Category: Podcast

Ep 116: Dynamic Speaking and Scaling Joy with Dan Thurmon

Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for tuning in to listen to this interview. We are so excited to bring you this information and wanted to let you know that, Hey, there’s no sales pitch coming. From anything that we do with this is all our value add to you and the community. However, if you are somebody who is looking for specific strategies on how to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and we offer a free call to everyone that’s interested in getting to know us and is willing to give us a chance to get to know them and share a little bit about what we do. So if you’re interested in taking us up on a free strategy call, you can do that at brand builders, group.com/summit. Call brand builders, group.com/summit. Call, hope to talk to you soon on with the show. Dan Thurman is one of the reasons why I almost gave up my career as a keynote speaker. He is extraordinary.

I mean he provides amazing content you know, just kind of like real, true thought leadership, but in the most acrobatic and entertaining way. And I use the word acrobatic because he does backflips. He juggles, he throws knives. He can do handstands on podiums, like and I know that most of you are listening to this, but if you don’t know this, we record all of these episodes as videos and we put them also on our YouTube channel. And you know, I don’t know for sure, but like, there’s probably going to be some elements because Dan is so visual that you, you may hear us reference and usual bit too to the visual and you might go check out our YouTube channel and you know, we’ll post we’ll post a link to that. But so Dan is incredible. I mean, he is a hall of fame speaker.

He’s also a former president of the national speakers association. I’ve known him for years. Although I wouldn’t say we’ve been like super close friends. We have the same friends that we’re super close to, and it’s not for any other reason than we just both been out there running a gun. And, but I mean, listen to his client list. Okay. So when I talk about the kind of work that he’s doing and the, the kind of companies that, that he is speaking to it’s extraordinary. So you’re talking about the Coca-Cola’s of the world bank of America, Proctor and gamble, Marriott Johnson and Johnson, Walmart crafts, state farm Honeywell. I mean, these are some of the world’s biggest and brightest companies that have brought him in to speak. The reason, not the only reason, but one of the reasons that I invited Dan to be here is because he has been around in the speaking world as a very successful speaker for a long time.

I mean, he was inducted into the hall of fame almost 10 years ago. So and he has also, you know, he spoke on the front lines in Iraq and Afghanistan. So he’s been around a long time, but he’s doing some incredibly innovative things. So he’s checks like all the kind of like classic marks, you know, he’s got a great book called off balance on purpose, but he’s doing some things. So first of all, on Tik talk, him and his teenage daughter, Maggie are like tick tock celebrities. They have multiple videos that have been viewed more than 30 million times. Their Tik TOK channel has over a million subscribers. And so it’s so innovative. And then one of the other things that he’s doing is the way that he has pivoted to his virtual live stream events is just extraordinary. And so we’re going to, we’re going to just talk about how to stay relevant in a kind of like COVID world as a speaker and all, all things. How do you get to be Dan Thurman except, you know, we’re not going to do pushup and handstand tutorials, I don’t think, but anyways, welcome to the show, Dan, glad to have you,

What an intro of Rory that is so amazing for your compliments. One quick update because things change quick, you know, that Maggie’s following on Tik TOK is now over 3 million. And so yeah, so things just keep growing and growing, man. It’s, it’s a lot of fun though.

I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s really crazy. Like, you know, and I’m serious about that. Like the first time I saw you keynote, I was like, why would someone hire me when they could hire this guy? It was like you know, I have that thought every week, not very often, but every once in a while I have that thought and I was just like, you know, that was it. And then, and then just seeing you guys crush it on social media is kind of the same thing. And I mean, you’re an entertainer. I think there’s a, there’s a big part of your background, right? Like you just been in entertainment, but so let’s talk about tech talk for a second. Since we can kind of dive in, what the heck, like, how do you get 3 million followers? Like why, what are you doing? Like, what is your strategy? Because most speakers, I think, a what a waste of time, and you guys are just crushing it. So like, what’s your mindset there a little over a year,

Year ago, like most people never heard of Tik TOK, but Maggie had. And so she got involved on the platform. She had a good background and foundation because for a year she had been in high school, a brand influencer and advocate for Hollister. She was hired on a team and a project to promote endorse, launched new products and things. They, they really educated her in many ways about social media and Instagram. It was really Instagram based on that platform in terms of how to work for for Hollister that ran its course and the program ended, but she already was quite marketing savvy, had grown her Instagram following a good bit and heard about Tik TOK got involved in, tic-tac had a couple of her videos that did well. And then she had a, she asked me, dad, do you want to do a dance together?

We did this dance that to a Fergie song that just went completely bonkers. We went to the gym to play racquetball. And by the time we got out of that session, it had over 300,000 likes or something stupid like that. And then it just kept going and going and going that elevated Maggie’s platform. And, and she continued to do her own thing, but the things that we did together, what was interesting is it became very much about our relationship. We have a very genuine, loving natural relationship which filled this need in Tik TOK. A lot of people responded saying, I wish I had that in my family. I wish my dad would do these kinds of things with me. And so in a very careful way, we’ve, we’ve managed her brand to she’s now in college, a freshman in college and envisions this as her career. Obviously I’m not going to be a part of that journey for her whole life. And so we we’ve grown the dad daughter stuff in dance and comedy. And of course the variety of skills that we do with juggling and acrobatics and unicycling and silks, and, and kind of found different ways to introduce all these skills.

And very quickly, I just have to say, like, you know, it’s a little bit frustrating that you like God was dishing out talents. And I think there was like a glitch in the system and just like dumped. I mean, you guys are incredible, like the dancing, the acrobatics, the juggling, I mean, that’s really, it’s really, it’s entertaining. It’s really entertainment, entertainment in the most pure sense.

It’s, it’s so fun. And it’s a part of who I am. It’s just by my language of my love languages, kinesthetic movement. I love to just do things, learn things, develop skills, always have. That’s kind of how I channeled my hyperactive energy. And now you and I are a lot, a lot the same. But as she got closer to college, what we began to do is, you know, obviously she’s branching out more with her own videos and her own skills. And, and now it’s probably like 90 10, like where she’s doing Mo mostly her content I’m involved in our channel here and there. We had a trip to LA last week to see some other influencers. And so we did some more together during that. I have my own tech talk where I only have like a half a million followers on mine, but but, but it’s, but I’m still thinking about Tik TOK relative to my brand, because this is gen Z. This is that next level audience. And what I’ve sort of learned is that they, they are very receptive to what I have to teach and to the way that I can teach it, it’s just a different vibe and a different connection. So I’ve been very careful and very fascinated by how I could develop that relationship, that relationship with a new, a new generation all over the world. And it’s extraordinary to wrap your mind around.

Yeah. So like talking about, thinking about the generations for a second, you know, we had Jason Dorsey on here just a few, a few episodes ago, talking about generation Z and all of their research and stuff, you know, on the one hand people kind of go, you know, how do you make money from tech talk other than like brand deals and stuff. But if you’re going to be like a speaker or an author or a, or a personal brand, and do you have some type of a monetization strategy or is it more of like, this is street credibility? Or is it more of like, these people one day will be the book buyers and the decision makers. And so I want to connect with them or do you just, or is it just like, I’m just there because it’s fun. And I think it’s fun to do, like, how do you approach that?

So I’m not trying to monetize it in any direct way. Although I have had speaking engagements that came in through Tik TOK or coaching relationships that started because people found me on Tik TOK, people who find me on Tik TOK, find me, go to my LinkedIn and see my business side. So, so it’s definitely feeding that pipeline. But so much of it, Rory is I know that something great is happening as a result because it’s pure and it’s, and it’s real. And, but my intention is only to give and to help. And if I can scale giving and helping and filling a need on this level, you know, that’s a type of success. I don’t even have to monetize. I would be, it would be so satisfying and wonderful to know that I, that I could contribute, especially now to a world where so many kids are facing depression and bullying and, and all this frustration.

And I’ve been challenged at early early ages to feel like they’ve got to have it all together when really they could, they don’t and they shouldn’t, and they can just be themselves and find themselves and they need joy. They need, they need, as Maggie’s tagline to her whole brand is go make someone smile, literally just go make someone smile. So there’s a lot of ways that you can make someone smile. And the best smile that we can have is when we appreciate ourselves and who we are. And so that’s really my intention with it is that yes, these will be perhaps future clients. It’s nice to have that brand elevated. It’s good to get recognized in Starbucks and in, by Jenny’s eaters, which, which happens regularly now. And, and it’s pretty bizarre cause it, it doesn’t matter where you are, right. It’s not geographic, it’s, it’s a, it’s a bigger type of celebrity, which I’m obviously not accustomed to, as a keynote speaker, I’m accustomed to going into the room. Nobody knows who you are. Right. Right. And then, and then when you’re done, you, everybody knows who you are and you get that like temporary celebrity. And then you can go back to the airport and blend in again and be completely anonymous. So it’s not that I’m super famous. I’m really not, but it’s, but it’s been fun to, to, you know, get recognized here and there.

Yeah. That’s amazing. I mean, I think I don’t want to skip over what you said there about, if you could just scale giving and helping at this kind of a magnitude, this sort of a level, that’s a success that you don’t have to monetize. And I feel like that mindset alone is the thing that ultimately is the cause and the source of the people who break through the wall, what we call breaking through the wall and sustain longterm, regardless of its Tik TOK or Instagram or email marketing or speaking or writing books. And just to like, hear you say that, you know, I want to ask you about some other stuff, but I don’t want to skip over that because that, that is such a big, a big moment. And that’ll probably be one of the biggest things that I take away from this, which I, I love,

It’s easy to say it’s, and we’ve always said that, that we’re in the business of giving and helping and serving, but, but, but really a huge part of our brain is always trying to work the revenue and work the business and grow the business and, and measure ourselves and compare ourselves to our competition by what we’re doing and how busy we are and how much we’re making. And so for me, the challenge of COVID was, you know, obviously the dates fell off the calendar and when you identify yourself as a speaker, who’s out there doing live engagements and there certainly are no, there’s no events, there’s no engagements, there’s no stages. There’s no audiences. Now we’re faced with the question, well, who are you now at? Or who are you really? And so very, very early on the shift became, I’m not sure how much money we’re going to make this year.

Yes, we’re going to, we’re going to pivot. We’re going to do our thing. We’re going to serve our clients. We’re going to grow our business, but let’s change that measurement to how many people can we help this year, because one, thing’s for sure in the supply and demand world point that the demand for our help and our services has never been higher. People need it more than ever. So if, even if it’s just giving it away, that’s what I want to do because I think it’d be interesting if we got hall of fame awards for the biggest impact that we made in the world. I pray, I certainly wouldn’t get one of those. But I I’d love to.

Yeah. And that’s, that’s such a great perspective. And social media gives you that ability to like, if you really want to change lives, like if it really has nothing to do with money, like turn on your camera and talk to the camera and change lives. Like there’s never been an easier way to, to, to access people. So I want to come back to the technical a little bit. What are you doing with reels? So now Instagram has released the reels functionality, which is basically like their answer or competitor of Tik talk, you know? Are you reposting the same videos to reels? Are you not yet paying attention to reels or like what’s yeah. What’s, what’s going on there.

Yeah. It’s not something on my radar right now. I I’m aware that it’s happening, but, but Maggie has I think it kind of told me that her generation kind of thinks it’s it’s not there yet in terms of what it could do and the capabilities you know, so, so that’s not something we’re doing. We are posting on Instagram and we’re posting on, IETV sort of my weekly coaching videos, which get a very modest impression. I think it’s, it’s nothing like the scalability of tick-tock for me. But I’d be very curious to know more.

What is your just for the purpose, what’s your Tik TOK handle and Maggie’s, do you mind throwing that out so that people,

So Maggie’s is Maggie Thurman, T H U R M O N. So just at M a G, G I E T H U R M O N. And and my, my ticket Tik TOK handle is actually Maggie’s dad one, two, three. So, so this, and this was a very early decision because I didn’t. So for me, what was happening with tick-tock was so special as a father and in our relationship. And I didn’t want to, in any way feel like I was trying to, you know, chase her clout and, and trade off of that in my own business. So I’m just, Maggie’s dad one, two, three, which is kind of funny. And it sticks because even though now I’m doing more of my own content on my channel, that origin story is still really special to both of us. But you know, all along, I really saw that as more our thing than my thing.

I love that that is really, really, really cool. So yeah. Okay, great. So we’ll put links to that. Maggie, Maggie Thurman at Maggie’s dad, one, two, three. So I love that. So you mentioned COVID here a while ago and the pivots, and I think most people are pretty aware of this. I mean, if for those of us that earned a large percentage of our ordinary income from getting on an airplane, flying to an event, being in front of hundreds of thousands of people coming in as a stranger, as you say, you know, delivering this whatever 60 or 90 minute performance slash teaching, and then COVID happens. And all of those events disappear. I mean, like literally all of them disappeared and almost literally overnight, they were gone. What so separate of this tick talk, social media thing, you also have done some amazing pivots with your, you know, what let’s call it, your corporate brand or your classic brand, or your classic message even down to the technology and the studio that you’re using. And again for you listening, you’re not going to have the benefit of this, but can I ask you to do a virtual tour for, so the people watching the video can literally see what you’re about to change rooms. Like, like just give us the, the tumor, if you, because when we jumped on here, you like stood up and walked to a different room and like the whole thing changed. So can you just give us like a virtual tour of your studio so people that can watch the video can see what’s happening here?

Absolutely. Okay. So the first thing to understand is my brand, which is that elevated experience. People hire me because they want more than just a speaker. They want mind, body, and spirit kind of all in connection. And my method of teaching is very physical, very, very visual. And so we realized early, we wanted a space where we could do that very well. So we have three different sets I’m currently sitting in the library, which is where we really get into that heart connection. More that spiritual connection, driving stories, home, closing points, that type of thing. But then we needed a physical space, which is right over here. So stepping just to my right, this is the stage, this is our action room.

Okay. And for those of you that aren’t seeing this, I have just, he stood up out of his chair, walked, I don’t know, three feet to the right. And the entire screen changed. And we went from looking at a library to now we’re still on a zoom meeting, but now I’m seeing a completely different backdrop with a podium and a teaching screen.

Right. So, so for example, you see the podium and you see my, my teaching screen. And you mentioned the book off balance on purpose. So in many ways I’ve been preparing for this moment this year and teaching in my contents, very, very congruent because we’re more off-balance than ever before. Moving through these changes with uncertainty, just kind of unfolding and forth in front of us for the foreseeable future. And so one of the ways I teach that here, I’m moving to the lectern is you know, this is like our foundations, which all of our foundations, how we work, we teach how we parent, how we eat, how we shop, all of it’s been rocked. And so the question is, how do you position yourself on top of uncertainty? Okay, here we go.

Going for it. This is crazy. He is vertical, complete handstand on top of a podium. This is so corroborate.

You got to see us. I’m not, I’m not balanced. I’m balancing, I’m making constant adjustments and corrections. And after all that effort, I’m still right here. So we just cut to a second camera, but here’s the message balance. Isn’t what you get balance is what you do this year is about developing the skills to make those adjustments in real time, even though your foundations are rocked and unstable, which you can do, if you bring a greater sense of purpose to the moment that you’re in and manage and use these skills, which we teach to help you leverage the positive aspects of uncertainty in order to, in order to change and in order to grow. So that’s,

That’s awesome. So, so this is where, okay, so hold on. I want you to, I gotta interrupt you because I want everyone to know what just happened. So he just, first of all, the last angle we were looking at, you were doing a handstand on a podium and there was two camps. There were two different camera angles on that shot. So it was the second setup, like a second stage with two different camera angles. And now you’re just walked another, like, I don’t know, three feet to a different direction. And now you’re in a different, what, what do you call this set? Okay.

This is our classroom. This is really where our we teach and break down ideas. So if you think of mind, body, and spirit, so this is where we would really focus on your mind and how we teach you ideas, but then break them down into strategies. Like for example, on this Flipboard here we talk about this is actually a different work for a client that we we’ve been working on right now. But let me move to one of our recent phases. We can interact with this and we can artfully go through different content in different phases. One of the things we talk about quite frequently is this spectrum of certainty. Like I talk about, you know, managing the positive aspects of uncertainty, which you can do because really all you ever get is some certainty. You know,

Just again for everyone that’s listening. So now he’s in his teaching classroom set and there’s another camera angle. So it just shifted. So you’ve got two camera angles here going,

And, and what, what I want you to know is that even with the, the other set, you had the low angle where I went into the handstand, we switched to a different camera here, we have this forward camera, and then we have the second camera, which is how you, where you see me, right. And it’s also a closer shot, a more personal shot. The point is, it’s not extraneous, everything’s intentional. And if you have different cameras, but they’re not for specific reasons, then it’s really the same as pacing a stage without any purpose. And so everything has to be well thought out and used in a strategic way. And so, okay.

So one other, sorry, real quick, before you go into the spectrum of certainty, because I think both your content is relevant to us, as well as how you’re delivering the content is super relevant. So I apologize for the interruptions, but like, are you looking at, do you have tally lights, like a camera lights that come on to tell you where to look or does the camera switch when you look to the camera?

No, I have Stephanie and Shan. Right? So, and that’s been another incredible thing this year. Rory is that so often we’ve, we’ve been on our own on the road doing our deal, and it’s been very much a solo effort. This brought our whole team together. My wife Shea is incredible and is a visionary and a video producer and developer in her own, right? So she brought a lot of understanding in terms of how to do this and was able to source the equipment. We leveraged fellow NSA, friends, like [inaudible] and others who, who helped us understand what they were doing and really cut our learning curve in terms of making this happen. So Shay’s here and she’s operating a camera and and kind of running some things in the background producing Stephanie is the, is doing the camera switching. And so we’ve, we’ve practiced enough and she’s watching me attentively. So when I, when I look from this camera, I do it very abruptly and she sees that and then she’ll, she’ll make that change. So it’s, it’s really a matter of me being clear with where I’m looking and, and then she knows how to read that. But you know,

And direct, you’re directing the camera shots basically by a definitive gesture to move where normally in a TV studio, somebody, the director is moving the tally light, the little red light, and then you follow that. You follow it, but you have it in reverse.

And what I’ve learned is I just have to be very clear because if I’m kind of like wandering around, she’s got no idea where to go. Right. And so it’s just, we’ve, we’ve, we’ve developed that skill over time,

But I love what you’re saying. That’s a, that’s a very SIM, that’s a similar parallel to just wandering eyes in an audience versus deliberate eye contact to like different people in the room. Right.

And, Oh my goodness. I can really go into that. We could do a whole tutorial on how to, how to teach to a camera which is maybe we should

Have you come back and do another one of those.

Yeah, exactly. But but the point is, we’ve learned a lot and we’ve really used this period of time to our advantage. And so this concept of a spectrum of certainty really is about three steps, three strategies that we teach to claim your certainty. So we got to claim what is certain, everything that we know already, still counts. We just have to use it differently. We have to redeploy what we’ve gained all these years and say, how does it still serve us? Or how does it serve us now in maybe even a better way than it did before? And so, instead of when you feel uncertain about some things, you can feel like you’re uncertain about everything, and it’s not true. There’s a lot that, you know, and it all counts and serves you. So you really have to claim it. You have to embrace what’s unknown because you, and I’ve seen a lot of speakers, authors companies, clients, who who’ve just spent enormous amounts of energy saying, well, when will this be over and how are we coming out of it?

And when will we be back on stages? And it just, all this mental exercise on really what is right now, not only unknown, but on knowable, right? We can’t control that. But what we can do think about your future as if it’s not just uncertain, but it’s unfolding, it’s unfolding and you have this role you’re playing in terms of how to shape it. But there’s just some things we’re not going to know until we get to the next chapter, like reading a great book or watching a great movie. You don’t have to know the ending to enjoy the movie to be engaged. And, and, and along the way we can create more certainty than the way you create more certainty is by testing yourself and improving yourself and saying, regardless of how everything else is working out, I know for sure we’re going to be better on the other side of this because of what we’re choosing to do now. And this studio is really our response to putting that into action. Right.

Right. Yeah. I, I mean, I love this. So can you walk back to the library? Is that, is that doable? Yeah. Amazing. And so then you just move over. So these are three, literally three different physical setups you have in the space. Then the room that you’re in this, isn’t like a virtual background shift at all. This is

Three physical spaces, five cameras. So there’s only one camera in here, which is all I really need, because again, this is about pouring into your heart, you know, and, and just really connecting eyeball to eyeball.

Yeah. So, so it’s a five camera shoot. And then the, in terms of the other technology, you got two people to run the room. You said Shay and Stephanie are both there to like help you operate things when you’re doing it. And then so you obviously have a switcher. So this is just like an alive event. You have to have a switcher to switch camera feeds. So you have a switcher. And then is there any other big pieces of technology that’s going on? I mean, must be some program that you’re running to like S or is it just different camera feeds into a school?

The beauty of keeping it with the physical switcher and we’re using an ATM system, a black magic ATM, which has a total of eight different camera inputs. We’re only, we’re using five for cameras, we’re using one for media. So in other words, we could start our show by taking a video and intro video that brings it in or cut to a video. I have, I have a scene where I’m in the action room and I finished something and I’m talking about, you never know where your next challenge is going to come from. And literally at that moment, a rope drops from the ceiling and I’m like, okay, well, I’m going to, I’m going to go for it. And meanwhile, watch this video. And I literally climbed the rope out of the camera lens, and then we cut to video. And so it’s, it’s really like producing a TV show, but the equipment of the cameras, bid cameras, a good switcher, a good computer to drive it, the S the software, because it’s hardware, you don’t need a sophisticated software program.

Usually there’s another device that flows out of the switcher for the interface to whatever platform you’re using. And what we found is depending on the platform, whether it’s zoom or go to meeting or black or whatever, it could be a Microsoft teams this afternoon, we’re doing one for a platform we’ve never done before. It’s a proprietary thing with each of those setups. And also with each of the updates, because there’s always new security settings and things like this, you really have to always, re-examine how your equipment’s working and make that happen. So it’s not a one and done set it and forget it. This is something you have to keep learning as you go.

Wow. but more or less you, you got, you got, you got a switcher, you got some camera and you got inputs from the from the cameras. And it’s not, you know, it’s not impossible. I mean, you guys are pulling it off. This is incredible.

Well, thank you. But I, and I also want to point out because I know that that a lot of people starting out are thinking, well, sure, like if I had a studio and a set, then, then everything would be easier and I’d be much more engaging and whatnot course. And the point is, you know, that’s the trap of this business is that comparison to what others are doing or what they, what you think will be necessary. And it’s not, it’s not necessary. There are so many of our speaker friends who are, who are doing something so much more simple and are still having incredible success because they know how to connect with an audience. And they’re bringing relevant content, which is the whole key. I mean, if you think about like an X, Y axis, this whole business and success and brand is about relevant content and then your engagement and your experience, and, and not just, not just what, you know, how, what, you know, really fixes the problem, applies to your audience and are you delivering it in a way that they can really absorb it, learn from it, remember it for a long time to come.

And so you can do that in any number of ways. This is just one of the answers. This is the answer that works for me.

Yeah. Well, this is so extraordinary. And, and I would, I would just, you know, I echo that point and emphasize that it’s not about the technology or any, it’s like, it’s your mindset to go? How can we serve? How can we adapt? How can we pivot? How can we be off balance on purpose as you say, and make the most out of this. And and it’s fun, you know, like I just, I really love it. You’re, you’re what a great way to showcase you, living out your message and your whole team coming together, and, you know, the family business of your wife and your daughter, like it’s just really, really cool. So Dan, where do you want people to go if they want to connect with you and like find out more, and man, if you’re booking virtual keynotes, like don’t bother calling Rory Vaden, just call Dan Thurman, just like skip past us contact Dan. And w H how do people connect with you?

Sure. Just it’s super simple. Just go to my website, Dan thurman.com Dan Thurman, T H U R M O n.com. It actually loads at the moment to our virtual page, but there’s a lot of content and resources there too, as well as our weekly coaching series. So maybe you’re running a team and you’re really looking for something that you can use to help them recalibrate their mindset. There are some videos on my website that can serve you and conserve them. And by all means, please help yourself and use those and spread those as you will.

So we’ll put links there to Dan thurman.com as well as to Maggie and Dan’s Tik TOK profile. So you can see this as lots and lots of fun. My friend, we just appreciate you and your mission and your heart to serve people. And just make the most of the talents you have to make the world a better place. And that totally shines through. And, and we wish you the best.

