AJ: [00:00:00] Lee Pepper. I am so excited to have you on the show today. And, uh, here’s what I wish I would share with everyone listening. As you guys know, there’s a lot of, uh, new friends that we have on the show that’s not today. Uh, Lee is a genuine personal friend. We go back now over 10 years. Can you believe that Lee: it’s gone by so quickly? AJ: When we first met, uh, your kids were still in like elementary school. School and now you have a soon to be college graduate, like crazy. Um, so I’m so excited to have you on the show and one of the reasons. For everyone listening why I wanted to have Leo on the show today as I just think he brings a really unique perspective to the importance of marketing and executive leadership and innovation that you just don’t hear a lot in typical digital marketing strategies on the web today. So this is a true marketing expert, and I can say that because I watched him behind the scenes at work and if it, if I don’t recall, like you helped [00:01:00] 60 X your former company before it went. Lee: At Foundation Recovery Network, our first private equity play, we returned 60 times. AJ: That’s insane. And, uh, for all of you who listening, I met Lee because in my former life when I was in sales consulting, I was hired by the company that he was running all the marketing for to come in and help with sales strategy. And I’m sitting in these call centers and they’re, they’re yielding 20, 30, 40,000. 40,000 calls a month from his marketing strategies, and my job was to help convert those into sales. But just sit there for a second and go, what would your business look like if you had 10,000 inbound calls a month? Crazy. It’s wild. So we’re gonna talk a lot about marketing, but also what marketing looks like in terms of innovation and on the leadership team, which is what I’m really excited about. But before we get into that, I wanna help our audience get to know you just a little bit, and you have a varied background. Anything from [00:02:00] military to presidential campaigns to uh, you know, private equity funded exits. But let’s start way back in the military. And you were in the Army. Yes. AJ: So your new book has a lot to do with some things that you learned in the military, in the Army, and how you can apply that to leadership and marketing. We, I would like to know what those are. Lee: Right. And I, and I hope, uh, thank you so much for the kind introduction. Uh, aj I think that for me, you know, when you’re first, uh, enlisting, I enlisted in the Army when I was a sophomore in college, and I, uh, was a 76 Yankee. Unit supply clerk. So you go to basic training and you know, one of the things that, that you learned, you obviously learn how to shoot, right? Uh, but nobody wins any battles just because they know how to shoot. Like there’s, there has to be a strategy and that is where I took that. Then when I went to officer candidate school and got commissioned as an officer went to, went to armor school. At Fort Knox. [00:03:00] That’s where then when I transitioned to my corporate career, especially in marketing, a lot of people want to get stuck on the how to shoot on the tactics and what really lacking is the strategy. So that’s what I try to approach in my book, never Outmatch, is to, is to give some voice to here are the strategies which are pretty accessible to most people, even if they don’t have not served in the military. They’re mental models, like they’re very accessible. And if you will focus on creating the strategy, then you will decide the tactics that will make you successful. If you do it in the inverse, you’re constantly switching tactics and you’re never getting that 60 times return that everybody wants. AJ: Okay, ’cause I wanna sit on this for a second because. We at Brand Builders Group are a personal brand strategy firm. Yes. And we know one of the biggest objections we get as you know, potential new customers get on calls with us is they’re like, yeah, yeah, yeah. But when do we get to do the fun stuff? Right? When do we get to [00:04:00] launch the website? When do we get to make the pretty designs? When do we get to? And it’s like, I don’t know, depends on the strategic approach you’re taking. So this is something we hear all the time ’cause we’re big believers in like. If you don’t have a good blueprint, then you don’t know how to build. Why is it? So many people skip the strategy. Lee: I think you, you hit the nail on the head when you said people wanna get to the fun stuff. You know, when I retired from the Meadows a few years ago, I didn’t necessarily mean to get in consulting, but people realized that I was now retired, semi-retired, not really retired, I guess. Uh, but, uh, pretend AJ: retired. Yeah, Lee: they, they started reaching out and calling a lot of word of mouth and. Every single one of my clients, it was always the same thing. We got started doing this one thing, this one tactic, and it’s not working, and we have to kind of reverse it and go, let’s start high. Kinda like what you guys do with brand builders, which I, I love being connected with you all, but I think it’s because. Uh, people, especially when you’re running a business, and a lot of times when my phone rings it’s [00:05:00] because there’s a major problem, like they’ve tried everything else that’s not working, and there are, there’s pressure for results and so people will over promise, oh, I can come in and I can help produce this many. Uh, website visits as much traffic or I can produce as many phone calls, but yet we’re still missing out on the whole strategy part, which is really, there’s a lot of temporary things you can do, but it’s not long lasting. Whereas the way you approach it, the way I approach it, it’s long term. It’s long lasting. AJ: Yeah. So I mean, a lot of what I hear you saying is like the strategy helps prepare for the long run versus a lot of