John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by HubSpot. Look, AI is literally eating the web ChatGPT is more search than I don’t know, Taylor Swift . Check out HubSpot’s AI powered tools, content assistant and chat spott. They both run on open AI’s GPT model, and both are designed to help you get more done and to grow your business faster. HubSpot’s AI powered content assistant helps you brainstorm, create, and share content in a flash, and it’s all inside a super easy to use c r m now chats spott automates all the manual tasks inside HubSpot to help you arrange more customers close more deals, and scale your business faster. Find out more about how to use AI to grow your business at hubspot.com/artificial intelligence. That’s hubspot.com/artificial intelligence.

(01:14): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Ben Young. He’s the founder of Nudge, an analytics company that was started as a commercial venture or product from his own agency. Nudge helps you measure the performance of your digital properties through the lens of what people are paying attention to with the retirement of Google Analytics. We’ve talked a lot about that on the show. Many are reevaluating what options are out there. Prior to Nudge, he co-founded an agency, a marketing agency in New Zealand that was the eighth fastest growing business at the time, and it was in that, that he started investing in today. That’s what we’re gonna talk about, how agency owners should invest in other businesses. So Ben, welcome to the show.

Ben Young (02:00): Thank you. It was great to be here.

John Jantsch (02:04): So I guess we need to set the table first. You and I were talking off air a bit about the, this idea of investing in other businesses, and I think some agency owners, because it’s a common model, might interpret that as you go to work for somebody for a piece of, of quid or profit sharing and you’re really, you’re talking about something different. So maybe let’s define Yeah, what you mean by investing in other businesses.

Ben Young (02:28): So I, I’m sure a lot of small business owners and agency owners have had those requests where they’re like, can you do some work for some equity? And that’s not what I’m talking about today. What I’m talking about today is for agency owners to take a little bit of their own capital, set it aside and invest it as a proper investment as a, Hey, here’s some things I’m interested in. And to do that as a bit of personal development and to see how those investments grow and foster.

John Jantsch (02:55): So, so I think one of the obvious questions, somebody listening to this might say, I’m already like really invested in this business that I’m building, right? Shouldn’t I take every dime that I have and put it in that?

Ben Young (03:07): Yeah, it’s, it’s funny, I had this exact thing from a, a founder I was looking at investing in and they’re like, well, Ben, you’ve got an agency, you’re just gonna put all your money into that, so I’m not even gonna ask you for money. And I was like, well, okay, you’ve made an assumption there, but I think you’re right. As an agency owner, you want to keep investing in your own business and you want to make sure it’s growing, but also the learnings that you’re getting are only from your own business. So if you’re able to go, Hey, look, if I kind of think about over the next three years, I’m gonna do a bit of a personal development and learning and I’m gonna take away a little bit of cash and invest it in other businesses as a way to learn from other founders, because I think that’s an amazing thing. By investing in other companies, you are getting the collective intelligence and learnings from all these brilliant companies doing amazing things, and that’s in addition to what you’re already doing. So of course you should be investing in your own business first, but do consider kind of the bigger picture and how these investments can make you a better founder in your own business.

John Jantsch (04:09): Yeah, so, so it’s not merely a oh 8% return on investment, you know, kind of calculation. Yeah, I mean, you’re saying that in some ways, even if you don’t have the money, the funds, you know, directly that go find them because in some ways it’s an investment in your own business.

Ben Young (04:25): Yeah, and there’s a few things to touch on there. So it doesn’t have to be a lot of capital. So through websites like angellist.com, you can invest with as little as a thousand dollars per deal. And yes, investing a thousand dollars isn’t as as sexy as saying, I’m, I’m Mark Cuban investing on Shark Tank. Right? But it’s getting you into the deal and it’s getting you learning. And so if you committed to five deals a year, that’s $5,000 a year. And again, that’s not nothing. But I, the point is that you can start with a small amount. And then the other thing, and this is how I actually did my first deal. So my first deal kind of came about, someone said, Hey Ben, you know the incident? I was like, well, yes, I do . And they said, there’s this funny company, I don’t really understand it.

(05:12): Can you have a look and would you consider investing? And so I had a look at the business and I was, I did understand it and I thought, you know, I, I thought it had a lot of potential. And so this was the very first deal. So this is like big stakes for me personally. So I went home and spoke with my wife and she said, but what if we lose it? And I was like, that’s a very good question, , what, what if we do lose it? And so I kind of sat and thought on it and I kind of went, Hey, look, if I do this sort of investment in other investments, I think from the learnings that will make me a better founder and help me identify new opportunities faster for my own business. So even if these investments go to zero, I’m gonna make that up through gains elsewhere. And I kind of detailed a few things where I thought it might help. So it was believable. I gave it to her and she said, okay, I get it. We can try it. ’cause worst case, you’re just gonna get the gains elsewhere. And I think that’s a good lens to look at it to go, Hey, look, let’s just start off and invest amount we’re comfortable with. But if I lose it, then I, I’ve made the gains or learnings elsewhere. And initially for my first investment,

John Jantsch (06:23): You know, you make a,

Ben Young (06:25): You go,

John Jantsch (06:26): What I was gonna say is, you make a really good point though, is that, you know, a lot of times people get pitched and they’re like, okay, I’ve got, you know, and I think there’ll be a decent return, but you really ought to go in with like, here’s what I want to get out of this. Like, be very, even if it’s just access, right? I mean that should be identified or you should know that, but then you should also communicate that, shouldn’t you?

Ben Young (06:45): Yeah, you should have a bit of a, an objective with it of what you’re wanting to do. And I think the best objective really is go in with from a point of curiosity and say, I really wanna learn, like I’ve done about 70 deals over the past 11 years and the best deals are the ones where I’ve learned a lot. And so it was something that I was innately interested in, kind of curious. And for founders, they also really like having agency owners or small business owners as investors because they get it. They, they know how hard it is to start a business. And also the intelligence you can provide, in my case it was marketing intelligence. So I could say, Hey look, here’s some areas to focus on, or here’s how you can position the company or hire some talent that’s really valuable for them too. So they really like that, right?

John Jantsch (07:30): So let’s say somebody’s listening to this and they’re like, well, you know, I look at some of those things and I, I’m just not that sophisticated of an investor. I don’t even know how to analyze, you know, whether this is something, I mean, I might be interested in what they’re doing, think it’s pretty cool, but how do I analyze an investment if I really don’t even know some of the terminology?

Ben Young (07:50): Yeah, good question. So I think the first thing on how most deals are structured, so when you are a angel investor and you’re investing a small amount of money, and typically you’ll invest through a platform like AngelList or a local Angel Association mm-hmm. , and they’ll, they’ll put together a S P V or a special purpose vehicle, which is like an entity to hold all the investments. And this makes it easier for the the company to manage it and also easier for you because you get the tax forms that you need each year and um, it just makes it easier to maintain. So technically that’s how it’s structured, but, but each deal is going to have some sort of terms associated with it. Um, often with angel investment, it’s called something like a convertible note. So you are providing some capital mm-hmm. that will convert into equity down the road. And that might be in 1224 months and there may be some discounts associated with that, or other times it is on an equity basis. And there’s lots of terms you’ll get like pre-money and post-money. But basically if, if you read the fine print carefully, you should understand it. Pre-money is the value of the company before the money goes in and post-money is after the money goes in.

John Jantsch (09:02): And now let’s hear from a sponsor. This episode is brought to you by Business Made Simple hosted by Donald Miller and brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals hosted by Donald Miller Business Made Simple takes the Mystery out of growing your business. In a recent episode, they talked with my old pal, Seth Godin, where he explained the virtues and values in his book called The Song of Significance, A new manifesto for teams, listen to business Made Simple. Wherever you get your podcasts.

(09:35): Hey, marketing agency owners, you know, I can teach you the keys to doubling your business in just 90 days or your money back. Sound interesting. All you have to do is license our three step process that it’s gonna allow you to make your competitors irrelevant, charge a premium for your services and scale perhaps without adding overhead. And here’s the best part. You can license this entire system for your agency by simply participating in an upcoming agency certification intensive look, why create the wheel? Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create. And you can have ’em today, check it out at DTM world slash certification. That’s dtm.world/certification.

(10:22): So obviously a lot of, you know, through are a lot of websites and places that can explain, uh, some of what you just talked about in great detail. Tell me a little bit about when you first got started because you were an agency owner. Were you naturally drawn to maybe tools that you had used or tools that marketers use? Or do you think you should actually get outside completely of your zone of comfort?

Ben Young (10:44): Yeah, so there’s two approaches that I did initially. One was to do direct angel investments where I knew the founder or was introduced or they’d pitched. And then the other focus was to provide a little capital into funds where they would pick the investments. And so through that I’ll get into companies which I might not have selected and that helped avoid my selection bias. So if we look at the first five years of investing, all of the companies I picked were marketing and advertising, right? And that was great because I had, I had an edge there like, well, I felt like I had an edge, like these are emerging trends and areas which I know brands will spend a bit more on. And also it helped me with clients to go, Hey, look, the smartest founders that are starting companies today are investing in these things.

(11:30): So I could kind of pass that intel back to clients to go, Hey, look, there’s a lot of investment going into this space. Maybe next year or the following year, consider putting more budget that way. And so between the two, I was initially mainly focused just in one sector and then I got these learnings from other sectors and some of the investments that came through the fund. I looked at it, I was like, I would never invest in that company. And in hindsight though, some of these companies perform really well and that’s where, where I’ve got some learnings. Whereas the initial investments in marketing and advertising, there were some benefits there, but I wasn’t learning as much. So over time I’ve kind of broadened my focus to, to kind of fit this criteria of what’s new and exciting and, and what’s where, you know, where can I really learn?

(12:14): So like a couple of more recent examples invested in a fusion company. So the idea of bringing fusion energy, the energy demands for the US and around the world are set to double by 2050 and wind and solar and hydro fulfill some of those needs, but there’s still a place for fusion. And so that, like, I had to read the investment documents a dozen times to to go back to fully un understand what fusion is and I’m still like 0.01% and then another was colossal, which is the effort to bring back the wooly mammoth. And so that’s kind of an interesting investment because it’s a big project to bring the wooly mammoth back to life. And through that they’re going to spin off other companies through the intellectual property they create. And it’s like, these are two examples of things which are completely new and additive learnings, but have exposed me to new things in the energy sector. Um, and as an agency owner being on top of what the energy sector is doing mm-hmm. or, um, gene editing and biotechnology. So like it, it is just a nice way to improve your own learnings as well.

John Jantsch (13:26): Yeah, that’s interesting. I hadn’t really considered the sort of the industry research aspect that it kind of forces on you that that might be of some value in the sector, you know? Yeah. In terms of attracting or serving a client.

Ben Young (13:39): And one other thing that you mentioned is like, what sort of like, what sort of analysis do I do? So for the marketing and advertising, it was a little bit easier, but when you get into these other sectors, you’re like, what? And it’s kind of a, it’s a bit of a sense test of how curious you are. And so I, I will try and first up, read all the documents that you’re given, then go do your own independent research to see, you know, is this supported or where are the weaknesses in it? And that’s a part I really enjoy digging into to go, Hey, look, if this is successful, how big could it be? Is what they’ve told me believable in forming my own opinion because answering those questions helps me really understand the investment.

John Jantsch (14:18): So we started at the outset talking about the idea, we’re talking about agency owners investing in other companies, but I, I have to say, as an agency owner, one of the best investments I ever made was in a company that provided a core service, uh, that we could sell clients because it was such a great fit, there was a need for it in the market, made total sense. So, you know, we’re, have any of your investments fit into that category?