Ep 114: Top Secrets to Effective Speaking with Vanessa Van Edwards

RV: (00:06) Hey, brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for tuning in to listen to this interview, we are so excited to bring you this information and wanted to let you know that, Hey, there’s no sales pitch coming. From anything that we do with this is all our value add to you and the community. However, if you are somebody who is looking for specific strategies on how to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and we offer a free call to everyone that’s interested in getting to know us and is willing to give us a chance to get to know them and share a little bit about what we do. So if you’re interested in taking us up on a free strategy call, you can do that at brand builders, group.com/summit. Call brand builders, group.com/summit. Call. Hope to talk to you soon on with the show. RV: (01:03) I am so excited for you to meet Vanessa van Edwards. We shared the stage at what I believe is the largest speaking event in the world is the, it’s the biggest one that I know of. It’s called the global leadership summit, and we got to share the stage. And you know, most of you know, I’m, I’m a nerd for technical speaking and built my career coming out of Toastmasters. And she got up and talked about her book captivate and some of the concepts that she studies as the she’s the founder of a company called the science of people. And her book is called captivate, the science of succeeding with people and she analyzes and studies body language and interpersonal communication and human behavior and relationships. And it was just so practical and applicable to everybody. The audience went nuts. I was, I was also tracking book sales. RV: (02:02) So I haven’t shared this with everybody. I was watching book sales with there’s three different tools that we’re using to monitor that. And I was watching Vanessa’s book, which was selling apparently from what we could tell was the top selling book from all the speakers who were there, which is exciting and also a little bit nerve wracking since our book was also for sale. But pretty sales. You got presales. Yeah. I’m I’m I’m sure. I’m sure. So anyways, the other thing to know about her in addition to being this bestselling author she’s very much into data, which I love and, and research and science and analyzing you know, her craft, but she’s also spoken obviously at the global leadership summit. She’s spoken at South by Southwest Google, Facebook, and she has a Ted talk as well. That is called, you are contagious. That also is gone viral. So she’s got over a couple million views on that within just a few years. So anyways, you’re, you’re talking to a pro and I was like, gotta have her, you guys are gonna love her. So welcome to the show, Vanessa. VV: (03:14) Thanks for having me. I’m so excited to talk and dive in. RV: (03:17) So I want to start with your actual work, like what you actually teach, because it’s super relevant to our audience. And you know, we’ll put a link to your Ted talk. You are contagious in the show notes. But can you give us, you know, a little bit? So, so a lot of our audience speaks all of our clients speak. We teach them that the spoken word is the number one marketing tool. There is. So whether it’s free webinars or free speaking, like I spoke for free 304 times, that was how I started my career. In that we eventually turned that into an eight figure business all by speaking for free. But you study a lot of, you know, a lot of your craft relates to speaking and you analyzed Ted talks. What are some of the things that you learned from the viral Ted talks, the successful Ted talks and then the not so viral ones? VV: (04:16) Yeah. You know, I was really intrigued as a speaker on why some Ted talks go viral and others don’t. And what I, when I was searching on the Ted website, I typically watch a Ted talk every day at lunch. I found that there were Ted talks, you know, like Simon Sinek, Tedtalk has millions of views. And I noticed, and I noticed when I was on the website, that there was a very similar talk that came out the same month of the same year. It was released the same on the same year on ted.com, a very similar topic, both 80 minutes, long excepted. Simon’s had millions and millions and millions of views. And this other top had less than 40,000. And I wondered why these were both experts, relatively unknown experts before their Ted talks, by the way. Sure. But something about Simon’s talk, it made it explode. It went viral. And so we decided to analyze thousands of hours of Ted talks. We looked at every Ted talk in 2010 and we split them up based on view count. So the most popular Ted talks versus the least popular Ted talks, RV: (05:19) You looked at weight, you looked at every Ted talk since 2010 in 2010. Oh, in 2010. Wow. Okay. VV: (05:30) I’d still be doing that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And also by the way, this was maybe four or five years ago now. So we looked at every, to every Ted talk that was released in 2010, where there’s a limited number that go on ted.com and we didn’t know what we would find. Right. We were looking at all the variables. I was looking at color of clothing. I was looking at entrance. I was looking at smiles. We actually clocked the number of seconds that they smiled. And we found that the biggest difference, the biggest you could actually see it when you put these talks side by side, was that the most popular Ted talkers used an average of 470 gestures, 465 gestures to be precise in 18 minutes, whereas the least popular Ted talkers by view count, use an average of 272 gestures in 18 minutes, almost half. VV: (06:21) And when I looked at this, I realized there were sort of two things happening. One is hands show trust. They show intention. We like to see hands, right? The moment we can see someone’s hands. We feel like we understand them a little bit more, but the second thing was even more important, which was when we know our content exceptionally well. We can actually explain it on two tracks. We can explain it with our words, but we can also explain it with our gestures. And so the very best Ted talkers, it was like they had a two track talk, they had the verbal talk and they had the gesture talk. And what was amazing about it was that it allowed you to have sort of these memory hooks when someone said they had three ideas and they held up the number three, the brain would actually wait, you’d wait to hear all three. And that would also help you remember those three. So I think what was happening is that the really memorable, amazing Ted talks just make it easy to be understood. RV: (07:22) Interesting. And so would you say that Bernay Brown and Simon Sinek and you know, Jan pink? Yeah, sir. Ken Robinson, do they all pass that test or are some of ’em outliers? VV: (07:38) No. Everyone passed the test. The only kind of odd outlier in our data that we looked at was Jamie Oliver. So there is no, yeah. The chef. Yeah. Yeah. So what’s really interesting is most really charismatic speakers. They use hand gestures in a purposeful way. So if they’re talking about something big, they show you how big it is, beach ball big, or is it, you know what ball would this be like? RV: (08:06) Like a Sumo, a Sumo, VV: (08:10) How big is it? Or is it really small and little and just between the two fingers. Whereas Jamie Oliver, his talk is so passionate that he’s actually just making gestures for no reason. He’s just shaking. So that one, I found a little distracting. Now he had a lot of gestures cause he was literally just, he would walk off, he was pacing the stage and just kind of move in his hands. That was the one exception where I thought, Hmm, I think that we, we like the purposeful gesture, the distracted gesture, make someone look out of control. So whenever I teach hand gestures, I like to teach on a spectrum that purposeful is what we’re going for. Jazz hands is not what we’re going for, or even I created some hand monsters in my career and I feel very bad about this. So I taught this research and a couple of students in one of my classes, they thought that I meant like modern dance. So I saw their speeches after my class. And then they came on like this today. I want to talk to you about a big idea. And the sun is going to come out. I mean, it was like, it’s bitsy spider, you know, RV: (09:21) Dan just like interpretive dance, like full VV: (09:24) And so purposeful is good, but like we’re not talking modern dance. I think that with Ken Robinson and Bernay Brown and Simon Sinek, they probably didn’t script out their hand gestures. And I don’t think that we should necessarily either, but we should be so comfortable with our work that we’re able to understand it and explain it visually. RV: (09:43) So gestures. So that’s really interesting. Cause it’s like, what you, where you saw the pattern, wasn’t the type of gesture or like, yeah, it wasn’t like the type of gesture. It was the volume of gestures. And basically twice as many. So that, that, that tells us that that humans are, are nonverbal, which we kind of, we know instinctually, right? It’s like, of course we’re nonverbal. So for an audience of people who are speakers or aspiring speakers or potentially speakers in addition to gestures, are there any other big kind of salient discoveries that you would point to and say, Oh my gosh, if you are speaking a lot, here’s another thing that you really need to know. Like you can’t miss this. And I know, you know, in captivate you talk about voice and you talk about facial expressions. Like in the book, you go through a bunch of different ones, but w VV: (10:43) For many speakers, the book I’m going to give it to you. RV: (10:46) Yeah, yeah, yeah. Give us one. That’s not in the book VV: (10:48) Book. Is there, if you want to read it, that’s great. But I want to give one, that’s just for speakers. Cause I love talking to audience and speakers. So one thing that I noticed not only in the Ted speeches, but also in working with students is the really, really powerful speakers use the stage as a content aid. And this is a really advanced technique, but once you get it, I think it’s, it’s like you can immediately apply it, which is you want to know where you’re going to plant. And that’s really important. Where are you going to deliver your first line or your first impression? So your first impression happens either the moment the lights turn on at the moment you walk on stage, the more purposeful you all are with that plant. Like I’m going to walk right to the center of the stage that makes your walk more purposeful. I noticed that speakers who don’t have a plant, they kind of wander onto stage. They kind of wander and they’re a little awkward and they, then they don’t quite plant. They kind of, they kind of pivot back and forth. Whereas Vickers who walk out to that plant, that’s one of the reasons why that Ted talk red circle carpet is so brilliant is it just gives speakers. A piece of confidence is this is where you stand. RV: (12:00) Can you explain that? Not everybody knows about what the red dot mean, like what it is. VV: (12:04) Yeah. So in Ted talks, one of the secret ways, I think that they’ve had so much power with their videos is they have a small red circle. And I think that every franchise of Ted talk, they have to have a red carpet on stage or the requirement. And they even have a measurement that they like it to be. And it’s actually a brilliant Lee measured carpet. I think of the red, that circle carpet when I speak without it, like when I just do regular speeches because it’s a plant. So you have someone who walks right out on the stage, they plant in that red circle and then you’re not supposed to leave that red circle. So they really don’t like you to leave it for the cameras, for the lights. I think that Mel Robbins and her Ted talk, she not only left her circles, she actually walked out into the audience was very fair. VV: (12:51) It was a very, you know, avant-garde move and she wasn’t supposed to do it, but I think it worked for her. So the first thing is to know where you’re going to plant have an imaginary red carpet for yourself. And then you want to use the stage as a transition for your content. So for example, okay, I tend to deliver right in the middle. I typically go right to the middle when I speak. And then when I’m talking science or background, I typically go to the left side of the stage and I plant and I deliver the stuff. RV: (13:21) When you say the left side of the stage, are you saying stage left or the audiences left stage left? So to the right, the audience is right stage left. Okay. VV: (13:33) So I, I stand there and then when I’m pivoting or transitioning topics, I literally show the audience. I’m doing it with a physical movement. And then by the end, they know when I’m on the right side of stage, I’m usually telling a story, I’m doing something fun. I’m leading an interaction when I’m in the center of the stage, I’m delivering something super important. And I usually save my super important takeaway challenges. Remember this for the center of the stage and my science and background the other side. And I’ve noticed that it helps people as they take notes. I’ve noticed that helps with attention. I’ve also noticed you have certain people, you know, very warm people who like the stories better. And so everyone needs moments where they’re going to tune out and audience is going to tune out. I would rather it be based on their learning style, but not based on their learning style, I’d rather choose it. So what I’ve noticed is very warm people who love stories and examples, they perk up when I get to the right side of the stage and my science heavy, my high competent folks, my data heads, they perk up when I get to the left hand side. And usually everyone perks up for the middle. So it’s a, I, that’s one of the really big things that I think excellent speakers do to help their audience. RV: (14:48) Yeah. That’s, what’s interesting about, you know, using the stage, but in Ted talks, you can’t because of the red dot, but they force you to plant and be powerful by having that confined space. I think yeah, that’s super interesting. Is there, is there anything you did on the marketing front related to your Ted talk that made it go viral? Like VV: (15:10) Oh yes. So I, I really, you know, it’s a little, it’s a lot of pressure when you study Ted talks that go viral, then you give a Ted talk pressure. You have to then give a viral Ted talks. I was very nervous about it. And the first thing was the title and I argued with them about this, by the way, like we went back and forth on this a lot. Now it’s kind of funny because it’s your contagious, which right now in our current state of the world, it’s getting a lot of use for a different reason. So that ended up working in a different way. And you’ll notice that there’s a lot of comments, recent comments where people are like, I really felt this talk was about something else, but I really liked it. So anyway, in the beginning I wanted a command. I wanted a title that was a command. RV: (16:00) I have a bunch of people worried about contracting COVID that are buying the captivate book and just sitting at home, reading it. VV: (16:08) It’s okay. It’s perfect. Actually, captivate sales have been up a lot in COVID. And so I want, I wanted a command. I wanted to have like a you or like a personal pronoun. So I really wanted to have like a, you are contagious or you are confident or you can do it or you are powerful. I wanted something that was a command because I noticed that a lot of the Ted talks that were out there weren’t, they were very intellectual. They were very much like the future of leadership or how thinking will change the future of humanity. Like, there are a lot of like, talks like that, which is fine, but I just wanted to be a different rant. I wanted to have a different thing. So I wanted to use the word you, I knew that. And I wanted RV: (16:54) I analyze titles by the way or only the gestures and like the actual presentation. VV: (16:59) I didn’t, I did, we didn’t formally analyze titles. No, I should. I, that would be fun. That would be a really easy one to do actually with like just put them all in a big spreadsheet, look at them. That’d be super interesting. So yeah, so that, and then once it came out, not only did I share it, of course, across socials you know, YouTube has been a big driver of our business. I’ve been on YouTube since 2007 when people thought it was like, you know, a joke. And one thing that we’ve learned is playlists are really important. So we did a huge campaign on the backend to get my Ted talk, not embedded in websites that I didn’t care about as much, but to get it on people’s playlists. And so we reach out to influencers, but also just friends who watch a lot of YouTube videos and ask them to put it on a relevant playlist with other videos that we thought people would like along with our sock, with the right search engine title. VV: (17:52) So for example, I reached out to a friend of mine who has a podcast, and I asked him if he would add my video to his playlist called human behavior hacks. And he was like, sure. And then it was immediately placed contextually. So I know on YouTube, your best, you have two options for your, for your game. One is search and YouTube search is very different than Google search. We use a tool called H refs. And so when I’m titling my blogs, I use H refs for Google when I’m titling my YouTube videos and my keywords, I use H reps for YouTube because they have very, very different search. And so I knew what kind of YouTube search that I wanted for the video, but I also knew what I wanted it to be related to. So the second thing that you really like for you to, to elevate your game is watch this next or when your video is listed alongside another video. And so it’s critical to have YouTube algorithm know what other videos people would like. And so I had a list of a hundred or more videos that I thought were the perfect audience for my Ted talk. And so very quickly we were able to scale and we got thousands and thousands of views and then millions of views based on, I think, the placement of relevant videos. RV: (19:12) So when you found a hundred, a hundred videos, a list of a hundred videos that you thought were like your perfect audience, did you just reach out to those people? Did you reach out to those people at all? VV: (19:23) Not typically. Actually a lot of them were other Ted talks, but I wanted to be on the same playlists as those videos. So for example, like if I really liked Allan Pease LMPs is a wonderful author about body language and he has a great Ted talk. He also some great stage talks that have millions of views. I didn’t need to reach out to Allen because his videos are living out other people’s playlists, but I did want to get on to people who listed Allen’s video in their playlists. Does that make sense? So how did you, RV: (19:55) How do you know who, which people have Allen pees on their playlist? VV: (20:00) You can see it. So when you watch his video, you can see, it’ll say like, this is recommended for you. And then you can see that it’s actually within someone else’s playlist. RV: (20:09) Interesting. So just on the video itself, which is like a video you’re probably watching, cause you’re interested in it anyways, you would just go, Oh, okay. I see like other this other recommended video lives on, so, and so’s channel. And so that person is featuring this kind of content. And then you, so it was more like you didn’t contact Alan, you contacted the person that had Allen’s video on his channel VV: (20:33) And they never get contacted. Allen gets contacted all the time. Plus Allen doesn’t own his YouTube, his Ted talk. So it’s not even on, he couldn’t even control if he wanted to. So I don’t need to bother Alan with that. He’s a busy guy, but some of the people who created these amazing playlists who love looking for relevant videos on body language or human behavior or psychology, those are my people. And I love reaching out to them. And they’re also thrilled when I reach out to them. So that’s how we’ve grown our YouTube channel quite a bit since from the beginning. RV: (21:04) That is fascinating. What a super awesome tip. Well, and this is kind of what I wanted to get into as well was a little bit about how, how you’ve built such a great business, because it’s like once you, you know, have a bestselling book and you’re speaking at GLS and you have a viral Ted talk, like you’re checking off a lot of the marks of like pretty big time personal brands, which is, which is super exciting. Clearly the Ted talk has been huge. Is that how GLS found you? Do you know, did you ask him? VV: (21:36) I didn’t ask them. I think that they just knew about me from YouTube. I think they found me from YouTube. So I dunno if that was my Ted talk or other YouTube videos that I had. But that’s where they came to me from seeing those videos. RV: (21:49) Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting to me, to this day, the number one cold way that we book high paid speaking engagements is someone will say, I saw your video on YouTube VV: (22:00) A hundred percent, same as in here, RV: (22:03) Which is crazy. Cause you, you, you know, it’s almost like people put YouTube and Twitter in the same category in terms, and it’s like, they’re completely different, like completely different purposes, completely different audiences. Yeah. VV: (22:14) Yeah. And the way I like to think about it, and this is what I, what I try to talk to my students about is Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, and even LinkedIn, our social media platforms, YouTube is a search engine. And that’s how you have to think about it. It’s yes, it’s relatively social, but it is a search engine. So you need to think about it just like you think of Google, you just study your keyword, just like you do for Google. You need to think about your content, like little mini blogs. RV: (22:44) Yeah. I mean, and that’s the other thing like literally is that content on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, the older it is the less valuable it is on YouTube and Google, the older it is the more valuable it is. Like it’s, it’s a complete inverse. That is such a, it’s such a key distinction. I, YouTube is something I’m loving you talking about this. Cause I feel like I’ve ignored you tube, like my entire career. And then, you know, we had a few thousand subscribers and then when we exit our last company that was gone. So, you know, like we had, we’re starting all over and YouTube is the one that I’m going, this is the one that we have missed the boat on. This is the one that drives like real big time revenue, big time credibility. And it sounds like you agree with that. VV: (23:36) Yeah. I completely agree with it. And the good news is you got time, you know, it’s still the wild West on YouTube. I think. I actually think it’s less tapped even than online courses. You know, I got into YouTube in 2007. It’s older. I got into my first online course in 2011, 2012. And even now I feel like online courses, a little bit tapped. I mean, there’s just a lot of opportunity there, but RV: (23:59) Launching an online course, VV: (24:01) Launching teaching, hosting. Yeah. Online courses, you know, like some of the boat has sailed, but like it’s, it’s an, it’s an existing ecosystem, right? Like it exists. You can tap into it, but you really got to work. It YouTube, I think is a lot of low hanging fruit. I think you have time, even though it’s an older, it’s an older beast, the way that people, the amount of video that people are consuming. And the, the bond that you build with people when they watch a video is incredible. And as a speaker and as a, as an influencer, someone who wants to change behavior or change minds, it’s like, you’re getting permission to go into someone’s bedroom, email box, you get to their desk, not as intimate, a YouTube video, you get into their bedrooms, even a podcast, you maybe get to their kitchen or their gym, but a bed is usually YouTube. I don’t mean that in a, in a weird way, but like, it’s so intimate when you’re with someone and you’re sharing a story that they really feel like, wow, I know her. I cannot tell you how many times I’m walking down the street and people are like, I love your YouTube. I feel like you’re my friend. No. And that’s, that’s a very special thing. RV: (25:08) Yeah. I mean, that’s interesting. So Mike, Todd was one of the other speakers with us. Did you get to see his speech and tell us, yeah, I loved it. I thought it was so great. And so AIG and I are watching his sermon series on relationship goals and we either watch it in bed or the living room couch. But to what you’re saying, both of those are that’s where you, that’s very intimate, that’s intimate a space and at different locations. And I’ve never really thought about that. I’ve always thought about the podcast being right in someone’s ear, which is very intimate. But you know, you, you don’t make a date to listen to a podcast, but you will sit down and like, alright. Or have you ever seen the show? The chosen on YouTube? Oh my gosh. It’s incredible. It’s a, it’s a TV series. That’s only available on YouTube and it’s free, but it’s like, we make a date to sit down and watch something on YouTube. VV: (26:02) Yeah. I think that that’s the difference, right? Like when I am listening to my podcasts, I am always doing something else. And even if I wasn’t doing smells, I begin to sweat. I fold clothes. I do laundry. I clean up the toys in the living room. Like I’m always, I’m like, it’s a thing where my hands are free. Not with YouTube. I’m going to watch a video. It’s my ears and my eyes. And there’s not much else I can do. I have to be locked in with you. And so it’s just a much more intimate and fulfilling experience. There’s a reason I haven’t done a podcast yet. I mean, maybe I will one day, but it’s because I also know that I, the biggest, so in our business, our revenue is sort of split between speaking online courses and then a little bit like ad revenue. And we don’t do any paid search. We only have organic search. And I know that the best way for me to sell courses is to get organic YouTube search that turns into an online email subscriber. It then turns into a, a buyer of our video course. And so if I want to sell a video course, the best way for me to do that is being on video. RV: (27:03) Yeah. So let me ask you that. This is so awesome. Okay. So when you say organic YouTube search, most of that is just basically like optimizing your video as a blog post on YouTube. So you’re showing up in search and then in the description, you’re driving people to a lead, a lead capture, which is gonna then nurture like a lead magnet. And then that will nurture them for the course. When you do, when you sell courses, do you do mostly like a video? Do you do mostly like video sales letters, like a video funnel, like yeah. Three videos and then buy on the fourth video or do you more like a one long webinar kind of thing. VV: (27:44) So we’ve tested all of them feels like all of them we’ve tested the three videos to a purchase. We’ve tested a webinar to a 60 minute webinar to a purchase, which so 20 minute webinars, no purchase. We’ve tested a six email written series. We’ve tested, sneak previews, we’ve tested an audio training. The one that doesn’t work very well is three videos. We have too much dripping in the funnel too much, too much loss when we find that when people want it, they want it. So we don’t want to make them wait. So the best thing that we found is either an audio training for 60 minutes right away, or like a webinar for 45 to 60 minutes right away video. RV: (28:23) Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. well, where should people go if they want to connect with you and like learn more, obviously they can get the book captivate, which is awesome. We’ll put, we’ll put a link to your contagious. You are contagious, Ted talk, where else Vanessa, if they want to learn more about all the stuff you do. VV: (28:41) Yeah. If you want to see our funnel and action I recommend going to science of people.com/join. That will be whatever our latest in is. And so you’ll be able to see if he, you go to that, like sometimes it’s our likability training, which is the audio training, which also eventually converts into our big course or you’ll get our one of our webinars. And so that’s a really good way to get kind of acquainted with some of our materials and our free courses. But also if you are interested in sort of the funnel of the backend of how we build rapport and build relationships and teach to sell, you can all see it that way as well. Love it. RV: (29:17) Science of people.com/join. You can go there. We’ll link that up in the show notes, Vanessa, thank you so much. You’ve been so generous and like tactical and just is such, such actionable stuff particularly for personal brands. So we wish you very much the very best VV: (29:34) Gosh, I’m so grateful. Thanks for featuring my story and thanks everyone for listening. [inaudible].