like the quick tactics. It might work temporarily. But like with any fad, it’s kind of, kind of fade away, right? If you don’t know what to do next Lee: in the military, you can’t have these fads. Yeah. Or else you will get overrun. And there’s people, there’s people’s lives, uh, at stake. And so. It’s not that necessarily in our corporate li corporate businesses that lives are at stake, though a lot of times in healthcare there are. Mm-hmm. But we have to start with the overall strategy. But, and then [00:06:00] you can maneuver, you can change tactics, you know, things will change within there, but you have to have this overarching strategy. AJ: So when it comes to marketing strategy, like if there were some universal principles or some universal concepts, even if they’re just mindset shifts. What would you say to you are like the, the core truths? Lee: Here’s the first, here’s the first one that I always bring up. It’s this notion of commander’s intent. And what commander’s intent is. Do, do, do your, does your team, do they understand what the board. And what management actually wants. Like you need to give that commander’s intent. And then each of your team leads are going to take from that their own personal commander’s intent and they need to give that to their teams. And what happens a lot of times we want innovation. I. But we can’t just command innovation. We have to set up the culture that’s going to allow your team the freedom of movement, good military term, right, so that you can [00:07:00] innovate. But what ends up happening, a lot of times we end up being very top down, whereas innovation and creativity is bottom up. And in the military, there are tons of examples I give them in my book, where you would’ve lost a battle. Unless you allowed your, uh, soldiers to have that creative freedom of movement. So instead of saying, stay right here in this foxhole and defend it to the death, no, they’re told, Hey, here’s your strategy here. You have commander’s intent, you have freedom of movement. But a lot of times in our companies, we don’t really, we don’t operate that way. We have this top down mentality and we wonder then why our teams are not innovative. Mm. Because we haven’t given the freedom to be innovative. That is one of the things that when I first met you, uh, aj, was that. I had just taken over the, the call center, our admissions team, and I knew from the beginning, no matter what we did in the marketing, no matter how we changed the lead source, the volume, our conversion rate wasn’t changing. And so I wanted to be able to have that, the ability to, to change the [00:08:00] conversion rate, even if it made it worse. Yeah. I wanted to understand that we were controlling. That’s when I started asking questions like, who do we need to meet in this town? And that’s how we got referred to you. So. My team knew the commander’s intent and we had the freedom and the to innovate, which we did. AJ: Okay, so for so many companies that don’t have that, why not? Lee: I think it’s for a lot of small business owners and I work with a lot of folks that are owner founders. There is this struggle that this is their baby, that this is their company, their brand, and they are afraid to even. Let go of anything. And so a lot of times when I’m consulting the, the message is you spent the time to hopefully hire the right people and go through a good process. You have to entrust that they are hearing your commander’s intent. And there are some strategies. I talk about it in the book, there’s a thing called a talk back. Mm-hmm. You know, and in the military, when we’re giving orders, we ask for the talk back, [00:09:00] repeat back what I just said. So I make sure that you understood. What my intent really is. Right. And a lot of times in the corporate world, we don’t do that. Hmm. Um, you know, I, I had, uh, in my book I talk a lot about George Patton, probably one of my favorite generals, you know, ’cause he was armor and there are. There’s this lead from the front mentality, and I think you’ve been in enough companies and you certainly remember the days at foundations when you come, when you came into the foundation’s office, I dunno if you remember where my desk was, but my desk was out in the middle. Mm-hmm. Like Lee: we had a very open, open workspace 30, we had 30 staff members just in marketing, and I was right there in the middle. I was, I had always known from the beginning of my military career that I wanted to be at the front lines. Mm-hmm. Right. There’s a great example in my book How Patton used that same strategy, uh, to, to take over a failed American strategy in the, in, in North Africa. And within 90 days, you know, they were, they had ousted Rommel from North Africa. So there’s also this mentality, you can’t be stuck in your office. You can’t be stuck leading from [00:10:00] spreadsheets. You’re gonna have to be kind of on the front lines. AJ: You know, it’s so interesting that you say that because only here recently, so Brand Builders Group is about to turn seven years old this summer, and in the last like four or five months I have taken back over the sales department, but for the last seven years. Ironically, it’s kind of been led by other team members, um, and they’ve been, they’ve done a great job, but there were some things that were coming up where I’m like, I need to get back on the front lines. Something’s not clicking, something’s not working. And it has been so invigorating, so refreshing to be listening to the sales calls, remapping the sales talks. But like to what you’re just saying, it’s like how many people are willing to get back on the front lines and go, no, it’s my job to get in there and be on the front lines and be accessible. Lee: Absolutely. You know, and, and aj this is one of the things that you all brought to foundations was this notion of actively listening