Category: Podcast

Ep 58: Selling to the Government with Jack Siney and GovSpent | Special Edition

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@brandbuildersgroupdotcomslashsummitcallbrandbuildersgroup.com slash summit call. Hope to talk to you soon on with the show. RV: (01:03) Hey friend, I am so glad to have you with us. We were talking about this is a special edition, a special episode here of the influential personal brand podcast. This was content that we were not planning on releasing. And we have a good friend who you’re about to meet named Jack Sinai. Now Jack is the nation’s leading expert on selling to the government completing over one point $5 billion in government sales. And he is the co founder of a company called gov spend, which maintains the only database purchase order records for federal, state, and local agencies. The reason this matters right now is because obviously the economy has been spiraling in a variety of different ways and the government is one of the only groups that we’ll be spending more money than they, they would in normal times. So Jack has been featured in entrepreneur, MSNBC, Forbes. RV: (02:02) He has multiple degrees including an MBA from UCLA and a master’s in legislative affairs from George Washington university. He’s got 25 years experience working in the public sector. He is also one of our brand builders group clients. And so that’s why we knew about him and we were having some conversations and you know, we’ve been looking for creative ideas and creative ways for you to be building and growing your business and your personal brand in the economy that we are facing right now. And so that is why Jack is here. So Jack, welcome to the show. JS: (02:35) Hey, great. Thank you so much for having me. I would, I tell your audience that long intro is not worthy, that brand builders helped build it. So bring all those, my 50 years of life crunched into those senses. So thanks for the intro. Yeah, and I would just say to everyone who’s listening, I was on a unexpected and random call with Jack last week and was definitely not planning on this Steve and pop up. And as I was reading through all the stuff that is happening with his company and all the people that they’re able to help, I was like, we have to have you on our podcast and we need to release it ASAP. Hence you being here today. And I told worry, I was like, this is, this is timely, it’s urgent. RV: (03:20) And when mama says this is how it’s going down, this is how it’s going down. So tell us Jack, like what, what is going on? What does government sales mean? What does gov spend do like your company. But like why is this all matter? Just like give us the context. Cause I think for most entrepreneurs, like at least the ones that we know and we hang out with a bunch, the idea of selling to the government, it’s like [inaudible], JS: (03:47) Right? We’ve already lost half your audience, right? RV: (03:50) So walk us through like high level. What does that mean? JS: (03:53) Sure. So I would tell if anybody, you’re just listening don’t hang up or don’t click off or whatever it is. So just hopefully we’ll simplify it. So obviously we’ve all heard the stereotypes of selling to the government. It can be long and complex and challenging and red tape and it’s, it can, you know, historically can be a challenging to go win some of that government business. So about 10 years ago we took on this challenge of Hey, how can we make that process simpler for companies that are trying to sell the government? If your audience does not know that the government combined, there’s 90,000 government agencies, they spend over $7 trillion a year, they’re by far the largest prospect in the entire world. It’s a ton of money. And, and the current events, we’ve all seen that the government just actually approved another $2 trillion in government spending. JS: (04:38) So there is a ton of money in the system. And one of the things why it’s so important from our conversation the other day with AJ is that now sometimes when the U S market slows, then folks go internationally. Well now with the pandemic, there really is very few opportunities internationally. And really the main opportunity for most companies over the next two quarters is going to be selling to the government. And so that’s really been our messaging over the last week or two. It’s our businesses exploded as folks realize this can be the saving grace for probably most middle to small businesses across the country. Across the world. RV: (05:13) So who can, who can sell to the government like that? It’s such a nameless, faceless, massive entity. JS: (05:21) Sure, sure. JS: (05:22) Plus, it’s like per our conversation, there’s over 90,000 government agencies that you can sell to. Like what are these and how do you know as an entrepreneur, a small business owner? RV: (05:33) Like does my stuff apply to them? JS: (05:36) Yeah. First off, the government buys everything, literally everything. So if you make it, the government buys it. And so I would just encourage folks, even now, folks here, we hear a lot about this medical stuff. The government’s also buying a ton of nonmedical stuffs to support all of this infrastructure that’s needed for the COBIT 19 effort. There’s a ton of nonmedical stuff being purchased. Okay. So the second part is folks are like, Hey, how can I go sell to the government? How do I, how can I win some of this business? Well, once that we always give to folks is 80% of government spending does not go through the bid. An RFP process, 80% so that’s 7 trillion. And this $2 trillion they’re going to put out 80% of it doesn’t go through the bidding or RFP process. So there’s about 10 ways that the government will buy that expedites the entire process. JS: (06:20) So here’s one. So there’s a platform called Gulf quote. Where literally government agencies will go out, they’ll put things they need on Gulf quotes. It’s a release, an RFQ [inaudible]. They will literally award business in just a day or two once they get a sufficient number of quotes. So that’s happening real time right now. So agencies go to Gulf quote, we’ll say, Hey, we need and 95 masks. We need a laptop computers, because we’re going to be e-learning. We need hotspots for some of the stuff we’re doing. We need infrastructure for these test stations. Literally, once they get three, four, or five quotes, they will award that contract. Sometimes just a couple of hours. It is amazing. We have folks, government agencies, to list that RFQ in the morning and then awarded later the day or the next day. So the one thing that everybody on this podcasts can do, you can go to Gulf quote.us, register your company, you’ll see the RFQ that are coming out. It’s free, it takes 15 minutes and you can see a flow of government contracts that are happening right now live. It’s amazing how quickly it’s happening. RV: (07:21) This is services too. Does that include like educational, educational services and training and all different eyes? JS: (07:29) The government buys everything from a commodity, a phone to a laptop to services, construction, engineering, you name it. Like in New York, you know, they’ve built all of these now offsite hospitals, they need engineers to lay out the room engineering of Hey what’s all the facilities? It has to be, you know, say for all the patients. So there is an array, an array array of services and products mean the purchase right now, and I used my pitchers to behave. Government sales used to take six to nine months and now it’s down to weeks or days. So our company has been told, Hey, you can win a government contract and weeks and days. We’ve been saying that for a long time and then the last three weeks I’ll just say we’ve now gone to hours. We literally, you can win a government contract in just a few hours. It can literally save your business and just a few hours. We had a tool, one store to AGA the other day. We had a, we had a Midwest public university had an RFP, RFQ out for 174 laptops. They needed because their student body went off campus, right? Like all of the schools, they released that on Thursday morning. They awarded on Friday morning. So in 48 work hours, 48 business hours, they awarded $150,000 contract that fast on the Gulf quotes site. JS: (08:41) It’s happening super fast. It’s amazing cause everyone’s in this hyperspeed try to accommodate them. AJV: (08:48) Now tell us, do they need personal brands? That’s what we need to know. I do government aid. JS: (08:56) Well listen, you know what’s, you know what’s really interesting is that I think this time is, I think everyone looks back, you know, we were talking about just before we kick this off, that having a personal brand and having folks that are aware of you and this digital only age is, can be so important that government does everything. Like there’s no doubt government agencies that have a higher social media following and have spent some time building followers are no doubt more prepared for this crisis because they can outreach to their community, their constituents much faster than someone tried to put that together. You know, if you’ve been doing this kind of digital thing and communicating with your community virtually, this is a much easier process than if you’re trying to start that thing from scratch. So there’s no doubt even for the services that brand builders offers, there’s definitely a need for communities to outreach and inform their constituents. That’s a real, real [inaudible]. AJV: (09:44) Yeah. So there’s, that’s really fascinating. So a ton of our audience are people who are consultants, trainers, speakers. What, what, what would you recommend to them to do two access? Some of this opportunity? Like what w what would be the easiest, fastest thing to do? JS: (10:04) Yeah, so I think again for everybody, I would just go to GovQuote.com, Register your company. Just cause it’s, it’s free and it’s simple. It takes 15 minutes. It’s there. It’s an autopilot that have you. Then I think your, the organization, whatever organization of the person has fear like, Hey, where potentially is the best fit for me? Right? What, not every, everything is for everybody, right? Am I, I would, I would just encourage folks to always start. If you’ve never done anything with the government, start state and local, start local. When you go to the federal, it gets very complicated. There are bigger contracts at the federal level, no doubt. But if you’ve never done any government business, the easiest business is closer to you. Just like a regular mom and pop business, right? It’s, it’s easier to reach out, communicate, have great affinity towards your local agencies because you can talk the talk of your area, your state. JS: (10:48) So I would encourage folks, Hey, where would I potentially best fit my services? What I offer? I’d encourage you to start state local. And then once they do, there’s really, we’d say there’s two options if you’ve never sold to the government. Like you want to learn some of that, right? Because like all things having the intricacies of it can be important. And so there’s some of that, there’s govsalesuniversity.com you can go on and learn how to sell to the government. So it’s just like all these online classes, a chance for folks to go. What are some of the nuances of songs to the government? AJV: (11:16) And that’s govsalesuniversity. JS: (11:18) It’s called sales, sorry, it’s gov sales university.com so anybody can go on there. It’s a one line on demand set of classes. They can learn how to sell. The government’s a couple hundred bucks for some free ones on there now. So it’s just chance for you to get your feet wet on how does it really work? Right. Okay. Then. And then once you do the selling to the government part is really like selling to a an enterprise. It’s like, Hey, who do I contact and how can I reach out and send them my value proposition because again, everything that private industry goes through, the government goes through. So for the consultants and the folks that are in development and there is no doubt that this crisis is going to create an array of needs for staffing infrastructure. How do I use these online platforms? How do we connect with our community? JS: (12:03) I have like all the things probably that most high tech executives and I assume most of the folks you’re dealing with take for granted. I’ll just tell you the folks in the government, some of them are like, how do I do a zoom meeting? How do they all connect? How do I get it on? How do I, the stuff we have room for this call. How do we get infrastructurally and how do I get all my stuff set up? How do I reach out? All of those things. So maybe it’s not in the wheelhouse of what you’ve historically done, but looking at the community and saying, Hey, how do I help my government agency interact with the community? If everybody’s at home for the next 90 days, like how it’s going to be new ways to reach the community, inform them, when are we back to work? JS: (12:41) Where are we going? How is my website? How can I communicate? How can I creatively? If you watch governor Cuomo, he’s done an amazing job, right? He’s turned his press briefing, kind of. Have you seen any of them kind of into this kind of almost inspirational message every day, right? He mixes in the update. It also sends a message of, Hey, here’s what’s happening in the community. Here’s how you can stay calm. He talks about his communication with his daughter and all those things. It’s been really amazing to watch. And so I would say that all the folks that are in the brand builders network, there’s a chance for you to take your skill set, probably most of the things you take for granted and offer them to your state and local agency to help them deal with the communication struggles and the all the connections they’re going to need to make over the next 60, 96, you know, 180 days. So that would be my encouragement. AJV: (13:26) You said something there that I think is really, really important and I want to draw people’s attention to, it may not be what you’ve always done, but it’s a skill set that you already possess. How are you utilizing that in these unique times? And you know, I was just, I was dying laughing inside because, you know, there’s that viral video going on of poor Jessica who was on the zoom meeting who didn’t realize that they could see her going to the restroom for Jessica. But to that point it’s like even using brand olders in example, that, you know, we don’t offer online training skillsets as a service of ours. Yeah. But we know exactly how to set up all of the online infrastructure, what you need and what you need to do to be a good host. How do you have good sound quality quality? How do you make sure everyone knows what they’re doing? How do you host an interact and online meeting or an online training? Those are service skill sets that we don’t currently offer, but those are also skill sets that we already possessed that we could be offering to innovate and create during this interesting time. RV: (14:37) Yeah. This is just a whole opportunity if you are struggling, like if you’re in, where can you go and you want to follow the money, right? Like there’s, there are people, there’s always people spending money. It’s just where are they getting money. Yeah. JS: (14:52) Yeah. I wouldn’t, I, I’ve seen you guys like you moved, some of, you’ve had a lot of onsite moving online, but, and I encourage it in the sales world. I would just say this, I’m very biased. I think we’re all indebted now with Hey virtual this and virtual conference and have a tell them, you know, all these LinkedIn line. But I would just say most of it is very pithy. I think a lot of folks, this took them by shock. And so they’re like, Oh, let me just get online and get my face in front of people and let me talk about feel, felt, found and Hey, be empathetic. And you know, and I think a lot of it is to me a little empty to be quite honest. And so if you can find a way to inject yourself into the process with some facts and some data and some hardcore information to help people get through it, huge, huge, huge opportunity. JS: (15:33) Like one, I was talking to one of my friends of mine who’s is in ministry and you know, we hear so much about work from home, right? But what we don’t hear I, I’ve seen no training or feedback on the family dynamic of work from home. Hey, get me set up for work from home. But now what happens to your family with your kids are home and how do you balance all your days and the meals and also trying to teach them and education. It’s like I haven’t seen one thing yet where it’s like, Hey, how do I now immerse work from home with my family and you know, almost homeschooling. Like, so there are so many opportunities to like help people in this dynamic. And so I’d encourage just be the brand builders group or what are concrete hard deliverable as you can give folks because the world said, Oh, I’ve got to go online, let me do some pithy things. And so the more meaty, the more data, the more concrete it can be, I think the more valuable folks will find it. And we’ve certainly found out at our company because we were blessed to have the shoot dataset and it’s been invaluable to companies here over the last several weeks. RV: (16:32) So, Jack, the, to clarify one thing, so you know, you said go to gov, gov, quote dot U S right. And that is, that’s basically agent government agencies that are looking to spend money actively, potentially within hours where they need something done. So those would be kind of low hanging fruits. But then you’re saying additionally [inaudible] [inaudible] in parallel with that, you could just reach out to your local government agencies and try to con just like you would just like you would reach out to any new customer and offer whatever you know, market, whatever your services are. So that’s kinda, is that what you were saying? There’s like two different ways to kind of go about it. JS: (17:14) Yeah, the, the government buys in a variety of ways. So just for the, just to kind of level set a little, the Gulf quote thing is happening live. It’s exploded because of COBIT 19 the traditional way folks always hear about, it’s kind of this big new RFP thing, like go out and get a bid, an RFP. So government agencies will still put out bids and RFPs and during this time it’s somewhat hard to reach government people. So one of the things we’re going to do is actually make all the coven 19 type efforts. We’re going to make them free online and we can talk about that again. So it’ll be available to folks. The key three shouts at agencies is going to be the contacts. Like, Hey, how do I reach people? How do I get ahold of them? So one of the additional things we’re going to be doing is if you reach out to gov, spend.com we actually within our database, not only did we have all this historical spending and we have the bids and RFPs, we keep this whole set of contacts for folks to reach out to because we’ll, we’ll give you actually their name, title, phone number and email. JS: (18:07) So it can, in the sales world can be super beneficial because not everyone’s on site when they go to emergency, state of emergency, it’s only site. Essential personnel is how they define it. So not everyone will be around. So it’ll take a couple cycles. But I would encourage the listeners to start reaching out because we all know this in sales and marketing, you have to hear from you seven to nine times, right? And if you wait, so this thing settled. So if I have a lot of folks that work with schools and they’re like, well, the schools are gone, the schools are out, the schools are closed. Well listen, it’s a great time to start marketing to the schools, reaching out to the schools because you know, they’ll start to get your stuff. They’ll see your name the first time you write. They may be like, I don’t want to hear it, but they’re going to fire that thing back up. JS: (18:48) And when they do, if you’re not one of the names, they think about if you haven’t done some marketing and some selling and some ranting for yourself, when they go to fire the schools back up, they’re just going to go back to their old vendors. Right. They’re going to, I know, I know Bob. I know Susie. I know Mike. I’m going to go back to them, but if you can find some time now to start marketing to them and have them know your brand, know your logo, they’re your service when it comes back because it is going to come back. You were then you’re way down the road of your seven to nine times, right? Folks who have seen your own, Hey, I saw that company, they were around here, they offered us some free services, they did this for us. Let’s give them a try. So strongly encouraged folks, even if the short term deal flow does not work, start planting seeds in the government world that could pay off 10 X 20 X down the road because we all know the normal stats of sales and marketing that applies to government agencies to letting them see your brand. Now in a time where it’s much more quiet and they’re not inundated with opera, they’re not inundated operationally could be a huge, huge win, you know, later this year. RV: (19:47) And so just just to be clear, Jack, so, that’s what govspend is. So your company is actually a data, you’re basically a database you keep and people pay for access to this database and they can say, you know, whatever, I need this zip code. Like what agencies are close by to me. And then you, you providing that most UpToDate information like of, of who they would reach out to. JS: (20:09) Yeah. So for your audience, just to clarify, so gov fan. Really what we do is 10 years ago we started to go to agencies because we watched them. You’ve watched some of the government contracts and they don’t make sense, right? You’re like, wow, why did I do that? That doesn’t really make sense. We started to gather purchase orders from government agencies across the country, federal, state and locals. We gathered their purchase orders. We put in this online database and in this database it looks, it works like Google. You could put in any product and you could see every government agency that’s buying that product, who they bought it from and what they pay it is, it almost feels like corporate espionage. It is. It’s very, very informative. It’s 250 times bigger than Wikipedia. And so what, what happens with that database? Like all things in life, if you just follow the money, then the transaction makes sense. JS: (20:54) So for instance, when a government agency pays 20% more for a product that you bid, maybe as a company, you’re like, why don’t they do that? We were low cost. What happened? Well, when you go into our database, you see they’ve worked with that company nine straight years. You’re not unseating that company that RSP was on the street that it was on the street as a formality, right? They love that company. But if you find out as a company, Ooh, I have a been RFP that’s open, and that agency has used a different vendor every other year, you have a much better shot at that deal, right? That’s a deal. You can actually win because they are looking for the best provider overall. But again, if you go look at it, a purchase of an agency and they’ve had the same vendor for nine or 10 years, the chance of you winning that business is so small. So that’s what our database does. It allows you to really go in, find the product or service that you sell, find out the agencies that are buying it, and then you can make a subset. These are our deal target, this price point. This set of agencies work great for us. It’s a huge, huge win at that point. It’s kind of like shooting fish in a barrel on the sales side. JS: (21:51) Yeah. I think too though, it’s just helping you have the necessary sales data to know where should I spend my time and invest my time versus where’s my best chances of winning versus, Hey, I’m, I’m putting in all of these proposals and there’s no chance of me ever winning these because they use the same vendor for the last decade. This gives you the insight to know where my best chances. JS: (22:14) Definitely. It’s, it’s, it’s this database is amazing because we as sales reps, we have this thing like we kinda like, you use our gut feel, you know, we’ll see it. We’ll see, Oh, Google posts, we’ll see our press release and we kinda like follow our intuition. But always say, just see if you’re dealing with the government, imagine this. If you’re a salesperson trying to target a government agency and you sell iOS, right? So you spend three or four months, you’re trying to get into the city of Miami, you spend three or four months trying to get this meeting set up, you get it set up. You’re so excited, your best suit, your best stuff. You walk in there and the first 10 minutes you start talking about what you do and they go, Oh, we’re totally on the windows platform. Literally that whole meeting, that months and months of effort is wasted at that point because now that product is done on Iran, but they’re not going to change their entire infrastructure for your product. JS: (22:55) So being able to look at the legacy purchases and know exactly which agencies are the best fit for you and what you’re selling. When you guys mentioned earlier, not every agency wants to blow out their social media. They don’t. They don’t want to necessarily communicate the way, communicate that way. But I promise you there are a bunch of agencies of the 90,000 that do. So you guys can go in and check, Hey, what are all the agencies looking for? Additional social media connections and using your firm that would be a great fit versus trying to target all 90,000, which could be very challenging. RV: (23:25) Yeah. Well, and I think, you know, [inaudible] and for our clients, right? Like brand builders group, we’ve had a, fortunately for us, we’ve had a very, very strong, like we’ve got, I think we’re sort of counter market what’s going on right now because people are going, I need to make money online. But I’m thinking about like, you know, somebody who teaches leadership who sitting at home or a JS: (23:45) Web designer or photographers or you know, people, fitness instructors, home designers, all of JS: (23:55) It’s all, it’s all happening. If you guys watch on Fox has it was interesting. One of the shows on Fox at every intro and outro break. There’s a photographer that’s taken shots of empty in New York city. I don’t know if anyone’s seen that and that’s how he goes into break and out of break every single race. It’s amazing. So there are opportunities. It’s creative. No one would, no one had thought about, there’s a videographer that goes around New York city and he tapes what would be the subway, you know, normally populated nine 11 Memorial areas and he put some music background to it and he shows how empty it is and it’s so compelling. It is super compelling, which again, is an innovative way to take your skillset and apply it to what’s needed today because folks are in dire need of, JS: (24:38) Yeah. The big idea is what are you doing differently to innovate during this time period and government selling is one of those things specifically right now. Yeah. They’re prime to spend more money than ever over the next two to four months. So how are you going to capture some of that market? JS: (24:59) Yeah, my heart, my heart, my heart for all of your folks who are listening are please, please, please, if you, if you’ve kind of dismissed, the government thought it was annoying. Are government buys very, very quickly. There’s 10 ways they can buy. Now is the time. Don’t wait until Q three when your business is upside down and you’re at the break, now’s the time. The U S government, the federal state, local is going to be spending more money the next two quarters in anybody’s ever spent ever. And so they are spending a quicker, it’s more like private industry. You must, must, must take a run at it because a lot of other things are going to get locked up and if you wait, so it’s, you know, a couple of months it could be too late for your business. So I can’t encourage folks enough. Please, please, you don’t have to come to golf, spend or do anything we’re doing. Please go out. Look at the government marketplace. It’s a ton of money. They need a ton of services, products, medical and nonmedical. Super critical for most companies in the United States for the next couple of quarters. JS: (25:50) Yeah, and I just have one last thing because I think so many of the people out there are inundated with media and news. Talking about how business or businesses are suffering. And the prediction is that tens of thousands of businesses are going to go out of business over the next six months. And there’s so much talk around that there’s not a lot of talk around [inaudible]. At the same time, there are businesses that are succeeding or businesses that are winning. There are opportunities to be had invented, businesses are being invented. And you know, I love this post I saw from Lewis house between 2008 and 2010 the, see that was Uber, Airbnb, Venmo. There was a whole list of, other ones were in, were, were invented, but golf spend is one of the companies right now, but you’re not just maintaining your tripling sales and revenues right now in this unique time period. So I want just to, I think it’s important for people to get the counterbalance of, yeah, there’s a lot of people hurting and struggling right now and a lot of businesses, but there is also an opportunity to innovate and change and win during this time period. So can you give us just a quick highlight of how gov spin is winning right now? Is it, RV: (27:10) And also give us, just like as we’re wrapping up Jack, make sure we’ll, we’ll put a link to, to what you talked about gov quote.us, but then also where should people go if they want to connect with you? JS: (27:21) Sure. So I would encourage folks to kind of stay in touch what’s happening in the government. If you go to my LinkedIn account, which is Jack [inaudible], S I N E Y is probably the best way to follow because we’re constantly putting a, every day we’re putting out government opportunities for free. Oh, on my LinkedIn site. And that’s where you get all the connections. Probably the easiest way. And as Aja mentioned, we’ve been really less humbly, I’ll just say during this time, you know, we’ve been in this market niche and it’s kind of funny previously when we’ve done PR and other things, we’ve kind of been on the back burner and folks don’t want to talk about government procurement. And they’re like, Hey, I don’t know how to, I don’t know how to weave this into, you know, some marketing cycle, some newspaper article. And then in the last three week has been just the opposite. JS: (27:59) We have been inundated, spun, crazy spokesman, reaching out all the time. Hey, how can I win government business? How do folks settle the government? How do I find some of this $2 trillion previously, the $60 billion, all this money? How do we, how do we access it? How can we find it? And so, yeah, our business has exploded. I’ll take that, you know, just the grace of God. We’re so thankful for that. And, and so it’s been amazing. So I encourage all your listeners, if you go to my LinkedIn, it’s Jack [inaudible], S. I. N. E. Y. You’ll find all the links and everything. We put out several things a day. We’re going to, we’re having a live link, we’re having a LinkedIn live coming up. We’re kind of a couple different other free services we’re going to be offering. So it’s probably the easiest way to follow what we’re doing. RV: (28:39) Awesome. Well, Jack, thanks so much for the energy and the insight and the perspective, and then, you know, thanks for being one of our customers and, and being willing to contribute to the whole community here. It’s very, very timely. JS: (28:51) I bless, they say, thank you all so much. Speaker 1: (28:54) Thanks so much.

Ep 56: Dominating the Customer Service Vertical with John DiJulius

Speaker 1: (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@brandbuildersgroupdotcomslashsummitcallbrandbuildersgroup.com slash summit call. Hope to talk to you soon on with the show. RV: (01:03) It is my honor and distinct pleasure and privilege to introduce you to somebody who is really interesting. I admire this guy as a mentor. Also value his friendship. But in addition to all that, this is someone that I have actually learned so much from in terms of how to run a great business. So John DiJulius is his name and it’s hard to refer. It’s hard for me to refer anyone else in the customer service or customer experience space that’s like, this is the man that I learned it from that I follow. He’s written all the books on the subject. Several books customer service customers, [inaudible] secret service. What’s the secret customer service rep revolution. He ha hosts every year. The customer service revolution conference. I’ve spoken there twice. AGA has spoken there. And John is just an amazing guy who has totally dominated a vertical, is a real expert. And I asked him to just come and share the true story of how he built his personal brand in such a dedicated, consistent way. And so here he is. John de Julius, welcome to the show. JD: (02:15) Thanks Rory. It is such an honor to be here and the best and only piece that I care about in that introduction is that our friendship, that that means the world to me. RV: (02:25) Yeah. I you really do live that, you know, brother and the relationships and, and I, I’ve always admired that about you and I’ve looked up to you and I think, you know, when I think about your business you’re a great example of one of the things that we talk about brand builders group. It’s just, you know, breaking through the wall by becoming known for one thing and in your space it’s just like you’re one of only a few people really that are even at that top tier, top caliber. Tell us a little bit about how you got started. You know, cause you used to be a truly like a, you know, tell us about spas and then tell us like, how did you, how did you move into where you were teaching customer service? JD: (03:12) Yeah. you know, all on accident. I wish I could tell you I had this great plan. And and you know, I like sharing this even with kids, you know, kids be in, you know, college age, just cause, you know, I feel like kids of today have so much pressure on them to figure out what they have to be. And I think it’s crazy for a 21 year old nobody wants to do for the next you know, 50 years. And so when I graduated from college, first I was a horrible student all the way through, really bad, you know flunked out of college, but eventually went back and finished. I was working at UPS and I was driving a truck. And only because it was a significantly better pay than anything I can get back in the late eighties. JD: (04:01) I was making $45,000 as a driver, which might’ve been wet, might as well been $1 million to me. And, and coming out with the marketing degree, it was like 18 to 22,000. So my plan was, you know, I always wanted to be an entrepreneur and, and I was gonna own my own business, so I wanted to put as much weight as I can for the next five years as a ups driver, then quit and open my, and I couldn’t think of anything what that would look like. There was only, you know, two things. I was passionate about owning my own business and sports. And so the only thing I could put two and two together was I was gonna open a sporting goods store. Like that’s really, you know, the only logic I can come up with. And thank God I didn’t end up doing that, but meet my future wife. JD: (04:49) We get married, she’s just fantastic hairdresser. And you know, the, the challenge with, you know, in the late eighties, early nineties was the hair salons and, and, and hair dressers weren’t thought of as a professional place. A lot of great hairdressers quit. While they loved it, they had to get real jobs, right? Jobs that paid vacation and benefits and 401ks and all that training. And so, you know, good hairdressers should be equipment or friends and at work would be quitting. And so, you know, that’s where we got the idea, let’s, let’s open a salon at, offered something different to customers. Unlike not, we didn’t want to be known as the best customer service hair salon. We want to be, you know, anywhere, you know, you went that day paled in comparison, right? I’m kind of like, you know, when you take your kids to Disney you know, every business you visit after that is just disappointing because Disney just blew your mind in the way they take care of it. JD: (05:52) So I’m taking care of employees and then give back to the community, and so my initial plan was if if that took off, I get quit this golden handcuff job that I had at UPS and start my own business. Well, you know, as, as luck, fate would have it, we we almost went out of business the first four weeks. It was my wife and three of her closest friends from cosmetology school you know, for several years earlier. And you know, our, our, our business plan was really a sophisticated back then. It was made of a three or four cocktail napkins. That’s when we’d be out at a bar and talking about opening this Lao, we’d say, Oh yeah, write that down. And we lived there. I have them framed you know, treat customers really well and treat employees really well. JD: (06:42) But we were passionate about it, but the, the three others didn’t want anything to do with that. So it was back to my wife. We’re open a month. I really thought we were going to go out of business, but that’s where I jumped in at full time, a little bit more kicking and screaming cause I didn’t want to be in the industry initially. And then between her artistic and my customer service we just started blowing the doors off. And so we had a 900 square foot salon and, , and it knocked down you know, the doors and expanded at 1200 to 2000. And then we vacated, built, you know, one of the largest in the countries. And then you know, they have open evermore, so 27 years later still have them. But it’s, it’s not what I do. I, you know, I, I don’t have anything to do with it. [inaudible] RV: (07:27) How many are there? How many, how many? You still have JD: (07:31) Four. RV: (07:31) Okay. so you still have these and then at some point you, you go, Kay, I want to move and I want to start teaching this. Did somebody ask you or did you say, was it like a definitive, like I want to go teach customer experience? JD: (07:47) I wish I could say, you know, Rory, I had this plan and it just like going into the salon and distribute, kicking and screaming. I didn’t want to, at first I was so glad I did because we saw the opportunity. You know, while there was a salon at every corner, none of them operated at a high level. Today is a different story. But back then you know, professionalism, all that customer service. So, so we started growing really, really fast and making a lot of noise in Cleveland and they’re all in Cleveland and in the salon industry. So now it’s the mid nineties. We’ve opened up three, four years and people in Cleveland and the salon industry would ask if I’d speak because they were like, you know, what do you guys do here? You’re growing really fast. Your reputation’s X off for customer service. So at first you know, it probably like you, like a lot of people, a total accident. JD: (08:37) I was flattered, you know, that someone wanted to hear my story when I did it locally. I was like, this is cool cause that now I can promote the salons to the local chamber of commerce or whoever at the time when it was asking me. And then what happened was it never thought it would, you know, materialize to you know, two or three people, two or three people come up to me after speak and say, you know, you do this for companies. And I kind of like yeah, what do you charge and I’m like, know charge for what? Like, you know, I didn’t know that there was, you know, you could do this all, you know, on the fly, I’m like, shoot $150. And, you know, they were, you know, shocked. But that, that’s all I’m like, Oh God, I should have asked her more. JD: (09:21) So, but every time I spoke, two or three leads came from that. And so it, you know, and so I was a salon owner that, that spoke a little bit. And then in 2002 I wrote my first book, Secret Service. So you know, again, I know you, you went through this when I started getting a bigger conventions, I was a, the breakout speaker in the basement. They had the map and a flashlight defined and that’s where I belonged. But yeah, the world beaters, you know, Michael Gerber, Tom Peters, Jim Gilmore on main stage, and I watched them, I’d be like, Holy cow. So I’d wait in line without all the 500 attendees when I finally get up there and say, hi, I’m John, I’m a speaker too, and get it. And you know, they, they, they were all so generous and slow down and they gave me their number and, or you know, it may have email, but they said, you know, Hey, I, I’d be happy to help you. JD: (10:17) I couldn’t believe how generous they were. So, you know, I reach out, they said, here’s what you gotta do. You know how to create a website, you got to get demo, you got to write a book. And you know, so I, I listened to them and you know, so my first book comes out and a 2002 secret service and overnight basically that in the next 12 months it took me from a salon and it spoke to a speaker that owned salons. And then since you know, 2003 I haven’t been active in the salons. And then, you know, the salon, the speaking consulting business just exploded from that. RV: (10:53) So then So that’s interesting. So you started as a speaker. Now today, your primary business model, like if you have to go like w you, you know, you’ve got, you’ve got customer service revolution, the conference, you’ve got keynote fees, you’ve got book sales, you’ve got consulting, you’ve got other trainers. What is like, where does most of the revenue come from today? JD: (11:19) Those streams, number one, probably at 50, a little bit more than 50 is customer service consulting. You know, working with Starbucks and Lexus and Pricewaterhouse and you know, all those great companies, the Chick-Filet A’s of the world. And, and we have our consultants and that’s just ongoing in there every month, every quarter. The, the second revenue stream is, you know, keynotes and I primarily do that, but that’s where we get our leads from for our consulting. And then, you know, the, the customer service revolution conference. And then we also have the customer experience executive Academy, which is something that people come to Cleveland for a, for a whole year. They come four times a year. And, and you know, it’s like a, a master’s degree in customer experience. RV: (12:08) Interesting. So they come for four times a year. Like, like how long do they come? JD: (12:13) Three days. January, April, July, October. So next week literally is to 20, 20 class start. So it’s sold out. And so now the, you know, if you want to take the next one, you have to wait until January 20, 21, because you can’t come midstream. It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, it builds a pipe. We do have an online version, but, but the, the physical class, it’s, you know, 20 to 25 of the tops chief experience officers from all over. You know, they get together and learn our methodology. RV: (12:46) Man. So that is awesome. So then so

Ep 54: Blogging: The Gift that Keeps Giving with Elizabeth Rider

RV: (00:01)
Holy moly friends. Ayou’re about to have your world rocked by. One of my newer friends who I absolutely adore and admire. Elizabeth Rider is her name and she is incredible. So she’s a nutritionist. She’s an author. She has a book, a great book that just came out called the health habit. She’s a, you know, a health coach and an online business mentor, but she is one of the like, Oh geez. Of blogging and building an audience. And if you go to your, if you go to her website, so she’s, she’s a seven figure. She’s turned it into a seven figure business, which we’re going to talk about. If you go to her website you’ll see, you know, we’ll put links to it, but elizabethrider.com. There’s over a hundred thousand people on her email list, which is very public. But what you wouldn’t know unless you were friends with her like me and we call her Liz and not Elizabeth cause we’re friends, is that this woman is getting 700,000 to a million page views a month of pure organic traffic from Google. From her blog. So to give you a frame of reference, like at my peak as a blogger, I was around a hundred thousand views in a month. So this is like 10 times beyond as an average of where I’ve ever been at at the best. So I, I was like, we gotta we gotta we gotta have her. So anyways, she’s the coolest. She’s here and Elizabeth, thanks for making time for us.