Ep 112: The Miracle Morning with Hal Elrod

RV: (00:06) Hey, brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for tuning in to listen to this interview, we are so excited to bring you this information and wanted to let you know that, Hey, there’s no sales pitch coming from anything that we do with this is all our value add to you and the community. However, if you are somebody who is looking for specific strategies on how to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and we offer a free call to everyone that’s interested in getting to know us and is willing to give us a chance to get to know them and share a little bit about what we do. So if you’re interested in taking us up on a free strategy call, you can do that at brand builders, group.com/summit. Call brand builders, group.com/summit. Call. Hope to talk to you soon on with the show. RV: (01:04) My day is just better. When I look on my calendar and I see an appointment with Hal Elrod I have grown to love this man. Truly love him. And it’s like, John O’Leary, you heard me, I’ve interviewed John O’Leary before. These are two of like people that most inspire me in a profound way personally, in terms of what they’ve overcome in their life, the attitude of which they’ve overcome it. And what, how has been able to build in terms of a community is just inspiring. And it makes a difference in the world. Like he is someone who is a mission driven messenger. He’s a classic example of what we’re trying to help people become in his book. The miracle morning is what we actually uphold in our bestseller launch plan event, as sort of like the ultimate pinnacle of a, of a self published work. RV: (01:55) It has now sold over 2 million copies. There are multiple derivatives of the book for, you know, different groups. He released another book called the miracle equation, not too long ago and how, and I saw each other again, and we shared the stage at an event, one of the best speaking events in the world advisors Excel in early 2020, it was like one of the last human events in person events. And I got to see him speak which was such a treat. So anyways, how brother welcome to the show. Good to see you, Rory brother. It is, it is a pleasure man. And I’m I’m excited to to dive into that. So I want you to tell the story. We want to hear the story of the miracle morning community, which is amazing 270,000 people in this Facebook group. And I want to hear how you built a quarter million people in a Facebook group and sold 2 million copies of a self published book. But for people who don’t know you, can you just tell us like a little bit of your personal story of like, what happened and, and, you know, you survive this near death experience and then how that kind of led to you starting your, you know, as an, HE: (03:12) On a personal brand. Yeah. Yeah. I think we all have wake up calls at different times in our, in our lives. And they usually come from adversity, right? Some sort of adversity challenge tragedy. When I was 20 years old, I was driving home from a Cutco sales meeting. I sold Cutco cutlery and I gave a speech that night at this conference and driving home that night in a brand new Ford Mustang. My first new car, I was hit head on by a drunk driver at 70 miles an hour. And my car spun off the drunk driver. The car behind me hit me at 70 miles an hour in my door. And I broke 11 bones on the left side of my body from the side impact. And that night I bled to death. It took the paramedics and the fire department and our to use the jaws of life and cut me out of the car. HE: (03:55) And so I was just bleeding with 11 broken bones in the car. And that night I was I died on the helicopter. I was clinically dead for approximately six minutes while I was taken to the hospital. You know, heart stopped beating, wasn’t breathing for six minutes and then six days in a coma. And I flat lined twice more. He came out of the coma to be told I would never walk again and that I had permanent brain damage. And I always joke that my wife will about for the brain damage, but I did learn to walk again. And you know, and, and went on to, and not really did launch me into like, even in the hospital. I’m like, I felt this sense of purpose. Like I’m meant to overcome this in the most positive, proactive way. I can, as an example for other people. HE: (04:39) And I didn’t know who those other people were. I didn’t know if those were just going to be my future kids or my circle of influence or my family or the world, but I did always want to be a, a keynote speaker, motivational speaker. I called it back then. And I remember I told my dad, I said, dad, you know, he, he was the doctors were wondering why I was so positive. And I said, look, I’ve always wanted to be motivational speaker, but I had kind of a normal life. I never had anything good to talk about this. Maybe this is why this is happening. So I have a story of overcoming that I can share with others and, you know, turned into be exactly that. And and then in 2008, when the economy crashed, I crashed. RV: (05:18) So you actually, so you died clinically died three separate times and, and that, that’s how this all started. HE: (05:26) Yeah. That’s where, yeah, that, that, that was where that adversity, that wake up call of like, Hey you know, it really taught me what I think right now is so important year. What year was this? Two a night, December 3rd, 1999. Okay. And yeah, so 99, so 20 little over 20 years, right, right. Over 20 years ago. And and just taught me that our, our outer world what’s going on in the world, what’s going on with other people what’s going on in our government, what’s going on in our job. What’s going on in the economy is not determining the determining factor of our inner world. You know? And, and I really that’s what I learned is that the, the, the world can be falling down outside of me. And I will choose to be at peace, happy and grateful, no matter what’s going on around me. HE: (06:12) And that for me, I applied three years ago with diagnosis of cancer, a very rare, aggressive form of cancer. I was given a 20 to 30% chance of surviving. And, you know, as a doubt, I mean, you know, when you’re, when you’re sitting there looking at your 11 or your seven year old daughter in the face and your four year old son and the doctor just told you that day, that you’re most likely going to die. It’s a hardest, that’s the hardest thing, you know, to deal with. And and I have, I had the same, the same decision. The day I was diagnosed with cancer. And given those grim odds, I called my wife. She was out of town and I had to tell her, and she in buttoned tears. And I said, sweetie, I promise you one thing, I can’t promise that I’ll beat this, but I promise, I believe I will give it everything I have, but I said, I will promise you, I will be the happiest and the most grateful and the strongest I’ve ever been while we endure the most difficult time in our lives together. HE: (07:02) And it was by far the most difficult time, but but I was, you know, there’s video of me, you know, in pain and, and no hair and then chemo. And, but just genuinely, like, I’m not letting my circumstances dictate my emotional wellbeing. And I think for all of us, we, we, we’ve been conditioned to think they’re mutually exclusive like, Oh, bad things happening in the world. And in my life, I feel bad, good things happen. I feel good. But, you know, I think that the most important thing that we can adopt is it doesn’t matter. What’s going on outside of me. I am always in control of what’s going on inside of me. And from that place, we can find joy, happiness, motivation to create the circumstances that we want in our lives. RV: (07:42) Gosh, brother, that is just so powerful and meaningful and needed, I mean, in the world. So, so how does, did the community start first or did the book start and like, did you try to traditionally publish and or did you just kind of go like, cause basically, so miracle morning was the first book, miracle equations, the new book, but miracle morning is this story. And then it’s also a morning routine and set of set of practices that you follow and help people to live this. Did you so, so talk to me about the book. Like when does the book come on? How does that come about? HE: (08:22) So miracle morning, it was, it was never a book idea. It was in 2008, when the United States economy crashed, I kind of crashed with it. And after like a six month downward spiral of losing over half of my clients losing my, you know, having to foreclose on my house getting my body fat percentage tripled, like I, I was, I was, I was in debt. I was depressed. I was kind of a mess and a series of events and some advice from a good buddy of mine. John Burgoff do you know John Bergoff? I don’t know John Bergoff and that’s all right, I’ll introduce you at some time. But I said, John gave me advice. He said, how you should go for a run every morning and listen to self-help. He said, put yourself in a peak state, physically, mentally, and emotionally, and listen to something that will enhance your mental and emotional wellbeing. HE: (09:07) And I’m like, Oh, okay. You know, like I need to make money even. And I don’t, I don’t say that’s gonna make me money, but, but it basically led me to realize that how I start my day was the single most determining factor in the state that I begin the day in and thus carried out the day in and thus created my results. And so, in other words, how you start your day sets the tone, the context and the direction for the rest of your life. And so I started practicing this and it changed my life very quickly. I went and told my wife, after two months of doing this, I said, this morning routine feels like a miracle. You know, we’ve doubled our income. We have all these amazing results. And she goes, it’s like your miracle morning. And I go, yeah, yeah, yeah. I like that. And then that’s when I started teaching it to people, my clients, and in speeches and RV: (09:53) Quickly that the most successful male authors in the world are simply plagiarizing from their wives. Yeah. Yes. HE: (10:00) Our wives or our muses. Yeah, no, she, she, she came up with the title and even though, again, it wasn’t a different book title, but so I finally was like, I have a responsibility because it changed my life and it was changing all of my clients’ lives. And I went, none of us were morning people. So the, this, if this could change our lives, this could change anybody’s life. And I felt a sense of responsibility to write a book about it. And it took me three years. And during that time to answer your question on the traditional versus self publishing, I thought, okay, I really want to change millions of lives with this book. So therefore I have to traditionally publish to be taken seriously and for it to get any distribution. And then as I kept writing the book and doing my research, I went, Oh, that’s not true. HE: (10:42) Like the publisher doesn’t do much to market your book unless you have a household name and they know that it’s going to give them, you know, give them a nice ROI. I realized that if you traditionally published, you’re lucky just to get a deal and then you still have to do all the marketing. So I thought, I believe in this concept, I’m going to self publish. I self published the book on 12, 12, 2012, so 12, 12, 12. And it didn’t have a huge, you know, I didn’t have a big, I wasn’t an influencer. I wasn’t like Tim Ferriss. I didn’t have a blog. I, you know, I wasn’t well known. And it’s about a year and a half of, of promotion. The first year I did 150 podcast interviews. I did 50 of my own podcasts. I get 36 speeches. HE: (11:24) I was on 12 TV shows. Like I did everything I could. And I sold like 13,000 copies. It wasn’t anything fancy, but I was committed for as long as it took to get the message out. And it took six years, six years to reach a million, a million copies sold. And in that time, the book was translated and traditionally published in 37 different languages. So once it got fractioned being self published an agent reached out, I got an intro to an agent and said, Hey, this, you know, this things like the trajectory of this book is, is, is going off, you know, was on fire. We think that traditional publishers would be interested and publishers. And so, yeah. So then, so it’s, it’s still sell published in the U S and it’s traditionally published in 37 other countries. So RV: (12:14) Do you have to traditionally publish a book to make money from writing a book? HE: (12:19) No. I would say 90. RV: (12:23) That was a short, complete answer there. HE: (12:26) No, no. Tell us about it. 95 to 99% of authors I would say would be better served self publishing. I have 13 books or so, and all of them, except one is traditionally published. And that was last year. And here’s what I learned. The only thing that a publisher cares about, I shouldn’t say the only thing, their highest priority is the size of your platform. That’s it? That’s what you get paid in, advance on. It’s not on how good your idea. Everybody thinks I have the best idea ever. They don’t care because the best idea, if you don’t have an audience that you can reach that, that book too. That’s why anybody that’s on the news or has a talk show, Anderson Cooper, whoever, right? Like Oprah, they get a multimillion dollar band because the publisher knows that it’s a guaranteed success, right? It’s a business. HE: (13:12) So if you have a large platform of, you know, let’s say a hundred thousand followers, then it’s worth shopping around to a traditional publisher and seeing what kind of advance you can get. But the big difference is you’re going to get, you know, let’s say on average, 10, 12% of the royalties are of the book, the profits from the book, if you traditionally publish, when you self publish, you get anywhere from 70 to 90% of the profits. And so in the long game, you’re, you know, you’re almost always better off to self publish. So, RV: (13:47) So I love that. So thank you. Thank you for that. It’s funny you use that 100,000 number. We use the same number. We say once you have a hundred thousand followers, that’s about the time to start, look at traditional publishing. And when you can move 10,000 units, when you feel like you can sell 10,000 units on opening week, that’s when it’s time to think about bestseller, you know, like bestseller, New York times wall street journal, kind of a thing, but the money here. So can you talk to us about how the money works? Like, we don’t need to know how much you make or anything, but like, I think a lot of people don’t realize that, like people say, you know, you don’t make money writing a book. It’s just a business, HE: (14:28) Which, yeah, RV: (14:29) It is a business card, but you actually can make a truckload of money from doing this, but can you walk us through, like, how does the money work? Like where does it actually, like if you, if I type a book, if I write out a book on my computer today, it took you three years and then I go print it and put it in Amazon, or I use create space, or then what happens? And where do you, where does, where do all the sales come? They come from Amazon. I’m assuming a lot of them happen in Amazon. HE: (14:59) Yeah. So all of, I mean, so all true. All self published books. So I self published through it was CreateSpace now it’s called it’s Kindle direct publishing, which they just took over create space. It’s all, they were all, it was an Amazon company. And and so that when you publish the book, you just check a box if you want it on Tindall right. So paperback, Kindle and then Amazon owns a company. I don’t know if it’s changed since I started doing this, but it was a C X, the letter, a letter C X acx.com. And that is what that is there. Audio book publishing arm. So audio book, self publishing. And so I, you earn on your traditional books. So my traditional, my paperback is or on my self published paperback it’s the retail price is 20 bucks is what I haven’t said at 1999. Amazon sells it for whatever they want, which usually ranges from 15 to 18. And I think I earn just under $9 per book compared to a dollar or two per book, if it was traditionally published. Right? So you sell you know, a thousand copies of the book, right times, you know, that’s, that’s what, $8,000 in income now on Kindle you price it at nine 99, you were in 70% yearning, $7 per book sold on Kindle. Okay. Sorry. Hold on. Sorry. Kindle. RV: (16:22) So, so like on paperback, you’re getting like 50% HE: (16:25) Ish. Yeah, yeah. 50% ish and 70% on, on Kendall. RV: (16:30) Got it. Okay. 50% paperback and then 70%. HE: (16:33) And it’s not an exact formula it’s based on the cost of printing based on how many pages you are. Right. So, so, but, but let’s say yeah, you know, 40, 50% and then on audible I got lucky when I signed on the audible, they used to have a sliding scale where the more books you sold, the higher your percentage jumped up and it stayed there forever. So we are now at 90% for audible. So we are nine on, but now that’s not the case anymore. They changed that model. It’s now a flat 40. So you had 40% of all your books sold an audible. When you go through the, the audible exchange, the ACX company, you can find a narrator, put up, put up, you know, a word, a PDF of your first chapter of your book. You can have people audition for it and then choose one and then either pay them a split or pay them upfront. RV: (17:21) Wow. I mean, that’s pretty simple. I mean, really like, that’s, it’s really pretty simple. And then you’re just basically like doing social media and emails and speaking, and webinars and like, whatever, like all the usual stuff, people go to Amazon or Kindle or audible, and then they buy books and, and then get, HE: (17:40) Yeah, you get a direct deposit in your bank account every month. That direct deposit every month. Yeah. Towards the end of the month. Okay. RV: (17:46) That’s so cool. I mean, and 2 million copies is, is all in for paperback, Kindle and audio. HE: (17:54) So 2 million copies, a half of that roughly is self published us and the other half are those other 37 foreign publishers. So the other half are across the other countries, which by the way, I think a million are in Brazil alone. That’s been the biggest, I think we’ve sold more books in Brazil than in the United States. It went crazy there. Wow. RV: (18:15) That’s so funny. I mean, it’s random how that stuff happens. And then, so talk to us about the, the community, the community. Yeah. Like w w w when did you start that? I mean, this is like, this is way before Facebook groups where like a strategy, you were just, I remember the first time we met, I can’t remember. Maybe it was probably John Ruhlin who interviewed, introduced us, or maybe, actually I think it was Peter Vogue actually, who introduced. And I think the first time you interviewed me, it was actually maybe in the community. I don’t even know if you had a podcast back then. I don’t know if that’s right, but, you know, anyways, tell us how did it start? HE: (18:54) W w where did this come from? So it was an 11th hour deal where I had sent the, my almost finished a manuscript for the miracle morning to a handful of my buddies. And I was like, Hey, will you guys read this and give you feedback? And Jon Vroman was like, Hey, have you thought about creating some sort of online group, any, and this was yeah, 2011, right. Or 12. He said, somewhere, he goes, it feels like this is going to be a lonely venture for a lot of people. Like, if they’re the only morning person, their family they’re by themselves. And there’s nobody to, to connect with and be held accountable to. And he goes, I could see them sliding backwards. I was like, Oh, that’s a great idea. You know, he goes, yeah. He goes, I go. And so I started looking like Kajabi. HE: (19:34) I’m like, maybe I’ll create like an online form. And he said, dude, if I were you, I would just do Facebook groups. He goes, don’t, don’t give people another place to log into because they don’t have that as a habit. You’re trying to get them to create a new habit. If they’re already on Facebook, they’ve got notifications built in the functionality of the group has already, he goes, I would remit the wheel, I’d go to Facebook. And I’m like, yeah. Great idea. So I started a Facebook group called the miracle morning community with me, my mom, dad, John Broman, my sister, right. Like, you know, a handful of us. And I put in the, in the book in the beginning, a special invitation join the miracle morning community to, you know, to, to get accountability and encouragement, swap smoothie, recipes, learn new meditation routines, like whatever. HE: (20:19) And I was the only one in there. I would just check in every day and put quotes and means and add value and right in there and this and that. And as the book sold, right. I mean, as the, you know, so in the beginning, the Facebook group mimicked the book sales because that’s where people found out about it. And and so it started out with, you know, grew to a few hundred people and then eventually crossed a thousand and that particular year, you know, and and then and then it just, it just kind of scaled up. And, and now there’s 270 some thousand members from over a hundred countries. And and they support each other. Like, I don’t, it doesn’t run on me. It’s, it’s them logging in every day. And it’s, we’ve really created this culture of people who are waking up every day and dedicating time to fulfilling their potential with their miracle morning. HE: (21:05) And then they’re, they’re lifting each other up, they’re supporting each other and you get in there, people that, you know, that will celebrate, you know, Hey, today’s day 100 of the miracle morning, and then you’ll get somebody that’s like, Hey, I’m brand new. My friend told me about this group in this book, but I’m not a morning person. Should I do it? And don’t get 150 people for an hour. And they’re like, dude, I was the same, I wasn’t a morning person. Like it works, you know? And, and then they’ll give it a try. So yeah, it’s become really, really, really, really a special, special place, RV: (21:35) Man. That, that is so awesome. And so just a technical question here, you know, like normally when you post on Facebook, a very small fraction of the people, see it when you posted in the Facebook group, like at that scale 270,000, is that similar that only a fraction of those people are seeing it? Or is it, is it, is it because it’s a group it’s a little, it’s a little different HE: (22:01) No, it’s still true. And it’s really, really frustrating. Right. I mean, it is what it is, but and we’re, and we have explored, you know, going with a different platform, like mighty networks and yeah, but it’s just, it’s this, it goes back to John Bowman’s original advice, which is like, you know, are they people really going to log into a different thing? And so we’re, that’s still ideal. We want to take the control of that, but to give you an idea yesterday, one of our admin Stephanie Blackbird, she runs the group in terms of the admin for it. And cause we get, you know, hundreds of new requests every day, somebody’s got to, you know, vet those. And she, but she posted, where are you from? And in less than 24 hours, we had over a thousand comments. You know what I’m saying? I’m from, I’m from Belgium, I’m from France, I’m from America, I’m from Russia and from you just all over the place. So I would imagine out of the 270,000 people, maybe 2000 saw it, you know what I mean? Like, so it’s, it’s definitely tough. RV: (22:59) Yeah. Well, I mean, whether you’re sending emails or you’re doing social media or, I mean, you’re always, you’re always dealing with that, but how cool that this community has taken a life of its own and and then it’s like, it just, it’s just growing, like it’s just this asset that just keeps making a bigger and bigger impact in the world. HE: (23:20) So like what else RV: (23:22) Do you do other than the book? I mean, the cool thing is if you have one great book, self published book like this, like you could actually make a pretty fine living just off of the book and then, and then you speak and any other parts of the business model that you’re working on or have been doing that you’re super excited about. I mean, obviously I know you’ve you were dealing with cancer here for a while, so that’s been, you know, that’s got to have been. HE: (23:46) Yeah, well, yeah. I’ll tell, I’ll tell you the Mo the miracle morning movie is coming out on 12, 12 to 2020, and there’s nothing I’m more excited about than that, but I will share what I turned before. I I’ll, I’ll get to that in a second. It was that when the book came out I, you know, I, then I started, I was a college speaker and I always wanted to be a keynote corporate speaker and be able to raise my fees and Reno reach more people. And so I used the book to plant the seed in there that, you know, when I was speaking at this event, when I was speaking at this event, you know, I can, you know, I’ll bring the miracle morning to you guys. Right. And and so almost every speech I’ve given in the last, you know, whatever eight years is some leader that read the book and wanted me to bring it to their people. HE: (24:30) Right. So it did, it might, my speaking career launched off of that. The so that was a speaking career. And then we started doing live events every year, and then God, last year, because I was having trouble with the chemo and depression and anxiety, I decided to take a year off of the event, which is this, it would have been this December and who knows what headache. It would have been trying to deal with the hotel and re refunding 500 tickets transitioning to LA, you know, online, who knows. So, so we did have live events. We did have a mastermind right now it’s it’s, I just do virtual keynotes, which are not the same as you know, I’m sure. And so, so, but books and virtual keynotes, and then, yeah, we were making a documentary called the miracle morning movie about five or six years ago, we started making this and I started going around and interviewing, you know, world-class influential people, Muhammad Ali, 18, or Mohammed Ali’s daughter, sorry, not Muhammad Ali mom and all these daughter, Laila Ali she’s in it, her morning routine, you know, Brendon Burchard, his morning routine Lewis, Howes, Robert Kiyosaki, Robin Sharma. HE: (25:40) We started interviewing all these world-class individuals, their morning routine. And that was the movie we were making. And and then I was diagnosed with cancer and I called our director and I said, Hey we gotta put the movie on hold, man. I’m, I’m fighting for my life. It’s not looking, it’s not, it doesn’t look good. And he said, you know, being a filmmaker, he said, actually, if you’re okay with it, I’d like to film this journey and, and, you know, come to the hospital and film you going through this. And Holy moly kind of caught me off guard. And thank God we pushed for it because the, the, the first hour of the movie is what we intended it to be. And the last 30 minutes is the most unexpected inspiring, you know, me fighting for my life, with my family, by my side, a wall, I’m still traveling the world trying to spread this mission. And yeah. And so that, that, that’s what I, my main focus right now is just launching this movie to the world on in December. And and then, and then I’ll take a breath and see what’s next from there. So did you so the, the, RV: (26:44) So the movie is that like, self-published too, like, did you pay for it? Did you get a film? You just got your own film crew and a director and said, Hey, I have a vision for a movie. I’m going to make my own fricking movie. HE: (26:56) Yes, yes, my buddy. So my buddy, Nick Conedera is a director. And a few years, like six years ago, he was at my house for dinner. He said, dude, we should make a movie about the miracle morning. Cause he’s in the miracle morning community. And he does it himself. And he would see these people, you know, this guy, Mike Keaton posted how he lost it. And he lost 90 pounds, six months after he started the miracle morning. And he had been obese his whole life. And he attributed to my miracle morning. And so Nick is goes, dude, we got a feature, all these stories of people overcoming depression and starting businesses and all the sudden you’re good morning. I was like, that’s a great idea. I said, but I don’t even know what that looks like, dude, like, right. Yeah. There you go. Yeah. HE: (27:34) Yeah. Yeah. Like, like I don’t even like talk to me later and he kept bugging me about it. And like a few months later, he, he, he found the angle and he called me and he said, how, what’s your mission in life? And I said to elevate, or actually back then it was to change millions of lives one morning at a time. And I said, why? He said, what percentage of our society, you’re trying to change the world. What percentage of our society read self help books? And right away, I kind of got where he was going. And I went, I like 1%, maybe he said, what percentage watch movies? And I went, you’re right. If we’re going to reach, if we’re going to reach the masses, it has to be in another format. And so that’s when we started making the movie and yeah, I funded it. We had a few producers, but I, for the most part, I funded 98% of it. And he, and then I started just meeting people that became part of the team that just kind of God put them in my life. And it was like, perfect. You know, RV: (28:31) That is amazing. How buddy, you are, you like, you are amazing and your, your life is been used for so much. Good. And then continues to be used for so much. Good. And I just buddy, I’m so grateful for you. Where do you, where should people go if they want to connect to you? Obviously you’ve got the Facebook group. Where else would you direct people to? HE: (28:54) Yeah. Miracle morning.com is the best hub. You can find all the books from there. You can join the community from there. You know, you can join the join, the email list. We don’t the movie isn’t for sale yet. We’re working on getting the site up and stuff. People can buy tickets for the world, premier, which is gonna be really cool on 12, 12, 20, 20, we’re doing the miracle morning movie experience, the world premiere. It’s going to be the worldview of the film followed by an immediate, like, how do you implement this? So like, okay, you just watched a movie, you were all excited, you know, about the miracle morning, how do you start it tomorrow morning? And I’m going to teach how to do that. And there’ll be like a live Q and a with me and the director and the team. And then there’ll be a 30 day challenge that people will be able to join, you know, for free. And so yeah, so go to miracle morning.com. And if you join the email list, you’ll get my weekly podcast. You’ll get that way. We don’t RV: (29:42) Sell anything really to you. It’s just, we just try to add value. And until the movie comes out, I love it. Well, we’ll put miracle morning.com in the show notes, rather, thank you for what you do and for your story and your faith. And just for keeping the fight for yourself and your family. And obviously for the message, we, we appreciate you and we pray for you and we wish you the best. Thanks brother. Appreciate you, man. Keep doing what you’re doing.

Ep 110: The Foot Traffic Formula with Stacy Tuschl

ST: (00:06) RV: (00:06) Hey, brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for tuning in to listen to this interview, we are so excited to bring you this information and wanted to let you know that, Hey, there’s no sales pitch coming from anything that we do with this is all our value add to you and the community. However, if you are somebody who is looking for specific strategies on how to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and we offer a free call to everyone that’s interested in getting to know us and is willing to give us a chance to get to know them and share a little bit about what we do. So if you’re interested in taking us up on a free strategy call, you can do that at brand builders, group.com/summit. Call brand builders, group.com/summit. Call, hope to talk to you soon on with the show. RV: (01:03) I’m so happy and excited to be able to bring you a little bit of a discussion from brick and mortar land from one of the women who is really one of the experts and is also kind of a new friend, but we’ve known of each other for like the last couple years, her name’s Stacy Tuschl. And I met her at a couple of different masterminds. I spoke at and through mutual friend, Julie Solomon, some of you know, and she’s amazing. So first of all, she’s a bestselling author and speaker, she’s the owner of multiple seven figure businesses. She’s the creator of something called the foot traffic formula, which we’re gonna talk about. And she, one of the things that I love is she has a real good focus and balance on just not making work, everything always all the time, but like having the personal life and being, being a family, a family woman, or a family, man, I guess you could say two of ’em those of you that are, you know, trying to raise a family. And, and, and in addition to the business recently she actually became she got the Wisconsin, small business person of the year award from the SBA, which if you know anything about like local business, that’s a big, a big freaking deal. And Wisconsin is a big state. So I’m excited to introduce you to her. We’re just going to chat and hear some of her stories. So Stacy, thanks for making some time. ST: (02:36) I’m excited to be here. This is going to be fun. RV: (02:39) So you have 18 years, you five years of doing online business. Yep. Which we’ll talk about that too, but really you’re 18 years, like a true brick and mortar business owner. Like, can you tell us a little bit about that and like how, what you were doing and how you got started? Yeah, so I actually started right out of ST: (03:00) High school. The summer I graduated. I was a dancer in high school, kind of late to the game. So I knew I wasn’t going to do it professionally, but I didn’t want to stop. So I decided while I was going to college, I went to UWM Milwaukee here in Wisconsin. While I was going to school, I decided I was going to teach middle school dancers. And we held classes in my parents’ backyard. Talk about strapping. And I had 17 girls start that first year. Within three years, we had a hundred kids still coming to the backyard. And then thankfully I grew up in a small business. So my grandfather started a construction business about 50 plus years ago, so older than me. So I grew up in that and my family saw the dancers, saw what I was doing and said, I think you have a business here. ST: (03:50) Like, I think we could start charging and you could do this for a living. And like just blew my mind because even though I had grown up in that world, it was very different. I mean, construction, dance classes, it just didn’t feel like this could be something I could do. So in 2005, I officially incorporated started charging, rented a space. Today we have now two locations here in Milwaukee. I own both of the brick and mortar, like commercial buildings that we house the dancers in, and I’m about 50 employees. So it’s a pretty well oiled machine. I no longer teach. I strictly work here in my home office on the business. And then about five years ago, people started to say, how are you doing this? Can you teach me? And that’s kind of the birth of our, my online business. RV: (04:39) Huh. So this is like, so it’s a dance studio effectively. I mean, that’s, that’s what this is. And there’s a whole community dance studios is it’s fascinating. Clint Salter is a, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of him ST: (04:54) Spoke at cleanse event in January before we all were shut down. RV: (04:58) Oh yeah. I love that guy. And you know, so, but, but one of the reasons that I thought this would be cool to talk about is cause everyone talks about online business and, and I think there’s a good overlap, but foot traffic formula was originally designed. Tell me if I got this right. Specifically for more of those brick and mortars about how to drive more revenue. And so, you know, I kinda think of three things going on here. There’s sort of strategies for, for those of us that are using a personal brand to drive a brick and mortar, then you go, how do we supplement this with online? And then we go, how does COVID interrupt both of those things and marry them together? So that’s kind of how I want to like talk about this, but in a non COVID world for a second, I feel like we never produce content for the people that, that our clients are like, you know, they either have a dance studio or a fitness gym, or they do salons and spas, or we got jewelry designers and they have like boutiques. So if I have a retail business, how do I get people to come in? Yeah. ST: (06:02) Okay. So I love this and here’s what I want to tell you too. Even if you were an online business owner, listen, because business is business is business, right? The strategies I’m using online, I’ve used in my brick and mortar. But the biggest thing that I, I, the difference I should say with brick and mortar is we can get them faster because we’re in person, it’s a deeper connection, right? So sometimes you’ll hear online marketing and they’ll talk about these email drips and spending how many emails, you know, getting them warmed up in the brick and mortar world. I I’m running Facebook ads directly to a free trial or a book, a call or things like that. And we’re getting people on the phone that day and possibly in our building that week. So it’s a little bit different and how fast we can do it because a lot of times our people are searching for us. They already know they have a need and they trust us a little bit more because we are local down the road. We’re one of those neighborhood businesses. But our typical funnel looks like Facebook ad to some way to not just collect their name, their email, but also their phone number. So we get to go a little deeper on our landing pages than a lot of people do in the influencer world. Not everybody’s collecting phone numbers, but in local brick and mortar, it’s more normal. Like it’s the regular everyday thing. RV: (07:20) Yeah. Well, and, and one of the things you said there to me, which is like such a big delineation for people to understand, but whether you’re online or brick and mortar or some combination of the two is when I think of local businesses, that’s like intent based search. Someone is searching for a plumber or a dance studio. And there’s a whole world of digital marketing related to that, which my mind also goes to Google because like the Google network has really like intent based search, which is different from the online world where it’s more like I’m trying to create intent. I’m trying to drum up interest like, Hey, check out this ad, meet me or this piece of content. And then kind of like rope them in versus capture them. Is that, do you see it that same ST: (08:09) For sure. I feel like the intent based marketing is a lot more we spend more time on it. So Google, my business is a thing you want to make sure it’s updated. It’s maximized because people really are searching for us using search engines like Google. So that’s huge for us. It’s absolutely one of our number one resource or sources of new leads. However, we are doing paid traffic to look alike audiences, people that, you know, we’ll upload our current customer base into Facebook and we’re doing lookalikes in this area. So that is an intent. We’re putting it in front of them, hoping, okay, maybe this will be a good fit. Right. So we do a mix of both in our brick. RV: (08:51) Yeah. So, so just so everyone understands, you kind of brushed through that real quick, but it’s like, you actually took your customer, your customer database from your brick and mortar store export it, it, theoretically you could use a plugin, but you export it as a, as an old school CSV file, upload it to Facebook. You could show ads to those people, but then you’re allowing Facebook to create a look alike off of that, knowing that those people are all from a demographic, like a geographic region. And so is going to pick that up and show ads to people like that. ST: (09:25) Yeah. And one thing we do too, to get a little bit more advanced too, is if you have a software where you can say, who is not currently active, that used to be active, like, could we get a reengagement campaign? Could we get them back in the gym? Could we get them? So you don’t, especially with COVID. If, if people have taken a break from you, how do we go back to our inactive list of customers upload that into Facebook and see who we can target. Like that’s another great way to get them back in and engaged. RV: (09:56) And then the other thing. So I love this cause you’re, you’re advertising to your customers. This is like the intersection of digital and brick and mortar you’re advertising to your customers. Like in some that are inactive, you’re advertising to look alike audiences, which are people who Facebook says, looks like these people. And then do you also run ads? I mean, when you’re the one thing about brick and mortar is you go, can I run ads to people who like the ice cream shop right down the street from my studio? Do you do that kind of stuff? ST: (10:25) So it’s a little harder because a lot of these little local brick and mortar businesses, we can’t, we’re not big enough to say like that they like this person, you know, do this. So it’s a little harder, but we will find, you know, for my ideal client, she’s a typical mom who likes target and certain brands. So we can grab bigger companies that are more nationwide that she’s going to, like that would still be a good fit for us. Like if we’re looking for the soccer mom, right. The dance mom, we can find out some of those interests, but it’s, it is harder to grab like the little ice cream shop or the gymnastics studio down the road. RV: (11:00) Gotcha. Okay. So that’s really powerful. So would you say that again, we’re talking brick and mortar, but we’re talking digital strategies for brick and mortar. Do you think most of the, you know, kind of like the primary ways you drive traffic or controllable traffic to your store, is that coming on the digital front and that’s pushing people into your store or are there still a bunch of things that you’re doing that would be like offline advertising that is really moving people into your physical location ST: (11:35) Is definitely pivoted much more digital. I mean, I’ve been around since pre social media. I always tell people, my first memory of marketing was I would walk in subdivisions and hang door hangers on people’s doors. Like Facebook ads was like the most amazing blessing that I’ve ever, that I didn’t have to go walk in some divisions anymore. So I mean, we’ve been doing it a long time. I will say one of our best sources to this day is having a referral program. And I know you’re big on that too. So we, we do kind of like the direct TV model where, you know, the friend gets something as well as the person they refer and we are very public about our referral rewards and referral program. So that’s huge for us. I mean, they’re either coming from a Facebook ad, a Google search or a friend referred them. I mean, those are the three big things we’re finding. RV: (12:25) Interesting. So Facebook ad a Google search or a referral. Yeah. So we had brand builders is that way, right. We have a very public lifetime referral fee. And then Amanda tress, who I know you also know who’s also a good friend of ours. She was on the show, I don’t know, a few weeks ago. And she, you know, her whole business like blew up with all the referral program and she’s talked about that whole thing. Okay. So you talked about Facebook ad, you mentioned, you mentioned Google, my business and then the referral program. Is there anything about else about Google search that we kind of need to know or key in on? And I, I guess this would apply again for brick and mortar, but I think, I feel like we hear a lot of people talk about Facebook ads. But we don’t hear that much about Google for personal brands. And so could you, is there anything there that you feel like we should know? ST: (13:20) So Google my business and Google, right, just in general, SEO is definitely brick and mortar. People are searching for you there, right? We want to make sure that you’re ranking high. Now, if you’re in an area where you want to get on that homepage, but if you have tons and tons of competitors, it can be really hard to fight for a spot on that homepage in the online world. It’s going to be very difficult to fight for that homepage because there are a million people doing something very similar to you. That’s why I think there’s a big difference in people. Don’t really talk about Google and SEO as much online as they do in the brick and mortar world. It’s just less saturated. Right. but I will say with Google ad words I think Google ad words work great for brick and mortars. ST: (14:06) The one thing that I will say is watch your market. So I don’t run Google ads right now because nobody in my area runs Google ads and I’m at the top of Google. So if you Google like Oak Creek, Wisconsin dance classes, I’m going to be right there at the top. So I don’t feel the need to run ads to get higher than myself. If that makes sense. If my competitors started to do it, then I would probably have to consider it. I also know it would totally push me in the game and I’m afraid that if I start proactively, it’ll just push them into the game. And then we’re just going to be outbidding each other when let’s just stay free. If we can. Let’s just say, RV: (14:45) You’re the one that if, especially if you’re the one at the top, ST: (14:49) Yeah. It was still reason to get the Google game. RV: (14:52) We’ll make sure that this podcast isn’t seen by anyone in Wisconsin. We’ll, we’ll, we’ll ST: (14:59) It’s just kind of like my strategy right now, but you may be in a different situation. You might be not even on the homepage, like number one, and you may have a lot of people running Google ads that you might want to think about time to pay to play. Right. There may come a time that I’m going to have to start doing it. It just isn’t right now. RV: (15:18) Yeah. Well, and I think, you know, one of the things about brick and mortar, one of the things about Google in general, that’s amazing is you can actually see how many people are searching for a specific term. And, and then how much it would cost to bid on that term. And so when I think of brick and mortar, I also think about hyper localized search. So like the name of a community or a small, you know, like I’m a Nashville, you know, it, you wouldn’t be going for like personal branding Tennessee, or you could do personal branding Nashville. I mean, it doesn’t really fit for us cause we don’t have like a retail location, but you might use like Oak Hill or green Hills or whatever the name of the community is. If it, if there are people, if there is a lot of, a lot of pain going on, you could like narrow the geographic niche. ST: (16:11) Yeah. And I think there’s different phrases that somebody local is looking for. Especially if they’re typing in Nashville, they might be typing in marketing agency, right. Consulting, like they’re looking for phrases like that. And then that’s something you absolutely could be doing keyword wise, trying to get people to see you, but people that kind of get this whole online world and that there’s gurus out there. Right. They may not be going to Google. They’re probably going to Facebook and kind of going down that rabbit hole. RV: (16:39) Yeah. well, that’s interesting. Okay. So that now this whole context of this conversation was brick and mortar strategies, everything, including the referral program applies to digital as well. Are there, are there things okay, so the foot traffic formula originally, it was kind of targeted at brick and mortar and but all of these things would apply just as you said, in the beginning to any digital business, is there any other sort of advantage that a digital business has that your, you would say is like, you’re seeing a lot of traffic that you really don’t, you can’t do or benefit from and in the brick and mortar world? ST: (17:18) I don’t, I don’t think so. I mean, for the most part, when I started my online business and I was struggling in the beginning, I had to go back and go, well, what did I do in the first business to become successful? And I truly was duplicating a lot of that online. That’s why I always go back and say like, this is just marketing. You know, this is not something brand new. It’s just a transitional period of what our marketing looks like, what business is now turning into. And 2020 has been a slap in the face to say like time to update, you know, your business model if you’re still living in the past. RV: (17:52) Yeah. Well, and like, just even using that as an illustration, like the door hangers, I mean, a Facebook ad is kind of like the equivalent of a door hanger. I mean, you’re going to see it, the diff the difference is you often don’t have to pay for a digital impression where you would have to pay to physically print that. ST: (18:10) Yeah. I paid for everyone. I had to manually put them on every single door, whether somebody took that and just threw it on the ground or threw it in the garbage. Right. but it looked just like a Facebook ad. Would it had a graphic, it had a headline, a call to action with a link. I mean, it took them exactly like you would do it right now in 2020. RV: (18:30) Yeah. I mean, that’s like, you know, when, when we’re trying to teach personal brands about like a webinar or something, we’re going look, the way I built my whole speaking business was I went and spoke for free. And I was on stage in front of live people with humans and they get to sample me. And then that was how they buy the stuff. A webinar is exactly the same thing. Except I think what you’re saying is true. You got to realize in the digital world, it’s, it’s slower, a lower percentage than, you know, kind of like in that physical world. So on the topic of the digital marketing, are there any places, so Facebook and Google, is there any other place that you’re looking or spending time, or you have your eye on right now in terms of online traffic sources beyond Facebook and Google ST: (19:13) For my brick and mortar or online or both? Both. Okay. So we’re definitely, we’re, we’re trying to do Facebook and Instagram, both. So when I say Facebook, I also mean Instagram and we’re definitely starting to look more into LinkedIn and YouTube for our online business this year. We’ve been doing it, but I’m talking like getting really serious and using the platform and maximizing it. RV: (19:38) Yeah. But not for brick and mortar per se. ST: (19:41) I’m not for brick and mortar. I actually thought about with my brick and mortar, I thought about doing a podcast, like a local podcast, and that will be happening. It’s just with COVID things that definitely changed the game a little bit. And that’s something that I is a little different. I don’t see a lot of brick and mortars having a podcast, but I also see podcasting just getting bigger and bigger. And I kind of want to start that trend in my area too, for just that extra credibility. Yeah. So I’m really excited that it would have been on my, to do list already pre COVID, but now we’ll, we’ll be doing something soon which is exciting. Like I love doing something experimenting. Like, let’s see if this works, let’s see what happens. RV: (20:20) Yeah. And we did an interview with a guy named Rick Steele. Who’s has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on Google advertising. And one of the things he was talking about was with the YouTube ads, you can choose to run an ad in front of any specific video, not just a, a channel, but one video. So if there are videos out there that are like getting a lot of views that are somehow for a local market, I mean, it’d be to see, yeah. It seems like the battle there on YouTube and Google land is developing more and more in LinkedIn too. Although I, you know, I hear pretty consistently at LinkedIn feels very expensive to get to people. So let’s talk about just COVID real quick then. So you, you you’ve mentioned COVID for our brick and mortar people. I mean, what do you do, ST: (21:14) Where do you start? RV: (21:15) I mean, yeah. Where do you even start with? I mean, obviously stores, you know, some of them are getting to open up the nail salons and stuff, or start open a little more and more, but what, what was the strategy? I mean, here you are an 18 year vet to brick and mortar, and I’m guessing that for some period of y’all, must’ve got shut down. ST: (21:33) Yeah. We were closed from about mid-March until June 1st. So for us you know, we didn’t have anything digital. We had never been doing anything like that. We, the good thing is because I already was in this world and I, you know, I’ve been on zoom a million times. Like this is where we live as an entrepreneurial online. I was able to go into my brick and mortar and that day say we are immediately going virtual. We are going to have zoom classes. And it’s funny because my entire team was like, what is zoom? We don’t know what you’re talking about. Where are these videos going? What are you after you do the video? Where does the video go? Like, it was just, they were so like, I couldn’t even believe that my team who’s incredible. They just, they didn’t live in that world. ST: (22:18) So what was exciting was I realized, okay, they’re so confused. And this is what’s happening right now for my competitors. They’re doing this whole thing, but they don’t have me going guys. I live on zoom. My mum’s zoom all day long. I’ve got this right. So we were the only ones in my area to pivot virtually. First of all, we pivoted within two days, we opened up on like a Tuesday and said, here’s what we’re doing. And we kind of held it over. We kept, I think we were at like 90% retention that first month. Wow. So we were really like trying everything. And then we got to open back up June 1st, but we’ve actually kept, you can come to us in person or you can stream virtually at the same time for those that don’t feel comfortable. So it’s definitely changed the way we’re going to continue to do business for a little while. But what I realized was we can’t have all of our eggs in one basket in one type of product. Like, all we do is service based businesses in person. That was scary when I realized like, that was a lot more fragile than I realized it was. RV: (23:24) Hm. ST: (23:26) Well now we’re, we’re asking ourselves, what else could we do? Cause I think there’s some people that say, yeah, but I do live of like, like I have a customer that is in live event, promo. They do swag for live events, right. In person events, they’re gone. Right. And they’re so stuck on like, but that’s what we used to do. That’s how used to make money. And you have to just scrap how you used to do things and ask yourself, how would I start again today in 2020? What could I offer that would still work in this market, you know, in the online space per se. RV: (24:02) Yeah. That’s powerful. That’s a powerful question. What did you do to like when you stream? So I was actually curious about this. So we are streaming classes, your dance classes. How are you connecting the camera to zoom? Like, what are you, is that where you using zoom to stream it? Or were you using something else? ST: (24:20) So we were just using zoom. However, some people did not have great computers. So we bought them little webcams that hooked up to their computer. RV: (24:28) Oh, okay. So, so people just, this is your, Oh, that’s right. Cause your instructors are not at the studio either they’re at home or wherever they are ST: (24:36) Correct. Even when we opened back up and they were streaming with it, now they’re in the building, but they all have to have their own computers. We have to have, we have like, I don’t even know maybe seven classrooms going on at the same time. So I need seven computers, seven cameras, seven microphones. Like I needed all the equipment. So that was, that was a process right there. RV: (24:56) But you’re streaming. You basically got a U S like a, an external USB camera that plugs right into the computer. And then you’re just setting that camera wherever you need to film the instructor. Correct. And then how are you miking up an instructor? ST: (25:11) Yeah. So that was a challenge. And that was something I’m like, you know what, no, one’s going to know that, no, one’s going to know they’re going to need good audio. I knew video needs to know. RV: (25:19) I know that. But like these mikes we’re talking on you, can’t like, if you’re teaching dance, you’re not just like, ST: (25:25) I wish I could show you, but there are fitness. Mike’s like, if you Google like fitness microphones, they’re wireless, they plug in your back pocket. So you can actually hook up a headset. And my, now my instructors have these fancy ones that go like around their neck and they sit right here. So they’re talking into the microphone. So there are options for people that need even us, if we want it to walk around and do a whiteboard back here, I could be 10 feet away writing. And you could still hear me with the wireless mic. RV: (25:51) Yeah. Yeah. So the, but it’s Bluetooth, Bluetooth technology basically. Yeah. wow. Well, look at that. We’re getting, we’re getting a few secrets again. We’ll make sure not to run ads to anyone in Wisconsin to promote this episode. And if you’re from Wisconsin, I’m sorry. You just have to ignore this episode. Particularly if you’re in the dance dance business, but I’m not thinking we’re reaching a lot of people in that market, Stacy. So I think, ST: (26:15) And here’s the thing. I really have that abundance mindset of even if they go to do X, Y, Z, I’ll always be one step ahead. Right. I’m always looking and investing and researching, and that’s what you have to do because there are competitors everywhere. Right? So you’ve got to stay on top of your game. They make me stronger. RV: (26:32) Yeah. And I mean, so many of these things, it’s like, they’re simple, but nobody actually does them. Like, there’ll be such a small percentage of people who actually go do something. And it’s, and it’s like as simple as exporting your customer list, uploading it to Facebook and running ads to those people. Who’ve been inactive that could change your business. But only 5% of people who hear that idea will probably ever actually even attempt to do it. ST: (26:58) Right. Cause somebody is thinking, I don’t know how to do that. I don’t know where that would be. I don’t have the software to do that. They think of excuses. Why they can’t instead of just making it work and figuring it out. RV: (27:09) Yeah. So are you, you, you’re still loving the brick and mortar. Like you’re, you’re doing, you’re finding the hybrid. I mean obviously teaching people, brick and mortar. So foot traffic formula is an online business that teaches brick and mortar people, how to use online to drive their brick and mortar business. Right. So you’ve got an online, but you’re still brick and mortar. ST: (27:32) I am. And you don’t, people will say to me all the time, like, why don’t you sell? Like, why don’t you get out of it? And here’s the thing. When you build a business that runs like a well oiled machine, there’s no reason to get out of it. I don’t feel trapped. I don’t feel underpaid. I don’t feel exhausted by my brick and mortar. And when people tell me, like, get out, sell, do this. I always think you probably had a bad experience managing a team. You probably didn’t have consistent paychecks. You probably had a lot more chaos than I’m experiencing. So for me, I don’t have plans to sell my brick and mortar at all. Like we’ve been doing this, I haven’t taught a dance class in over 10 years. I haven’t worked in the building for about seven years. And I plan to keep, to keep running them. RV: (28:17) Wow. Well, and isn’t that the truth? I mean, when you understand the way businesses are valued, all you’re doing is getting an advance on future earnings. So it’s like, I’m just, I’m just giving up an ATM machine that I’ve built and in exchange for a onetime payment, it’s like, well, I kinda like my ATM machine and it’s, as long as I think it’s going to keep running, I’m probably just going to hang on to that. Yeah. That’s awesome. I mean, really, really cool. And just something you just don’t hear every day. So I mean, Stacy, where do you want people to go if, if they want to connect with you or learn about foot traffic formula or, you know, some of the stuff that you’re up to. ST: (28:53) Yeah. So you can just go to my website, Stacy, social.com. I know that is a lot to spell. So I’ll have you look that up on [inaudible] podcast, but yeah, RV: (29:04) L it’s not a big deal, but it, you know, until it’s, you know, you might go Tuscaloosa to show just to shul, but to USC AHL, but yeah, we’ll put a link to it, of course. ST: (29:16) But yeah, I would say my podcasts, foot traffic, and then everywhere on social media, it’s just at Stacey social. RV: (29:22) Yeah. I love it. Well, thanks for sharing some of these secrets. This is a very unique space. I think you’re, you’re one of the earlier people for sure, into this space and I love that you’re doing it. I love that. You’re like running the brick and mortar doing it as an active, not teaching stuff you used to do, but like, you’re actually, you’re doing it. It’s really good. ST: (29:44) I think that was one of the big differences with COVID. We had an influx of people coming to me and it’s because I’m still running it. I’m in the thick of it. That was a crazy mass in March. And when they could learn what I was doing in real time, that was helpful. So it actually showed me the importance of keeping the brick and mortar to truly be able to teach in real time what’s going on so we can continue to strengthen our skills as well. RV: (30:10) I love it. Well, we’ll link up to Stacy tuschl.com. Thanks for being here. We wish you the best and we’ll talk to you again.

