Monthly Archives: November 2021

Ramping Your Brand For Exponential Growth

Ramping Your Brand For Exponential Growth written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Dr. James Richardson

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Dr. James Richardson. He is the founder of Premium Growth Solutions, a strategic planning consultancy for early-stage consumer packaged goods brands. He is the author of Ramping Your Brand: How to Ride the Killer CPG Growth Curve. He also hosts his podcast—Startup Confidential and routinely appears in trade magazines serving the CPG industry.

Key Takeaway:

Dr. James Richardson has helped nearly 100 CPG brands with their strategic planning. In this episode, Dr. Richardson outlines his approach to thinking smarter about growth as a consumer packaged goods entrepreneur. He shares some of the core concepts from his book that is based on years of anthropological research — Ramping Your Brand — and talks about how and why consumers pay for premium-priced CPG items.

Questions I ask Dr. James Richardson:

  • [1:41] What would you say are the significant critical distinctions between considering a CPG brand versus marketing a service?
  • [2:38] How do you convince somebody that this is something you’ve never had before and you’re going to love it?
  • [4:29] Do you have to make a connection with a product or service that people already have? For example, when someone comes up with a new lawn mowing service – it could be described as Uber, but for lawnmowers.
  • [6:21] Are you saying that you shouldn’t even try to define your product in comparison to another and instead get it out there and you might find that there are unintended pathways that open up?
  • [8:29] How often do you think a new product creation happens because somebody is just trying to scratch an itch they have personally?
  • [10:58] You use the skate ramps metaphor quite a few times in the book — can you talk about how you use it and why?
  • [13:52] So how big, how important of a role does design play in consumer packaged goods?
  • [16:07] If you want your brand to be seen as cool, does it have to be seen in certain places? How important is this role?
  • [17:11] There are a lot of brands today that are direct to consumer – how has distribution changed?
  • [20:10] You have a number of case studies — what’s been your biggest hit or any great case study you’d like to share?
  • [25:00] Where can people find out more about your work?

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John Jantsch (00:01): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network. Hey, I want to give a shout out to another member of the HubSpot network, the success story podcast, hosted by Scott D Clary. It’s one of the most useful podcasts in the world. Success story features Q & A sessions with successful business leaders, keynote presentations, conversations on sales marketing. Hey, and if you’re a freelancer, his episode on how to make seven figures freelancing on Fiverr is a must listen to the success story podcast, wherever you get your podcasts.

John Jantsch (00:47): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jansen. My guest today is Dr. James Richardson. He’s the founder of premium growth solutions, a strategic planning consultancy for early stage consumer packaged goods brands. As a professionally trained cultural anthropologist turned business strategists. He has helped nearly 100 CPG brands with their strategic planning. And he’s also the author of ramping your brand, how to ride the killer CPG growth curve. He also hosts his podcast, startup confidential and routinely appears in trade magazines, serving CPG, the CPG industry. So with that, Dr. Richardson, welcome to the show.

Dr. James Richardson (01:34): Thanks for having me,

John Jantsch (01:35): John. So for those of everybody, generally speaking has a knowledge of concepts of marketing. Anybody that listens to my show. What w what would you say are the significant kind of critical distinctions between considering a CPG brand versus say, like marketing a service?

Dr. James Richardson (01:51): I think you, it’s easy for founders to underestimate the challenge of changing habitual patterns of consumption. So consumer packaged goods, if you’re intending to, to scale quickly is about changing habits. And whereas services tend to be purchased fairly sporadically or on a longer time cycle. So it’s just a very different animal.

John Jantsch (02:15): We’ll talk a little bit about the, you just said changing habits. So it would probably two challenges. If I I’m just gonna throw out goofy names. If I sell Coke, getting somebody to want to drink Sprite or something already in the category is one challenge. Right. But what if I’m creating, there’s so many drinks I’m thinking like hard kombucha or something that like, that’s not even a category that existed a few years ago. So how do you convince somebody that this is something you’ve never had before and you’re going to love it? Okay.

Dr. James Richardson (02:43): So I think this is what I tell my clients is that first of all, you’ve just got to, you’ve got to shove your, your thing into the marketplace in some, in the local context where you have easy access, uh, to your fans, and then you need to listen. Cause usually early on in the first, even the first months and certainly the first year or so, your fans will probably do a better job than you, the founder of articulating why it matters. And so I’m, I’m a big believer in using those fans to figure that out early on, and then whatever that, why is that something that you get to them selectively pick from, if there’s more than one, I use the language of outcome, but there’s more than one outcome that people are seeking from your thing. Then you get to, you get to use the marketing flywheel to reach more people who may not intuitively get it.

Dr. James Richardson (03:38): If that makes sense. So like the heart kombucha is a good example because I don’t know if you’ve ever had any of those brands theirs, but they taste a lot like wine. Yeah. And so we know when you, when you’re creating a new category, it’s really important to figure out where you’re sourcing volume from and what is the, what’s the logic of figuring out where you’re sourcing volume from and what is the, what’s the logic or linguistical linguistic frame you can use. You can either do that with language, but I’m also a big believer in just inserting, because in my industry, we’re selling widgets, these are physical art, they’re physical artifacts, right? And in some cases they’re, they’re status symbols, they’re extensions of personal identity or their claims about your identity. And so sometimes you want to just show up in the right social space.

John Jantsch (04:29): So though, are you saying, are you saying it’s a little bit, you, you have to make a connection that they already have everybody when they come up with a new services, it’s like Uber, but for lawn mowers, is it that same thing? You were just saying it, it fills the space of IRD like wine. So I’ll like this, or at least already you’re looking at,

Dr. James Richardson (04:48): Well, what you’re looking for actually, John is, is a late what I call a latent dissatisfaction that there may not be articulating until they have your thing. And this is really quite common actually in consumer packaged goods because Americans have two to 300 different products stored in their homes or apartments at any one time. And that crosses 50 to 80 categories. Right. It’s just, we, we refuse to think very consciously about those things, because it, it would be insane. I pick an attorney I’ll think of hard and long about that, but so you have to you’re, you’re, you’re hoping to tap into symbolism language or social context to nudge people into saying, Hey, here’s, here’s this key attribute that my brand delivers we’re chasing, we’re offering the same outcome as the thing you’re already drinking will be, but here’s, what’s better about ours. And that has to be done in, in my, like a really simplistic fashion.

Dr. James Richardson (05:49): So like for instance, a lot of hard can boosters are lower and vastly lower in calories than a glass of wine. Yeah, yeah. Right. So you start to get down into some serious nuance. Yeah. But when you get into the nuance and you can unlock what it is, and usually it takes your fans for you to figure this out, because you may have created the company for some other reason. Right. But it’s, it’s in the nuance details where you can say, I have the new, so instead of saying, I’m the Uber of blankets, forget Uber. I’m more modern than,

John Jantsch (06:21): Yeah. So are you saying that a lot of ways you shouldn’t even try to define it’s almost again it out there, and you may find that there are unintended sort of pathways that open up that you really wasn’t what you were thinking it was going to be.

Dr. James Richardson (06:37): Yeah. I, I think we, I have found that in most of my clients businesses, and in most of the case studies I’ve reviewed there, I talk about my book. There were pivots and those pivots were based on, oh, oh yeah. I had no idea that that’s what, this was kind of a kind bar was a weight management product. Yeah. Yeah. But, but Dan Lubetsky created it as a status symbol, but that the fact that it’s in a, in a clear wrapper, really isn’t the reason it’s scaled it scaled because there’s no sugar and it was the, there never was an issue. Yeah. So sometimes you, because the founder is the worst source of bias and consumer packaged goods, you have to let the consumer and the market basically reeducate you on what you have and then run with that. And I think, I personally think that’s true in B2B. It’s been true in my business, my consulting business, I’ve done the same thing. I went to market for four and a half years ago with one idea what I was going to be doing. And I’m not doing that.

John Jantsch (07:40): I think you, you ended up discovering, I think a lot of times when you’re starting out, you’re, you’re guessing for the most part and, and being open to discovering how often are, are big hits rather than cooked up in a laboratory are cooked up because somebody couldn’t find a weight management product. So they started making their own flavored waters and all of their friends liked it. And then it turned out Kara golden was on the show, the creative hint to the water, the fruit flavored waters. And that really is her story. She wanted to create a product that tasted better than water. I was wanted to stop drinking sodas. And so she was baked cooking it on her stove top and or somebody told her at some big consumer packaged company told her she was crazy. He’d go back to just being a housewife. And she now has a a hundred million dollar product. So how often do you think that happens to where somebody is just trying to scratch an itch? They have personally.

Dr. James Richardson (08:36): Oh, I th I think it’s, it’s most of the folks who don’t have a prior background in the industry, it’s the vast majority of them. The problem though, John is most of those, not all those itches actually have any, any scalability. Right. So the biggest problem that I was just listening to one of your episodes before I got on, about finding your ideal customer. And then I, because I only work with my ideal customer, I literally throw away 50% of my leads every year I screen about. Yeah. So I’m in part of that is just finding people who, who really are going to benefit from what I can do. Yeah. As a consultant. I think that that has value as a B2B service provider, but for consumer packaged goods founders, what I found is a lot of folks are tempted by stakeholders to chase a whole bunch of trial.

Dr. James Richardson (09:24): Let me just get a ho if I can just get there, they all believe they’re the next kind bar with when the other 98% conversion rate or whatever he claims in his book, men, very few of them are, most of them need some kind of tweak in the product experience. They’re halfway there. They need to get better. And those are all fixable problems, but you have to be, you have to be coachable and you have to be coachable by the market for like, if you can’t learn from the market, right. I don’t want to work with you. Yeah, yeah. And no, and stakeholders, or they may take your money though. That’s, what’s funny.

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John Jantsch (10:58): So, so I want to unpack one thing that comes up in the book a bunch, and you, you use the metaphor of scare skate ramps. So you must have been a skater. I’m guessing that’s my son I’ll use that is so, so, so talk about how you use that metaphor.

Dr. James Richardson (11:15): So I, it literally came out of the mathematics of the, of a big study I did on the brands that scaled in the last 10, 15 years, the ones who got to a hundred million and beyond, and consumer packaged goods, which isn’t very common. And they all rode this curve, which is an expedite. It’s really just the sigmoid curve that you learn about in business school textbooks, but which rarely happens today at the grocery store because of the dynamics of the major players and the beauty of this curve is that, that it does two things. One is that it allows arrogant competitors to ignore you because they think you’re failing. But every year they look at your numbers and you’re like, well, he’s still small, whatever. Meanwhile, you’re actually doubling, but because you’re doubling off of a small base, and this is the key to the math, you’re, you’re buying time to do it. We’re just talking about, which is learned from your fans, iterate, finished the experiment, essentially finished your product line in market, or you make a big pivot.