to phone calls. And that was something that was not being done. [00:11:00] And we implemented that. And a lot of times when I come in to do an analysis or, or start working or coaching a CEO or a CMO, that’s the first thing I’ll ask. How many calls have you listened to this week? And it’s every single time it’s, I haven’t listened to calls. Hmm. Lee: And yet. They feel like they have a marketing problem, that’s why they’ve called me. But invariably, there’s, there’s some mix. It’s not just necessarily the marketing issue. It may be a conversion issue. And so you have to be able to take the time and not, and, and not be afraid, right. To jump in. Because like for me, I didn’t have any expertise, right? In sales. Like I learned a lot from you all. Uh, but I wasn’t afraid to listen in and learn. And so that’s a, a lot of where you, you have to kind of put away some of your biases. And, uh, I write about this, uh, you know, in my book there are a lot of, uh, cognitive biases that we all, that we all bring to the table that we don’t even realize around subconscious. So if you’re a, a finance person, right? And I talk a lot about how, you know in [00:12:00] the book, how you can start to communicate differently. With your finance team and your accounting team, but there are cognitive biases that they have. Doesn’t mean they’re bad people, but they have these cognitive biases. And if you’re not aware, you don’t even know how to fashion, you know, building out your KPIs or how to fashion, uh, how you communicate in an effective way. AJ: You know, that’s interesting because I think a lot of times when you think about companies as they grow and scale departments start to become siloed. Right, and marketing does what marketing does, and sales does what sales does, and it’s like, well, no, really, part of marketing’s job is to provide leads for the sales team, and if they’re not talking together. Inevitably there’s gonna be some issues. So I’d like to hear from you like what is the role that marketing should play in driving enterprise value, like in an ideal world, and you’ve had so much experience with being at the helm of not just marketing, but technology and information, but like what is an ideal role for marketing to play in a company’s growth? Lee: Uh, I [00:13:00] think that marketing has the ability with the right person developing a strategy to impact so many departments. Amanda, uh, one of the, the, uh, examples I use in the book is with, uh, human resources. We always say that, wow, I wish I could recruit better people. Hmm. And I wish our retention rates were better, but yet we never, like, we never partner. With the marketing team to see how that relates. And so I use this example of force multiplication of how you can kind of create a budget to kind of take advantage of that. But there’s so many opportunities where you can become kind of that, that you can relieve the pain that your other departments have. So, like in the HR example, marketing can really help with retention, keeping people like employed longer and, and, and being happier in their job versus just saying, Hey, hr, that’s your job when HR doesn’t necessarily have that experience. Same thing in accounting and finance, you can make accounting and finance’s job a lot easier, right? If you’re in partnership and connected with them and now all of a sudden, instead of just being another department that they have to kind of, you know, maintain and [00:14:00] run reports for, they see you as really driving value. It’s just understanding what, what is important to them, if that makes sense. AJ: So I would love to hear just a couple of minutes. How do you do that? Right. Because in theory, that’s like, yes, our communi like our, you know, different departmental, you know, teams are communicating and they’re working together and they’re collaborating and it’s shared resources. And in reality we know that often doesn’t happen. Lee: Right. Well, you said this word shared resources and I kind of get, uh, tinged. So I think that there’s, there’s, there’s a couple of things that, how you get tight with them. One, you have to be part of their budget. Hmm. And a lot of times companies are like, well, what? At foundations, we had a percentage of the alumni team budget went to marketing. A percentage of the HR budget went to market so that we were responsible, right? That we were actually having meetings and that we had, that they had skin in the game, and we had skin in the game. So many companies don’t budget that way, and I’m not [00:15:00] suggesting you’re giving like 50%, it can just be like 5%, but all of a sudden now you’re putting, you’re, you’re giving your marketing team. Right. Something that they can maybe hire somebody extra to kind of help support. A lot of times we say, oh, it’s gonna be a shared resource. Well, if there’s not actual hard dollars to it, you’re not gonna get their attention. The second thing is, are the goals matching? And I use an example in, in, in, in my book where, uh, there was a, a, a, an opera. There was a time when, uh, finance and marketing, like our, uh, bonus goals were not aligned. And so all of a sudden it creates a lot of headache. So you have to make sure from a leadership perspective that each of the department’s goals are aligned and supportive of each other. Because if there’s any type of contradiction or incongruency, now you’re gonna have inviting, which is what a lot of times you see in companies when they’re like, well, marketing’s not helping me Or, well, maybe you didn’t budget and maybe you also didn’t align your, your actual bonus goals together. AJ: Interesting. So if [00:16:00] you were to look at a company, I know this is a broad statement here. If you look at like allocation of resources, human capital dollars and cents, is there like a best practice of what should go to marketing versus other