have some book that is in a similar category, we will use book a and by that search term. So when somebody buys book a, they’ll see our book B as a suggested a title that they might like, because they’ve demonstrated an interest in the subject matter.
RV (17:49):
Interesting. And you’re saying, you’ll buy the same title of book a or just the term,
NA (17:55):
No, we’ll buy the w we’ll buy the title of okay. As a comp title. So anytime somebody buys book a, because we know bill K and we think that the readers of book a would be interested in, in our book B we’ll buy the title.
RV (18:10):
Interesting. Yeah. So then yours would show up kind of above, and then they’re directly underneath, and then Amazon searches to see those sales kind of track together. And so it’ll start to organically, like recommend people who bought people who bought this book, also bought this other book.
NA (18:25):
That’s right. That’s right. And so particularly with non-fiction titles particularly with thought leadership titles this is an effective way to, to advertise and, and the analytics you get from Amazon are fantastic. They’ll say you spent $200 on this campaign. It directly resulted in, you know, $350 in sales.
RV (18:49):
Hm. Yeah. And that is that part of your Amazon author page that you see that like in author central, is that where you do that?
NA (18:59):
We have we have a Amazon account where all of our authors are in our authors do have Amazon central or author’s page. But we do it from our overreaching account.
RV (19:11):
Okay. But if you, so if you theoretically wanted to do this yourself, you just have to whatever search on how to start an Amazon addict, Amazon ad account, and then you, whatever you go in there and you have to input some creative and a headline. And how much does it cost for a click? I mean, I know it’s all over the board, but is it, is this a dollar, a click? Is it $10 a click?
NA (19:31):
It’s pretty cheap. It’s surprisingly cheap. So you know, any, anything from two to $10 a clip.
RV (19:39):
Okay. and, and that’s, that’s interesting. So, and then when they click that, do they go to your author page or do they go to the book? Page?
NA (19:52):
Book. Page.
RV (19:53):
Okay. And is that like a, when you’re talking about like writing the copy and the categories, that’s all focused on like the book page itself, not the author page. Correct. Okay. All right. I gotcha. So in terms of Amazon, are there any other obviously, so the category thing is interesting and there’s, I dunno if there’s got to be thousands of categories, maybe tens of thousands of categories. And so you guys are monitoring how competitive each category is, and then you’re making recommendation that, and that’s one advantage that you have with a hybrid publisher or self-publisher is you can actually, you get to choose which categories you want to index your book for in Amazon, right? Correct. Yeah. So that’s one thing we do not have that advantage, at least we haven’t or are the clients that we know of that have worked with publishers. They select that for you. So you don’t, you don’t have that. But the and then obviously, and then I’ll even the copy. Like you don’t have this, this is one of the things that’s really powerful. I think about hybrid publishing and self publishing is you just, you have more control in general. Like you get to decide what words you want to put on the back cover of your book or what words you want to use on your, on your Amazon page.
NA (21:15):
Yeah. And, and to that point I’ll just point out that you know, whether you self publish, go with the hybrid publishing company or you’re with a traditional house and, you know Rory, you know, this, the author must be engaged in marketing. And so some folks have this notion that if, if I get a traditional deal, I can just turn over the marketing to somebody else. It doesn’t work that way. So that should sort of factor into your thinking in terms of publishing pathways.
RV (21:45):
Yeah. Well, I’d like to what you’re saying, it’s like that one is a simple one, which is if you’re not willing to do the work don’t publish at all, like it, doesn’t it traditional publishers, aren’t going to do more marketing than that, a hybrid publisher. And obviously if you’re self publishing, there’s, there’s nobody else. There’s nobody else there to do it. Like it comes down to you. So I, you know, on that topic, Narren like what do you think are some of the big differences that separate the successful authors from the unsuccessful ones in terms of what they do to launch? I mean, obviously they have to be engaged. I think the idea of just going like, well, Hey, my book is up and, you know, I maybe hire a PR firm is one thing. But beyond that, what are some of the activities that you see the authors doing that are more controllable in terms of like directly driving the sales of their book?
NA (22:41):
Sure. So I think a baseline is you have to have fantastic content. You have to have good content that really resonates with your intended target market first. And so in order to have that, you have to really have an understanding of your target market. Many times I’ll hear from authors saying they’ve got a book that they that they’ve written and everyone will, everyone will love it. And so that’s when I immediately think to myself, great, you don’t know your target market because saying everyone is going to love it, that doesn’t work. So you have to do the work in terms of figuring out who you’re writing for and why they’re going to care. And then the other thing that I would say is it’s important to have, of course, as I just said, good content. But the book has to be a piece of a of a larger content plan, right?