Ben Young (14:43): Yeah, so I’ll tell you about a couple. So, so one, one was a video advertising platform and I got the presentation, I went through it and I just went, nah, I’m not sure about this. And so six months later I’m chatting with, with our head of advertising, he is like, Ben, I’ve been using this new platform that helps with video advertising. I was like, oh, how much we spending on it? And he is like, nearly a million bucks a year . And it was the , it was the exact platform I passed on. Uh, so that was, that was not, not a good example, but, but others have been in, in the email and um, like analytics and uh, video space and we have ended up using the solutions. So Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (15:26): So I’m sure that you, when you start, I, I know that when a lot of people invest in things, you know, the hope is that I’m gonna make money. Yeah. Off of this investment, obviously it, should there be a measurement or a criteria or like a window of time in which, you know, should say, I, you know, I need to see some sort of return, or is it really, you know, you can’t calculate all the benefits of return?

Ben Young (15:53): Yeah, good question. So I think you do want to be seeing the benefits after you’ve made the investment through your own professional work and, um, through your own learning. So you want to see that and see that you, you’re getting that value. And if you’re not, you might need to change the types of investments that you’re doing, but this is a long game. Um, it can like, it can take 10 years to get your money back. So you do need to invest in a manner that you’re, you’re comfortable with. So like some of my oldest investments are on that 11, 12 year mark and they’re still going there. They’re great companies, but I just haven’t got my money back. But in other companies, I’ve had things sell as soon as 12 to 24 months and a few more at five years. But, so it’s not a, a fast-paced return.

(16:39): You should kind of plan depending on how many investments you’re doing, but maybe after five years you might get your money back and then you’ll have a whole lot of other value tied up in these companies where you’re like, oh, will you sell please or exit? And that, that also is part of the excitement. You don’t know when these things are gonna happen. You just wake up one morning, you get an email and say, yeah, yeah, we’re excited that later today there’ll be a press release announcing our acquisition through this company. Or you get sent an email saying, we’re gonna pay a dividend soon. And you’re like, dividend . So, so yeah, it is a long term.

John Jantsch (17:13): There’s one company we’re involved in that same thing. They have 10 x the business, I think now’s the time to sell, but the founders are like, oh, we know we can do a hundred x . Yeah. But you know, it’s their baby.

Ben Young (17:26): Yeah. And, and, and that’s the thing, like you gotta support the founders like the, the other ones that, that know the business best and the other ones one, the other ones that got it there. And I think fortunately these days there are more opportunities to, to sell down along the way as companies get big enough later stage investors will come in and offer to buy a small chunk of earlier investors. So there are more opportunities, whereas in, in the past it used to truly just be, put the money in and throw away the key. You, you’re not gonna see it again.

John Jantsch (17:56): Yeah. So do you, you’ve talked about a couple examples, but, you know, maybe give a, let’s see how to position this, give a example of what turned out to be a great big win. Yep. And then maybe an example of, and you could use this for either and maybe an example of one that that was a disappointment, but maybe you learned something in both of those instances.

Ben Young (18:18): Yeah, so I’ll, I’ll start with a disappointment. And this was a disappointment ’cause I was convinced, I was like, this is good. And, and, and for, for all of my investments, I do chat with my wife to make sure I’m not drinking the Kool-Aid too much. . And, and I explained this one to her and the idea was that if you’re selling something online, you could just drop it off at their de depot and they would take the photos listed on eBay or wherever else and cut you a check once it sold. And I was like, this is great. I’ve got all this stuff I wanna sell on eBay, but, but never do. My wife was like, that’s not going anywhere, . I was like, and so we did invest and after a year the founders, and this is a, a case of really good management, but they, they went, Hey, look, we’ve spent some of the investors’ money, we’ve tested it, we just don’t have the confidence that there’s a big business here, so we’re closing it down. And they returned some of the capital back to the investors. And so that was one where I was like, nah, I think this is big. And it, it was in the, it was in the time where we were getting all these apps where you could press a button and someone could help you with something. And I thought, this is another app that sit sits in there. Like we’re kind of three or four years after Uber. But it just, I think there were too many moving pieces.

John Jantsch (19:32): So the learning on the learning on that one was that your wife’s really smart, is that yeah,

Ben Young (19:38): She should do all the investment, right? , but in fairness of the other investments, she has kind of said yes. So like maybe my performance returns are really associated to her. And yeah.

John Jantsch (19:52): So what’s been the success that you learned from?

Ben Young (19:55): So the, the, the first early success was a company called Screen Hero. And it wasn’t a direct investment, it was through a fund. So it was one that, um, someone had selected and they did screen screen recording and screen sharing software. And then, uh, a company called Slack acquired them and said, Hey look, can you enable phone calling and screen sharing in our app? And so through that ended up with some Slack stock, and then of course they, they later iPod. So that, that was a, a nice one where I was like, okay, we’ve good team, good product executed really well. Another company said, Hey look, I want that they acquired it paid with stock and then I’ll forget, but I think it might’ve been seven years all up or something like that. Like it was still a long time to to hold. But it, it was pretty nice. Like when, when Slack IPOed, I went down to Wall Street and saw the banner up there and it was kind of cool. Like you’ve got a fraction of a, like a participation in the journey. But, so that one was pretty cool. Yeah.

John Jantsch (20:58): But to get to say that you had, uh, 1247% return is not bad. .

Ben Young (21:04): Yeah. So on some

John Jantsch (21:05): Of those deals, right?

Ben Young (21:06): Yeah, there’s, there’s a good question around performance and there’s a lot of analysis on venture capital as a sector and usually like it’s between 15 and 27% return year over year. But those numbers are always reported before fees. And if you’re investing through a fund, they take their fees of course. And so they should, and there are administration fees even if you’re doing the deals yourself. So I kind of guide people like 17 to 19% is not unreasonable. If, if, you know, if you’re kind of spreading out through a few different companies and you’re being smart about it. My, my own returns have been a bit higher. But the problem is when you’re looking at your returns, there’s how much cash you got back and how much is on paper. ’cause the stuff on paper can still go away. So till it’s mm-hmm. , you know, till it’s all said and done, that’s Yeah. Yeah. Doesn’t count.

John Jantsch (21:57): Well, Ben, I appreciate you taking a few moments to come by and talk about an interesting thought provoking topic. Obviously there’s lots to learn in this topic, but you wanna tell people where they might connect with you or, uh, find out, uh, about the work you’re doing there at Nudge?

Ben Young (22:12): Thanks. Uh, the, the best place is on Twitter or threads. And we can say threads now, and my handle is my initials. It’s @bwagy, at B W A G Y and that’ll have links through to nudge my blog and ways to get in contact. And if you see any good deals, do like, do send them my way. ,

John Jantsch (22:31): Awesome. Again, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by and hopefully we will run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Ben Young (22:36): Thanks John. Hey,

John Jantsch (22:37): And one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @marketingassessment.co, not.com, dot co. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing assessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by HubSpot. Look, AI is literally eating the web ChatGPT is more search than I don’t know, Taylor Swift . Check out HubSpot’s AI powered tools, content assistant and chat spott. They both run on open AI’s GPT model, and both are designed to help you get more done and to grow your business faster. HubSpot’s AI powered content assistant helps you brainstorm, create, and share content in a flash, and it’s all inside a super easy to use c r m now chats spott automates all the manual tasks inside HubSpot to help you arrange more customers close more deals and scale your business faster. Find out more about how to use AI to grow your business at hubspot.com/artificial intelligence. That’s hubspot.com/artificial intelligence.

(01:14): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, no guest today, just me all solo show. Today I wanna talk about a new tool that, um, we’ve created. It is a gap analysis. So the idea behind a gap analysis is, and in the consultant toolbox, , forever, pretty simple concept. It’s a way to go into a business and say, okay, here’s where we are today in a certain area, but here’s where we wanna go, or here’s like perfect state in that area. Where are we now? Right? So it’s what’s the gap, right? Does that make sense? So, um, one of the things that I kind of recently discovered is that while the gap analysis has been around forever, there haven’t really been anybody that’s created, uh, an effective marketing gap analysis. And in other words, just we’re gonna focus on the gap in various areas of marketing.

(02:13): Ultimately, what these gaps circle around quite often is a lack of vision or strategy, uh, for marketing or for the business. And so by, by at least analyzing the areas that are key to understanding a marketing strategy and then going to work on those, I, I think you can effectively build some momentum around marketing in a way that gets rid of some of the chaos and some of the idea of the weak and some of the, I don’t know, what’s working , is it working? So that’s why we created this tool. So the areas, I’ll just go over quickly the areas that this gap analysis gets into, and you’ll see hopefully . It’s a pretty comprehensive idea. All right, so the first area is vision and objectives. So we’re gonna ask you to describe your current vision for your business. Do you have a marketing strategy that aligns with this vision?

(03:08): Are your company business objectives aligned as well? You know, answering questions like that might, you know, you may say, well, I’ve, we’ve done mission, vision values, but I find that for a lot of people, those are just academic exercises almost. So keeping kind of the current state of your vision, the impact that you want to have, where you’re going, I think is a great start for marketing. It’s really obviously important for the business as a whole, but certainly gets into some of the marketing areas. So the next one of course is revenue and profit marketing is driving a lot of that, right? So is your revenue growing compared to, you know, performance maybe in the industry or you know, what about profit margin? Have you even really considered that ? Is it abstain, uh, sustainable? Do you have a goal for it? So again, just looking at and asking yourself, you know, here’s where we want to go, as opposed to just merely focused on here’s where we are is a great way.

(04:07): Next one I wanna talk about is ideal client. Do you know who makes an ideal client? I mean, what problems and needs does your product or service really solve for them? And my experience is an ideal client is probably represents about the top 20% of your client base and not your entire client base. And that really has a lot to do with the fact that we don’t, if we don’t focus on identifying who that ideal client is, we’re really just gonna attract anybody who shows up. So this can really be a great filter for all of your marketing, for all of your messaging, for everything you do in terms of your website and things that you send out is, uh, meant to be focused on that ideal client. Next one is core message. Do you even have one? Does it differentiate you from your competitors?

(04:55): So many businesses basically talk about what they do. Here’s the service we offer, here’s the product we sell. And nobody really caress about that until they can connect solving a problem with your product or service. So quite often businesses solve very unique problems. They just don’t know what they are, or they certainly don’t use them and communicate them as part of their marketing.

(05:18): And now let’s hear from a sponsor. This episode is brought to you by Business Made Simple, hosted by Donald Miller, and brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals hosted by Donald Miller Business Made Simple takes the Mystery out of growing your business. In a recent episode, they talked with my old pal, Seth Godin, where he explained the virtues and values in his book called The Song of Significance, A new manifesto for teams. Listen to Business Made Simple. Wherever you get your podcasts.

(05:51): Hey, marketing agency owners, you know, I can teach you the keys to doubling your business in just 90 days or your money back. Sound interesting. All you have to do is license our three step process that it’s gonna allow you to make your competitors irrelevant, charge a premium for your services and scale perhaps without adding overhead. And here’s the best part. You can license this entire system for your agency by simply participating in an upcoming agency certification intensive. Look, why create the wheel? Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create, and you can have ’em today, check it out at dtm.world/certification. That’s DTM world slash certification.

(06:38): Do you understand this is the next area. Do you understand the extent of the customer journey mean? How does somebody, how does your ideal client, I should say, or customer find businesses like yours, what would make them want to engage with a business like yours?

(06:55): What’s their buying process is really what it comes down to because with all the, talk about all the changes in marketing, and there certainly are plenty , the biggest thing that’s changed is how people buy now. Uh, how they make their decisions, how their entire research process. So do you fully understand that? And if you do, are you actually using that information to guide a customer through those stages, or at least impact the journey that they’re making? Do you understand what your competitors are? And, and a lot of times people, there are competitors that we see every day, maybe you truly compete and win and lose business with, but there are also a lot of other competitors out there. I mean, people that rank ahead of you in search engines, for example, you know, are a bit of competitor even if you don’t know who they are today.