Dr. James Richardson (12:22): And that gives you if actually buys you the time to pivot. And you’re pivoting at a lower, lower scale, which in my industry is sort of, it’s almost critical because if you say you’re like $50 million, you do discover, oh, I’m running out of consumer. Oh no, you now are going to have to spend you have money. So that’s great. But you’re now going to have to, you’re not going to wind down a $50 million business and replace it with something else. And that mathematic, you’re never going to find an investor sign on there. Yeah. So that’s going to be very painful. Probably won’t happen, but you can completely pivot like a two or $3 million business. Yeah. Birth something else out. And then within two years, everyone’s forgotten the original thing. And sometimes that original business gives you the right thing. It gives you access to a consumer audience. Spindrift is a great example of that. They launched premium soda pop all natural, yada yada, yada, but there’s no market for it. Believe it or not. When people want a Coca-Cola Pepsi, that’s what they want. They don’t need an artisan version of, and when they do, it’s like a goofy Christmas gift or something, what he discovered was people wanted, they wanted a different kind of sparkling water and that took off. Yeah. Yeah. So, but he did it at the right time. Now I’m talking about bill Creelman, but he did at the real, at the right time in the business. In other words, he killed the first idea early based on data.

John Jantsch (13:52): Yeah. So how big, how big is design in the package, the colors, the box, it comes in the bottle. It’s in how thinking of like method, for example, a very design driven product taking on Procter and gamble products. How, how big a role is that? Maybe more so even than what’s in the box.

Dr. James Richardson (14:13): Yeah. Design is, is important and can serve package goods for premium products, which is sort of my world, but it’s, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t say it’s up to the importance of Dyson and that category of durable goods, um, where the user experience actually is incredibly complex and people are super demanding and they have a million ways to attack you. Right? When you’re just selling a beverage, there isn’t much going on there. There’s very specific uses. This is the thing that’s counterintuitive about design. It’s not so much about being the next coach handbag of beverages. That’s not really, you can do that to get attention. That’s, that’s great. But that just gets you trying. What really matters is able to use your packaging to signal. And this is what I help folks with using just the right words, just the right symbols and deleting everything else. And it’s the leader, it’s the removing the clutter, which is a big thing too.

John Jantsch (15:05): Well, it probably accentuates the brand promise or the brand story too, obviously. Right?

Dr. James Richardson (15:10): Yeah. I think there’s something that you’ll notice that most, most premium brands across industries, I’m sorry, across production verticals that chase the consumer, the premium ones tend to have very clean websites. They don’t have a lot of IX. They’re not like the used car dealer with the 75 pop-ups it’s. So they, they assume, you know why they’re cool. Yeah. And, and if you don’t know, they’re going to rely on your social network to tell you that, and that gets really extreme in the fashion world. But I think it’s a mix of that in CPG word of mouth. John is huge in driving the initial years of growth like you need. And that’s what, and that’s, what’s funny is that the word of mouth storytelling about your premium CVG brand, that’s actually where the secret sauce is for paid marketing later. You’re going to, if you can learn from them and then fund that story once you get the right one.

John Jantsch (16:07): Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, and that’s, I mean, obviously the role of influencers for good or bad, frankly, certainly plays a role in, in a lot of cases. That’s a page story too. Yeah. But, but how important is that role, if you want your brand to be seen as cool, does it have to be seen certain places?

Dr. James Richardson (16:25): Yeah. I think social insertion is something that matters in certain sub categories. Beverages is one of those certainly liquor and because, and it also depends what the outcome is. You’re selling. If you’re a liquor brand, you are selling a mixture of, of class status sex, basically. Right. And so you’re trying to be the new thing at the bar. Yeah. And so you have to be at the right clubs now, in other categories, you may want to be showing up at surfing events. Right. Right. Because you’ve got a group of people who are into fitness and because they’re into fitness, they are into weight maintenance because these people were never fat. They just don’t want to get fat. So when they drank, they want boom, heart kombucha. That’s a story of June shine right there.

John Jantsch (17:11): Well, let’s, let’s talk about how distribution has changed. There was a day when, if you couldn’t get three feet of shelf space at no bubble block chain, you really couldn’t exist. But today there are a lot of brands that are direct to consumer. So how has the distribution piece sort of changed? Because on the flip side of that, you see whole foods going out and saying, oh, you can only get this at this whole foods in Austin, Texas, because the person that makes it lives right around the corner. So there seems to be a real hunger to get micro that way. But direct to consumer seems to be driving a lot of these startup brands.

Dr. James Richardson (17:45): Yeah. I, I, so my, my general takeaway is direct consumer for all. Initially it works really well for all, but the frozen refrigerated temperature stay category, which is eliminates a chunk of the grocery store. I, what I found working with my clients is that it’s a great learning laboratory to do what, to reduce the time John, in which you accumulate that massive early fans who can then educate you on what you created. Yeah. Right. So you can now do that in three to six months, not 18 months. Yeah. Which is what used to happen. People would go out and they’d sell it even locally. And it would take time to gather the negative feedback. Well, the positive feed, right. D to C allows you to create this flywheel communication. If you know how to use it, plus you can, you can stare at your repeat rate.

Dr. James Richardson (18:33): And if it’s really bad, if you can’t hide from that truth for very long, right. That’s what I like is it’s a brutal laboratory in CBG. It’s sort of mixed results on how much you can scale and certain categories. And they tend to be not that traditional grocery ones, their beauty and personal care. That’s where I’m seeing people create huge businesses. I don’t have the, I don’t know. Perfect. I don’t have the perfect behavioral explanation for why it is with those categories, but I don’t think it’s, I don’t think it’s, it’s certainly not shipping cost or anything like that. I think there’s something cultural about people willing to, they’re willing to see a Facebook ad and buy a $180 beauty cream or wrinkle cream almost instantaneously. And you won’t see, you won’t see P well, John, you won’t see people switch their case packs, soda habit, right. Like instantaneously that takes weeks or months to change that.

John Jantsch (19:28): And it’s partly it’s because sort of maybe the, the dream that’s being sold by that I was never fulfilled. So it’s, well, maybe the next one. Or

Dr. James Richardson (19:36): I could, if I, if I channel my evolutionary anthropological training, beauty is sex. Beauty is mating and reproduction. It pretty much has the highest stakes like behavior of the species. Right. So deep down in your unconscious, if you have anxious, if you have insecurity about how you appear, it’s not that hard to monetize that insecurity. Yeah. I think it’s, like I said, it’s a little harder to find that group of people who hate diet Coke, like Kara and they need her solution that took her time. Yeah,

John Jantsch (20:07): Yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally. Yeah. So, um, you have a number of case studies, so I’m wondering if there’s, you could pick out one that you think is, was a little tiny brand that you worked with that now might be a name, or w w I, I guess I’m asking for your biggest hit, what’s your, what’s been your biggest that we maybe would, that listeners might recognize or be familiar with or any story that you want to share that you think was a great case study? Well,

Dr. James Richardson (20:36): That’s a good question. I just, uh, wrote, I’m going to pick the one I can publicly talk about. Okay. I said, that’s a good idea. You’re a big name podcast. I don’t need lawyer letters. So we’re, I started working with John Forker, who’s the CEO of once upon a farm, the baby started as a baby food brand for the last two or three years. And they were, you know, they were doing okay, they’re doing okay. But they, they had this, he had this nagging suspicion that something was off. And part of part why can’t. So I came in and we worked together just for a day. I did a little of my shamanistic sort of data analysis and stuff like that, which sort of in my book as well. And I discovered that we had a velocity problem. The problem was that it was selling, but it was, it was really, it’s not the kind of a loss.

Dr. James Richardson (21:33): I won’t get into the details of why not the kind of a loss city, that velocity trend is more important. I not growing, that’s going to create scale. So the key behind the skate ramp is that the velocity is actually growing every year. It’s sort of like, it’s the investor’s dream and in investing right as your, your industry keeps growing. And so you get richer and richer and richer, and then it explodes. This is what exponential growth is in CVG. And so I think he wants to get on that track, but was struggling with, they had always wanted us to be a kids brand. Okay. They organic HPP sort of fruit and vegetable. It’s a fruit and vegetable, a smoothie, basically a pouch. You stick it in your mouth like goo. Yup. Yup. So babies have no problem with doing that. Kids don’t have any problem with doing, doing that, but actually a lot of adults don’t have a problem.

Dr. James Richardson (22:26): So they had always fought the investors as well. That we’re going to be a big kid’s brown, but they had always seen that as down the line. Right. And I think what I helped them figure out is look, the baby food category is probably when you didn’t even want to have to start with. Yeah. Which, which is it’s okay to discuss now. But I think it was hard to swallow at the time. Cause you raised money on the basis. So we’re going to take over baby food. But the reality is that the behavior, the demographics, the cultural trends, all the stuff that I’m trained to intersect and synergize, it was all bad, bad, bad, bad. I, as pretty much the worst case scenario, John of a category review of every death, it was like, I don’t think these people you’re going to run out of these people so fast.

Dr. James Richardson (23:10): It’s basically what I told them. So switch to a kid brand now. And they made that decision. Basically he had half made it already and he, by the end of the day he was sold. So they did. And they had to make a whole bunch of changes. Yeah. They had originally thought that they were going to have to launch all these new lines. This is my favorite thing in CPG is new audience, new product lines. And when you’re, I guess, $5 billion brand, maybe that makes sense because you have a bunch of segmentations that tell you that that’s, that’s real. But if you’re starting a business, that’s a 1520, if you’re 15 to 20 million, you need to still stay focused. John. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So what we found in the data was that kids were already older kids already in the pouches. So they just rip the baby food label right off and re did a new brand identity that doesn’t cost too much money. Right? Yeah. Put some cartoon characters on there and suddenly, boom, this end, the ad do some basic things in CPG. Like moms hate picking up four packs, put four of them in a box.

Dr. James Richardson (24:16): So once you stay focused and you listen to the data, then you can actually, that was, so that was an example of a pivot and they’re growing like crazy now. That’s awesome. And part of that was just not getting distracted by solving growth problems with like new products, which is a big temptation. Sure.

John Jantsch (24:31): Yeah. Yeah. We’ll we’ll

Dr. James Richardson (24:32): We’ll yeah. I, I can’t tell you how many brands I’ve encountered that are between 25 and 50 million. John they’re still here and they have a 50 UPC. Nobody knows what they stand for. Right. And they basically, to me, what they have is that they have, they have concatenated like five little niche, consumer basis, nothing to do with each other. Yeah. It’s a marketer’s nightmare

John Jantsch (24:58): Because it’s worth creating the new stuff’s where the fun is. So, so James can tell people where they can find out more about your work. We have run out of time. So tell people where they can find out more about your work and, and obviously a pickup ramping your brand.

Dr. James Richardson (25:12): So wrapping your brands on amazon.com, you can also order it for libraries on Ingram. And if you want to learn more about me to follow me on LinkedIn, go to premium growth solutions.com, where I house my blog and that’s updated three times a week. Okay.

John Jantsch (25:29): Well, I appreciate you something by the duct tape marketing podcast, and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Dr. James Richardson (25:34): Sounds good. Thanks for having me, Joe. All right.

John Jantsch (25:36): That wraps up another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. I want to thank you so much for tuning in. Feel free to share this show. Feel free to give us reviews. You know, we love those things. Also, did you know that we had created training, marketing training for your team? If you’ve got employees, if you’ve got a staff member that wants to learn a marketing system, how to install that marketing system in your business, check it out. It’s called the certified marketing manager program from duct tape marketing. You can find it at ducttapemarketing.com and just scroll down a little and find that tab that says training for your team.