Ep 108: Why Research is Your Competitive Advantage with Jason Dorsey

Speaker 1: (00:05) [Inaudible] RV: (00:07) Hey, brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for tuning in to listen to this interview, we are so excited to bring you this information and wanted to let you know that, Hey, there’s no sales pitch coming from anything that we do with this is all our value add to you and the community. However, if you are somebody who is looking for specific strategies on how to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and we offer a free call to everyone that’s interested in getting to know us and is willing to give us a chance to get to know them and share a little bit about what we do. So if you’re interested in taking us up on a free strategy call, you can do that at brand builders, group.com/summit. Call brand builders, group.com/summit. Call. Hope to talk to you soon on with the show. RV: (01:02) You’re about to meet one of the smartest people that I know, one of my best personal friends, someone that I learn a ton from, and I admire tremendously. Jason Dorsey is truly one of the, I think, most respected, true thought leaders in the world. Somebody who’s work defines our world and helps us redefine our world. So he is the leading generational researcher. I think in the world he’s been on 60 minutes. He’s been on the today show. He’s been on the early show. He’s been on over 200 shows. I mean, he’s on national TV on almost a weekly basis and him and his wife. Okay. So Denise via is the CEO of gen HQ and they are a research firm that helps huge companies conduct data driven, you know, empirical analysis on the trends of how generations are buying, selling, working. And they have a brand new book that’s coming out called Z economy. RV: (02:09) How gen Z is going to change the future of business and what to do about it. So this affects you as a personal brand. We’re going to talk a little bit about how Jason and Denise have built their careers up to where they are at now. And Jason was recently inducted into the professional speaking hall of fame. He’s had over 1000 standing ovations and there’s also one of the most dynamic onstage presenters that I have ever, ever seen. So Jason, welcome to the show, buddy. Thank you. Just thrilled and honored to be with you. And I just want to say thank you for all that I’ve learned from you about brand building and developing a platform and really being able to leverage ideas and to influence. So thank you so much for having me on and for your friendship. It’s truly an honor to be with you today. JD: (03:00) Of course, brother. So I think hopefully don’t mind me sharing this. You’re one of the highest paid speakers in the world and specifically among speakers who are paid a lot of money who are no offense I would put in the non-celebrity Speaker 4: (03:16) Non-Celebrity yes, definitely a non-celebrity over here reminded about that, JD: (03:20) But my nine year old daughter every day that I’m not a celebrity. And when I think about why, okay, we talked about a lot of the reasons why, you know, being amazing on stage, you have been in this industry a long time, but I think that your super power is probably research. And of course, Jen HQ you, you the center for generational kinetics is actually the name of the firm, right? So you guys do real research and so can you just talk about like, what do you, what do you do there as a research firm and how do you think that that shapes, you know, or has shaped your speaking career in terms of what separates you from other speakers, authors, thought leaders, you know, et cetera. Yeah, it’s a great question. And so I think maybe to go back a little bit, I got into this when I was 18 years old and I didn’t have a resource like you or, or other groups that could sort of help me to figure out what my path would be to become an author and speaker and a consultant and eventually a board member and so forth. JD: (04:22) So I had to sort of stumble my way through as many of us do. I ended up sleeping on the floor of a garage apartment when I was 18. I was $50,000 in debt. I had 5,000 books that I had self printed and no idea what I was doing, which is probably a good thing. Cause I may not have gotten that if I do what I was doing, but, but out of that, I sort of took the traditional path of in order to be an expert, I should write a book, which I still believe is one of the absolute best ways to get out there. It’s not the only way, but it’s a great way to do it. It shows depth of understanding and, and sort of a body of work or around a question or strategy or topic or something. So I wrote this first book and then eventually I started speaking for free. JD: (04:58) And then eventually I started getting paid a few hundred dollars and then more, and then I guess it was two or three years later, I was keynoting event. It was me and Barbara Bush, 5,000 people in arena, fireworks, going off. And, and to some degree I sort of thought I’d made it, you know, my mom was there. So that was really helpful. So that was my mini celebrity moment. And then after that, I realized that people would pay me to speak and that there was actually a business here to be a brand at that particular time talking about my generation, which we eventually called the millennials. But back then we did, and it was just young adults. And so I would go when I would speak and write and do all that. And I did that for many years, wrote a bunch more books. And then I ended up on 60 minutes and it was sort of one of those watershed moments, certainly for me in my career, but also around the topic of generations. JD: (05:46) Because until then it wasn’t nearly as hot of a topic, but that 60 minute episode really got the attention, particularly of executives, entrepreneurs, baby boomers, frankly, people that had money and influence and were makers. They then called me up and said, you know, we’ve hired your generation, Jason, they’re terrible. Their pants are falling off. You know, their moms here, they won’t work on their birthday. Like, you know, what’s wrong with you. And so I sort of became the flak jacket if you will, for my generation. And in doing that, I’m speaking at all these corporate board events and just, you know, doing what I do. And I’ll remember distinctly, I was at this one boardroom and I was, I was meeting with the board and the CEO of this public company. So it’s publicly held company trades on the New York stock exchange at the time basically said that millennials were terrible and head and they just had all these problems with it. JD: (06:34) So I not knowing any better when afterwards. And I asked their head of HR, I said, would you mind sending me the data so I could understand the problem that we just heard about because I want to make sure I can contextualize it. Cause then maybe I can try to, to solve for, to come up with some ideas. So they sent me the data and I looked at the data. I’ll never forget it. And the data didn’t match what the CEO had just said. And that was a huge deal because I, you know, I’ve served on the board of a public company. I serve on lots of private company boards right now it’s unusual that a CEO would make such a bold claim that isn’t grounded in their own data. Right? And so I went through the niece, my wife, who has a PhD, and I said, Denise, this is the strangest thing. JD: (07:16) You know, it just was with this company. They’re amazing. The CEO said this, I got the data set. And then the data does not match what the CEO just said. I said, what do you think we should do? And she said, we should start a research company. She said, because then we can give people great data, accurate data, and then they can make better decisions. And if we control the data, if we, if it’s our data, then we’re the people that they’re going to keep coming back to in order to help them grow their business or whatever the problem is you’re trying to solve. So that was how we created the center for generational kinetics. And Diddy’s being a professional researcher, became the CEO, ran up all of our research. And then we started doing more and more research. And we started doing research in the U S and then we started doing research outside the U S multiple languages and what ultimately happens. JD: (08:00) And I think this is so important for people who want to build their brand is the more data that we collected that was our own. The more people came to us for that information, for that context, for that insight. And so when you want to separate yourself in a market, one of the things I’ve learned to do is to be unique or different from everybody else that now I may not be better. I happen to think in most cases, our solutions are better, but I’m certainly different because we’ve now done more than 65 generational studies around the world. We’ve worked with over 700 clients, including many of the biggest brands in the world. And every time we work with clients, we get their data. And you can imagine now when somebody comes to me from, I don’t know, pick an industry life insurance and says, Jason, you know, can you help us think about the generational impact on the life insurance category and what our sales professionals need to know? JD: (08:46) I can say absolutely. In fact, I know exactly what works to sell life insurance, to millennials, gen X and boomers, and why one generation tries one technique to sell and that work with this generation of customers and vice versa. But then I can take that and apply it to automotive. I can apply it to physicians and healthcare. I can apply that to technology B2B enterprise company. So all of a sudden what we did, and it was not intentional. What we did is the more data that we created, the more research we did, the more we stood out in the market and you asked, you know, how do we charge the fees that we get that we receive? It’s because people are hiring me because we bring this data. This research has insights to everything that we do. So even if I don’t do a study for someone, the fact is I’ve already done 15 studies in automotive. JD: (09:28) I don’t have to do that. So they already know what it was, and I’m still getting data from all these different sources. And so for me, like when we wrote this economy book, what I think makes it so powerful. So we have all this data about gen Z. Who’s now 24 years old, as they relate to, let’s say millennials and gen X and baby boomers. And so for people out there, let’s just use the book as an example that wanted to let’s say, recruit or motivate or retain gen Z. They don’t have time managers out there to go try a whole bunch of stuff and see what works. They want to know what works. So we’re able to give them that, cause we’ve already proven it same with marketing or sales or building trust or driving influence. And that’s what people pay us for. They pay us to bring context and data driven insights and help them solve a specific problem. Right? I’m not a raw speaker. I’m not, you know, I, wasn’t a coach of a professional football team. I don’t do that. I help people understand how to solve tough generational challenges. And right now, like in our case, gen Z and millennials are upending. Every major industry, huge issues being created and they need to be solved so that leaders can move forward, grow their own personal brand, but also move their business forward. And so that’s how we got into this. And what was left RV: (10:33) You think for you that they’re all causing ruckus. Cause that’s key that keeps you in high demand, screwing everything up JD: (10:40) For everybody. Well, and that, so let’s take that comment. Cause I think it’s a really good one. So, so the perception we hear from executives all the time is, you know, Jen’s Dean, they’re driving all this change or just all of this change. They’re creating all this problems. And argument is no, they’re not. They’re just doing what they’ve always done. It’s all they’ve ever known for them. This isn’t changed. This isn’t new. This is indifferent. This is purely all they’ve ever known in terms of how to communicate what their work styles are, what their motivations are. What’s important to them. And they’re bringing that into an environment. The environment sees it as change, but gen Z and even millennials, they don’t see it as change. It’s all they’ve ever known. Why are you calling me, send me a text. You want me to do bring a checkbook? JD: (11:23) I don’t have one. You know, like these sorts of things are real deal. And so in the book in particular, we try to humanize with a bunch of Jensey stories, but also have managers who are sharing their personal stories, working with Genti marketers, talking about how they’re using social media and why certain things work and certain things don’t. And I think that’s the biggest issue for me. So we’ve sort of built our brain on the idea that we separate generational myth from truth. That’s really the key, right? We separate myths from truth and that’s what most people want are smart. If they can just get the truth, they’ll make a great decision, but they don’t know who to trust, where to go for the information so forth. And so we can bring that to them. So as a brand, you know, my brand evolved originally. JD: (12:04) I was a writer, writer wrote my first book and then I became a speaker. I didn’t become a speaker out of strategy. I became a speaker cause nobody bought the book, but I could eventually I got offered a free lunch to speak. And then I got offered dinner to speak. And then I got paid on a hundred dollars, whatever. And so, so all of that. So I went from author, really being passionate about a subject to being a speaker and then trying to figure out how to communicate well, right? 3000 talks around the world to all kinds of audiences. I mean the same kind of big stages you speak on. And then from that going into research and every time I’ve done that our fees have gone up, demand has gone up, influence has gone up the media, calls us all the time because we have the data. And so for me, when I think about building a brand, for example, this economy book is the way we’re going to base our brand for the next 10 years, gen Z is not going away. So do this and put it out and build on it. RV: (12:53) I want to talk about gen Z specifically in a second, because I think it’s, it’s you know, they are a massive force in the world, which is going to affect all of our businesses before we do that though, in terms of research. Okay. So, so let’s say that I’m, you know, I’m not a generational speaker, but I speak on something marriages or health or money or something. JD: (13:20) What, what does research, what does research mean? RV: (13:23) Like really mean and how can I, how can I do something semi substantive at lease and semi, you know, like I think there’s gotta be different levels of research, right? Like one thing is like, Hey, I did an Instagram poll to my followers. Another might be, Hey, I actually conducted a survey and I found some audience, another level might be, I hired some research from, and then maybe the next level is I hired an actual researcher that was on my team. Like, can you just walk us through like the varying levels of like what counts as research? And, and, and to what extent we really need to be able to do it in order to kind of cite it as fact and truth and not just like, you know, my Instagram poll. JD: (14:07) Yeah, absolutely. So I think there’s a, a pretty big difference between data and research. And so a lot of people confuse the two. And so for let’s take your Instagram poll. I actually think social media polls are great way to drive engagement, but they don’t represent really anything other than the people who happen to follow you more than likely or you’re advertising to, and then sub some subgroup of those that happen to be so entice that without being paid any money and they have nothing else to do that they’re actually going to complete the poll. Right. And so if you think about who it represents, I would argue probably doesn’t even represent your followers. It represents some subgroup that at that moment was interested enough and didn’t have something else going on that they wanted to participate and receive nothing in return for it. JD: (14:47) Right. So it’s helpful. It’s interesting. You want to share it and it’s a great data point, right? It’s, it’s really interesting. And you’ll probably find a lot of things that will help to inform future things. We wouldn’t consider that research, but we will consider it interesting. And I wouldn’t say that it’s wrong or bad. It’s just one source of data. But I think the problem is people do an Instagram poll or a Facebook poll, or they email their list and then they put it out as infantry search. And that I think is where you, you can, it’s a very slippery slope for us, generally speaking quantitative research, which is primarily what we do. We’re always looking to have a very low margin of error usually plus, or minus 3.1 19 out of 20 times. And so if somebody comes to me and says, Jason, I want to know your methodology. JD: (15:29) I want to know your sample. Then I absolutely want to be able to share that with them, help them to understand it. And I always say in my talks, if people are citing data, but they don’t tell you where they got it from, or they don’t tell you the methodology and sample be very leery because they could have just pulled their friends. They could have just asked their family. They could have asked a group that they knew was going to answer in a very specific way. So sort of on your, your hierarchy, if you will, of what you provided. So, you know, polls and things to your friends, which by the way, that’s a great way to understand your list and a great way to understand your followers. There’s probably even, Speaker 5: (16:00) Yeah. There’s other uses there’s other uses for that data point. JD: (16:04) Absolutely. And if it’s for internal insights in particular, I think that’s fabulous. What you don’t want to do is go start publishing that as if it’s research because anybody who’s an actual researcher, we’ll, we’ll fight, we’ll poke holes in it and that’s it like somebody like us, we have to be careful. We have PhD researchers because other PhD researchers are looking at our research. Right. And so we know that that’s sort of the, just the way it works. So you have the poles like you talked about, and then you could say go up. Like, here’s what I would do. If somebody came to me, cause we work with lots of big name celebrities and we do this for lots of companies that the easiest way to understand what’s going on in an industry that you want to be an expert in is to go and aggregate third party research. JD: (16:43) What I mean by that is you go from find research from all different sources where they did actual studies and then you put it together. And now you sort of have your one page five page, 10 page, 50 page source document of all this great research that other people have paid for, but they’ve released it publicly. Like for us, most of our research, we never released publicly because our clients want to use it as a competitive advantage in the marketplace. And then we have some that want to be really positioned as thought leaders. And so they want to release the research and bring something different to that conversation. And we help them get tons of media and get on TV shows and all this kind of jazz. But, but if we’re going back to the personal brand side, then what I would say is you want to start with this sort of landscape research where you take whatever you can find out there. JD: (17:27) And if you have no budget, you just find all the free stuff and you sort of synthesize it together, you cite it correctly. And now you’ve got this foundational piece of information, right? That you can then refer to going like a step up from that. You could join, let’s say a syndicated study or some other study where there’s a whole bunch of people chipping in, in order to do a really great study. That’s pretty common. And then you can jump up if a mortar, which is to what we do, which is customer. And we do quantitative research, qualitative research, we do mixed method, all kinds of things. But the key there is I like on the quant side, we’re doing pretty large studies, a thousand completes 2000 completes 5,000 complaints. We’re doing it around the world. We’re waiting it to something like the, let’s say the us census for age, gender, geography, and ethnicity or whatever it is. JD: (18:07) And then we’ll do like maybe I just want to find out about people who I don’t know started college, but didn’t finish or people who are small business owners that are millennials and female, right? Whatever those are, I would do studies built around those. And so, as you want to, frankly, as yet to spend more money, you can do much more complex studies. You can do more complex analytics with the data and so forth. But fundamentally what I would say to somebody can mean said, look, Jason, I got no money. Where would I start? I would say, great. What I would do is I go find all the publicly available research. You can put it together in some source documents, cite everything correctly, which is really the key. And then you can start to talk about it, cause it doesn’t have to be your data as long as it’s released publicly and you cite them appropriately. JD: (18:48) I mean, our research gets quoted all the time and that’s how we get so much media. It’s shocking how many other people use our research and their work. I mean, part of the reason we even did this economy book is because we do this study called the state of gen Z. We do it every year and have done it for many years. And that’s really sort of the source study for people trying to understand gen Z. And it was getting so much publicity that we ended up doing this economy book in many ways, because we wanted to go really deep around those core questions and strategy. So I personally believe that research is one of the best ways to separate yourself, particularly in a crowded market. And like there’s, there’s competition everywhere. It doesn’t matter what your topic is, motivation, strategy, generations, leadership, whatever. Right. And so anything you can do to distinguish yourself in a credible way, particularly through research, I think is very valuable. And I believe that if you want to work with executives and entrepreneurs and people that are making big bets, the more data and research that you can bring, the more you’re going to have trust with them because they will know that you know what you’re talking about. And I think that’s really important, even more so where do you RV: (19:50) Nine? I mean, that’s really a powerful, that’s so practical and powerful is just to like, even for your own confidence that you’re not just sharing random thoughts off your head, but it’s like, Hey, this is based. Okay. JD: (20:02) Some, some statistically valid RV: (20:05) Work, even if I, if, even if it’s not my original work, where do you find third party research? You just go to like Google and type it in or is there JD: (20:14) Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. What I always suggest to people. So we do customer research. We do custom research for brands who do it for companies who do it for lots of big institutional investment groups. We do it for tons of people. So that’s our core business, but if somebody wanted to not use us, so let’s say, I, you know, they say, I don’t want to work for the center for generational kinetics. I’m not interested in, you know, whatever the topics are, where we specialize. I want to go hire somebody else. I would just go on Google and would always tell people is get three bids. You’ll be stunned, how different the pricing will be for the same exact thing, dramatically different pricing. If you’ve got five, you have five. And so then you sort of got to work through and say, okay, what’s going to get me what I want. JD: (20:56) What would I have confidence in the deliverables they’re going to provide? Are they going to help me to understand it? Or do they just write a survey and send me the answers? Then I got to go figure it out. Like our specialty is we write really great questions, but that’s what, that’s what we have so much business. And then we turn it into really powerful deliverables. And so what happens is you can do a great study, but if you can’t tell a good story based on the data, then it doesn’t matter how great the study is because people won’t be engaged to it. So you really got to be able to write great questions, have the right sample do all the things that you do and sort of good research hygiene. And then from there, the next step is turning it into that story based in the data that connects with the people you’re trying to reach. JD: (21:36) Maybe those are executives. Maybe those are entrepreneurs. Maybe they’re meeting planners, whoever it is they are, but they need to be able to understand why that, that research is important to them. Why do they need to take action on it? Why should they engage with you? And that I think is where it starts to get very powerful. I think people very often go cheap on research because they think, Oh, I just need to do a study. And I’m going to throw a few thousand dollars at it or something. And then they’re frequently disappointed. They say research doesn’t work, but it’s sorta like you. And I joke about, well, if you pay for, you know, an inexpensive speaker and you’re not happy with them, you probably got what you paid for. You know, that there’s not always a direct correlation, but oftentimes there’s enough, particularly if they’ve been around for a long time, but then RV: (22:15) Aggregating third party stuff. Like you’re saying that you can just search like the state of gen Z. You guys make that available just on your website and stuff like, so you’re saying you can find credible third party research just to help you understand your own space just by basically searching around and then looking for in their citation. What’s their margin of error and their sample size and that kind of stuff to make sure you’re looking at a valid JD: (22:40) Peace. Yeah. All great research will share their methodology. So if you go on our website, which is gen hq.com, GE and hq.com, you can click on state of gen Z. You’ll see our state of gen Z research studies there for those who are still sort of unsure what this looks like. You can see lots of research done for other clients. And so anytime something’s publicly available on the web, it usually says, you know, here’s our methodology, but also says, here’s how this can be used. If you want to use it, make sure you cite us. You know, if you’re going to publish it, make sure you link back that kind of thing. And by the way, you want to do that because that’s the right way to do it. And so yeah, I would go with the third party research first. I think that that’s statistically valid, put it together and provide it to people in a way that’s very helpful for them to understand something. JD: (23:20) A lot of times people think that research is about solving problems. Like we happen to use it for solving problems, but it may just be understanding a situation. Sure. If you don’t have understanding, you can’t drive towards that resolution, you can’t innovate. And so it brings a different perspective. You know, I’ll use millennials or gen Z as an example, lots of our clients say they know gen Z or millennials, and then they start to describe them. I’m like, well, that’s your kid or your grandkid, but that’s not the 80 other millennials, you know, in the U S or RV: (23:51) That’s not a statistically valid sample. It’s not, JD: (23:54) It’s a sample of one that, you know, you happen to have a lot of emotional tie to. And so we always joke that, that a lot of our clients have a proxy for the generation and that representative of the generation is their child or grandchildren. And usually the one that’s most frustrating for them. And so they’re stunned when we say, you know, gen Z is the fastest growing generation in the workforce. Millennials are the largest generation in the workforce, millennials outspend every other generation last year, millennials were the number one generation to refer their friends, gen Z or the key group of trendsetters right now for the first time, the youngest, which is gen Z. RV: (24:29) So let me, let me stop there. Cause I wanna, I want to officially transition here to the, to the, to the Z economy book and to gen Z, because I, I think that, you know, this expertise and the data you’re talking about. So if you put your hat on, so let’s just steal a little bit of free consulting from Jason Dorsey as personal brands that are, you know, communicating about a variety of topics, but we’re kind of like establishing thought leadership and things. What are, what are the things that we need to know about gen Z, that the data is telling you that you go okay, if you’re trying to reach this audience and why we either should or should not care about reaching the audience, but just like, what are some of the macro trends? I mean, obviously that’s what Z economy book is all about is like in the state of gen Z report. But I think if, as you apply that to personal brands, what are some of the things you think we could be on the lookout for? JD: (25:25) Yeah, absolutely. So I’ll show you, I’ll share with you some things that you should do and what to avoid. So in terms of things to absolutely do, like for us, we know a gen Z, they’re very values driven in terms of how they engage with brands and they don’t just engage. They join a brand. And so if you’re going to go out and you’re going to promote whatever it is that you’re, you know, is your personal brand or your larger brand, it’s very important. You share the why behind what you do. And I don’t mean like the Simon Sinek, why, I mean the, you know, how are you going to make the world a better place? How are you helping your local community? How are you working to combat some of these social challenges that gen Z is very much connected to this and we’ve seen it over and over and over in our research around the world. JD: (26:04) So it’s very important to have that mission, that thing that you’re owning, that you’re saying you’re tied to, it’s not just about making money. In fact, gen Z is more frugal than millennials. Gen Z has a higher savings rate. They’re looking for coupons and discounts are entering the workforce later than ever before. They’re going to graduate college there than ever before. 12% of them were already saving for retirement at age 22. Like, I mean some pretty staggering numbers for a generation so young. So if you want to message to them, and again, this is 24 and under you want to be very thoughtful that you’re in alignment with their values, whichever ones, you know, obviously they gotta be your values, but you want to make sure that they’re in alignment and you’re talking about things that are going to resonate with them. And then you to walk the talk on that, you can’t just say it. We saw so many brands over the last 12 months get completely blown up on social media because they said one thing and then they didn’t do it, or, you know, and so that lack of alignment gen Z will call you out so fast for that. So I think that’s really important. The second is RV: (26:59) They socially aware, is that like you would say, they’re kind of like socially aware, JD: (27:04) Well, they’re, they’re aware of social causes, right? They want, they want to know that you’re about more than just making money. And so much of personal branding unfortunately, is like, here’s how to make money or get rich or do this. And then people turn around and try to sell that. Like that’s interesting for gen Z. In fact, we would argue that gen Z would prefer to a side hustle versus trying to Steven start their own business. There’s a bunch of reasons for that tied around risk and money. But, but the idea here is you want to be really clear what you stand for so they can understand and decide if they, if it resonates with them. The second we know is they are very much into video and not into reading. That doesn’t mean they don’t read because they do read. But in terms of them taking the effort to engage with the brand videos where they start, that’s where we see things like ticktock doing so incredibly well or Snapchat and even Instagram. And obviously you’re the expert on videos. So that the video is what pulls them in and drives that sense of engagement reading for many young people is work doesn’t mean they don’t like to do it. It’s just work. And they’re used to just getting so much content through video that if you’re not providing a video, you’re missing them, all the posts with photos and all this stuff. Interesting. But you really want to pull them in. RV: (28:08) Oh, so not even phone, not even photos, you’re saying like donate, don’t think of photo and video is the same video is different. JD: (28:16) Definitely. Yeah, absolutely great distinction video. We find much more effective than photo or an image. They don’t like Photoshop things that are fake things that are perfected. That’s why you see brands like Arie who’s in this economy book doing so well with gen Z, where they’re showing like real images of real women, these kinds of things. So that a real desire for sort of rawness, I think is very strong with them. But we also see when we look at gen Z is if you are trying to sell them something, they need to know they’re getting a good deal. Now that’s important because they are very fiscally conservative or practical with their money. We see that they use coupons, they have this high savings rate, they get money for their birthday. They put it away and then ask their parents for money to go buy stuff. JD: (28:54) They really there’s a lot of that in the book. Does that mean that it reflects all gen Z? No, because our belief is generations or clues and not a box, but they’re powerful clues that do three things. They allow you to connect with build trust and drive influence. And if you can do that at a high level, you can grow your brand faster, but we also see what gen Z, if you want to engage with them, you have to understand their life stage. Remember they’re doing everything later than previous generations. That’s getting their driver’s license later in any other generation and into the workforce later RV: (29:22) Boggles my mind, my, my niece, like she waited like a year to get her driver’s license. And I’m like, everyone I know. Was there the day JD: (29:33) That you were eligible for a driver’s life RV: (29:35) That blew my mind? JD: (29:37) Yeah. Well, th that the concept of freedom, which is underlying that the, that for other generations, your driver’s license was your passport to freedom. Lose your ability to leave your home. Well, gen Z, we find don’t need that for a variety of reasons. We could go into all those take the rest of the time, but, but fundamentally they don’t attach the same thing to a driver’s license. And so if you have a different view of it, then you’re engaging with is different. Even owning a car, sounds like work and expense, but you don’t have to do it in a lot of places. So all of that, that’s why I say, you know what? Work with millennials. Tell brands this all the time, but we’re moving millennials. Doesn’t work with gen Z because they’re not millennials 2.0, I mean, they are completely different. They don’t remember a time before social media. JD: (30:16) They’ve always been able to do everything through, by sliding a finger on a screen. I mean, it’s fascinating. They’ll never write a check. They’ll never have a landline at home. All this stuff that’s sort of millennials started and was new and different gen Z doesn’t remember anything, but that in fact, gen Z does not remember nine 11. And that was one of our biggest discoveries. And that’s when he got here. So yeah, I mean, this generation is so different, more diverse than millennials. So in the book, a NC economy, we talk about this because if you can bring this accurate context, then you can figure out what to do. But the problem is so often we start with our own and then we apply it to them. And that’s where we misspeak. RV: (30:55) That is fascinating. I mean, yeah, just some of those things that you just said, like nine 11 and driver’s license. I mean, those are, you know, these like capstone moments in our life that don’t even, they’re not even on their register. So the way that we live and think is completely different from how they live and think, and it’s not that they have changed. I love what you said early on about they’re stepping into our environment. They’re not changing. It’s who they is, who they have been. Awesome. So Jason, this was like, man, I have to have been listened to this, like several times, just to pull out the part about how to do research and think about that. And then also gen Z, where do you want people to go to connect with? You obviously does economy book is coming out, you know, about this time. And so you can go find that and learn more about how we can take our personal brand and connect it to the trends that are coming with gen Z. But where should people go if they want to connect with you personally? JD: (31:56) Yeah, sure. Definitely. If you want to go check out the book, if you buy it on Amazon and you email us at [inaudible] dot com, we’ll send you all the free video courses that we put together. Denise, neither really, really good in terms of connecting with us personally, you could find me easiest way to find me is on Twitter. You can also just join our newsletter. That’s when we share all of our best research every month, you can sign up for [email protected]. And if you want to read more about the book and different things, you can go to Z economy, Z C O N O M y.com. I really look forward to connecting with everybody. You know, if people are part of your tribe, Rory you know, I I’d love to connect with them. So please feel free to reach out. RV: (32:36) Yeah, well there you have it friends. That, that is what it sounds like. And looks like when you have real data backed insights as research. Jason, thank you so much for, for this. And Kurt, you all go follow Jason, check him and Denise’s books, economy. We’ll link up to that in the show notes. Jason, we wish you the best. Thanks for being here. My man. Thank you, Rory. Congrats.