(07:42): So understanding what their marketing strategies are, what their messaging is, what their strengths and weaknesses in some cases helps in your sales process as well. Of course, then we get into some of the channels, you know, does your website perform? Does it produce any results? I I can’t tell you how many, you know, everybody realizes they have to have one. And so they go out and they hire a designer and they build one, and then they, they say to themselves, well, this doesn’t do anything for us. So understanding how to convert traffic, what the purpose, I mean, when somebody visits, what do you want them to do? Those types of things are part of a, a great gap analysis. Content marketing. I mean, uh, there again, a lot of people are writing blog posts and writing content, but is there any thought about how that content could perform for you?

(08:29): I could go on and on social media, email marketing, paid advertising. You know, where are you today? Are you using platforms? Have you decided it’s too expensive? You’re using other ways? I mean, we’re, we’re really, you don’t have to use all of these channels, but having some integration between all of these channels is part of where I see quite a gap. Let’s talk about your sales funnel. Do you have stages, of a sales funnel? Do you know what your conversion rate is? We’ll go beyond sales to retention referral. Is there a focus? These are all parts of the customer journey, but is there a focus, the proper focus on repeat business and retaining business and generating referrals? And then the last one, nobody in marketing likes to talk about math . Well, unless you do like to, right? There’s like 20% of the people out there, uh, that are very into tracking and metrics and data.

(09:24): And then there are a lot of business owners that it’s a necessary evil, but in some cases it just doesn’t even get dealt with. So what are the key performance indicators? A lot of people will say revenue, certainly, but what about profit retention, customer lifetime value, customer acquisition costs, lead generation, lead conversion, all those types of things that if you focused on where you are today, where you want to go, then the, the logical question is, okay, what action steps do we need to take so that we are going to make where we want to go or we’re gonna close, uh, these gaps? So that’s the entire idea behind the gap analysis. If you looked at those areas and you know, measured kind of where you are, you could actually come up with a number one through 10. You could come up with a, Hey, here’s a current description of your current state.

(10:18): If you would like us to take a look at those, I’d love to meet with you and go over this process with you because I think you’ll get a tremendous amount of insight about what you need to focus on and consequently what you maybe need to stop or not focus on . So the way our process works on this is you’ll actually complete a questionnaire asking you about various state where you are, current state, that’s the idea, current close the gap, right? And then we will meet with you, we’ll go over your results, we’ll meet with you and create actually six to 10, you know, action items that we think would actually help you close those gaps. Kind of give you a close the gap plan, if you will. And I think what it’ll do is it’ll help you identify a handful of areas that are very important for you to spend some time focusing on fixing and closing the gaps.

(11:12): You’ll have a plan so you won’t just be guessing anymore. It is, if you wanna find out more about this, obviously we’ll have it in the show notes as well. But we are calling this the Marketing Gap Analysis and you can find it @dtm.world/closethegap. So that’s: dtm.world/closethegap, and I would love to help you close those gaps. All thanks for listening, tuning into another episode. We love those reviews. Review us on all the websites where you listen to your show. If you have been a long time listener, I truly appreciate you. Love to hear from you anytime, just john@ducttapemarketing.com. Alright, that is it for today’s show. Take care.

(11:58): Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @marketingassessment.co, not.com, dot co. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.co I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by HubSpot. Look, AI is literally eating the web ChatGPT is more searched than I don’t know, Taylor Swift. Check out HubSpot’s AI powered tools, content assistant and chat spott. They both run on open AI’s GPT model, and both are designed to help you get more done and to grow your business faster. HubSpot’s AI powered content assistant helps you brainstorm, create, and share content in a flash, and it’s all inside a super easy to use CRM now. Chat Spott automates all the manual tasks inside HubSpot to help you arrange more customers close more deals and scale your business faster. Find out more about how to use AI to grow your business at hubspot.com/artificial-intelligence. That’s hubspot.com/artificial-intelligence.

(01:14): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Isaac Watson. He is an event strategist and entrepreneur who founded Kickass conferences in 2016. He’s produced over 50 conferences and gatherings worldwide, specializing in event strategy and design for communities. And he also is the co-host of the Make It Kick Ass podcast. So we’re gonna talk about events today. Isaac, welcome to the show.

Isaac Watson (01:41): Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.

John Jantsch (01:43): So how did you get into events? Let’s start there. How how’d you fall into this business?

Isaac Watson (01:48): Uh, you know, I was working in communications and marketing at an art school. Was doing a little bit of public programming, a little, you know, artist receptions and guest lectures and things like that. And that kind of wet my whistle and I started volunteering for the World Domination Summit planning team. And that’s kind of how I cut my teeth on conference planning.

John Jantsch (02:07): I’ve attended that, uh, conference three times. So I was a speaker 2014 a long time ago. ,

Isaac Watson (02:14): I I

John Jantsch (02:14): Remember that. So if, if you’re talking to a business, let’s say that doesn’t do events at all and they’re thinking, ah, should we add that to the mix? You know, are there reasons you tell people, yeah, you should be doing events? I, I’m sure there’s some reasons people shouldn’t be, but for the most part, you know, why should people think about that as part of the marketing mix?

Isaac Watson (02:29): We usually find that events work really well for any business that’s trying to build a community. Events can really serve as this catalyst to like give the community energy and keep up it propelling forward. Um, and I think, uh, one thing that, that people don’t think of all the time is that if you’re gonna do an event, especially a conference right? Like something big, something annual, something that you want to do on a cycle, it’s kind of like adding a whole other product to your lineup and you have to treat it like that.

John Jantsch (02:56): Yeah. And it’s kind of becomes a yearlong, uh, beast I think for a lot of people too. So what are most successful, I mean, you gave kind of reasons for doing it, but then obviously there are good ways to do it, bad ways to do it. What are some of the most successful kind of event marketing strategies that you’ve seen implemented and you’ve probably implemented on behalf of some of your clients?

Isaac Watson (03:16): Yeah, for event marketing, we always like to think about it in three phases. And it’s a cycle, right? Especially for an annual thing, you have to keep repeating it. So you have to focus on your pre-event marketing where you’re actually communicating everything that you’re gonna deliver for your event to people. Um, then you have to focus on your intra event marketing. So while it’s actually happening, how are you continuing to market that event both to the people who are there Yeah. Who have chosen to attend and to the people who aren’t there who are looking from afar, right? Because you’re helping sell that for the next time. And then you have to do phase three, which is often something people forget about, which is post event marketing, recapping everything that you’ve done, prepping people for the next time around and keeping that cycle rolling forward.

John Jantsch (04:01): You mentioned WDS, which is no longer around, but I mean they did, you did maybe if you were involved in a great job of, I mean I think 60% of the next year was sold out, you know, before the thing you know, ended the year four. I mean, that’s a pretty fabulous way to, to build momentum going into the next year. So I’m about ready to stop mentioning the word covid on my show , but darn it coming back. How did it change the landscape of your business? I mean, you worked right through it, right? So what is

Isaac Watson (04:29): Yes,

John Jantsch (04:30): And, and I don’t need to hear like how you adapted. I’d really rather hear more kinda like where are we now? Has, you know, has the landscape current changed?

Isaac Watson (04:40): Yeah, I think that the, the big wake up call was we can do virtual events and we can do them. Well. A lot of people do them terribly. And I think where we are now is in this reconciliation between kind of the e economic impacts of where we stand now with inflation and layoffs and budget constraints and people not being able to attend in-person events like they used to. And balancing that with everything that people hate about virtual events and the zoom fatigue that we’re still carrying that trauma with us, right? Of just being isolated and locked into our spaces. And so it’s really about crafting something that’s intentional and focused on the attendees experience, whether that’s gonna be a virtual or in-person affair.

John Jantsch (05:26): Yeah, I I think in the very beginning people were just happy that we could get the technology to work and so that like 10 people could talk to, you know, at one time. Right? But the bar’s really been raised, hasn’t it? I mean, people expect engagement, they expect technology that, you know, that that works and works for them, . And so it, it’s really, it’s really made it harder for somebody to just go, oh, these virtual events are free, I’ll just do it that way.

Isaac Watson (05:49): Yeah. And I think what a lot of people haven’t realized is that with the tech boom that came through all the virtual event production costs for that skyrocketed too. So if you wanna do a really good hybrid event, for example, which a lot of people were really interested in doing last year, it turns out those are really expensive to do well and they take a lot of effort and a lot of planning. And so a lot of people are just kind of recoiling and backing off from that concept and trying to figure out how to do something a little simpler and a little more budget friendly.

John Jantsch (06:20): Yeah, I, I did one a hybrid event and I learned, you know, from the AV company that it was twice as complicated for them, you know? Yes. To produce, you know, rather than just turning on their cameras, go, go for it, you know, it was way more complicated and consequently way more expensive and a lot more considerations. Logistics. Are there some technologies, specifics, tools, software, things like that, that you recommend to, to businesses these days?

Isaac Watson (06:44): You know, we don’t, because our focus is always on strategy first and there are so many different tools and options out there. Yeah. That we want to figure out exactly what a client’s needs are for their particular event before we go shopping around for a platform or even an in-person venue or a city to, to host something in. Yeah. So we’re always looking at the needs first and then finding the tools that fit within that.

John Jantsch (07:08): So talk a little more about that strategy, uh, component because that’s certainly, you know, we are a marketing agency as well and that’s our motto. I mean, it’s strategy first. People hire us to do strategy before we’ll ever take a look at their website. So, uh, talk me through a little bit of how your process then for, cuz I’m sure a lot of people will say, oh, we got an event, we’re gonna have people gonna showcase this, uh, and you know, it’s all, what are all then they start asking like, should we do it? What’s the technology? Right? So tell me a little bit about your process for getting to the heart of an effective strategy for an event.

Isaac Watson (07:39): So we always like to look at three components that all work together to be able to produce something that’s really great. Uh, first of all, you have to have a community behind what you’re building. Some, a group of people who is engaged, who is ready to take that next step to connect with each other, uh, through some sort of event. You also need to look at your resources, and that’s everything from your teams capacity, the time, every other product or service you have on your docket and even your budget. And then the third component is that event vision. So if you can balance your vision and kind of temper that against the community you’ve built and the the resources you have available to you, then you can create something within that balances it all and that works well together.

John Jantsch (08:26): So you’ve mentioned the word several times community, and I think a lot of people think in terms of, oh, I have this online community that likes to get together and now they wanna do an event. And a lot of events have certainly think at social media, marketing world, content marketing world. I mean those came from, you know, those types of communities, but I mean, community can be your customers, right? Or it can be people that you wanna turn into. Customers can it,

Isaac Watson (08:50): It can, the first question that I would ask someone to ask themselves is, do you actually have a community or do you have an audience? An audience can turn into a community, but it does not always want to begin with. Uh, in my book, a community is a space where the people who are gathered around your product, your service, your mission, whatever that is, they have the opportunity to share with each other, to give feedback to each other and support each other. So you’ve created a space where they can then form relationships on their own and support each other in that way. An audience only would be a one way, like, this is my marketing, I’m talking to them top down kind of situation. Yeah. And that’s a little bit different. That’s where you get into like sales events for example, right? It’s really just about marketing your product or service as opposed to creating something that meets your audience’s needs.

John Jantsch (09:43): Obviously you help somebody develop a strategy, you help them put the event together. How do you measure success? Do you have a set process for that or is part of the strategy to, with KPIs

Isaac Watson (09:53): Early on in the strategy process, we identify what our attendee goals are. So we work to deeply understand what the community’s needs are, what they’re hoping to get out of whatever event we’re trying to design for the client. Uh, and then we carry that through into our post event surveys and into, you know, anecdotal feedback and, and the more qualitative experiential stuff that we gather as we’re producing it. All of that comes through the end of our process with some reporting back to the client that says, okay, you know, obviously we want a great net promoter score and I know we want to know who the most successful presenters were. We also need to know how the attendees have resonated with the event and with the other people that they met. And that’s much harder to track from a data standpoint. Yeah. So we have to rely on more qualitative sources for that.