ER: (01:33)
Thanks Rory! Wow, that’s a lot. It’s a lot to live up to I feel like. But it’s all true. The page views the [inaudible] that’s what I want to talk to people about.

RV: (01:41)
Yeah. So, so I want to just hammer that directly, right? Like, because social media is like, it’s like the world of it’s like in golf, you know, they say like you drive for show, but you putt for dough and, and social media is like the drive. Like, Oh, you can drive the ball 350 yards. But it’s like the people who make the money know how to putt. And I just want, like, I just want your perspective on social media versus blogging because I don’t think people hear it. I don’t think that’s what you hear people talking about.

ER: (02:15)
Yeah, for sure. Like let me just say this. I mean I’ve got a lot of thoughts about that. I’m going to preemptive all the saying everything I’m about to say doesn’t mean that social media is bad or not good or useful cause I still use it too. So this is not to say that none of it’s useful, but I see an epidemic that needs to be corrected, especially with people coming into building brands right now where they want to spend all of their time. And I’m going to use Instagram is like the place, right? Because we’re in the zeitgeists. We’re Instagram is a place that people want to be. And again, it’s not bad. I want Instagram too. But when it comes to like this like longterm idea of people seeing your content and building a brand and getting, establishing yourself and using your time well, this is what I want to talk about.

ER: (02:59)
Instagram or Facebook or any of them, maybe 1% of your audience, you know, maybe if you’re really highly engaged, three to 5% of your audience sees all of your posts, right? And they see it within 24 hours and then it goes into your feed or onto your grid or whatever it is. And it’s, it does happen, but it’s very rare that someone scrolls back through maybe five posts, even think about a hundred posts, right? Like a deep, like, you know when somebody deep likes one of your photos and you’re like, Whoa, they were deep on my feedlike that. You know what I mean?

ER: (03:28)
And it’s like, well, you never want to happen when you’re like scrolling. Like maybe you find your app, your significant others acts or like you know, someone who you don’t want them to know that you’re looking at their stuff. You’re like, don’t like anything. Make sure that you don’t accidentally double tap something like my example all the time, but it’s rare, right? Right. What I see is people, you know, spending so much time crafting this content that maybe a hundred people see if even right, if you have a large brand, maybe 1,002 thousand people see it. If you’re just starting out, maybe a few people see it, but then it gets buried, right? And none of that is cataloged in the search engines. Now let’s talk, let’s talk about a blog where I have a post that I wrote in my sweat pants eight years ago that sends 80 to 100,000 people a month to my blog. Still from every month, every month.

ER: (04:26)
And in turn the, you know, a percentage of those people get on my email list. That’s the granola post on my healthy homemade granola post. I just wrote a post and I want to also make sure everybody knows it’s not just because I wrote it eight years ago, that one happens to be there. A post I wrote last year is a number one ranked Google search for easy to kill hard boiled eggs. So in that, I just wrote that last year. So I don’t want people to think, well, yeah, that was eight years ago, right? Like you can write a post now that, yeah, it’ll, it’ll become it. So what I want to, what I would, I really stress for the people who I coach and anybody who asks me about this, I’m like, look, your blog is the home of your business. It’s cataloged by Google and it lives there forever.

ER: (05:03)
And if you do it right, if you know how to do it, you will get traffic literally, perpetually, forever. That can continue to build and continue to grow and continue to put people on your email list to see your products and services you can continue to serve. Or that same amount of time could’ve been spent on an Instagram post that’s now buried 80 posts deep. No one’s ever gonna see again. So it’s kind of like, you know, w I think people, and I’m gonna, this might be a little bit of tough love, but you’ve really got to humble yourself to be like, I don’t need to be part of the popularity contest on Instagram. What I need to take my time and serve my blog so that I can continue to reach readers and PR potential clients and customers forever.

RV: (05:48)
I love that. You know, I’m thinking of a parallel here with money. You know, there’s a metaphor I heard a long time ago that you know, growing your wealth is growing in army and when you spend a dollar it’s like you kill off one of your soldiers. When you invest a dollar that is like a soldier multiplying, like it’s sort of, you know, kind of spawns when you, that’s almost how this is. It’s like when you spend all this time on a social media post, people see at once and then it’s gone forever. When you put that into a post that is, is cataloged on your blog, Google is driving traffic to it and the older, it’s almost like from a Google perspective, the older it is, the better in it. Like the, the, it can be really valuable.

ER: (06:30)
There’s something, and I want to make this clear to people. I’ll give everybody a tip here. It does, it establishes that Google, Google wants to continue to send people to things that they know people like which are being clicked on and people are spending time on the page. Google also likes old posts being updated because it knows that the site is fresh. So like the healthy homemade granola. Once a year I’ll go in there and maybe update the photo or like, you know, I’ve, I’ve updated a few of the sentences so you don’t have to do that, but Google does like that. I never changed the URL. Don’t ever change your URL. That’s really important but you can even add to it. You know, I’ve gone in there and been like, Hey, this is now one of the most popular granola recipes on the internet. You can, you can continue to update it. But yes, it likes the longevity when building the site. So the stores doing it now, the point of that is start doing it now. I haven’t got a year or two years or three years to start blogging

RV: (07:21)
And, and so I think it’d be fun to talk about Google here a little bit. Cause everyone hears about like hashtags and like follow and, and you know, hitting the search page or the for you page or whatever. But Google is like the ultimate search engine. And I think a lot of authors and content creators don’t really understand that much about you know, how does, how does Google work, so like, is there anything that you kind of do to, to, to sort of think in your mind okay. With every post, like is there any kind of checklist that you go through for that?

ER: (07:57)
That’s actually my new program called blog. Like it’s hot. I actually have an entire program, but I would love to share for free with all of your listeners. I’m like, it’s hot is my new course because that’s the problem is people are like, well how do I do that? Right? So I give everybody an exact checklist and you know, after, after a certain creative time, that becomes second nature. So I don’t even need to use a checklist, but I’ll, you know, give everybody a checklist. One thing you really want to do is name your posts. The title of your post needs to be what somebody would Google. So like one of the reasons that that you know like if we look at easy to feel hard boiled eggs people, I didn’t, I didn’t call the post the trick to peeling hard boiled eggs or

ER: (08:36)
Don’t make this mistake when you peel hard boiled eggs or something like, and Google might Google would find that. But the just easy to peel hard boiled eggs. It’s like boom, that’s the title of the post and that’s what somebody Google Google’s. Now Google did make an update to the algorithm at the end of 2009 to have more of like predictive called bird. We don’t need to get into like the analytics, the technical side of that. But what it just means is that there is predictive, the search, the search engine is smart enough to kind of predict what they think the person is trying to find. So there is some logic built into that. But you know, for the most part it’s really important to name your post what it actually is and what somebody would Google. Whereas like an email list, when you’re emailing, you know, for the subject line you might use like a headline, right? Or like a question or you’re trying to get people to open the email that’s different than like what you would title the post. Just make sure your title. Yeah. So your post title and the email subject line are different. But just make sure your post title is what somebody would Google. That’s super, super important.

RV: (09:37)
Yeah. It’s almost like, like an email subject line might be like curiosity or shock or whatever, but it’s like your post on your page needs to be like, almost like it could be very literal boring cause, but it’s what the person would type in and and so how do you know, like so do you, are you like in the back of Google ads all day, every day? Like, are you in Google analytics looking and being like, what should my posts are ranking and traffic or like what’s, how do you keep score?

ER: (10:09)
That’s really interesting. I don’t that much. So I teach things a little different because, so you can look at keywords and you can do that. I don’t use Google ads at this moment. I could in the future, I don’t use ads. There’s a, there’s a keyword tool in ad words that people can log into and search keywords. I always tell people like, look, and I think this is what makes me different. And like the blogging teacher’s sphere, if researching keywords worked and ever you just blogged off of researching keywords, everybody who ever did that would have millions of views and they don’t, right? So the way I teach blogging is like, one kind of goes back to what you guys teach about a personal brand. It’s got to like fit into your how you serve and what you teach. Right? So, and when you know your customer, when you are connected to your mission and your customer, I know what my customer’s Googling.

ER: (10:56)
How do easy to feel hard boiled eggs, right? Like how to make healthy, homemade granola. These are all things that I know that my customer would Google. And I think that blogging has to be enjoyable. This is all stuff I’m doing in my, like, this is stuff I eat and stuff I’m doing in my real life. I’m not blogging about things that I don’t use or eat. So, you know, the truth, the actual definition of blog is weblog and it was intended to be just a wet, a log on the web of your daily life. Right? That’s what a personal blog started out as. And now it’s, you know, we use them in many different ways, but for me it’s like I stay in my lane of, I know like my blog is about healthy recipes and practical tips for healthy living. That’s, that’s right.

ER: (11:36)
That’s right. I stay, I also have, you know, category for business for when I do that. You know, I always tell people have three to five categories of your, on your blog, not more, right? You don’t want to dilute yourself. You’re going to see five categories on my blog, something’s going to fall in there. And really for me, the way I decide what I’m going to post, I do have, you know, a map out a calendar, but if the week, if I want to change it that week, if I’m like, wow, I made this instead or you know, this recipe just came up. I change things on the fly too, but I actually keyword research can be, can be useful but it’s also when you have a personality brand and a personality based business, you’re blocking about what you’re doing right and about what you teach and what you’re good at.

RV: (12:18)
Sure. But, but so you’re not, you’re not like huge like into Google analytics or using, you know, crazy tools. Just every once in awhile you’ll get a report from like somebody who will send you a report or something.

ER: (12:29)
Yeah. I look at my Google analytics. I mean absolutely you need to have it installed. I look at it probably once a month. What I think is super valuable for me for with Google analytics is that I can see those really high traffic posts that are performing well. Google does want to see those updated or just that they’ve been touched at least once a year. Just cause it still says, Hey, I’m still here. Like some someone’s the gatekeeper of this. I might update an image, I might update something, but I also make sure like midway through the post I have an extra special banner or something that’s like, Hey, get on my email list. Like, Hey, if you’re loving this post, make sure, you know, cause you can include extra calls to action and those really high performing posts to make sure that that you’re maximizing the space. So, so it’s interesting, you know, it’s interesting to see and I go look at those posts and you know, I do the same thing on every post as far as like how I you know, write the title, pose the H two tags, the images, how I construct the post. But then I’m like, what are these, you know, I do have these like 10 or 15, like huge traffic posts. I’m like, okay, what’s happening on these? You know, what’s, what’s making,

RV: (13:34)
So you’re always watching those, you’re always like, let me pay attention. Is it like star players, right? It’s like, okay, this is like, you know,

ER: (13:41)
It’s also seasonal. You know, like in December, healthy homemade, hot chocolate almost surpasses healthy homemade granola, right? But in July, that’s not going to be the case. So you know, for a blog like mine, it’s a little seasonal. One thing that I would tell people to do, I know a lot of people listening to this are like, wow, I’ve just been spending so much time on Instagram. So I want to mention this real quick. Look at your top nine or your top posts from Instagram from the last year and fricking take a Saturday or Wednesday and Thursday night and turn that into nine blog posts. Like whatever your highest performing content was, turn those into blog posts, immediately. Get those onto a blog. That’s nine posts. People are always like, what should I post to my blog? I don’t have to post. I’m like, if you have good Facebook or Instagram post tournament blog posts.

RV: (14:23)
So I was going to ask you about that in terms of like repurposing your content. You know, like it sounds like you’re a classic, your process is more of like a classic blogger. Like you sit down and you write, you write an article, you’re not transcribing something or starting with something else. And then how much of that information do you post on social or does it, do you really treat them separate as like separate entities?

ER: (14:49)
You know what’s interesting, right? I don’t, it’s not that I treat them as separate entities. We do take we link to my posts and we rotate through them on the Facebook feed. On Instagram. It depends, I do a story or you know, a post if it fits into the grid. But I really, for me personally, I see social media as like an accoutrement to my, to my blog and it’s really work. People connect with me. So I do a lot of like face to camera stories and that kind of a thing where, and again, it’s more the reach. And one thing I’m proud of and I’ll say, I’ve never bought Instagram followers or any social media followers. I’ve never purchased followers. So all of my followers are, you know, legit real followers, which means also it hasn’t grown as fast as some people who have, you know, invested in different ways or maybe have purchased an audience. So, you know, I have 20,000 ish Instagram followers, which is amazing. It’s all, you know from just organically growing that. But when I know that I can have almost a million or more page views a month on my blog, that’s where my time and effort is going.

RV: (15:56)
So can we, do, I want to shift the conversation a little bit to the email list? Because you know, I mean like, obviously we’re, we’re big, we’re big fans of the blog, right? And we, we basically think of social media as just like traffic redirects. They’re just like tributaries that like point, point people back back to the blog. And there’s some other things that it does, social proof, et cetera, et cetera. But the, once they come to your site. All right, so you’ve got this title like you’ve gone through, you’ve done all the tagging and all the, all the steps of the, you know, what you’re going to do to make sure it index as well. What are the things that are actually building the email list and can you just talk about why that’s important? Like if, you know, there’s a million people coming back every month, like does it even really matter to build the email list? How do you do it? Where do you do it? How often? When like talk about that a little bit.

ER: (16:54)
It’s still absolutely important. You know, email is, this is the way I credit, it’s almost like to dating. Like if, if someone’s going to ask out on a date, social media is like meeting at a bar and maybe chatting with somebody and all your friends are there, right? Like you’re, you’re not really that invested in it. Like maybe he’s cute, she’s cute. You’re like having a little bit of a thing. Somebody coming to your website to me is like you’re meeting that person for coffee, right? Like it’s a little bit more intimate [inaudible] out of the noise. You’re like, okay, we’re gonna have some coffee. Being on someone’s email list is like inviting them into your living room. Right? Or maybe, and I will say like in a cheeky way, like almost your bedroom, cause a lot of people wake up in the morning and they get on their phones and they start scrolling.

ER: (17:35)
And guess what, you might be on there, they might be on your email list and you’re the first person that they see in the morning. Like that’s like a legitimately like real thing that happens. It’s like this deeper level of intimacy because there’s been an exchange you gave them, they gave you their email address. And generally what, you know, people call these different things like a big banana. Like everybody on the internet is monkeys and you need to like, you know, have a bunch of bananas that people can grab. I don’t love that analogy as much. You know, the free download on your website, right, like that you’re, you’re exchanging value, they’re giving you their email address and you were giving them something for free

RV: (18:08)
Lead magnet.

ER: (18:11)
Right now on my website we’ve got five, five healthy habits that you can implement today for immediate results or, you know, an eight page guide. And one thing, you know, which was actually something that I like, I had this dawned on me, I should have done this way sooner because my email list would probably be even bigger. That’s in the header of every single blog post on my website. My lead magnet is in the header of every single blog post on my website. So when somebody lands there, it’s, it’s at the top no matter what. It’s also underneath every single post. I keep my sidebar pretty clean of things just because on mobile and traffic’s going mostly mobile. I think 60 or 65% of my traffic is mobile. They don’t see the sidebar. Anyways. so don’t, you know the sidebar, it’s not a bad thing to use, but I, I have the sign up. There’s one above the post, one below the post, and then there’s a scroll pop up that once somebody gets, I think it’s 30 or 40% through the page, it pops up and it was like, Hey, do you want this free thing?

RV: (19:13)
[Inaudible] What are you using for the scroll pop-up? Do you know?

ER: (19:16)
Well, I, my WordPress, my side of WordPress it’s designed on show it, but the blog is WordPress and I think we’re using pop-up ally pro right now is the WordPress plugin for the pop up. That might change in the future, but I think that’s just the tool that we’re using and it’s worked well. And then I use active campaign for email. So whenever somebody subscribes anywhere on the website, they get funneled into active campaign.

RV: (19:38)
And is there a certain percentage, like if you go, is there a certain percentage that you aim for every month? If you go like, Hey, if you’re getting a ho, if you’re getting you know, call it a million, cause it’s easy numbers. If you’re getting a million page views or visitors, I guess if you’re getting a million did you, does are page visits, right? Those are page views, so, so that could be it could be the same person. Right. So and then also

ER: (20:02)
It’s usually a million page views. It depends on the month. Honestly, the series is probably 200,000 to three or 400,000 people could be more, could be less, but you know, just depends.

RV: (20:16)
It totally depends. But then it’s like, and then some fraction of those people, like a, a larger, I would, I would think at this point some large number of those are people who have been there before. But then there’s also going to be a pretty big chunk just because of the volume here that are new people. Is there a certain percentage or anything that you go like, I want to see my email list growing by this percentage every month? Or you watch that closely or not really?

ER: (20:41)
Yeah, I, it’s, I’m, I’m definitely into analytics. I watched that. But I also focus, I try to focus the majority of my on just serving the audience and blogging. Although I will say we’re aiming for a thousand or more signups from organic Google traffic a week. I’m onto the email list and I would like to continue to scale that. And you know, the next will be 1500 and then 2000. So, and that’s, you know, that’s about what we’re out. I will also say with my email list, we very actively dump dump. That’s a terrible word, right?

RV: (21:11)
Well fits your dating analogy. Yeah.

ER: (21:14)
We dumb people who are inactive and this is really, really important. So on the email list, because people want, here’s what happens, a lot of things happen. Someone signs up, they Ms. Key there email address. So it’s never going to, you know, it might balance or it might be going somewhere or somebody changes jobs. 30% of email addresses are abandoned every year. So just think,

RV: (21:35)
Wow, that’s crazy.

ER: (21:38)
So think about like a previous job or maybe somebody changes their last name or they, or they just are like, wow, I’m so over this email address. Or people have like a catchall email address for that. Their, their signups, you know, it’s not their primary email address. There’s, there’s a variety of reasons or they’re just not interested. So I can’t, I think ours is set, it’s, and I give them a good amount of time. It’s like three or four months. If they haven’t opened an email, it triggers an automated re-engagement campaign, trying to be like, Hey, here’s, here’s another free ebook. Like here’s another freebie first and then a few days later, here’s another one. So we give them a lot of opportunity to stay, but if nothing’s being opened, we dump them. They’re not on the active email list anymore because at that hurts your open rates and it skews all of your numbers. So we really actively dumb people.

RV: (22:27)
Interesting. Do you delete them completely from the system or do you just put them in a bucket of people you don’t send email to?

ER: (22:32)
I want to delete them because I just like energetically like to see the number as is, however keep them. And it depends on what system you’re using. It’s ridiculous. You also pay for them. Well, no, actually an active campaign and most of them, if they’re not on any lists, you’re not paying for them. So it doesn’t hurt to keep them. Gosh, if I was paying for them, I would probably delete them because I’m at such a, the more your email list grows, the more you pay and I’m not going to pay for people who aren’t opening emails. Right, right. So if you’re on a system that you are paying for it, I would suggest considering deleting them. However, in the system that I used, we were only charged with their analyst. So we just removed from all lists and then the data’s there. Historically in case like this is more of just a general best practice in customer service and technical stuff, you want to keep people there because if they resubscribe two years later and are asking for something, you can see, Oh wait, you subscribed two years ago? It just gives you a history, it’s probably not a big deal to delete them. Again, my, you know, active campaign consultant and specialist is like, no, we need to keep them. And so I’m like, fine, if that’s the best practice, we will.

RV: (23:36)
Who is also a client, a client of brand builders group a and we love her and we’re so grateful for her. She’s amazing. So how, so do you email

ER: (23:46)
Your list every time you post a blog? Yes. Yes you do. No, I don’t just copy and paste. So I tell people do not use RSS feeds. There’s, you should, no one’s going to open those. Right? People want emails that are written to them and that are personal. Just like you said, that’s such an old thing to do like an RSS feed where it was like, Oh, the blog posts triggers and it just goes to everybody. People know that, that they’re not gonna read that. So, and besides that, your email subject line needs to be different than the post title. Because if you tell people what the post title is, they’re probably not going to open the email cause they’ll just know, Oh, if I ever want to did it feel hard boiled eggs, I’ll come back and open that. You know what I mean? But I do send them a quick email with like maybe a little personal, a line or two, like about what I’ve been doing that week. And then I might copy the first few sentences and then there’s an image and then it’s read the posts because you’re always trying to get people back to the blog cause then they’ll go to more pages, they’re more likely to see your services and they’re engaging in your brand more. The goal of that email is to get them back onto the blog. Yeah.

RV: (24:52)
So then, yeah, so once they’re on there, you say you’re pushing, I mean, once your email list gets big enough, you’re pushing your own traffic to some extent. I mean at some whatever, 20% open Raiders, 3% click through rate or whatever your email rates are, you’re driving a lot of that traffic.

ER: (25:06)
That’s a good point. As your email list gets bigger, what happens is like I do the post and I will tell everyone I am consistent. I am definitely not perfect. And there’s a big difference between those things. So I’m to, that’s you what I want to happen every week, but this may or may not happen on this timeframe.

RV: (25:25)
We’re going to all be looking next week to make sure this happens. And then we’ll be sending you

ER: (25:30)
Exactly most of blog posts on Monday. Schedule the email to go out Tuesday morning. Sometimes I posted on Tuesday and the email goes out Wednesday morning. I like to send my, have my emails go in the morning. And I do really realistically, it would be great to do one post a week, but really blog posts, I’m probably averaging three a month right now, which is good. And again, that’s consistent. Google really likes consistency on blogs and it doesn’t have to be perfect. Again, don’t mistake perfection with consistency. So don’t get down on yourself if you’re like, Oh, it’s Tuesday and I didn’t do it, you know just make sure that you’re doing at least three to four posts a month. Heck, even if you just did two, you’d be doing better. Well, Google doesn’t want to see is that you have all these blog posts and then you don’t post for a year and then you tried it, you know, and you can rebuild that.

ER: (26:17)
So that’s okay if that happens. But just try to be at least getting something up, you know, three new posts. And if even if I don’t write a blog post, I’ll still email my list that week. And it might just be because I’ve been blogging for so long, let’s say I didn’t get a post up this week, the email would just be like you know, Hey, here’s, here’s five chocolate recipes to get ready to for Valentine’s day and I can just link to five recipe chocolate recipes from the blog. Right. So it can be a new linking to other things. Hold things. Yeah.

RV: (26:46)
How do you keep, how, how long have you been blogging?

ER: (26:51)
12 years.

RV: (26:52)
So how do you keep coming up with new art? Like articles after 12 years of doing three posts a month?

ER: (26:59)
Yeah.

RV: (27:00)
Like don’t you run out of stuff to say

ER: (27:02)
No. So here’s a few tips for people. I never run out of things to say. One, if you’re doing, if you’re blogging about something that you really genuinely are passionate about, and for me that’s healthy food, you will never run out of ideas. Like there’s just, you know, and that might be, you know, when I think about recipes, I would never run out of recipes. There’s always something new. But one, one thing that really helps is like if you go look out, if you click on natural beauty or something on my site in that category, I’ll do like the natural beauty series where some people would be like, here are the 10 best natural products. I’ll call that the natural beauty series. And I’ll do 10 blog posts. Like one’s castor oil, one’s menuca honey, like each one will get. So, so take something that normally would be a list and turn that into individual blog posts into a series. Like one of like, one thing that I teach people in my program is like a year of content. You can create a year of blog ideas in one hour if you just come up with like four or five like categories and the thing about like three things that you want to teach in each category and turn each of those things into a series or into multiple posts and you’ll just never run out of never run out of ideas.

RV: (28:12)
Interesting. Interesting. Interesting stuff. Okay. So the last little section I want to ask you about is just a lot of our clients struggle with this, which is, you know, you are a nutritionist and a health coach, but then you have a section of your blog that is about business. Yeah, it’s so, so to me it’s like, it’s one thing if you have like health food and then you know, maybe did like a series on healthy oils or something like that. But business seems kind of like a, it seems like a little bit of a distance. Maybe it’s not. But that’s what I want to ask you about is like you, you, you have kind of gone ahead with just like keeping it together on the blog. Like how have you reconciled in your own mind? Like I’m, you know, I’m, I’m known for healthy, like you broke through the wall with healthy recipes.

RV: (29:00)
Like she hands wallets, you use that term which all of our listeners know about. You broke through the wall with healthy recipes. You’re a, you are a classic example of one medium, a blog, one topic, healthy recipes, extremely consistent for years and years and years. One primary business model, which is information, a secondary business model of affiliates. Like you are such a great example even though you weren’t our client of somebody who actually did this stuff. Does the stuff that we teach and talk about and then, and then so, so talk about the business piece. Like how did, when did that come in? How did you, was it like, Oh, I’m on the other side of the wall, fine. Or Mmm. You know, like,

ER: (29:44)
Yeah. I mean, I didn’t even know what the wall was, but I think here’s, here’s what it is. The business piece of my business grew from me figuring out the business on the house side and people being like, how are you doing that? What are you doing? Will you teach us? Right.

RV: (29:58)
So they were asking you for it.

ER: (30:00)
Yes. People were asking, but I’m also just teaching what I’m doing and I think if you look at it like ultimately, yeah. W like if you needed to pick a thing, it’s healthy recipes that I broke through the wall, but that’s also just what I was doing on a daily basis. Right? I was blogging what was working for me. And when you look at these categories, they’re all things that are working for me in life. All right. I am big, like I said before, like on your blog, pick three to five categories, right? Business. I, I did kind of, I was like, should I just, I was, I debated having business as a category. I’ll tell you that because I see what you’re saying. Like it can be confusing. Like somebody lands here for granola, what’s this thing about business? But what they’re seeing is that I’m running a business, right? When somebody lands on my blog, I’m running a business. So I think, you know, that category in my mind is there for someone who’s like, wow, I want to run a business like this. How would I do that? And if someone’s not interested in that, they just want the healthy recipes and they can just get the healthy recipes.

RV: (30:55)
Oh, so that’s just one of your five categories. It’s just like this, this thing that’s kind of over here. And I think what’s interesting too is that your audience was asking for it. That is sorta telling, right? If you’re serving the audience and they’re asking for it. Yeah. So anyways, I just, I thought that was, I thought that was really interesting. And you do, I mean, you do a lot of business from your business portion of your site. I mean you’ve done, Oh yeah. I mean you’ve, you’re one of the top affiliates for Marie Forleo and several other business people like and that, and that’s, I think the part that’s so cool about it is like that’s who you are. Like you’re interested in business, you’re learning business, you’re constantly, you know, we, we actually met cause you were at Louis’s mass Lewis house mastermind and I was there and that’s how we met. And so it’s like clearly that’s just like a hobby and passion of yours and it’s kind of true to the roots of the web blog concept of like I’m blogging about my life. Yeah,

ER: (31:49)
Totally. It’s, yeah, that’s exactly it. Worry. It’s like I view my blog and like everything I do now is, you know, I figured out what works for me and then I put it on the blog and I’m not saying that, you know, everybody has to do this. I’m not, it’s not like this is the one way that will work for everyone. I don’t say that with food and nutrition. I don’t say that with business. I tell everybody you need to figure it out for yourself. What way works best for you. But I view everything I do now, especially, you know, via the medium of the blog of like I feel a responsibility right in the different areas of success that I’ve had with my own health, with the business that I’ve grown you know, with, with what I’ve learned to share that and to say, Hey, this is an option for people.