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network.

HubSpot Podcast Network is the audio destination for business professionals who seek the best education and inspiration on how to grow a business.

 

 

 

How To Turn Your Agency Into A Profitability Machine

How To Turn Your Agency Into A Profitability Machine written by Sara Nay read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Agency Spark Podcast, hosted by Sara Nay, is a collection of interviews from thought leaders in the marketing consultancy and agency space. Each episode is designed to spark ideas you can put into practice for your agency today. Check out the new Spark Lab Consulting website here!

About the episode:

In this episode of the Agency Spark Podcast, Sara interviews Marcel Petitpas on how to turn your agency into a profitability machine. They discuss the agency profitability flywheel, creating accurate estimates, value vs. hourly pricing, the agency pricing quadrant, tips for tracking time, client reporting and more!

Marcel Petitpas is the CEO & Co-Founder of Parakeeto, a company dedicated to helping agencies improve their profitability by streamlining their operations and reporting systems.

He’s also the fractional COO at Gold Front, an award-winning creative agency in San Francisco working with brands like Uber, Slack, Keap and more. As well as the head strategic coach at SaaS Academy by Dan Martell, the #1 coaching program for B2B SaaS businesses in the world.

In his work as a speaker, podcast host and consultant, specializing in Agency Profitability Optimization, he’s helped hundreds of agencies around the world improve profitability and cash flow in their business.

When he’s not helping agencies make more money, he’s probably watching “The Office” or “Parks and Rec” on a never-ending loop and eating breakfast foods for every meal of the day.  

Questions Sara asks Marcel Petitpas:

  • Tell me a little about what led you to where you are today?
  • What are the four key pillars to the Agency Profitability Flywheel?
  • What advice do you have for creating accurate estimates?
  • What should we consider when figuring out our hourly rates?
  • What is the Agency Pricing Quadrant?
  • What tips do you have for tracking time?
  • What advice do you have for client reporting and review?

Show notes:

Like this show? Please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts here!

 

This episode of the Agency Spark Podcast is brought to you by Termageddon, a Privacy Policy Generator. Any website collecting as little as an email address on a contact form should not only have a Privacy Policy but also have a strategy to keep it up to date when the laws change. Click here to learn more about how Termageddon can help protect your business and get 30% off your first year payment by using code DUCTTAPE at checkout.

How To Live Your Ideal Entrepreneurial Life

How To Live Your Ideal Entrepreneurial Life written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Gino Wickman

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Gino Wickman. Gino is the founder of EOS Worldwide, an organization that helps tens of thousands of businesses implement EOS – the entrepreneurial operating system with the aid of an international team of professionals and certified EOS implementers. He’s also the author of the award-winning best-selling book – Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business which has sold now over a million copies. He’s got a new book we’re talking about called The EOS Life: How to Live Your Ideal Entrepreneurial Life.

Key Takeaway:

As an entrepreneur or business owner, creating an ideal life around doing what you love can be difficult. In this episode, best-selling author and founder of EOS Worldwide, Gino Wickman, shares how the five major points of the EOS Life will help you move forward towards doing what you love 100% of your working time.

The EOS Life will help you discover, clarify, and customize the life you want to live: one where you do what you love every day, with the people you love doing it with—while at the same time making a huge difference and impact, getting compensated very well for doing it, and still having plenty of time to pursue other passions, hobbies, and interests that energize you.

Questions I ask Gino Wickman:

  • [1:28] What is EOS? Can you talk a little bit about the relationship between EOS life and EOS as a professional organization?
  • [5:55] Can you talk about the 5 points from your book and the tools that go along with each point that help people live the EOS life – starting with number one?
  • [9:05] Do you ever have people who come to the realization that they are great at something and they love to do this specific work, but they should delegate it? How does someone wrestle with that?
  • [11:55] Let’s dive into the second point – with people you love.
  • [15:19] Can you talk about the third point – making a huge difference?
  • [17:37] There’s kind of an entrepreneurial myth: You’re a founder of this company and you put your sweat and blood into it and you don’t take any money out until it’s producing at a certain level. There’s a lot of folks that do that to themselves and let’s go right into number four – being compensated appropriately.
  • [20:57] Let’s dive into the last point – with time for other passions.
  • [23:44] So you did a sneaky thing – you put a bonus book inside a book. Can you talk about that a little bit?
  • [25:26] Where can people learn more about your book, your work, and the resources you’ve mentioned?

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John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network. Hey, I want to give a shout out to another member of the HubSpot Network, the success story podcast, hosted by Scott D. Clary. It’s one of the most useful podcasts in the world. Success story features Q & A sessions with successful business leaders, keynote presentations, conversations on sales marketing. Hey, and if you’re a freelancer, his episode on how to make seven figures freelancing on Fiverr is a must listen to the success story podcast, wherever you get your podcasts.

John Jantsch (00:46): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Gino Wickman. He is the founder of EOS worldwide, an organization that helps tens of thousands of businesses implement EOS the entrepreneurial operating system with the aid of international and the international team of professionals and certified EOS implementers. He’s also the author of the award-winning best-selling book traction, get a grip on your business, which has sold now over a million. He’s got a new book today. We’re going to talk about the EOS life, how to live your ideal entrepreneurial life. So Gino, welcome to the show.

Gino Wickman (01:23): Pleasure to be here, John. Glad to be with you again. Yeah,

John Jantsch (01:26): That’s right. It’s been too long. So let me let’s set the table, uh, kind of the, you know, there’s obviously some people, not many probably out there that don’t know what EOS is necessarily. So maybe set the table between kind of the relationship between EOS life and EOS sort of the professional organization, kind of the context of, of where that came together and for this book.

Gino Wickman (01:49): Yeah, for sure. I’d love to. So I’m going back 20 years ago, I basically took a leap to help entrepreneurs. I realized that that was my calling. That was my passion. That was my gift. It’s been a total of 30 years of doing this, but 20 years is when I started to create an operating system to help entrepreneurs and their leadership teams run a better business. And so for five years, I did that with 50 companies, 500 sessions, put the finishing touches on what is now EOS. And then I decided I was going to leverage it. So I put it in a book called traction, found a great partner in Don Tinney. He and I joined forces, started EOS worldwide, and that’s about 15 years ago. And so then he and I basically built EOS worldwide one EOS implementer at a time. And so we’ve now as implementers, there are 450 implementers around the world.

Gino Wickman (02:42): We’ve taken about 14,000 companies through the process. We have about 130,000 companies that are using the tools and running on EOS. And, and, and so that’s the big picture and the backstory and that’s EOS. Well, what happened? I just gave kind of a 20, 21 year timeline that is EOS well there’s then this other piece that kind of percolated along all of those years. And that’s what led me to writing the EOS life. And the way that that worked is it’s very interesting because when Don and I joined forces and I decided to rebrand EOS, it was originally known as the business accelerator. Now known as the entrepreneurial operating system, I engaged a real high-end marketing firm and they interviewed my top seven clients. And the owner of the firm went out and sat with each owner and asked them very specific questions. And that the owner of the marketing firm came back kind of in awe, because he said to me, Gino, he said, we, we, we got the same answer from all seven clients, seven out of seven.

Gino Wickman (03:50): And what they would talk about is how EOS has given them a better quality of life. And I kind of shrugged that off because I’m so obsessed about helping the entrepreneur build a great business. I kind of ignored the fact that they’re living this great ideal life. Then what happened is my partner, Don Tinney started to live the EOS life, his ideal life, ideal life. And he saw the effect on him and he came to call it the EOS life. And as we were building this community of implementers, he would share this with them. And again, I shrugged it off and then shoot forward to probably five years ago when the community are EOS, implementer community really started to embrace this idea of the EOS life. Don described it as five points, doing what you love with people. You love making a huge difference, getting compensated appropriately and having time for other passions.

Gino Wickman (04:40): And so I finally gave in and at our conference, our EOS conference five years ago, I decided to deliver the EOS life talk. And it was so unbelievably well received. I did it the following year and then ultimately out of a pandemic with extra time, not being on a plane, you know, S you know, 18 times a year, not being in a hotel 40 nights a year, I had some excess capacity and I decided, you know, it’s time to write this book. And it just kind of flowed out of me and so long, long story, but that’s how the EOS life was birthed. And that book just launched 30 days ago.

John Jantsch (05:18): Yeah. And I, you know, it really makes a lot of sense while you talk about in EOS, you know, delegation and having a vision and creating systems and processes, those all should lead to at least less stress and things like that. So it, so it makes a ton of sense. And, you know, over the years, I’ve worked with a lot of entrepreneurs and help them get some control of their marketing. And they’ve actually kind of expressed that, that gives them their life back a little bit. And I think, I think there’s certainly a lot to that. So since you mentioned the five points, um, one of the things I love is that you are very tool driven. I mean, you, you produce lots of tools. You give them away freely. This book is no exception. And so I thought maybe we’d take each of those five points and let you just kind of unpack the tool that makes that happen. So the first one you mentioned, do what you love. And, and if you’re an author like me, who sometimes forgets what you wrote in a book, I’ll remind you that, you know, that’s the delegating.

Gino Wickman (06:11): Oh, yes. Yeah. You don’t have to remind me, believe me, I intimately know this content, you know, and I would say one other thing as I answer your question. Yeah. The reality is I have been living this EOS life. I have been living my ideal life for at least 20 years. And that’s another thing that Don saw in me. But for me, I kept shrugging it off because it’s so natural for me. And, and so for what that’s worth, you know, I don’t teach one ounce of theory. I’ve been living all of this, but, but to your exact point, I then realized it’s kind of the tool or tools that we teach our client that help kind of expedite move the needle toward them living each point on the EOS life. So to your point, I always love to start with a question and then share the tool.

Gino Wickman (06:54): So the first point again is doing what you love. Okay. And so that’s the whole idea here. And I start by asking you the audience out there. The question is, what kind of work do you love to do? And I urge you in, in this book, it’s, it’s a, it’s a thinking exercise. I urge you to work from a journal and you spend 5, 10, 20 minutes thinking about that and writing that. But the tool that we then have every client use in the EOS process is something called delegate and elevate. And the way that delegate and elevate works is it’s an exercise where if you cut a sheet of paper or a document into four quadrants, it’s also lovingly known as the four quadrants. And then you write the words and I’ll try and share this quickly in the bottom right hand quadrant. If you write, don’t like not good at, in the bottom left-hand quadrant, if you put don’t like good at, in the upper right-hand quadrant, if you write the words like and good like to do in good at it.