John Jantsch (10:46): So this is one of those that you’re gonna say, well there lots of depends, , but yes. You know, I think a lot of, a lot of people focus when they do events on, you mentioned the presenters or you know, the topics that are going to, you know, the run of show from, you know, who’s gonna speak next, that kind of thing. How important are the other things like the food and the breaks and the entertainment and, you know, all the things that are not necessarily core topic.

Isaac Watson (11:12): They are all important and they have different weights. But I was just talking to someone the other day about how a bad food experience at an in-person event Yeah. Can destroy the vibe, right? I went to an event a month or two ago where they ran out of coffee in the morning and it was like, you know, faux pa, right? You don’t wanna do that because then that’s all people can think about. Yeah. That doesn’t mean you have to go investing $400 a head a day into catering, but you have to make sure that everything, every component that you’re crafting, this whole experience is a multisensory thing and that matters to the attendees and that’s gonna have an impact.

John Jantsch (11:50): And now let’s hear from a sponsor. This episode is brought to you by Business Made Simple hosted by Donald Miller and brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals hosted by Donald Miller Business Made Simple Takes the Mystery out of Growing Your Business. In a recent episode, they talked with my old pal, Seth Godin, where he explained the virtues and values in his book called The Song of Significance, A new manifesto for teams. Listen to Business Made Simple. Wherever you get your podcast.

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(13:09): So I, I probably should asked this earlier than now, but you know, there are different types of events, right? Not just types, but different goals, different purposes, right? So there’s significant kind of categories of, I mean, a lot of times people think of, you know, product events and service events mm-hmm. and then some are just, you know, we keep mentioning ws, I’m not sure what that was. That was just like a community, you know, hug Fest event. But do you kind of look at like, is that like checkbox number one? Like what type of, you know, event, what are the goals of this? And based on that it’s like, well we have to go down this path.

Isaac Watson (13:43): Mm-hmm. . Yeah. If you can identify first who you’re creating the event for sure. And why it exists, then you can start to wrap around what the format of it is. I think that that, yes, you obviously have like sales or marketing oriented events, whether that’s a product event, a launch. Yeah. You know, anything where you’re trying to expand your audience. Uh, but then there’s, I would categorize WDS as a community oriented event. It was independently organized and it was all about bringing the people together to share in this moment. It wasn’t there to sell anything in particular except ideas and inspiration. Yeah. Right? Yeah, yeah. Um, much like a TEDx or a TED event or any of the other larger kind of ideas driven things. And then you have celebrations, right? Like you can have like a nonprofit will have an awards dinner to honor and celebrate their community in a different way than they would host an annual conference. Yeah.

John Jantsch (14:38): We put together half for many years, a very small but I would call hybrid event. I have a community of consultants and agencies that license our methodology. They are in the pure sense customers, but we’ve also created a network platform where they collaborate and do a lot of things together. And so consequently it’s been pretty easy for us to bring that a core group together that wants to see each other in person, but it is, you know, it essentially is a customer event that we’ve built a community around. Does that make sense?

Isaac Watson (15:10): Yeah, absolutely.

John Jantsch (15:11): And it’s been a terrific retention tool, quite frankly. Mm-hmm. , you know, because they get that, that’s how we view it. We, in fact, we lose money every year on the actual event because we charge a small ticket price. But you know, people, you know, stay because of it.

Isaac Watson (15:25): Yeah. We had, uh, a client as an example, similar to that, uh, a couple years ago. They were a, a design prototyping startup, and they had created these tools and had this growing user base that was global, that had really formed community around themselves and they wanted to host a conference about the industry, not necessarily about their product or their tools that they were making and bring those people together. And that was the perfect example. They were customers, yes. But they were also a community.

John Jantsch (15:54): Yeah. You know, when you’re, obviously not obviously, but I spent a lot of time teaching people how to integrate, you know, all their marketing, all this stuff relates to each other. But I think that there is a tendency for people to think in events like this Totally. You know, out there thing one off, you know, almost how do you get people to think in terms of the event integrating with everything else they’ve been doing, particularly when it comes to marketing.

Isaac Watson (16:19): Part of that comes through the resources aspect of the strategy work that we do upfront with our clients. Really looking at like, what’s on your upcoming calendar? What products and services are you releasing? Yeah. Do you have new features? Do you have new, um, whatever it is that you’re coming out with. I think the other piece that, that people are often surprised at when I start engaging on strategy is I wanna know everything that there is to know about how your business works. Yeah. Because if I can understand that, and then I can understand everything that there is to know about your audience and your community, then I can start to craft something that fits within that, that truly integrates with everything else that’s going on in the business and supports that.

John Jantsch (16:58): So how comprehensive do you take approach or does it come down to what the client wants and what their budget is? I suppose? I mean, you’ve talked a lot about strategy, but We’ll, if I come to you and I say, we wanna do this event, here’s who they are. You know, we get the strategy down now like, Isaac, go get me the speakers, get me the venue, get me the food. I mean, do, uh, soup to nuts if that’s what somebody wants.

Isaac Watson (17:17): Uh, soup to nuts is what we love. And so we wanna start with that strategy. We want to co-create that strategy with our clients. Because a lot of times I can’t tell you how many times a client has come to me and they’ve already locked in a venue and dates and a location. And then as the process goes through, we realize that it’s, it doesn’t match our needs. Yeah. And we have to figure out how to pivot around that, right? Yeah. So we always wanna work with the strategy first and then carry it through. Now we also do one-off strategy. So if people can come to us and say, Hey, we’re thinking of an event need kind of the concept and the the preliminary design done, and then maybe they have an in-house team that can actually execute on the event, or they have another relationship with an event planner who can actually do the implementation. Great. They’ll run with our strategy and use that to their advantage.

John Jantsch (18:04): Where, where do you suppose the term soup to nuts came from? I’m gonna have to look that up. couldn’t get past that. Look into the future. I mean, are you telling people here’s some of the trends that you need to be aware of, or here’s what’s coming.

Isaac Watson (18:17): I’m fairly trend resistant. Yeah. There’s a lot of talk, especially within the industry and especially with where we are, post-intro pandemic, whatever we’re calling it these days about what’s next to me. If you can lean on your strategy first, the that strategy will be valid regardless of where the industry is going. It’s about figuring out how you can actually implement that in the moment with the group that you’re doing it for. So taking that kind of trend-agnostic approach. Obviously, you know, when it comes to choosing entertainment or uh, specific activities, there are trends in what people are into these days. Right. Uh, and we’ll follow those. But from a core design and and implementation standpoint, there, there is no trend that’s really going to affect, uh, how we do what we do.

John Jantsch (19:07): Well, I’m going to break with you there and make my own trend. I, you know, what I’m seeing a lot of, I’m seeing a lot of desire, at least I don’t know that necessarily everybody’s putting ’em on. I’m seeing a lot of desire for smaller, more intimate, more personal events. You know, not the 3000 person thing, but the 50 people who are very passionate about a certain thing. And in fact, when we start back to in-person events, you know, post pandemic that’s going up, it’s like they so desired to be in that room with people that they were really passionate, you know, kind of on fire group because you know, they went against the odds and did say, you know, a lot of people weren’t willing to do. And I think a lot of people are, are pretty hungry for that.

Isaac Watson (19:48): Yeah, I would agree wholeheartedly that these shared or intimate experiences are more highly valued these days. Yeah. Especially because people have a lot more scrutiny around how and where they will spend their time in

John Jantsch (20:02): It. Yeah. I think that kind of knee jerk, oh, we have to be at these five conferences and we have to send our whole team. I think those days are probably over because I think people realized, wait, nobody died, , you know, we didn’t send people No. You know, we’re still here. Right. So I think now you’re absolutely right. People are saying, if I’m gonna invest that it’s gonna be worth it. Yeah. Which quite frankly, ups the game certainly. Or ups, the raises the bar for people putting on events, doesn’t it?

Isaac Watson (20:26): Yeah, it certainly does.

John Jantsch (20:28): All right, Isaiah, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. You wanna invite people where they could connect with you and find out to maybe a little more about kickass conferences there. I said ask three times in my show,

Isaac Watson (20:39): , and you didn’t even have to bleep it. So we have our podcast, uh, called Make It Kickass, which is all about building great experiences for communities. We have a new season coming out in September and have a lot of great guests on board for that. You can also visit our website @kickassconf.com.

John Jantsch (20:59): Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the show, and hopefully we’ll run into you out there on the road someday.

Isaac Watson (21:05): Sounds good. Thanks John. Hey,

John Jantsch (21:06): And one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @marketingassessment.co, not.com, dot co. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing as assessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by HubSpot. Look, AI is literally eating the web ChatGPT is more searched than I don’t know, Taylor Swift. Check out HubSpot’s AI powered tools, content assistant and chat spott. They both run on open AI’s GPT model, and both are designed to help you get more done and to grow your business faster. HubSpot’s AI powered content assistant helps you brainstorm, create, and share content in a flash, and it’s all inside a super easy to use CRM now. Chat Spott automates all the manual tasks inside HubSpot to help you arrange more customers close more deals and scale your business faster. Find out more about how to use AI to grow your business at hubspot.com/artificial-intelligence. That’s hubspot.com/artificial-intelligence.

(01:14): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Sam Horn. She’s the founder and CEO of the Intrigue Agency, author of 10 books, including Tung Fu Pop. Someday is Not A Day of the Week and the new one we’re gonna talk about today, Talking on Eggshells: Soft Skills for Hard Conversations. So Sam, welcome back. This is at least your second time, if not third.

Sam Horn (01:43): Thanks John. You know, I love our conversations because we always, uh, focus on how we can use our communication to be a force for good. So rock and roll. Let’s go. Huh.

John Jantsch (01:53): So let me start by saying, I know in the description of the book you talk about sharing every day character building situations and offering examples of what to say and not to say does it seem, is it just me or does it seem like we’re offered more character building situations today than ever?

Sam Horn (02:09): Yeah. Character building is, is such a diplomatic word. . . Yeah. I unfortunately, I think that it is worse. In fact, when I wrote the Take the Bully by the horns book, I remember radio disc jockeys would say, is this getting worse? And I would say, it’s not your imagination because we see so many examples of it and it kind of seems like this is what people are doing, so it must be okay. Right? Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (02:35): Wrong. Yeah. Yeah. Well, especially when you see the multiplication of that kind of activity on social media, that’s, you know, I’ve, I don’t know about you, but I mean it’s kind of soured me on even wanting to pay attention to it because there’s so much of that,

Sam Horn (02:49): You know, there’s research. So this is not just a subjective opinion that Right. When you are anonymous, unfortunately, some people feel like they’re not being held now, so they’re the snark or the, you know, just the nastiness or the cruelty online can be very disheartening. And that’s why we need to be the contrast and the opposite of that to remind people that it is possible to, uh, be kind and compassionate and proactive.

John Jantsch (03:16): Yeah. And, and one of the things I like probably the most about this book is that, you know, a lot of people get eaten alive by that stuff. Right. And at the heart of this book is how to take a different path yourself. So because it’s, you know, we all know that the bully is the one who’s really got a problem , you know? But what happens so often is we take the problem on. And I think that what you present in this book is a way to actually not internalize it. And you talk about the word I ever read it, impatience to empathy. You know, I just think that’s such a beautiful idea.

Sam Horn (03:48): See, you, you got the crux of the book, which is Elvis said, when things go wrong, don’t go with them. And so when someone’s yelling at us, maybe it’s easy to yell back when someone’s taking their frustration out on us, it’s easy to to respond, you know, in kind. And I really believe we can be the pattern interrupt that there are pragmatic. We’re not just talking about being kind and nice, right. And being eaten for lunch. We’re talking about being pragmatic and proactive in a way that we really do work towards finding solutions instead of finding fault.

John Jantsch (04:21): And you know, one of the kind of side benefits of this is you probably help that other person out too, don’t you? Because they come with their, whatever their normal habit is and you know, all their frustration and we just compound it when we deal into it. But in a lot of ways, you’re showing people how to def not only diffuse themselves but diffuse others.