ER: (32:33)
You know, even working with brand builders group, I want people to know that I’ve gotten a ton of value from you and I’ve had so much value from our interactions because I want people to know that I got value from that. And I want people to work with you. You know, be schools the same way. Like you, somebody just emailed me yesterday, they’re like, Lizzie, if you have your own business program, why on earth would you be an affiliate for another business program? And I’m like, because it changed my life. It, it legitimately changed my life. And there are people on my email list who might be like a photographer or a a business struggle, just store, you know, I had a woman who came through who wanted to start her own toothpaste line. Like you know, all of these different things. I feel like I’m doing a disservice to the world, to the email list if I don’t share what taught me to do what I’m doing now, if that makes sense.

ER: (33:23)
You know, so and I don’t view it as competition or cannibalizing. I think any business program I teach works in synergy with anything else that I recommend. Right? We all need to learn from multiple teachers. So I don’t view it as like you should do one or the other. I’m like, look, go learn from a lot of people, see who you resonate with and, and learn from a lot of people. But you know, at this point it’s still why, you know, on my website under become a health coach, you’ll see the Institute for integrative nutrition because that’s how I became a health coach. So, you know, there’s this old model of wanting to keep our secrets for ourselves or you know, the secrets to success that people don’t care or, you know, cause we feel like, well, what if I share this and somebody becomes more successful than me in my view.

ER: (34:06)
I’ve done my job as a mentor and it’s just a citizen of the planet. If I can share something with somebody and they do better than me, that’s good. That’s what I want. I want people to build bigger blogs, bigger businesses. I want them to become a more famous health coach. You know, have a higher traffic recipe blog. Like that’s good. Right? That’s why we’re here. And it’s, it’s, it’s, so, I don’t even know what the word is. It feels, it’s, it’s awful to think, well, I’m going to do all of this. I’m not going to tell you what the hell. Like I don’t want to live that way.

RV: (34:35)
Wow. That’s such like classic scarcity versus abundance mindset. Absolutely love that about, you totally got goosies listening to that. I mean that just the, the mindset of just what has changed in my life and just wanting to help people. Liz, where should people go if they wanna connect with you? Obviously Elizabeth rider.com and the health habit, the book, and we’ll link all that. What else?

ER: (34:59)
Yeah, Elizabeth fighter.com get on my email list. I send people a lot of free books and the longer you’re there, the more free recipes and eBooks and just insider stuff that you get the books on Amazon. I’m on Instagram. I do lots of stories, but yeah. However, here’s what I tell people. However, they want to connect. We’ll connect. I don’t do Snapchat. I don’t do tech talk. You know, I, I have my few mediums and I would love for people to come over to the website.

RV: (35:24)
Awesome. well thank you so much. This was hugely valuable, a totally a powerful perspective that I don’t think people hear enough about and really appreciate you opening the door to like you know, just the, all the behind the scenes of your business. So thank you for supporting us and we’re cheering you on and we wish you the best.

ER: (35:43)
Thank you. Thank you. Bye everyone.

Ep 52: Finding Your Right-Fit Client with Bill Cates

RV: (00:00)
Hey, one of the things that we find that our clients struggle with a lot is just, you know, getting new clients, right? I mean, building a personal brand is exciting. Having a message is exciting, but there’s a big difference between having a message and having an audience and making money. And so one of the people that I’m honored to introduce you to today is bill Cates. So I’ve known bill for years. We actually met through a group at the national speakers association called the million dollar speakers group. So he has run multiple successful enterprises over the years and, and it’s been, you know, decades that he’s been in this space. He’s actually a hall of Famer a hall of fame in the hall that speaking professional speaking hall of fame. He’s also a certified speaking professional. He’s the author of many different books or I guess three, three books.

RV: (00:52)
I think this is your, this is your fourth book is actually my sixth book. But that’s cool. Six book. Yeah, he’s cranking them out. But so historically Bill taught referrals, right? He is one of the, the, the most recognized thought leaders in the space of referrals. But his new book caught my attention. It’s called radical relevance. And so it’s more about sharpening your, your marketing message, cutting through the noise and winning more ideal clients. So I think he has adapted a lot of his expertise here in this book. Radical relevance to I think very much a modern approach to how business is being done. So anyways, bill, welcome to the show, man.

BC: (01:34)
Thank you Rory. I appreciate it. Always good to see you.

RV: (01:37)
Yeah. So let’s start with the radical relevance concept, right? Like, so that’s, you know, I think that’s a, that’s a pretty catchy concept. Can you explain exactly what do you mean by radical relevance?

BC: (01:51)
Yeah. So a couple things. First of all, I believe we live in a, a radically relevant world. And what I mean by that is that our prospects are inundated by messages, right? The beauty of the internet has made it easy to get our message out. And, and the double edged sword is that because everybody’s getting their message out, nobody’s getting their message out. Right? So it’s that people are a deluge by messages. And so we’ve got to find a way to cut through all that. And if you look at the way the world is moving, I mean, relevance has always been important. Anytime anyone tries to influence someone else, you gotta be relevant. But look at Google. Google is built on relevance, right? You start to type in a message and you’re two words into the seven word search and it already knows what you’re looking for. Amazon bought this book. You, you want to buy this book, et cetera. Everything is about relevance. There’s even you know billboards on the, on the side of the road that,

RV: (02:50)
Well, yeah, like the bud, the bud light. I’ve seen the beer where they do like hyperlocal marketing. Like, Hey, Nashville. Yeah. Or, Hey Titans fans will, they know based

BC: (03:00)
On ways and Google maps and all those, you know, a map functions. They know the demographics of who’s driving by the sign and everything get any given part of the day. And so they, the, they adjust the message for who their market is at that moment. Some billboards even have pollen sensors in them, so they detect when the pollen count gets to a certain level, it automatically triggers a ads for allergy medicines in the local pharmacies. So we live in a world where the way to get through is to be really, really focused and to have the right markets selected and not that, you know, to be all things to all people and everybody knows about having the right market. And that’s kind of the target. We’ve got to have a target. But we also gotta have the bullseye. The bullseye on the target is what I like to call the right fit client.

BC: (03:48)
Now people probably heard the term persona or avatar or ideal clients, pretty much the sure thing who you are meant to serve, who was meant to be served by you, who appreciates your value for all the reasons you want them to appreciate the value. It’s kind of the, you know, the, the your business soulmate, if you will, is your right fit client. And so the more narrow we can go, the more relevant our messaging becomes. And one of the mistakes I found, there’s a lot of people, you know, in an effort to kind of include a little more, to not exclude this group or this group. They make their message a little broader. Well what does it do? It actually diffuses the effectiveness of the message. So that’s what I mean by being radically relevant.

RV: (04:31)
So I want to talk to you about that for a second. Cause I think that, you know, this is something we walk clients through is, is identifying their core target audience and getting really clear on that. And in every scenario, every single time we do this, there is like this emotional bond that people have to, you know, the, the, the world at large that they feel like there’s somehow, you know, they’re disserving people and they’re, you know, not being inclusive and there. So how do you get over the emotional side of this?

BC: (05:07)
Yeah, that’s, and that is the toughest. And some of it’s based on fear in the, in the fear is if I just work on this group, this segment of the market, I’m going to miss all this opportunity. And the truth is, if you pick the right market, yeah, you’ll miss this opportunity, but you’ll be so successful here and help these people so much better than if you’re the fuse. You won’t even notice that you’re missing that. So part of it’s fear based, part of it is you’re right. Just that emotional attachment to your message and wanting to help as many people as you possibly can. However, the problem or the fallacy with Adam mistaken thinking is that if you don’t come up with the right messaging that’s going to attract the right people, you’re not going to be helping anybody. You’re going to be helping actually fewer people then what you want to do.

BC: (05:51)
So what you can do over time is you can develop more than one target market. You can develop more. One bullseye someone just starting out probably doesn’t want to try that. You want to start with, with your, with your strongest position. But over time you can do that. I’ve done that with my business in a number of ways over the years. You just, but for instance, a website’s a good way to think about this. If someone comes to your website and you’re, you’ve got a message that’s trying to serve like three different masters, right? Three different types of visitors, then everything’s going to be, it’s going to be too much. You’re probably gonna use too many words. People are going to get confused. What we want people to see when they get to our website is that we know them, that we get them, that we understand them.

BC: (06:34)
Empathy is huge in this, right? And it’s hard to do that on a website unless you help them self identify. So for instance, on my website I have three personas, three avatars of people who are coming to my site. One is corporate folks who bring me in to speak at conferences and do training and our video training and all that. And I have individuals, individuals, solo preneurs, individual salespeople, reps, advisors who also looked for the content we have. And other people are planning a meeting and they want a speaker. And so what I do is I have them self-identify who they are. They click on that appropriate link and then everything that they are given, all the messaging is geared towards them. So you can have more than one, but you got to treat each one differently and separately. So

RV: (07:22)
Do you think that by narrowing the market, like narrowing this focus is sort of like, you know, that saying the riches are in the niches, do you think that you make more money by serving fewer people or do you think that you actually are serving more people? It’s like you’re, you’re, you’re reaching us a bigger percentage of a smaller pie rather than a smaller percentage of a bigger pie.

BC: (07:47)
Yeah, that’s a hard question to answer because it’s probably gonna depend a lot on, on the niche, the market you go after. What I do know is that you’re going to bring more value because not just perceived value because you have the right message, but real value because you’re actually going to know them better. You’re going to go deeper and wider and you’re gonna, you may come in with a certain level of expertise, but as you serve those people, you’re going to learn about other problems they have and you’re going to help him solve this problem, this problem that creates a new problem or new opportunity. That’s why I wrote the book because I was helping people generate more referrals and introductions and that borrowed trust would get them in front of more people and the borrowed trust would carry them a certain distance into the new relationship, but eventually they had to build their own trust and they have to have the right messaging and the right a trust-building mechanism.

BC: (08:39)
And that’s what radical relevance does. It takes a deeper with my clients. And that’s the same thing in any niche. As you get to know the niche better. Now you may just decide to serve a sub niche niche within that niche, which is just the high most successful companies in an industry, let’s say. And there may not be a lot of those, but you get really deep in them and there’s a lot of opportunity there. And you serve them really deeply. So it’s hard to say. You could end up serving more people. You’re gonna end up serving fewer. One thing I know for sure is you’re going to serve them better.

RV: (09:12)
That’s value. Yeah. I mean it’s interesting if I, if I use me and Aja as a case study, you know with brand builders group, it’s like, you know, we’re under somewhere underneath the topic of business and then some are underneath the topic of business you’d have like sales and marketing. Our former company, you know, that we exited, used to do sales. So now it’s like we’re somewhere under marketing. And then under marketing you would have branding and then under branding you would have personal branding and then under personal branding you would have like specific niches. And it’s like this company in our first full calendar year, we have gotten in to the same revenue point as what has taken us five or six years in previous endeavors. But our niche is so narrow.

BC: (10:04)
It is. And what, what, what’s happening is your, the way you’re messaging your value, the way you’re talking about what you do. And who you do it for. It resonates so well with the right people that it attracts the right people to you. I hate to use this word, but it repels the rest. In other words, some people say, all right, that’s not for me. And that’s what you want, right? You want people to identify very quickly to see that you understand them. And now thank God we live in a large country and in the great big world that there are enough of those people there that allows you to create a very robust business. I mean, it’s possible to select and go so fine tune that there aren’t enough people in that niche to sustain a business. So that obviously has to be considered.

RV: (10:50)
But it’s pretty hard to do that. Well, that’s pretty hard to do that like in the world we live in and how connected. But it’s funny you say that because like our vision is what we call a thousand messengers. And so our, our core offering, right, is that we, we work with people, we see them four times a year. They talk to a strategist every month. They get virtual trainings for us, that’s like our, our signature program. It’s called pro quarterly. And we know like our vision is we want to just a thousand people. Like we only need a, a thousand is a, is a huge business for us. That is, you know, more than what we would ever need. And it’s only a thousand people out of however many, 8 billion on the planet. So you don’t need to reach millions and millions necessarily. And I think, I think that’s what a lot of our clients, you know, they see Tony Robbins, they see Lewis house, they see Oprah, they see, you know, even even like Bernay Brown in the Simon cynics and they go, Oh, I want to do that. I want to reach millions of people. And you know, they’re, they’re stepping over probably the likelihood of having a very wonderful income by just finding a narrow, narrow focus in just really serving those people at a high level.

BC: (12:06)
And it doesn’t mean they can’t get, eventually get to that point, but to get from here to there, you know, you don’t do it in one step. And if you find that niche, you find that target market, you Excel at that and you create those, those thousand raving fans, if you will, then there are other opportunities will open up and you can start to leverage that great will that you have with those people and create more opportunities. You just have to take it one step at a time. Another way to think about this for the folks who really just love serving as many people as they possibly can understand, especially if you’re in a B2B kind of situation or even a B to C can work. You know, if by you serving whoever your client is, remember that by helping them be better at whatever it is that you do, you’re serving other people, you’re serving the people they come in contact with. So for instance, I’ve been helping affirm who does peer groups with a CEOs. And so they know when they help the CEOs come to the peer group and, and get better and become better leaders, they’re impacting all the employees and all those companies

RV: (13:14)
Are being impacted. Oh, I see what you’re saying.

BC: (13:17)
Right. So there’s a, there’s a follow on effect or benefit. If you’re serving an individual and you help them become a better individual, whatever it is you do that makes them better, you’re impacting their family, you’re impacting their friends. So, you know, I don’t think that the impact you have just stays with that one client. It really impacts a lot of people. And when you think that way, you realize you really are affecting a lot of people.

RV: (13:41)
Yeah. Like consider the indirect impact that you’re making. That’s really good. That that’s a cause. I think a lot of this is just an emotional, it’s a fear. It’s a, Oh my gosh, I can’t narrow like I need to, I need to reach more people. And there’s various reasons why. So, and I think if you get this right, like if you nail the audience, it’s exactly what you said, you, you, you’ll, you will serve them better. So how do you know which audience is the right audience to go deep on? Right. Cause it’s like this is you know, this is a part of in our, what we call our phase one experience, we call it, you know, finding your unique Randy and ne is going, you’ve got to find your audience. And it’s like there’s all these different audiences you could serve,

BC: (14:31)
Right?

RV: (14:31)
How do you pick the one or like what’s the criteria you use to say, well this is the one I’m going to attack or you know, or,

BC: (14:40)
And my answer to that is going to be a little bit of my own personal experience. It’s a little bit trial and error. It’s, it’s rare that someone comes into a and immediately knows exactly what their message is and who it’s for. And as the perfect flow. I mean, some people probably do that. Sometimes it’s based on what you did before you came into this new business. You know, what other industry you worked in, what contacts you have. There’s a lot of that that goes into it. You know, that natural market, some people call it. So for instance, in my own business, I’ve been at this for over 25 years. When I sold my second book publishing company and decided to get into coaching and training and speaking, I knew the printing industry because I bought printing, I sold printing. So that was my natural place to start.

BC: (15:26)
And so I knew what to say to those people to help them, et cetera. But I eventually outgrew that industry a little bit. The profit margins are low, et cetera, et cetera. And I was looking for the next thing. And so sometimes [inaudible] we have to take action looking for the clarity, right? We can’t always wait for perfect clarity to take action because if we do, we may never take action. And so we just act and we, and we, and we deliver our value to different groups and we see the resonance. So in my particular case, when I wrote my first book on referrals and I had an opportunity to speak with some financial professionals, financial advisors, it was like immediately love it for a site, for both of us. Right? Cause they, they wanted what I taught, I believe in the value that they brought to their clients.

BC: (16:14)
And I always tell my staff that when we’re helping these financial advisors and planners help their clients, you know, we’re, we’re helping a lot of people get their financial house in order and it’s very important for everybody to do that. So that was like the perfect match and it’s expanded a little bit since then. I do a lot of different types of professional services now, but that’s, I w I was doing what I was doing, looking for the right match. You, you, you might not know it sitting in a seminar, you know, you know, you bring tremendous value to your clients, but a lot of it just getting out and do it and see how who had resonates with,

RV: (16:51)
Well, I think that’s, that’s a, I think that’s an interesting insight is it’s like don’t wait for the clarity to come before you take action, take action. Knowing that the clarity will come. Mmm. As you walked down the path.

BC: (17:04)
Yeah. Looking for the clarity. I mean, when I, I knew I wanted to write a book but I didn’t know what I wanted to do on, I knew I wanted to go deeper into a topic. I was kind of a generic sales speaker and I’d like to prospecting, but I didn’t know it. And then eventually, too long of a story to tell here. But this idea of referrals and introductions hit me and it like resonated immediately. So it’s like I was acting, doing my thing, looking for the clear vision. Now you’ve got to have a certain amount of clarity. You won’t do anything right now and you give that to your clients. Right. But you don’t have to be perfectly crystal clear. It doesn’t have to all be figured out. You got to take action.

RV: (17:40)
Yeah. It’s, it’s, it’s sort of like, you know, come up with something that’s like 80% right. You know, or 70% in a, and then just start walking towards the direction and then figure it out. Now as you were talking, I’m actually coming up with my own little checklist. Here it is, is going okay. How do you find your right audience? You know, one thing would be going, okay, what do I have? W who do I w who do I have knowledge to serve? Another is like you said, who do you have relationships with? I think another one would be what audiences do I have access to? Right. That was one of the things about brand builders group where it was like, you know, we’ve been serving salespeople for so many years, but it was like, I know so many people in this space and Aja knew so many people in this space of authors and speakers.

RV: (18:29)
It was just like, gosh, this is an audience that we have access to. That’s, and, and, and, and then also like there’s a need, like who has the need that aligns with your expertise? Those are some of the clues. But so anyways, I want to, I want to, I want to come back to something directly in, in the book. So in chapter three, well the title of chapter three is the neuroscience of relevance. Mmm. I want to talk about this cause this is interesting to me because I think when we hear relevance are we here niche? Are we here target audience, we think of marketing strategy or like brand speak or like business best practice. But I thought this conversation is fascinating. What does the, how does neuroscience affect this? The context of what we’re talking about here?

BC: (19:23)
Yeah, it affects it intimately in a lot of different ways. And you know, the way I think and the way I structured the book was there are certain principles that that that should guide us. Marketing principles, principles based on how the brain works. And so I start off with the principles and then from there we derive the strategies. And then from the right strategy, we tried to strategies, we derived the tactics. The problem most people do is they go straight to the tactics, right? And, and if something’s not working, they look for a new tactic. But it could be a flawed strategy or it could be based on it just a flawed belief or principle in the first place. So with that as kind of a, an umbrella to this conversation I, I wanted to learn how the brain works because I know the more we can understand how the brains of our prospects work in our own brains for that matter, the more we can tailor the message properly.

BC: (20:15)
And there’s a couple of quick things I’ll give you the [inaudible] from that chapter. One is just understanding what the brain’s main function is, which is to keep the organism alive, which is to conserve energy, to conserve calories. That’s the brain is designed to do that. And so whenever you come with a message for your business, that might be a little too clever, a little confusing, a little convoluted. The brain goes, Oh, confusing. It takes more energy. I don’t want to go there. And it’s not relevant. It’s not perceived as relevant. It’s almost perceived as a threat and it moves on. And so that’s why we know that the brain craves clarity. Now it doesn’t mean we can’t use cleverness sometimes and headlines and how we’ve discussed what we do, but it better get into the brain immediately if you could. I use it as a kind of a back to the billboard scenario.

BC: (21:08)
It’s like if you’re driving down the road and the billboard has a message and it’s 30 seconds later, you finally get the clever message, it’s on the billboard. Well it didn’t do its job. It’s too late cause she missed the exit, right? And so it’s got to resonate quickly and that’s what the brain is looking for. The brain is also a scanning six times a second. That’s pretty fast. Am I safe? Where am I? Am I safe? Am I safe? And then three times a second is, is there an opportunity? So the brain loves an opportunity, but only if it feels safe. Well guess what? No wonder most marketing messages that are most effective start with what’s the problem? I understand your problem. I know you have this problem. And then there’s an opportunity that comes from that. So that’s how we structure our messaging based on how the brain works.

BC: (21:56)
There’s one more real quick, it’s a concept called [inaudible]. So hold on one second. You said, you said it’s six times a second. The brain is asking the question, am I safe? And then three times, three times a second, the brain is saying, is there an opportunity? Exactly. And, and the brain is built for opportunity. It loves opportunity, but only when it feels safe, it’s subservient to safety. It is. Absolutely. Because what happens is it’s like the, the reptilian brain is just looking say, am I safe? I’m safe. If it’s fear-based, right? Am I safe? I’m gonna say once it feels safe, that’s when the cerebral cortex can start to come into play and thought can start to come into play and aspirations for things we want to accomplish. Start to come into play, but only when the organism feels safe. And so, you know, no one, this sort of stuff really directs how we talk about our value, right?

BC: (22:47)
How we message it, the questions we asked, you know, how we display empathy for our prospects situation, so will resonate with them. The other one real quick is called cognitive and fluency. And what it says is, let’s say if someone goes to your website and your website is a little convoluted, it’s not as clear as it should be. Everybody’s always saying, well, when you look at my website, you know where it’s under construction. Yeah, I get it. Everybody’s website is always under construction, under construction, but if it’s, if it’s lacking a certain amount of clarity, the brain is going to immediately make the leap that this is confusing, confusing. To me, dealing with that company is going to be complicated. It just makes that immediate leap. And so the clearer and simpler we can make all our messages, all our steps, everything that we convey to people, the easier it is for people to take that path to us. Otherwise the brain will just say no too much. Which again, to me, all of that is sort a natural byproduct

RV: (23:46)
Of narrowing the niche. Because if you narrow the niche, like you automatically are speaking to a specific subset of people and they quickly go, Oh, this is for me. Or they quickly go, this is not for me. Exactly. That’s what we want. We want them to say, this is for me, this is not for me. And if they say this is for me, we’ve earned the right to a few more seconds of their attention. Yeah. It’s just slowly pull them through. That is so interesting. Thinking about brand builders group, again, just as a, as an example of we have co clients because you know, my background, I come more from like the corporate world and speaking and stuff. We have people going, Hey, can you help our company do branding? And it’s like, no, we don’t do that. Like we don’t do company logos. We don’t, we, we, we work with personalities, we work with people.

RV: (24:35)
And then you know, that definitive decision is really, you have to have discipline to make a decision and especially to follow through cause. Cause here’s the other thing that happens. Bill, is like our clients say, all right, I’m going to serve this audience. I’m going to go in this direction. And then all of a sudden one client shows up and waves a little money at them and says, Hey, I, and, and that’s a real issue too, right? It’s like, we gotta pay the bills, but agent, I had this conversation the other day, pretty soon we’re going to be free to get back into the world of sales training. Like, you know, R, R, w, w we’ll just, we’ll, we’ll be able to do that, but we’re probably won’t. But she gets calls every day of some like some of the, Hey, you know, we need help, our sales team needs help.

RV: (25:26)
And we’re just like, Nope. But, but that, that money is super enticing to pull you off track. Well, and that’s where you’re forming an Alliance with someone who can, who can serve the client, and you make the introduction and maybe you make some money out of that. Maybe you just create some Goodwill, but either way the client gets served and, and you can say, no, and, and I get it. Look, we’ve all been the place where, you know, we’re attracted by the money, especially when we’re getting started. And, and I, I’d say that sometimes there may be a reason to do that, but first of all, if somebody comes with a big check and you’re able to serve them and do a good job, you don’t want to take it. If you can’t do a great job, there can, can possibly could be some synergy there because in that large company you might also be able to like for in your case, yeah, help it all.

RV: (26:15)
A lot of their employees create their own personal brands, right? Salesforce great there. So there could be a synergy there but in all your outbound marketing and all your outbound messaging, it has to stay on focus, right? You may take your ideal to help keep things going for a little while, but, but here’s what I found. Here’s what I found about the side deal and I wonder if this is true for, for you. Like speaking is a good, the speaking business, a good example of this, right? Like some company shows up, they pay you some money to come speak to some audience outside of your core thing. It’s like w G sometimes there is a, there is a natural fit and it kind of makes sense. Sometimes you have to do it financially and you just go that this is not a longterm strategy thing.

RV: (27:01)
This is a short term desperation thing. But if you’re financially stable, what I have found is every time I’ve chased one of these, it begets more of the same. And so it’s like, it takes you further and further off the path that you are on. Yup. It’s, it’s true. And, and and your [inaudible] probably going to spend more time trying to serve this company or person that’s not quite in your niche, so it’s not going to be as profitable. You’re probably not going to be as good. I mean, there wasn’t a time when I did, I took anything. Anybody, you know, put it in the just, that’s what happens. Yeah. But it’s a sign of neediness, right? It’s not an abundance mentality for sure. And, but I, I’m never as good when I take something outside my main focus. I won’t take a speaking engagement or training engagement if I feel really good that I can do a great job for these people.

RV: (28:00)
And then I also don’t have to spend, you know, triple time trying to figure out their business and, and, and do the right thing for them. Cause I don’t want to do a half ass job. Right. And so, right. It’s an abundance mentality and sometimes it takes working with someone like you and your firm and your coaches to stay on track, right. To not be teased by that. You know, one of my first mentors in this business, a guy named David Rich out of South Carolina, he says, it’s like a garden hose, right? It’s this shooting, this fountain of energy of this water that’s going out. But if you start taking this little over here or this little idea and a little pinpricks right into the garden hose and then the water starts to sprays that and then the water coming out again isn’t as strong.

RV: (28:45)
And so we just have to be careful with all those distractions. Easier said than done. I know. Yeah. Well. I think it, I th I think it, I think it really is. So one list kind of off topic question, but Mmm. It’s relevant and then we’ll kind of what kind of land the plane. A lot of, a lot of our audience, we know they are people who have the, the desire to do paid speaking [inaudible] and just being that you’ve been in the industry and you know, you’re in the speaking hall of fame, what is, what is some of the advice and, and speaking to relevance, right? Like the industry has changed dramatically even in the last five or 10 years, let alone 20 years. The, what’s the advice that you would give to somebody who’s saying, gosh, you know what? I really do want to pursue the profession of paid speaking. You know, what, what do you, what would you tell them? Well, there’s

BC: (29:42)
So much, but a few things. First of all, be very clear on what the problem it is you the solve, right? Do you solve a problem that people want solved? Right? You’re going to be much more successful, much more quickly solving problems than you are helping people hit aspirational goals. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with hitting aspirational goals. That’s a great thing to do. But usually if someone has a goal and aspiration to, to go somewhere, do something at the heart of that is actually a problem, right? They don’t like where they are. They don’t like something right now. And so we got to know what problem do we solve. And then, you know, what’s the result of that transformation? That’s one thing. Another thing is you gotta be, you gotta be really good at, at, at doing what you do and conveying your message.

BC: (30:30)
And you know, everybody thinks they’re pretty good as a speaker and most people don’t really work on their craft. You know, I have a certain natural ability, but that only carries me so far. I’ve worked with coaches, I practice, I hate practicing what I practice to get better and better. And you’ve got it. You’ve gotta be willing to do that and pay the dues, if you will, in terms of building that craft as a, as a speaker. And then the treat it like a business. You know, it’s, most people in this business don’t make very, because they don’t treat it like a business. They they don’t have a business mindset. And, and I guess the final thing as we approached the the landing strip is, is you got to get good at talking about your value, you, you in, in a way that isn’t arrogant, but in a way that displays confidence. There’s a fine line I think between arrogance and confidence and we know people that have both, but your clients need the feel that confidence coming from you, right? It’s okay to be humble and modest and I’m a pretty modest kind of guy, but at the right time, I’ve got to turn on that confidence and people have to see that. And so that’s part of the sales process, right? Of just showing up with confidence and making confident recommendations to move someone along in that process.

RV: (31:50)
Yeah. Well, I love it. The book is called radical relevance. Bill, where do you want people to go if they want to get connected with you and, and stay in touch.

BC: (31:59)
Thank you. I appreciate it. So a radical relevance book.com radical relevance book.com will, that’s the page for the book. You’ll learn about the book, see if it’s a good match for you, see if it resonates with you. And then my main website is referral coach.com referral coach.com and a lot of free resources. There are a lot of ways to get into my world to see if I can bring any value to you. I appreciate it.

RV: (32:22)
Absolutely love it. There you have it. My friends the one and only it’ll Kate’s and talking about narrowing the niche. What a great conversation. Well, bill, thanks for being here, my friend, and as always, we wish you the best.

BC: (32:35)
Thank you Rory.

Ep 50: Mindset Shifts That Up Your Media Game with Susie Moore

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 to talk to you soon on with the show.

RV: (01:02)
It is a happy day for you because you are going to meet one of the coolest people ever. Her name is Susie Moore. We met Susie at an event we were at with Michael Hyatt, who of course is a good friend of ours and Susie is one of these people that the more we’ve gotten to know about her, the more that we have fallen in love and ha and I know her and her husband Heath pretty well. We’ve gotten to meet him face to face a couple of times. And she is somebody who used to be a sales director in Silicon Valley and she left that to become a life coach and an advice column. This, but her real expert, one of her real expertise is understanding media. All right. So she helps people develop confidence and you know, does a lot of coaching around that.

RV: (01:47)
But tactically she knows a ton about the media. She’s been on the today show herself. She’d been on Oprah, she’s been in all the big outlets. She’s been in media over 300 times, I think if I saw that right, it’s 300 different outlets. There you go. And she’s just a master at it. So she’s the author. She’s an author, you know, her first book was called what, what if it does work out and she lives in Miami with a Heath and they’re just awesome. So I felt like you had to meet Susie to talk a little bit about media and PR. So Susie, welcome to the show, my friend. I just love much. Yeah. So I think of, you know, I remember when when we did our first book launch, you know, we hired a publicist and we did like, you know, a tour bus and we ran out of the country and like we did all this like formal media and it was in my mind, it was just like this one time event and, and yet you have, you help people like stay in the news all the time and and just kind of like get a understanding how did use media to drive their business.