Gino Wickman (07:53): And then the upper left hand quadrant love to do and great at it, obviously where we want you is in that upper left hand quadrant. But the exercises where you literally list everything you do all day, every day on a document, and you’ll write 10, 20, 30, 40 things. And then you take each one of those things that you do all day everyday and put it in one of the four quadrants. And just be really honest, the way it works is once it’s all filled out, we then just urge you to delegate one thing in the bottom two quadrants to elevate yourself more to the top two quadrants, with a focus of someday getting you to that upper left-hand quadrant. And so the whole idea here is a process. It’s a journey, and it’s about moving the needle. As you’re probably going to hear me say 10 times in this conversation, because if you will delegate one thing every quarter, you’ll look up in 2, 5, 10 years, and you will be living in heaven. And I’m the testimony because for the last 25 years, I have delegated one thing every quarter, and I fully live in that upper left-hand quadrant, even. So that three and a half years ago, I sold EOS worldwide because I needed to delegate an entire company to free me up to go to the next level and do what I wanted to do to free up my energy, my creativity, so long dissertation, but there’s the,

John Jantsch (09:06): We had some pushback from some people or, or not just even pushback the realization that a great at love to do, but that doesn’t really serve the company. You know, for me to be doing that work. I love it. I’m great at it, but I should delegate it. I mean, how does somebody wrestle with that? Yeah,

Gino Wickman (09:23): Well, let’s start with, you know, the primary audience for this book is the entrepreneur is the business owner. And so that entrepreneur and business owner has the most freedom to design their life. And, but in saying that my dream is that then leadership team members live this life, which they can employees, which they can and then families, but we’ve got to start with the entrepreneur. So I would challenge that because that visionary entrepreneur at the helm of the organization, they kind of get to write their own ticket and live in their sweet spot and then build a structure around them, bring in talent to do all of those things that they don’t like to do. So I would challenge that as possible. And the beauty is I get to prove that it’s possible because I’ve proven it now with 14,000 companies and entrepreneurs with the work that we’ve done.

Gino Wickman (10:12): And certainly the intimate 135 clients I’ve worked with, it’s absolutely doable. But I will say this, John, just to hit probably the most important barrier and that is people not feeling they’re worthy, not feeling they deserve this life. And so I go right at that psychology in this book, and I always say to the audience, and so if you’re out there and listening, I just want to say this, you deserve it. You deserve it. And you really truly do. And if we can get you past whatever psychological barrier is making you feel unworthy, oh, then you’re just absolutely gonna take off. And again, if you keep moving that needle every quarter, you’re going to look up very soon and be living your ideal life again, starting with doing what you love. Okay.

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John Jantsch (11:55): All right, let’s move on. Number two with people you love.

Gino Wickman (12:00): Yeah. So again, opening question, I urge you to answer and ponder for 5, 10, 20 minutes is who are the people you love to work with? Okay. And so it starts there spend some time, think about that, ponder that, but the tool that we help our clients accomplish this with is something called the people. Analyzer sounds incredibly cold, but it is one of the top five tools in the EOS process because it’s helping you surround yourself with great people. Great people are defined by the right people in the right seats, right? People means they have your core values, right? Seat means they get it, want to have the capacity to do the job. Every one of these tools we’re talking about are downloadable free on the website. So EOS life.com. So there’s nothing you have to go by. It’s there waiting for you, but I would urge and ask a couple things here.

Gino Wickman (12:52): First, you must discover your core values you out there. You got to decide the three to seven characteristics that describe you, that, that, that, that make up who you are as a person. And a way of thinking about as the antithesis of those things are the things that you have in life, or have in people. And so let’s pretend though you discover your core values. I would suggest one way to do that is amazing core value cards think to perform as a company that has great core value cards, but you can buy them online. A few bucks, 52 cards, 52 core values. And in 15 minutes you will discover your core values, lots of ways to do it. But with that, once, you know, your core values, your job, if you want to be happy is to surround yourself in your company with people that have your core values and the ones that don’t, you’ve got to part ways they will thrive somewhere else.

Gino Wickman (13:49): And then the last little point I’ll make, and then I’ll shut the heck up. And let you respond is once you’ve mastered that because it takes about a year or two to help our clients get to that point where everyone is the right person in the right seat at or above the bar in the people analyzer. Then I urge them to expand their circle. Now that they got all of their employees to be the right people, right? Seats matching core values, then expand the circle to your vendors and suppliers to your clients and customers. And then all, ultimately the icing on the cake is to your family and friends. And I go into great detail on how to do that in the book and countless real world stories. Because when you cross that line into family and friends, Ooh, that one gets scary.

John Jantsch (14:35): Well, I think for a lot of people probably just crossing into customers and clients, you know, it’s like they, they showed up, they need what we sell, you know, but, but if you’re a particularly a professional service business have a one or two bad clients can, can be a real issue

Gino Wickman (14:49): Here, here. And if, and if your audience will listen to you, John they’ll have so much business coming at them that they can be selective and they can fire some clients that just don’t fit. You know, we EOS implementers. I’m an EOS implementer. I have clients, I have the luxury of handpicking, every single one of my clients, the ones that I just love being around. And so we all have that luxury because we get to pick and choose our clients because of this awareness that we have, that life’s too short, not to work with people that you don’t love working with.

John Jantsch (15:19): So I think we’re on to making a huge difference. So we’re going to get into some, some vision.

Gino Wickman (15:25): Got it. So opening question here is how do you make a difference? And so again, urging you to ponder for 5, 10, 20 minutes. And so really think about how you make a difference, but I’ll give kind of two contexts here. And so the tool is something called the vision traction organizer. It’s a tool I created that helps an entrepreneur in their leadership team, capture their vision and plan by answering eight questions about the company. They captured them in the VTO and you’ve got a vision and plan to take to the organization. Well, the first context is when you fill that tool out, the answers are all there. The way that you and your company are going to make an impact is by executing what’s in that vision traction organizer. But in addition to that, if you’re not an entrepreneur or maybe not a leadership team member, or maybe you are, there is a second context, and that is you can make a huge impact on the people in your company and your community on your family.

Gino Wickman (16:21): So there’s so many ways to make a difference, make an impact. And so you just have to think about that. But one example I always like to share is if you’re a leadership team member of an entrepreneurial company, there’s a great quote by Simon banks. That goes, you are a leader when you produce a leader who produces a leader and so very profound. So if you’re sitting there going, I don’t know how to make a difference. Well, if you’re a leader or a manager in an organization, focused on achieving that goal, focus on helping others around you become great leaders and then therefore help them help others become great leaders. But that’s the mark of a true leader is when you’ve created an left that legacy where you’re creating lots of leaders in the world. Yeah.

John Jantsch (17:04): I do think a lot of people get hung up on that idea of impact, meaning, oh, I have to cure world hunger or something. And it’s like, gosh, I could make two or three or 10 people’s lives better. That’s pretty special to this.

Gino Wickman (17:14): How even one person’s life, just imagine one. And, and, and the point about the VTO is if your passion is that customer or client to provide them tremendous value to solve their need, that makes an impact. That makes a difference. So you’re exactly right. Don’t overthink this, this, this isn’t about solving world hunger, unless that’s your thing, but there are lots of ways to make a difference. So there’s,

John Jantsch (17:37): It’s kind of an entrepreneurial myth. I think that that’s out there that you’re a founder of this company. You start this thing, you put your sweat and blood into it and, and you don’t take any money out until it’s producing at a certain level. Or there’s a lot of folks that do that to themselves. And let’s goes right into number four being compensated for

Gino Wickman (17:55): Here, here. Right. So yeah. I urge you to pay yourself first, generate big profits. Certainly, hopefully you will share those profits with your people, but there’s nothing wrong with making a lot of money. So that’s exactly what this one gets to. So the, we call this point, number four, being compensated appropriately. Again, this was my partner, Don tinnies wording. I like to call it getting paid very well, but nonetheless, whatever you call it, this is what we call it. The question to ponder here is, and this one always comes out of this like a curve ball, but how are you adding value for people? That’s what it all comes down to. If you don’t feel like you’re making enough money, you’re not adding enough value in the world. So really think about how do I add value? How do I add value for people? And, and you’ll start to get to your answer with that.

Gino Wickman (18:45): The tool we teach here, I already shared, which is delegate and elevate. So ironically, the more you delegate and elevate what’s in those bottom two quadrants and elevate yourself to the top. To again, working toward that top left quadrant, the closer you are to that, the more money you will make because you are adding more value. And, and the, the, the discipline I would leave you with on this one is something that I learned from one of my business partners in my twenties. And it was, don’t do $25 an hour work. Okay? And so if you’re sitting there frustrated with your situation and you’re making 50 grand a year or 40 grand a year, whatever the number is, and you want to make six figures. So the DISA, the, the, the philosophy here is that you want to earn six figures because we need people earning 15 bucks an hour, 20 bucks an hour, 25 bucks an hour. I’m not knocking it, but for the people that want to make six figures and beyond you, can’t do $25 an hour work. And so everything you’re delegating in those bottom two quadrants, typically that is $25 an hour work. And you need to build support around you to delegate that work. So you can elevate yourself to doing hundred dollars, $250, $500 an hour work. That’s how it works. You got to add value.

John Jantsch (19:56): Yeah. And I think, uh, I, I heard a great quote. I can’t remember who said this. I said that, that, you know, business owners tend to think, look at all the work that needs to be done and figure out how do we get it all done? And entrepreneurs, truly entrepreneurs look at all the work and say, how do I get other people to do all this? You know? And I think that’s a great distinction. A lot of people are in this mindset of, oh, I’ve got the time I can do this. But as you say, I think we undervalue the, the lost opportunity cost in that.

Gino Wickman (20:21): Yeah, exactly. And, and, and, you know, a way to, sometimes people don’t quite grasp what I mean by, you know, you got to add more value. So it’s very simple. If you flip burgers that pays 15 bucks an hour, if you cut a lawn that pays 25 bucks an hour, if you’re a supervisor that pays 40 bucks an hour. So the point is, if you want to make 100 grand a year and you’re cutting lawns, you’re never going to make a hundred grand a year. So you’ve gotta be doing hundred dollars an hour plus work. You’ve got to solve a bigger problem for people cutting along. That’s worth 25 bucks that you’ve solved a $25 problem. You gotta solve bigger problems for people.

John Jantsch (20:57): All right. Let’s move on to another number five and with time for other passions,

Gino Wickman (21:03): You bet. So let’s start with the opening question, which is what are your passions outside of work? Okay. And so again, please ponder that, give it a good few minutes, 5, 10, 20 minutes. And this one, the tool that we offer here is something called the personal or family VTO. So there were, there was a VTO for the business. There’s also a VTO for the family or for the individual. And so what I urge here are a couple of things. First of all, what we’re having them do in the EOS process in the tool is called EOS time management. And so when we get to create the structure for your organization and what we call your accountability chart, when all that work is done, there’s then the seat that you sit in in the organization. And like we said, you gotta have the right people in the right seat.

Gino Wickman (21:55): Well, once your seat is clear, you then have to decide what your hundred percent is, how much time per week. You’re going to devote to this business, how much you’re going to work. And I’ve got clients that they are 35 hour a week people, and I’ve got clients that are 85 hour a week. People I’m like a 50, 55 hour a week guy. So that’s that you got to figure out the amount of time that you feel fulfilled, but you have time for other passions. And so that’s my formula. Everyone has their own formula. The reason we start there is then you need to protect that because if you don’t protect it, your time is going to be this ever expanding amalgamation nation that you’re just going to completely burn out. But if you will protect your a hundred percent, put a stake in the ground, it will help, you know, when it’s time to delegate and elevate, but it will also help you protect the time.