Sam Horn (04:41): It’s, you are right. There is a ripple effect of respect. Yeah. Is that not always, let’s be realistic. It’s that sometimes people will say, you know, I’m sorry, that wasn’t fair. I was having a bad day. It wasn’t right to take it out on you. And so sometimes people come to their senses because once again, instead of fanning and fueling their anger, we come up with an alternative. And for most of us, it’s just a better way to get along with people. Yeah.

John Jantsch (05:08): So I saw you recently in Boulder, Colorado promoting the book and uh, meeting with friends and you shared, so I have a little advantage of this. So you shared kind of really what I think is probably the main tool, if you will, that comes from the book and that’s the, the concept of words to use, words to lose. I wonder if you could unpack that, cuz I love the simplicity of it, but also the power.

Sam Horn (05:28): You know, John, in fact, unless people are driving somewhere, I hope they get a piece of paper. And because as marketers we understand the power of frameworks. Yeah. It really is the quickest way to make complex ideas. Crystal clear is to communicate them in a way that people say, oh, I see now they literally and figuratively see it. And that’s when they get it. So put a vertical line down the center and on the top of the left hand column, put words to lose on top of the right hand column, put words to use. And what we talk about is how to turn conflict into cooperation, how to turn resistance into receptivity, how to turn resentment into rapport by giving these real life examples what to do when people complain, what to say, when people are blaming, et cetera. That shows what we often do on the left. That doesn’t help. And then what we can do on the right, which does help.

John Jantsch (06:23): Yeah. So, so maybe, uh, give us some examples. Let’s say you’re in an argument with somebody. You have two different opinions. Uh, how would you, how would you frame lose and use? Okay,

Sam Horn (06:34): Over on the left. So we’re talking about arguments, put talk louder. , right? Cause it’s like we’re in an argument. And so normally people get more intense. Shouting is a way to get their way correct or to back someone down or to force someone to listen to us. It just makes it worse. Instead, you and I talked about a pattern interrupt and I mean a physical pattern interrupt. Mm-hmm. , like if we play sports, we know if we go time out or like a policeman would, you know, wait a minute, stop , hey, you know, anything to stop because that will give a pause. That gives us a chance to get the verbal foot in the door. And then we say these four words, let’s not do this. We could argue for the rest of the day about who dropped the ball on this. It won’t get that client back. Instead let’s, or this won’t help, this won’t help. Blaming each other won’t help. Instead. And we literally and physically and verbally shift people over here to what we can do now instead of what should have been done. Then

John Jantsch (07:37): My dad used to say it when people would be like, well I don’t know how this happened. You know, I did this. And he was like, well, fix the problem, not the blame. And I just always loved that statement, ,

Sam Horn (07:48): By the way, and you’re wise man. And by the way, those words, what happened are not helpful . Right? It’s, uh, there used to be a woman on the playground and uh, if kids were getting into it, she would go, what happened here? Well, it’s like, well, he took my ball. Well, it wasn’t his turn. You know, we actually encourage blaming and finger pointing. Yeah. Instead, when we say, okay, give each other space, I love those words. Give each other space. So we’re literally and figuratively not in each other’s face. And then we say, what do you want? What do you want? Now we can focus hotana to get that. Or as your dad said, fix the problem, not the blame.

John Jantsch (08:26): And, and you know, since we went into to talking about kids, well my mom, I know I recognize this years later when I became a parent, she, when we would fight, we had, I have seven brothers. So you can imagine some of the brawls that, that we had, instead of telling us what to do or I mean, instead of telling us what not to do, she would give us something else to do. . You know, it was like, why don’t you guys go play baseball? Oh, okay. That argument was stupid. We’ll go play baseball. And I, it it worked time.

Sam Horn (08:56): John, why speak? You know, one of my favorite, it’s a video for kids and it’s called The Snowman and it has the most wonderful music. And there’s a woman at in the kitchen doing the dishes and her kids are outside playing in the snow. One throws a snowball and it smacks into the window. She opens the window and she leans out. And do you know what she says?

John Jantsch (09:18): Do something else. Yeah. .

Sam Horn (09:20): That’s exactly right. She says, do something else instead of stop throwing snowballs. Right, right. You just reinforce that dreaded behavior. No, do something else.

John Jantsch (09:30): Let’s talk about a very common workplace, uh, situation. You know, a mistake is made on something and it’s kind of a big deal and there’s a lot of finger pointing that goes on. Uh, how do we diffuse kind of the blame game, uh, you know, using these tools?

Sam Horn (09:48): Okay, over on the left, just put the word should, you know, you should have told her she didn’t know how to use the computer. You should have like kept the computer on instead of losing the finals. You should have asked Charlie for help. That word should, has no constructive value. It serves no good purpose. It usually pertains to the past. No one can undo the past. So over on the right, put next time from now on in the future. Cuz now we’re being a coach instead of a critic. We’re shaping behavior instead of shaming it, they’re learning from the mistake instead of losing face. And we’re showing them how to do it better instead of just making them feel bad.

John Jantsch (10:26): Yeah. And from a leadership standpoint, you know, the should thing just makes people not want to try. Right? I don’t wanna make that mistake again. So I’m not gonna try what was probably a better way. Right. , whereas what you described kind of opens up the door for trust to say, okay, it’s okay to fail here. I mean I obviously, I can’t just catastrophically fail over and over again, but it’s okay to fail here if I’m trying. I mean, and that, I think trust, extending trust like that is probably one of the greatest leadership skills.

Sam Horn (10:55): See John, we all heard of the great resignation. You know what, 10 million people quit their job. They don’t feel seen or heard or valued. What they feel is shame, or ignored. Right? And often it’s like, especially if they’re new and they make a mistake, it’s like you shouldn’t put so much information on your slides. Well, you should have told that customer. It’s like, and they shrink while they resent, resent because it’s like, you’re making me feel bad and I can’t do anything about it. Yeah. So this is an incredibly constructive way versus a destructive way to handle mistakes is to immediately, how can we prevent that from happening again? What did we learn from that? How could we handle it more effectively in the future?

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(12:55): Okay, let’s talk about an unfortunate situation that probably many people have faced. And that’s just the bully. I mean it, you’re not arguing with the person because they’re just there to accomplish one thing, right? I mean, and your point of view is not the one thing, right? So is there a constructive way to handle, uh, the bully?

Sam Horn (13:13): Absolutely. I’m gonna say something John, that flies in the face of what we’ve been told. We’ve been told to use eye replies. I don’t think that’s fair. I don’t like to be yelled at. Guess what? With bullies or narcissists? Controllers, manipulators. You know, that’s double jeopardy cuz it keeps the focus on our reaction to their behavior. And if we say, I don’t like being yelled at, they’re thinking good. That’s why I’m doing it.

John Jantsch (13:38): I, I is who I came to bully .

Sam Horn (13:42): Exactly. So over on the right, I believe in interrupting, especially if this is a pattern. This isn’t a one-time thing. This isn’t normally a great employee who’s had a really bad day and just is happened to let no know this is over time, repeatedly, intentionally we can see there doing this to get their way, stand up and speak up for yourself. And by the way, if you’re seated and they’re standing, which is often what happens cuz they’re dominating you. This is a dominant submissive kind of thing. Literally and figuratively, stand up for yourself. Stand up, use their name, say Bob, say Sarah, you know, you are welcome to come back when you are ready to treat me with respect or enough or, you know, this is, this conversation is over. Or we’ll revisit this when you, and now you’re keeping the attention where it belongs, which is on their inappropriate behavior instead of our reaction to it.

John Jantsch (14:36): So I interview a lot of business book authors. You’re a business book author, but this book is really a self-development tool that anyone, you know, we’ve talked about parents using it. We’ve certainly talked about in the workplace, we’ve talked about with, uh, bullies in any situation, probably family arguments we could cover pretty easily. So, so in a lot of ways it’s just a, would you call this a soft, well you do call this soft skills. So it’s really a soft skill that we need to work on, right? I mean, as a habit. So how do you, obviously there are situations that are ob that present themselves and you’re like, oh, I remember Sam’s book, I’m gonna use this here. But to really habituate it, you know, how can we just, how can we practice it? Keep it top of mind?

Sam Horn (15:20): Well I tell you is that if with your permission, John, we’ll through you, we’ll send people a words to lose, words to use perfect reminder cart that they can put right by their laptop. They can put it right by their desk on their refrigerator. And here’s why you just brought up, it’s a skill. Ideally we would’ve been taught this in school right? Along with physics and calculus and so forth. The good news is it’s not too late if we keep these words to use instead of these words to lose insight in mind. Mm-hmm. , it keeps them top of mind. And then even our family, even our teammates, even the people in the office, they’re about to say, well I’m sorry that happened, but it’s like, whoop, I’m sorry that happened and thank you for bringing it to my attention. And it really does help us accelerate acquiring this skill by keeping these words to lose and use insight in mind.

John Jantsch (16:13): So, so are these words, actual words that you have on the card or, or are we in charge of creating that

Sam Horn (16:18): List? Well, no, both because I love it when people say, do you ever add words to your list? All the time. What you got? Tell me . It’s uh, in fact a guy came up after a session and he said, do you ever add words to your list? And I said, yeah. I said, which word would you like to add? He said, well this word it causes so many problems. I said, good. What’s the word he said, that’s the word. I said, no, what’s the word that caused the problems? He says, yes, . I said, I felt like who’s on first? Right? , it was the word problem. Just put the word problem on the left, you know, how do we wrap up meetings? Any other problems we need to talk about? You know, can I go ahead with that project? Sure. I don’t have a problem with that. What’s your problem? Oh boy. For most people the word problem means something’s wrong and we use it even when there’s nothing wrong. And now there is . Yeah.

John Jantsch (17:11): So, so your books, one of the things about your books, all well-written books frankly have a lot of stories and you are great storyteller. Do you want to pick any of these kind of common places where people use it and really give us a concrete example through a story?

Sam Horn (17:26): It’s, and, and I’m so glad you asked that because this is a personal story. However, after having the pleasure and privilege of, of doing speaking engagements and workshops and podcasts, the feedback is this is the story people remember and this is the one that changes the way they deal with someone in the heat of the moment. So I’m visiting my son Andrew in New York, and his one-year-old son hero is crawling across the floor, hauls himself up on the guitar stand, starts banging on the strings. Now Andrew over on the left, could have yanked the car guitar away, could have said Stop banging on the guitar. He could have said no. All of which would’ve made hero feel bad instead. And you probably remember this story, John, he said one word. Do you remember the word

John Jantsch (18:14): Don’t . Gentle. Gentle. I failed

Sam Horn (18:19): .

John Jantsch (18:22): Don’t was I I was giving an example of on the left

Sam Horn (18:24): He says he’s quick folks, . Well, and and here’s the ripple effect cuz you and I agree that words have ripple effects. I saw hero’s face transform in that moment and he reached back to the guitar Strong. Yeah. Reached up to some bell’s ring. And he made music is because Andrew used words that shaped his behavior instead of shamed it, he told him what to start doing instead of what to stop doing. And he reinforced the desired behavior instead of the dreaded behavior.

John Jantsch (18:58): Yeah. So Sam, how could you make this, um, a bit of a movement where people would start teaching this in schools and people would start, um, having not just workshops, but coaching, uh, inside the workplace.

Sam Horn (19:12): What a great idea is that what actually I do certi, just like you certified people, I certified people in tongue fu and talking on eggshells. Yes, they do take it into schools, they do take it around the world. We have people, you know, in fact Tung Fu was the number three ranked book in South Korea, you know, almost 20 years after it was published. It was the most checked out book. So wow. Hopefully this is a mission and a movement and uh, it helps us do what Mother Teresa said. She said, the world is full of good people. If you can’t find one, be one . That’s what I hope this book does and gives them the language to do it.