RV: (03:02)
So I, I guess my first question is just sort of like, what do you think are the misconceptions that people have about PR in media in general? And specifically I’m talking about, you know, for our audience is mostly like either authors or speakers or executives who are trying to promote a cause or a book or a movement or some type.

SM: (03:24)
Yes. I mean I think the misconceptions, a couple of the real big ones, all that you have to have, you know, fancy [inaudible] the connections that you have to have some type of training or you know, foot in the door with somebody or something, but you need a publicist that this isn’t something that you can do yourself. I think the media can be a little bit intimidating. We don’t know where to, again, sometimes you think you have to be a real expert Xbox, you know, and certainly as authors, entrepreneurs, you already are experts in all fields, but sometimes I think it can be a bit intimidating. You think that you still need to kind of wait or you need somebody to help you do it and that it’s just not accessible. And really the opposite is true and it just does need content. Like you will be generous when you all pitching yourself. A couple of my editors need new 15 pieces like holiday on that website that, I mean they pay a lot of content, fresh content daily, so they also want to hear from you the talent. I mean there’s certainly a place to publicist because doing DIY media isn’t for everybody, especially at a business level, but I know having a lot of medicines as friends now that they will do hear from the talent, which is just regular people like you and meet with a regular stories

RV: (04:34)
And you’re saying when you’re saying hear from him, you’re saying it’s not a, it’s not a hit to your credibility to reach out yourself versus having someone on your behalf do it.

SM: (04:46)
It’s the opposite, right? It’s actually having a real, a real human, bright, real possible person about some of the human story and the reaching out directly wanting to connect directly and wanting to just kind of speak from the heart. I mean the best stories, the best media messages, all just these real stories, right? Human beings. Like what is that? We have to say what we’ve experienced, what it is that we’ve love to share hearing from this source is preferred in Mercedes.

RV: (05:11)
Yeah. I think that that is I think so that is a misconception for sure. Is like I gotta have a publicist just even to be credible now. And so I, I hear you saying, so it’s not that, where do you find these people? Cause, cause you go, okay, let’s say you are going to DIY and, and you know, some of our clients have pretty big operations and they, you know, they’re probably going to have someone, but a lot of our clients are newer and they’re just getting started and they need, they need a few media appearances to like build some of that credibility. But I don’t think they, I think you’re right. They, it seems daunting. It feels overwhelming. It’s like why would anybody reach out, listen to me and, and I don’t, I don’t even know where to start. So like where do you go find these people?

SM: (05:55)
I mean, it’s an interesting question, right? Because the, the daunting facts, it just puts people off in the beginning, right? It’s like I just went for the right, you know, I do need some help with it. Whereas people are just, they’re accessible everywhere. Like what do you think about, how do you find anybody’s info anyway, right. Twitter is still then as a right to stop home. If you can take any like large media outlet as often a contact with us page and even look at any magazine. Next. Last name, last name is listed, finding contact information. I mean, well I was speaking to an editor recently and I’m like, he’s like in a couple of my friends email address and she’s like, if they have five seconds in a Google account, like they could find it. Like edit does want to be available to, they will want to be found by people.

SM: (06:35)
Like again, just like even me and I even have a couple of edits and friends who are, who say, you know, if I get publishes emails I just delete them. Bet against you in some cases because if somebody found her information and they craft a pitch that’s, that’s relevant and suitable, then you’ve really gone up and an editor’s estimation immediately. They already can see it was a really promising source. So finding information, I mean you just, I use a couple of different email sites for specific, you know, if it’s Conde Nast or Haas for example, or NBC if you’re looking to pitch television. But I mean the intonation’s everywhere, it just takes you five minutes of home up to say, you know, I was a puzzle.

RV: (07:17)
So you’re basically, but the editor is who you’re going for. Is that who you’re looking for?

SM: (07:22)
Yes. The editors or producers? Yeah, it, depending on all the podcasts, Booker, if you will. And often it’s just reaching out to a host directly on Instagram. It can be as simple as it’s real again, right rule, just human beings. We love stories that really, you know, it’s what makes the world go around and people want to receive pitches, content. And if you, if you have something relevant for that audience and you’re being of service to them,

RV: (07:45)
I love it. Okay. So number one, don’t necessarily need a publicist. Number two, you can find the people they want to be found. Number three number three.

SM: (07:57)
So you’re just saying like race.

RV: (07:59)
Yeah. So then the, and then the third thing I think is that they need you probably more than you need them. So those are, those are big things. So now let’s talk about the pitch itself. All right. So you know, when you say pitch, that’s like an email or a DM or something, right? As typically that’s going to be how it happens. What do I need to know to like get their interest and make it worth their time, you know, reach out. Like how does their mind work and how, what do I need to know about how their mind works so that I can craft what I’m trying to say in a way that they go? Sure. Done. Let’s have, let’s have you [inaudible].

SM: (08:41)
Yes, it’s a great question. So a pitch essentially is you in an email and no more than three paragraphs saying why, you know, why. Well, you’re a perfect fit for this editor at this time. And then looking for just a couple of very things. So looking for relevance, right? So if you’re a travel website, no one wants to know about your newborn baby unless it’s about traveling with a newborn baby. Right? So it’s surprising how few people do the research on specifically what type of content editors want and what you have to do. Again, it’s five minutes like you’re going to travel and leisure.com going to Marie-Claire, going to SPI, going to whatever website it is and just seeing what type of content is being created. So you one of the relevant and then natural good thing. Well that audience what it is you have to say.

SM: (09:23)
And then also just being succinct. And how did you present your information? So a lot of mistakes. Icy, probably the most common mistake is a lot of rambling and a lot of lists. Why you like I’m this author, this many books and I’ve you know, been here and there, you know it’s great to include a couple of clips. Like your bio is like one sentence. Say why you right. So who has your hip has some white. So I’m worry and I do this for a living. And then you say your picture is simply what your idea is and then a couple of sentences about what you’ll say in your articles. So this is for guest post specifically or even for a segment, what it is exactly that you’re going to say about that topic. And then just having to, you know, assess, I mean ideally even those in peg it to something happening in the media. So if I mean thinking about anything that’s in the news.

RV: (10:10)
Okay. So, so hold on on that part. Cause that’s, that’s I want to come back. I want to come back and hit that. But, but so you’re saying too much rambling. So it’s just like an unclear like what the heck are you, what, what is the idea that you’re trying to present and too much of like the me monster, like here’s my 15 page bio.

SM: (10:32)
Yeah.

RV: (10:33)
And what all they really care about is what is the value you’re going to provide to their audience? Like what are you actually going to say? What is the segment and how is that useful to their audience?

SM: (10:43)
Yes. What am I, a friend says, you know, who cares? So what, why you right. And it’s as simple as that that you guys said walk, why you, and it’s like, yeah, so it puts simply who you want. We don’t need to know much. Right. And some people just really go into detail that isn’t necessary. What is it that you want? Just chef evaluates your Rita’s OPO is, and then how he finished it. Like what’s your idea? You know, he was a little bit of context and for context for this conversation where he’s, some editors get a hundred pitches in a day. So it’s just simply a time thing, you know, scrolling, scrolling. You don’t really want someone to scroll like you want me to just, Oh that, Oh, the meat there. And that’s it. I mean JetLine did a timely pitch. Ikea, keep it really simple. I think some people, again, Oh the complicate all of this, I swear, where we like life and business can be easier. The other ones who make it harder. We are the ones who created these like new roadblocks and this illusion of, you know, something has to be really challenging. It’s not, again, editors are just humans just like us. They want to get good ideas. You’re being generous when you’re sharing them and they just want to hit them struggling or simple way like we all

RV: (11:45)
Right. Yeah. And I think that was a big shift for me, which is, it’s just, you know, so much of fear is always like self-centered. Like, you know, am I good enough? Are they going to want me? And so you spew all this stuff about you and it’s like they don’t care about you. Not in a mean way. It’s what they care about is their audience. And it’s like if you can show that you, you know what their audience needs and you know what they put out to their audience and you can just sort of share, Hey, here’s something I could do for your audience. Then they’re going to be like, okay, great. I’ll take a look like this. This could be legit.

SM: (12:20)
Yes, absolutely. And if you want a couple of protips or brownie points.

RV: (12:24)
Yeah, yeah, brownie points.

SM: (12:28)
Because we want, I mean, we all want to get a yes, right? Rejection is very natural. I know certainly the pop machine process, but you know, a couple of things that you can do that kind of really go a long way. Again, because editors and producers are human, just like us, if you know to do a bit of often editing, she was staff writers and they do interviews or they write their own pieces. So if you can say, you know, I love the piece that you wrote on maybe music or you know, tumeric lattes, like with Android, either pieces based on where they are, wherever you can change to share the right. That was as a human, we all want to be acknowledged, right? If somebody liked how welcoming they connected with it, just, you know, Hey, I loved your piece on one sentence.

RV: (13:06)
Huh. Butter, butter them up. And if you have a British accent, it helps. It helps because if you’re, if you have a, if you have an accent, they like that too. If you’re talking to them on the phone. That’s so true. I mean that, it boggles my mind when people will reach out to me for my podcast and they’re like, you know, we can come talk about customer service or, or something crazy. And it’s like I’m, I’m dealing with authors and speakers. It’s like clearly you haven’t even, you haven’t, you haven’t listened to the opening 30 seconds of one episode ever. Like, it’s very obvious who our audience is. If you literally take like a second to know now I have other, you know, I’ve done other podcasts in the past and stuff for, it’s like, okay, yeah, this would be a fit for that, but not for this. And I, I think that does go a long way. It’s not even, it’s not even buttering up. It’s just showing them like you care enough to take a second to figure out what they’re about.

SM: (14:06)
Yes, exactly. And you know, I always say, I think I already said it, but if that’s repeating like a couple of minutes, if I’m lucky they call it [inaudible]. Let me just not being received as like, well I mean what, what like 30 minutes of research should be done in order to send like 10, 15 pitches. I mean it doesn’t, didn’t take much for me. Right. But the this thing does go a long way is research. And then the second piece, the second thing you can do for brownie points and you know, you’ll be fumbled likely to get a yes is to to, you know, pick a pitch to anything. Just really timely. Anything already kind of trending on this site. So maybe you have a different point of view. Maybe you don’t have an extension of information. If you start a piece on the right public speakers do this.

SM: (14:47)
Wow. Is there something missing? Do you disagree with that? Like, so it just shows that you’re kind of engaged, being annual aware of what’s hot. And then also, I mean, we’re all just, you know, SEO, you know, addicts here and we want, if something’s happening in the news, do you want to have an opinion? And so if you even have, I mean all of my content is evergreen, but I’ll pitch it to some things in the news whenever I can, which is actually again, pretty simple to do. I mean, one success story we had was when there’s a woman who, and I’m prepared as breath work, so like calming breathing, she doesn’t break you and other things, but she was like, my pages aren’t being accepted and then we’ll have fast pitch was accepted because instead of, you know, how to breathe through a lapse, you know, simple technique. It was how Megan Malko should breathe on the way to the chapel is Mary and Harry, like how should she eat everything? And it was all of the day of, or the day of the wedding were they also, so you can just see how it’s the same content, but can kind of pick it to something that just makes it really timely and relevant.

RV: (15:47)
Yeah, I mean it’s, it’s just like, and that’s, that is also the work, you know, like the work that people don’t want to do is they don’t want to research, they don’t want to understand anything about the medium and then the work is going, how do I apply my expertise to something happening in the news? It’s the same five tips you’ve taught your entire career. It’s just connecting it to something that’s going on in the news that makes it worthy of dropping it into their, their news cycle. I didn’t, I think that’s, that’s so powerful and it’s, it’s so, so important and it’s, it’s, you’re just dressing up. It’s like lipstick on a pig kind of thing too. You readdress, you’re just, it’s a, it’s just a new wrapper. It’s the same candy bar. It’s a new rapper basically.

SM: (16:35)
I think they’re very exciting map, but it’s exactly the same. Me add a couple of veggies into a one sentence intro that’s different and a couple of kind of like bridging sentences in a piece to connect it to the timely relevant thing. The way that I’ve kind of explained it is just say, okay, I’m in a long, long trip and you’re driving like a junkie. Right. And you know, it’s like we get used to it and you’re like, I’ll just keep grabbing my jacket. If you just pulled up an Apple and like took a little break and just go on a plane, which involves just doing something different, you’re then just arrive at your destination very, very quickly. But most people just stay there and he called you a janky pitches and they confuse as to why they’re not getting any way quickly. So it takes a bit of a change, but it’s so worth it. I mean, it’s, it’s true. It’s pretty amazing how it can just transform your success.

RV: (17:18)
Yeah. So okay. The, the last little part I want to talk to you about is the money. Okay. So like how does this, because this takes a lot of time. I mean even if it’s a few minutes, but if you’re doing, you know, several things a week and then you’re going back and forth, even if you get accepted, it’s like, Hey, you need to edit it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There’s, there’s a lot of, there can be a lot of time here. Does this convert to money? Like, or how do you make it convert to money? Like cause I’ve had, you know, I’ve been on TV shows where we’ll see a it’ll sell a thousand books like that. I’ve been on other TV shows where there’s like, no, no, nothing has it, you know, it doesn’t apparently move the needle at all. So are there, are there certain outlets that you like more than others? Are there certain, you know, ways to do this, to actually make it move your business forward?

SM: (18:07)
Yeah, it’s a great question. Not only he is created equal, I mean absolutely not. And surprising what gets results over what you might see in buses actually, what, you know, what will drive immediate feature to actually make put money in the bank. And this is why I love guest posting specifically as a tool because it’s the most frictionless way for a Rita or to then purchase, right to have, if you had to base a piece of content. But simply that and I can share a free writing and write guest posts too. But if you have a piece of content where you get your advice regime tips, for example, you share a personal story, you then have what’s called a shut tale at the ultimate battle multiple, which is a two sentence bio. Again, really simple with a link or someone can have LUN.

SM: (18:52)
So for example, just say, you know, you’re, I know the sleep X-Box and you give advice on maybe business travel, you know, sleeping. If you have a child, be a newborn, wherever we go, peace, you know, it’ll be placed wherever it’s suitable. And then if someone’s like [inaudible], so who helps new moms get eight hours up to three months after your baby reaches the three month Mark and then you download this. How am I see my quick free training? It’s amazing when you, when you can see the, how many eyeballs will receive that piece say right? Or parents don’t come. Then the people who read it will then click through and to them, Oh definitely sacral you all parenting magazine, your trust factor is pretty like massively established, which really shows your sales cycle and then you already go directly to a landing page or even to a purchase stage.

SM: (19:40)
So that is, I mean it really the magic of of course, and then you get all the other crap, right? So media of course is a huge credibility market. That’s why I’m doing it as when I was side hustling as a life coach because I wanted to get people to discover me, to find me and I wanted to get through the credit, the immediate red, but only started realizing how you can just monetize these eyeballs. But I just didn’t. Giving them a flavor view with multiple and then an opportunity to work more deeply with you, which you just make completely visible and available and it just, they don’t care what happens. They just want them to like the piece and to share it and to comment. But that’s specifically why I like to guest posting. And then

RV: (20:18)
You’re saying because the, the, the, the idea is like if you watch a TV segment, you might be in your kitchen or whatever, but if you’re reading, yeah, like you’ve got to remember their name or a URL or something. But if I’m, if I’m reading a blog or an article and then it just says, you know, learn more about Rory or learn more about Suzy, you just click right there and they’re off and they’re into your, you know, relationship engine as we call it.

SM: (20:46)
That’s right. And another golden point here is you can, instead of even making it about me, you can say where we helps new moms. Oh this helps. And then you say about who is it you saw? And that often just be like, is that me? And then it’s pretty awesome how like how many just views, clicks and new subscribers purchases. I mean, depending on how your back is set up, it certainly leaves money in the bank. It still goes for me, the old pieces like that just out there in the ether and speculation. So that’s direct money in the bank, right? You see an immediate payoff once a piece goes live. But then there are also indirect, right? You can get speaking opportunities. I’ve got with my book deals from articles, you know, being discovered that way you can get brand deals. I mean there’s just, there’s so many, once you put yourself out there, I’m confidently more visible. It’s like you could almost say, I’m here. Right? Come, come and get me. Kind of take that step and then you’ll, I mean out there and then people, it’s how they discover you.

RV: (21:43)
Love it, love it, love it. This is, it’s, these are so many big mind shifts of just how all of this works. It’s where did, where should be, where should people go? Okay. All right, so give me Susie. I want, I want your, what did you call it? A short tail

SM: (22:03)
Shuts tail because it looks like,

RV: (22:04)
Oh, it’s a shirt tail. That’s, that’s, that’s an inappropriate American interpret interpretation. It’s a shirt tail or like a byline or you know, it’s like a micro bio or whatever. It’s just so, so anyways, so where should are our fans and followers who are wanting to get, you know, more media, where should they go to to learn more about you?

SM: (22:30)
I have a free training where I kind of break this down and she has specific hacks for writing a really great guest posts specifically to get rockstar on.com.

RV: (22:38)
Yeah, get rockstar PR. Yeah, that’s what I want. I want rock star PR. I don’t, I don’t want no like cover tunes in the back of a dive bar. PR arena, rock star PR.

SM: (22:57)
I just pulled overnight rockstar because it’s, I mean, one thing that I love about media to worry is unlike, you know, building this takes time, right? Building brands take time, but you can have a quick ring. I mean it’s something that you can turn around but even a week old. So I think we can allow our lives to be a little easier and allow some wins. Like, you know, have some of the fun with this and other people getting all the media like the slice.

RV: (23:22)
I love that. I love that concept of allow some wins in that. Maybe that’ll be your next book. I think that’s such a cool thing. I’m just like, life doesn’t have to be so hard. Like let, let things come to you. Keep it simple, be clear. And and I love that and I think that’s it’s so you’re so encouraging and you guys are so delightful and wonderful and also think you’ve really helped us feel empowered that this is, this is doable. They need you more than you need them. And so let’s just allow some wins.

SM: (23:56)
Yeah. And if I could just ask one more thing, cause I think that it’s kind of important because we all have our moments, right? Where we think, gosh, am I ready? Is this going to be, will they accept? Let me, I have no qualifications for work. I have a high school education. And so to be, have these kinds of expert stages, which you can you claim cause power can ever be gave. And she had to go and get it. New claim claimants yours. I, I’ve done this with like zero kind of formal qualifications. So wherever you’re at, you’re already have you have is enough.

RV: (24:25)
I love it. I love it. All right, Susie Moore, ladies and gentlemen, get rockstar pr.com. Thanks for your tips, Susie. We wish you well. Wish you the best, and we’ll talk again soon.

SM: (24:35)
Thank you so much Rory.

Ep 48: Orchestrating a Career Pivot by Owning The New You with Donald Miller

RV: (00:01)
Donald Miller is someone that I have grown to respect a tremendous, tremendous amount. I feel lucky to have been able to see StoryBrand in terms of the framework and develop as he started building the company. And I was honored to give him an endorsement. We did the Book Launch Party at our house. And I absolutely love the elegance of what him and his team have done with StoryBrand and the SB seven framework. Now, if you’re not familiar with StoryBrand every year about 3000 business leaders go through StoryBrand and various forms, really their workshop and they help people clarify their brand message companies and individuals alike. But dawn is a New York Times best selling author of several books. So Blue Light, jazz, scary, close, a million miles in a thousand years. And then building a StoryBrand is his most recent book, which was a number one Wall Street Journal Bestseller. And so he’s just incredible business guy, incredible man of faith.

RV: (01:06)
I’ve gotten to know him a little bit more personally over the last few years. We’re going to be neighbors year within a couple months. And it’s just just so excited to have him and make sure you guys get a chance to, to see a little bit behind the scenes of Donald Miller. So, Donald, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me Roy. So one of the things that I wanted to take a little bit of you know, just friend, a liberal friend I guess privilege that maybe you don’t always get to talk about that I thought would be interesting is this hardcore pivot. Cause I do want to talk about StoryBrand cause it’s super applicable for everybody watching. But behind the scenes is something that I don’t know that everyone is aware of is you made a massive pivot. I w what I would consider a fairly massive pivot.

RV: (01:54)
I mean you had sold millions of copies as, as you know, writing Christian memoirs and being really big in that space and then you pivoted and then have built an equally, if not, I mean I don’t know how you would measure it, but to a huge presence very quickly in the business nonfiction space with StoryBrand. And certainly, you know, a large business. I think a larger business enterprise was with StoryBrand. And that reinvention to me is really interesting. And it’s something that people don’t talk a lot about. And, and in my mind, I don’t know this for sure, so I just wanna kind of like hear your thoughts on it, but I have to think that, you know, maybe there were some haters, right? Like maybe there were some people who were upset that you kind of like went from the Christian world to like the business world. And maybe there were people who were super supportive and some people followed you and some people lost. But like, I just want to hear a little bit of your journey and your philosophy about how to do that. Cause I think a lot of people watching this, they’ve been doing something and now they’re pivoting to their, you know, personal brand and, you know, so you mind sharing a little bit about that? Yeah, I will.

DM: (03:00)
You’re right, there were some haters at the beginning. You know, I, I built a reputation and based on books, based on who I really was. I wrote memoirs and my memoir voice is really sort of this stumbling through life and discovering deep truths and then kind of sharing them and applying them and that sort of thing. And probably heavy emphasis on the stumbling through life part. But the reality is, as you know, Rory you know, if you sell millions of books and you, and you have some success, you’re not really stumbling through life. You’ve actually, you’ve gotten some discipline there and some good work habits and you know, a little bit about branding and you show up when they’re supposed to speak. And so I meet a lot of artists who they want to kind of be this, this true artists where all they do is create art and they’re desperate for people.

DM: (03:49)
They want people to discover them, but they don’t want to look desperate for people to discover them. And those kinds of things, those brands tend to fail. The brands that tend to succeed are artists who act like that, but in reality, they’re really good business people. They know how to negotiate a deal. They show up on time. They, you know, they, they play a role that is truly them, but they, but they hide the rest. And so, you know, if you think about Taylor swift and you know, she’s singing about, you know, her boyfriend broke up with her and you know, she’s going to get him back when, when her real life is about private jets and, you know, dating supermodels and sharp like, and from everything I’ve heard so many sharp and generous and all that kind of stuff. So you know, so you have to understand that as an artist that I have, I have friends who do both.

DM: (04:42)
They’re the true artists but they won’t promote themselves cause they want. And if you really think about that, there’s a little bit of arrogance to that, that I am so great that I don’t need to go out and tell people who I am. That almost never succeeds. Wow. what succeeds is really you know, I really liked my stuff. I hope you like it too. And I’m not going to stop promoting it until I’m heard because it’s a really, it’s a really noisy world. That honest truth out there, that humble work ethic is Chris Martin of Coldplay. You know, Mick Jagger and the rolling stones that, you know, it’s just, you got to see it as a job. So if you really want to build a personal brand, you can’t wait for the world to come to you. You can’t throw a message in a bottle and hope that people get it.

DM: (05:26)
You have to actually get in a boat and go to the other shore and start handing out business cards. Now at some point that there’s the, the returns come in were enough people. You’ve created such momentum that you, you have to do that a little bit less. But in my opinion, in my council, I would never stop. I would keep going. So, you know, there’s a lot of hustle involved in building a personal brand. For me, you know, being a Christian memoirist, you know, I worked hard building that and, and the reality is that before I ever wrote my first book, I was president of a company. So I knew about business, I understood it. I didn’t write about it. Some people didn’t know that I understood it, but I did understand it. And then even running my own personal speaking and writing business, you’re running a business.

DM: (06:10)
And so when I started pivoting into how to create messages and and build your business both with a clear message, all that was completely natural to me and it just seemed like the obvious next step. But on the outside looking in people, that was a huge chasm. So there was a big difference between what I was experiencing, what other people were experiencing. But you know, I noticed something whenever you’re driving in traffic and you, you kinda change lanes into the faster lane, you sometimes get people honking at you and they shoot the finger or whatever and people like you to stay in your lane. And so I experienced the kind of like go, well, we, we missed the don who wrote these books. You know, we kind of missed the lovable loser and and, you know, I, I, that just wasn’t who I was anymore.

DM: (07:01)
That was, that was not a big part of my personality. So in order to be myself, I had to change lanes, but I was smart enough to know, you know, they only honk for a minute and then they go away and they accept you in the lane that you’re in. And a lot of people stay in their lane for all of life because one guy’s going to honk at them when they could really be moving much faster through life. So because they’re a little bit conflict avoidant, they don’t let you know it’s important. Sometimes all of us have probably run into an old friend who we haven’t seen in 15 years and they tease us about something that we’ve already conquered and overcome. And sometimes it’s important to sit them down and say, Hey, oh, you need to know that’s not who I am anymore. And I changed.

DM: (07:46)
You know, let’s say you’re married and you’ve got an old friend that used to run around with and go to bars and they want you to be that old friend. And it’s important to sit them down and say, hey, I made a sacrifice and I’m a different person now and this is who I am. And I live in the joy of that sacrifice every day. And so, you know, you have to actually explain to people you’re different and a lot of people in order to not create conflict will play their old role for the rest of their lives when and they never allow themselves to actually change.

RV: (08:17)
So do you think a graph that is so powerful, I love the part about like people will stay in their line cause one person is honking that it’s ridiculous. So true is to make that kind of reinvention. The other thing that I heard, which was interesting there was about that you weren’t, it wasn’t like you said, oh I’m going to create a new endeavor cause I need to make more money. It was more of like this is who I really am now and I’ve changed the years and I just need to be that person. So That’s interesting. But now when you come out, like with this whole new persona and brand, do you think the way to make a pivot like that, is it gradual or is it emphatic and flamboyant and do you, do you try to sort of coddle your old audience or do you just kind of go one day you wake up and boom, like this is who I am and you just start being that person and whoever comes along comes along like, you know, I have, we have clients that are like, you know, they’ve been a fitness personality and that’s who they were in their twenties but now they are like, you know, this woman who runs all of these multimillion dollar enterprises and businesses and they need to pivot.

RV: (09:23)
But it’s like some people still think of them as like the Bikini model and those are the posts that she gets a lot of engagement on. But it’s like, it’s not who she is anymore. Do you think you just make the hard turn or do you

DM: (09:35)
I do. I think you can do it both ways. My, my personality is leave the past behind and create a new brand. And so being true to my personality, I’m very comfortable with, with, you know, repeating, this is who I am now. This is who I am now. There’s alumni and I think you’d be surprised. It, it takes about three years of telling people who you are before they even forget who you used to be. And so, you know, I still have people, it took about three years. People still come up sometimes and say, I love your old books and but your new books are really changing my life. It took a long time for them to step me as a business kind of personality and but that at the same time, that’s who I was. And so I felt it felt completely genuine.

DM: (10:19)
And you know, I, I also think people love and respond to your energy and your competence of saying, this is who I am. Now, you know, this just happened recently with a friend of mine. His wife, actually Kyle Reed are graphic artists here in house. His wife is a, is a yoga instructor and I think she still a yoga instructor, but she fell in love with photography. She started taking very good pictures. Her name is Mandy, Mandy Reed. And you can follow her at Mandy. Read photography on Instagram. Her, her photography is excellent, very good. And somebody on staff recently said, Oh, you know, we should hire Mandy for that. She’s a photographer because her Instagram is Mandy read photography and she’s showing all her photography. And Kyle just turned to me and said, isn’t that amazing? She changed her brand in one year from Yoga instruction to photography. And the reason is she said, Mandy, read photography, not Mandy read Yoga. And I also have the hobby of doing photographs. Right. and she started submitting her photos on Instagram and showing people her work. And even I was like, oh my gosh. Wow, that happened quick. Cause I only think of her as a photographer. So you’re actually programming people’s minds. And I think if you do that passively or slowly you are not programming very hard.

RV: (11:39)
Yeah. So that kind of leads us, I think, to what you do at StoryBrand. And I think we’re huge fans of it. I think a lot of people here, I mean, you know, have the book, have read the book or follow the podcast in of applying StoryBrand

DM: (11:54)
To the personal brand. And maybe, you know, there’s probably a lot of people who still aren’t yet some million with it. What, what do you think StoryBrand, like the SB seven framework, what do you think that is? Like if you had to explain this is what it is and what problem does that solve specifically for people with personal brands, do you think? Well, the StoryBrand framework is a message clarification framework. So, you know, we all have to, you know, if you’ve ever branded a cow a, and I have once a buddy of mine took me out to his ranch and I, you lay across the back of that calf and you’d punch it with the brand and they actually don’t feel pain to the degree that you and I feel pain. So they kind of were like, Hey, what’s going on? Which was kind of weird.

DM: (12:39)
Oh well that’s good to know. It’s very good to know. And but you know, if you took that, that ranches brand and you branded that, that calf and then you took a different ranchers brand, you bring to that calf, you took a different one, you brand it over the top of that and another one over the top of that. You’d have an irreconcilable brand before long. And the reality is people in their mind are going to categorize you. They’re just going to do it. And you have got to you’ve got to control how you’re thought of. And the way that you do that is you come up with a very simple message and you repeat it over and over and over and over and over again. You brand and bring just like a cattle brand, it has to be fixed. It has to be the same language.

DM: (13:24)
You have to repeat it and you have to brand yourself in somebody’s mind. So your friend who was the bikini model, who’s become the business guru, you know, she, she needs to be known as the business expert who came out of the fitness world. And she needs to say that over and over. But people will think of her as a business expert and, and then they can make that bridge from, and as you know, you say that to somebody three times and that’s they finally just think of you as a business expert. So I think I don’t think moving passively serves us at all. The actual StoryBrand framework is based on 2000 years plus of, of, of, of screenwriting and well, it’s a hundred years of screenwriting, but storytelling ever since the days of of really Aristotle who wrote a book called poetics, it’s just an old, old formula that we have shaped and adapted for businesses and they give you, it gives you seven different categories the brain responds to so that you leave with seven messages that you repeat over and over and you begin to make an enormous amount of sense to people.

DM: (14:30)
And it’s, the stakes are very high. You know, I’ve gone around the country asking, what did Jeb Bush want to do with America when he ran for president? And nobody knows. But if I ask what a Donald Trump want to do, everybody knows that’s branding. So did the best candidate win. You know, that’s, that’s up for debate. But the best branding age of the best person on messaging did win. And it’s, they almost always win.