departments? Lee: Well, that, you know, in my experience in behavioral health, we always tried to, uh, keep our marketing budget 10% of net revenue. So that was, but you know, some companies can afford more and some companies maybe they have less margin. So it has to be less, but I think it shouldn’t be a secret. Like you should develop, what is your number going to be? And it shouldn’t be a secret. And then when it comes to other departments, they have to understand the value and how you can solve some of their problems. So like in the HR situation, you know, I think, you know, if you establish a starting point, so you, you might go with something very small, like 5%, and if they know that 5% of their budget, now they’re gonna start wanting to know like, what are you doing for me instead of just this? Oh, shared re resources, and maybe I’ll get something, maybe I won’t. No, now they’re a [00:17:00] customer of marketing. Right. And I think that all of a sudden you start to get some synergy there because from the marketing perspective, I want to be well connected to HR because I’m gonna get some value from maybe website traffic, you know, or outbound links, you know, coming into my website from stuff they’re doing. Like there’s some benefit there too. Uh, and that’s where in my book, I, I talk a lot about this idea of force multiplication. AJ: Yeah, I love that. And that is for sure the first, I have heard about this whole concept of make sure all the other departments are almost customers of marketing. Absolutely. And this vested interest, they Lee: can’t be free. Marketing’s not doing free work. AJ: That’s right. That that’s good. Lee: Yeah. AJ: I mean, and that really does force some more of that communication and collaboration and transparency in the budget. Lee: Yeah. I mean, so many times I’ve been at some of my customers and they’ll, they’ll be like, oh, well, HR is doing, they, they decided to start experimenting with TikTok or reels and, and you wonder why they’re terrible because they didn’t like partner with somebody in marketing and kind of maybe help and maybe marketing would love to, but marketing’s also [00:18:00] busy driving revenue. That’s AJ: right. Lee: So we, why would you want to take them away? So you have to give them some allocation. And now all of a sudden you’re gonna see amazing things that can happen. AJ: Okay. So you just brought up something that leads me to a question that I have around, you know, maybe they’re experimenting in TikTok or reels or all these other things. So there is a lot of companies that you can just tell there is not a strategy in place, they’re just dabbling. Right. And with the amount of data and the amount of platforms that are available now, like what would you say are some key. Tips or key strategies to make sure that you win at marketing. And also what have you seen of why companies are failing at marketing? Lee: Wow. Well, there, there’s a lot in that question, aj, but what, what I would say is that you have to forget these vanity metrics. AJ: Mm-hmm. Lee: And that’s what we, I see a lot. Um, you have to just, you have to make sure you’re communicating not only to wait, be clear. AJ: Like tell everyone what’s a vanity metric in your world? Lee: Well, a vanity metric might be, um, an [00:19:00] example of YouTube. You know, it might be, um, subscribers. Mm-hmm. Lee: Um, it might be, uh, even views when, so that, that to me is a vanity metric. Whereas a real metric is I want to see the number of comments on a video because if you’re getting comments that’s real, people that have watched your video that are giving you feedback or with views or with subscribers, could just be bots that were bought. Mm-hmm. Could be poor traffic. So for me, I, I go straight to the comments. Um, same thing when it comes to, uh, site visits on your website. I mean, it’s a number you look at, but it’s a vanity metric, right? What really is important is the conversions. How many phone calls did I get? Or if you’re doing lead forms or live chat, that’s where it’s really is important. Um, so I, I’ve had a lot of times where I’ll come in and I’ll coach A CMO and work with the agency to kind of help shift that narrative. AJ: Okay. So real quick for everyone who’s listening, ’cause I think this is a really big deal because at least in our world, [00:20:00] in the personal brand space, there’s a lot of focus on vanity metrics. Yeah. A lot. And I think some of that is because you get tempted by, oh, I wanna blow up. Oh, I wanna go viral. Oh, I wanna do this because everyone else is. And at the end of the day, we all know that doesn’t necessarily mean you have any dollars in your banking account. We say a lot of times people are Twitter rich and dollar poor, right? Those are the vanity metrics, right? So in terms of the real metrics. Can we just do like a quick list? You said comments, so some engagement, um, email subscribers. Would that be one? Yes. Like what, what are some other real metrics people should be looking at? Lee: Yeah, I think, um, well, like when I’m thinking about like what we were just talking about off camera, about, you know, our, our conversions off our website for books. I mean, you want to get to that number and so there’s. The, the, the key is that most agencies, they’re going to tell you they can’t do that because, well, they don’t have, they don’t have insight into your backend. Hmm. Right. Uh, well, yeah, you can get ’em insight, like [00:21:00] you can get ’em access to your call tracker, you can get ’em access, uh, to, uh, you know, actually what converted, and you kind of start to remove that. And I, and I think that we’ve fallen into this vanity metric. Um, situation because we didn’t have that integration. But the integration is possible. And even if you have to use something as fancy as Microsoft Excel, it is possible right to track this and get the