Ep 106: From Mentors to Millions with Kevin Harrington and Mark Timm

Speaker 1: (00:04) [Inaudible] RV: (00:07) Hey, brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for tuning in to listen to this interview, we are so excited to bring you this information and wanted to let you know that, Hey, there’s no sales pitch coming from anything that we do with this is all our value add to you and the community. However, if you are somebody who is looking for specific strategies on how to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and we offer a free call to everyone that’s interested in getting to know us and is willing to give us a chance to get to know them and share a little bit about what we do. So if you’re interested in taking us up on a free strategy call, you can do that at brand builders, group.com/summit. Call brand builders, group.com/summit. Call, hope to talk to you soon on with the show. RV: (01:03) So honored and excited to bring back to you to have people that I would consider mentors and to friends, to people that we have worked with. Kevin Harrington, most of you probably know because we had him on, when we originally did our influential personal brand summit, he was the original shark on the show shark tank. He is a co founding board member of EO entrepreneurs organization, and really the inventor of the infomercial, which has led to him selling over $5 billion in global sales. You know, these are products like Billy Mays and Jacqueline, Elaine, and Kim Kardashians and 50 cent and George Foreman. And he’s just amazing. And then my other friend, Mark, Tim, who you’ll, you’ll hear his story right now, we’ve Mark is someone that we met through the Ziglar family, and I know that’s how him and Kevin met and he is a serial entrepreneur himself. RV: (02:01) He has started more than a dozen companies. Several of them have grown and been sold. He has spoken professionally for more than 25 years. And I consider Mark a personal mentor because of the way that he runs his family life and the way that him and his wife and just, you know treat their family like a business. And that’s probably the biggest thing that I have taken from Mark over the years. So the two of them have teamed up to write a book here that is called mentor to millions, which has we already know has pre-sold thousands and thousands of copies. It’s a fantastic book from two amazing people. So guys, welcome to the show. Hey Rory, thanks for having us. It’s great to be here. Thanks buddy. So let’s talk about how y’all met because obviously, you know, this book is really interesting. You write it from you know, about the power of having a mentor. And I think in this relationship, Mark plays like the mentee, Kevin plays the mentor. But how did you guys meet? Because the three of us all share sort of a, an unusual, Cool and unique bond MT: (03:07) Yeah. So I’ll jump in and do that because we actually met through our mutual mentor. So I had Zig Ziglar as a mentor when I was a young man and Kevin had Zig Ziglar as a mentor, as a young man in guests who else had [inaudible] better than you Roy. So so this is the, the book wouldn’t even exist if it wasn’t for zigs mentorship. So we, we, we owe a lot to him and Tom Ziglar wrote the forward, but that’s the why we had to write this book because the, the, the book’s title is mentor to millions. That’s not millions of dollars. That’s millions of people impacted. So I didn’t know, I didn’t know Kevin. Okay. I didn’t know you, but because of our mentorship of Zig Ziglar, even after his passing from the earth, we all knew the children Zig Ziglar. MT: (04:00) And it was the children of Zig Ziglar that introduced me to Kevin, that introduced me to you. They introduced Kevin to you. And so you see impact of zigs legacy is now rippling on, you know, way past his passing on the earth. So that is how impact, that’s the kind of impact that we’re talking about, the exponential impact of mentorship. And that’s why we had to write this book because that’s the secret that crazy awesome successful people have is they had mentors in their lives. And would you say that, so, so Kevin for you who were RV: (04:34) Of your other mentors. So like, I know Zig you talk about cause secrets of closing the sale and you, you know, you guys have done a lot with that, you know, who are some of your other mentors in addition to Zig? And did you have a lot of mentors growing up? I know you’ve been a mentor to so many. KH: (04:50) Yeah, good question. And I think I go all the way back. I kind of joke a little bit, but it’s it’s for real, that I had my first mentor when I was 11 years old happened to be my father Charlie, because my, my father was, was a bartender. I’m one of six kids and there wasn’t a lot of money and, and great surplus as I was growing up. And, but my dad said, Hey, I’ve saved up enough money. I’m opening up my own restaurant. Harrington’s Irish pub. So I was in there at 11 years old, not just washing dishes and serving trays of food. I was in the back with him counting the money at the end of the day and looking at the suppliers. And it was pretty amazing how he brought me shoulder to shoulder with him. We’d go out and pick up supplies. And, and, and of course I was going to school also, but grade school at the time, but make a long story short. My dad was, he mentored me to start my own businesses when I was young. So I started a business when I was in high school and then another one in college and, and et cetera. But so as I KH: (05:58) Got out of, out of getting into the, the TV business and sold some of the businesses I started during high school, one of the first big mentors for me was, was somebody that I needed desperately. Cause I built a business in this SMTP space. I had a lot of orders that were sitting, but I couldn’t fulfill them because I didn’t have the inventory. So I needed capital to have inventories. And I went to bank after bank people say, Oh, go to the bank and get lines of credit, get financing. Right. Well, there was no assets for them to lend against. I was a young entrepreneur. This is 35 years ago, but I got a former bank president who was retired that came in and said, let me tell you the deal I’m going to do. You got five banks that turned you down. KH: (06:48) I’ll get you financing probably from one of those banks that turned you down. I’m going to get you a $3 million line of credit, which is what you need. And then after that’s all done, there’s no cost. That’s straight mentoring me, helping you because you deserve it. You need it. I want to help you. And then at that point, if you want to do some business with me, we can sit down and talk about it, but I’m going to have brought you an amazing gift in the process. 90 days later, 3 million bucks in my account, we took that and grew the business. I mean, we went 10 fold from there and it was just unbelievable because I was a great marketing guy, but I needed cash. I needed capital and inventory. So this, this was an amazing step for me. And of course, beyond that, people don’t know that before Russell Brunson ever started ClickFunnels, I was in this as seen a TV business. KH: (07:41) And I said, I’m losing all my viewers TV viewership is dropping. So I reached out to Russell and Russell gave me some great tips on digital marketing. And I, I actually came out of that meeting with Russell and sold a bunch of my at semen TV assets. Cause I realized the handwriting is on the wall. This is a business I’m on TV today. But now I say today, that was 10 years ago today. It’s digital, it’s Facebook, it’s Instagram, LinkedIn it’s you know, so I’ve had some great transitions from Russell Brunson to Zig Ziglar to my father, to the banker that was retired to even getting a, a couple of days with Richard Branson down at the famous Necker Island. He gave me some really powerful advice. So mentors have been near and dear to me. And to this day I still have quite a few in my life. So RV: (08:35) Let me ask you about this, Kevin, cause this is interesting. You mentioned Russell Brunson you know, and he’s younger than you and he’s much younger than you and you also came to Veda years, I think that’s right. Well, you and your son and your team and Mark came to Vaden Villa for a day of strategy stuff with us and you know, amazed me was, which is, and it amazes me to hear you say it now that you’ve not been afraid to have mentors younger than you. So, you know, how do you pick a good mentor? Cause I know this is part of the book, the book, again, mentor to millions. What are some of the things that you guys use to, to pick mentors? Cause age obviously is not necessarily the key criteria. And I’d love to hear from both of you on that. KH: (09:24) Mark, go ahead and I’ll give you my thoughts from, from my perspective, MT: (09:28) you know, when, when I looked at Kevin, he, it doesn’t matter. The age matters. Do they have wisdom and experience in an area that you need? And, and more than anything, Kevin can speak a lot on the mentor side, I can speak a lot on the mentee side as well, because you know, Kevin is my mentor and that’s the journey we take in the book. But one of the things that you should be looking for in a mentor is number one, have they failed? You know, because it’s hard to learn from somebody that hasn’t had some failure in their life. Wow. And that’s big. We talk a lot in the book about failure and how you respond to failure and you need mentors that know and have failed because you’re going to fail, but you need to know you can lean on them and they’ll pick you up and they’ll help you learn from that process. MT: (10:13) It’s not about failure. It’s about how you respond to that failure. You know, our mutual mentor Zig said, nobody drowns from falling in water. They only drown. If they stay in the water, you know, he knew you’re going to fall down, stay there. And so you need mentors to pull you up. So you’re looking for someone that isn’t a one hit wonder that doesn’t just have one way. And the other thing you look for in a mentor is do they listen because you need them to hear you out. What are you trying to accomplish in this world? What’s your unique gift to the world and let them listen long enough to then know how to really pour into you. And so when that happens, again, it doesn’t matter if they’re younger than you or older than you. I have to tell you right now, I’ve got younger mentors that are mentoring me in technology. MT: (10:56) I mean, I, you know, I just, I can out myself right now and say, I didn’t have a cell phone at 25 years old. I was in my late twenties. I got a cell phone. So the things that are happening in technology are just intuitive auto Metronic for these young people. And so I have young people that are mentoring me to be able to use technology in a much more robust way to get the message out there. So it’s really do they know something. And one of the other things that people look for in mentors are getting a lot of phone calls right now from folks that are building up a little business. They’re getting some sales on Amazon and some places, and now they’re like, Oh, okay, we need capital. Or maybe we should exit. So finding a mentor, that’s been through a few exits because too many people would come on shark tank and they just want a lot of money for this teeny little percentage of their company. Right now I own equity and a private may never KH: (11:54) Be able to get my money back. Right. So finding an exit or a way to, you know, to monetize your investment is an important thing in today’s world. So and there’s a lot of roll-up companies that are buying up the Amazon type entities and things like this. So there’s a lot of good folks out there that, I mean, I, I know a neighbor bought a house and came in and found out, Oh, he’s a lawyer and he’s 35 years old. And he, and he used to work for major league baseball, but he’s selling, he’s starting Amazon businesses, buying Amazon businesses and crushing it. So he’s in his fifth or sixth acquisition right now. So there’s a very smart, young mentor that could help a lot of companies that are out there in the marketplace of, of monetizing an exit strategy. Well, and so most of them RV: (12:48) People listening here are our entrepreneurs in some sense, right. It might be their side hustle or something, but do you think mentorship applies directly to like personal brands and people specifically that are like in this space? Cause a lot of, I think a lot of personal brands are like both of you in that they achieved something and now they’re kind of moving into more of like a teaching role. So do you, do you think that this message still applies directly to them? Or, or how, or is it, is it different from how you would mentor someone in a corporate environment or just in a classic kind of entrepreneur entrepreneurial setting at all? KH: (13:30) Well, you know, I think certainly personal brands, it is a personal brand is still it’s a business. It has, it needs customer acquisition you know, metrics. So you’re building funnels, you’re acquiring followers customers. Yes. So and, and again, you, you mentioned my age, so, you know, it, it Russell Brunson’s way younger than me, but here a lot of the, the younger generation has tuned into the world of digital and much more powerful way. So, so yeah, I do believe that even on the branding, I mean there, there are, what are the outlets that personal brand should go after me now there’s something new with LinkedIn, LinkedIn live and there’s obviously Facebook live came and was very powerful for, for quite a bit and still is so you know, so one of the questions for personal brands is where is the best place to spend your time focus your energies? And if you do have some dollars to invest to invest. So you know, it, I try to keep myself on the cutting edge of what’s happening out there in the world. And I, you know, from artificial intelligence to virtual reality type things, I’m already KH: (14:52) Starting to explore ventures like this that will you know, maybe be a little bit pioneering where you get your legs, blood running down your ankles kind of thing from, from being too early in the market. But I like experimenting with things like this and I think sometimes mentors can help steer you in certain directions. RV: (15:15) Yeah. Yeah. And so Mark for you specifically, you know, in terms of mentoring, personal brands, like it’s interesting cause being a personal brand, it often happens like in the cracks of time, in your day, like in between meetings, you’re checking social media or you’re like, you know, you don’t often have like blocks of just days at a time unless you’re writing a book. But outside of that I find that there’s this real temptation to have it creep into taking over your whole personal life. And one of the things that both of you have done is not just scale businesses, but you know, like I know Mark specifically for you, you study this a lot about scaling your, your, your life and running your household like a business. Can you just share with us, that’s been a one way, I think that you’ve mentored me directly. Can you share a few thoughts on that? And you know, if it’s specific to personal brands or not, but just that we have this temptation to always be like on social media, doing DMS, doing comments, doing posts during dinner, you know, and after hours and in bed and like, how do you, how do you deal with some of that? MT: (16:26) Yeah, it’s a challenge. And so, and I gotta tell ya, just to be candid with everybody listening, I got it wrong longer than I got it. Right. I can only share what it feels like to get it right, because I know what it feels like to get it wrong. And I was there building the brand of company, a personal brand, 24, seven, always on my family saw me and you know what they did, they resented what I did. The book starts out with me at the end of my driveway, having one of the most pivotal moments of my life, a driveway moment where I realized I had everything upside down, that I was giving my family and my last and my lease instead of my first and my best. And I didn’t know what to do about it. I just knew it was wrong. And I was always searching like all these entrepreneurs and brands for this perfect work life balance. MT: (17:10) And then I figured out it’s a myth. There’s no such thing as work life balance. You’re never in complete balance of work and life, but you can integrate. And that’s what we talk about in the book. What if your family becomes your most valuable business? What if the business you’re going home to is the most valuable business you’ll ever own ever operate everything and be a part of what is the most valuable brand is your family. Okay. Then versus the one you’re going to. And by the way, I took it to the next level. That day in that driveway, I came home, I incorporated my family. I actually created a brand out of my family. We have a logo, we have a mission statement. We had meetings on Sunday nights. And what I did was I started taking everything I knew to do in business and started applying it at home. MT: (17:56) So if you’ve got a great personal brand, create a family brand, one of the coolest things we ever did was do a family logo cost is $99 on 99 designs. And we had 185 designers submit designs for our little family logo. It was Epic. And we were sending surveys out to aunts and uncles and cousins and friends, and they were voting on it. And the family was so proud when it was done and we had this common ground. And so the bottom line is if you’re building a family brand and it’s all consuming, integrate your family, involve them in that family brand involve them in your personal brand, tell them what they’re doing, what you’re doing, integrate what’s happening. Let them be a part of it, be transparent with it. And they’ll not resent. It they’ll want to dive in and help you do it. And that’s a huge difference. And that’s where we want to be as moms and dads, husbands, fathers, wives. We want our family to embrace us as a business and brand not resent it. Wow. RV: (18:59) I love that. And I mean, being at the book is about being a mentor. You’re actually mentoring your family first. Like by the, by the, by the work of doing that is, here’s a real, this is funny. So a few nights ago, AJ and I are putting Jasper down for bed, you know, Jasper has now so Jasper’s three, like three and a half. He was baby last, basically the last time when you guys got to meet him. And he said you know, basically he was like, what are we doing tomorrow is tomorrow family day. And we said, no, tomorrow is Workday. And he said, Oh, okay. I go to work. And AJ said, do you think you want to work with MT: (19:39) Best in the business one day Jasper? RV: (19:41) And he says, yeah, but I’m going to need a cell phone for that. RV: (19:48) So he’s negotiating his package already, which I love. Kevin, last, last little question just for you. What are some RV: (19:59) Things that you, you know, advice that you would give to personal brands? I mean, you’ve been on TV, you, you like, you’ve played this, you know, such a big role in the world, 30 last kind of parting thoughts that you’d have for anyone that kind of aspires to have the kind of worldwide impact and reach that you’ve been able to have. KH: (20:16) Yeah. So let me get this pandemic has shown a lot of interesting developments and what happened at the very beginning, I started getting a lot of phone calls, people wanting to collaborate and, and because time to challenge you hunker down, but reach out, talk to your mentors, talk to folks. And I, I believe that collaboration is good, venturing together, doing things together. So I’ve been, we’ve been doing Mark and I outside of the book. We we’ve been doing KH: (20:48) A lot of things together, but I’m also with other organizations with Roland Frasier war room with Joe Polish’s genius network and Mike Calhoun at board of advisers, you know, these collaborative efforts and even writing books. I mean, Zig Ziglar created amazing content, you know 30 some books and dozens of languages. I collaborated with the family to relaunch some of those books in, in partnership. So so in fact, with, with this one, Rory, but this was a book that was rereleased secrets sale with Kevin Harrington shell. And by the way, Zig has 4.7 or 4.9 million followers on Facebook. So you know, when you collaborate, you tie in to the network of the followers of the collaborator that you’re collaborating with. So if I just, I believe in, in creating lots of content, putting it out there, joining groups, LinkedIn groups writing books, writing lead magnets, and, and just continuing to push and build the brand. But this is a great opportunity to be able to reach and collaborate into some really powerful networks followers with other folks. I love it. RV: (22:09) A mentor to millions is the name of the book. Where do you guys want people to go? You have some amazing bonuses and stuff. MT: (22:16) Yeah. We have a lot of amazing bonuses and stuff that they can do as well. But the biggest thing we want to share, if they go to Kevin mentor.com, Kevin, and I want everybody to develop the habit of mentorship. So we’re giving away 30 days of mentorship and that’s above and beyond. The other bonus is just something Kevin and I came up with and said after 30 days of seeing what it’s like to have mentorship, and some of that will be library. And so, you know, so we’re 30 different areas of mentorship in their life. We know after those 30 days, they’re going to want to raise their hand and say, I need a mentor in my life always. And so Kevin mentor.com go there. That’s where your mentorship journey. RV: (22:56) Well, I love it. Collaboration, mentorship. I’ll never forget Kevin. One time told me that the secret to negotiating is to make sure it’s a win for everybody. That’s how you know, it’s going to be a healthy partnership. And we appreciate you guys so much. We’ll put links to all that. The book has mentor to millions. Y’all go get it. Let us know on social. What you thought about these guys, guys. We wish you the best. KH: (23:19) Thanks, Rory. Always a pleasure