Gino Wickman (22:45): So you have time in your personal life to pursue those other passions. And then just so everybody knows that this isn’t like some revolutionary thing. It’s not a, it doesn’t have to be jumping out of planes and hella skiing and all that kind of stuff. So for me, my passions are simply going for a walk with my wife, going for a bike ride, golfing gambling with my buddies, traveling with family, friends. These are the things I love to do. These are the things that give me energy and light me up when they’re on my schedule to do. And so it’s a matter of just having time to do those things that you love doing. And then I give like 50 to a hundred things you could do if you can’t figure out your passions, but I don’t know that I’ve met anyone that can’t figure out what they’re passionate about.

John Jantsch (23:27): And, and, and the thing that people realize pretty quickly when you have that time and you do recharge doing that. You’re just, you’re 100% time, so much more effective to,

Gino Wickman (23:37): Yeah, well, that’s the secret formula is you recharge your batteries. You come back into work and you’re literally twice as productive. So

John Jantsch (23:45): You did a sneaky thing. You put a bonus, a book inside the book, which for those people that like the little kind of mini snack size, a great added addition to attend disciplines for managing and maximizing your energy. I’m not gonna, we’re not gonna have time to go through them, but I’m a, I’m an audio book listener. And I must admit, I, I made the mistake of listening to that section while I was on a walk. And I found myself wanting to write a bunch of stuff down. Just really, just as you said, there are things in there many, much of which we’ve talked about, tenure thinking is sort of revolutionary idea. Don’t do $25 hour work. We’ve talked about no, you’re 100%, but you really organize them. I think in a way that, that probably everybody that consumes that part of it would look at say, five of them and go, I’m not, I need to do that.

Gino Wickman (24:32): Yeah. And, and if I may just take 30 seconds on that. So what I did is I put this mini 30 page book inside of a book, which is very unconventional, but that was the place to do it. Cause I didn’t want you to have to buy another book. And so where this evolved is two years ago, I decided to get vulnerable. And I taught this at our EOS conference. And it’s for anyone, that’s a hard charging individual. It’s 10 ways to manage and maximize your energy. They’re so powerfully simple, but this is how I’ve done it for 20 years. And I just kind of put myself out there and said, this is how I absolutely optimize my energy. And again, the reaction has been so incredible. I decided what the heck I’m going to put that in this book.

John Jantsch (25:12): Well, and what I love about this too, is, is there’s so many books on managing your time. And I think that that’s really the wrong approach. You can’t actually manage that. Couldn’t agree more. So I love that you focused on energy because that’s really, that’s how we make time. If you will. All right. Tell people where they can find out you’ve, you’ve shared some of the, the links and the websites. And I of course will have them in our show notes, but maybe just invite people to where they can find out more about the book and about all the resources. Yeah.

Gino Wickman (25:39): Fantastic. Well, I’ll share four things. You know, the first is that the primary is to go to EOSlife.com. So that’s where you’ll go to learn about the book and the content and download the tools we talked about. Second thing I would say is if you’re intrigued by the 10 disciplines, go to the 10disciplines.com, it’s the number ten one zero. You’ll see that there. The third thing I would say is if you’re curious on everything, I’m up to everything. I’ve created all of the content in one place. Cause there’s really five major pieces of content that I’ve taught the world. Just go to Gino, wickman.com. If you want to see what I’m up to. And then the last thing I would suggest is if you’re going to buy the book, the EOS life, you know, it’s in all forms. But what we did with the audio book, if you’re an audio book, lover is an in-depth more than two hour interview with me from an incredible interviewer friend and client Rob do bay. And so if you really want to kind of get into the, behind the scenes on all of this EOS life content and the 10 disciplines, the audio book will take to take you to a really fun

John Jantsch (26:42): Place and think we’ll also learn that you are a wild and

Gino Wickman (26:44): Crazy guy when you were young. I still am. Yes, I very much so was when I was young.

John Jantsch (26:50): So, um, I will say one thing, you know, on your, your whole delegate, obviously you’ve taught people to get executive assistants and things of that nature. I will say that your executive assistant is one of the most efficient I’ve ever worked with most effective I’ve ever worked with. Oh, that’s so nice.

Gino Wickman (27:05): And she’s been with me for almost 30

John Jantsch (27:07): Years. Yeah. Yeah. Well, she, you can tell that because she kind of channels you and your energy, you know, in her responses, even though you’d know it’s not you, which you just told her,

Gino Wickman (27:17): You made her day in my day with that comment.

John Jantsch (27:19): Thank you so much for that. That’s a hard thing to teach. So it does, it does take a while. All right, thanks so much for coming back to the duct tape marketing podcast and hopefully we’ll run into each other one day soon out there on the road. Always a pleasure, John.

John Jantsch (27:32): All right. So that wraps up another episode. I want to thank you so much for tuning in and you know, we love those reviews and comments. And just generally tell me what you think also did you know that you could offer the duct tape marketing system, our system to your clients and build a complete marketing consulting coaching business, or maybe level up an agency with some additional services. That’s right. Check out the duct tape marketing consultant network. You can find it at ducttapemarketing.com and just scroll down a little and find that ‘Offer our system to your clients’ tab.

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network.

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Weekend Favs November 20

Weekend Favs November 20 written by Karen Cutler read more at Duct Tape Marketing

This post is brought to you by Start Page by Buffer

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you to check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from an online source or one that I took out there on the road.

  • Plexicam –  transparent camera mount that lets you position your webcam anywhere on your screen so that you can look at your camera as you look at your screen
  • Snazzy AI – an easy way to create content for your brand with AI copywriting
  • Copysmith – content crafted by AI but perfect for humans

These are my weekend favs, I would love to hear about some of yours – Tweet me @ducttape

Thriving In A World Of Constant Change

Thriving In A World Of Constant Change written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with April Rinne

april-rinneIn this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview April Rinne. April is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader and ranked one of the “50 Leading Female Futurists” in the world by Forbes. She helps individuals and organizations rethink and reshape their relationship with change, uncertainty, and a world in flux. She released a new book this year called – Flux: 8 Superpowers for Thriving in Constant Change.

Key Takeaway:

Being adaptable and flexible have always been hallmarks of effective leadership and living a fulfilling life. But in a world of constant change, flexibility and resilience can be stretched to and beyond their breaking points. The quest of life becomes how to find calm and lasting meaning in the midst of enduring chaos.

In this episode, April Rinne talks about her new book Flux and the 8 powerful mindset shifts that enable people of all ages to thrive in a time of unprecedented change and uncertainty. These eight superpowers empower people to see change in new ways, craft new responses, and reshape their relationship to change from the inside out.

Questions I ask April Rinne:

  • [1:26] Would you say that right now in this current moment that people have a new relationship with change?
  • [1:43] Why is it that we resist change so much?
  • [2:55] We just had a giant experiment in massive change for a lot of people. There were those who dealt with the change and ran towards innovation. Would you say there was an element of positivity to that change even though it’s not the change we chose?
  • [5:22]  Are you advocating that we have to actually go out there and seek change and make change instead of letting it happen to us?
  • [9:54] Can you talk a little bit about these two concepts you’ve covered  – flux baseline and flux deficit?
  • [12:11] There’s value in seeing the value in change. Would you say that if you come to a place where you have that relationship with change, you may still struggle when it hits you, but you’ll also see the value in it and the message that it carries?
  • [14:18] Would calling your book a change management book be doing it a disservice?
  • [16:32] Your book has a framework of eight superpowers. One of the things that hit me at first when I was studying it was that you have what I would call all the elements of mindfulness to them and more than just intention. Would you say that’s valid?
  • [18:01] I’ll ask you to talk a little bit about one of the superpowers that stood out a little bit. And that’s the idea of the portfolio career. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
  • [21:55] Can a culture or an organization have a flux capacity?
  • [23:36] Where can people find out more about Flux and where to connect with you?

More About April Rinne:

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John Jantsch (00:01): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network. Hey, I want to give a shout out to another member of the HubSpot network, the success story podcast, hosted by Scott D. Clary. It’s one of the most useful podcasts in the world. Success story features Q & A sessions with successful business leaders, keynote presentations, conversations on sales marketing. Hey, and if you’re a freelancer, his episode on how to make seven figures freelancing on Fiverr is a must listen to the success story podcast, wherever you get your podcasts.

John Jantsch (00:46): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is April. Riney a world economic forum, young global leader, and ranked one of the 50 leading female futurists in the world by Forbes. She helps individuals and organizations rethink and reshape their relationship with change uncertainty and a world of flux. And coincidentally, we are going to talk about her new book called Flux: Eight super powers for thriving in constant change. So April, welcome to the show.

April Rinne (01:20): Thank you so much, John. I’m delighted to be here.

John Jantsch (01:23): So, so would you say that right now in this current moment that people have a new relationship with Jane?

April Rinne (01:28): That’s a loaded question. We need any relationship to change. I’m not sure that many possibly even most people have it yet. We’ve had a glimmer, but we have a lot of work to do.

John Jantsch (01:39): Uh, it’s a course, well-documented people hate change. So, you know, why, why is it that we resist change so much?

April Rinne (01:46): Well, I would actually argue. It depends. So our relationship human’s relationship to change. It’s messy, it’s complicated. And I come across people every day who are like, I love change. Well, humans and at the risk of generalizing a little bit here, but humans tend to love change. We can control that we can opt into, right? So a new relationship, a new job, a new adventure, a new haircut, right? Right. We tend to really struggle with change. We can’t control. So the kind of change that blindsides you on a Tuesday after noon, it goes against your expectations. It disrupts your plans, but meanwhile, like a change, a kind of change that’s really easy for you might be really hard for me and vice versa. So I bring all of this up because it’s like, there are, there is no one cookie cutter formula for assessing our relationship to change. But once we start getting into it, every person I’ve ever met has said, you know, there’s some aspect of your relationship to change that can use some improvement. So, yeah,

John Jantsch (02:52): So I don’t want to go too far down the pandemic rabbit hole, but I mean, we just had a giant experiment in, in massive change for a lot of people. And I saw a lot of people who were not those, I love change who said, well, let’s deal with change and let’s innovate. And let’s, you know, do what we have to do is that, I mean, clearly that was not under our control. It was not a change we chose, but I think there was an element of positivity to some of that change.

April Rinne (03:20): Yes. And that’s what we need more of. So the way I like to frame it, and also, I know, you know, this, but listeners may not, I didn’t write the book about 2020 or the pandemic I was working on this book since 2018. Although it’s been, I like to think of it as three years in the writing, but more like three decades in the major of just layering this on. But I have to admit in the last 18, 20 months I’ve been given like the best example, like the sense of the world being in flux has really been incredible acceleration and validation of some of these ideas. So humans are really adaptable when we’re forced to be. And I would argue a lot of what’s happened over the last year and a half. Our backs have been against a wall and it’s like, Ugh, I got to change or I’m not going to survive.