information back. Um, a, a similar one is, uh, when you look at, say, Facebook and, and Instagram, it’s likes, you know, I mean, that might, could, you know, you, you really gotta drill down like what is, who is liking and how are you getting these likes? Again, I like to get back to the actual, um. Uh, comments and also the clicks into your website. Like that might be something that’s not quite as vanity. Like, I, you can drive all this traffic, but did somebody actually click and now you’ve got, now you’ve got something to work with. You can say, well, I either had a conversion problem mm-hmm. On my, on my social channels or on my website, which that could be valid. Mm-hmm. Maybe you don’t have the right CTAs and you can fix [00:22:00] that or. You’ve got a problem with the kind of traffic you’re getting. So where are you sourcing your traffic? You know, where are you, where are you trying to get your traffic from? And you might find, oh, well I didn’t realize that I was paying the agency to run these paid, you know, ads. And they’re, and they’re terrible. Yeah. But now you’ve got something to work with, but you, it’s your responsibility. You know, you have to kind of do the research and it’s not that complicated because, um, we’re not talking about really super complicated theoretical things here. Right. You’re saying how many phone calls did I get? How many people clicked on that ad and then how many bought something? I mean, it’s not that complicated. AJ: That’s good. Okay. Sorry. I wanted to hit through, ’cause that, that’s a constant never ending source of conversation in the brand builders group community of Right. Putting the attention quite honestly on the wrong thing and having the right things, the real things that matter, I think is a big deal. And Lee: aj, I don’t know if you remember me saying this, but you know, with most of the behavioral health clients that I, that I coach and support, um, they’re surprised when they’re always talking about, well, I [00:23:00] need more phone calls. I need more phone calls. And I’m like, do you? Mm-hmm. Because what I’m trying to do. In working with an admissions team, I’m trying to get one phone call, right? That converts to one assessment. That then that assessment converts to one admission. Mm-hmm. I’m Lee: not looking for 500 phone calls. Yeah. Lee: But what does that mean? Mm-hmm. Lee: So they’re all, and usually when I explain it that way, they’re like, yes, I want less noise. I want better quality. That’s right. That’s where the vanity metrics miss out sometimes. Mm-hmm. You know? And you more is AJ: not always better. Lee: Yeah. More is not always better. I want quality. Listen, we only have so many hours in the day. Right. So like for me with, you know, especially, you know, with my coaching and consulting clients, I don’t, I can’t take 10 prospecting calls a day. You know, I mean, I Maybe that’d be all you do. I mean, it’s all I would do. Mm-hmm. I, I need the one. Right. AJ: That’s good. Okay, so back to this, you know, what are some of the, you know, reasons why marketing fails, and then [00:24:00] what are you, what, how do you, like, can you spot a company and go, they have a great marketing team, they have great marketing and also. That they don’t. Lee: Um, y well, yes. You know, and the thing is, I, I think about my clients. I, I’ve got, um, a dear client who’s who I’ve, who’s been with me for a long, long time. And, um, when I first got to their location, I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna name, I’m gonna protect the, but, uh, but I, when I first protect the innocent air, yeah. When I, when I got there, I was watching what they were trying to do on, on TikTok and, and Instagram, and they thought. That they were doing it right because they were just busy. Mm. And I, and I use an, I use an example, uh, in my book about this. How, you know, if you’re, if you’re, if you’re not careful, you’re gonna, you’re gonna look busy, you’re gonna be in your uniform and, and, and all the pageantry, and then all of a sudden you’re gonna get completely wiped out. Mm-hmm. You know, by somebody that has done some research and is gonna wipe you out. And so that was what was happening with, with this clients like they were. They, they had just said to their team, we, we need, we need, we need [00:25:00] reels, we need TikTok. Mm. And that was where they left it. And like, nobody, like, thought to maybe get some coaching, some maybe bringing, have a strategy. Have a strategy, right. Instead of just doing the tactical part. Which is what? And, and that’s the danger of our technology today in a sense that we do make it very easy. Yeah. And Lee: it becomes very accessible. But, um, it’s, it’s almost like a gun in the wrong hands that can do bad things. So can all these social media tools we have totally, like in the wrong hands that can do some bad things. I mean, there’s AJ: a lot of noise. Yeah. So how do you know, and on a marketing, you know, when you think about like strategic marketing plan mm-hmm. How do you know what the right thing to do is with so much noise? How do you know? Lee: To me, what I challenge, uh, each of my, um, clients and the folks that I coach is that it has to be documented. And so I think that when you go through that, and it doesn’t, documentation doesn’t mean bureaucracy. It doesn’t mean that it takes months to create this, but I challenge them to put it down in writing, right? And so we do things like if we’re going to do social media, okay, then [00:26:00] we’re gonna grab and do screenshots of the social media that we’re going after. So I wanna see the style guide. I wanna see the types of messaging. ’cause you, there’s tons of ways to go there, but we’re gonna document what we’re doing. Same thing with our website, our SEO content. Um, and it’s gonna be documented even in a Word doc, right? I mean, it could