RV: (14:54)
Well, nothing that I, one of the things that I took from you and this a great example is it’s not even necessarily the best branding. That one, it was the clearest, most consistent. It was the most repeated. Make America great again over and over and over and over and over again.

DM: (15:13)
What you’re doing when you’re doing marketing and branding, the exercise really is a, an exercise in memorization. You are trying to guide people through an exercise and memorization so they memorize what you have to offer.

RV: (15:26)
Yeah, that’s so wild. You know, we, we often share the story about the success of take the stairs and then the failure of procrastinating on purpose. Our second book and one of the simple differences is just take the stairs is so was so memorable. People see stairs and escalator and they would think about it and procrastinate on purpose, just needed explanation. And it was like, what does that mean? And don’t really know how to explain it. That in is so clarifying it just what marketing is in general I think is, is, is memorization.

DM: (15:57)
Yup. That’s what it is. Yeah. And you know what’s interesting is something like I’m procrastinating on purpose. It’s pretty easy to memorize, but it’s actually confusing to know what it is, where take the stairs is obvious. You’re going to use more effort. You’re going to, you’re going to do things, you’re going to hustle, you’re going to have a strong work ethic. You know, it’s all kind of implied. But you know, you’ve done a great job in your pivot and it’s not much of a pivot. You’ve gone from sort of sales coaching to personal branding. But I already think of you in this, this time you’ve been doing this as the guy to go to. If anybody needs a personal branding coach or needs help with personal branding and really, you know, you’re an ex, you’ve done an excellent job of just saying Rory Vaden, personal branding, Rory Vaden, personal brand new work, and personally because you want to lock people in. Right?

RV: (16:45)
Yeah. Well, and in our case it was, you know, it’s interesting because like there are certain things we couldn’t teach, we can’t teach anymore for a while. And so it’s like we had to make that pivot, but I also danced, I think I was doing one of the mistakes of like, well, I want to do reputation, which is like kind of personal development and kind of, and I think that that is a thing that’s like, one of the mistakes that we probably make is we try to like straddle the line of two things and it’s unclear. It’s, it’s unmemorable, it’s it. And, and, and like you said, it’s just like going all in and just saying, this is who I am and everybody knows, and over and over and over again. Right, right. So I want to ask you something else related to marketing, which I think is really, again, more of a behind the scenes thing, but the, the, if you guys the SB seven framework, like if you haven’t read the book, Go get the book, go to the workshop, like don’t be silly.

RV: (17:41)
This is, this is the best thing you can do for clarifying your, your messaging and like the, what I think of StoryBrand is helping you find the words you need to describe what you do. And it is such a practical application. So you know more on that to come you know, by following don, which, you know, we’ll talk about that in a minute. But behind the scenes, one of the things that I love about StoryBrand is you guys do a lot of the digital marketing, online marketing info, marketing sort of principles and tactics, things like lead magnets and funnels and email marketing and social and webinars and free downloads and sales pages. But yet there’s somehow, when you guys do it, it doesn’t feel slimy at all. It doesn’t feel manipulative at all. Like, it doesn’t feel cheesy. It just feels elegant and clear and direct. How do you do that? And, and, and it’s been a really good case study because it shows you that you can do those things, which are really powerful, really powerful psychologically without cheapening the brand in any way. So I, I’d love to just Kinda hear some of your philosophy about how you think you’ve been able to do that.

DM: (19:01)
Well, I, I wish I had a formula for it. I, I think part of it is you know, it’s, it’s never been a thing with us in our, in our shop to try to trick anybody into doing anything. And, you know, I just spoke at a big conference about 2100 people in Las Vegas paid about 10 grand each to be there. I mean, you know, and they the thing that I got after I left the stage was, well, you were the only speaker who didn’t try to upsell us anything. And it was, it just never would have occurred to me to try to upsell you anything. Right, right. Because I’m there. You’ve already paid an enormous amount of money and, and so we really don’t try to upsell anything. I think that’s part of it. And then I think genuinely when we create something we are trying to help you solve a problem.

DM: (19:52)
And I think when you go into it saying, how can I help this person solve a problem rather than how can I help? How can I get this person to buy my product? The tone changes. Now there, there is a product involved. I mean, we want you to come to a workshop, we want you to do these things. But I, I think the tone changes and you get to kind of keep your reputation. And so I think, you know, Roy, the reality is, you know, we could probably be 50% bigger and be making 50% more money. It’s just not who we are. And, you know, we, we, we we really just want to help everybody win whether they pay us or not. Now we’ve got, you know, I’ve got a staff, 20 people, we got bills to pay, we’ve got, you know a lot of bill is six, $600,000 a month we have to come up with in order to keep the shop open.

DM: (20:44)
So, you know, I have to sell something. And and so but but at the same time, I think part of that is isn’t so much a strategy or tactic. It’s really a state of your heart. And, and I’ve always said, especially in business to business, if your goal is to help somebody else make money, you will never suffer for job security. I mean, you’re always going to have it [inaudible] because you know, other people are trying to figure out how to do this and you can help them do it. So yeah, I think that’s part of it. And then the other part of it is, you know, the people that I hire are just they’re great content creators, but they’re not sort of slick at tricking anybody into doing anything. And that’s actually been sometimes a point of contention where it’s like, Hey, wait a second.

DM: (21:32)
You know, we, I, we did this thing called business made simple daily. So you’ve got a business made simple.com you can get me giving you a piece of business advice every day, right? We’ve done that. I think we’d launched it three months ago. Maybe we have 43,000 people getting a daily email from me with a video. Wow. We realized really quickly sales were starting to trickle down, but we’ve had better, we have more leads than ever. And then we realize four, eight, none of the videos were selling anybody anything. There was no comments, no commercial applications at all. So this is completely unsustainable. I mean, we will, we will literally, the generosity of this offer will put us out of business. So we actually are now coming along and every second or third one and we say, hey, by the way, you know, we do a workshop, we’d love to have you. And and you know, sometimes you can take what you’re complementing me for too far.

RV: (22:24)
Yeah. Well that’s right. Like every strength is a weakness. But I that’s right. I love and want to highlight, you know, and make sure it’s a salient point for people of what you said, like don’t have to be as a snake oil salesman. No. Well, and it’s like your goal is to solve a problem not to sell them something. And even though the way to solve that problem may involve a purchase, the mindset, you know what it is to the finish line is different. If my goal is to sell you something, it stops when the sale is made. But if my goal is

DM: (22:59)
[Inaudible] seen is you getting the money, that’s not the climactic scene. The climactic scene has to be them get solving their problem.

RV: (23:05)
Yeah. And that is a huge mindset shift and strategy shift and heart change. I love that. Okay, so one other last little thing here. And I know I’m not like asking you about all your normal content stuff, which it’s, yeah. So, but your business model is also something that is extremely clear, extremely simple. And this is another thing that a lot of the people that we help struggle with. So we take them through all these exercises called primary business model and figuring out what is their short term primary business model, what is their longterm primary business model? And we’re like really, really huge ongoing. What is the one way you’re gonna make money? Because one the things that I think people fall victim to in this space all the time is it’s video courses, it’s membership sites, it’s masterminds, it’s coaching, it’s one on one coaching, it’s consulting, it’s, it’s an agency. It’s you know, like our own events. Like there’s so many things that they’re doing and StoryBrand, you know, has built a massively successful business, particularly in the space of people doing things, you know, kind of around a personal brand. And you guys pretty much do like one main thing. Can you do it over and over and over? So can you explain what the one main thing is, how you got there and why don’t you do a thousand other things, even though you do do a couple other things?

DM: (24:28)
Yeah. Well, I learned from a guy who he had a $10 million consulting business and he consulted on six sigma, which is a framework and industrial framework of productivity framework. And he told me, you know, my father actually invented six sigma. And I said, wait a second, you have a $10 million company, but your father invented it, six sigma bills for over a billion dollars a year. Where’s the other 990 million that don, you won’t believe it. My father did not protect the IP, so his father never legally protected it. So other people started using it. Well, we created the StoryBrand frame or DSP seven framework and it is a, a, you know, it’s the six sigma of messaging. And, and I knew that there’s potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in this and, but if we kind of did this and we did this and we did this, I would never be able to grow that framework so that it was institutionalized in global business culture.

DM: (25:32)
So it was very important to only do one thing for a long time. And now we’re, we’re doing something we launched in November called business made simple university and business made simple university. We’ll have a finance track that Mike McCalla is, is going to help us with. Nancy Duarte. Hopefully it’s going to do something on speak, giving speeches. It’s basically it, you can develop your whole team and, and in finance and human resources will StoryBrand and the StoryBrand framework will become the marketing track of that. So it will, so the mother company will actually be business made simple and StoryBrand will be a subsidiary of that. But it took us a very long time to figure out how to do that without confusing people. And, and who knows? We may fail at that, but, but I don’t think we’re going to and, and so, but it was, it was four to five years of, of people saying, well, can you do my website?

DM: (26:27)
No, we don’t do that. Can you do this? No, we don’t do that. We literally teach these the seven part framework and an online workshop and a live workshop. And then we can send facilitators you to teach it. And that’s gotten us to where we are. We’ve got a 12 or $13 million company only selling one in three different deliverables. And then, but that’s what works for about 3000 companies a year. They clarify their message and their, their company grows, you know, and I learn, here’s a great lesson for you and all your audience. I had a manager one, she was really amazing. He was, he, and he’s still a very close friend. And any speaking offer that I got for about $5,000, he would, he would accept and I’d be getting on planes going around speaking $5,000 is not a small amount of money.

DM: (27:11)
I mean, that’s, that pays my mortgage for a few months. And but I noticed that I was on planes all the time and I couldn’t get another book written. And because I couldn’t get another book written, the tail end of my career was coming in closer and closer and the longevity of my career was done. So I finally had to sit down and say, hey, let’s not chase five grand anymore. Let’s chase 25 grand. Let’s do less opportunities and let’s, let’s, you know, be more disciplined about what we’re doing. That was a huge moment for me in my career because I could speak less and make the same amount of money and still write a book. I think when it w where that overlaps is, you know, you’ve got to pick your lane, I’m going to be an expert in this and then there’s going to be this opportunity to go over here and make five grand being an expert in something else.

DM: (27:59)
Yeah. I would suggest that you don’t do it that, that you actually say, no, I’m only going to take money for this because I cannot be made. I cannot be known for too many things. I want to be known for this one thing and it’s, it’s, it’s tough for a minute, but if you can really carve in and be known for that, the longevity of your career is, it’s great and then you get to do what you want and you’re not always chasing money. And so to just be known for one thing and be disciplined and only do that.

RV: (28:33)
Yeah. I, I think that that whole little shiny objects syndrome assistance, that dead downfall is, there’s a hundred ways. Some, there’s like, there’s like a thousand ways to make 20 grand. But there’s only a few ways to, to, you know, to make 13 million a year or whatever. And it’s, it’s like, well, it’s, it’s actually, it’s like, it could be any of those thousand ways, but it’s choosing one of them and just doing that one thing over and over and over. Like that’s how you get to the 13 million.

DM: (29:00)
And that’s what’s so interesting about when people come through the workshop, they’re working on their external message. How do I talk to customers? They ended up getting that. But what’s even more valuable as they leave having talked to themselves. Oh yeah, that’s what I do. And that’s why I matter. And then we would say, just like if you are writing a book and you’ve written some terrific books, you gotta leave everything else out. The, the key to a great writer is not what they say. It’s what they don’t say. MMM. And the same is true with our careers. And building our personal brands. You’ve got to discipline yourself to not present yourself in certain ways so that people can only remember. They’re only gonna remember what you’re actually [inaudible] say in a focused and way. And so you’ve got to come back and say, yeah, I used to be a swimsuit model. Now I’m a business expert. Now I’m a business expert. Now I’m a business expert now at business experts. So we, you know, we, we’d said if you confuse, you lose for five years. Now we repeat it every day. And we’re here to help you clarify your message. That’s kind of the one, two punch of our messaging and just like a brand on the back of a cow, we keep punching it and it’s paid off for us in the long run.

RV: (30:07)
I love it. I love it. Love it, love it. If you guys can’t tell already you need to be following Donald, do you need to go to the workshop like it is powerful, powerful stuff. The SB seven framework I think is going to be one of those things institutionalized here. You know, in business culture, if it’s not already, Donald, where do you want people to go? If they want to like check out the workshop like online or come and see you and, or you know, follow you, what’s the best place to check that out?

DM: (30:35)
I’d love everybody to just go to business made simple.com and you can get a daily coaching video from me. I actually put on a suit and a tie and we use a welded studio. I’m telling you, I show respect. I learned from Rory Vaden. You got to look good

RV: (30:48)
Now. I don’t wear suits anymore. I used to wear them every day and now I’m just like, okay,

DM: (30:52)
You still look better than me. I don’t know what it is.

RV: (30:54)
Well

DM: (30:55)
Yeah, go there. Go to business made simple.com. I’d love to send you a daily video for free.

RV: (31:00)
Yeah, check that. So check that out. We’ll put a link up to business made simple. Dawn, last little question. I think you know, if you have somebody out there watching right now, when they’re dealing with some haters, you know, they’re, they’re dealing with either people in their personal life or sometimes it’s like the random troll on Instagram that I’ve, you know, I’ve always been shocked in my life and how much that person used to get to me, you know, or a random review on Amazon or maybe its themselves, right? Like if there’s somebody that is just dealing with the voices of you can’t do this, you can’t be this person. Like you are better. The old Jew was better, you know, what, what would you kind of say to that person that is like on the precipice of leaving behind the old in search of something new. But it’s kind of like, you know, feeling the heat of the Naysayer.

DM: (31:49)
Yeah. Two things. One is people are going to be incredibly inspired and impressed with you if you are comfortable being yourself. And so you gotta ask yourself, who am I really and, and I’m I, and I’m not gonna apologize for that and I’m not going to disappear. And the second thing, and my batting average is about 300, which would get me into the hall of fame, but my batting average on turning the other cheek is about 300. So about 30% of the tough. I’m hoping to get that up to 40%. But to take somebody who has insulted you and show them love and kindness and forgiveness is, is literally one of the best things you can do for your personal brand because everybody walks away believing you’re the stronger person when you do it. And, and I know that’s a selfish motivation. We also really want to be kind to those people.

DM: (32:38)
But if you can get done you know, Jesus taught us that right? Turn the other cheek and if you can turn the other cheek, he get to sleep well at night. People think you’re the better person. It’s very hard not to seek vengeance or wanna throw a punch or say something snarky and but that’s, you know, yeah. You know, I just had somebody on Instagram recently actually deleted the post because I thought it was going too far, but somebody said something like, you know, we missed the old don, nobody needs another business guru. And if they made a little bit of an insulting comment by saying, you’ve really thrown away all the gifts that God has given you which basically says you’re ruining your life with the, with the way that you’ve taken things. And I just wrote back in a Kai, posted that on my Instagram and then put a comment that just said a look.

DM: (33:26)
You know, I wrote eight memoirs. I’m s the world does not need a ninth from Donald Miller. Since I’ve gone this route, I’ve lost almost 200 pounds. I’ve married the woman I love and I became a multimillionaire. And so I know you’ve got your wounds and I’ve got my wounds, but I think I’m, I’m turning out okay. And I mean, probably 600 comments, lighting that guy up. I finally deleted it cause I thought they were being a little mean to him, but just having an understanding. But if I would’ve said, hey, you’re a jerk, what an asshole. I probably wouldn’t have gotten any comments except for people defending him. Right. And so he was coming off as a bully and I need to come off as, as Fred Rogers. And that’s the best way to deal with that kind of stuff. If you can turn the other cheek, I think you’re going to be okay.

RV: (34:16)
Well, I love it. There’s a lot of discipline themes in your, in your message, like in, in the things you talk about turning the other cheek, choosing a business model, choosing a message like maybe that’s, maybe that’s part of how we’ve become friends is, you know, good old, take the stairs, like go take the stairs, classic discipline. Clearly you believe in it. Well, for whatever it’s worth, man, thank you for being yourself and for reinventing and forgiven SB seven because I think it has solved the real problem in the world of just helping people explain clearly what they do. And that enables the good people to be found, I think. And I think that makes a real big difference. So we wish you the very best. Donald Miller, author StoryBrand, CEO, founder of StoryBrand. Go check it out. Don, all the best.

DM: (35:06)
I love it, Rory. Thank you.

Ep 46: Expert Tips for Marketing, PR, and Personal Branding with Julie Solomon

RV: (00:01)
So Julie Solomon is my new next door neighbor, best friend or neighbor bestie, they just moved to Nashville recently and we got the chance to work together like six or seven months ago and got to know each other a little bit. And I just adore this woman and I adore her story and her heart, what you’re gonna hear all about. And she’s already never home in Nashville, so I don’t actually get to see her that much. Even then. Now she is here, but you know, the official, let me give you like the official so she’s a seven figure entrepreneur and she hosts a podcast called the Influencer Podcast, which is an incredible podcast. So she’s been an expert in marketing and PR and personal branding. You know, her whole career. She’s been featured in Forbes, Huffington Post people magazine, but her podcasts, literally has gotten millions of downloads. She has listeners in like 170 countries. And so over the years she’s worked on campaigns for people like Dave Ramsey or Lenny Kravitz. But in the last couple of years she’s gotten to interview, you know, Amy Porterfield, Marie Forleo, Rachel Hollis, people like that. And she’s just awesome. And I, I knew when we put this together, you had to, you had to get to meet her if you didn’t already know her. So, Julie, welcome, welcome to the show.

JS: (01:21)
Yes. And thank you so much for having me. You know I love any more soul of time that I get with you. So it’s amazing to be here.

RV: (01:29)
So tell us like your, tell us a little bit about your story, right? Like it seems like one of the reasons I wanted to talk with you is cause it seems like you sort of started behind the scenes promoting everybody else and then you stepped forward and became the personality. Is that an accurate

JS: (01:49)
Yeah, yeah, that’s for sure. And I think that partly due to confidence and partly due to just knowledge and experience and then how, you know, how, how I saw that I could really show up and serve people I’m a two part in and why and why I was kind of behind the scenes and then went in front of the scenes. So I started well growing up I’ve always had a knack for connection and you know, loving to talk to people. I’m a very curious person. My mom was a medical sales rep growing up that, you know, so that, that knack for marketing and sales and just kind of doing that. I, I saw it, you know, around me. I came from a line of realtors, you know, so just that knack for really kind of being that being that people person being someone who wants to serve people kind of in that, in your face capacity. It was always around me growing up and majored in marketing and communications. Started my career in New York City as a publicist. So that was kind of, I remembered at one point in college, I was watching some kind of like red carpet, like Golden Globes or something. And I kept seeing these women in like black dresses with like little walkie talkie things behind the celebrities, like walking them around. And I was like, what is that? And I kind of looked into it and it was a publicist and I was like, I want to do

RV: (03:13)
Laura bodyguard. It couldn’t use the potty card, but you went to publicist route, route.

JS: (03:20)
And so I, you know, and I think at the time it was, it was a little bit of, I knew that I could probably do that very well. I, you know, I’m, from what I just said, I love people. I was always really good in terms of integrations. Really organized type A, did well in school, could stay on top of my stuff. And I think at the time I probably didn’t realize it, but I might’ve really wanted to tap into more of my visionary stuff, but I wasn’t confident enough to do that yet. So it was a lot easier just to kind of like sit back and in play that integrative role, which ended up serving me very, very well. And so women,

RV: (03:57)
Let me talk to you about, I want to stop you on that part because, cause I want to get into some of the tactics, particularly in publicity because the, that’s like I think something you’re really good at and always have been. But before that, tell me about the confidence issue because more and more as I have learned and gotten to meet entertainers and celebrities, you’re married to one a and an actor, a very successful actor. And it’s, it’s like the confidence really matters on camera and really believing it. And then also the confidence to just like start your own thing and go after it. So what, what was the point where you made the pivot from going, you know, I, I don’t have the confidence to, I’m ready to take the leap. So, so what was kind of going on in your head that was the limiting belief that was holding you back? That you kind of like something happened, he flipped the switch and you, you went for it. Do you remember much about that?

JS: (04:54)
Yeah, I just, somewhere along the way of growing up, I cultivated this belief system in me that as a woman, in order to be accepted, I needed to s to stay small and quiet and just cute and just kind of like stick to my little like box kind of thing. You know, it’s dream but not too big speak, but not too loud, you know, you don’t really want to be a big deal. And so I kind of allowed that to hold me back and you know, I would, I’ll, I’ll be a publicist for the people, but I’m going to stay right here. And so I would always kind of like dabble in this idea of wanting to all these kinds of creative endeavors, if you will. Always wanted to write a book, but I didn’t have the confidence to do it. So I became a book publicist, you know, I always wanted to have these creative endeavors that didn’t have the confidence to do it.

RV: (05:48)
It goes to the people, but you were never the person.

JS: (05:52)
Exactly. So it was kind of like in some way I was like feeding off of their energy, kind of felt like I was a part of the cool kids club, so to speak, but didn’t really have the confidence and the self and the I think the, not that necessarily the self awareness, but I think it’s, it was just purely the confidence to really step into that and say, I don’t have to believe that story anymore.

RV: (06:17)
Wow. And I, I mean, I know for sure you know, I still to this date have these moments where I really struggle with, I know for sure somebody is watching right now or they’re listening and they’re going, holy crap. Like that’s me. Like, I, I’ve wanted to pursue this dream. I know I have a mission I, you know, I feel called by God or I feel like this is why I’m here. But they don’t have the con like they’re up against that block and they’re, they’re probably watching or listening because they want to do it. And, and this helps them feel close to it, but making that leap. So what do you remember what happened that like, cause that’s a big time limiting belief. Oh does he know that you were carrying that? Like oh women are supposed to sort of play small. Were you, you were aware of that and then how did you break free of it?

JS: (07:05)
I mean I think that if I, to get really honest with myself, I do believe that there was something in here that was telling me like, cause I also at the same time I had this small voice inside me that was longing for more, that wanted to pursue more, that was curious about gangs. And it just kind of kept getting louder and louder and louder. But I also knew that by staying small and not really taking action on those things that I wanted to take action on, you know, I wasn’t being authentic. I wasn’t really living authentically. And so, you know, it’s kind of that idea of my beliefs became my thoughts like which became my feelings, which became my actions, which became my results. And so that’s just kind of what I allowed myself to stay in. And then it wasn’t until I mean it was a while.

JS: (07:50)
It was probably about almost seven or eight years into me doing PR. I had at that point had met Jonathan, had moved to Los Angeles and that, what was the other thing too? I think that at that time I was also surrounded by people, at least what I kind of look back on now, that they might have been a little afraid to kind of lose me in their life. And so they didn’t really want me to grow either. And, and I kind of allowed that to be like a really easy excuse for me not to grow as well. But once I met my husband to is so about just supporting my dreams and letting me go and, you know, having that path and holding space for that it was a multitude of things. I think it was I moved,

RV: (08:37)
He’s a good piece of arm candy too. It’s, it gives you confidence and they, when they land a good piece of arm candy,

JS: (08:43)
Yes. He’s not, he’s not too shabby to look to look at. And I, I got that zest in New York, you know, I was around so many different types of people and different types of industry and cultures and so I got this zest for it but didn’t really have the confidence to like drive it home myself. And once I moved to La and met John and we had gotten married and we were pregnant with our child that’s when it really started happening. I had been doing the PR thing for about seven or eight years at that point and I was just kind of getting to this really stagnant place. Like I was hitting that ceiling. I wasn’t inspired. I had, mind you my PR work, I got to do a lot of really awesome things. I got to work with a lot of incredible authors and thought leaders and we’re part of really amazing projects.

JS: (09:29)
So you know, my work there, I don’t want to kind of just shy it away because I did learn so much. I learned a lot about business, a lot about marketing, a lot about, you know, being an entrepreneur. But I would even see some of these people, even the, the old CEO of my publishing house was Michael Hyatt and he even left the company to then go off and do what he does now, which is this massive entrepreneurial company and machine. And so even watching people like him, I was like, man, like people do this and it works out. Like people really do follow that, you know, and really listen to that. So if they can, like, why can’t I? It’s kind of that idea of if you spot it, you got it. So so I started kind of again and it was slow because I had this limiting belief, took some time to kind of retrain.

JS: (10:17)
So I started kind of dipping my toes into blogging, which was kind of my side hustle at the time. And I started out as a lifestyle mommy blogger. I was writing content, I started to acquire brand deals. I started to really use my, my expertise and my technique of pitching to pitch myself for media, pitch myself for, you know, paid collaborations with companies and really use my expertise as a publicist to kind of help me along the way. But again, I found myself kind of hitting that ceiling of like, you know, lifestyle and fashion. Blogging really isn’t my passion either. I love to write, but fashion is not really a passion for me. Like I’m not as passionate about it as some of the other people that I see or talking about this or that or whatever. So I kind of got back to the roots of like, what my why was like, why do I want to do this?

JS: (11:09)
What, what problem do I really solve for people and how does that align with my why? And that’s when I kind of went back to the, to the, to the connection piece and the communication piece and the marketing and PR piece and tried to figure out ways to kind of merge those things together. And so I thought, well, maybe, maybe I’ll start blogging about marketing and PR and branding. And maybe help these bloggers and youtubers and content creators that are now my people years that I’ve met through this blogging space. And that’s what I started doing.

RV: (11:42)
One of the things that jumps out to me about that too is, is just like the people you were around had something to do with with it. And that is so true. It’s like you’re either around a group of people are holding you back or you’re around a group of people that are pushing you forward. And when we started brand builders group, you know, we were very clear on like, all right, we’re gonna, we’re gonna support people and help them, you know, get clear on their positioning and figure out what problem they solve and who their audiences and their primary business model. But the thing that’s come out of it, which we never really saw is the community of all the people that come to the events. And it’s just like this rabbit, like quick friendships that are developing. And it’s like, it has nothing to do with anything we’re doing other than just putting the people together.

RV: (12:31)
So I, I think that networking thing is, is powerful. So I want to talk about the publicity thing cause I don’t think people understand it and I don’t think I even, Eh, do a great job of it. But what is your mindset like you mentioned pitching and a that like when you think about publicity, like getting PR. So if somebody’s watching and they’re like, okay, well I want to watch the ban but I’ve never been on good morning America and I’ve never been featured in Huffington post and I’ve never been whatever. How do I do that? What is your like mindset and process just in terms of ground, how do you get PR who gets selected to be interviewed? You know, like what’s that all look like?

JS: (13:15)
Yeah, I mean I think the first step, and I think this goes with, with whenever you’re trying to cultivate any type of audience for what you do, you’ve got to know who you’re talking to. So that’s the first step. Because you want to make sure that you’re pitching the appropriate outlets for what you want to talk about. So a lot of it is research on the front end. Like if you, if you want an article in Forbes magazine or forbes.com or Huffpost, you first have to figure out what, what am I bringing to the table, what is the content that I’m going to be sharing and who does that content for? And then once you get clear on that step, the next step is, okay, now who is the editor or the freelancer or the writer who serves this content in this audience. And a lot of times you can find that through Google. You can find it through Twitter, you can find it through going to Huffington post or going to forbes.com and going through the articles and see who was the contributor for that piece. And you can reach out to them directly and say, Hey, I have this idea. This is who it’s for

RV: (14:15)
Through Twitter or Instagram or like

JS: (14:17)
Through linkedin. Yeah, I mean in this day and age, when I first started PR in 2007 there was no Twitter there. Facebook was kind of really early in its, in its beginning there was no Instagram. We literally had media databases. There was one called Cision that costs an arm and a leg that people had subscribed to for a year to get it. And then you might have gotten lucky if you, if you googled back then, but now in 2019 I mean honestly if someone comes to me and says like they can’t find a contact, I usually kind of think I have to call them, call them out on that excuse because we have more information available to us now than we ever have of, you know, it’s like sign up for the $20 a month on linkedin. Right. Like get the email, you know, it’s not that challenging of, of a, of a thing at this point to find a contact or to find someone who may know someone a little bit of work.

RV: (15:09)
Are you shy? You’re not in, you’re not shy about approaching. It was like if you’ve done, if you’ve done the research and you know that this media outlet produces this kind of media and this is the writer or the interviewer that covers segments just like this, and, and, and I can talk and provide value to that audience, then you just basically like straight up send him a linkedin message or a tweet or a DM and you tell them, I know you write on this. I know you serve this audience. That’s who I’m an expert in and here’s the content, you know, I’d love to like, is it that simple?

JS: (15:43)
It is that simple. And a lot of times you can actually take, if you’re someone who has a blog, for example, you can take a piece of content you’ve already written and repurpose it and send it to them. Say, yes, you know, I sent this out. We got a lot of feedback about my audience. It really served them in this way. These were the, you know, this is what we hit on. This is how it helped them. This was the call to action. Okay. And I think that it would fit your audience. This is why I already have it written. If you want to read it, let me know your thoughts. I’m happy to tweak it for you. Let me know. You know, if you need anything else or if I need to help you pull together something else to make it happen or responsive to this.

JS: (16:16)
Oh yeah, they’re responsive. I mean even the other day I there’s a company called create cultivate that have conferences all over the country that target my ideal audience, that target my ideal woman and I’ve been wanting to be a part of their conference for a while, kind of put it on the back burner, saw something that came up the other day and it reminded me and I literally found an email, sent it to them and said, you know, hey, I’m going to be in La for a couple of weeks. I would love to have coffee. And I also know that you have some conferences coming up. This is what I’ve been doing this year. These are the topics that I’ve been speaking on. I would love to come wrote me back the next day and said, we would love to have you at our San Francisco conference

RV: (16:53)
And this is just like send an email, lay it out and just,

JS: (16:58)
Yep. And you may, again, there is a little research on the front end. I don’t want it to sound like it’s just, you know, I mean, and I’m also going off of the basis that you are someone who actually has valuable content to share. Right? Well going off of the basis of that

RV: (17:11)
You have something worthwhile bring them. Yeah.