John Jantsch (19:50): Well, I couldn’t get past your South Korea, your Korea, South Korea, cuz I’m just, I’m, I’m instantly going to pop there with, you know, like K-pop and

Sam Horn (19:58): Quick mind there John

John Jantsch (20:00): . So well, Sam, tell people where they can find out obviously about more about your work. We will have the link to the template that you offered, the, the card that you offered. Um, and um, obviously find out more about all of your works including talking on eggshells.

Sam Horn (20:15): Well, thank you. They can, it’s easy. Go to samhorn.com and I’ve got my TEDx talks there. I’ve got, you know, I love quotes. Got a lot of good quotes on how to be a good person there. And also if they follow me on LinkedIn, I post usually a couple times a week with new examples and with new phrases and techniques and recommendations that aren’t even in the book. So hopefully we’ll just keep expanding this message and mission and movement. Yeah,

John Jantsch (20:40): That’s um, it’s fun about it. I think lots of books, most authors would say this, but a book like this, I’m sure you’re getting a lot of feedback where people did something or they tried something and you’re hearing their story of how it worked. And that’s probably one of the most gratifying things as an author I suspect it is for me. Certainly,

Sam Horn (20:57): You know, and we are back to the ripple effect because so, you know, you’re in the marketing space, in the leadership entrepreneur space and what means so much to me is when, you know, Albert Schweitzer said in influencing others example is not the main thing, it’s the only thing . So if we go first and we set the example, once again, our teammates, our customers, our family members are more often likely to follow our example and that way we really can be a force for good.

John Jantsch (21:28): Yeah. Awesome. Well, Sam is always great. I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast and hopefully we’ll see you again soon out there on the road.

Sam Horn (21:36): I will look forward to it.

John Jantsch (21:37): Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @marketingassessment.co, not.com.co. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing assessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

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(01:14): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Joe Rare. He is a, I’m gonna say self-proclaimed underground serial entrepreneur, investor and outsourcing expert. He focuses on helping small to mid-sized businesses and currently owned and manages a number of digital companies that are fully run by virtual assistants, including Level 9 virtual, wedding booking system, engaged.app campground, digital. We’ll talk about a few of those. So Joe, welcome to the show.

Joe Rare (01:45): Thank you so much. I, I appreciate you having me.

John Jantsch (01:47): So I have to get into that like underground thing. , what’s an underground, what’s an underground entrepreneur? Cuz you’re clearly like not in a cave or anything.

Joe Rare (01:55): No, no, no. Well, I mean, I’m actually in the lower level of my house, so that counts for some. No, I, you know, somebody actually kind of said that to me when I was speaking at an event and we were discussing social media and whether you have to be a personality in order to succeed Right. In business today. And you know, everybody’s kind of telling their story over and telling everybody else what to do and is that necessary? Is that how it has to be? And I said, well, you know, at that time, I mean I’m like, I don’t produce content. Like I don’t do anything on social other than in some, you know, Facebook communities where I engage with people in my market, but I really don’t spend much time there. I don’t post a lot. It’s just not something I love and I don’t enjoy it.

(02:34): And so I don’t think I do. And they were like, geez, that’s so underground. Like it’s so, you know, you’re not in the spotlight. You’re not trying to tell everybody how to do everything like everybody else is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was like, that’s kind of interesting. And so that carried over and somebody else introduced me at another thing I spoke at and they called me an underground entrepreneur and I’m like, you know, that kind of sticks and I kind of like it. So, I mean, the way that I say it is I build businesses in. Yeah. I, I don’t, you know, nobody knows. We just lost a company and kind of see here in the background, we just launched a company called visitor match.com and it’s, you know, we did it and nobody knew we were even doing it. Half the com, half of my team didn’t even know we were working on the project. Cause I’m like, look like let’s not do anything until we know it works, . Then we’ll actually say, okay, let’s build it. And so yeah. So that’s kind of how that came up about.

John Jantsch (03:23): Well, and and I actually love that cuz there definitely are a lot of people, like you say on social media that, you know, they’re making a lot of noise, but they’re not really making a lot of impact. And I think that, you know, being busy, building a business, making money, having an impact, you know, you don’t really need to necessarily have a megaphone to do that.

Joe Rare (03:38): Right. I mean, you look at the, the biggest businesses in the world didn’t have, um, a single person out there telling everybody what they should be doing. Yeah. And I think I actually just had this thought today and I was like, oh, should I make a piece of content around it? Because it’s completely inverse of what the thought is. But I said, you know, everybody out here thinking I gotta make this content to make my business more successful. It’s like, no, you don’t. You need to pick up the phone. You need to contact your customers, you need to sell stuff. That’s how you make your business more successful. So stop producing content at the, you know, where you think you have to. Right, right. The moment you think you have to produce content to make money, you’re dead. Yeah. Because everybody else that’s competing with you, they’re calling your customers and winning the business.

John Jantsch (04:25): . All right. So you’ve got, you’ve had a really sort of interesting journey. I wouldn’t say you’re a youthful guy, so I’m not gonna say long journey necessarily, but how, how’d you get started building businesses?

Joe Rare (04:37): When I was in high school, towards the end of high school, I think we took a road trip to visit my grandfather in Canada. And so we were driving from California to Canada in an rv and I read the book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, I think, you know, over a two 10, day two, no, I used this two week trip. I think I read the book six times.

John Jantsch (04:57): . That’s awesome.

Joe Rare (04:57): And the first time I read it, uh, it literally just, it just nailed me. And I went, yep, that’s exactly what my life’s supposed to be. And so then I went to college and I, you know, started school and thought, okay, I’m gonna go play sports. And of course I’m a five 11 guy who isn’t gonna play basketball at any level, you know, beyond, you know, maybe I sit in the bench in college I decided, you know, maybe I should start a business. And so I dropped outta college, started a business and my thought was, I can always go back to school. Right. If I ever want to, I can go back to school. But the business that I started went from zero to 40 employees. And then I sold the company two and a half years later, . And so I didn’t make a ton of money cause I didn’t know what I was doing. I was in my early twenties and I was kind of an idiot. And so I didn’t make,

John Jantsch (05:39): Yeah, you probably made early twenties money.

Joe Rare (05:41): I made early twenties money, you know, and, uh, I was able to get into real estate investing and bought some properties and got to play that game. Uh, but that, you know, I, right out of that, I was like, okay, hold on. I, I, this is like, it’s my itch, it’s my thing. And I have to be, I have to be able to flex that muscle. And really that’s, it’s where my interest lies. It’s where my heart lies. I don’t think I could work in a job. I think I would suffocate and it would just be devastating to me. So that’s how I got started . So,

John Jantsch (06:12): So what attracted you to the virtual assistant world? Um, you run one of your organizations is fairly large, uh, VA Level 9 virtual is a fairly large VA placement agency. Uh, was it one of those things where you needed one and you were like, Hey, this is cool, this works. And so business?

Joe Rare (06:28): Right. So yeah, so I mean, to kind of make this story more colorful, I actually was in the real estate world and I was doing fix and flips and, you know, the 2008 nine economy crashed and I got stuck with a lot of properties that I had. I, I didn’t have any money to pay for. I didn’t have anything to do with it, so I had to give ’em back to the bank. And so I ended up giving I think, eight mortgages back to the bank, which was pretty devastating when I’m, again, I’m in my mid twenties. Yeah. And I felt like at the time, you know, it’s like, hey, I got like, you know, six, 8 million in real estate. Like, I had this, you know, I’m wealthy, but I was broke and gave the money back to the bank trying to figure out what I’m gonna do next.

(07:05): And you know, I read Rich, I read Rich, Dad Poor Dad previously, which got me on the entrepreneurial journey. And then I read Tim Ferriss four hour work week. And I went, okay, this digital world seems kind of cool. I could create an e-commerce business, we could do some drop shipping, we could do that stuff. And I started building that business. And so what I did was I literally sat down at my dining room table and I built a business page by page out of the book. Literally every, I executed everything except one, one piece of it. And that was that I sold an ingestible product and he said not to. But other than that, I did everything by the book. And so I got virtual assistance and I started out in India and then I was in Pakistan and in Sri Lanka and Vietnam and all over the place.

(07:50): And I ended up down the road, I landed on the Philippines and it was a very, you know, it was very kind of a successful place to land for virtual assistants. Yeah. Just because their culture matches a lot of the United States, right. They watch our movies, they wear their clothes, their clothes, and they listen to our music. And so they very much follow what we do. Street signs are in English, universities teach in English. It was a good fit. That business worked well until the FDA shut down the product. And then we were like, okay, well gotta close that down. And so then that led me into marketing. And I was using VAs at that time, but I hired my first VA in November of 2008. And I’ve had a team working with me every single day since that day. So that’s how I started with VAs.

John Jantsch (08:33): Yeah. So I’m jumping around a little bit here now. You’re building some apps and some marketplaces. So talk a little bit about that. I mean, that’s a different beast building an app and building a marketplace around an app. So what, what got you there? And then, you know, what have you learned that’s gonna allow you to repeat that process?

Joe Rare (08:51): You know, when it came to like, you know, engaged app process, you know, the, I was looking at, I was servicing my, our clients at my agency, which is wedding booking system, and I was servicing our clients there. We were using multiple softwares to fulfill a service. And because there were so many that we were using, I got to the point where I said, okay, you know, we should probably build our own and put all of this into one. So I reached out to a buddy of mine that I knew was kind of dabbling in the same thing. And I said, Hey, why don’t we pull some resources, let’s see if we can go develop this. And he said, I’ve been trying for a while. The developers couldn’t finish, so I just lost about a hundred grand. And I’m like, oh, that kind of sucks.

(09:32): Okay, , this isn’t good. And you know, and then I said, well, look, let’s go to the table and see if we can find somebody else who can help us with this. And maybe somebody could be another partner. And then we could find the right development team. A few weeks later he goes, Hey, hold that thought because I actually know somebody who’s already on track to launch something. And what we could do is we can piggyback off of that and then we can have our own app. And so I said, okay, let’s check that out. And so we got in early, went through the development process of, hey, we need this built in and this built in and all that stuff, and kind of customizing it to what we needed. And then, you know, and that’s how we kind of, but the whole point of the software, the only thing I wanted it to do was service my existing clients. It was never a thought to then go sell it to people who weren’t our clients and just have people use the software. That was never the intent. And then I’m like, wait a minute, why don’t I just do that? And so he started doing that and next thing you know, you’ve got hundreds and hundreds of users and it’s, and it’s doing great.

John Jantsch (10:28): So, so an all in one engaged is focuses on the wedding industry. Could you take that to other industries?

Joe Rare (10:34): Of course. Yeah, of course. Yeah. And there’s, you know, there’s other people who have, have, you know, dealt with same development company and they’ve taken it to other industries as well. Yeah. Where I kept it was the moment that everybody becomes your customer. Nobody’s your customer. Sure, sure. Right. And so niching down was the key to my success, especially with my agency businesses, is the niche side of things, being very specific in who we service. Because then every single point of communication is designed for that industry, that niche. And so I said, you know, this is what we use the software for. This is how we have it set up. This is why, you know, everything is the way that it is for us. Let’s just keep it that way for that niche. If we wanted to do it for another industry, okay, we should do something completely separate. But, you know, so

John Jantsch (11:19): It’s that. Well, and it did support. You were already in that business. Right? So it supported that, which I think quite frankly, I think is always a great play. I mean, if you, if the extra money or the extra opportunity comes out of it, serving in an industry you already know because it already supports your main business, is a great play.

Joe Rare (11:36): Absolutely.

John Jantsch (11:37): So I just touch briefly on the fact that you’re, you’ve taken a similar thing to the campground industry, an RV industry though, right? Or is that a whole different play?