Ep 104: Get Your Foot in the Door and Kick it Down with Paula Faris

Speaker 1: (00:05) [Inaudible] RV: (00:06) Hey, brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for tuning in to listen to this interview, we are so excited to bring you this information and wanted to let you know that, Hey, there’s no sales pitch coming from anything that we do with this is all our value add to you and the community. However, if you are somebody who is looking for specific strategies on how to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and we offer a free call to everyone that’s interested in getting to know us and is willing to give us a chance to get to know them and share a little bit about what we do. So if you’re interested in taking us up on a free strategy call, you can do that at brand builders, group.com/summit. Call brand builders, group.com/summit. Call, hope to talk to you soon on with the show. RV: (01:02) So you’re listening and probably your dream at some point in your life as a personal brand is to like be on good morning America or be on the View, or you know, this America this morning. And you’re about to meet the host. One of the hosts and Emmy award winning journalist, a new friend of mine, Paula Faris. She was a co-anchor of good morning America weekend. And she was also the cohost of the view for like three years. She has been on world news now and anyways, she’s awesome. And I met her at the global leadership summit. She was another one of the speakers, totally connected with her. She has a new book that’s called, Called Out, which we’ll talk a little bit about, but I thought you had to hear her story about how she got to where she is. Some of the things that we can steal from her and learn in terms of some of her skills. And then also hear a little bit about her new book and why she wrote that. So anyways, Paula, welcome to the show. I’m the interviewer and you’re the guest. PF: (02:12) It feels kind of awkward, but you buried the lead, which is one thing that you don’t want to do in broadcast journalism. Don’t bury the lead. You forgot to mention that I am the global leadership summit, cornhole champ in some capacities, because if Rory just mentioned that we met at the global leadership summit in Chicago, what he failed to mention was that I schooled him in Cornwall and if you’re familiar with unfamiliar with cornhole, some people call it what what’s bags, which I don’t understand that, but I have to say you were really gracious in defeat though. So RV: (02:54) As long as you want, cause we’re going to edit this entire section out. So just let me know when you’re done. PF: (03:00) I’m done. I’m done. RV: (03:03) Yeah. Well, you, weren’t the only person who embarrassed me. There’s a great video of Sadie Robertson Sadie, Huff destroying me as well. So, you know, I wouldn’t, yes, it’s true. It is true. But I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t take too much pride in it. You weren’t, I’m not like a formidable foe. PF: (03:22) Oh, well, I, listen, I think there’s plenty of room for growth there. RV: (03:27) Definitely. Definitely. Well, so I, I just thought, you know, it was really cool because you got at GLS, you, you were, you got, I got to see you kind of in both roles, like you were kind of doing the hosting kind of MC thing. And then you were also speaking about the, about the new book, but I, you know, short of just thinking you’re awesome and you know, me and AJ kind of connecting with you and your daughter and just like that whole thing, I really thought, wow, this is a rare opportunity to learn about hosting because I think like a lot of our clients and even myself, my dream was to be a speaker. Like I wanted to be a speaker and there’s a lot of people who talk about that and then there’s like writing and then there’s social media, but more and more like to me, the podcast medium is the most rabid fan base that we had at our former company. RV: (04:25) And it’s still the most rabid fan base of email and social and book readers and people who see me even speak live. Our podcast listeners are, they are there week in and week out. And yet nobody talks about how to be a great host. Like where do you go to, to learn this? So I really just want to hear, like, how did you even get started and, and how did it become, how do you become an, an a co-anchor of good morning America? Like, or the view, like how do you get to that level? So just, you know, tell us a little bit about that. PF: (04:59) Sure. Well, I didn’t grow up thinking that I wanted to be a broadcaster. It just kind of happened. My high school drama teacher, his name was mr. Barsoon, and he would, he would continually cast me as the narrator of our school productions. And of course I thought I was like a leading lady and he thought otherwise, so he cast me as the narrator and I actually really loved the role because you’re telling the story and you’re really setting the stage and setting the tone. And he’s the one when I was kind of floundering in my junior year in high school, I said, I don’t really know what I want to go to college for. He said, you should consider broadcasting because he knew who I was inherently. I’ve always been innately, curious my nickname growing up, Rory was Paula 20 questions. So I’ve always been innately curious. PF: (05:59) I love to ask questions. I like to champion and challenge people. He knew that about me. And then coupled with the fact that I can tell a good story would be my intonations and connecting with people the way that I narrated the school productions. So he, that was honestly the first time I thought about going into broadcasting. And so I did, I went to college for it, but I, instead of pursuing on air, I pursued off-air. So I was producing, editing and writing because I wasn’t confident in who I was. I was so scared of failure. And, you know, fear is one of those. It’s one of those tenants that has gripped me throughout my life and paralyzed me from taking the next step. And so fear for a long time, paralyzed me from really pursuing, being on camera, because I thought I wouldn’t have the words to say, even though I had people speaking life into it, I had my college professors, I had my high school drama teacher. PF: (06:56) I had people around me saying that this is what you’re inherently good at, and you’re comfortable on camera. I didn’t believe in myself. And it wasn’t until nine 11. When I was working in radio sales when nine 11 happened, I was so gripped by the coverage and the ability of these broadcasters and hosts to just unite the country through tragedy and the way that they were able to tell a story and tell it sensitively, with dignity through pain. I was, I really felt like that was the first time I accepted that dream for me, that that was the first time that I accepted the dream that other people had for me, because I, I said, okay, I’m going to step into my fear. And so I applied, I quit my job in radio sales. I was making killer money for a 25 year old. PF: (07:46) I was making like 50, $60,000 a year. We’re talking, you know, nine 11. So 2001, I quit my job. And I said, I’ve got to get back into broadcast. I’m going to pursue this. I’ve got to stop allowing fear to grip, to grip me. And I applied at the local television stations in one station called me back. And he said that he wanted to bring me in for an interview to be a production assistant. I was going to make seven Carolina are in Dayton, Ohio at the time I was in Dayton, Ohio. And I got hired to be a production assistant, making seven bucks an hour. And I had told him, in the initial interview, I said, I eventually want to report. I know that Dayton is a large market. I doubt it’s going to happen here. And he said, yeah, it’s not going to happen here. PF: (08:33) But unbeknownst to him in my downtime, I was borrowing the camera equipment battery pack the tripod from the guys in the sports department on my downtime. I’ve put together a tape. I shot my own standups, which if you’ve never worked in television or worked with a video recorder or of any sort, and you know, it’s hard to shoot your own standups. I had nobody helping me shot my own interview is all my highlight, but edited it. I handed it to the news director and I said, I just want you to take a look at this. His name was Ian Rubin. I said, Ian, if you could just take a look at this and give me some constructive feedback, I didn’t anticipate him to put me on the air at all. I just was literally trying to get some feedback. And he took a look at it and said, you did this by yourself. I said, yeah, I shot it. I edited it. And that’s where my production my production, RV: (09:19) You stole the equipment, right? So he was, I’m sure he was impressed by that. PF: (09:24) Yeah. I stole equipment yeah. RV: (09:30) Resources at the office too. PF: (09:32) I, my downtime, I, my downtime, but he asked me to make another tape for him, a resume reel as we would call it. And I was in the midst of making that and he decided to put me on the air. And that was that I had worked in Dayton, Ohio, that I worked in Cincinnati, Ohio for three years. And then I moved up at the chain to Chicago, which is the number three television market. And then nine years ago, I got the call from the network, which is the pinnacle. It’s like getting a coaching job in the NFL. Okay. You started PV leagues and you moved your way up. I got a job at ABC news and they wanted me to anchor their overnight newscast. And I was like, you have an overnight newscast. So I, I initially went to ABC nine years ago with my family, two little kids. We moved from Chicago to New York. And I anchored the overnight news. I worked third shift. I did that for a year. Then they promoted me and then they promoted me again to good morning, America weekend anchor. And then they promoted me again to, you know, cohost of the video. So it happened quite quickly, but it was through a lot of hard work and tenacity to get promoted RV: (10:41) When they tell me. So like, when did you, what year is it that you get on in Dayton? And then what year do you get to ABC overnight and then good morning America. And then the view PF: (10:51) 2001 is when I was on the air in Dayton, Ohio. RV: (10:56) Okay. So you went from seven bucks an hour, PF: (10:59) 2001 to 2002 was my first like was in Dayton, Ohio. But I, by the way, when you put me on the air in Dayton, I still didn’t get a pay raise. So I was still making seven bucks an hour, but that’s why I say, take the opportunity, get your foot in the door and kick it down. Don’t wait for the opportunity to come to you. And that’s what I tell a lot of young kids. They’re like, well, I don’t want to take this, take it and prove yourself. And you make it what you want because no one, he didn’t tell me that interview. You know, if you want to report, you can borrow the equipment. Like you, you have to take your, and you have to take the initiative and you have to dream for yourself and you have to be tenacious and be persistent. Nobody told me that that was a possibility, but I just, I wanted to go for it. RV: (11:43) Yeah. And I just, I mean, when you go like, Hey, I’m going to be on TV. And it’s like, woo, you’re making seven bucks an hour. Like get excited. Like what could feel further away? Like the national network morning show, like you couldn’t possibly feel the further away than seven bucks an hour. And so then when do you get to New York? When do you go to ABC? PF: (12:05) I went to New York in the end of 2011. So 10 years later and that I good morning, America happened in August of 2014. And I anchored that show for four years until September of 2018 and write about it. I got burnt out. RV: (12:22) Yeah. But that was, so that was a, still a 13 year. I mean, that was a 13 year journey as, as a host, which I think that’s, that’s really powerful to see, like even that’s fast. But it’s third. It’s still 13 years from dream to reality. And I think there’s a lot of people that go, Hey, I’m going to start, I’m going to start an Instagram account today. And I hope to be making six figures within two months. And then if it doesn’t happen, it’s like, Oh, I suck. And it’s like not, it does not really. RV: (12:52) So what about, can we talk about the hosting part? RV: (12:58) What do you think is the difference between a good host and a great host? PF: (13:07) Their ability to connect that? I think that’s, if I’m watching the news or I’m watching a show and I feel like that person is speaking, isn’t speaking to me, they’re speaking. Or speaking at me, they’re speaking to me and speaking with me, if they’ve made me part of the conversation, if they’ve invited me into the conversation and invited me into the environment, then I feel like that’s a connection because so often, you know, we’re so polished and, it’s funny because my sister is getting ready to start a YouTube channel. And her husband started a YouTube channel and I’m looking at their videos and I’m like, guys, you need to be more conversational. And it sounds so simple, but it’s so true because if you’re too stiff and too polished, you’re speaking at people, you don’t want to speak at people. You want to, the only way you invite them into the conversation is by being conversational. PF: (14:10) Okay. Well, looking into the lens and pretend, I always say, pretend like you’re talking to one of your closest friends, somebody that you let your guard down around. And I asked, I encourage my sister to do this one exercise. I said, I want you at the very beginning to verbally say your best friend’s name or your husband’s name at the end of the, at the end of the sentence. So whatever she might be saying, she’d be like, so today drew, I want to tell you about this really cool thing I want to do. So you’re, you’re injecting that person’s name into, into what you’re articulating. And then you take a step back and then you’re just thinking that person’s name, and then you’re seeing their face. But what you’re doing is you’re, you’re, you’re creating a conversation, you’re being conversational and you’re inviting people and you have a conversational tone, right? PF: (15:02) So I think connecting with people and you connect with them by being conversational. Because when you’re, when you’re speaking, you really only have one path. If you’re reading something, you know how many times they say you have to read it X amount of times in order to absorb it. But that’s why it’s so important. You have one shot when you’re speaking and you have to be incredibly engaging and incredibly conversational. And not that you’re dumbing it down by any stretch of the imagination, but just connecting on a level where you’re being extremely conversational, I think is the most important thing. And I think that’s where people have felt like they’ve connected with me and they feel like I’m authentic. If you can also be authentic within that conversation. I think that’s a, that’s a win, win combination. RV: (15:52) Were you always conversational as a host or did it, did you develop, was it intentional? Was it accidental? Like how did you like that exercise is awesome, but how, which I, I think that’s killer like of going, Hey, pretend you’re actually talking in real life. Like there is a one person on the other side of the camera and saying their name as powerful. Is that, is that something you had to develop consciously? PF: (16:16) Totally. I think, I mean, I, I think there are certain aspects that you’re born with it or you’re not, but I think it’s definitely something that I had. It’s a skill I had inherently a little bit of, but I had to grow it and the way that I had to grow it was just, you know, if you look at some of my early work, it’s awful, it’s not great. But I, you know, I think I was trying too hard. Sometimes we try way too hard to be funny, or we’re just trying too hard in general. And I, I think just the more relaxed I got weirdly, it, it’s not like I cared less, but it was just the more relaxed I got and the more comfortable I was, some of that came with experience. But some of that just came with being confident in my own skin and being confident about what I was talking about and confident about the topic. I think if you’re not prepared, you won’t be confident and you’re, and you will be conversational and you can, or your ability to connect is based upon whether or not you’re prepared. That’s one of my big fears is not being prepared. RV: (17:25) Yeah. But, okay. So let’s talk about the preparation thing, because how much of hosting is like on a teleprompter versus like you’re talking about being conversational, but some of it is on a teleprompter, isn’t it? PF: (17:43) It’s very tough. And that’s the thing I was when I first, when I had my first gig in Dayton, Ohio everything, when I was anchoring, I would what we say. And I don’t want to get too deep in the, in, you know, in the weeds with television speak, but you know, you’d be on cam and you’d say, here’s my role, acute a video. And I would just give them a roll cue to VO. So we’d come back on cam and that you’re on camera. Like, Hey, tonight, the Dayton dragons are playing then blah, blah, blah. And you’ll never guess who showed up and who showed up with that’s in the prompter would be my role cue to VO. Okay. So VO means voiceover. So that means when we go to tape and I’m voicing over the highlights. When I first started, I would just say roll cue to VO, and I would ad lib everything. PF: (18:29) I would ad lib the highlights cause I started doing sports. That’s how I really cut my teeth in television. And when I was out in the field reporting, you don’t have a teleprompter out in the field either. So I’m learning probably a little differently than, than a lot of people, a lot of my other peers and colleagues. And just cause that’s the way that I was trained in our sports department. So the challenge is, is when you have a teleprompter, it can. And I feel like in sports, sports anchors are usually really good at their job because they’re, they can, they’re quick on their feet. They can improvise and they can tap dance and they can talk around things. And they’re, you know, they’re, that’s just, that’s the sort of situation that they’re used to. They’re used to add living highlights and ad libbing stories, whereas a news it’s much more produced. PF: (19:23) And so when I came from sports to news, because when I, when I was in Chicago, Dayton, Cincinnati, and Chicago, I did sports. And then I decided to do news, which is one of the reasons I took the job at ABC because they wanted to give me an opportunity to kind of get my news leg, my news, sea legs, because I’d done sports for so long. And everything’s very scripted and it’s, it’s challenging because it’s hard to have that conversational tone when, when everything has been scripted for you. So, but there have been moments where the teleprompter has died and I’m like, finally, you know that this is, I mean, this is, this is how I, this is how I was trained. This is probably where I’m most comfortable. But it is a mix if you’re in the field and you see a reporter out in the field, like in front of the white house or in front of a stadium, there’s no, there’s typically no teleprompter for any of that. That’s just all off the cuff. But if you’re in studio, most of the time there is a teleprompter and I hate teleprompters because I just think they become a crutch and you just, and they take that conversational tone, which I think is so imperative to the connectivity. They remove that from the situation. RV: (20:33) Now what about like on the V on the view? Oh, that’s not a teller. PF: (20:38) No, that’s like, no, there’s no teleprompter. There, there might be a teleprompter for sponsored segments, but no, that’s all off the cuff and it’s, it’s, it can be a little, it’s very nerve wracking because you’re not really sure what everybody’s going to say. Whoopi Goldberg, I love Whitney. And she would always say, you know, we would have the hot topics meeting in the morning. We would show up at, I think our meetings were at eight 30. Yeah, eight 30. And then the show was 11 o’clock Eastern. And so we would have the hot topics meeting and we get this huge packet. And most of the times we didn’t get it the night before, but then it was revised by morning. And you just, we pick out the stories that we want to talk about that day. And based upon our fire and our passion for the stories, the producers are then pick the stories that we are gonna do for the show. PF: (21:31) Right. And what we are going to cover. We didn’t. And if we got a little too heated in the hot topics meeting at eight 30, what we would say, save it for the table. So she didn’t want us to totally go there cause she didn’t want, she wanted him so much of and kudos to her. She wanted so much of it to wait for the table for the hot topics table so that we didn’t know where we didn’t know what the other person was going to say. Cause it keeps you on edge and it keeps the conversation like really fiery. So that was a situation where it would, we would say, yeah, let’s not, don’t give too much of it away. Save it for the table. RV: (22:10) Yeah. So you went from like totally impromptu to totally scripted to all the way back to like completely impromptu. PF: (22:18) Yes. Like sitting on the edge of my seat and not sure what the hell was going to happen. It’s very, it can be scary. And for a journalist, you know, and I, I had the added pressure. I was still, when I was doing the view, I was still anchoring good morning, America weekends. So I was still a journalist and I, I didn’t want to say anything that was going to foil my news career. Cause I, my number one objective was to stay neutral on, to stay objective and really kind of like tip toe around a lot of the political talk because when I was first hired, this is pre-Trump this isn’t, you know, he, he was just throwing his name into the hat and the primaries and you know, and then he became a nominee and then, and then he became president and then it became a really political show. PF: (23:03) And but it was tough for me cause I was given explicit directions by my bosses on the news side, ABC news that I couldn’t give political opinions because of, because I was a journalist and still anchoring one of their flagship shows. So when it became a new, a strictly, when it became very political, the show, it was really uncomfortable for me. And I felt like I couldn’t go there and I felt like I couldn’t give the audience what they really, really wanted. And that was probably one of the first times that I felt like I felt like a failure in many regards because I wasn’t able to connect with the audience because the audience it’s called the view for a reason. They want you to give your opinions and give you our muse. And I would give my opinion and views on most everything except for abortion and politics. And that’s really the, that the show started turning towards when it became political. It was really uncomfortable. RV: (24:03) You think this translates pretty directly for a podcast host. I mean like, or a YouTube, like a YouTube channel. Like if you’re not, do you think this con this topic, these kind of lessons, do you think they apply to just somebody with a Mike? You know, like me, right. I mean, is it going, is it the same? Is it the same idea? Whether it’s, you know, national television or it’s a local podcast? The idea is just to connect is to connect honestly with the audience. And that is the most important thing. PF: (24:34) Absolutely. I think that is a, that’s the baseline, that’s the foundation of everything. And you can do that through a myriad of ways. Like the way that you were able to connect with me early on, like kind of telling a joke and cornhole RV: (24:48) Part of my strategy. So we were already connected, PF: (24:52) But you put me at ease as a host. I will tell you, put me at ease because you have done your research on me. And I, I detected that just from what you, the way that you introduced me. And for me, if I’m doing a big interview with someone and I haven’t read their book and that’s why I’m sitting down with them, or if I haven’t done my homework they’re going to know that, okay. So what you do is I always say it’s so important to do your research on whomever you’re interviewing whoever you’re sitting down with, whether you’re hosting a podcast or you’re conducting an interview, do your homework. It’s so important to put the other person at ease and you don’t have to, like, you can just, you don’t have to say, Oh, I read your book. And it’s amazing. You can just say, yeah, I read this. PF: (25:36) I, you know, I remember this one line in your book and you said this and that to them triggers, Oh my gosh, they took the time to read the book or they took the time to do some research on me. And it’s just one book to open the book, but you’ll see that other person guard kind of come down and like, and I can open up to you now because you have put me at ease and you’ve made me feel comfortable. And you showed me that you care enough about this interview, that you’ve done a little bit of homework, but if you haven’t done any homework and haven’t done any research, then the way that I interpret that as the person that’s being interviewed is that you don’t care. And if you don’t care, then why should I care? Why should I open up? RV: (26:19) Interesting. All right. So last little part here, why’d you leave 13 years. You’re like at the top of your game, you’re at two, I mean, literally two of the biggest shows PF: (26:31) More than 30 years. More than that. RV: (26:33) Oh yeah. It was 13 to get there. And then you were like, you were at the peak, you were like doing the thing here for five, six years. And then all of a sudden you made a decision to leave. PF: (26:44) Yeah. I made a session, a decision to step away to pump the brakes at the height of my career, which I thought was totally insane. And, but I was burnout. And I think what I was doing for so long as I was chasing these accolades and achievements, and it never seemed to satiate and I became addicted to this thing. And so often we misplace our significance in something that shifts like a job or your bank account. And for me, I had misplaced my significance in something that shifted and I was at a professional high, but it was at what cost, what good is it for a man to gain the world, but to lose his soul? And I just, it came for me, it came at too high of a cost. I, my relationships with my, with my kids and husband were really not doing well and I wasn’t going to church. PF: (27:34) My health started suffering and I thought, okay, I don’t think I was called to do this. If this is what it was going to cost. And I don’t think everybody is called to walk away or to blow it up, you know, for all intents and purposes. But for me, I really felt like, and I’m a person of deep faith. I really felt God called me out of that space where I was addicted to what I did. I was really scared to walk away cause I was scared. I was like, I built this career. I don’t want to just disappear into the ether. I was scared of being irrelevant. I was scared of what people would think of me. I didn’t know what was on the other side. I just knew I needed to get my life back because I was working crazy hours and I wasn’t seeing my husband and kids. PF: (28:21) And the things that I said were of value to me, Rory, you wouldn’t have known those based upon the choices that I was making professionally and personally. So I didn’t really truly walk away until I went through a really tough season. Like a season that a lot of us are going through right now with the pandemic. But my personal hell happened in seven months and I had a miscarriage with an emergency surgery. Then I got hit in the head before a live shot for good morning America. Some kid threw an object at my head, 60 miles an hour, had a concussion. The day I was cleared to go back to work, I was out of work because of that incident for three weeks. And the day I was cleared to go back to work, I get in a head on car crash and then I got influenza and then I got pneumonia and that was seven months. PF: (29:07) So I knew at that point, it wasn’t just a string of bad luck. That was, God’s saying, you need to slow down. You need to find out who you are because you have, you have wrapped up your entire identity in this, but it wasn’t until I stepped. And it was after that season of how I decided I needed to slow down and walk into this space where, you know, I told my bosses, they were gracious enough to kind of like, you know, they said, well, we want you to stay here. We’ll let you work Monday through Friday. And you can walk away from the view and from good morning, America weekend. And you know, he can be a correspondent and I asked them to a faith podcast, but I’m still kind of figuring it out. I knew I just needed to get my life back, but they were gracious enough to let me do that. PF: (29:47) And but it was scary cause it was, I write much of the book in that space where I walk away from these two things that I didn’t realize that defined me and they had, and I had no clue who I was outside of them. I didn’t, I didn’t know myself anymore because I was Paula Ferris, the anchor of good morning America and coasted a view. And then all of a sudden I wasn’t, and I, I didn’t know how to process that. And so I read a lot of the book about finding out, like, who are we outside of what we do outside of the things that we place our significance in. And there’s nothing wrong with loving what you do, but how do you find that balance between loving what you do and not being defined by what you do? And so that’s what much of the book was for me finding out the parts of me that won’t change in a pandemic and the parts of me and so who I am and that won’t change in a personal crisis, just digging into that because our society tells us to lean in and to find our calling and it’s always career related. PF: (30:44) And we do when we press in and guess what career will change at some point in our lives. And if we, you know, status on Instagram will change, our bank accounts will change. And if we placed our significance in those things that are going to shift, and we’re not going to know who we are outside of them. So it’s so important to find your true purpose outside of doing, to find to discover that personal mission statement, but to find the parts of you that won’t like, what parts of you won’t change. I’m in a crisis for me, I would have said, I’m Paula Ferris. I’m the anchor of good morning America and the view. And, and when that changed, I had to figure out what my mission statement was. And now it’s my purpose statement. I just say, I’m Paula Ferris. I love Jesus. PF: (31:28) I am a wife, I’m a mom. I’m curious, I ask lots of questions and I like to champion and challenge people. And so those, those, you know, championing people and being curious and question, asking a lot of questions. Those made me an effective communicator and made me an effective broadcaster. But those things aren’t going to change the way that I, that I go about manifesting them will weather through it’s a broad broadcast capacity or through another capacity. So that was really important for me to, you know, to figure out and when I wrote the book, RV: (32:01) Wow, well, the book is called, called out. And of course you can get it anywhere. Great books are sold. Don’t go looking for it. Wherever crappy books are sold, you won’t find it there. Where do you want people to go Paula, to connect with you? Or if they want to link up, I mean, obviously Instagram and all that kind of stuff, but where would you point people? PF: (32:24) You know, I, I developed this gift of telepathy during the Panasonic. So people can just reach out to me through their minds if they want. I know I don’t know what happened, but Instagram’s probably the best place to reach me. And it’s Paula Ferris. My last name is spelled just like the city of Paris with an act like Frank, Paula Ferris. So, and pick up the book, support it. I really appreciate it. Let me know how, how how you connect with it. And it’s just been great to see, to hear from people and say, Oh my gosh, I feel like you were writing my story men and women indiscriminately. So yeah, reach out to me. I’d love to hear from you. RV: (33:10) Yeah. I love this. I mean if, if you’ve ever had a struggle with identity, which is all of us, particularly those of us with personal brands is separating that, you know, what we want to be seen as, from who, you know, online or wherever, but we really are. This is a really, really key discussion from someone who was at the top of her game and left that all behind. So we’ll link up to called out. We’ll obviously AIG and I’ll do the debrief of this on the next episode, you can check it out, but follow Paula and connect with her. It’ll be interesting to see how she reinvents herself, but in this next phase. And thank you so much for being with PF: (33:53) My pleasure. And I can’t wait for that. That redemptive game of Cornwall, RV: (34:01) I don’t know what you’re talking about. We edited out that PF: (34:04) I beat him at [inaudible].