JS: (17:15)
Right, exactly. But it’s a lot of the times, again, it’s that fear of like, well what if no one gets back to me? What if I email the wrong person? What if I hear crickets on the other end? And that may happen and you know, you have to kind of go into it with, with, you know, for every 10 pitches you send out, you may get five that actually respond to you and then three out of the five that you actually land and hey, that’s three more that you would not have if you would have never reached out to begin with. And you can craft, I mean,

RV: (17:44)
We have a good ratio that’s not like, that’s not like you’re making a thousand calls and you’re going to sell one person. I mean

JS: (17:51)
Exactly. And it’s actually easier now more than ever because when I was doing meaty, yeah. You know, back then that that was before, you know, dotcoms had really blown up and there were more traditional editors that were on, you know, there were employees of the company, they were on staff there. They’re looking for contributors, they need the content. They don’t have a team and a staff of writers anymore. So they love it when you come and you hand them everything on a silver platter, you have it curated and you’ve done your homework. Like take a little time to read what these writers that you’re pitching to are editors that you’re pitching to have you actually written, give a little time and a little feedback to them so they know that you’re being serious about what you’re offering.

RV: (18:33)
Yeah. So I love this. Now I know I want to talk to you a little bit about like national TV cause that’s the thing like, oh my gosh, you know, like people think media and they go, good morning America, the today show. Yeah. Like, you know, is it, when is it realistic to do that? Like should you wait, should you just go for it? And you know, I know that you’ve, you know, you’ve, you’ve worked with people who are on those, you know, have been on those outlets and what does it really take to sort of catch the attention at that? Like huge, you know, major national scale,

JS: (19:09)
Right? Well there’s a couple of ways that you can go. But specifically for TV, there’s kind of a little niche here. Like there can be instances, again, depending on the climate, you know, of our culture. So if, let’s say if your, if your topic is politics and you’re coming out with something fall of 2020 during an election, you may have a better opportunity of getting a national television spot, depending on what that topic may be. So the seasonal approaches can change certain things with television, hot topics, folks can change certain things with television. But you know, traditionally speaking, if you’re someone that wants to hit a national television spot, nine times out of 10 a national television booker or producer is gonna want to see something from you that is on camera, right? Whether that’s, you know, a local television spot, you’ve done what they’re, that’s youtube interviews that you’ve been on, any kind of local media, they’re gonna want to see how you are and in your dynamic on camera if they’re going to potentially put you on camera.

JS: (20:11)
So the first thing that I would always tell clients of mine in the past is that sometimes you do have to start small to kind of build up your reel and build up your deck, go to your local television station and you know, pitch them, start small and kind of build it up. Reach out to dotcoms that have digital television shows or digital and interviews there, things like that. Anything, even something like this, you know, where they can just, they can see you on camera, they can see how you’re dynamics, they can see how, how you flow your dictation, all that kind of stuff that will go into effect. So that is the first key. Those are the kind of the two folds there. You could go off the bat and national media and see what happens depending on the topic and what not. Or what I always say is build up the deck and build up the real, and then you can have a real that you just send out and then they can see for themselves.

RV: (20:57)
Yeah, I think that’s, that’s the big thing that I learned. You know, I’ve, I’ve had a few major national appearances, not a ton, but I is remembering that TV is a visual medium and whatever you’re doing, the more you can make it visual and just if, even if that’s just you as an interviewer, ultimately to attract eyeballs, you have to do something that’s interesting visually. The other thing I remember is it goes by insanely fast, like a five minute segment feels in real life. Like 10 seconds. I mean, yes. So, so I think that’s great. All right, so I’m a little bit kind of, oh, go ahead. Go ahead. Yeah.

JS: (21:36)
Is that, and no one ever really thinks of this. If you’re pitching yourself for TV, you can always do a pitch on video. So they see lar, we’ve actually had some pitches come through on video for us for the podcast, which was great because we got to hear the person auditorily. We got to really kind of hear their passion and how they were and how they really sounded. So video pitches can work really well as well.

RV: (22:03)
What a simple, yeah, what a simple thing. A, I love that. I love that. Okay. So I, I want to, I want to get to, you know, kind of also on the line of pitching his brand deals. Yeah. you know, this is a thing we have a saying around Bram Ram builders group where we say, you know, there’s a lot of people out there unfortunately who are Twitter rich and dollar broke. They have lots of followers and they don’t, but they’re not converting it to money. And it’s amazing. You know, we’d meet these people with a million followers and like they have no income coming in and you know, we teach all these different business models and you know, as you, as you know, you’ve been through our training and we try to help people figure out one. But when it comes to brand deals, like I go Julie, like Julie is she, she’s the master and I know you have your course pitch at perfect, which is killer course for people on this space.

RV: (22:56)
But can you dislike, talk to us a little bit about what is, what is a brand deal? What’s the likelihood of getting one, you know, how much do they actually pay? I mean I know if you’re tiger woods or you’re Michael Jordan, but like if you’re, if you’re a person, how many followers do you need to have to get one? And then what’s the process of actually of actually getting one? Cause I think like national TV, we all SORTA sink. We sit around waiting going, what do I have to do to make somebody find me? And I’ve really appreciated your outlook, which is like, no, that’s not how it works. Like you Kinda, you gotta go get it. So can you talk about it?

JS: (23:34)
Yeah. And actually I love that you bring this up cause this is the entire reason why we created pitch it perfect was that when I was starting out, I didn’t have, you know, compared to a lot of my friends who had tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of followers on social media, I had way less than 10,000 followers and I would pitch a brand and I would make, you know, three times more on a brand deal than they would. They would actually be accepting gifted product. And I would be over here making five, $10,000 for the brand deal. And so I would have these women predominantly that would come up to me and say flat out, you know, they would say, no offense Julie, but how is it that I have a hundred thousand followers and you have 7,000 followers and you’re waking, you’re making way more money than me.

JS: (24:14)
And I’m like, well, I know how to pitch myself. And so that’s when I said, I really need to create something that can support these people that are interested in doing this and having it be a really good source of a, of a revenue stream for their business. So we created pitch perfect under, under that pretense. And since then we’ve had thousands of students go through it. But with, with that in mind, well, one of the biggest issues that we see from people that come into our program, one of the biggest things that they say is, I thought that I had to have a certain amount of followers in order to get a brand deal. But now I know that that’s not true because I’ve gone through your program or I thought that brands were just gonna come to me when I was ready to work with them, you know?

JS: (24:57)
But now I know that that’s not possible. And that’s the thing that really kind of letting people know that there’s no brand ferry that just falls from the sky and is going to give you a brand deal. Just like with anything like you, you’ve, you’ve got to go out. If it’s something that you really want to make a model in your business and kind of part of your revenue stream, you’ve got to get your ducks in order and kind of go there. So there’s kind of certain tiers. First off, I will say that there’s really no set number to start building that relationship with a brand brand. Love what is called, you know, micro influencers, which is anyone that has 10,000 or less followers. We’ve had students that have had as little as 300 followers that have gotten brand deals. So what we really talk about is you want to get in there from the beginning to really start the relationship.

JS: (25:42)
It’s kind of like a marriage of sorts. You wouldn’t go to someone and marry them most likely the first night that you meet them, you want to warm the relationship up. You want to go on a few dates and really kind of get to know the person and see how you can support one another. Same thing goes when you’re working with these brands. So it’s really about coming and approaching, asking them certain questions, you know, how you know, what is it that you’re looking for? What is your bottom line? What are the new products and services that you have coming out? Who are you trying to target? What is your current budget in your marketing plan? Do you even have an influencer budget? Do you even pay influencers or do you only do gifting? Really asking these kinds of questions on the front end.

JS: (26:21)
It’s gonna kind of help you save a lot of time in organized. So there’s no quite follower number. But I will say that mostly, you know, you get those 300 to 500 follow a 300 to 500 influencers that have that number of following that get brand deals. But I would say mostly I see any anywhere from 2,500 followers and up, it’s really about the engagement rate. So brands like to look for an engagement rate of at least 4% or higher. Now obviously, typically the smaller your follower number is, the higher your engagement rate’s going to be because you’re not going to have as many followers there that need to engage with you. So that’s why they really do love micro influencers that you may only have 2,500 followers, but if you’ve got a 25% engagement rate in 25% of those 2,500 people are seeing it, you could actually outweigh someone that may have 10,000 followers, but only 0.03% of their followers are seeing their content. So it’s really about, we really like to focus more on the engagement rate and getting your engagement rate strong, as strong as it can be. Then the following number per se. So you’ve got your micro influencers, then you have your macro influencers.

RV: (27:33)
Who are you talking to? Like if you’re going to go, I want to deal with Nike, like who are you trying to get ahold of? Is it the senior vice president of marketing or is there like a person that may be,

JS: (27:46)
Yes. So it, it depends a lot like a company like Nike for example, they are going to have this farmed out. You know, their in house team is not going to be dealing with pitches from influencers all day long. They’re going to be sending it to an influencer marketing company, a PR company, you know, there’s kind of a bunch of different umbrellas of how that can unfold. So the first thing, again, you have to go back to the research. Linkedin is a really good place to start researching some of the, you know, who’s the PR Rep and just asking them, hi. You know, I’m so and so. This is my website. This is what I do. You know, I’m really wanting to build a relationship with Nike who is the best contact, you know, that works with the influencers for you guys. Simple as that. I mean, it’s really just getting out there asking the questions,

RV: (28:30)
But just find somebody and ask them who’s the right.

JS: (28:34)
Exactly. Deeming brands on Instagram works very, very well. Facebooking brands, sending dms on Facebook to brands works really, really well. And linkedin and Twitter is really good for media. For brands, I would say Linkedin, Facebook, and Instagram are going to be your best bets.

RV: (28:50)
Oh, interesting. So Twitter, you say that again. Twitter is good for media. Yes.

JS: (28:54)
From media. Yep. And then Instagram, Facebook and Linkedin is better for brands and then the companies that represent the brands, the PR companies and that sort of thing. But a lot of times with Nike, you know, if Nike has a $10 million marketing budget, they’re not going to go. I mean, no, mostly they’re probably not going to go to micro influencers and they’re not even going to go to macro influencers. They’re going to go for the celebrity endorsement deals. We’re going to say we’re going to get so and so.

RV: (29:21)
What’s the realistic, what is the realistic version? Right? So let’s say somebody is watching and they’ve got 7,500 followers or maybe 25,000 followers, you know, and there you, you know, but they’ve never done a brand deal. What size company would they look and, and then like how much does a reasonable amount to expect? You know, it’s like, you know, celebrities get millions of dollars, but what does just, you know, kind of a person get,

JS: (29:52)
Yeah. So again, it also depends on like how full Tom are you going into it. So for example, I’ve got a girlfriend of mine that has 250 ish thousand followers. Influencer marketing is her full time Gig and she makes anywhere between 30 to 50 grand a month off of brand deals.

RV: (30:07)
Okay. Say that again. So she has 250,000 followers. Yep.

JS: (30:12)
And she makes about 30 to 50 grand a month off brand deal. Okay.

RV: (30:17)
Gotcha. So, so posting content on social is her full time. That’s her full time job. That was her job. And, and what do they kind of like? So what does that, that’s probably several brands and then would be, what do they normally ask for? Like what do you have to do for them?

JS: (30:33)
Yeah, so it depends on the assets. It depends on kind of what they’re typically it is. It’s a, it’s an Instagram, it’s a static Instagram post, so on your feed it is brands really love Instagram stories because of the swipe up feature and they can, they can see how many clicks are going and it’s a lot easier to kind of equate into, into follow for them to really see what their ROI is. So they really like Instagram stories and like Instagram is their main focus. Facebook not Twitter, not so much. They may ask for some Pinterest stuff depending on who the brand is and what their focus is. And it also depends on, you know, what is the brand’s goal? And this is one of the questions that I always tell my students to ask when they’re reaching out to brands. Are the brands focused on conversion or are they focused on awareness? Because that’s also going to factor in on how much they pay you on who they choose to work with on why they’re choosing to work with them. So that’s another big thing. If they’re looking to convert dollars, there may be some influencers out there that for whatever reason they don’t convert really well, but they have a huge platform for awareness. So it really kind of just depends on where, what is, what is the goal of the brand and then they can align with the influencer that way.

RV: (31:46)
So the other thing is while we’re on this topic, this is awesome. This is so enlightening I guess is a world that I know nothing about. Like it’s very eye opening to me how this is how this works. And it’s also very simple and sort of straight forward. It’s like, oh, you know, you just go do it. But what about influencers paying other influencers? Does that, are you seeing, like, do you hear of that happening much? That’s a, a growing thing.

JS: (32:14)
Yeah, it, it used to not mean, I mean when I first started into this industry of blogging in influencer marketing, which was 2013 ish, it that wasn’t happening as much, but now that influencers are essentially becoming their own brand, they’re creating their own products and services and getting it out there. You definitely see that happen more and more. And in the, in the online course creation industry, you would see it a lot with you know, launches that that affiliate launches that people would do or they would come on board and kind of do a co launch and support one another that way. But I’m seeing it now more with influencers. You’ll have an influencer who has a products coming out and now see it out to other influencers to support that. Or even the brand may put some marketing dollars behind that influencer to then use to kind of see it out that way. The other thing that the brands are doing are also white listing Facebook ads. So they will ask for an opportunity, what does that mean? So they will basically take the posts that you do for them and then they will sponsor it. So they will pay the money to sponsor it as an ad and then that will run for a certain amount of time time. So obviously if the brand is doing that, then they’re going to be saturating you even more, which means more money in your pocket.

RV: (33:28)
Hi. So that, so you do a, like you create a post on Facebook, like a video of like a product review or something like, Hey, I love this microphone. It’s amazing microphone

JS: (33:39)
And that’s sponsored. So you’re getting money in your pocket to create that piece of content for the brand and then the brands going into your Facebook ads and they are putting money in and promoting that post. Exactly.

RV: (33:53)
Yeah. Interesting. So you don’t make any money off of that, but they’re paying you to create it and then they’re exposing you to a bunch of people.

JS: (33:58)
Right. And what I say is to take it one step farther to say, yeah, you can boost my posts, but if you’re going to be doing that, we need to have terms. And limitations because you’re essentially oversaturating me to my followers and I need to be compensated for that.

RV: (34:13)
Yeah. So you’ve kind of worked that, worked at an a, this is so, so interesting. I mean, I think the thing of all of this, this is just, yeah, it comes back to that original piece about the confidence and just the siting. Like, you know, I’m going to do this. So I have one little, one last little thing I want to ask you about before we do that, where do you want people to go to connect with you and follow you? You’ll, we’ll put a link to your website and pitch it perfect in in the, you know, recap, show notes of this, but is there where, where’s the best place to find you?

JS: (34:48)
Yeah. So if you want to learn more about that, that specific skillset of pitching [inaudible] been talking about today, you can go to pigite perfect.net and then if you want free resources on an array of things including pitching, branding, marketing, I of course have the influence or podcast and you can find [email protected] or iTunes, stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. And then my website is just Julie solomon.net and there is where you can learn more about me. I have a lot of free resources on there as well. And then of course it links to the various other things that we’ve talked about today too.

RV: (35:23)
Love it, love it, love it, love it. So we’ll link, we’ll link all that up as well. So the last thing I want to, to have you talk about is when, when, when you came here, you came to Vaden villa, you, you were, we did a two day strategy session with you and John was there and loved it, loved meeting you guys. And I think we became friends out of that. But the, there was something that you said that has stuck with me ever since was you, you have this thing, I just, I love this so much called special snowflake syndrome. And again, I think the thing that just sticks with me from, from you is just that decision to just go and just freaking do it. Can you, can you just land the plane by talking to us about what a special snowflake syndrome. How do you know if you have it, what, what, what is the problem with special snowflake syndrome? And then just like what do you do about it?

JS: (36:23)
Yeah, I know being diagnosed with sss can be detrimental to your, to your overall success. And again, it comes back to that confidence piece. So really to me, special snowflake syndrome is just an excuse. It is a way in which we use certain circumstances to keep ourselves small, to limit ourselves and to make up excuses as to why we can’t achieve something. So an example would be, you know, I, you know, I don’t, I should, I shouldn’t have to worry about sales and marketing, but I’m the influencer. I should just be able to cope. Did to create my pretty content and to post it on Instagram and to do my Instagram stories. I shouldn’t have to learn about business. I shouldn’t have to learn about strategy yesterday. I have to learn about this finance syndrome or this finance stuff. And it’s like, well no, you’re in special snowflake syndrome.

JS: (37:13)
They’re, you know, you think that you’re just this special snowflake who doesn’t have to worry about certain things or it doesn’t have to figure out certain things. And also that idea of when we kind of get into a little bit of that idea of I’m, I’m powerless or I’m helpless to something, right? Like, I just can’t grow no matter what I do. Or I just don’t have enough time to figure that out. Or there’s no way I’ll ever have enough money to invest in myself. I just can’t do that. I’m not like everyone else. It’s like, no, you’re in special snowflake syndrome. You know, the, we all have the same amount of time of day. We all choose to use it, how we choose to use it. It’s really goes back to that accountability piece that you really have to start being responsible and accountability for the, for your own beliefs and for the decisions and choices that you make. Because really at the end of the day, the only thing that you do have power over is yourself and your thoughts and the truth voices and the beliefs that you choose to have. You are actually kind of powerless to everything else outside of that, but it’s that idea that, you know, I’m so different. I’m so unique. Woe is me. No one can understand me. No one can, can understand what it’s like to walk in my shoes. Therefore nothing will ever work for me. That’s the special snowflake syndrome.

RV: (38:31)
I love this so much. Suck it up. Yeah. Is Great. Great. Great. Well Julie, thanks for sharing your story. Thanks for your inspiration. Also, you know, your strategic clarity and your tactical clarity but just kind of your, your mission and I know you’re, you’re inspired to help people get their message out. So it’s been, it’s been wonderful having you, as always, we’ll continue to promote you and thanks for, thanks for being here. Thanks for having me.

Ep 44: The Prepared, Consistent, and Persistent Host with Alberto Sardinas

RV: (00:01)
Such an honor when I get to introduce you to someone who is not only an incredible influential brand but also someone who is a client of brand builders group because we get to know these folks really well and we get to kind of work with them behind the scenes and I’m excited for those of you that don’t know him to meet Alberto’s tardiness. And if you don’t recognize his name, it’s probably because you don’t speak Spanish. But if he did speak Spanish you probably would know him. He’s a celebrity Spanish radio hosts. He has a show called Empty Mo, which as 22 affiliates across the country and it’s a story-based show where they take calls from listeners and Alberto has 2.8 million Facebook fans closing in on 2.8 million Facebook fans. Now it’s all in Spanish primarily and he is doing, he’s doing something interesting.

RV: (00:57)
He is now moving over to the English market and that is when we met him and we started working with him. But he also has an MBA. He’s the author of multiple books. His English podcast is called the passion accomplished podcast. So he’s now hosting, not just terrestrial radio, but now he is in the podcast platform. And so I wanted you to get to meet him here are different perspective about, you know, doing, building an audience in the Spanish market, but then also he’s just incredibly experienced as a host and he’s a really amazing, genuine guy. I know you’re going to love him. So Alberto, welcome to my show, our show.

AS: (01:37)
What an honor. Thank you so much Rory, for having me. It’s really a pleasure and an honor to be here and thank you for the wonderful intro.

RV: (01:45)
Yeah. And I can’t wait. I’m sure we’re going to get the comments of like, Oh, you guys could be brothers mad. And I’m like, Yep, I like it. I’m sure we’re going to get the comments. So let’s go ahead and do that, get that out on the table. But so first I would love to just hear kind of how you got started and let’s talk about kind of the Spanish market specifically. Cause I, I know you’re, you’re kind of, you’re not, you’re not transitioning away from that, but you’re simultaneously building up in the English market. But I think that’s a world that most of our listeners are probably not that familiar with. And so how did you get started? Like how did it happen and then how did you end up on the radio? And then from there, I mean, you are one of the number one Spanish radio hosts in the U S at least in terms of social media following. So just kinda give us that, that story a bit.

AS: (02:35)
You know what, I’ve always been passionate about radio. I remember my dad sharing with me when he was a teenager, he used to have a radio show. And I remember seeing at home those recordings that were very hard to play because they weren’t very old formats. And he didn’t do that for long. He did it for a couple of years. This was back in Venezuela where I, you know, when I was born and raised, but when he came to college, he went to FIU here in Miami. He decided that he wanted to look for a business degree and pursue that and he just got out of radio. But I was always inspired by the idea of communicating. And when I went to college, I went to the school of communications in Caracas and I literally started pursuing radio opportunities. So I remember I was the only crazy guy.

AS: (03:20)
I was 17 turning 18 starting college and I was the crazy guy that suggested to some friends that we rent a radio studio for a couple of hours a week just to practice, just to see what we could do. And we tried to it inside the university and they didn’t have anything available. So we went to an actual commercial radio station and just started practicing by paying a board operator anything we could and anything we scramble together just to try out radio for a moment. And then one thing led to the other. I mean, I spoke with someone who who knew that I was interested in doing this. And then I started doing a radio segment once a week. It was an evening show, top FM station. I could not believe I had given the opportunity. I was given the opportunity of spending 10 minutes a week to talk about what was going on in colleges around town just anything that had to do with science, from science to parties, to exhibits to anything going on in colleges in Caracas which is where, where I was born. And then I remembered the, you know, driver’s licenses in Venezuela for minors were only valid to 8 o’clock at night. And if you drove after I, you know, past 8:00 PM you’ll get in trouble with the authority. And my dad used to drive me to a radio station then and he was so proud of me and he would stay downstairs listening to me on his, in his car and I would go do my segment. And that’s how I kind of like broke into radio for the first time.

RV: (04:42)
So how did you end up in Miami on the radio and like when does it start? Cause you’re not, I mean you’re in markets all across the U s right? I mean Texas and California. Yes,

AS: (04:52)
Absolutely. When did that happen? Well, it was a slow transition. And to me the key message here is patience. And I’m just being very, very consistent in your attempt to communicate and to get your message out there, which is what you guys are experts on it, you know, I mean you can give everybody the tools, but people don’t have the consistency to keep trying to keep hearing no a few times and just, you know, keep pushing it. It’s very hard. But I moved to Miami when I graduated from College and I came here to pursue my MBA at the University of Miami. And then I was the only crazy guy who was going through an MBA program, going to the career center, trying to find a radio job before like hello, we’re all try to work here at Morgan Stanley or Bank of America. I mean, you know, or, or, or, or the corporation, why are you looking for a radio job?

AS: (05:35)
And I had been doing radio for a few years in Venezuela and that’s what I really wanted to do. So I started working for free. I did the whole thing, you know, I interned, I pretended that I don’t know anything, so I could just be given an opportunity to make photocopies and get coffee for people. So I would kind of like go in, et cetera. And then the other thing that happened, which I think was also very interesting is the fact that I worked in different formats, several different formats for a very long time and I was never really I’d never written, never had a sense of belonging to any of those formats. Now, there was a crucial point in my career, which happened, you know, over 10 years ago now in which I was going through a very, very rough moment in my life. I had been taken away, so to speak, from one radio company to about to another.

AS: (06:25)
I was kinda like stolen by the competition. Very exciting moment, very exciting time. However as I transitioned to this new company, they made internal changes within it and I was hired to do a show within a certain format. And the day I walked into the new job, they had completely changed the format of the station that I was hired for. So everything just became this thing with the new guy. You imagine one of those weird corporate moments, you know, we have this guy, we hired him for one thing, but we’re changing the station to another. So soon enough, three months into it, my radio show gets canceled. And at the same time I was going through very difficult personal moments. I, you know, I had been in a relationship with a girlfriend for about three years and that also ended and the biggest, biggest thing that was going on in my life is that my mom was battling breast cancer.

AS: (07:15)
And that unfortunately, and very sadly, within 90 days, my radio show got canceled. The relationship ended and I lost my mother to breast cancer. All within 90 days I was going through this really, really tough time. Imagine, I mean, when you feel that life just gets absolutely out of balance, that you really don’t know how or what you’re going to do. You’re trying to just like go to work every day to have that consistency, not to lose your job. But my boss had promised me that he would keep me on board. He liked what he saw as far as me being a producer, not only a host, and he calls me to the office one day and he shares with me this idea, this concept that he had. He says, listen, I want to start a radio show during the evenings on this radio station in which between songs, the host of the show is going to open the lines and is going to listen to people’s personal stories.

AS: (08:08)
And when asked, the host of the show was going to give people advice. So I’m in producer mode, right? I’m not even thinking about my future there. I’m just trying to make it to work every day. And I go, okay, so we’re doing a pilot, what are we doing? And he goes, no. And he’s like, you know, I remember asking him, for example, who do we hire? Who Do we test? Do we bring a psychologist? He said, Oh, I’m talking about you hosting the show. I was silent for like a minute and you know that in a conversation these, I’m like for a minute it feels like an hour and I go, are you asking the most depressed person in this building to give people advice? I remember that. I’ll never forget that moment. And like you’re asking me, I’m dragging myself to work everyday and he’s been a great guy. He’s still a great friend and I knew he could understand me and he’s like, yeah, I’m asking you to do it. And suddenly I said, well, I don’t know if I’m gonna be the best person to do it, but I’m jumping in. I’m jumping in. I’m doing it. And that was the beginning during the most difficult time.

RV: (09:09)
And this was 10 years ago.

AS: (09:12)
Tha was about 12 years ago. Okay. That was the beginning of intimal, which is a show that started in Miami, is now syndicated in 22 markets. But it was also the beginning of becoming an inspirational speaker in Spanish network television, getting a book deal, getting speaking engagements and getting into the best part of my career ever. And it all started in the darkest moment I’ve ever had in my life. So it’s one of those things where you never know when the opportunity is going to come, but what you do have to know is that you have to be prepared. You have to be at the best of your game because that opportunity could have shown up, could have showed up and maybe I would not have been ready to take it. But it had built so much into my career that certainly when this shift happened, I was able to take it. I was able to ride it and capitalize on it.

RV: (10:05)
Yeah. Yeah. I love that. I think that that’s a good personal note for people to just know. I mean there’s, I think I can look back on my life and go, hey, there’s all these things that didn’t work out for me the way I thought, but they’ve all kind of led to something better. So I want to get into the sort of like some of the technicalities of hosting.

AS: (10:27)
So, first of all, and this could be for radio and I do want to delineate a little bit between the radio format and the podcast format because a lot of people don’t know this. I was on terrestrial radio before I became a podcast host and it’s very, very different. People might assume it’s the same as not the same, but in general, what are some of the things you think that make a great host? Because I think, you know, when you’re the speaker or you know, when you’re the author and you’re there teaching, I mean do you think it’s quite a different role than the role of, of playing the host or do you think it’s basically the same thing with just having another person there?

AS: (11:08)
You know, I think it’s interesting. I was, I’m rereading the book by Simon Sinek, you know, It Started with Why and I feel that does stronger your why, the stronger your delivery in any platform. It doesn’t matter where you’re trying to get to because at the end of the day we’ll know that we have to be where our audience is or could be. So if you’re on stage, of course you have a different purpose, you’re probably more specific in terms of who’s there, you know, who’s in the room, what they’re interested in. But one of the things that I believe that really, really makes a difference in this whole system is the fact that you have to be absolutely prepared for the situation prepared for the occasion. And what I mean by that is that I learned this very, very powerful concept many years ago when I was studying to be what we call them in Venezuela [inaudible], which is a radio host.

AS: (11:59)
And you know, you need to get a certificate in our country to do that, et cetera. And, and the key to this was that the secret to improvising is not to improvise. That’s kind of like one of those big, big concepts that I learned when I was preparing for this at the beginning of my career. So the secret to improvising.

RV: (12:18)
What does that mean?

AS: (12:19)
Basically what it means is that I am able, I am ready to speak with you about a subject in a fluent way when I know what I’m going to talk about. And unfortunately a lot of people focus so much on the form and focus so much on trying to get that delivery perfectly. You know become perfectly familiar with the delivery and make sure that the words are carefully chosen, et Cetera, that they forget about the essence of the message and people are not going to give us their attention, which is one of their most valuable assets if we’re only, they’re trying to show how good we are.

AS: (12:56)
What we’re trying to do is we’re trying to deliver a message and that has to be mission-driven. And that’s one of the reasons why I like the work that you guys do so much because you help everybody and you have helped me gain that clarity that’s necessary to be able to deliver a message. Nobody will ever be comfortable in front of a mic, whether that’s a podcast set up or whether that’s a live radio set up. If their message is not clear, if their intention is of clear, if their purpose is not clear. So if you want to remove 50 60 70% of what holds you back from opening a mic and delivering a message, just get ready with that message. But don’t prepare that message by memorizing it. But make sure that you have a message that you feel very passionate about and that you have a message that you could talk about for hours.

AS: (13:43)
And then when the light goes on, when the microphone goes on, when you’re live on the radio, regardless of the format, you will be prepared to tackle that and you would prepare it also to get the attention of people. Because at the end of the day, Rory, when we’re trying to deliver our podcast where we’re trying to have a live radio show or try to speak, all we’re begging for is for the attention of others because we believe that our message has value. But an on prepared message, a message that is not strong, a message that we don’t love, a message that we couldn’t talk about for hours is a message that will be a weakness. And we’re on the opposite side. We need to be on the opposite side, which is the passion, the thriving, the encouragement and transmitting that energy to others and showing them why our message is valuable.

AS: (14:31)
Yeah. So what do you think, cause I know you host the podcast and the radio, what do you think are some distinct differences between, you know, hosting the radio show and the radio format, I guess versus the podcast format? I think it all starts with, with the audience because it should all be about the audience at the end of the day. So, so when you do broadcast radio, when you do broadcast television, which are beyond of doing every day of my life you are, you know, you are preparing a message for a broader audience. So, so that’s why it’s broadcasting because you’re trying to get as many people as possible involved with your message, whether that’s entertainment or that’s listening to other people’s stories or delivering valuable information when you’re doing some breaking news coverage, et Cetera. So you are appealing to a broad segment of the population.

AS: (15:25)
And of course you need to have a target. You sort of have an Avatar that you work from, but you are, you know, hoping that you’ll be able to gather as many people as possible for a message that’s very broad. However, when you start podcasting or you do anything for that matter, that has to do with a niche, with a video, with a market that you understand a lot better, then what you’re doing is you are aiming to, you know, satisfy and to inform and to deliver your message to a group that really doesn’t matter what size it is. But it’s a lot more about the value of the group. It’s more about the relationship that you can create. It’s about a lot about what they’re craving. And this is maybe just an area of their life that you’re talking about. You may be talking about pets, you’re maybe talking about psychology, you maybe talking about technology and what you’re trying to do there. You’re not trying to find a million people that listen to you. If you get a million people listening, that’s amazing. But really what you need is those 1000 true fans. You know, as the article says and it’s gone viral all over the world. I mean, what thousand true fans can just bring you the fortune, the, you know, the, the success, the revenue. It can just bring you it’s just brought your business model to life. So it’s a lot more specific and I believe that it is possible to like coexist with both.