be in something like Evernote or Notion too, but, but we’re gonna document it and then each of the team members are gonna have access to this so everybody knows. What everybody is doing. Mm-hmm. Even your HR department, your accounting department, your C-suite, it needs to be readable and accessible. Now all of a sudden, now you’ve got buy-in and now you start to overcome these cognitive biases. Mm-hmm. Because now you’re not gonna fall to. Uh, to fomo. Mm-hmm. Because Lee: that’s a lot of times where I’ll go somewhere, I’ll be, oh, well this treatment center over here is doing this, or, you know what? Our CFO, you know, uh, they just said their son is blowing up on TikTok. Well, okay. Or I just Googled myself like, another, another problem that can happen. And it’s like, and, [00:27:00] and you fall victim when you have not. Documented what you’re doing and then, and then maintain that documentation as a living, breathing. And that’s where the innovation and the experimentation comes in. We wanna experiment. Mm-hmm. Right. Lee: So, you know, the companies that are doing well now, it’s not because they just started TikTok today. Sure. They might have been dabbling in it’s evolution process, investigating it last year. And that’s the thing, you always wanna have some percentage of your budget where you’re willing to experiment and learn instead of, instead of getting involved two or three years when it’s too late. AJ: Uh, I think that’s really good. The documentation part I think is a huge part ’cause so many of us are just going out and doing the new thing, doing the next thing. And not even paying attention to the old thing. Yeah. Right. And it’s always what’s new? What’s new? What’s new and what’s new isn’t necessarily right. Always. What’s better? If you Lee: remember aj, uh, there were, there were two things that really helped us sell, uh, a couple of the companies that I’ve been involved with. One was, you remember, remember all the screens we had? Oh, AJ: yeah. Lee: Um, you know, at one point we had 20, it’s AJ: still Rory’s vision. Yeah. To have TVs with marketing [00:28:00] data everywhere. Lee: We had, we had, I think, I think we were up to 20. Uh, TV’s, monitors that were reporting in real time, different aspects of our marketing. And that’s a AJ: true marketing war room. Lee: It was a war room, absolutely. And, um, that was one of the things that really helped us sell, uh, our businesses because people that were acquiring us and investing in us, they knew that we knew. Mm-hmm. And it’s not, and Lee: we were understanding trends and we were able to react, uh, because we were, we were proactive. You know, in, in, in our approach, like we were monitoring, we knew what was happening. So if Google made an algorithm change, we knew it. We didn’t find out about it three months later. AJ: I think that’s a huge misconception that people have about marketing. Lee: Mm. AJ: Is how data-driven. Lee: Yeah. AJ: Really good marketers are. Lee: Yeah. Yeah. AJ: So. I mean, I know that you’re super data driven and Lee: Absolutely because, you know, I, you know, I’m, I’ve been fortunate that I married, you know, my wife, Jennifer’s an artist, and a lot of art can be very subjective. Mm-hmm. Like how [00:29:00] people view it. And so I’ve always been sensitive to that and. I know enough that as a CMO, that when somebody brings me something and they’ll ask me a, uh, an open-ended question about, well, what do you think about this ad? Okay, I’ve, I’ve got cognitive biases. I’ve got subjective biases, but that doesn’t mean I. That it won’t work. Mm-hmm. So that’s why you have to look at the data. I want it to be, uh, objective, not subjective. And that’s why if you are tracking some data, even just some basic data points, I want the data to be the bad guy instead of well lead in like my ad. Right. And that, and, and there’s, and again, companies can decide. It doesn’t have to be super complicated. You’re gonna have two or three basic. Data points that you wanna, that you wanna review, and then all of a sudden now your team is focused on reviewing that instead of, oh, well, you know, Susie didn’t like that shade of green. You know, I mean, it’s, it, it gets like that. AJ: Oh, I know. I think, I [00:30:00] think somewhere along the lines, a lot of people, and if. This is you listening, I’m not shaming you, but somewhere along the lines, a lot of people have gotten branding confused with marketing. Yes. And marketing is not fonts. Typography. Right. Iconography, color palettes. That’s not marketing. Yeah. That’s branding. Yeah. And I think a lot of people get confused with us ’cause we’re a personal branding firm and they’re like, when do we get to make my visual identity right? AJ: And I’m like. I don’t know. Yeah. AJ: Do you, do you even know what you’re selling? Right. Do you even know what you wanna be known for? Right. They’re like, no, but when do I get to get my visual identity? So have you seen that too in like, big companies? Lee: Oh, it’s, it’s all the time when I, when I go somewhere and, and they’ll say they’re creating a new program and, and they’ll use that term brand. AJ: Mm-hmm. Lee: And they’ll be like, well, you know, we, we need to start branding. And for me, I’m like, I, I don’t know what you mean. Oh, well we need to run billboards. Okay, billboards are appropriate in certain circumstances, but I need to understand like, what is your, what is your overall [00:31:00] goal so that we can create the strategy first. We don’t just go run, I’m opening up a new location, so I gotta run a billboard and just put our logo up there. Mm-hmm. And Lee: that’s where it gets into the branding, the marketing. And people have to understand that. And I think, I think for most, for most people, like we’re small. Business owners, you know, or we’re creating these businesses. We’re not Coca-Cola. AJ: That’s right. Lee: You know, and that’s where, um, we are establishing ourselves and that’s where we have to be data driven because we only have so much time and we don’t have so many dollars. And so we have to be very strategic in how we spend those, especially when it’s a lot of it’s our money. Mm-hmm. AJ: That’s good. Um, all right, y’all, I have a few last questions for Lee, but before we run out of time, uh, I want to encourage you, if you, if you guys have been listening to this, this is barely scratching the surface. This is the tip of the iceberg of all of the conversation that Lee lays out in such a strategic way in his new book. So I just want to give everyone an opportunity. [00:32:00] His book comes out in early fall. Lee: September 2nd, AJ: September 2nd. So if you go to never outmatch.com, you can go and pick up your pre-order copy right now before it sells out. Right? So that’s, I’m putting that out there. Thank you. Into the world. Never. outmatched.com. Go now. Pre-order your copy. It’ll be hitting bookstores on September 2nd, and I’m a huge advocate. I wrote an endorsement for the book because I have been a part of the living. Legacy, um, that you’ve created through all of this marketing work you’ve done with these companies. I’ve seen it firsthand. So highly, highly, highly recommend and endorse it. I will make sure our marketing team reads it. Um, but all right. I have three last questions for you. Yes. And this is a little bit of, uh, rapid fire. And I think what I love about this conversation is it’s, it’s not just about marketing, it’s about marketing and leadership and company collaboration. And I love that so. [00:33:00] Best leadership lesson that you learned while in the army? Lee: Boy there, there’s so many. I think one of the, um, one of the first lessons I learned and, and this is very appropriate for admissions teams, you know, that I, that I coach a lot and that is when I first arrived at Fort Knox. They set up video cameras. Now this is back before the internet when I was in, right, this is 1992. Um, but they set up video cameras and they had us read our orders of the day in front of video cameras. Why were they doing that? Well, they wanted you to start to watch yourself, huh? And understand. Were you putting your hands in your pocket? Were you saying ums and ahs? Because now you’re giving orders. You’re a young lieutenant, nobody cares about you, but you’re giving orders to grizzled old veterans, so you better have your stuff together. And so that was one of the first lessons that I learned at Fort Knox and, and the army was really ahead of its time in that, in listening and watching and giving that feedback. AJ: Ooh, I love that. I actually just watched a video, someone had sent it to me about how the Blue Angels [00:34:00] practice. Before they go air. I saw that same Lee: video. It’s amazing. AJ: It’s a, and it’s like, it was amazing their precision and accuracy and how well they knew how the other person was gonna react and they closed their eyes and they visualize it. Right? And but so much of that is because they’ve been watching each other and they’ve been practicing each other. And it’s so much of like, how do you become good at something you practice, Lee: right? AJ: And you watch yourself. Do you still watch yourself on video? Lee: I haven’t watched myself on video in a long time, though. I guess I do, because I’ve been on a lot of podcast interviews, so I have seen it. But I do listen to myself on phone calls. Mm. So I, I will say I do that, but. You know, it’s one of these things where I’ve tried to instill this in both my sons because my older son is graduating, uh, well, he’ll be graduating next year from Wafford, so he’s going through the interview process, you know, with internships and we practiced. It’s like it’s not enough just to get Oh, that’s good. You have to practice with your team. So we’re always, I, I’m always available to people I’ve worked with. When they’re going for job interviews, it’s like, no, let’s practice, let, let me be the interviewer. Oh, that’s good. And like it just helps so much because [00:35:00] we just, sometimes we’re afraid because you know, you have to be a little more vulnerable. And so, but once you can do that, now all of a sudden you’re going in prepared. You’ve done it. AJ: We were laughing because this is something that we encourage speakers to do, is to become a great speaker. It’s like you’ve got to watch yourself on film, but we encourage you to watch yourself four different ways. You need to watch yourself normal, then you need to turn your back to the camera so that you’re just listening. Then we want you to watch it on mute so you’re paying attention to your body movements. But then we want you to watch it on fast forward. ’cause you pick up ticks, you pick up all these little weird nuances that you don’t do. And somebody in the audience at one of our events said, well, why would you wanna do that to yourself? Right? And we said, well, the audience had to sit through it. Shouldn’t you have to? Right, and it’s the same thing with what you’re saying. It’s like you’re making all these people sit through phone calls with you and interviews with you. Like shouldn’t you take the time to know what they’re experiencing to become better at it? Lee: Absolutely. Absolutely. AJ: Okay, I love that. Watch yourself on video, y’all. Most overlooked marketing metric, Lee: [00:36:00] most overlooked marketing metric. I think the, well, I think we alluded to it earlier, was the YouTube comments, I think. I think you’d be really hard to find somebody in an agency that would report that number to you. Hmm. Lee: Um, again, ’cause we wanna, we always wanna report subscribers, which can be bought, you know, or be bought. We always want to, we always wanna, uh, report views. Sure. And it was like, okay, well did they watch the whole thing or just two