Ep 102: One Core Message with Dan Miller

Speaker 1: (00:06) [Inaudible] RV: (00:06) Over the years, I would say it’s been delightful and inspiring to get to know Dan and Joanne Miller. Dan was one of the very first mentors I sat down with when we moved to Nashville now 10 years ago. And I reached out to him because I heard of him and knew of his, his influence. And he’s the New York times bestselling author of a book called 48 days to the work you love, which just released the 20th anniversary hardcover edition, which is pretty amazing. That book has been in hard cover and still so successful after all these years. He’s also written other books. No no more dreaded Mondays wisdom meets passion. He’s been on CBS early show hardball with Chris Matthews. He’s been on the Dave Ramsey show. He’s spoken at the white house and, you know, he, he has a huge podcast. RV: (00:57) It’s usually like in the top two, three, five, every, every single week for careers under career podcasts on iTunes. And he’s just built an amazing community, the 48 days Eagles dot com. It’s like a community and he’s, they’ve built a business out of it. It’s given them an amazing lifestyle. And I just wanted to give you a chance to meet Dan and hear some of his philosophies about how they’ve done it and the behind the scenes journey, because I, I think of him and, and Joanne of just having more than prosperity, having peace and joy and happiness and just as well as profound impact in addition to money and influence that I think a lot of us aspire to. So anyways, Dan, thanks for making some time for us. Thanks was looking forward to, this has been too long since we had a conversation is going to be awesome. RV: (01:53) Yeah. And I, you know, the other times I’ve interviewed you for like, you know, our other old podcasts and stuff was really kind of about your work. And I, I feel like I kind of called in a favor to say, Hey, would you talk to us today more about, less about your expertise? Kind of, although there’s a lot of overlap and more about how did you become, you know, what you are today? Cause you were a personal brand long before personal branding was ever a term like you were building a digital community long before that was ever popular. And so can you just tell us, like, how did you get, how did you get started? You know, this is before social media was really around and like, this is before all of this, you know, what we know today is are the, the essential tenants of a personal brand. You were doing it long, long before. So can you talk to us about that a little bit? DM: (02:47) Absolutely. Yeah. And I was around doing things, building the business before we had hogs podcast and Instagram and Facebook and Pinterest and all those things. It can Be done. Those are just tools and we’re thankful for them, but I started what I’m doing today as a Sunday school class at our church in Nashville. And it was just a class on career life transition. A lot of people were going through unexpected unwelcomed, kind of transitions. And church asked me if I would do that. My academic background is in clinical psychology. I said, sure. Now the interesting thing about that is that I expected to have the 22 year old had just lost his job at burger King, you know, show up in frustrated, what do I do next? We had a few of those. We also had dentists physicians, attorneys, pastors, engineers, accountants, who showed up and said, everybody sees me as successful and I’m doing okay, but I don’t think this is it. So it was that kind of board that I don’t think I’m on track that was so such an obvious need and an immense need caused me to move into this space. DM: (03:58) Well, I didn’t anticipate originally this being a business. I mean, I’m an entrepreneur. I can go make money in a lot of ways. I’m a sales guy, but this was so explosive that finally with Joanne, my wife’s insistence, if I was going to spend so much time in this, that ought to have something to do with our income, that I started looking at opportunities. There put together a real rudimentary form of my Sunday school notes in the three ring binder. And we started selling those like crazy, but I immediately recognized the need. How do you make this stand out? There’s a lot of material out there on careers, on starting a business, finding your passion, all of that. How do you make this stand out? So I was way back then experimenting with what is the catch phrase? You know, I had 30 days to the work you have. DM: (04:47) Well, 30 is just a generic number. It’s like seven, 10 30, 90, 180. And this was back when 48 hours was becoming popular as a TV show. And I said, I’ll bet I can get some brand recognition. If I use that number 48, wasn’t very scientific. Roy. Wasn’t very thoughtful, but I just did it as a marketing technique, just as let’s try this. We started sending out 48 peppermint patties with every order that we were sending out. And that became something that was really iconic that people recognized and expected, but it was so powerful. It really was like somebody threw gasoline on my business because it was something that got their attention and thus what you do with branding. So 48 days now, here’s how that, you know, gonna close the gap here. I mean, I’m still known as a career coach. So if you put in career coaching in a Google search, you’re going to get 13, 14 million sites. DM: (05:46) I’m sure I’m in there somewhere, but I don’t really care where you put in 48 days. Just that nothing else. I own it. I’m going to own the first couple of pages of Google, not because of fancy SEO or buying ads or anything just because I’m the guy who says not just, well, we’ll figure this out. When the kids graduate, when you get another degree, when you finished paying a mortgage, no, I’m the guy who says you can change your life dramatically in 48 days. If you create a plan and act on it. So I discovered that 20 years ago, and that was so powerful. And so I’ve built everything and celery products all come back to that core message. And that’s important as well. One core message, not 10 different messages, one core message, figure out how God has uniquely gifted you. What’s it going to look like on Monday morning? That’s the message I’ve built from that all these years. RV: (06:42) It seems like you recognize also the problem was a big part of like you recognized early on. Wow. People are really struggling to find purpose. Like they’re really struggling to find sort of their sort of their career identity. So what’s, what is your business model? So you mentioned career coach, and I think, you know, I know a lot of people who kind of think of you in that space, cause that’s like, you know, a lot of, kind of what you’re writing about career transition or you have written about what’s your actual business model. Like how, how do you make money? And then also give us a sense of how that’s evolved over time. And and, and also when did you start this, right? Like how many years ago did you start on this journey? You know, so that we’ve got some perspective cause we got some people that are pretty experienced and then we’ve also got people who are brand new beginners, you know, just trying to kind of figure it out and find their way. DM: (07:36) Well, I started this really about 22 years ago when I started teaching that Sunday school class and the low hanging fruit. So to speak in terms of monetization was coaching. People want said, man, can you meet with me? You know, help me review revise. RV: (07:55) One-On-One you’re talking like one on one coaching. DM: (07:57) Absolutely. So initially I was co when I made the transition and stop the other things I was doing to do just this, I was coaching five days a week, five days a week because the needs were so immense. And here’s the thing about building a brand. I could still be doing that today. The needs of certainly not diminished, they’ve increased, but today, well, starting then, as soon as I started develop other parts of my business, I went to four days to three days to two days today I dedicate one day a month to personal coaching because the other parts, my business have grown now, what has, what has happened there? You know, as you know, as you mentioned at the brand new addition to 48 days to the work you love out as a book. But when I do my projections financially, even though I have a New York times bestselling book and others, lots of others out there too, I project zero in income income directly from a book is so elusive. DM: (09:01) You can’t really do a whole lot to make it happen. I feel like it’s kind of, you know, getting, getting an ice cream cone when those royalty checks come, but I don’t place any direct focus on that, but I use the message and leverage it in other ways. So we have a course that goes with that an online course in person course, other insulary products that we’ve got with that. And because I have a clear core message, I do get requests for speaking. So there’s that, you know, universities contact me a lot for speaking and then there’s live events. Cause right now we’ve changed that model. But we have lots of live events that are really popular. We’ve been doing those at the sanctuary, which you know, is just a barn on our property and Franklin. We, we say we limit those to 48 people. We usually have 60 there. We can kind of cram 60 in that little space. And we were doing seven of those a year, 70 events. People pay a thousand dollars each for those. So 60 times, seven times, RV: (10:09) Hold on, I want to capture this. So you said, so you’re saying seven events a year and six 60 people, DM: (10:19) Right? RV: (10:20) So you’re talking about 420 people, right? 60 times seven DM: (10:27) I’m thousand dollars. So there’s that property on our property and dollars just right there. That’s right. So no, you know, no overhead, no hotel fees. We could handle our own catering. We’d have a lot of fun. We’d have famous, Dave’s show up with their red truck and do live barbecue right on our property and just fun things like that. But our overhead was extremely low. So it did that. And then affiliate commissions, you know, nurturing relationships. My goodness right now I’m doing a lot of interviews. Well, I set out like 50 packets, like I said to you for this book. And I didn’t send those to anybody who I don’t have a longterm relationship with. So you talked about our friendship goes back 10 years. That’s pretty typical. So if I send it to John Lee Dumas or Pat Flynn or Dave Ramsey or Michael Hyatt, you know, those are all people that I know. DM: (11:21) I didn’t just send these out cold and say, Hey, interview me zero of those. These are the people that I know. So I sent those out. I’ve already booked I think 36 interviews as a result of that. So there’s that kind of exponential impact on my brand that comes easily when I’ve developed a relationship. So for years, and then affiliate commissions, the same kind of thing. So a free Edwards is promoting is a copywriting Academy. You know, I promote that. Well, I think the last time I did that one in particular, I think I got $26,000. So, you know, affiliate commissions are another way there. And then the biggest thing, the thing I’m most excited about right now is our online community. So what we talking about though, is having, RV: (12:08) Is that, is that a membership? Is this like a membership model? DM: (12:11) Yes. Yes. It’s $48 a month. We just went with my signature number $40 a month. But it’s where people who know they have an idea they want to pursue, they want to develop it. They can link arms with other people who were in the same path where there’s a generous sharing of ideas and resources. So they’re in that now it’s fairly new for us. We have about 1100 people in there right now. And I’m very quickly focused on growing that to 2,500 people. Well, again, if you do the math on that, you know, 2,500 people, $40 a month, that’s another, that’s a million dollar revenue stream there and doesn’t require a whole lot of me, but it’s those things that have allowed me then to go from coaching, something that requires all of my time and effort and also something that requires that generates linear income. I do at once get paid ones into these models where there’s continuity, where there’s ongoing revenue and things that require very little, my time RV: (13:14) [Inaudible]. So I love that. So you’ve built into that. So you started as service model and then you moved. Can you give me an idea with the courses? Do you do one course for every book or do you just have one course and are, are your courses like, you know, higher price ones or lower price ones? Or have you done like a little bit of all of them? Like give us a sense, a sense of that, because it seems like if you, if you’re doing one on one coaching and then that teaches you a lot of content, cause you’re working and then you go, okay, let me put that into a book and you go, if I wrote a book, now I can produce a course. So do you have like one flagship or do you have multiple ones? DM: (13:52) The 40 days to work you love online seminar is, is really what I would call our flagship course. So there is that, but we have other courses and I am quick to throw out a course. I mean, I’ll put together a course. We have a lot of courses that are $48. How to start a business with 15 hours a week, how to overcome your upper upper limit challenge in those are things I’m doing one right now, I’m going to put together on how to hack cars. So you can drive exotic cars without cost you any money. But I put together courses and in, in having an audience, having an audience that pays attention, I can put things out there and there’s a ready receptance of those. I don’t have to do some fancy, you know, click funnel, launch to get it out there and surprise a lot of people who never heard about me. Now we do a lot of just gentle releases inside our community. And then they spread the word to what goes beyond that. RV: (14:55) So on those courses. So you’ll see like the flagship course versus a $48 course, like just a quick one. How much time is there a big time difference in the content like is, is and I just mean like recorded time. So like if I buy your flagship course, how many hours, you know, do I need to have versus if it’s like, okay, it’s a, it’s a $48 course on something that’s like kind of fun and fast, you know, is there a big difference? Is it, is it the, is it the topic that determines the price point or is it kind of more of like the volume of, you know, training hours that are in the course? DM: (15:36) Some of both we consider 48 days to really be that big, the big, the big bear, you know, that, that really covers a lot in there. I have 48 videos of the, usually four to six minutes. So they’re short, but in that to really go through it, you know, you need to be prepared to spend 20 hours to really go through that. That’s two 97 is what we charge for that, those that are $48 or $17. You know, some of those you can go through in two hours, so there’s much less content. It’s a very specific topic that we’re addressing. Gotcha. RV: (16:16) In a couple and just a couple hours, but that’s, I mean, that’s really interesting. You’ve, you’ve built a flagship course on something that’s a few hundred bucks. It’s not a thousand dollars or $2,000. And like you’ve been over the course of time here just to kind of steadily grow and grow. Like, is that how you would, you would describe your business as just like a, a snowball that kind of just has been steadily growing and then over, you know, years you look back and go, wow, this has grown to be something pretty, pretty amazing. DM: (16:47) Yeah, it is, you know, a lot of what I’ve done and this is almost embarrassing to admit as a business guy, you know, I didn’t sit down and really create a strategic plan, have my big whiteboard up and all about this. This has really evolved around me because I keep responding to things that people I asked for. One of the mantras that has served me really well is if three people ask me the same question, I create a product to solve that. Wow. So a lot of this, and it’s only been my goodness in as much as I’ve been doing this, you know, 20 years, it’s only been in the last three or four years that I brought in as strategists to really help us map out what we’re doing, but there’s been so much just responding to what people are asking for. And we had those, I mean, I didn’t intend to do live events. DM: (17:40) And then people were asking me, how did you do what you’ve done with 48 days to the work you love? And while I’m telling people and over and over again, I decided it’d be easier to tell people, sitting in a room to do that same way with coaching. How have you become recognized as the coach that you are? Well, we started teaching people now one of our flagship training programs is coaching mastery where people come in and it’s a six month program, $4,800 come in. And again, the economy of scale, we have people in a group we’re going through that at any given time. We walk them through, there’s a weekly call. They have to document, they have to go through this certification coaching one-on-one, which is online training that I’ve done. So it doesn’t require my time. And then they have to document 48 hours of paid coaching. DM: (18:35) And that’s really a distinctive element because there are a lot of coaching certification programs out there where you buy the videos and you’re certified that breaks my heart. You know, how do we measure competence in that? So we require 48 hours of documented where I listened to recordings and all that on, on that to get somebody certified, but it’s responding to what people are asking for and in doing so, I keep seeing these new areas of things that are developing as major business legs for us. And the interesting thing is, I mean, right now we know live events have been decimated well, fortunately we’ve got a whole lot of other things in place that have been accelerated in this period of time. Sure. But the interesting thing is as well, if I anticipate what I want my business to look like three years from now, there are some core components that will certainly be continuing, but I am confident there’s going to be new things that I can’t even imagine yet. DM: (19:40) That to me, that’s really exciting. So I use as my business model, a Venn diagram with three circles. So they overlap in the center, are my books. My writing, my writing is my first love. That’s, that’s my zone of genius. That’s where I want to spend more and more time, but those don’t create money directly, but they fuel the growth of everything else we have in place as part of our business model. But having that Venn diagram then allows seven distinct areas. So that at any given time, one of those can be on the bubble. Is this going to continue or not? But replacing it, doesn’t put us back starting over. It’s simply a small component of continuing to move forward. RV: (20:30) So in terms of your audience, like you mentioned it you know, I think there’s such a, there’s such a craze around social media, you know, and, and that, and, and you’re not someone that, I mean, you’ve got a social media following, but you’re not someone that it’s like, you go, Oh yeah, this guy is he’s, he’s the killer. He’s the King of online influence. So you’ve been building your community in some other way. I’m going to presume as more of like the email list and the podcast. So could you just talk about how you what’s, what are some of your philosophies around building that audience? Cause that’s, that is how I think of you is you have this community that you’ve built a longterm relationship with longterm trust. You’re not always pitching them the next highest dollar thing. It’s low dollar things consistently that provide value. RV: (21:24) The soft launches. They’re not like these huge, like blitzes where everyone in the world hears about them. It’s like very casual and, and, and in a nurturing relationship. And I think that’s, that’s just a philosophy that I think is not as many people hear about. I mean, the other one certainly can, can generate a lot of income and be successful too. But I feel like everything you do is more kind of just like graceful. And I, I don’t know that it’s, that slower is not the right word, but it’s more like organic and maybe slower is the word it’s not rut. It doesn’t feel rushed all the time. DM: (22:00) You are exactly right. And I do that very intentionally. Is it tempting to jump on the bandwagon with some of the news, social media things we’ve got where you can do, you know, a $2 million launch? Yeah, it is. But I resist a lot of what I see in those spaces and the way that they use slick sales copy, oughta, hype, urgency, all those things in artificial ways to move people into making a decision. And what I see that also, you know, I hear from people who do a launch like that, and then they have a 30 to 40% refund rate. You gotta be kidding me. I mean, we, you know, we track like with mail order, you can anticipate like 12 to 15% returns just buyer’s remorse. You know how that goes. We’ve never hit 1% in what we do. And what that means is are we missing some of those big infusions of cash? DM: (23:09) Yeah, absolutely. I recognize that I liked the other way around, you know, in our community and in online communities tend to be really volatile. People come in and you know, stick their toe in the water. And two months later they’re gone in shirt is horrendous. That’s not true in my community. We have people who come in and they’re going to be there for a life. They just stay. I have people who have purchased everything I’ve ever done. So they started with an $8 audio. They moved into a $297 course. They came to a live event, you know, then they went through coaching mastery. Then they want to have access to my mastermind. You know, they’ve spent 30, $40,000 with me, but it’s been over a period of time. Not all at once. We’ve looked at that. And again, boy, is it tempting with some of these things, but we did well, I just prefer the tortoise and the Hare. Remember that kid’s story. RV: (24:16) So to dive in on that a little bit, cause I, you know, when I think of like, you know, the different mentors that I have in my life and, and that agent and I’ve had over the years, you know, I think a lot of my life is driven by kind of, you know, like my early development is ambition and success and hustle and drive and even, you know, my own book self-discipline and taking the stairs and you guys are really, I feel like are like a counterbalancing force in our life, which is more like harmony peace you know, like pace lifestyle. And can you talk a little bit about that? Like, just in terms of how much you work and, and, and was there, was it more like there was a season when all you did was hustle and it was like, you know, do the Gary Vaynerchuk work until your eyeballs bleed and then you kinda got to a point where you pulled it back or have you always just kinda been like steady Eddie kind of plugging along, but doing other stuff and like, you know, having, I don’t know, I don’t really love the word balance necessarily, but you know, more, more pursuits outside of just like driving the entrepreneurial success story. DM: (25:32) I’ve always hustled. I kind of resist that word because of what it seems to imply, but I’ve always been a hard worker. I’ve always been disciplined. I enjoy work. There is no way that I am trying to get to four hour workweek. It’s just not on the horizon at all. I have zero desire to ever get there. I hope the day I die, you know, that I write three new chapters in my current book in the morning and then go to my funeral in the afternoon. I have no desire to pare down, but now that being said, I’m very strategic about how I use my time. So let me give you a quick example. Mondays are I take care of anything having to do with business? So meetings with my team, always on Monday benders, considering new software, whatever those things all take place on Monday, Tuesday is my coaching day. DM: (26:29) So any coaching calls I have happened, then I have our coaching mastery call call with my personal mastermind. All this kind of things happen on Tuesday, Monday morning, I do my podcast, I that magic mailbox with mr questions. And I put my podcasts together Wednesday afternoon, I’m available for interviews. So I usually do three or four interviews on Wednesday afternoons. That’s the only time Thursday and Friday, no appointments, no commitments. Those are dedicated to at Cal Cal Newport calls, deep work, deep work. That’s when I think and write, I love. And to me looking at the course of my week like that, I mean, it’s like, you know, salivating to get to the piece of key lime pie. That’s what it’s like for me to get to Thursday and Friday, because I love that so much, but those are days. And inevitably there’s an opportunity. Gee, we want to get together for a committee meeting. Do we want to have you come to this conference or whatever? No, I’m more protective of those two days than anything. Now, to me that provides the kind of harmony that I want my weekly schedule. So I’m not overbooked. I’m not rushing around. I’m not, you know, crazy with, you know, things on top of each other. And so in rushing in and out, I live a very casual life. I’m pretty introverted. So I’m not looking for lots of things, just immerse me in crowds. And I have a really peaceful life. RV: (28:11) I mean, it’s, it’s a wonderful thing. And it’s just your, your home is peaceful. Your relationships are peaceful. And I just, I really think it’s it’s a different energy about how you’ve done it. And yet it’s been hugely successful. It’s given you everything and more, I think that you ever originally set out to do. I mean, beyond DM: (28:35) I, I’m still humbled in recognizing that on a decent day, I make more money than my dad ever made in a year. That’s pretty astounding. You know, I’m a simple farm kid, but I recognize the power of having, having a system in place systems that work for you systems that create residual income. And it allows a freedom that is just hard to have imagined even 20 years ago. And one of the things that comes up a lot roar, and you, you, you’ve alluded to this. A lot of what I get contacted for today is not how to grow your Facebook likes by another 20,000 people, how to get more bog hours or how to launch product. There’s a whole lot of guys out there and your generation that can do a better job with that than I, but I get contacted a whole lot by your generation saying, how can I make sure I create the kind of life that you enjoy and are living now that I don’t screw this up? Just recently, I had worked with the young guy who went from $50,000 a year in one year to two to 1.3 million and is looking to grow that there’s a tendency in that to sabotage it, if you aren’t careful. And he’s saying, how can I protect the things that matter most to me, even though I don’t have to get up and hustle to make another buck this afternoon? RV: (30:05) Yeah. Well that DM: (30:07) Is an RV: (30:09) Awesome perspective. And I think a different perspective that we don’t, we don’t hear enough of Dan, where do you want people to go? If they want to kind of plug in and see how you do it and what you do, and maybe join in as a being led by you? Where, what where would you direct them? DM: (30:25) Well, I appreciate that we created a really cool page for your listeners. They go to 48 days.com/rory, and you’ll see samples of the new book. There’s a quiz there. How close are you to living your best life? I really love that and just free resources. They can go there and circles, see other things we’re doing. RV: (30:48) I love it. We’ll put a link to 48 days.com/rory. You could go check that out. Damn. We wish you the best we miss you at Tennessee. I know you’re down there in Florida now, but thank you so much for your, for your, for your wisdom and, and and just your perspective in your friendship. DM: (31:04) Hey, always my pleasure, Roy. Thanks. [inaudible].

Ep 100: The Battle Against Reactive Busyness with Juliet Funt

RV: (00:06) Hey, brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for tuning in to listen to this interview, we are so excited to bring you this information and wanted to let you know that, Hey, there’s no sales pitch coming. From anything that we do with this is all our value add to you and the community. However, if you are somebody who is looking for specific strategies on how to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and we offer a free call to everyone that’s interested in getting to know us and is willing to give us a chance to get to know them and share a little bit about what we do. So if you’re interested in taking us up on a free strategy call, you can do that at brand builders, group.com/summit. Call brand builders, group.com/summit. Call. Hope to talk to you soon on with the show. RV: (01:03) I’m so excited to introduce you to one of the coolest people ever here. Juliet funds a story just as a first of all, I’ve known her for years. I met her in the national speakers association years ago when I was this little runt kid, she’s an amazing performer. She has spoken at the global leadership summit, which is like the largest speaking event in the world multiple times. She’s the CEO of a very successful company. And she works with a lot of the fortune 500. So her expertise is around something called white space, which you’re gonna, you’re gonna hear about and we’re going to talk about it and the company is white space at work. But you’re gonna tell us a little bit about her story. So one thing to know, she just got I don’t know how to say this. RV: (01:50) A very awesome, awesome book deal with Harper Collins, juicy, juicy. Yeah. So it’s coming out. Yeah. So we’ll maybe talk a little bit about that. The other thing is she has the last couple years, or several times in her career, she has built her business while living abroad with her family. And she has lived that dream of being able to speak and write and let you know, travel with her family and see the world. So she’s just incredible and had to bring her on. And so Juliet it’s, it’s good to chat with you. I have been called different things, but JF: (02:26) The coolest, so infrequently one of them and I’ve always wanted to be cool. So I’m really, I’m super excited about this one. RV: (02:32) Well, yeah, so I mean, you are cool. I mean, you do cool stuff. You’re your content is fantastic. I think that’s super relevant. I want to, I do want to hear about that, but I, I want to start by your story about how you got into the industry. I think a lot of, a lot of people listening, you know, they want to be a speaker. They want to speak at big events. They want to be an author. They want to travel the world. They want to maybe work with the fortune 500. Some of our clients are more on that, like kind of corporate track, some are more entrepreneurial, but you’ve been able to do so many of those things. And can you just like, give us a little bit of behind the scenes of how did you get started and then how did you end up there and then like, how do you see the world now in terms of your personal brand? JF: (03:23) Yeah, so I started, I really started my speaking career when I decided to be a theater student because the performance elements that I learned when I went to Northwestern and thought that I was going to spend my life with pinner and Shakespeare and Shaw have actually been the secret sauce of everything else that I did in my career. So I tell people constantly whatever you’re about to do to build your career in any aspect, go take acting and theater and improv and voice lessons first, because there’s something about creating a performer self that then follows you around and amplifies everything else that you do for your entire career. And I was just lucky that I accidentally ended up thinking I wanted to be in theater and learning all of those things in college. And, and I did it for a little while. It wasn’t a right match for me, but then those skills sort of became part of my kit bag that I took with me everywhere else. JF: (04:16) And I was really lost in my twenties. I had no idea what I wanted to do. I wasn’t one of those people that found it early, I did catering. I was what’s called a food stylist, which is when you take a little tiny tweezer and you make food beautiful for photo shoots. I’ve always been really into that. And along the way, I started volunteering because I had an eating disorder in my twenties and I spoke on some panels. So, sorry, where’s that off? It’s not even going off now. So sorry. I spoke on some panels. People asked me if I would speak on panels for eating disorders and it was just me with three or four other people, personal testimonial. How did you get better? What did it look like? I was very young and something happened when I was on those panels at those little folding chairs and folding tables at high schools and colleges, where I realized that people leaned in when I was talking in a way that seemed different than other people. JF: (05:18) And it seemed like I enjoyed putting together the arc of thought the stories connecting with the audience. There was something there and it was different from acting because it was getting to be myself and it wasn’t being another person. It wasn’t having to pretend that I was another person. It was me, but still in front of an audience, there was something kind of magical. I just got a little tiny goosebumps of just that feeling of I get to be me, but I still get to perform. And so speaking became an Avenue for that. Now I put it back aside for years and years and years, and I was still doing some volunteer work. I did some talks in colleges and high schools, and that was the beginning of my paid career, but I was working my job as sorry, when you first RV: (05:59) Is this, like how many people are in a room here? Like when you’re first starting. I mean, I have to assume, you know, like some of the events you speak at now or 7,000 people in an arena, and you’re like up there doing your performance when you started, I’m guessing it was quite a bit different than that. 12 people JF: (06:19) For $750. I remember this one eating disorder talk. When I first started getting booked to be paid, to go up and talk about body image and women and media. I was writing content and I was expanding beyond personal testimonial and this little kind of funky high school way up in the mountains in Colorado that paid me $750. Cause a friend of mine, Scott Greenberg, who’s another speaker. We were volunteering at the same place. And he said, come up and got me my first gig. And that was, that was that one. And then I very quickly evolved out of youth and education evolved out of the topic of food, started talking about media, started talking about over-scheduling of teenagers, which was the crossover topic because these kids were so busy, they were busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, and Hey, their parents were busy and their administrators were busy and everybody was busy. And that became the very, very early seeds of whitespace was looking at why are we so overloaded? Why do we keep moving this way? Why don’t we have time to think and pause and breathe and appreciate. And that really quickly took over everything, all the food related body related image stuff dropped completely away. And that became my topic, which became the seeds of white space. And then, yeah, RV: (07:33) That Peter’s early, like the early, like you cry. That was pretty much like your first pivot became the foundation, which you’ve pretty much stuck with of just like, over-scheduling just that concept of being overloaded, you know, just busy over-scheduled. JF: (07:50) But I tell speakers any, and people creating a brand. It actually took me years to get to the point where you’re describing this as a fast pivot. So when people come to me and they say, I don’t know my topic yet. I say, speak on everything in the sun for five years and don’t even worry about it. Don’t even worry about finding the lane cause you might want to be in the lane for a while. Don’t don’t marry the first guy, a kiss, you know, just that get, stay in their play, try different topics, commit to something and then know that it’s going to be iterative and give yourself permission to tell everybody you’re one thing. And then be another thing two days later, this is just so important. I think. RV: (08:29) Interesting. so then over the course of time, like why do you think like a lot of speakers kind of come and go and I’m using speakers just cause that’s kind of the way that we kind of interfaced and met. Do you, do you see yourself as more of a speaker, a consultant, a trainer like an entrepreneur? Like how has that evolved? Cause it does sound like you started as a speaker. JF: (08:57) Yeah. The first, the first 15 years was a speaker. Now the last 10 years has been as an entrepreneur. And I actually had sort of a victory of sorts last year where I spent 14 months in a row where I made no money from speaking. And for me, that victory is that I I’m ready. It’s been 20 years. I love speaking. I’m enjoying different things. Now I’m enjoying writing. I’m enjoying running a company I’m enjoying figuring out where our philanthropic dreams are going to go. And so I feel like I don’t need so much of that anymore. And it was a, it was just a victory in terms of business to be able to sustain ourselves 14 months, no speaking, because speaking is a very lucrative part of our revenue model. And it’s also the most lucrative part of our lead generation model for the things that we sell as a company. So you pull out speaking, you realize, Oh my gosh, all other lead sources suck compared to speaking because there’s something about being up there. The people that you meet are already enthralled with what you’re talking about by the time you even move into a conversation of, can we help you? So you take all of that out for over a year. It’s way more lost than just the revenue loss. RV: (10:10) Yeah. I mean, that’s a, I guess those are the blessings and the curses of a great have a great have a great speaking business. And so so let’s talk about that a little bit because you, you, so it’s interesting that you did that 14 months ago, like for 14 months, a couple of years ago, and now in a COVID world, everybody’s doing that JF: (10:35) Speaking disappeared, RV: (10:37) You know, as a model, it kind of disappeared and you were already traveling and I know, you know, travel, you know, we’ve talked about this. This is kind of a sensitive thing. JF: (10:47) Yeah. Let me actually, I’m just before you get to travel, let me just, I feel like we left our well, we left our friends a little bit disjointed in the middle of a story because we’re having so much fun jumping around, but let me just finish. So youth and education led to talking on overload, which led to about 15 years, speaking on this concept called white space. We can talk more about that in a minute. And then at some point a client said, can you scale this? And we built a company with models that could be taught and digitized and shared, and that’s what we do now. So what allowed me to take that 14 month period was that we sell a lot of other things that are not now involving me speaking for a check. And so that’s just to finish a little bit of that story before we flip to travel, which is so interesting. I just wanted to let them understand the last chapters there. RV: (11:39) No, actually I’m glad that I’m glad that you closed close that loop cause that’s really important. And that’s, that’s I think that’s a rare position that a lot of personal brands never get to the point where they transitioned from a personal brand to a real business where they, they are scaling how many people are, are in like the whole white space at work team. JF: (11:58) It’s small, we’re tiny boutique. We have 11 people including our part time people. And you know, just so you know, it’s still a struggle every day to separate the brand from me. I have branding conversations, people all the time. You’ve been one of the people that I’ve come to for help in a lot of areas that, that there’s something about the looping in of my personality with the brand personally, we’ve tried pulling pictures off the website. We’ve tried pushing the content instead of pushing the person. But it’s really tough when you grow a tree, it’s like those two trees, you see that grow up on a, on a side of a wall in Cuba or Guatemala or something where they’re just, they grew into each other and it’s very hard to unwind them. I definitely have not cracked that secret sauce yet of extricating myself. RV: (12:49) Yeah. Although you have been able to create the lifestyle that we were talking about here, which is where, you know, you’ve lived the dream for years at a time of being able to take your kids and your family and go on the road. You’ve got three kids, right? JF: (13:07) I have three boys, 10, 12, and 14. Now we left on this trip that you’re talking about two years ago. Next week on our anniversary, August 28th is going to be two years on the road. And it has been a dreamy combination of the world of white space. It’s the ultimate white space application really? And it came out of, I was having do you know, David Covey, but one of the Covey brothers RV: (13:38) I’ve met David Covey. I haven’t, I actually he’s been at my he’s been to my house one time. The only time I met him. JF: (13:44) So I had, I was having Indian food with David Covey and salt Lake city about four years ago. And he told me that he lived in different countries with his children when they were growing up. But, but he did a year at a time and he ran his businesses and lived in different countries. And it just fascinated me and it captured my attention and it percolated and percolated and percolated. And then we met these people that were doing something called a world schooling, which had a name in which had an association. And they had conferences about people who had decided that travel was a better education for their children than school. And we left, it took me about four months to convince my husband. And then one day he left a map. I get up about five 36. He gets up around nine and stays up till a billion o’clock in the morning. JF: (14:32) So we have very different schedules and he left a little map in the shape of a heart on my desk. One morning for my 6:00 AM walk in and said, let’s go. And he finally went over the line and decided, and then we left and we went to, we stayed domestic for the first months only because of speaking. I would have been international immediately, but I couldn’t be far away. Cause I was flying away from the trip to go finish the gigs that had already been booked. And then once that concluded and we were able to say, no more gigs after a certain date, then we went international. We’ve been in Europe, Asia, Bali, Thailand. And we are now in New Zealand where we were supposed to be for two months before going to China. And then obviously didn’t go to China. And then we waited and waited. And now we’ve been here six months and we just applied for another six months. Cause honestly we don’t really know where to go. So COVID has stopped the trip where we’re very dedicated to one more location on our way home. So that the story is not that we went on this beautiful trip and then COVID killed it. And we’d like there to be one more different final chapter to go. We’re thinking about going back to Hawaii, which is where we started at the very end RV: (15:48) And, and you’ve been able to do that. So, so the business you mind sharing with us a little bit, how have you operated? JF: (15:54) No, I’m trans transparent to the point of you have to stop me and then I get myself in trouble. So that’s not, that’s not hard to share. We have not sold a house or gone on savings or anything for any portion of this trip. We have earned as we’ve traveled with the one exception that I have quite a lot of miles. So miles have helped for sure with the international, but I work, I live on a laptop. I go into coffee houses all over the world. And in Bali I watched the ducks and in, you know Croatia, I was on my laptop in a hotel above these fighting Russian tourists. Every time I would go work and I pull out the laptop and I, I work in the time zones, kick my butt. And in Bali, I’m up till two in the morning and here I’m up at four 30 and you get used to it and we have a remote team. So we sell, we sell an online product now and actually COVID inversed what you just said, which is that I went back to live presenting because of COVID because so many people wanted immediate help with work from home efficiency, which is a subset of our work. So I actually did more presentations in the last four months than I did in the previous two years. RV: (17:13) But they’ve all been virtual. Yeah. JF: (17:14) Correct? Yes, yes, yes. Yeah. I’m just talking about speaking for money came back after. Yeah. RV: (17:22) Well, and I think that’s it. I think that’s really interesting because you know, if you hang around the speaker crowd, you know, there’s a lot of like, Oh my gosh, you know, all the gigs are postponing and et cetera, et cetera. And it’s like at the same time, every company in America is having meetings every single day that are virtual and they need outside voices. And it’s like, in some ways there’s more opportunity than ever. No one has to rent a ballroom, they just need a link. And like you can be in front of their entire company from anywhere in the world. Like you’re, you’re stuck in quote unquote stuck in New Zealand. JF: (17:58) Yeah. It’s a bad word for wouldn’t being here, but yes. RV: (18:01) Yeah. well I think that’s, I think that’s, that’s, that’s amazing. Now you also have this book deal. How did the book deal come about? Cause that happened over that same time period, right? JF: (18:14) The book deal had been so that my, my, the comic secret of my professional career is that everybody already thinks I’ve written a book because of where I am in the circuit. So if you’re on stage between you and Marcus Buckingham and then Laszlo Bock comes up, there’s no way that that lady in the middle hasn’t written a book. So everybody always thinks that this is my second or third book. So it’s just a funny thing, but it’s not because I had a lot of trouble writing a book and I had trouble getting quiet enough. I’m super interpersonal. I’m great graded all the parts of business that are interpersonal and the lonely quiet work of the chair. And the laptop is very hard for me, but I also was doing other things and I had three children in six years and I was building this business and I made a decision not to be a mom. JF: (19:01) Who’d never saw my kids. And there was a lot of other things. And so the book just kept getting pushed, but there was an agent who adored my work and tracked me through ups and downs of that process. And he became my agent and he’s the best agent in the universe. And when we wrote the proposal, the time was right and we had six offers and it was wonderful. It was a wonderful experience. Wow. And I got the offer. I got the final offer from Harper on a porch in Gatlinburg where we’re looking out at these kinds of Misty. I think I want to say smokey mountains, but I can’t remember if that’s Gatlinburg. My God, it was, I have locked in memory the moment that we got that phone call and, and it’s been a really wonderful experience. I’m preparing for the ups and downs of an actual book launch, especially post COVID. We have a lot of things we’re going through, but it’s been wonderful and I’ve really enjoyed the writing more than I would have guessed. RV: (20:02) I love that story. So, I mean, and you got, I mean, you’re technically a first time author, but you’re not, they’re not treating you like a first time author and that’s something I think that’s good for people to know is like, if for whatever reason you don’t write the book, you don’t write the book, then it’s like, Hey, all of your hard work will catch up with you at some point. JF: (20:22) Yeah. Oh, I’m so glad you brought that up. Cause I, if I could have had someone I trusted relieve the pressure the 10, 15 years in NSA of write the book, write the book, write the book, write the book. If I had written the book at any of those times, it wouldn’t have been this book and it wouldn’t have been as fully cooked and it wouldn’t have been as perfect as it is now to write this book. And so I’m glad I didn’t write the book. I’m glad I didn’t use my content and my brand and the name Widespace on a book that was so much more juvenile than this book will be. Cause I couldn’t have done it twice. And so that I wish that I could have taken that out of my psychological equation. Maybe I can do it for one other person. RV: (21:05) Yeah. Well, and it’s like, you can do it both. Like you can, you can do it both ways. You can be successful either way. Like, you know, some people say, Hey, the book changed my life and here you’re going, look, I was able to do it without it. And now I can write the book and you know, it was like, the book is going to change your life. Again, and it’s like a whole, you know, but it’s not, it’s not a, it’s not as a straightforward formula that you must follow one way or the other. Right. so I love that. Okay. So I want to, I want to spend a few minutes actually talking about this. So, you know your story, I wanted everyone to hear your story about kind of the sequence of how things have gone and, and, and what that’s looked like. JF: (21:50) What is it, RV: (21:50) White space? Can we talk about white space for a second and specifically what is white space? Why does it matter? And then what I’d like to do is be able to get into the, you know, a conversation of how does that apply to personal brands, which is something that even though you don’t traditionally teach that you are, you are one and you know that, you know, you haven’t been and you know, that space really well. So I’d, I’d love to get like a, a once and only Juliet Funt white space for personal brands in the only place you could get it right here in influential personal brand podcast. JF: (22:26) Cause it’s never been done. So here we go. So white space is we define white space as a strategic pause taken between activities. It’s, it’s the open fluid, flexible unscheduled time that used to be in between things in life and now has gotten filled by busy-ness and cell phones and tech addiction and all the things that we cram in. And one way to think about it is if you imagine the periodic table of the elements, and if you imagine what would happen, if one of the elements just fell out and all of a sudden there was no salt or all of a sudden there was no nitrogen systems would collapse. And we believe that this is the case in a sense with white space, that there is this element that is supposed to be present, weaving in and out of our days for breath, recuperation, stepping back, all sorts of things that this element of white space is supposed to give us permission to have that have now just gone away. And the mission of the book is to reinstate that into the lives of working people everywhere. And that’s my mission as well. RV: (23:39) So it’s like going extinct. It’s this thing that’s sort of disappearing from, from the earth because there’s always JF: (23:46) Something to do. So if you have a second and you can think of it really, really tactically, the name white space came from a couple of different places, but the main place came from coaching executives 20 years ago. And we would look at there then paper day planners and we would look for white is the white, just Penn and Penn and Penn and Penn and Penn. And where is the white space here in this day where somebody could think strategize, prepare for a call, step back, reflect on their own behavior. Where, where is the white deer executives? And that’s where the white spaces coming from. The white space is literally on the calendar came from. So we don’t have it because now when there is a pause, our nervous systems are so wired. Usually it’s just the phone is the simplest first insertion. But if you were to, let’s say you were to finish this podcast and you look at your calendar and you realize that you have seven minutes before the next thing, the chances of you leaving any of those minutes open would be very rare. JF: (24:50) You probably get up and get a cup of coffee and do those things, but then you’d come back and you’d realize you had 40 minutes left. You would probably check your email or check a social feed or do something tactical or manual like unplugged desk or pack a bag or get ready for the, the chances of you leaving even a minute where you just looked up and went, Hmm, how’s my life. How’s my work. How am I? Am I okay? It’s been a lot lately. The chances that you would use that time to leave it open and see what happens is very, very rare. And that’s what we want to change. And for personal brands and entrepreneurs, work is never over the, to do list is never over. So if you have five minutes between calls, you have to jam something in there and get one more thing done and check off one more box. JF: (25:42) And the chances that you would use that time to remain open are light, even when it furthers your business goal. So let’s say you’re an athlete and you have a call in six minutes, that’s going to be with a promoter. Who’s going to do something fantastic for your career. Most people would work right up to a minute before, especially if they’re very experienced salespeople or presenters, they just swing around in their Herman Miller and dial right in. They’re fine. But what if you had white space before that call for five minutes and you sat there and thought, who is this person? How were they last time? What were they into? How do I want to come off? What is it? What could this really mean to me? And you really used thinking as a business tool to change the outcome of what came next, everything would be magically and completely different. And so that is part of the goal. It’s not only personal white space or reflective white space or recuperative white space. It’s also a tactical use of white space to further the thing that comes next. RV: (26:48) Yeah. So it’s, it’s not necessarily, you know, I saw one of your videos one time that said like white spaces, not meditation. JF: (26:55) Yeah. Not meditation, mindfulness nine. My wandering, we go through all the things that it’s not, RV: (27:01) But you’re saying it’s like for entrepreneur or a personal brand, that it, it actually that minute to pause, to think, even though it feels like slowing down, you’re saying that that actually could enhance the overall business versus just doing constantly JF: (27:17) Must enhance it. How can you know where you’re heading? Would it be a tragedy if you were on full steam for seven years heading in a direction and you never even took some time to say, is this the right direction that I’m heading full steam for seven years? Or is this the right way? I want my data flow or how, who am I bringing to this business? How am I treating the people that work with me? And for me, these are contemplative questions that great leaders ask, but they must have white space to do that. RV: (27:48) Is there a, is there a amount or a percentage, right. You know, and I, I think this is so relevant, personal, personal brand, right? It’s like, and then onto any entrepreneur, let us, like, you could be shooting a video, writing a blog, preparing a presentation, building a funnel, like answering your emails, writing a book, like customer service. JF: (28:13) And that could all be like within a couple hours. I know. Is there like a proportion of RV: (28:18) Time? Like, how do I know what’s the right? Like, how do I actually practice? You know? JF: (28:26) Yes. And that’s that question is the perfect litmus test of our entire personality. Isn’t it? Like, you want to know, you want to know the formula, right? So that’s yes. RV: (28:38) Block it on my digital calendar and you know how you could color code it. I’m going to color code at white in honor. JF: (28:44) Yeah. Juliette actual white space. So the people that like that more regimented approach, you can just start with two minutes, a couple of times a day, it’ll feel like the longest two minutes of your entire life, just begin to experience stopping the machine and restarting the machine. So for those of us that are more fluid and less structured, it’s just about an interstitial pausing. 10 seconds here. A minute there, 30 seconds here, this incremental and interstitial use of white space is extremely powerful. It’s also the majority of the way that I personally use this tool as an overbusy Energizer bunny, kind of a person. So that interstitial use can be amazingly. It can be you’re finishing work and your kid needs you. And you say just a minute and you spend 30 seconds transitioning from business hat to daddy hat. And that’s all it is now longer stretches of white space, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes with a legal pad, deeper white space away from your technology to think deeply about your business or brainstorm or vision. Beautiful, beautiful, and important. But the life saving element of white space is the interstitial sip. That’s what makes us learn that mechanism again, of stop the machine, start the machine. That’s all we want to do is step off for a period of time. RV: (30:20) Yeah. I mean, I liked that idea of a sip. Just like a sip of water, like water. I feel like there’s a fear that is underneath this. That’s driving that leg. If I’m not maximizing every single second, like it’s all gonna come crashing down. JF: (30:37) Yep. And it is come. I mean, that philosophy is crashing down all around us. Now five months post the novel coronavirus because teams are now working 12 to 14 hours a day because they can. So when the office is in your bedroom, there’s no off switch and there wasn’t an off switch before. So actually one way of thinking about it is all of our corporate pals have now joined the entrepreneurial pain that we’ve all lived with for a very long time, which is work can be all the time where can be all the time. And there’s mental health challenges and focus, challenges and creativity, challenges, and sustainability challenges to that. The corporate people are starting to see it. It’s harder for us to see it because we have that bravado of I’m an entrepreneur. I just have to keep going. RV: (31:22) And if you’re a chronic like, you know, checklist or the idea is not that you have to retreat, you know, you’re not retreating into meditation. It’s just thinking as a business tool about going like, Hey, before I dive into my email, like, let me just process what’s going on? Where am I at? What’s the next most, you know, best use of my time. And JF: (31:48) It can be. So the whole purpose of white space is that it is an open container. Now your saying one possible application of it, thoughtfulness as a business tool, another possible application, I’ll just rifle through a whole bunch of them is daydreaming, which has been proven to lead us to wonderful creative places, appreciation time to combat some of the pain and challenge by looking at what’s wonderful recuperation, literally just doing nothing, letting your body come back during that a little bit of open recuperate. It better be, it better be, you know, we have, we have the dopamine from our devices. We have caffeine, we have energy. We have passion. We have a lot of different ways that we can goose up adrenaline to keep going, but the price paid at some point will arrive for never turning it off. And the, you know, the deep white space that I, one place I’m really, really good at deep white space, even though I tend to take my sips incrementally, is that on those vacations, when I take a vacation, the cell phone is in the bottom of the suitcase. JF: (33:01) It is dead and it is off and there is no email. And it’s the only way that I can come back after the kind of exertion I put into my work month. So I’m a big advocate of when you do disconnect, really disconnect. I think a vacation kind of like driving from New York to LA and you want to get to a different destination, but every time you touch base with work, even once in the morning, you have to drive back to New York. So you never get farther and farther and farther away to have perspective and look back. And that’s why people who do take disconnected vacations, even if they have to be staycations, that’s why they do come back with innovations for the business and great new creative ideas. Cause they’ve gone away. You can’t really go away. If you go back for a visit every 12 hours. RV: (33:52) Fascinating, fascinating. And I could, that would totally apply to any creative work, writing a book. You know, it just, just makes sense to like, to be away from all the busy-ness to just kind of sit and think, or, you know, recoup or daydream JF: (34:11) And writing the book has been a great example. If I take these book day retreats where I’ll do 12 hours in a shot on and off with my white space breaks, but, but a lot for me, and it is so tempting to spend all of the working minutes of that period, working to spend all the working minutes of that period in a document editing, writing on book related phone calls, interviews. But if I’m willing to really just close it all down and think about what do I want to make sure that I don’t not say in this book and what do I want to really make sure that what part of my heart and my willing to be a little shockingly authentic with so that in a business book, you’re crossing a line to realness in a way that people aren’t anticipating those kinds of thoughts can only happen in white space. And they can only happen when you create separation between you and your product. And that can’t happen while you’re in it. RV: (35:11) I love that. I love that. So Juliet, where, where do people go to connect with you and stay plugged in and, you know, be on the list to be notified when the book out and all that JF: (35:24) [email protected] we would love to hear from you. And you’re welcome to reach me personally, a [email protected]. RV: (35:31) Love that. So we’ll link. We will link that up. We’ll keep you all posted. When the book comes out, clearly you can see the application. Y’all I know you’re listening going. Yes. I need white space in my life. Well, we wish you and your family the best be safe while you’re out there traveling and then have your one big adventure Juliet, and then hopefully we’ll get to see you in person soon.