NA (23:29):
It’s gotta be supporting your social media, your blogging, your op-eds your speaking, your consulting rarely is a book enough to persuade a person who has never heard of you to go out and buy your book. So those authors that understand that a book is a part of their overall platform and understand that it takes a lot of work to cultivate an audience and readership before the book actually comes out. Those are the ones that will reap the rewards of all that could flow from a positive and you know, a good book project.
RV (24:14):
Yeah,
NA (24:14):
Sounds simple. It sounds simple, but you know, you just kind of put in the work to gain trust of your potential readers and you know, have them invest time in you before you make an ask of of them to buy a book.
RV (24:30):
Yeah, yeah. That, and I think the there, there is a whole conversation there around just like building it out and there’s, I’ve heard different, I’ve heard different, different statistics on this before about like how many times somebody has to, has to hear your name before they actually buy something. But, you know, I’ve heard is like as high as 17 times, whereas like they have to see your name 17 times, whether it’s your social media feed in their inbox, you speaking at their event on someone else’s podcast on a local TV show, like, and they just have to like, hear your name and then they see you in Amazon. And they’re like, oh, you know what? I think this, this lady looks cool or this guy looks cool. I think I’m going to try this. I don’t know if you’ve, if you’ve heard any exact data on that, that’s always been, I’ve always heard just kind of very loosely cited statistics around that. But I do, I do very much agree with the concept that it’s like, you know just to what you said, rarely is it like, I’ve never heard of you. I see your book, I’m going to buy it. It’s usually more of like a culmination of, I’ve been hearing your name and now I see it and like, okay, I’m gonna, I’m going to give this a shot.
NA (25:47):
Culmination is a great word. And it’s fitting here because you’ve demonstrated that you are an expert in a particular field. You’ve introduced content that the potential purchaser finds worthwhile the potential purchaser has invested a time in your thoughts. And then at that point, you go in with your new book, just work.
RV (26:16):
Yep. Well, I love it. So y’all, if you ever want an introduction to narrow and I mentioned, so he’s one of our preferred Vitor providers here. You know, every author we work with is at different stages of their platform. You can always email us info at brand builders, group.com info at brand builders, group.com. We’ll gladly connect you directly to Narren. Of course you, you can find him in his company where, where do you want people to go near? And if they want find you directly.
NA (26:44):
Sure. If you go to amplify publishing.com, that is our thought leadership division, where we publish business political policy leadership type books, again, amplify publishing.com. And then we also have another imprint called the mascot books, [inaudible] books.com. And there we publish across various genres, everything from children’s titles to cookbooks to fiction. But I think, you know, most of your audience are in the brand building and thought leadership space. So amplify publishing probably would be a good source. You can feel free to email me. It’s Narren and a R E [email protected].
RV (27:27):
Yeah. You know, it’s interesting. We, we are mostly like, I would say in that thought leader space, but now they’ve been around a few years. We, we have some cookbook authors, we’ve got some diet books, we got some children’s books going on in there. And I actually would say among my circle of author friends, I feel like there is an a rising interest in doing children’s books that correspond with their business books. So they, they release a business book and then they’ll take that same, you know, core principle and they’ll make a kid’s book out of it, which I’ve always thought was interesting. I think my first book take the stairs would lend itself really well to that. And I was just like, maybe I should one day do a kids’ book, but anyways, that’s great. As always, you know, you can email us info at brand builders, group.com.
RV (28:12):
We can connect you directly as well. And Narren thank you for being here and thanks for what you do. I think you know, it’s, it’s, it’s really, really empowering to know there’s an option like you out there. I know for years early in our career, one of the biggest things that we struggled with was self publish or traditional publish. You know, and we have a, one of our courses is called bestseller launch plan, where we talk about all the steps that have to happen to like orchestrate a really great launch. And one of the stories that we talk about is just how much of a conundrum in this internal battle we were having between self-publishing and traditional publishing and hybrid offers offers you a lot of the best of both worlds. And so it’s, it’s a really, really good option. And so far we’re enjoying working with you and, and looking forward to having more of our clients go your way.
NA (29:03):
Well, this is fantastic. Enjoyed it. Thank you for the invitation and looking forward to working with a lot of reclined.
RV (29:12):
Awesome. We wish you the best.