seconds of it? Uh, but comments, you know, you, you’ll see quickly are those real people? And, and, and what is the, so I, I think comments is, is a big one. And then of course, uh, you know, for a lot of my type of work, uh, we’re optimizing to the phone call. I have to have the phone call. AJ: I, I would say for most people in our world, that’s the same as well. It’s like most people are making a soft, off, soft offer for some sort of high ticket dollar offer. And it’s all about call conversions. Um, so that’s not different in the personal brand world. Uh, one marketing book that you think every executive leader [00:37:00] should read other than never outmatched, right? Because definitely that the outside of that. Lee: Yeah. Um, well, what’s funny is, I think I mentioned this in the book, uh. A book that I have by my bedside table is, uh, Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gaelic Wars. So it is a military book that was written, uh, authored by Caesar. I have that and my wife always laughs because I’ve got a a 1895 translated edition, uh, that I, that I read, and I don’t read it every night, but it is probably, it’s, it’s, it’s not, it’s. Usually at least once a week, I’m flipping through it. So that’s where I continue to get inspiration for these, um, military strategies that have stood the test of time. Wow. Um, and when you think about, um, corporations, uh, were first started in 1602, uh, with the East India Trading Company, you know, in Amsterdam. So a lot of times we get. We get focused on just reviewing the last 400 years. Mm-hmm. But military strategies are thousands of years old. So the [00:38:00] question is, what can you learn from the leadership, the innovation perspective of these military mental models, and then how do you apply them to your marketing? Fascinating. So that’s, that’s what I’m constantly, uh, and that, and that’s what I’ve written in the book. I mean, it’s 12 chapters. Uh, there are 12 basic military strategies that I, that I go over and I, and I find they’re, they’re very accessible. AJ: So I have a, a quick side question. Um, since you’ve been in the army and you’ve, you’ve been spent a lot of your years there, but also in presidential campaigns, how many, how many new tactics, how many new strategies are there? Really, I. Lee: Yeah, it’s a lot less than you think. Yeah, because again, we get stuck on the tactics. Mm-hmm. There’s always gonna be new things, you know, coming on our plate, new, new ways for us to reach people. But at the end of the day, there are some, some really time tested mental models, military strategies, ways that you, that you can reach an audience. The, the, those are not things that [00:39:00] are just being, you know, reinvented all the time or invented all the time. AJ: And that should be hopeful and promising to all of us. Lee: Yes. And I think that, you know, uh, you know, less than 1% of the US population will serve in the military. And that’s, that’s not a critique. That’s just where we are in today’s society. So I think a lot of these things, um, when I speak to people about some of these strategies, a lot of times they’re like, wow, they’re just not as accessible as they might’ve been even a hundred years ago. Hmm. Right before we had all this digital advancement. So I think what I’ve tried to do in this book is I’ve tried to like, kind of like, um, reintroduce. Some of these, uh, time honored strategies that really we should all be familiar with. These, these, these, this is not necessarily, um, that I’ve just come up with all of a sudden these new innovations. Mm-hmm. No, the, you know, I’ll talk a lot about Caesar and Hannibal. I’ll use probably the most recent example I use is, uh, Norman Schwartzkoff. And his use of the hammer and anvil in the, in the first Gulf War. But I mean, a lot, I talk a lot about, you know, Joan of Arc, you know? Mm-hmm. And, um, [00:40:00] and so I, I’m really excited to, to, to bring some of these new ideas, and that’s why I keep using this word, mental model because, uh, sometimes military strategy might seem inaccessible. Uh, but I think there’s a lot for, uh, people to grasp and think about how they’re gonna apply this strategy right into their marketing before they start jumping into tactics. AJ: Well, the truth is, is military strategy has been around a lot longer than marketing strategy. And there’s some timeless pieces of information that we can pull from military into marketing and leadership in general. So if you didn’t hear me earlier. Please check out Lee’s new book. Never Outmatch. Go to never outmatch.com. Grab a copy, get the pre-order comes out, drops September 2nd. And Lee, thank you so much. Thank you AJ for being on the show. This is so good. Uh, I can’t wait for the book to come out. I can’t wait for everyone to read it. And then one last quick question and we’ll wrap. What does influential mean to you? Lee: Uh, [00:41:00] influential to me. Uh. I, I’m a big believer it’s not who you know, it’s who knows you. Mm-hmm. And so I have always, uh, uh, used that as, as one of my mantras. And so to have people know you, you have to help people. So that’s always, I’ve always been very giving of my time and my advice, whether they take it or not. Uh, and so to me. Um, I would consider myself influential, though. I’m not sure you would count me as an influencer, but I feel like I have been very targeted and influential in a lot of people’s lives, and I think that’s the most important thing. AJ: I love that, and I love what you said. It’s not who knows you, uh, it’s not who you know, it’s who knows you, but people know you because you’ve helped them, Lee: right. AJ: That’s the key part. I love that. Lee: Absolutely. Absolutely. AJ: So good. Y’all okay, AJ, stick. Stick around for the recap episode. It’ll be coming up next, and we’ll see you next time on the influential personal brand.