Ep 98: Seven Principles To Make Your Company Irresistible with Jim Cumbee

Speaker 1: (00:05) [Inaudible] RV: (00:06) Hey, brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for tuning in to listen to this interview, we are so excited to bring you this information and wanted to let you know that, Hey, there’s no sales pitch coming from anything that we do with this is all our value add to you and the community. However, if you are somebody who is looking for specific strategies on how to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and we offer a free call to everyone that’s interested in getting to know us and is willing to give us a chance to get to know them and share a little bit about what we do. So if you’re interested in taking us up on a free strategy call, you can do that at brand builders, group.com/summit. Call brand builders, group.com/summit. Call. Hope to talk to you soon on with the show you are about to meet one of the smartest people that I know Jim combi is a J D and MBA from Harvard. RV: (01:13) He is a former attorney general in the state of Missouri, and he is one of the most recognized experts. I think in specifically the South wheat Southeast of buying and selling businesses. So he’s a business transition specialist. He wrote a book on the topic it’s called home, run a pros guide to selling a business, and he’s just become a Jay and I have become close with him over the years. I’ve learned a tremendous amount from him. One of our events, eight figure entrepreneur, it’s a, one of our phase four events. We actually talk about a lot of the principles that we’ve learned from Jim. And so we thought, Hey, you should hear from him directly and, and get to meet him. He’s also a brand builders clients. So those of you that are clients, you may, you may see him at one of our events, he’s in the community. JC: (02:04) So Jim, welcome to the show. JC: (02:07) Great to be here. Let me, let me clarify. I was not a former attorney general of Missouri. I was a former assistant attorney general in the state of Missouri. So I don’t, I don’t want my boss, my old, my, my boss and good friend, John to think I was trying to co op to sidle. RV: (02:26) That’s good. Yes. Thank you. Thank you for that. But you’re also a Tennessee Supreme court general civil mediator. I mean, you’ve got a lot of stuff going on, but when I think of you, I think of you as like the, one of the go to people on my life for understanding business valuation buying and selling companies, how do they, how does it work? What’s the process. And so, you know, AIG and I were talking about people we should have on the show and, and personal brands are interesting because they are businesses, but they have some specific dynamics, which I do want to talk about. But before we get into that, can you just talk in general, if somebody doesn’t understand how businesses are valued, like when you sell it, like, we all know like how to sell a car or how to sell our clothes on Craigslist or something, but how is a company valued when you go to sell a company, just like walk us through the basic mechanics of that? JC: (03:27) Well, it’s a lot more art and science because no two businesses are alike. You know what let’s think about the house parallel. For example, if I, if I sell my house, I want to value my house. You know, the, the, the appraiser will look at comps in the neighborhood, you know, square footage. Does it have a pool? I have a porch and, you know a fourth bedroom, a finished basement and they add or detract subtract, and they kind of reach a, a, an appraised valuation. This is, are not like that at all. You have to kind of balance a quantitative look at the business and a qualitative look at the business, but a quantitative is what people are most used to seeing and hearing and talking about. And that is, you know, a function of their, their EBITDA, which is a EBITDA is a, is an acronym for or stands for earnings before interest taxes, depreciation, and amortization, even you could think of it as net operating income or cash flow RV: (04:37) Terms. It’s kind of like, think of, think of profit, right? JC: (04:40) Right. But you take that number, EBITDA, a profit, and then you have apply a multiple to it. You know, and people walk and talk at the country club or cocktail parties or gatherings. And what kind of multiple did you get, or this guy got this multiple of this gal got that multiple. And that can be a gift, very confusing metric. But, but quantitatively, you’ve got to look at the growth of the business. The, the revenue, the revenue growth, you’ve got to look at the profit margin percentage. And then you have to look at the course of total size of the, but those three things for a triangulate to give you a multiple, RV: (05:21) Say that again, the revenue growth, the profit margin percentage JC: (05:26) Margin, and then the overall size of the business. I mean, for example, a $1 million EBITDA, well, we’ll sell for less than a $2 million EBITDA. Multiple will be larger. The multiple itself would be larger. Let’s say all things considered equally the multiple on a $1 million business may be, let’s say seven. I would say the same business with the same characteristics. If it’s a $2 million EBITDA would probably get a multiple higher than seven, maybe even as high as eight, just because just the rationale that buyers will pay more for size size does matter. So obviously the business will is more valuable to me than 1 million by definition, but it also will get a higher, multiple, so size revenue, growth and profit margin are the quantitative factors. And that’s often where people stop. And that’s a really big mistake because, RV: (06:32) Well, hold on a sec, cause I want to talk about the qualitative too, but so basically if I have a multiple, it’s kind of like going, I have one year of profits is some number, and then I multiply that times, the multiple, which is a determined by these kind of three factors you’re figuring out. And then that’s what gives me the quantitative part of, of this as like the business would be worth, like if I had a a million dollars in profit and a 10 multiple, then that would be a $10 million valuation. Right, JC: (07:04) Right, right. Okay. Now, so that’s, that’s where most people stop, but the smart buyers start there that the smart buyers go to the qualitative factors. And that’s what I wrote my book on home run a pros guide to selling a business. I called them the seven principles of irresistibility and the seven principles are the qualitative factors by which a buyer really is thinking, this is really what’s filtering through a buyer’s mind. And by the way, that buyer, whether it’s, whether she’s buying a business worth a million dollars, or whether she is head of merger, requisition, and buying a business for a hundred million dollars at a large company, these are the same factors that sort of filter through a buyer’s mind. And these qualitative factors are kind of what moves the multiple up or down. So the quantitative you kind of get a basic understanding. JC: (08:13) And then the example you used earlier of a 10. So the buyer looks at the quantitative evidence that says this business is worth a 10, but let’s now look at the qualitative evidence and see how that might move that multiple up or down. And the qualitative factors are the diversity of the customer base, the sustainability of the revenue stream, the quality of the financial statements, the scalability of the businesses, the business demonstrated an ability to get more profitable as it grows. Is there a uniqueness to the business that really is the state that that creates value is the business independent of that owner. Can the owner walk away? And I know we’ll talk about this principle later. Can the owner walk away from the business and the business continue? And then, then finally, is there a believable growth strategy, any buyer eyes on the premise of future growth? So if you can communicate a growth strategy and I don’t mean put more money in marketing, that’s not really a growth strategy. So those are the seven factors. So how, how you, how you kind of judge a business and those seven factors may move that multiple. Often they move it down and that’s the art that’s. I have to stop there because that’s the art. There’s, there’s, there’s no way to really quantify how that moves. RV: (09:38) So I missed one of them. I got diversity of the customer basis, JC: (09:44) The sustainability of the revenue stream. RV: (09:46) That’s the one I missed. Okay. Sustainability of the revenue streams, quality of the financial statements, scalability of the business uniqueness of the business, independence of the owner, and then the believable growth. JC: (09:59) Right? Right. So these are the, these are the factors. It’s kind of like when I wrote the book, I really spent a lot of time over having done this for over two decades. Kind of really thinking about RV: (10:13) You’ve sold hundreds of millions of dollars of businesses, JC: (10:19) Including my own. I, I, I sold my own. I left the Walt Disney company 20 years ago, 20, 25 years ago, and bought a radio business, how I got to Nashville by the way, and bought a radio business and bought it out of bankruptcy. And four years later, I actually made three acquisitions and cobbled together. And four years later, I sold that business to a publicly traded company. So I’ve, I’ve been I’ve been a buyer and a seller and I’ve been an advisor. So yeah, so these, these seven factors are really how a buyer thinks. And every situation is different. In some cases, the sustainability of revenue is less important than the growth story. Sometimes the diversity of the customer base is more important than older independence. That’s all a function of the buyer objective. And this is where I go back to the buying a house is much more of a science. Whereas this business is much more of an art because every buyer’s objectives are different. So there is no absolute right or wrong as to how to value a business. That’s kind of a long answer to your question. How do you value a business? Well, kind of a, it depends is the real answer. RV: (11:30) Yeah. But it gives you, it gives you an idea and then you have, you know, basically like strategic buyers would be somebody who knew that, like, if they knew that your house was, you know, buried or was built on top of a gold mine or something, or built on top of some natural resource that they could mine. Now that house is more valuable. It’s kind of like going like, well, the house is worth, but we’d pay more for it because it’s right next to our country club or it’s right next to ramp. Right. JC: (11:58) Right. I was outside. I was, I was outside this morning with my grandchildren playing in the backyard and my neighbor’s house is for sale. And I was thinking, boy, I’d love to buy that house and have one of my children move in next door. I would pay more for that house. RV: (12:15) Yeah. So, JC: (12:18) Well, I’m not sure my children, I’m not sure my children have such a good idea. RV: (12:24) They’d be into it. But I think so there’s a lot that goes into the valuation part, but specifically for personal brands here, do you think it’s possible? You know, cause I think when someone starts a personal brand, a lot of times like our audiences mission-driven messengers and we go, Hey, I want to start. Cause I just, I wanna, I want to help the world. I want to make the world a better place. And then you get into it. And you know, at first it’s like basically sucks a bunch of money and time, but then you start to be successful at it. And hopefully you’re learning some things and then you go, wow, I’m making real money. And then it’s like, gosh, I’m making real, real money. And then at some point there’s a few personal brands that seem to get to the point. You know, I think like Dave Ramsey, it’s a hundred million dollar company where you go, this is, this is the kind of thing that changes generations. Is that possible? I mean, do you think it is possible for a personal brand to become a business that has a sellable equity or because of your number six, if a personal brand is built around the personality of the person you’re saying that that maybe isn’t as independent. So is it not sellable or like you just talk, talk, talk to us about, JC: (13:39) Well, those are not, those are not mutually exclusive principles to build a business around a personality. As long as it is sustainable after that personality exits. So unless let’s take, let’s take Dave Ramsey as an example he has a fabulous business and, you know, hundreds of employees and that’s tremendous value to people all around the world. And I know he is working very hard over the past several years to develop, you know, a sustainable business that, yeah, it depends on him. This is radio, his voice. But having, having a business that if he steps out, if he got hit, you know, the proverbial, if he got hit by a bus, right. Would the business continue? That that’s, that’s an example. JC: (14:32) I use David’s example, guess what? Because he’s done it right. You know, he’s done, he’s done most things, right? It’s not all things. He has, he started as a very much a business around Dave Dave’s personality point of view and Dave’s presence, but he’s, he’s very hard to develop myriad of products that go beyond his voice on the radio. And that’s what those hundreds of people down there know office building do. They, they create products, they deliver them to the customer base. So they’ve done a great job of developing a business that is sustainable outside of his presence. It’s built on his name, but it’s not built any more just around him, but that’s been in, in fairness, he’d be the first to tell you that’s not easy to do. That takes a lot of time and energy and focus. And I think to your point about missing mission-driven messengers, which I hope I’m would be considered myself one as well. We get so focused on our mission and doing our work. And most of us love the work we do. It’s kind of a mandation. What drives us to it? It’s been hard to kind of separate it and think about, okay, am I really creating something that has sustainability and goes and extends beyond beyond me? And that’s, that’s the, that’s the leap, most mission driven messengers don’t make. RV: (15:58) Yeah. Yeah. Well, and, but that’s interesting to hear you say that, you know, as someone who’s buying and selling businesses, helping people do that back and forth, that you actually could have a business that had a very strong personal brand. And it doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t be a sellable company just because it had a strong brand, but you should work as much as you can to kind of go like what would happen if we, if we took that personality out of it, is that the way to think about it? JC: (16:27) Yeah. The, the it’s and I communicate this to business owners all the time. And by the way, this, this is a problem, right? Not just for mission-driven messengers, this is a problem for, you know, a lot of business owners out there, RV: (16:43) The author, it’s still just whoever the founder is. JC: (16:46) Well, I’ve got a, I’ve got a client in, in North Tennessee, 30 miles North of here guy has a really, really good business 68 years old and wants to retire. But if we sell the business on a Friday and he’s gone on Monday the customer base won’t know what to do. And the, the people that run to the manufacturing floor, he really is the glue that keeps, it, keeps it running. So that’s the same, that’s the same problem. He’s got a fabulous business. And you go up, there’s a lot of activity, a lot of people that if he leaves, RV: (17:23) Like, what do you, how do you, how do you get around this? JC: (17:27) Well, there’s two answers. Number one. Well, there’s three answers. Number one, you don’t sell the business. You just close the doors and you, you, you, you, you milk it for you can, as long as you can. And then when you’re, when you’re ready to retire, you lock the doors right. Or, or that’s kind of the second alternative. You should sell it for less than its potential. Or thirdly, you say, I’m going to, I’m going to stop. And I’m going to try to fix this. And I, I can’t sell the business now, but I may take two or three years. I’ve worked with business owners for doing that to help them really kind of develop their business in a way that and that requires training people with development in a way that’s sustainable health. And that’s the real point is to get into common, common sense way of looking at it is you sell the business on a Friday. JC: (18:19) And what happens on Monday that business owner doesn’t show up. Those people know what to do when they come to work. Did the customers still have the product that they want or the services that they want? So it’s it’s a challenge. It’s a challenge that I’ve had to have a lot of. Let me tell you, I’ve had some difficult conversations with business owners to say, Hey, your, your, your business is not saleable in this, in this format. And they go, well, I’m making great money here. The guy that I was telling you about, he’s got a really strong business and made a fabulous amount of wealth over the course of time. And he, you know, my biggest situation where he can afford to close the doors and walk out, but not everybody can do that. RV: (19:02) So I want to talk again as this dynamic specific, as I think this is fascinating. I don’t think I’ve never been in rooms talking about personal branding, where people are talking about this. And I think it’s like, I think this is incredible opportunity because the tools exist today to launch a personal brand faster than ever before, build it meaningfully. And I want to talk about recurring revenue specifically. So first just highlight for us. I feel like in general and correct me if I’m wrong on this recurring revenue is sometimes valued differently than most businesses. And can you talk about when and if so, and how, and then I want to talk about specifically, you know, that, like, there’s just, there’s a lot of recurring revenue type of models that you see in personal branding. And, you know, I’d love to kind of just talk about those for a minute, but, but is, is recurring revenue value differently typically? And if so, when and how and why JC: (20:11) The answer is? Yes. the reason goes to my second qualitative factor, which is sustainable revenue stream. Recurring revenue is perceived and, and, and well, let’s say it this way. It is perceived as less risky because whether it may be contracted or it’s an ongoing delivery of service, it doesn’t have to be sold every month or every, every week or every year. So in theory, it should be more profitable revenue because you’ve got the customer on a recurring on a, on a recurring purchase behavior. So that’s why it’s more valuable. If you kind of peel the onion back, a few layers, you go, the recurring revenue is more profitable because it’s perceived as less risky and people by definition, the way the world’s financial markets work, it’s always a trade off between risk and reward and the higher, the risk, the less you’ll pay for something. So recurring revenue is perceived as reducing the risk. So buyer pays more. RV: (21:26) And then how are recurring revenue companies value different from, you know, like you were saying before, basically a multiple of EBITDA or multiple of profits. JC: (21:36) Well, they, they, that as a category, they’re not, and a lot of people were confused about that, but let’s go back to our example of the million dollar EBITDA business. And we just look at it from a the quantitative factors. And we’re going to say it has a multiple of 10 just for discussion purposes. And then I look at it, you know, wait a minute, hold on a second. That million dollars is recurring that, that that may in dollars is automatic, that million dollars is on a farm or something. So what does that tell me about the million dollars revenue or million dollar EBITDA is it’s less risky? Well, by definition, I’ll pay more. Now. I don’t, I don’t think of it as a category goal because it’s recurring revenue. I’m going to pay 15. I just, I just looked at it and go, it is a less risky proposition to buy that business because of the sustainability and the, and the, the the less risk of the revenue. So, so therefore I’ll, I’ll, I can pay more. RV: (22:47) So when you’re in your eyes, you just see it as, like, it’s going to help skew the calculation of the multiple, maybe to be a little bit higher, because it’s less risk. Okay. JC: (22:57) Because ultimately it’s about risk and reward. Just if you grab that premise, it makes sense. RV: (23:02) Yeah. So, so, so now we’ve got a lot of our clients who are like, you know, they either have a monthly leadership training or a monthly entrepreneur program, or monthly fitness. We have a bunch of people that have like some monthly, monthly fitness product. Do you think that those, I mean, are those more sellable than like, let’s say, let’s say if, if you created a video course or something, and you said, Hey, I got a onetime course here that’s available for sale, and I have a model for going out and selling it versus, you know, like if I have say, say I have a, a thousand dollar course that I sell one time versus I have 10 customers who pay a hundred dollars, you know, a year or whatever, the, whatever the timeframe is, is one more sellable than the other, do you think? Or is it just basically come down to what’s the sustainability of the profits? What’s the track record? How long has it been going on? How likely is it to be? JC: (24:05) Yeah. And, you know, the, for the very first quality is what’s however, green is the content. I mean, because at some point that that thousand dollar product has to be, you know, reconceived or represented or improved. So it, it, it, it’s so dependent Rory on the, on the factors, and that’s why I’ll say it over and over and over business valuation is much more of an art to the science, but let’s grab holding the principle. The recurring nature of the revenue is more valuable. That’s what we’re trying to communicate. RV: (24:43) I’ve always kind of, I’ve always wondered, like, you know, if we had a fitness business, let’s say as an example, I’m always wonder to go. I wonder if there would be some type of a strategic buyer maybe that would come in and they don’t even want the content, they just want the customers, and they’re just going to pluck the customers out and put them on whatever their platform is. And be like, well, I already have, you know, I already have, we already have our own fitness system and machine. We just want these paying customers. And we know that, you know, based on data, some percentage of them will stay over some period of time. And is that, is that a, is that a JC: (25:21) I’ve made acquisitions? I’ve made acquisitions like that in the past? When I was at Salem communications for nine years I oversaw lots of transactions. And w when you, when you, when you look at a business that has that kind of sustainability you’ll, you’ll, you’ll buy it. I mean, you don’t, you’re not really telling the seller, you’re just buying the customer list, but that’s sort of what you’re doing. You’re you just, you know, that customer has a certain purchase behavior and they’ll, they’ll buy from party a, or party B kind of whoever’s there to deliver that purchase behavior. And, and so now you can buy a customer list. You try to figure out how much of that customer, let’s say you’ve got a hundred customers and they reach spending, you know, a thousand bucks a year, that’s on the thousand dollar revenue stream. So, well, I think that I’d get 70% of those to, to transition over to my platform. So you didn’t look at it as this as a $70,000 revenue stream. Then you kind of start your evaluation on that number, but that’s very much a a normal principal in business acquisition, and would certainly work in the personal services side, for example, fascinating, RV: (26:44) Fascinating stuff. Jim Cumbee, so the book we mentioned is called the ho a home it’s called home run a pros guide to selling a business. You can check that out, Jim, where else do you want people to go? If they want to learn more about you or connect with you, or, Hey, if they have a business and they’re going, I want to sell this thing and I need someone to help me. JC: (27:05) Well, I appreciate that my website is TN Valley group.com. My business is Tennessee Valley group, by the way, I’m not sure we said that. So my website is T N Valley group.com. There are all sorts of ways to connect with me there. I have a BI monthly blog called entrepreneur say the darndest thing where I every time I meet with an entrepreneur, I tend to hear something that kind of this blog worthy. And I, I write a blog twice a month about things I’ve learned through talking to entrepreneurs. I always change the name and the fact pattern. So I’m not giving away any personal secrets, but I hear some, some crazy things and we’ll try to communicate stories. So you can subscribe to that on my website, but there’s all sorts of content there that can help you figure out your company valuation. JC: (27:54) I’ve got, I’ve got actually a questionnaire called know your value. That takes you through the seven principles of irresistibility to help you grade yourself on that. I’ve actually had people come back to me and say, Hey, I’m not going to show my business, but we’re going to start grading ourselves on these similar principles, because we want to sell it two or three years. We want to make progress on each of these seven principles. So there’s a lot of content there and that’s the best way. And then my phone number and emails is on my website T and Valley group. RV: (28:24) All right, well, we’ll put a link up there to Tennessee Valley group.com. Thanks for being here. And I think hopefully for expanding our minds, like of just going, Hey, there’s a big, it’s not just how much money do you make every year, but it’s like, if we do this the right way, we can draw off an amazing income and actually have some big pot of gold, maybe at the end of the tunnel. So or at the end of the rainbow, I guess you’d say, JC: (28:50) Well, you know, it can be, it can be a part of bronze or a pot of silver. It doesn’t happen, but there’s a, there’s a pop there. If you think about it and do a little planning, I think the point is do a little planning. And Stephen Covey said begin with the end in mind and you’ll have a better result. RV: (29:09) I love it. Thanks so much, Jim. We wish you the best. We’ll, we’ll catch up again sometime in the future, JC: (29:14) Right? Talking with you as always, man, have a good day. [inaudible].