April Rinne (04:10): And whether that’s you or your business or your team. So we do. So the challenge we face is that as we look towards the future and whether that’s next week or next year or next, the next decade, the future has more of the kinds of change we can’t control. It has more of that kind of change you resist and struggle with. And it has so much more of that. And again, this is at individual levels, organizational societal so much as in flux that we need to not just radically reshape our relationship to it, but more specifically, we need to learn how to do this. Even in times of calm when our back is not against the wall, because what you don’t want, that, that we, yes, there’s some positivity in it, but it tends to be after the fact, it tends to actually be quite sometimes traumatic, chaotic, difficult, not fun when it’s happening. And that’s what I’m trying to help people do is like get ready for that kind of change in advance. And as I like to say, it can be a lot more fun when your back’s not up against a wall as well

John Jantsch (05:19): When you plan it or so, so I’ve always said, you know, comfort sometimes is the enemy I’ve changed. It’s like, oh, why it’s not broken? Why fix it? Even though it’s horribly broken, right? So are you, in some ways, are you advocating that we have to actually go out there and just seek change and make change and you know, not let it happen to us. Okay.

April Rinne (05:38): Yes. To some degree there is this active, like leaning in and it’s changed, but it’s also uncertainty. And it’s also from a leadership perspective, for sure. It’s also ambiguity this comfort with ambiguity. So partly it is seeking it out. I would say right now, at least. And you know, my theory continues to play out every day where it’s like, there’s, there’s just as much flux now, as there was a year ago, it just looks a little different. There’s going to be just as much next year. It’s going to look a little different. So like year up for the longer haul that life gives us opportunities every day to reshape how we think about, talk about, feel about, and ultimately relate and respond to change. So some of it is seeking it out and some of it is simply pay attention to what’s already happening all around you because there are a lot of big and small changes improvements we can make when it comes to change.

John Jantsch (06:34): Yeah. It’s funny. I actually have a sense that there are people struggling right now, more than they did say a year, year and a half ago when the change was like, you know, constant and dynamic. And now it’s just kinda like a grind. And I think that, I think that there’s actually more struggling. We, we, we have not actually dealt with this word. Flux Webster says it is a flowing, oh, a discharge of fluid from the body, especially when excessive or abnormal. And I won’t go on to cite the examples. And then of course, who could forget the flux capacitor from the fictional piece of technology that allowed us to, time-travel why the word flux.

April Rinne (07:10): Yeah. So you have just landed on the historical medical definition as well. And there are a couple others that I’ll add to the mix. Cause they’re fun because we had to do a lot of surveys and testing and, you know, flux, flux, conjures up for most people. It’s kind of fascinating, but they’re like, I don’t really know what it means. Occasionally some folks have said reflux. It’s like, no, no, but flux is both a noun and a verb. And in today’s modern usage, most people know the noun as constant change, continuous movement, motion, things are in flux, but it’s also a verb and to flux means to learn, to become fluid. And I love that because you can think of it as the world is in flux and we all need to learn how to flux a little bit better. Now, just a fun footnote.

April Rinne (08:01): Uh, there is this medical definition of flux was actually internal bleeding, not going to go there, but there you go. It also though, and this is the one way that I still see it used today. It is a substance, a chemical compound that’s used in metal smithing and jewelry making and stained glass making. And flocks is the compound that binds the Juul to the metal. So it’s this or it’s stained glass. It’s the compound that, that allows the, the glass, the beautiful piece of glass to nest in its casing. And I love that too, because it, it allows things to stick together that wouldn’t otherwise, and it helps create beauty, even though these two substances are very, very different. So anyway, that’s just a bit more etymology for us.

John Jantsch (08:48): Awesome. And I’m sure that there is a software company out there somewhere named, uh, to the uses the name as well. Right?

John Jantsch (08:59): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by Sendinblue and all in one digital marketing platform, empowering small businesses to build stronger customer relationships through end to end digital marketing campaigns. They support businesses successfully navigating their digital presence in order to strengthen their customer relationships, send them blue allows you to create captivating and personalized email campaigns, custom landing pages, sign up forms, automated workflows, transactional messaging, CRM, and more, and best of all, duct tape marketing listeners can click on sendinblue.com/ducttapemarketing to sign up for a free trial. And if you use the promo code on that page, DUCT TAPE, you’ll get 50% off for your first three months, either on a light or premium account.

John Jantsch (09:51): All right. So you then take this and give us a couple of new concepts. And I wonder if you could just, obviously there are many, but these are the two I picked up flux baseline and flux deficit.

April Rinne (10:01): Oh, how fun. So building on this notion of our relationship to change and central theme of the book is also this concept of a flux mindset. So the state of mind that can see all change, whether it’s good or bad, unexpected, or not as an opportunity to learn and to grow and to improve your flux baseline is really what is your relationship to change today? Because as we were just talking about some changes, delight us, other ones trigger us. Some changes, entice us. Other changes, derail us. Everyone is different in this regard. And everyone has strengths and weaknesses and areas of improvement and so forth. And so getting to your flux baseline is this notion of what’s your starting point for this journey to reshape your relationships change. And then a flux deficit is when you’re not, and this is such a fun term to riff on, you know, flexi people and flexing your flux capacity actually is another way to put your Fluxus. So a flux deficit is when you are not very flexy, when you are really struggling with change. And I ran a massive flux deficit for many years. I still, I still practice the superpowers. Everyone somehow thinks that because I’ve written this book that I’ve somehow like mastered them all. I’m like, no, I’m just exhibit a for all of them, but

John Jantsch (11:27): I’m much better than

April Rinne (11:29): Precisely. And I’m much better than I was years ago. But I also will have work to do for the rest of my life because that’s what the nature of change is about. But a flux deficit is, are, is, are, are those areas that need the most help when it comes to learning? How to, if not, embrace change, see change from a place of hope, rather than fear a place of curiosity rather than danger, which is what a lot of people are struggling with today.

John Jantsch (11:59): Surely there’s an assessment in here somewhere that somebody

April Rinne (12:04): Can call it your flux capacity.

John Jantsch (12:08): So I have often said, I don’t know where I would be on your continuum, but I would say probably somewhere in the middle because yeah, I I’m old and crotchety and don’t like change sometimes, but I’ve realized the value, I’ve seen the value in it. And so it doesn’t bug me as much. In fact, I’ve, I’ve, I actually think it’s changes sort of the art of living. And, and so if you come to that relationship with it, I mean, it’s still, I think it’s kind of like you in a way, you know, you still maybe struggle with it when it hits you, but by the same token, you, you, you see the value in it and it like shows up with a message, right?

April Rinne (12:42): Yeah. And another fun footnote on this back to nouns and verbs, I’ve heard, I’ve heard so many different framings and what I love about not just the book, but the concept is how people can kind of make it their own. And like, this is how it applies to me. And you said this, but I’m going to take it a little further. And I love that. But one of the, one of the best ways that to put it is that people love change. They hate being changed. So again, we love the, now we hate the verb, but it’s the being changed. It’s the allowing yourself to grow and evolve, which to your point, we tend to know like great growth comes often from the unexpected difficult changes. Right? Right. Easy to say that after the fact, at the time it’s like anything, but I’m going to resist.

April Rinne (13:26): I’m going to pretend it doesn’t exist. You know, all of that. And it’s overcoming that to kind of regroup again, back to this mindset, thinking of your mindset as a mental muscle, strengthening that mental muscle, that’s much more attuned to not just one change and like we’ll fix that and go back to the way things were. That’s not, it it’s this constant change. And this understanding that moving forward, the way I like to put it is there is no end game. There is no steady state other than more change. And that is a pretty big difference from what we’ve been taught for the most part over the last several decades.

John Jantsch (14:04): All right. You ready for the kindest question anyone has ever asked you?

April Rinne (14:10): Oh, of course.

John Jantsch (14:12): Would calling this a change management book, be doing it a disservice.

April Rinne (14:19): That was easy. So I love that you kind of predicted that question perhaps because I’m finding myself in conversations sometimes recently where people like, oh, you wrote a book about change, or you wrote a book about change management. And I’m like with all due respect to change management, I did not read a book about it. I read a book about humans, relationships to change, but I do want to call out the tension and the relationship between our mindset about change and our change management strategies. And that is that I believe we’re actually getting those things backwards. We are spending. And I say, we, the collectively we’re spending so much time trying to figure out change management strategies, how to invest in uncertainty, what to do in the outside world. And not just those things

John Jantsch (15:09): Go matter. We want hacks, right? Yeah. And

April Rinne (15:13): Those things matter, but what we’re not remembering or even realizing sometimes is that every single strategy investment and decision you make is fundamentally rooted in your mindset. So do you see change from a place of hope or fear? That’s not strategy that’s mindset, but that the answer to that question will absolutely shape and color and dictate the kind of strategy you set. Do you expect that things will go to plan and then get anxious or unravel when they don’t, that’s not strategy that’s mindset, but again, so the way I like to put it is it’s not that strategy doesn’t matter or change management doesn’t matter. It’s the mindset drives both of those things, not the other way around. And when we can get clear on that inner relationship to change all this external stuff becomes clear, change management is no longer this thing. That’s, I mean, we’re, we’re just, we’re trying to triage stuff, but we’re not actually doing the harder work which is gaining self-awareness about what again, what triggers us, what excites us? What is the baggage we bring to the table when we’re talking about any kind of change period.

John Jantsch (16:29): So you have a belt this around eight superpowers, that’s kind of the framework of the book. And one of the things that seemed at least hit me at first, when I was setting in and you have a nice graphic and all, is that all the elements have what I would call an element of mindfulness to them. And more than just intention. Is that just me?

April Rinne (16:51): No, that’s intentional. I love that you pick that up. Thank you. And you know, it’s interesting. I think more broadly I am walking this fine, but beautiful line between having written a book that is, you know, business it’s for leadership, it’s for teams. That’s kind of where I sit professionally, but there’s also an element of, I don’t want to go so far. It’s not self-helpy per se. I’m not a self-help, I’m not a guru. I’m not in that world, but this notion that all professional development and organizational development and strategy and execution all that, it is all rooted in personal growth. And this notion mindfulness, which isn’t something that until recently we found much in the business world, that’s at the core of everything and presence and self-awareness, and, and this ability to be rooted and grounded. And then that flows into all kinds of things around how we identify ourselves and how we value different things. How we look at our relationships and can we trust people and our pace of change and productivity, like it just shows up everywhere.

John Jantsch (17:57): So there are eight superpowers, as I said, and, and, you know, if you want to know what they are, go by the book, but I’ll ask you to talk a little bit about one that maybe stood out a little bit. And that’s the idea of the portfolio career. I mean, I’ve certainly, we’ve all heard people talk about that now. Especially if you’re a millennial, that’s, you know, what you’re supposed to be doing, but I’m not, I think in the context of what you’re talking about, I found that one to be the most sort of intriguing.

April Rinne (18:21): Oh, fabulous. And that one is unique amongst the eight in that it is very specifically geared towards the future of work that is itself in flux and kind of how we look at our professional identity in our overall career career development. So I love that you bring this up and each of the eight superpowers, I also have to give the kind of not caveat, but framing that they’re all counterintuitive in some way, they all go against the grain of what I think a lot of us have been taught about the world and how it works and how we’re supposed to show up in it. But a lot of what we’ve been taught is really for a world that is, as I will say, neat and tidy and orderly and predictable, you know, that the world as if we could tie it up with a boat, right, a world in flux flips a lot of that on its head.