Joe Rare (11:46): No, it was, that was just kind of a, a weird needs play at the time. We haven’t done a lot with it since. So I was, I I keep to tell somebody like, Hey, yeah, don’t even really include that. But I mean, we built a business out of it that produces income that most people would beg for. And the way that I did it was we were traveling during the whole covid crisis. We were traveling around in, you know, an rv. Sure. And, you know, I’m telling my wife, Hey, let’s, okay, let’s stop in this city and then let’s stay somewhere. And so she starts, you know, she’s on her phone in the car and we’re, she’s trying to find like, where do we stay? And she’s like, God, this is awful. Like, I can’t figure out are they good for kids? Do they like dogs?

(12:22): Yeah, yeah. You know, like, what are the amenities of the place? And unless she went with like a big company, like K oa thousand trails, like mom and pop places were awful. Yeah. As far as their marketing goes. And I’m like, you know, we could fix that. My wife said, oh my God, no, you’re not gonna try something new. And I’m like, I have an idea. So we end up getting somewhere and we stay and I just, I, I reached out to one of my developers and, and our designers first, and I said, Hey, can you create a landing page? Here’s what I’m kind of thinking. Create like a little brand around it. Let’s buy a URL and let’s throw up a landing page and then I’m gonna make some contact with some people. And so we, I literally just started making calls to all the people that we looked at previously.

(13:02): Yeah. And I just started calling ’em. I said, Hey, listen, you know, we were trying to stay at your place. We ended up staying over here. The reason we couldn’t stay with you is because of X, Y, Z. We couldn’t figure out, you know, your marketing and, and the way you display online. I, I couldn’t figure out if this was the right place for us. And, and I said, I, it made me think I have a company, I think that we could support you. Here’s what we do. And they’re like, absolutely, we’d love to help. We always talk about it, but we just don’t know how to do it. We don’t know where to go. We didn’t know who to. And so I’m like, okay, hey guys, can we create like a logo because we need to have some sort of branding around this and like, let’s do it. And so as we traveled, we just kept contacting people and the next thing you know, you know, we got 30, 30 clients paying, you know, a couple thousand bucks a month and you’ve got a real business margins were great. And I went, okay, I have a real business here. Like, this is something we could pursue and grow and do something great with. And so, yeah. And then it’s been very steady for, you know, a couple years. A few years now.

John Jantsch (14:00): It’s funny, I own a camper van and we do the same thing. And that’s been my experience too. I mean, they’re just, it’s

Joe Rare (14:05): Awful. Oh my gosh. It’s so funny cause it’s like, it’s such a simple opportunity, you know? And I think there’s some other people who have dabbled into it and, and they might be supporting others. But yeah, it was just something that, it was just a happenstance type opportunity. I’m like, let’s just see what we could do. . Uh, yeah. So that was great.

John Jantsch (14:23): And now let’s hear from a sponsor. This episode is brought to you by Business Made Simple, hosted by Donald Miller, and brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals hosted by Donald Miller Business Made Simple Takes the Mystery out of Growing Your Business. In a recent episode, they talked with my old pal, Seth Godin, where he explained the virtues and values in his book called The Song of Significance, A new manifesto for teams. Listen to Business Made Simple. Wherever you get your podcast.

(14:55): Hey, marketing agency owners, you know, I can teach you the keys to doubling your business in just 90 days or your money back. Sound interesting. All you have to do is license our three-step process that’s gonna allow you to make your competitors irrelevant, charge a premium for your services and scale perhaps without adding overhead. And here’s the best part. You can license this entire system for your agency by simply participating in an upcoming agency certification intensive look, why create the wheel? Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create. And you can have ’em today. Check it out at DTM world slash certification. That’s DTM world slash certification.

(15:43): All right, let’s pivot back to VAs, the world of VAs. So I, I know your answer to this, but I want you to support it a little bit. I mean, should every business be, uh, looking at that as a way to supplement, grow, be more profitable, , let

Joe Rare (15:59): Sort that, I mean, if, yeah, it depends. I think it just depends on what your business structure’s like. Right? Do you require people to be there physically? Mm-hmm. das are not the way to go, but most businesses have the opportunity to outsource something. Yeah. There’s a human being sitting around that could be better utilized somewhere else in the business or at a different capacity. And you could use cost leverage to outsource to a virtual assistant. I truly believe almost every business can do that. There’s a mind shift that has to exist. And, you know, as, as widely known as virtual assistants and outsourcing is, the reality is that the majority of businesses have no clue. They don’t have any idea about this. And so it’s like, wait a minute, somebody where is gonna be supporting my business? Like, that’s crazy. And so we’re still, it, it’s funny, like as long as this has been going on, I mean, we’re a couple decades into this, I I feel like there’s still immense opportunity for businesses to really, you know, grow into this and understand that, you know, as the economy changes, you know, this is the one area that I love to share this with.

(17:06): When the economy shifts, people like to pull their marketing out mm-hmm. , and they go, hold on, let’s pull our marketing dollars back. And it’s like, whoa, double down on marketing, decrease your labor costs. Yeah. Yeah. Because guess what? Your customers are still there. You don’t need more labor and less customers. You need more customers, less labor. And so I love that side of it. When the economy shifts, don’t pull your marketing dollars back, double down on marketing, decrease your labor costs. Virtual systems are a great way to do it

John Jantsch (17:37): Because good news is other people are pulling their marketing back, which even makes down better.

Joe Rare (17:42): And that’s exactly it. And that’s how, during things like Covid and, and all that, how we ended up doing so well was so many people in the agency world and in, you know, in the wedding industry, you know, during Covid, what was funny is, you know, wedding venues who we serve and, and you know, and I’m a partner in five venues, they, everybody stopped. Oh, we can’t have people come tour. I’m like, so like FaceTime virtual tours, have people come until somebody tells you no. Like, we really, we pushed the envelope and I said, everybody stop marketing. We, I, I read it across forums. I saw, you know, in Facebook communities, I saw everybody was pulling their dollars back and I said, Nope, we’re doubling down. And in one of our venues we tripled marketing dollars and we took everybody’s market share. And still to this day, they’re just like, they, I see ’em all the time. We can’t book out our calendars. And we’re like, dude, we’re booked all the way into 2025 . So I don’t know what you guys are doing, but we don’t have that problem

John Jantsch (18:38): . What’s the best way for somebody? So, so let’s say somebody’s saying, okay, I can think of some stuff. I, you know, you talked about the marketing world. A lot of marketing agencies, you know, have certainly, uh, landed on this idea. What’s the best way to go about finding virtual assistants other than going straight to Level 9 virtual, which of course, uh, is one option.

Joe Rare (18:56): Yeah, I mean, I think you can dabble in the idea by going to like Upwork and outsourcing something. The challenge and the reason that we, that our company’s been so successful is that there’s, you know, Upwork is a huge marketplace for things like that, right? And you could find people from all over the world who have very different specialties. Some people are super inexpensive, some pla people are extraordinarily expensive. And it just depends on who you’re looking for, what you’re looking for. But you can dabble into that stuff. The problem is, is you have to put dollars up front to find out if the person is actually good, right? , what we’ve created and why it’s been so successful for us is we took that model and said, hold on a second here, why don’t we create a team, what we call a pod, which is a, a kind of a play on words.

(19:41): It’s projects on demand, but it’s also a pod of team members. And they will do their specialty over and over thousands and thousands of times. So we have, you know, hundreds and hundreds of clients who submit multiple tasks every single day. Our team knows how to do their specialization, they do it every day for hundreds of clients, and we know that we can do it better than everybody else. So you don’t have to go test and put money out and go, I hope this is gonna work out. You can come to Level 9 virtual and say, Hey listen, I want to buy a block of hours. I wanna submit a bunch of stuff to you guys, have you guys help me with it? And then after that you can decide, hey, okay, this is great. I’d love to have my own virtual assistant working with me. And that’s a great way to get your toe, you know, your toe into the water.

John Jantsch (20:24): And do you find that, you know, people obviously start out, it’s like any new employee, even, it’s like, okay, we gotta get to know each other, your style, you know, how we communicate, blah, blah, blah. Do you find that people graduate towards like, you know, higher levels of responsibility for that? You know, that virtual person where maybe they’re even client facing in some cases,

Joe Rare (20:43): They they should be. Yeah. That, that would be the goal is that you can grow them into it. So realizing that just because there’s an ocean between you and somebody else doesn’t mean that person’s incompetent . And uh, and the interesting thing is, you know, here I am, I’m a college dropout. However, my, like for example, my lead developer is a professor at a university, like highly educated individual, unbelievable at what he does, why? And, and, and he makes a great living. And so I kind of look at it, I go, you can’t hire that talent here for the cost leverage that we can. Yeah. And so just because the ocean exists between the two of you doesn’t mean somebody’s less competent or less skilled. Very often you can find people with way higher skill, way more education easier, you know, because of that. And they can grow into whatever role you want. Just like here, I think that you just have to shift how you communicate coach train and bring them up to speed. It’s just, it becomes a digital communication rather than you and I sitting face to face and working through that. And as long as

John Jantsch (21:48): You, yeah, and I think people underestimate how much responsibility you have, you know, as the hiring company to Oh yes. To make that person successful. Talk. Talk to me a little bit about what you’ve seen. You can either come from the mistakes or you can come from the like best practices when you’ve seen the relationship really work. What’s been the keys to success?

Joe Rare (22:08): Number one for mistakes and success is failure or is, uh, excuse me, is communication. It’s communication hands down. So if somebody’s gonna succeed or somebody’s gonna fail, 95% of the time it’s communication. Here’s what’s interesting. People don’t wanna communicate. Business owners don’t wanna communicate down and you know, team members don’t want to, they’re afraid to communicate up. If you can get both parties coming into this and realizing, okay, no matter what, we’re a team, we’re gonna communicate with one another. It’s okay for you to fail. And this is something I’ve gotten much better at because I’m totally okay with myself failing learning the lesson and moving forward. But I’m becoming really good at allowing my team to take a shot at something, fail and then learn the lesson and improve. And when they can do that, they just become unstoppable. And I think that if as leaders, as business owners, if we can provide the safe space, call it for somebody to go in and make a mistake and then, you know, not something detrimental that’s gonna cause you to lose clients and and all that.

(23:17): But if they can go in and understand that, hey, it’s gonna be okay for me to learn, it’s gonna be okay for me not to know everything day one. And especially with hiring virtual assistants, a lot of people think like, well I got a VA and how come they can’t do everything that I say, well you couldn’t do everything when you started. They’re no different. So, you know, build them up and grow them as a team member. And we have people who have had VAs for, you know, years and years who are so important within the company that it’s funny, some of those VAs now interview to hire more VAs. And so we have one of our VAs working for a client, interviewing somebody new to come work for the same client. And it’s kind of cool to watch how they’ve grown in their career. Yeah,

John Jantsch (24:00): That’s awesome. Speaking with Joe Rare, uh, founder of Level 9 virtual, Joe, I appreciate you stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Do you want to invite people where they might connect with you, find out more about your work?

Joe Rare (24:10): Yeah, I’d love to. You know, a couple places. Level number nine virtual.com. So Level 9 virtual.com, top right corner, it says, book a call, totally no obligation. You can chat with our team. They will support you and guide you in the right move. If you want to, you know, get started using a virtual assistant or at least test the waters, you can also check out what I’m up to @joerare.com. And, uh, you can always reach me at Joe at any of my business names joe@level9virtual.com or joe@joerare.com. Yeah, there you go. Awesome.

John Jantsch (24:41): Well, again, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Joe Rare (24:45): Would love it. Talk to you soon.

John Jantsch (24:46): Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @marketingassessment.co, not.com, dot co. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing assessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by HubSpot. Look, AI is literally eating the web ChatGPT is more searched than I don’t know, Taylor Swift. Check out HubSpot’s AI powered tools, content assistant and chat spott. They both run on open AI’s GPT model, and both are designed to help you get more done and to grow your business faster. HubSpot’s AI powered content assistant helps you brainstorm, create, and share content in a flash, and it’s all inside a super easy to use CRM now. Chat Spott automates all the manual tasks inside HubSpot to help you arrange more customers close more deals and scale your business faster. Find out more about how to use AI to grow your business at hubspot.com/artificial-intelligence. That’s hubspot.com/artificial-intelligence.