RV: (16:44)
Okay. Yeah. And what about, the one thing about your radio show, I mean, when your podcast, you’re interviewing one person and typically I feel like the person you’re interviewing on a podcast, they’ve thought through what they’re going to say right there. They’re probably an author or at least a speaker or you know, coach maybe on some kind. But on your radio show you kind of just open it up to like random people calling in, sharing their stories. How do you, how do you kind of rein it in, right? Like if they’re, if they’re either babbling or they’re not making sense or they’re taking a long time to get to the point, or there’s not anything that engaging, like, you know, it’s like, if they’re not entertaining, they’re not, and they’re not informing, they’re just kinda talking. What are some things that you kind of do at a host to either like speed it along or get to the point, or like how do you kind of manage that relationship?

AS: (17:44)
It comes back to preparation. We never put anybody on the air that we don’t know what they’re going to give us. So, so you never, I mean it’s nice when you give the sensation on the air that this is just a free flow of different callers, et cetera. But you know, you prepare people from the technical standpoint because you don’t want them on Bluetooth, you don’t want them on speaker, you want the be all the onto the phone, you want to have the right communication on the technical side. And then the next thing is you want to have the right story. Not that, not that one story is more important than the other, but you want to make sure that people are actually willing to share something that’s relevant for the show. Because what could happen, it happens many times is you can have people first that can have, you know, they want to call on.

AS: (18:26)
They just think that they can speak to me off the air. Like as if I’m available, you know, for hours and hours just to speak to people, which unfortunately is not the purpose of what I do. And then you could also have people just wanting for you to kind of like, guess what’s going on. But they’re so afraid to be on the radio that they really don’t give you anything, but they’re eager to get some type of advice from a friend. And unfortunately that’s not going to work either because we need to give the audience who is, you know, who we’re working for a full story that allows us to find a lesson that can apply to a lot more people.

RV: (19:00)
Yeah. So you’re, I mean, that’s telling in and of itself, there’s like, I think we’re a pretty rigorous screening process and selection process and it’s almost like by the time they get to you, everybody knows what’s going to happen. Yeah. For the most part, sort of what’s going to happen.

AS: (19:16)
Absolutely. You have some sort of a base at least on, on, on where to take it off from, you know.

RV: (19:21)
Okay. and, and is there anything that you do during those interviews to try to draw out the story? Cause this I think would apply to anybody watching that maybe hosts a podcast. I think we probably have much fewer people that are watching that are hosting terrestrial radio. But anything that you do or you’ve learned over the years to try to like draw out the most compelling parts of the story or draw out the lesson or you know, basically just kind of extract the, would be value for everyone listening, not just for that one person.

AS: (19:59)
Absolutely. Again, it all starts with the purpose you need to be, you know, really interested in, in fulfilling that purpose through that story. And that applies to anybody who’s ready to start a podcast. As you know, it’s a very simple process on the technical side, but you have to have that clarity of the format of the show. You need to understand where is it that you want to take people and who’s actually relevant for your, for your story. I mean, no fortune, a lot of people just want to have this podcast about conversations. You know, I, it sounds very nice, but a conversation sounds a lot better when you’re not recording where you don’t have a Mike in front of you. I mean, if you just want to have conversations and, and you believe that you may get some attention, give it a shot. But My, you know, my take on this is understand what the format of your podcast a creates as far as expectations.

AS: (20:50)
Understand who your audience is. And then when you understand your audience and you align it with your own interests, then conversations really, really flow well. But if you’re not interested, if you’re sort of like forced to be in a position where you say, well, they just, you know, Rory said that a podcast would be good for me, but I’m not really, you know, I’m not really interested in asking anybody questions, then that may not be the right place for you. And there’s so many other formats and so many other outlets, you know, from blogging, from doing video in any other way from people capturing and following you so they can see what you do every day or courses, et cetera. So I really don’t feel that there’s too much of a magic there. As long as you’re aligned with your purpose, with your brand and that you understand who your listener or ideal listener is, so you can deliver the right value.

AS: (21:41)
And then when you have that combination and you have an interview you right in front of you, it’s only going to flow. You’re going to go into this zone where you’re just gonna want to know more about them. Okay? So I’m here to talk about, you know, a flat screen TVs if that’s your thing. You know, and I’m here to talk about, you know, how the gut is smaller and cheaper and this and that. And then suddenly you talking with someone for an hour. I didn’t even realize that you’ve been there for so long. It’s because you generate a genuine interest and there’s a, you know, a back and forth that’s interesting for the audience.

RV: (22:12)
So, so speaking to that, kind of like the niche part in the competition there, there’s no shortage of radio shows and there’s certainly no shortage of podcasts. Do you, how do you get yourself mentally around that? You know, like particularly I think about, you know, you’ve reached this scale in the Spanish market and then at the same time you’re having to start over in the English market and you know, it’s like people don’t really know you. I mean, you know, there’s gotta be things that come up about just like self doubt of well, you know, I’m too late to the game. There’s already a bunch of other podcasts in my space. Like, you know, I don’t have the team or the ad budget to really reach a lot of people. Like do you ever, do you have some of those thoughts or have you had some of those thoughts and like what do you, what do you kind of tell yourself to kind of push past the, the idea that you know, somebody else’s already out there doing this?

AS: (23:09)
Well, you know, my first thought is the fact that I’ve done it before and that’s definitely what pushes me and, and I can understand how some people may be getting into a, this whole thing about communicating their message and it may be a new thing for them, but if you been successful before, no matter what your background is, it means that you have the ability to be someone who can, you know, bring the attention to be someone who’s successful. There’ll be someone who can actually accomplish in life. So I really believe that if, if there’s anybody within your platform, anybody who is a current or a past client or potential client of the brand builders group that has had any level of success in any industry, they can definitely do it. As far as creating a platform, it’s totally doable, but you just have to go back and say, okay, what other stages in my life have a been in that I’ve had to work it a lot more that I thought how you know, would we’re just remember for a moment and for how long you worked for free.

AS: (24:10)
Remember for a moment how many hours you had to, you know, be getting ready for an examine college or masters would be, or whatever you were pursuing. So as long as you have gone through this process before, you just have to keep going. And in my case is very specific because it does become frustrating. I’m used sometimes also believe like there’s not a lot of people listening or am I wondering if this is the right message? And all you have to do is number one, believe in yourself. Number two, make sure you’re consistent. This is not going to happen overnight. It’s definitely not going to happen over night. But we made the decision, I made the decision to deliver a podcast episode every Monday morning at 5:30 AM no matter what, it’s not that I’m doing that, I’m just pushing it out at five 30 in the morning just for that consistency.

AS: (24:53)
And every Monday morning, no matter what, there is an episode of the passionate, accomplished podcast out there, regardless of one person listening to it or a million people listening to it. And that I, and the biggest piece of advice I can give them this, have someone help you with the shortcuts and that’s where you guys come in. I mean, I could have said, you know, I’ve done this already. You know, my message in Spanish is so big, I really don’t need anybody. I know what I’m doing. Or you know, I could have done what I actually did, which was, you know, learning more about you guys and saying, Hey, you know what, maybe these people can help me focus more. Help me with some shortcuts, understand my messaging, understand that my message is Spanish is a little different than the English language message and get some help. And if you can get that shortcut in the different levels that you guys offer, I mean just find help because we’re not inventing the wheel or reinventing the wheel here. A lot of people have gone through this process and all you have to do is, you know, be ready and, and have the self-awareness that will show you your weaknesses and you can go for it and take it from there.

RV: (25:56)
Yeah, I appreciate it. I appreciate that and I appreciate the plug. I, before we started, you were sharing a little tidbit about how a couple of our strategists, Jeremy and Elise, that you’re working with made one little tweak and your handle and the name of your like your Instagram handle and Facebook handle, which made a big difference. And it’s, it’s funny how little things like that you don’t see for yourself, but somebody else kind of comes in from outside and it’s like, gosh, that’s such an obvious, an obvious thing to make and it makes a huge difference.

AS: (26:25)
Absolutely. And I’ll share that with everybody. I mean, it was such a small fix, a small change. You know, I, when I started doing everything in English, my big decision was that I wanted to have a separate set of social platforms for English than the one I have in Spanish. So that way when people get me on their feet, they get me in the language they wanted me for and they also get a little bit of that specialized message that again, it has some tweaks and I’ve been working with you guys on that as well. But what’s interesting is that I created for the English language platform I created at Alberto is here. So I register everything. I remember even reaching out to a guy on Twitter who was amusing Gilberto’s your account, who was super nice and he let it go so I could pick it up.

AS: (27:06)
And I started that platform on the Alberto’s here on time. I remember sitting down with with ease and Jeremy and we started having that conversation. And our conclusion was that I should not be using anything different than brittle Sardinas because it would be a good idea to show some of the credibility by having somebody search in English for the Burritos, Jalapenos and running into the Spanish language platform, which are all verified accounts and millions of followers on Facebook, et cetera. So what we did is we did a really, a little ugly thing, which is for English.

RV: (30:03)
Well it’s amazing man. How one simple change, like that kid can make such a big difference just like changing the handle and I think that’s really great. Well, our, Alberto, I I want where should people go if they want to connect with you? If they wanna stay in touch and follow what you’re doing and see what you’re about.

AS: (30:45)
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So we are doing the passion accomplished podcast and this is where we help everybody will fill their passion and allowing them to transition without quitting the day job better. The whole mission of the show. We’re not telling anybody quit your job because we’re going to do magic here. We’re just helping people slowly transition to what they really want to do by releasing episodes every Monday morning. And all you have to do is search on any social media platform for Alberto starting yesterday. And I hope you get a chance to listen to us before the podcast is on apple podcasts, on Spotify, on tuning. And I would love to get everyone’s feedback about it and I love to engage with them and everybody else follows you as well.

RV: (31:28)
Love that. And of course, if you speak Spanish, you should go listen to NT moe and why not like catch the show and and do that. Well, my friend, thanks for sharing a little bit about what it’s like to be on the other side of the Mike as a host. I think hosting is a very special skill. It’s one that doesn’t get enough training and time teaching. And I don’t think hosts get celebrated often like they should. So we really appreciate it and we appreciate your trust and friendship and we’re excited to keep building your brand. So we wish you all the best.

AS: (32:00)
Thanks for everything you guys have done thanks for having me.

Ep 42: Get Started with Ed Tate

RV: (00:01)
Yeah, there was a time when I had a dream the first time I had a dream to be a professional speaker and I didn’t know exactly what that entailed. And one of the first people I encountered on that journey is the man you’re about to hear from Ed Tate, who now at this point we have known each other for coming up on 15 years and he is wild to think about that cause this, this man literally knew me like at the very, very beginning. He and I were actually in the same toastmaster club and he had just won the world championship of public speaking, which was the biggest thing that I could ever imagine at that time and was one of several people who mentored me. He is also a certified speaking professional. He has really been a corporate trainer and keynote speaker for you know, the last 20 plus years and he’s fantastic on stage. He’s also an executive coach and does a lot of like kind of presentation coaching for media and you know, people who present like a winning high stakes presentation. So anybody who has like an important presentation, whether that’s a keynote or just like presenting and he has a fascinating journey that I think is different from a path that you, you may, you may hear about often. So so glad to have you old friend. Welcome back and thank you for being here.

ET: (01:22)
Well, thank you for inviting me, Rory. I really appreciate it.

RV: (01:25)
So at Brand Builders Group, we study reputation, you know, that’s our new space. We like that. Our little pivot from, you know, everything was all about discipline and now we’re all about reputation, which are kind of connected. But you know, when you just hear that word, you know, like you’re someone I think of just as a great reputation. Everyone knows you’re a great guy, you’re gonna kill it on stage every single time. But when you hear the word reputation, what do you think about, like what is your definition of it? What are your personal philosophies on building one and, you know, how important has it been in your career? And, and just give us like a little bit on that

ET: (02:02)
Reputation. I think it’s that mental space that you possess in someone else’s head. That’s what a reputation is. You know, when we think of, you know, the, the tried and true examples, McDonald’s, you know, I’ll or FedEx, et cetera, FedEx just rang my doorbell just a couple seconds ago. They have specific reputations and you know, I think the worst reputation you can have is like no reputation and that is be the best secret that no one’s ever heard of, you know. So I think that’s one of the challenges Here’s something else to consider as well. You know, like you mentioned, I’ve been in this business, there’ll be, it’s actually 19 years this year and you’re doing this professionally.

ET: (02:44)
Condoleezza Rice said you never wanted to be the past, anything, you know, and, and I think that you’re constantly want to evolve. You, you constantly want to develop your brand. You constantly want your brand to stay with the times and the relevant, if you will. So in my particular case I got my start my jump by winning the world championship of public speaking and we can talk about that like a little bit later on. Okay. That helped my career and then I became a CSP, a certified speaking professional, that helped my career. I was in this space called making managers into leaders. So for example, my customers or my clients, they know me it with that brand in that particular space. Does that make sense what I’m saying? So far? Yeah. And I’ve, I’ve constantly tried, like your company is evolving into a new space. Okay. You’re into brand building, right? Right. Okay. You are disciplined before or that was the brand before you’re evolving because the marketplace says this is something that you need to do. And I think this is something critical for all of us

RV: (03:46)
And be the one that compete. Okay.

ET: (03:52)
Well number one, like when you’re starting out, you know, what is your brand? You have to establish your brand. And then number two is you got to get the word out in terms of what is your brand. Cause if you don’t I think the worst thing you can have is saying this sameness as the enemy of any presenter or any company when you look and sound the same like everyone else. And that’s a Patricia Fripp Buddhism if you will. Then no one that no one’s going to recognize you.

RV: (04:18)
Huh. Well I think that’s really interesting because I think a lot of people who are just starting on their personal brand journey, like they either are doing the work of figuring out who they are and what their brand is about. Or there’s some people who immediately jump into like telling a bunch of people but they’re not totally clear on it. And, and it’s like you have to do both. You know, we say the reputation formula is results times reach equals reputation. So I think that’s, I think that’s interesting. So I wanted to ask you about how you got your start as a personal, it was building your brand and one of the things that I think is, is you very unique about your, your past. I mean we have the world championship push. I want to hear about it. I want people to know what that is. But you also worked for a company doing other people’s content first and that’s a model that I think is really good for a lot of people that not enough people talk about everyone thinks I got to create my own content, I got to like build everything and do it all from scratch. And you know, if I remember correctly, you sort of started and spent a fair bit of time like teaching other people’s content. Okay,

ET: (05:26)
First. Yeah. Why? I worked for a company called career track career track at the time was the largest public seminar company in the world and I worked for them for exactly 18 months. So it was, it was part of my strategy to get experience and I wanted to like a, there’s a friend of ours, his name is Darren Lacroix and he says stage time, stage time, stage time. I wanted to get a lot of stage time, so that was my purpose. That was my strategy to get a lot of stage time and I did that for exactly 18 months. Then I worked for another company called them like leadership and we would get leadership programs and I did that for like another two years, but it was a strategy that a got me a great deal. That was a stage time number two. It also got me a lot of credible customers and that can actually put on my resume, if you will.

ET: (06:14)
So, you know, for example, glaxosmithkline, Johnson and Johnson and Nielsen, Nielsen Ratings Company, you name it. Like if you go to my website, so who’s who of Corporate America? Well, because I worked for this other company, I was able to legitimately claim that I actually work with those particular organizations. It gave me the other, the third thing is that for me, it gave me, it may be bulletproof onstage. I honestly believe this to be true and I know you have the same skill. There’s nothing on stage that can happen that I can handle. I got that experience by working for career track. For example, one, I’ll remember one particular client in particular a, the postal service in Dallas, Texas. Okay. And it is my first day leaving corporate America. Okay. It is my, this is my first Gig after I’ve left Corporate America, I’ve left this really nice paycheck. Okay. And seven o’clock in the morning and I’m passing out workbooks. I, I pass on a workbook to those good old boys, six with five of biscuits, shy of 300 pounds. And he just stands up and he yells, I don’t want to blank be here now. Blank is not the word he used.

ET: (07:22)
Anyway, immediately skew security comes in, they’ve got guns, Poles. And I’m thinking to myself, what is the, I can call my boss and still get my job back cause I’m thinking, well what in the hell have I gotten myself into? So apparently something had happened over the previous week and they, they were like this heightened alert, if you will. And the fact that this guy was yelling, they were just, you know, security was hyperspace sensitive sooner when they called the boss and the bosses, this woman she is, she’s not even five feet tall with high heels on. All right. She says, what’s going on here? They explained what was happening. So the good old boy, the boy, this woman and I, we walk out in the hallway now you got to see this. I’m watching this. This guy is huge. She’s this little tiny woman and this is back in the day when they had the Motorola flip phone and remember that I was like, you know, like a star Trek.

ET: (08:11)
So she said, Huh? She says, you’ve got two choices. Choice number one, you can go back there and shut up and listen to this guy for the rest of the day. Option number two is I’m going to call your boss and tell them what’s going on. So she whips out her a flip phone. She starts dialing a number. She says, I got one more digit. What’s it going to be? Hmm. Wow. Guess what he did? He went back in there and he shut up for the rest of the day. Now I did my program and the guy walked up to me and he apologized and said, you know, I apologized to you. I really needed to hear this. But the lesson I learned was this. It’s always your stage that woman taught me, no matter where you are, it’s always your stage, you know. So again, going back to the point, there’s nothing on stage that can’t handle, I love Dallas,

RV: (08:56)
A postal service because they, you know, I learned many, many lessons about being on stage and again, nothing that that can handle on stage. Yeah. Well and, and I think what that’s, that’s, that’s interesting and just a great model. I mean that’s, that’s the whole point is I want people to have their eyes open to her. You can start by working for someone else. You know, that’s a, that’s a good way to like kind of build up. And it’s real common. I if I remember right, I think Tony Robbins did that. I think mark Sanborn did that. He’s another hall of fame speaker. Mark St Horn. He was, he worked for career track. Laura Stack worked for career track a w as what if like a career track was called the crew track mafia cause it was actually basically

ET: (09:33)
Out of Colorado and does ward. There’s a lot of people who are actually in the speaking hall of fame today. Got Their start working for someplace else. Now the flip side of this is this do it only for limited amount of time. And what I mean by that, it is so easy to do it for, you know, for years and years and years. When I started doing this, I knew specifically 18 months, I literally quit 18 months to the day regardless of how popular I was with the company because I, I saw other people be there for eight nine, 10 1115 years and I didn’t want that to happen to me because I realized if I did that I would never be able to start my own business,

RV: (10:13)
Which is what you wanted to do. So some people may be okay with that, but like if you have the vision, then it’s like you’re using it as a stepping stone deliberately. Exactly. How did you make the, tell me, how did you, how did you make the leap? Like how did you actually start? I also happen to, you were being very highly paid in a corporate environment. That’s not an easy thing to walk away from the, and then when does toastmasters show up on the scene and like what, what does it mean to be the world? I mean you are literally the world champion of public speaking and there’s probably a lot of people that have not actually heard that term before. So, so walk us through like that transition of what it felt like to leap and how you did it and you know how to toastmasters fit into that. Okay, so I’m a, I’m going to tell you a story that you haven’t heard before. Okay. How I got started with this in the first place. A number one is I’m a stutterer. Okay. And there is no cure. First

ET: (11:10)
Salary. And when you grew up in a neighborhood where your stutter, guess what kids are, they’re horrible. You’re absolutely horrible. So my dad was in the military and we would move to a new neighborhood almost every 18 months to two years. So we’re moving to Chicago and I was sick and tired of being sick and tired. So one thing I did in preparation to move to this new neighborhood, because I didn’t want the new kiss and know that at the start or cause they’re gonna make fun of me in school. So I read newspapers out loud. I used to practice in the mirror during the summer. Kids usually like to play basketball. And that was really good at doing play by play outside doing basketball. I was so good that the other kids would give me their names and I would just do that.

ET: (11:50)
But it was a way for me to actually practice speaking. So how do I get started in this is I don’t want to be made fun of by kids. That was my motivation. I happen to go to a high school that had an a a TV station. I was a news anchor for four years. I went to a college that I actually got a job as a disc jockey. I was a number one disc jockey, my entire four, not a college station and actual radio station. And I did that. So these things prepared me for not looking back on it. In hindsight, those things prepared me. So when I actually competed for the world championship and the year 2000, those things prepared me. At the time I wasn’t executive, I was actually working for the Denver Rocky Mountain News. I was their, their, their training director and they were very, very supportive of me at that particular time.

ET: (12:35)
Now for those of you who don’t know what the world championship is, it’s a year long competition, 25 to 35,000 contestants and in the year 2001 the entire thing, Rory knows about this cause he’s been on a big stage a couple times twice. It is. And I want to tell you this, I, Hey, don’t make it on the stages as remarkable. You know, it’s absolutely remarkable. And most of you, if you follow Rory, you know how good he is on stage. You know, I like to say too, anybody can win at once. It takes a real man to lose twice.

ET: (13:14)
Okay. You keep going with that story. Okay. Anyway, so then your next question, how to make that transition. I, I literally, I told my wife, I said, I really want to try this. I said, I think this is something I really, really enjoy it and really good. The fact that I won the world championship, I got like a lot of the media attention right away. People dear old started approaching me, et Cetera for the first time. So I was at the right place at the right time, et cetera. So I got a lot of attention. I also knew that this was temporary and it wouldn’t last. So I I, I relied on my business acumen skills. I said to myself, this is something that I actually have to promote. I have to market. I just can’t wait. I can’t just sit back and wait for the phone to ring.

ET: (13:59)
So it was combination of taking advantage of the opportunity, which would tap into me and also marketing myself. You and I, you know, this is a term of endearment. We’re sales dogs. And what I mean by that is we both know how to sell. We both have know how to market, you know, we don’t have to close deals, we know how to close business, et cetera. So I’ve made a decision. The decision was like, if I could not make the same type of income I was making in corporate America, this was going to be a hobby. I was very, very clear about that. Being on stages, addictive. People love it, they love the attention, the adulation. But for me is I have a family. I got to take care of my family and if this ft I can’t make the same type of income that I made before then I was going to go back to corporate America. I went to my wife and I told her, I said, it’s going to take me a year to get this off the ground. Just give me a year. And if, if I can’t get it off the ground, I would go back to corporate America. So after a year we still weren’t making the income that we, that I was accustomed to. Now at the same time,

RV: (14:58)
I don’t hear as fast though. Like that’s, that’s, I mean that’s fast.

ET: (15:03)
The way I looked at it, I didn’t have a choice. It was just like it was going to be a year or not. Now I also told my wife, I says like your, your lifestyle will not change. Fortunately for me, I had a lot of money in the bank. I didn’t have to work for four years if I didn’t want to. Wow. I said, your lifestyle will not change. So if I can’t make this happen in a year, I will interview and I had a reputation in the computer industry. I’ll become an executive again. And that’s what happened because of the income wasn’t there. I interviewed, I did kind of cheat a little bit and what I mean by that is that I told the company that I am not going to start for six months. So I actually bought myself an 18 month window and that was a point where I started to see that the income was going to match my previous income. And then from that point in time I never looked back.

RV: (15:45)
So what were you doing like, like I think this is the thing like it’s interesting to hear you say this was one of the reasons that I wanted to have you beyond the fact. Interesting side note, I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed this. I tell a lot of our members and stuff that I s I studied 20 years of world championship footage, I graphed all the presentations. I measured the average number of lasts, the amount of time to the message, how many times they hit the message. And a lot of people think of Darren. Darren was like my humor mentor, right? And people think of him as the funniest, but your speech has the most number of laughs. I know. And a lot of people don’t give you credit for that. But

ET: (16:26)
So back, there’s a book where they actually documented the number of laughs of links of the labs, et Cetera. So I’m number one. I always pull that over him. Every time I see him

RV: (16:36)
There it is. So, but, but so you won the world championship. And I think what I want people to see is, you know, you might think, oh, something happens like that and that’s how you become a speaker and all of a sudden you’re a speaker the rest of your life. So it’s kind of like I want, I want people to be in touch with both the reality of you, you it, even doing something like that, you still have to promote yourself and also be in touch with the reality that even if you don’t do it, you know, and like I, I guess that would be an example. Although I got, I got pretty close that you can still build this, you can still build the career without it. What matters is not so much the trophy, it’s, it’s, it’s the process and the hustle after that. So what were you doing to get clean?

ET: (17:20)
Okay. So I’m going to jump ahead seven years because the experience I have is not a normal experience. And that is, again, I got media coverage, media attention right away. I got, I got an agent, I got speakers bureaus, I got training companies. That’s not a normal,

RV: (17:40)
Not anymore particularly these told about that time. It really did kind of like, it happened instantly

ET: (17:46)
And I also was smart enough to, I constantly had to market myself as well, so I can’t, so that happened that there was a seven year window, Rory. I literally didn’t have to pick up a phone and then we had to the worldwide economic crisis of 2007. So I want to pick up my stories from there. I lost it all. I lost the agents, I lost the training companies, I lost the consulting firms. They all went away. I had a half a million dollar business and it went to two zero in two weeks. Okay. A person I called up at the time was mark Sanborn. Mark Sanborn. Is he speaking hall of fame? I’m pretty sure your, your followers know who he is. You’d just Google him. And I explained to him what happened and and he said, ed, what you need to do is let go and let God, and he says, you need to get your hustle on.

ET: (18:33)
You know, you need to let this go. Because I was so distraught, you know, and I was like, Oh, poor, poor, pitiful me pour for filled pedal for me. And then I called up another friend of mine and her name is Lisa Joe Lansburgh. And again, I was about to cry this, this about the had this pity party, right? And she said to me, she says, ed, I can’t talk to you now. I says, what do you mean at least Joe, you went to my best friends, you know, why can’t you talk to me now? She says, I just found out my next door neighbor, they’re little, they’re four year old and their five year old daughters have been assaulted. Can’t talk to you now. In that moment it was like, you know, there are significantly more important things in the world than you losing your business.

ET: (19:17)
These little girls have lost their childhood, you know, and they’re never going to get that back. And my pity party was literally the over that day it was over and I said, and just like mark Sanborn had advised me, get your hustle on. So every day I have this philosophy, never put up a zero. And what I mean by that, every day, reach outside of these four walls and tell somebody about and ask for business. Now am I successful every day? No, but you know what? I like my chances, you know? And actually that was that philosophy. Help me make it through. Starting from scratch. 20 think about 2007 2008 worldwide economic is the, the, the Great Depression of our lifetime. It’s never, the economy’s always your economy and there’s business and every single economy, as long as you’re willing to reach outside of your four walls every day. That’s what I learned.

ET: (20:12)
So guess what? I still do that to this day. I’ve just closed a deal yesterday. You know, a coaching client yesterday. Guess what? I reached out every single day. Never put up a zero. Now, there are times when I put up Zeros. Yes, absolutely. Here’s the key. If you don’t, if you, if you, if you do put up a zero, don’t beat yourself up. Sometimes you know your schedule doesn’t work out so you can’t reach outside your four walls. Start a new wedding straight. So that was my mindset. That was my philosophy. But that’s like, that’s like maybe you’re putting up a zero in terms of a client, but it’s never, it’s never zero in terms of

RV: (20:48)
Effort. Like you’re exactly, you’re always making that. You’re always making that call. You’re always sending that email. You’re always making that out. Yeah.

ET: (20:55)
New when something there’s, you could do one thing every single day. If you do one thing every day, let’s, what is it like 260 business days? That’s 260 outreaches. If you just do one activity a day, guess what? You’re going to, you’re going to get some business. If your readings out once a day for 260 business days, you’re going to get business. You’re going to stumble across the business.

RV: (21:16)
Yeah. Well, so talking about keynote, so it sounds like, you know, for awhile, that’s interesting. I didn’t actually realize you did sort of have the fantasy of sound like for a little while, for a little while. Like it was in a way, I guess back in those days it was w you know, there’s an element of the world championship that is a little bit like American idol. You know, it’s a big for people in that space that know it. It’s, it’s a big freaking deal. You know, and we traveled the world for five or six years after speaking to groups. That was how we saw the world. And that was a big part of how I started my career, even though I didn’t I didn’t when I came in second for, for the record.

ET: (21:53)
But Rory, here’s the point. It wasn’t necessary that you want. Yeah. They, some people still treat you like a world champion. They saw you on the big stage and you were smart enough to leverage it. And that’s the lesson here. You know, actually, you know what has actually meant more to my career than winning the world championship is being a CDSP. And here’s the cool part about being a CSP. A CSP is everyone who’s listening to this, you know to this broadcast, they can become a CSP. There’s only one person who wins a world championship every way. It’s not the trophy, it’s the metal. You know, I gotta I have a metal right there that says I’m a CSP. You know, I’ll only word that one day. You know what, it’s, the CSP actually has meant more to me and more to my career then than the trophy and then winning it. So you were able to leverage it. You’re proof. What I’m saying is that that puts you on a platform and you ready to deliver that platform.

RV: (22:52)
That is the point that eds no, I, I totally get that. And that is, you know, I never really thought about that. Yeah. The only one person gets to be a world championship, but to CSP that Ed’s talking about is called certified speaking professional. It’s the highest ranking earned designation that is available through the National Speakers Association, which is sort of the governing body of the speaking profession specifically. Ed and I are both CSPs and you, you, you know, they try, they have to, you have to, they audit like all your clients and all this stuff. So, so on the topic of speaking, just since that’s sort of like the world that we play in and we live in, where do speaking gigs actually come from even today? Is it, is it, is it the outreaches that, like if you go, okay, I got so many speaking gigs on my calendar, like where do they in, in real life, where do they come

ET: (23:46)
From? How do you, how do you get them? Is it called outreach or what? So it’s a combination of things. And I’m sure you teach this to your followers, you know, it is a combination of you know, writing leads to wealth. Okay. So it starts, it starts with writing, you know, so like a, if you have, you know, if you have a podcast, if you have a newsletter, et Cetera, whatever your intellectual property is, make sure that you get it out to the world. So writing leads to, well, so like that’s, that’s one form of outreach. Another form of, I’m a salesperson, so I’m sold a half a billion dollars worth of computers in my career. I have no compunction whatsoever calling cold calling companies. Now that’s old school and I know how to do it. And we do that on a regular basis. We also have marketing campaigns.