April Rinne (19:08): So the concept of a portfolio career, the, the way that the superpower is phrased is that any future of work influx, we need to think about our careers and career development, less as a singular path to pursue or a ladder to climb. And rather more like a portfolio to cure rate as an, as an artist would, or an investor would, are lots of different kinds of portfolios, but it’s this sense of our professional identity goes so far beyond our resume. Our resume is capturing only a certain kind of data that not that it’s not helpful, it’s an incomplete picture of any person, what they can do, what kind of value they can add. But also your resume is very much for a linear kind of work where you would study hard, get good grades, go to college, get a job, do said job for a long time and retire.

April Rinne (20:02): Like that is a script that is a linear path. That is not the reality that we’re working in. And even before the great recession, sorry, not great recession, the great resignation that was in play, but the portfolio career concept maps really well with people also who are reconsidering, you know, what kind of professional life do they want, but also in the face of automation in the face of lots of unknowns, how do we actually prepare for a future of work that is a minefield of uncertainties. And so what I love to remind people is that every single person today already has a portfolio. You may just not realize it. And your portfolio is all of the skills and roles and ways you can contribute to society, add value. It’s not about titles and positions and so forth. Parenting skills are in your portfolio. They’re typically not allowed in your resume, right?

April Rinne (21:02): So you’ve got this, but also unlike a job. And I hate to sound blunt, but unlike a job that someone else gives you any job that someone else gives you, even if you love it, even if you’re great at it, even if everything’s going great, the fact that someone else gave you that job means that it can be taken away from you. And that makes a lot of people nervous and anxious and uncertainty just ratchets up your portfolio is yours forever. You own it. No one can take it away from you. It is your responsibility to curate it and to weave your narrative around it, but for a future of work and a world in which there’s so much, we can’t control this notion of a portfolio is something you actually can, and you’ve already got one and you can start today.

John Jantsch (21:52): You know, it’s been really fun for me. You know, I kind of poked fun at millennials a little bit there, but what’s been really fun for me is that, you know, who’s really waking up to this idea is 55. Plus you know, is really waking up to this idea, which to me is kind of cool. So art we’ve been, maybe you’ve been talking broader, but I think people have probably sensed it. We’re talking about individual and flux, but you know, can a culture have a flex capacity? Can an organization have a flex capacity? I mean, how do we apply those concepts to much larger? Uh,

April Rinne (22:26): Absolutely. So I get the question. Yes. Can an organization have a flux mindset? Absolutely. Yes. The key here and the book really is designed primarily for individuals because that’s where this starts, but I like to remind people, organizations are simply collections of individuals. And so when you bring those together, you have not just an organization that can be flexi, but this becomes part of your organizational culture. I mean, so much of this is about how do people relate to one another and then together, how do they relate to change? And then as an organization it’s built into, to design to just different processes, structures, et cetera. But yes. So start with the micro unit of the person, but then build that in organizations. I mean, at least so far organizations are still only as you could say, valuable as the people, in terms of a longevity in terms of the humanness as the people that are there.

John Jantsch (23:27): Yeah. It kind of becomes, I’ve got a new term for your flux ecosystem there. All right. So April tell people where they can find out more certainly about flux the book, but also your work anywhere you want to send them to connect with you.

April Rinne (23:41): So for all things flux, please head to flux, mindset dot lots, more resources, superpowers articles, et cetera. And then I also do have April rennie.com, which is more about the stuff. Not, it has a little bit of flux, but it has things like my hand stands on it. And people kind of found out that I do handstands. So they always want to know where to go for those.

John Jantsch (24:02): Awesome. Well, thanks so much for stopping by the duct tape marketing podcast. And hopefully we’ll run into the next time you’re in the Northwest, right? Did I read that? Is that right? Yeah. One of my daughters went to Gonzaga and so I spent for four years, I spent a lot of time in the Northwest, a beautiful area. So hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

April Rinne (24:20): Thank you so much, John. It’s been a pleasure.

John Jantsch (24:22): All right. That wraps up another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. I want to thank you so much for tuning in, feel free to share this show. Feel free to give us reviews. You know, we love those things. Also. Did you know that we had created training, marketing training for your team? If you’ve got employees, if you’ve got a staff member that wants to learn a marketing system, how to install that marketing system in your business, check it out. It’s called the certified marketing manager program from duct tape marketing. You can find it at ducttapemarketing.com and just scroll down a little and find that tab that says ‘training for your team’

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network and Sendinblue.

HubSpot Podcast Network is the audio destination for business professionals who seek the best education and inspiration on how to grow a business.

 

 

 

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Sendinblue allows you to create captivating and personalized email campaigns, custom landing pages, signup forms, automated workflows, transactional messaging, CRM, and more. Duct Tape Marketing fans can click here to learn more about Sendinblue and sign up for a free trial!  You can also use this promo code to get 50% off your first three months on either our lite or premium account!

Grow With Your Customers By Serving Their Ecosystem

Grow With Your Customers By Serving Their Ecosystem written by Kyndall Ramirez read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

john-jantschIn this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I’m doing part three of a solo show series on where I’m covering one of my favorite topics: referrals. You can catch the first episode and second episode of the Referral Generation series here.

Key Takeaway:

I’m doing a series on Referral Generation where I’m presenting what I’m calling the seven grades of referral fuel. In the first episode of the series, I introduce all seven approaches. In the second episode, I dive into the first point – why you should have referral offers for every client and what those offers should look like. In this episode, I’m covering why you should work with partners who also serve your existing clients and why leveraging your internal team for referral generation is essential.

Topics I cover:

  • [1:37] What the client ecosystem balancing approach is
  • [2:06] Why work with partners who also serve your existing clients
  • [3:13] How this approach of integrating with and providing value to professionals who provide your clients with value can generate referrals
  • [7:24] One of the most underutilized types of referrals is internal referrals
  • [7:52] Why everyone on your internal team should understand who your ideal customer is and how you’re different
  • [9:51] Incentivizing your internal team and strategic partners
  • [10:49] Why look at the inside of your business as a marketing campaign

Resources I mention:

More About The Duct Tape Marketing Consultant Network:

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network.

Finding The Balance Of Mom-Life And Work-Life With Lindsay Maloney

Finding The Balance Of Mom-Life And Work-Life With Lindsay Maloney written by Sara Nay read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Agency Spark Podcast, hosted by Sara Nay, is a collection of interviews from thought leaders in the marketing consultancy and agency space. Each episode is designed to spark ideas you can put into practice for your agency today. Check out the new Spark Lab Consulting website here!

About the episode:

In this episode of the Agency Spark Podcast, Sara talks with Lindsay Maloney on finding the balance of mom-life and work-life. They discuss how busy women and mom’s can grow their dream coaching business, the hustle mentality, following your intuition in business, daily planners and more!

Questions Sara asks Lindsay Maloney:

  • Tell me a little about your journey and what led you to where you are today?
  • Can you expand on how you help women follow their intuition when it comes to business?
  • How do you help people take a step back from what they are doing to really evaluate what they are thinking and feeling?
  • Why are you not a fan of the hustle mentality?
  • How do you help people find balance between their business and personal life?
  • Tell me a little about your daily planner and how you use it?
  • Why do you think introverts make the best coaches?

Show notes:

  • Click here to get access to Lindsay’s freebie vault and download tons of workbooks to help you start and scale your coaching business.
  • Lindsay’s Instagram

 

Like this show? Please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts here!

 

This episode of the Agency Spark Podcast is brought to you by Monday.com, a powerful project management platform. Monday.com helps teams easily build, run, and scale their dream workflows on one platform.  I personally am a user and big fan of Monday.com – I start my workday pulling up the platform and spend my day working within it for everything from task management to running client engagements. Learn more about Monday.com at ducttape.me/monday

Weekend Favs November 13

Weekend Favs November 13 written by Karen Cutler read more at Duct Tape Marketing

This post is brought to you by Start Page by Buffer

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you to check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from an online source or one that I took out there on the road.

  • Backlinko – a complete guide to video marketing in 2021
  • Markaaz – a simple and trusted way to find suppliers, connect with new business partners and providers of services in the United States
  • Canva – create videos on the go using Canva’s free video editor, no software installation required

These are my weekend favs, I would love to hear about some of yours – Tweet me @ducttape

3 Types Of Referral Offers Every Business Needs

3 Types Of Referral Offers Every Business Needs written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

john-jantschIn this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I’m doing part two of a solo show series on where I’m going to be covering one of my favorite topics: referrals. You can catch the first episode of the Referral Generation series here.

Key Takeaway:

One of the things I always feel the need to emphasize is that referral generation is something that should be baked into pretty much every angle possible. It’s not something that you do one time or one way.

So I’m doing a series on Referral Generation where I’m presenting what I’m calling the seven grades of referral fuel. In the first episode of the series, I introduce all seven approaches. In the second episode, I’m diving into the first point – why you should have referral offers for every client and what those offers should look like.

Topics I cover:

  • [1:46] Why you should have referral offers for every client
  • [2:48] The difference between direct offers, implied offers, and tangible offers
  • [12:11] Tools to make referrals as easy as possible for people
  • [12:44] Why consider building a funnel just for referrals
  • [13:00] Finding ways to publicly thank people who give you referrals
  • [14:17] The Referral Champions Program
  • [14:43] Getting your best customers who already evangelize your business even more engaged
  • [16:25] Having special, exclusive offers for your best customers

Resources I mention:

More About The Duct Tape Marketing Consultant Network:

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John Jantsch (00:01): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network. Hey, I want to give a shout out to another member of the HubSpot network, the success story podcast, hosted by Scott, the Clair. It’s one of the most useful podcasts in the world. Success story features Q and a sessions with successful business leaders, keynote presentations, conversations on sales marketing. Hey, and if you’re a freelancer, his episode on how to make seven figures freelancing on Fiverr is a must listen to the success story podcast, wherever you get your podcasts.

John Jantsch (00:47): Hello, welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and I am continuing on my series about referrals. If you didn’t catch the last episode on this, you might check it out. Referrals, generation episode one. This is episode two, we’ll have them all posted once we’ve got them all recorded the so that you can listen to them all one time. But if you have a list of that one, I, I, I, in the first one, I talked a little bit about the rationale, why we do referrals, why we need to focus on this idea of referrals. So for today, I’m going to focus on two of the seven. What I call grades of referral fuel. In the first episode, I introduced to all seven of those. And in subsequent episodes, I will continue to go into more depth on each.

John Jantsch (01:41): So for today, I’m going to do number one. And number two, number one is referral offers for every client. Anybody who has done business with you should at least know that you want a referrals that you’re open to referrals that you love referrals. So the real key there is to just find a way to simply stay top of mind, to remind them that, that there are ways to give you referrals dependent upon your business, what industry you’re in. They may have the opportunity to refer somebody to you every day, or they may just, it may just happen once or twice in a year. For example, if, if somebody is buying a house or, uh, trying to find a remodeling contractor or something, it’s not going to be something that’s an everyday thing. So one of the real keys is that you stay top of mind by having some things that come into the home or come into the business on a regular basis.

John Jantsch (02:38): I like to talk about, uh, referral offers that you are going to put out there to your attire, customer basis, three types of referrals. So there are what I call direct offers. And essentially a direct offer is if you do X, you will get X pretty straightforward, some sort of reason to act some sort of maybe it’s monetary. Maybe it’s not. The second type is what I call implied offers. And this is just a way for you to show up in your client’s life in, uh, in a way that they might share something. So they’re not necessarily say you should, you should hire these people. You should buy from this company. And, you know, and I get X in many cases, there may be no actual motivation or, or compensation for the referral. It’s just, you’ve made it very easy for them to, to showcase your work.