(01:14): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and I’m gonna do a solo show. Seems like it’s been a little while. I think it’s time. I wanna talk about the seven deadly marketing mistakes, uh, that every business makes, and it’s the ultimate benefit of having a marketing strategy and plan. You know, marketing can seem really overwhelming. There’s more to do every day than you can possibly do. There’s a new thing that comes along every day. Getting it all done just seems impossible. So when I talk about these mistakes, I mean, I, I, again, I think these are pitfalls that people can naturally fall into. And so I wanna talk about the things that you should avoid, things that you need to focus on, because by doing so, maybe I’ll also give you some thoughts about what you should stop doing or not need to do.

(02:08): Like, jump on every new trend and new shiny object that comes along, for example. All right, so I’m gonna go into, uh, these seven things that I see, and I call ’em mistakes because that’s a, you know, that everybody’s scared to make mistakes, right? But they’re really just common business, uh, practices that, uh, I want to help you avoid. And by virtue of doing that, help you focus on the right things. Okay? So here they come. Number one, I see so many businesses that have really no vision of where they’re headed. I started my own business without any vision where I was headed. And, you know, you quickly find that you get whipped around by kind of every breeze that that blows. So, you know, not having a roadmap or at least a thought about what success looks like for you. Now, it’s pretty common for people to advise, like, what’s the three year plan?

(02:56): And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, except who knows , what the three year plan is. But having some idea, not just of what the numbers are going to be, but what impact you want to have. But I will say when I set goals with numbers, somehow we kind of get there. So there is some real value in just projecting guessing as some numbers, but I think the bigger thing is what kind of impact? What kind of business do you want to have? Who do you want to associate with your brand? I mean, what place in the market do you wanna own? I mean, those are some things that you can make as statements early on, and I think that they can be very invigorating for your team members. They can certainly be attractive to customers as well. So having it holding and at least an outline of vision is so crucial.

(03:44): So that’s mistake number one that I see. No vision.

(03:47): Number two, trying to be all things to all people. Now, I don’t think people necessarily set out and say, I’m going to be all things to all people. But what happens is there, there is a natural inclination if somebody comes along and says, oh, you do marketing, or, oh, you do accounting, I need that. Then line up like, here it is, you know, buy from me. And I think what happens is, and you’ve probably experienced this if you’ve been around for any amount of time at all, is that you end up watering down any kind of messaging or any kind of brand. In fact, you typically have no brand and you will inevitably attract the wrong clients. And in fact, you’ll confuse the right clients, uh, by saying, look, here’s everything we could do. Uh, does anybody need that?

(04:31): As opposed to, here’s the thing that we do that nobody else can do for you. Like we can do having the top 20%. In fact, I always tell people, take a look at the top 20% of your clientele today, your ideal clients, they’re probably in your top 20% because they’re profitable. They probably have a good experience because they had the right challenge and they had the right behaviors on how to solve that. They probably don’t beat you up over price. Maybe they even refer you because they have such a great experience. I mean, those are the folks that you should build your entire business around. It doesn’t mean you won’t sell to other people, but your messaging needs to be lined up to attract more of that top 20%. And then really from a business model standpoint, you wanna make sure that you’re actually not just keeping those folks happy, but continue to explore what else could you do with those folks?

(05:22): Because you’ve already sold them, they already love you. Um, do 10 times more business with, uh, the top 20% of your client. You’ll double your business rather than than going out there and, and trying to convince new people, uh, to buy from you. It helps you solidify your offers, helps you solidify your customer journey. It certainly, you know, you can build momentum with repeat business. Um, this is a group that’s gonna refer you. We all know how great referrals are. So focus on that top 20%. Stop trying to be all things to all people.

(05:54): Number three, being just like the competition. And again, I don’t think anybody sets out to say, I’m gonna be just like every other business in my industry. But we have a tendency to look around and, and maybe we worked for a company like that. We start our own company. We have a tendency to look around and and find that we are, um, saying the same things. We’re offering the same things, we’re acting the same way. There’s really no way to build trust in that type of environment. And unfortunately, what happens is if you look just like the competition, well guess what? Somebody calls three people in your industry and all they can compare is price. And so you’re constantly competing on price because there is no, there’s no differentiating factor that people value. So you can’t attract the right fit. You can’t really make, or the the promise you can’t attract talent. You know, staff gets really excited about knowing, Hey, we’re, we have this compelling message, we have this compelling difference. Here’s the problem that we solve for folks. You know, this is one that, that I’ve got it right here in the middle of these seven.

(06:55): But this is one that, that leeches out into so many other things. You know, you’re gonna waste marketing resources, you’re gonna compete on price, you know, by doing this. And so finding, and guess what? Here’s a clue. Your customers know how you’re different. And so finding and discovering in their words what that difference is, the problem you actually solve is such a huge component that you can build into the overarching strategy. Not just marketing messaging, but the overarching strategy of your business. Your starts with a core message that you then build into everything you do.

(07:29): And now let’s hear from a sponsor. This episode is brought to you by Business Made Simple, hosted by Donald Miller, and brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals hosted by Donald Miller. Business Made Simple Takes the Mystery out of Growing Your business. In a recent episode, they talked with my old pal, Seth Godin, where he explained the virtues and values in his book called The Song of Significance, A new manifesto for teams. Listen to Business Made Simple. Wherever you get your podcasts

(08:01): Hey, marketing agency owners, you know, I can teach you the keys to doubling your business in just 90 days or your money back. Sound interesting. All you have to do is license our three-step process that’s gonna allow you to make your competitors irrelevant, charge a premium for your services and scale perhaps without adding overhead. And here’s the best part. You can license this entire system for your agency by simply participating in an upcoming agency certification intensive. Look, why create the wheel? Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create. And you can have ’em today. Check it out at dtm.world/certification. That’s dtm.world/certification.

(08:49): Mistake number four is wasting precious marketing resources. Man, there are so many channels, so little time . They, they’re coming fast and furious every day. And I think there, there is a real inclination to say, oh, I have to be everywhere. I have to do everything. I have to be in this channel. And what happens is, maybe it’s even an effective channel for you to be in, but we’re spread so thin that we can’t make any impact anywhere. I’d rather see you master one channel, one place where you can actually make money consistently and predictably, whatever it is, Facebook content, using seo, running Google ads, it doesn’t really matter. Master one and then move on to the next. You can’t build any momentum by building, by spreading yourself too thin.

(09:36): All right, number five, and again, this is another one of those that runs through a lot of challenges, but competing on price. Unless you’re Walmart, you know, uh, competing on price, being the low cost leader is not such a great place because you can’t pull it off . And so again, going back to like being just like the competition, trying to be all things to all people. A couple of the other mistakes I mentioned, that’s what really leads to this competing on price, because you have no option. It’s like the only way we’re gonna get the deal is to be cheaper. Well, the problem with that, of course, is then you have no profits to invest. You’re gonna track the wrong clients. You ever notice how the client that wants the deal is going to be the most demanding client that you sign up? I mean, you can’t innovate. You’re, because you’re serving people that came to you based on price. Guess where they’re gonna go the next time they can get a cheaper deal from somebody else? So you can’t hire, right? You can’t outsource, right? You can’t innovate. You’re gonna attract the wrong clients. And here’s the thing that’s really sad, is that, you know, if you focused on that top 20% that already loves you, that’s already willing to pay a premium, the opportunity for you to grow profitably resides there.

(10:49): And not in all the lost opportunity of chasing those folks that just come to you on price. Now, you can’t just, well, you can just raise your prices, but you better have a compelling message. You better have a compelling package. You better promise to solve a compelling, uh, problem for a specific person in a specific way. That’s how you get out of competing on price.

(11:10): Number six, overwhelmed with the idea of the week. Anybody feel that? I mean, business is overwhelming, period, , but the pace of change, the new things that come along, the new person that assures you that AI is now like the secret weapon that you can get rich. It, it, you know, chasing these things, and I’m not saying there aren’t times when you wanna look at opportunities, but what happens is when you’re flailing around chasing the idea of the week, you can’t build any momentum. You’re going to waste countless hours. Who knows how much resources you’re gonna confuse your customers. Having a consistent point of view about here’s what we do, here’s how we do it, here’s how we do it, here’s why we do it. Here’s how we do it better than anyone dreamed of doing. Sticking with that long enough for people to actually hear that message and start telling their friends, neighbors and colleagues is how you can get by or get through the overwhelm, you know, with this idea of the week. Now, what this also means is you have to have some data to make decisions. If you don’t know what’s working today, you’re more likely to try something new. Let’s throw some more stuff out there, right? The old spaghetti on the wall, see what sticks. But if you have good data, and this doesn’t mean that you have to be a data nerd and like have all kinds of dashboards and dials of everything that’s going on.

(12:35): If you have the six or seven or eight meaningful things, or at least what you believe will be meaningful things to measure in your business, and you put them on a spreadsheet and you look at them every week or maybe every day and you update them and you talk about them in your team meetings, you know, that’s how you’re going to say, Hey, this is working. Let’s stick with this. Let’s double down on this and let’s forget about the idea of the week. Doesn’t mean you won’t experiment, but you won’t be tempted to just run all over without any, any real idea of what’s working and what’s not working. Look, there is too much to do and not enough time to do it. So let’s stay focused on a handful of things.

(13:16): Number seven, no way to measure success. So every quarter, uh, actually every month to some extent, but every quarter we get together with the leadership, uh, team, we talk about what are two or three objectives, never any more than three primary objectives for the business. And certainly we boil that down to then what are the objectives for marketing? And those objectives for marketing are going to lead up to, are they going to help serve our business objectives by having those and then filter using that as a filter. You know, every time we get a great new idea, to say, wait a minute, where does that fit into this quarter’s plan? Does it support one of those objectives or not? If it does, great, let’s figure out how to get it done. If it doesn’t, let’s put it in the parking lot. You know, let’s wait on it. And I think having the discipline to follow a quarterly plan is absolutely how we get things done. I mean, you look up at the end of 90 days sometimes and you think, God, I feel like I’m exactly where I was 90 days ago.

(14:18): But working with two or three objectives, when we achieve those, we big things, uh, can happen to your business. You can actually accomplish a pretty significant goal in a quarter’s time. And that’s going to serve you in many cases for years to come. Whereas just kind of doing a little here, a little dabble there, a little dabble there, you know, isn’t going to allow you to make any kind of consistent growth. So all of this, uh, all of these seven, uh, deadly marketing mistakes that I’ve talked about are really solved or cured, uh, by developing a marketing strategy. We have a process we call strategy First. I’m sure you’ve heard me talk about it. It is a, a process that we’ve now between myself and my team and, uh, the, the hundreds of agencies that we’ve licensed, we’ve actually run thousands of businesses through this process. And it just flat works. It helps you stay focused on the things that I’ve talked about, uh, today. And it really allows you to see not just growth, but a roadmap of what growth looks like of where you’re going.

(15:25): So I, if any of this touch to Nerve, I’m sorry, first off, but I also invite you to reach out. Uh, you can just send me an email, john@ducttapemarketing.com and say, I wanna talk about strategy. I wanna talk about strategy first. Um, we’d love to set a meeting with you and talk about how we could maybe bring, we, we could solve these mistakes if you’re experiencing any of them. Uh, but bring you a solid roadmap that is going to serve you really from a marketing standpoint and a business standpoint for, uh, perhaps years to come. So that’s it. Thanks again for listening and let me know if you like these solo shows.

(16:01): I’ll try to remember to do more of them in the future. All right. Hopefully we’ll see you one of these days out there on the road.

(16:07): Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @marketingassessment.co, not.com, dot co. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing as assessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.