ET: (24:35)
And what I mean by that is, so for example, I have an assistant, so my assistant, she has access to three of four different databases. We, we on Mondays we go through these complete databases. We, we identify organizations that have putting on conferences, et Cetera, where I would be a good fit. And then when, what we do is we identify those particular individuals and then we started an email campaign to them and we send out three emails that go out over six weeks where people respond to them. We we, we send them information about us and we get into conversations. And then for the people who don’t respond to us, we put them in the, into the pot for next year. So that’s part of our process. So we have a system that we use every single day that we make sure that something from our organization is going now.

ET: (25:23)
And right now we’ve got, we’ve got like pretty much on an automatic process. So you have to have some type of system where there’s, you know, and using technology, using people. However, whatever type of system that you have that constantly sends out who you are, what your brand is, publishing your brand. Cause I think it’s a killer for you not to do outreach in some form or another. You don’t have to do cold calling. That’s my super power. I’m a former C level executive. I think I can call, I can get on the phone today and call a c level executive Cole, because I’ve been in her position, I’ve been in his position. Does that make sense? And this the thing I’m inviting people to do. What’s your strength? So for example, with me, I suck at social media except linkedin. I’m damn good at linkedin.

ET: (26:10)
Linkedin has made me thousands of thousands dollars. I haven’t made it. I haven’t made a quarter from Facebook. Okay. So Facebook doesn’t work for me, but you know, use the tool or use the channel that works for you. That, that would be my advice. Now, am I going to ignore Facebook? Of course not. I got to figure it out. You know I want to leverage youtube more. I want to, I want to do live streaming more. So these are things that I need to get better at. These are rope. These are roadblocks for me today. But you know, if you interviewed me a year from now, Rory, I’m a, I’m a figure it

RV: (26:44)
[Inaudible] yeah, I think it’s a, that’s an interesting distinction too. I think there’s a lot more people who are in the brand builders group community that are good at social media and are wanting to be a speaker. Then there are speakers and that don’t use social media. And I think it’s interesting, the speaking world is one that social media certainly helps just because it’s an avenue to pump your intellectual property out there, but a lot like I would, I would venture to say a lot of the busiest speakers I know the highest paid speakers do not have a huge social media presence. And if it, I mean there are some, when you get into the celebrity level of speaking basically, so there are certain social media people who become celebrities. This is the j Shetty’s of the world right now. Mel Robbins, Rachel Hollis, of course, Rachel wrote a book that sold millions of copies sold and Mel Robbins Jay Shetty would be a good example. Gary Vaynerchuk would be a good example. I like that. But that’s the rare, rare exception. Most of the people who are making a living as a speaker, it’s not really coming from social media per se. It’s more from being out speaking, just introducing, showing videos of them, talking and like getting them in front of the people who book, who book meetings.

ET: (27:59)
Well, once thing I did is I invested, I have this phrase, invest for your interest. So I you’re like in the middle of the economic crisis in 2007, 2008, I did something counterintuitive. I actually spent more money on coaches and investing in programs than I did the previous decade. Counterintuitive. The reason I did that is because the world as I knew it in terms of marketing and promoting myself no longer existed. It didn’t work and I needed fresh ideas. I also needed someone to hold me accountable. So one of the programs I enrolled in, and it wasn’t to coach anybody, it was for me to learn about marketing is I became a certified girl marketing coach. And here’s one of the things I learned from that is I have, I did not have enough channels in terms of people finding out about me. I had a website, I had a business card, I had a, a, a one sheet package and that was it.

ET: (28:56)
I only have three ways that people could ever find out about me. Guerrilla marketing and says you must have a minimum of 10 and I’m going to say today you got to have a minimum of 20 social media is only one. It’s not like, oh I’m on Facebook, I’m on this. None of that. No, no, no, no. That’s just one type of channel that’s only, that’s on the van. Only counts as one. What are different ways that people can find out about you in terms of your business? So I think one of the things that, you know, again, I’m going to call them ordinary everyday people, you know, non household names. What you need to do is you need to have multiple channels in terms of how people find out about you and your, and your company is perfectly positioned to do that for them.

RV: (29:38)
Yeah. I mean we, and we teach those of you that are watching, that are familiar. When we teach the con the content diamond is a big thing that we talk about, you know, creating one piece of content, just tearing it apart and repurposing and all these different outlets and, and so forth and so on. But I agree with that. I, I remember I heard someone say one time they said, you need to pump your content out into the world as fast as possible and as many mediums as possible, every which way you can. You can get it. And it’s just, it’s just a matter of people knowing about you. And, and that became one of our taglines at brand builders group was like, if, if people, people don’t know about you, they can’t do business with you. I love, I love what you’re, what you’re saying there Ed.

RV: (30:23)
So buddy, we could go on and on and on about this stuff. I think this is so fun for me to walk down. Some of it nostalgic. Where should people go connect with you if they kind of want to follow you and, and, and see what you do and, and you know, just stay plugged into what you have going on. You can, you know, the easiest is this like Ed tech.com EDTA t.com and you can find my, you know, Facebook and all my social media. You can find it from there. So if I’m not promoting anything, so if you want, you want to hang out with me, find going to connect me with me. Just go there. Yeah. Well, and I mean, when it comes to presentation coaching, I mean, I still to this day, like, you know, the world champions when it comes to the mechanics of speaking from the platform, the world champions are, they’re the best.

RV: (31:09)
It’s not the hall of fame speakers necessarily. It’s not the highest paid speakers. It’s certainly not the celebrities. It’s not the New York Times bestseller. It’s not the politicians, the people who win the world championship or compete at that level have studied this craft. I’m into a science and, and they’re amazing at teaching. And that’s, you know, and for me, that’s you, you know, Darren Lacroix Craig Valentine. I think Mark Brown would be in that. David Brooks. Those were some of the legends, you know, specifically on the art of speaking. And so I just really appreciate you brother, and I appreciate the reputation you’ve built and, you know, thank you for supporting us along the way and, and we just, we wish you all the best. Thank you. And, and youtube my friend.

Ep 40: Following Your Life’s Calling in the Face of Persistent Fear with Luvvie Ajayi

RV: (00:07)
Hey brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for taking the time to check out this interview. As always, it’s our honor to provide it to you for free and wanted to let you know there’s no big sales pitch or anything coming at the end. However, if you are someone who is looking to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and get to know you a little bit and hear about some of your dreams and visions and share with you a little bit about what we’re up to see if we might be a fit. So if you’re interested in a free strategy call with someone from our team, we would love to hear from you. You can do that at brand builders, group.com/pod call brand builders, group.com/pod call. We hope to talk to you soon so I have to share with you all.

RV: (00:56)
I’m so excited for you to meet our next guest. This woman, was somebody that I met actually through Brand Builders Group and somebody that we started to talk about her brand strategy and all that kind of stuff. And I wasn’t personally familiar with her before and she is a rockstar and a total firecracker. And I don’t know how we had crossed paths before, but I’m telling you, you are, you’re going to, you’re going to love this woman. Her name is Luvvie Ajayi. She is a New York times bestselling author, speaker and digital strategist who really kind of lives at the intersection of like comedy technology and then activism. So her, her first book was called, I’m Judging You. The do better manual was an instant New York Times Bestseller. She also has a Ted Talk that has like 4 million views, which of course I’m very jealous of because her Ted talk has more views than mine, but that’s okay.

RV: (01:59)
And she has a podcast called ransom and randomness where she shares a lot of her, you know, raves and faves. And so she kind of like, you know, she interviews, she’s interviewed people like Oprah Winfrey and Gina Davis and Shonda Rhimes and she just like is she critiques pop culture. And then it’s also like using her voice for gender and racial justice. She has, she has a course a school called the do better Academy, which teaches people how to thrive in their business and their careers. And anyways, I’m telling you, she’s just, she’s just awesome. So Luvvie, thank you for making time for us.

LA: (02:33)
Thank you for having me Rory.

(02:35)
So you’ve been blogging for 16 years. I didn’t even know the word blog had been around for 16 years. Right?

(02:44)
Right. Yeah, I started blogging in 2003 when I was a freshman in college and I was peer pressured into doing it because I’m very pure, impressionable. Like my friends were like, we’re going to start web blogs. You should tune. I was like, okay. And

LA: (03:00)
I started blogging about my undergrad life and back then my major, cause I thought I was going to be a doctor. My major was psychology, premed and then I got a D in chemistry, chemistry that semester. I blogged about that too and I was like, fuck, you know what I’ll do. I’m going to be a doctor anymore so that’s not going to work for me. So as that dream died, the blogging thing kind of took over and I looked at it very casually. For me, it was just this thing that I’d like to do after, after I went to class or maybe I didn’t go to class that day and it took on a life of its own. Like basically people, more people started reading, reading it. Back then there wasn’t like a career as a blogger. It wasn’t considered a thing. It was just this thing that you did. It was like your online diary. When I graduated from college in 2006, I actually deleted my college blogs. I was like, Whoa, kind of feel like I finished a phase. I don’t have the material that I have before. I’m going to start a new blog where I’m talking less about me and my life and talking more about the world. And I started awesomely luvvie.com August, actually, August 8th, 2006 yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

RV: (04:15)
That is so rent wild. So, so it’s interesting cause you know, like if someone goes and sees you now they’re like, Oh, it’s just got hundreds of thousands of followers and then blah blah blah. But how do you stick with something for, for 16 years? Like there’s gotta be times when you’re like, I’m freaking sick of this. Or like I don’t have anything to say or I mean is there, or has it always just been like you always got stuff to say and

LA: (04:41)
Like, well I think the power of blogging and the gift of blogging back then because there were no expectations of it being a career was that we were able to, a lot of us who started that early and we didn’t, didn’t continue. So that’s why you don’t know their names. I always say that I wasn’t necessarily the one who threw the best party. I was the one who threw many parties and just kept on throwing them. And writing was a practice. So I didn’t realize that I was actually practicing this craft. For me it was just something that felt like a hobby, something that was low stress, which funny enough, made it more fun. So I did it over and over. I kept on doing it. I didn’t feel like something that I was obligated to do. And I think that was a gift in that it allowed me to build that right in practice. But also it allowed me to build the voice that was authentically me because it wasn’t strategic. It wasn’t like I was thinking, huh, I should cover this today because that’ll get me some Google hits or clicks. Back then you were writing for the love of writing and it crafted and I really didn’t realize that it was something that had big, become increasingly important to me until I realized that when I didn’t write it felt wrong.

LA: (05:56)
So what do you think?

RV: (05:58)
So let’s talk about the writing thing. Cause cause I know you’re a speaker also. I don’t want to, I want to talk about that. Like you and I kind of share that. But I, I came at it backwards. I wanted to be a speaker. Like I spent my, my whole college was like doing the world championship of public speaking and I wanted to be a speaker. And then it was like, Oh, if you really want to make it as a speaker, you gotta, you gotta have a book and you know, if you can write a bestseller, then it sounds like, okay. So then I stumbled into writing and then I’ve since like fallen in love with the idea. What do you think are some of the secrets of great writing particularly today? Right. Cause there’s so much noise. Like it’s just like, and it’s not just, it’s like there’s books and there’s eBooks and there’s podcasts and there’s your, you know, random social, and that was video and like your feed, you know, like Jay bear, he’s another friend, he’s one of the other faculty members. He always says like, you’re, you’re not just competing with other writers. You’re competing with everything that competes for attention to puppy dogs and fantasy football. And so like, yeah, and babies. Right. how do you compete with babies? How do you write to compete with babies

LA: (07:06)
Knowing that you are not competing with babies, that you can exist in the same space with the cute baby. I think what customer, the noise now, what cuts, what elevates content is content that feels really authentic and thoughtful and does not feel contrived because I think all of the media that we consume now has actually gotten us slightly better and picking out what’s contrived and what’s not. And now when you are right or what makes you stand out honestly is the voice and the perspective that you bring. Because let’s be clear, none of us are talking about something that nobody else was talking about. There’s a million people talking about the same thing you’re talking about. You will not be the singular person covering a topic and you have to be fine with that. What people want to hear and what makes people come back is they’re like, I see myself and I see my thoughts in what this person is saying or they just gave me perspective.

LA: (08:00)
I didn’t have, I always say that content needs to be either funny or useful or interesting or timely, as many of those as you can be as possible best if you’re not funny, don’t, don’t try to be funny. But if you can be useful and timely be that, you know, so I’m, I just say take the pressure off trying to compete with the baby cause you’re not gonna win that battle. The cuteness is too much. That’s not your lane. You’re not even one in the same stadium, let alone race. Your job is to create the best content that you can. That the barometer I use for myself is if I’m not the person who wrote this, if I’m not the person who created this, would I still find this interesting or good?

Speaker 3: (08:42)
[Inaudible]

RV: (08:43)
Interesting. Yeah. Just so kind of like, Oh, if I was a random person, what would this, would this either be funny, useful, interesting or timely for me if it wasn’t me? So I like I liked that a lot. You’ve talked, you, you’ve used already the word a couple of times, authenticity and like your own voice. And that kind of a thing.

LA: (09:04)
How do you,

RV: (09:05)
How do you find the line of going, I want to be real and I want to be transparent. I want to be authentic because that cuts through the noise and it’s me and I don’t want to be fake, but I don’t want to share, you know, so much like that. It’s too personal and you know, and also it’s like there’s a risk of being judged, right? There’s this risk of people like you got haters and trolls and yada yada yada. So like how do you find that line of the right amount of yourself to share with the public?

LA: (09:39)
Yeah, that’s a great question. For me, one of my separate spaces, I, I, I compartmentalize my work in that I’m a public figure, but not my whole life is public. I don’t feel like I owe people access to every piece of my life. And I think some people feel pressure of being like, yeah, how do I figure it out? No, what your lines and your boundaries are. And for me a big line in a boundary for me is my relationship. You know, like me and my, my fiance, like you won’t see him and I post pictures of [inaudible].

RV: (10:12)
Congratulations by the way, because now you said Beyonce and only on on the influence of personal brand. Would you ever hear such a personal detail?

LA: (10:22)
I’ve already got the team, but yeah, I think knowing that the personal boundaries and why, right? Because you have to know the pieces of yourself that you must protect from people no matter how much and how large and how deep information you share elsewhere. So that’s a big second piece is being clear that building community, the community that you’re telling this information to needs to not just be the larger public, even though the larger public can have access to it. Because be clear that no information that you share online is really private. So also operating off that. But I think about my audience as a single person. Like you made us do the avatar exercise and you’re saying that every brand needs to have that one person that you’re thinking of that you’re using to serve. So I think about that person whenever I’m giving information out.

LA: (11:13)
Like, if she’s listening to this, if they’re listening to this information, will this be helpful to them? Even if I’m being vulnerable. And it’s with the idea that vulnerability comes with risks. Authenticity comes with risks. At no point is the information that you’re releasing guaranteed to land perfectly well with everybody, which is why I use three questions to ask myself whenever I’m sharing any information, anytime I’m talking about something, even when it’s difficult, it’s the, it’s a checklist for myself in these moments to kind of tell me either yes or no. Don’t do it, go for it. And mine is, can I do, I mean can I defend it? Am I saying it with love or thoughtfully? And I use that as a checklist because in the moments that I want to be really authentic, really real, really vulnerable, it can be scary cause you’ll be like, am I sure I want to say this?

LA: (12:07)
Could this, see the thing is we can’t use the idea of could this face backlash as a criteria because we’d say nothing. You can say the sky is blue and somebody is going to disagree with you. So that can’t be the barometer that you’re using to say yes or no to saying something that you think is important. So I think everyone should come with their own checklist of things that kind of serve as your own. Like, okay, so I’m not being impulsive, I’m not just going on a social media rent just for the sake of the fact that I’m angry or sad. Have I thought this through? Is this something that is worth my time to do?

RV: (12:41)
Hmm. I love that. Do I mean it? Can I defend it and am I saying it thoughtfully or with love? So I’m going to talk about that last one a little bit because I mean your books comes right out and says right on the cover. I’m judging you. You make no qualms about it. You are commenting on top

LA: (13:01)
Culture. It’s, it’s really interesting cause I think

RV: (13:08)
Of all like my friends and you know, various like people we interface with and clients and stuff. You have, you kind of walked this very unique space of being both like a speaker and like a thought leader, but also an activist. How do you, how do you kind of find that space or like, you know, is that just something you decided to do? Did you stumble into it? And I guess I don’t even really know what my question is here. I’m mostly interested in just your perspective on,

LA: (13:38)
Okay.

RV: (13:38)
Why and how you view the written word as both your right and your responsibility to kind of speak your truths and how do you kind of reconcile with,

LA: (13:50)
You know, the various challenges that come with that. Yeah, so I called my book. I’m judging you because I feel like it’s a phrase that feels accusatory, but really at the bottom of it, it’s not because we try to tell each other, Oh, we don’t judge anybody. We don’t try to judge each other. We absolutely do. And my thing is we judge each other for the wrong things. We spend so much time judging each other for, you know what we’re looking like, you know who we love, you know what God we practice or who, you know what God, we don’t believe in that. The things that we’re supposed to actually be judging each other on are the values that we bring to the table. How good we’re treating each other and other people. How we are leaving this world better than we found it. That’s what we need to be judging each other on.

LA: (14:37)
You know, we just judge each other on like, how are you just being a good person who cares about other people around you? So I called my book that because I wanted to hold a mirror to all of us, you know, have been like, yes, we’re absolutely something that’s fine, but let’s probably shift some of the things that we’re judging each other about and how we’re walking through this world. And for me, I stumbled upon all my, all my titles that I go by today. I stumbled upon all of them, speaker, writer, whatever, activists this person. Like I feel like life got me there because I was just doing the things I was compelled to do. And no, I love that you had clarity at 17. You’re like, I’m going to be a speaker at 17. I really thought I was going to be a doctor.

LA: (15:20)
So literally that I am today is opposite of what I thought I would be. And it’s because I ultimately kind of followed the path of doing the thing that felt like doing. So if it felt like speaking up about this issue I did. If it was about getting on the stage and talking about this thing I did, if it was about writing this book I did. So I don’t necessarily take myself seriously and that I was like, yeah, manifested all the sums, all strategy. None of it was strategy. Funny enough it was, I think my story of my journey is kind of a Testament of what happens when you kind of just follow your own like your own voice without necessarily doubting it. You know what I mean? Like you follow the things that you feel like doing without expectation, without any type of like plan and things just kinda came together.

LA: (16:10)
One question I get all the times when people say something like, well how do you find your voice? Or like how do you find that thing? It was less about finding it and more about not doubting when it’s in front of your face. We spent so much time but low hanging fruit thing like that thing that you wake up thinking about doing that thing that you always like, I should try that non, I’m not going to, that is probably the thing that you should be spending more time on. And because we’ve been told we’re supposed to be the doctors and the lawyers because everything else kind of has no blueprint. We’ll talk ourselves out of doing a lot of things that we want to do. So I think I just didn’t talk myself out of it and when I tried to talk myself out of it, it didn’t work.

RV: (16:52)
Yeah. So that’s, that’s the part that I love. I love that. I think it’s like, I think that’s super profound is it’s, it’s, it’s less about sort of finding your own voice and just following your voice without doubting it. The hard part is the without doubting it. Do you think that inherently you’re just like a rebel or you’re just that courageous or like why do you think that you didn’t stop yourself? Cause it sounds like maybe you did have some of those thoughts. It wasn’t just like love. He’s going to tell the world what she cares what she thinks and she doesn’t care that that’s not really what it is. It’s more like, well this is what I think. There could be some negative things about doing this but I’m going to do it cause I feel like I have to or I feel like I should or like walk us through that part and not outing.

LA: (17:45)
Yeah. I think for me the moments when I wanted to not do the thing that I wanted to do, I paused and I acknowledged that moment and I was like, yeah, I’m totally frightened. This is frightening. I shouldn’t do this. There’s, it makes no sense. Like you’re not a writer. Anytime I would try to talk myself out of that moment, it will stick with me where I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It’s like when I walk out of a room and I knew I was supposed to have said something and I did it, it kind of sit with me. I’d be like, ah, I should’ve just done it. So I hated feeling like that. I had it feeling like I didn’t do something I was supposed to do. So I was like, you know what? Okay, I’m just going to do it. Even if it’s scary, I’m just going to do it and close my eyes and run away if I need to, but I’m just going to do it.

LA: (18:30)
Cause I didn’t like the feeling of you should have done something where you didn’t eat. So I kind of operated from that idea is at the end of the day, I have to be okay with me. I have to be able to sit with me. It’s not as, it’s less about people’s ideas. It’s more about will I be sitting here for three hours obsessing about the fact that I didn’t say that thing or do that day. And if I will, you know what? No, just do it. Do it, whatever fall happens. But at least you won’t have the moments of so it’s one of those like having a life of Oh well instead of what if yeah, the writing thing and, and I, I started realizing that a lot of my, the best thing that I’ve done with the best since I’ve happened for me have been things that I’ve done in the middle of being afraid of saying that thing that felt scary.

LA: (19:24)
Choosing to not apply for a job cause I was like, I think I should make this writer’s thing work. All the things that I’ve done that have paid off by dividends, the Ted talk that you’re talking about that has like four, 4 million views. I was afraid of that talk, turned it down twice because I was afraid I wasn’t ready for it. One of my friends ended up being like, Hey, you’re not everybody get this done. You can, you can write this Ted talk in two weeks and kill it. And I was like, okay. So in those moments too, it helps when you have people who can reflect those backs to us and be like, you don’t have the courage right now. I’m going to give you the courage that you should have.

RV: (20:01)
Let’s talk about speaking for a second cause that that’s become a big part of your current primary business model.

LA: (20:07)
Yeah.

RV: (20:09)
If somebody wants to be a speaker, like how did that start happening for you? Cause it sounds like, you know, this was a casual blog and then it was like okay, now I’m writing and suddenly I’m a writer. And then how does that become speaking? Like where do you start getting speaking engagements? Do people come to you? Did you go to the [inaudible]

LA: (20:29)
Yeah. How did all that start to happen? Funny enough, 95% of speaking engagements that I’ve had, people came to me today. Yeah. Not even back then. My first speaking engagement was because somebody came to me. So my professional background after I graduated from college and I was like doctor is not it. I really fell in love with marketing communications cause I had an internship during college. So when I graduated I ended up getting a marketing internship for a nonprofit in Chicago, a journalism nonprofit. And I was like, this is where I belong. I was usually the person who introduced the organizations I worked for to social media cause I’m an early adopter of all of these platforms. Facebook I’ve been on since July, 2004. So marketing was big. And then I had a full time job working for another organization that actually taught nonprofits how to tell their stories using social media. And April, 2010 I got laid off that job but a month later they hired me to come do us a workshop, a Twitter strategy workshop. Wow. First ever paid speaking engagement

RV: (21:37)
From the people that fired you? Yes, I do. As a consultant, like as a trainer. I love that. That is a great story.

LA: (21:46)
First ever speaking engagement. And it’s funny because I have no clue. What was I thinking? Oh I am a speaker out. They literally was like, we want you to come lead this Twitter strategy training. All right, great. And I did that and then I got speaking engagements. I got invited to do a panel at blogger, which was the large, at that point was the largest community of women writers in the world. And they have your moderate a panel with Lizz Winstead who’s co-founder co-creator of the daily show. So like I felt like I was Forrest Gump, like Forrest Gump just stumbled upon these major moments. That was me. People were like, and then people saw me in that room. I got my next speaking engagement out of that room. So it was basically kind of organically grew. And then the more I spoke, the better I got and here we are.

RV: (22:36)
So a lot of it was just, it’s been a journey. It sounds like a lot of consistency and then a lot of courage to just be vulnerable and say what you feel like you’re supposed to say, even if you are scared to say it at certain times.

LA: (22:54)
Yeah. I, I called myself a 16 year overnight success. People see the hockey, the hockey stick success and think it just happened. I’m like, it was 16 years of consistency and I’m the person who stayed at the party and you couldn’t forget me because I was there the whole time. And I continue to be there. That hard work, that consistency. And my, I’m a, I’m a forever student. At no point do I think all right, I have made it. I am here. There’s no, there’s nothing left to do. I’m always evolving and what I’m doing, what I’m speaking on, what I’m teaching, I’m who I am and my audience has been able to grow with me and see all of that, which is why my book instantly hit the times list without like a lot of, shoot, I didn’t do any morning national, I wasn’t on the today show, I wasn’t on good morning America.

LA: (23:48)
But my, my book end up number five because my audience has seen that consistency. They’ve been along on the journey, they’ve seen the story and the transparency and they also see the courage. And I think sometimes we think courage is the big moments of maybe you go March or you know, you sign a big check. Or I think courage is in the tiny moments every day that the times that we tell ourselves, okay, this piece of doubt that I have, I’m going to move it to the side and do that thing anyway. That thing that I’m afraid of, I’m just going to do it anyway. Like I don’t believe fearlessness means lack of lack of fear. I think fearlessness means you are acutely afraid of that thing are you fear it, but you say, you know what, I’m going to do it anyway. So that fearlessness also carries me through.

RV: (24:37)
Yeah. That is so good. One other question. Well I actually have two other questions, but just in terms of the early adapter, cause I see that, I see that very much in you. Like you’ve been early adapter. Is there anything that you’re paying attention to right now, whether it’s like a social media platform or a topic or a trend or like is there anything that just kind of like has Luvvie’s attention that you’re going, this is coming and you all should be ready for it?

LA: (25:07)
Ooh, that’s good. People always talk about like video is the next frontier of content, which of course because people love that. But I think the people who are really doing well right now are creating content that does not feel like it’s attached to any larger strategy, if that makes sense. It feels very organic. It feels like you’re getting a glimpse to somebody’s life. Like the influencers who are doing very well right now are the ones who are telling you about their day. Even when they’re not sitting in front of a computer screen doing the work. They’re the ones who are able to move units and sell books. The ones who people feel personally attached to. I think now people are less people. You might have a million followers and you get a lot of likes, but if you drop a tee shirt and you can’t sell 30, then you really see that right now people are putting a lot of stock into feeling like they know somebody and whether it’s video or in written word, that’s huge. That’s huge and will continue to be huge. But in terms of platform, I’m seeing how all the platforms are mimicking each other’s content. I really think Instagram is currently the space that people are spending a lot of their time in. Yeah.

RV: (26:28)
Are you on TiKTok? Just curious

LA: (26:31)
Know what’s funny? I was thinking about TikToc. I’m not on TikTok. It used to be called what Musically? I feel like my job is not to be on every platform. TikTok, I’m gonna leave, I’m gonna leave to the demographic that is at right now, which kind of like what teenagers. I’m not on TikTok yet because my audience is also not on TikTok, so we actually wouldn’t even make sense. You don’t TikTok right now.

RV: (26:55)
Yeah. Yep. No, that’s an interesting thing. I, you know, we made that decision with Snapchat long time ago. Just a conscious decision, I’m not going to do it. I don’t regret that. I don’t regret that one. There’s a few that there’s, there’s a few that we’ve missed. We were super late to the party with Instagram and like, you know, well that there was some other stuff going on there, but I had to, I’m, I’m re had to restart my Instagram profile here recently. I’m restarted it from scratch. So but I think anyways, it’s just, it’s, I think it’s fascinating to see people like you and go, like, what are you thinking about? So Instagram is really like the place.

LA: (27:30)
I love what it’s changed considerably in terms of where I spend my most of my social media time. It used to be Facebook and then Twitter, and then Instagram. It’s completely switched. Instagram and then Facebook and Twitter less

RV: (27:44)
[Inaudible]. But like you’re saying, it’s, it’s the idea of people feeling like they know you, like they actually know you that is really working.

LA: (27:53)
And I think that’s, I think that’s super cool. So, yeah.

RV: (27:56)
Where do you want people to go lovey? If they want to get to know you, they want to follow you and like check you out and see what you’re up to.

LA: (28:03)
So I am all on all the platforms besides Snapchat and ticktock. [inaudible] I also have the benefit of being a one name social user person so you can find me on all the platforms. But just my first name, L U E and fun fact love. He’s actually a a British slang that really kind of means darlin nice. I do Googled lovey 15 years ago, the D the definition in Marion website would’ve come, come up number one, you to Google. Love you. Now it’s all me.

RV: (28:41)
That’s bad. That’s good. That’s a good thing. You own it. Pretty soon you can be like Oprah and you could be down to one letter. You’ll just be hell. Oh,

LA: (28:53)
That is a power right there.

RV: (28:55)
And yeah, just, Oh and like you will haveL magazine and you know, like

LA: (29:02)
That’s just saying, listen, Oprah has crowned me and her one of her lists. I was like, you know, I would not mind being the heir apparent, but yeah, push the envelope a little bit more. I’m, I’m slightly edgier, but she’s amazing. She’s, she’s actually goals in terms of the evolution of career. She didn’t just stick to being the person who was doing one thing and she was a Chicago girl and made everybody come to her. I’m in Chicago also and I love my city. So I was like, there’s already a model for that.

RV: (29:33)
Yeah. Yes, there’s, there’s certainly is lovey, I want to just thank and I think I get a lot of, I draw a lot of courage from watching you and just seeing, you know, looking at your body of work and what you’ve done and just, you know, willing to use your voice to do good in the world and do what you believe is right and all of that. And I think that’s really, really tremendous. And I just, I, I’m so thankful that you made some time to share with us. And I also want to applaud your consistency, girl. I mean you’ve been doing it for a long time and just like it’s, it really, you know, it’s just, it’s just a really, you’re a really great story and I think people can can learn a lot from just watching you and following your steps.

LA: (30:20)
Thank you. And I, and I’m really proud of my book. I’m judging you because I like is the manifesto my thoughts like my larger thoughts but on paper. So I hope you can go get it and yeah, follow me on all social. I’m on Instagram specifically also lovey. Rory, you are incredible because when I saw the podcast you did with Lewis, two and a half pages of notes, I sent it to all my friends and I was like you have got to watch this because it was like a masterclass and that’s what I became obsessed with brand builders group now and I believe I like posted all over Instagram and Facebook and Twitter and I was like y’all have to see this and then you DMD me. It’s incredible. I I respect the work that you’re doing. I think it’s amazing and glad you exist because this work is necessary.

RV: (31:07)
Yeah. Well thank you. That makes me, that makes me feel good. Well, let’s rise together, my friend and inspire, inspire people. So we wish you all the best. We’ll definitely stay in touch. This won’t be the last time lovey. I gie everybody. She is fantastic. Make sure that you go follow her and get the book. I am judging you. And there it is. All right, my friend. Take care. Thanks Laurie.