John Jantsch (03:33): I’ll give a couple examples of each of these. The third one is, uh, what I call tangible offers and the idea behind this is that you send or give your customer something that they can turn around that has value that they can turn around something like a gift certificate or a coupon and tangibly hand to someone so that you are not only making it easy. You are actually giving them maybe something of great value that they can share so that, that in some cases could be a true motivation. So let me give you example of each of these. So a direct offer. Everybody’s pretty much seen that. I mean, if you think about affiliate deals, they’re kind of, Hey, you know, send somebody our way, use this referral link and you get 20 bucks. So it’s essentially that. But I like to think in terms of, unless you have an affiliate program where it makes sense for you to have some sort of recurring revenue, a affiliate program, then I really like to get creative with these.

John Jantsch (04:30): And I think it’s an, I think it’s important that you tie it back to what it is that you do, but particularly if you’re going to reward somebody in, in some cases, monetary rewards are appreciated. In other cases they’re seen as well, gosh, you’re only referring this person because you get money or you get paid and that’s not, again, that’s not everybody’s motivation. So in some cases, they actually may be uncomfortable with that years ago, I was working with a remodeling contractor that essentially did very high-end upscale, remodels. And so when somebody referred somebody to them, that was worth a lot of money. So they basically had a standing referral fee of a thousand dollars. Some of their people would take it. Some of them would say, oh, just donate it to charity. I mean, obviously in some cases they, you know, they just said, no, I don’t, I don’t need that.

John Jantsch (05:20): That’s not why I told my friend that they should hire you. I told them because you’re awesome. So we tried to think of w you know, we still wanted to stay top of mind to give referrals. So we tried to think of something more creative. And so we came up with that offer that we called carpenter for a day. So they employed carpenters that did work. And so what would happen was when somebody would refer a customer, a new customer, they would earn the use of a carpenter for that entire, for entire day. So they’d create kind of a punch list of little, you know, tacky, little things that we all have around our homes that they just, it wasn’t really worth calling somebody or the hassle of getting somebody to come out and bid it, whatnot. It was just like, no, here we’ll, we’ll take off the list under these parameters.

John Jantsch (06:04): And the thing about that was that, that they’re, they’re more upscale homeowners, you know, actually found that harder to get at a thousand dollars. It actually costs the company less than a thousand dollars to do that, to send somebody over for a day. So they found that it, it became a motivation because people thought it was fun. Oh, I finally got these things done. I mean, they would talk to their friends about, Hey, if you, you know, if you hire them, I get a carpenter for a day know, and, and it just sounded so much better than I get, you know, I get paid for it. So the lots of ways that you can make this worked for you. And in fact, in some cases, people have been very successful at, you know, refer someone and we’ll donate X to a charity of your choice.

John Jantsch (06:51): That could be a motivation. That is if you do X, you know, you Y happens. So it doesn’t always have to be a monetary reward to the individual. Some people feel very good about supporting a charity and that could be motivation enough. All right, the applied offer is a little more subtle and it probably doesn’t work for every business. But the idea behind this is that that there’s some sort of reminder. So again, let’s go back to my remodeling contractor. They actually created when, so when they would do a project of a certain size, they would actually photograph the, before the, during and the after pictures, and then create one of those kind of nice coffee table, hardbound, full color books, that, that are pretty easy, uh, to, to, to get their number of companies that do those now. And you just produce one at a time.

John Jantsch (07:39): They were going to photograph the projects anyway for their own portfolio and further their own website. So it really wasn’t much of a cost to go to the extent of creating this coffee table book. Now, the nice thing about it was last page had just a little bit of subtle information about, about the particular contractor. So if somebody was reading that book, they might think, oh, I’m going to call that. And the thing is this, you know, when somebody redoes their kitchen, they have people over to see it and why not go through? Here’s what it looked like before. Here’s how they had to navigate tearing out this wall and that wall, and here’s the finished product. And so they were, it was something that the people appreciated getting, cause it chronicled their project, but it was also something that made it very easy for them to share their project.

John Jantsch (08:28): So consequently, it implied referral. Now there’s lots of ways that you can do this as well. I, I had a, a real estate agent that would send out gift baskets to, you know, typical things. Somebody closed on a house, uh, but they had a subtle message on them that had a little hang tag that, that, that said, I’ll go the extra mile for, you know, referrals. So just keeping, you know, top of mind keeping it so that when people saw that tag or saw, you know, who the gift was from. So lots of things you can do under that umbrella. All right. The third one, the tangible offer. I really like this one because you’re not only making it easy for somebody you’re, you’re also giving them something of value that that’s going to help incentivize. So it could be a gift certificate. It could be, you know, a product or a service be bonuses.

John Jantsch (09:22): So that, that kind of working in terms of referral. So once a quarter send all your customers a gift certificate for a hundred dollars and tell them, feel free to give this to any of your friends, neighbors, and colleagues, as you know, our appreciation is our, thank you. Now, one of the things, of course that makes that particular one work is also that they not only have the coupon or the gift certificate to give away that has a tangible value somehow a worded or, or structured. So that, that when they do, when this gift certificate comes back used with a new customer, that, that your customer receives something forward as well. In fact, those are kind of some of the keys, I think, to, to making these programs work. I think some of the best referral programs are ones where both parties win. So the person that they refer get something for it and the person who does the referral get something for it.

John Jantsch (10:22): And in way I think it, I think it adds a level of motivation because the person who’s referring gets something, but it doesn’t make it. So like the only reason you’re vegan is referrals because you get paid the, the recipient or the person who they are going to refer also wins, or also get something in, in the exchange as well, some discount or some kind of new customer park of some sort. So I think that’s a real key when you’re thinking about designing these. Now, the second one is I love it. When you can creatively tie back to the brand, the carpenter for a day, it was certainly a great way to tie back to what the brand did, what the company did. And then of course, consistency. Just if you get something that’s working at all, just think about this as a quarterly type of program, for example,

John Jantsch (11:11): And now a word from our sponsor with Q4 closing employee holiday travel and forecasting for 2022 underway, staying connected has never been more important. And HubSpot is consistently releasing new features to make your CRM platform more connected than ever with improved forecasting tools and custom report builders. See how your quarter is going, inspect new deals and use customizable data-driven reports to improve team performance. As you grow with custom behavioral events, you can track site behavior and understand your customer’s buying habits all within the platform. And if you’re looking for cleaner data with a centralized system, the all new operations hub enterprise gives your ops leads. The ability to curate data sets for all users, meaning even faster and more consistent reporting, learn more about how a HubSpot CRM platform can help connect the dots of your business @ HubSpot.com. It’s a couple of tools that you might also consider. A lot of times the thing that stops people in some ways from making referrals is, is just a bit of work. So make it as easy as possible, you know, create a landing page that can send people to pre-write an email.

John Jantsch (12:26): So if you want somebody to introduce you to their friends, neighbors, customers, whatever it is, rewrite that remail obviously they can make it their own and they could change it, but it’s going to give them a head start. And it’s going to make sure that maybe the way you talk about your business is the way you want to talk to that. You might even consider building a funnel just for referrals. So if somebody refers people to you or somebody gives you introductions or makes introductions that you actually have some sort of nurture campaign. And then the last one, when people make referrals, find a way to publicly thank them. I mean, in social media, in your newsletter thought that kind of thing, because what it does is first off, the person who made the referral might think, oh, look, you know, I’ve been recognized, but it also sends a message that you want referrals and that you appreciate referrals and that you get referrals.

John Jantsch (13:19): All of those are actually, you know, really good things in terms of somebody else referring a couple other, uh, points. There, there are some tools out there getting people to share your content is, you know, don’t under estimate the value of that in terms of a referral tools like spark loop, smart loop app spark loop app, make it really easy for you to, uh, have a little button so that somebody could share your, a piece of content, share your newsletter. And then, you know, maybe they win or they get some sort of awards for doing that. There’s also all kinds of tools these days for affiliate referrals, you know, things like referral candy, referral rock, those might be tools that you might employ. Really what I would call kind of community referrals. Somebody doesn’t have to be a customer. They, they may just be on your newsletter list, but that this, you know, a tool like spark loop can actually turn them into a referral source for you.

John Jantsch (14:14): All right. The second one I want to work on today is something I call your referral champions program. So the first programs that I was talking about it was really something you should be, you should be communicating to everyone, just, you know, even, even people that are on your newsletter list. But the second program is, is the people that are really champions. I mean, they, they evangelize your business already. They send you referrals already. They would do anything that you ask them to do. Certainly those, that group is a group that you should be understanding a lot about, actually think in terms of thinking church, treating them like a club almost so that you give them special appreciation, special perks, special events, special content of some short for that group. You also, I mean, that group actually might come to you. There may be somebody in that say, Hey, I want to refer you.

John Jantsch (15:06): What’s the best way to do it. So, so create content for them. Testimonials reviews of find ways to get customers, those customers, to generate content, doing videos, testimonials, and things, doing case studies on some of your best customers is a great way to get that even more engaged. You know, they know, they know they go to your website and see a case study of the success you’ve had with them that just gets them more engaged. But there are some other things that I think you could do. You might just bring them together for lunch, believe it or not, especially in, in certain settings. Um, that’s a networking event, uh, you know, for other business owners, for example, or even just individuals that live in, in a community that might be customers of yours, bring them together, just kind of creates a closer connection. Having them actually do some teaching on your behalf.

John Jantsch (15:54): So if you’ve gotten a result for somebody or a product of yours has got result for somebody having them talk to say a group of five or six people in a round table, kind of setting, talking about how they address the problem they were, they, they were trying to solve in their industry. You know, that’s a great, it’s a great way to get them engaged. It’s very valuable to anybody that would attend and effectively is referral selling on your behalf. Don’t forget exclusive events, exclusive offers. I mean, how many people put out that special offer only for new customers? Well, what about your best customer is about having a special offer just for them exclusive content, you know, maybe put, maybe build a, a, an advisory board for your business. You know, a marketing advisory board, uh, they’re, they’re not going to have any official duties necessarily, but they’re going to be closed.

John Jantsch (16:46): You’re going to be able to bounce things off of them. They’re going to give you feedback. They’re close, they’re closer and closer to your business. All right. So those are one and two. So, uh, next, in the next episode, I will cover a couple more. And then in a fourth episode, we’ll, we’ll wrap up this series. So put all together, this is going to be effectively a workshop in referral generation dependent upon your business model or the type of clients that you’re after. You will certainly be able to find something that appeals to your business and works for you. So keep listening, keep digging in and we’ll catch you on the next show. All right. So that wraps up another episode. I want to thank you so much for tuning in and, you know, we love those reviews and comments. And just generally tell me what you think also did you know that you could offer the duct tape marketing system, our system to your clients, and build a complete marketing consulting coaching business, or maybe level up an agency with some additional services. That’s right. Check out the duct tape marketing consultant network. You can find it at duct tape, marketing.com and just scroll down a little and find that offer our system to your clients tab.

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network.