John Jantsch (00:00): Hey, this is John, and before we get started, I have a gift for you for being such an amazing listener. Everyone’s talking about AI these days, but most of it’s about tactics. We’ve created a series of prompts we use to create strategy, and you can have them for free. Just go to dtm.world/freeprompts and grab yours. Now. Let’s get started.

(00:30): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jansen. My guest today is Lloyed Lobo. He’s an entrepreneur, podcast host and community builder. He is the co-founder of Boast.ai where he leveraged a community-led growth model to bootstrap the company. He’s also the co-founder of Traction a community empowering over 100,000 innovators through connections, content, and capital. We’re going to talk about his book, which is titled From Grassroots to Greatness, 13 Rules to Build Iconic Brands With Community LED Growth. So welcome to the show, Lloyed.

Lloyed Lobo (01:10): Thank you for hosting me, big fan and I’m excited. It’s like you watch those people, listen to those people and then eventually have the opportunity to do something with them and you feel honored. It’s like this celebrity moment here.

John Jantsch (01:25): Well, I’ve been doing this for a long time, so hopefully you have heard a little bit of it. So if those of you that watch the video clips, I know those of you listening won’t, but I love your hat. They’re hard to forget your last name. Lobo,

Lloyed Lobo (01:38): A great entrepreneur once told me that you got to do things to stand out, right? It’s all about standing out. And if you look at Mr. Beast, actually one of the things he did does is stand out is one of the biggest influencers now on the planet. I mean, he does things like cure a thousand blind people or gave a homeless guy $20,000, started a free car dealership. The thing is, those who are afraid to be a little eccentric, a little authentic and a little different, often blend in with the rest. And if you are just like everyone else, it’s hard to become an iconic brand.

John Jantsch (02:15): I mean, it’s not for everybody, but there’s no question pissing some people off occasionally is one way to get noticed. Like I said, it’s not for everybody, but it certainly works.

Lloyed Lobo (02:25): The story with the hat was I used to have Lobo hat and I’d wear it everywhere, and when we sold 50% of the company or majority of the company and I transitioned to the board, I ended up depressed because I’m like, I left my baby. I built my baby on this company. It’s funny because for a founder, no matter how good the financial outcome, leaving a company you started that you sacrificed your family for is like fraught with mental health issues. And a friend of mine gave me this hat as a joke. I wore it in the podcast. It’s stuck now where I go to the gym. People are like, Hey, you’re that guy from LinkedIn or I went to an art gallery. Oh, we see our content on LinkedIn, so it stuck.

John Jantsch (03:01): That’s funny. So let’s get into the book from Grassroots to Greatness. This sometimes comes off as a lame question, but a lot of times the answer is brilliant. Was there some problem you were trying to solve that said, I have to write this book?

Lloyed Lobo (03:13): Definitely. So my journey throughout my life has had one common thread, and that is community. So my parents grew up in the slums in Mumbai where they made a movie on it, slum Dog millionaire. And anytime I visit my grandparents who had 10 kids, I’d ask them like, you barely have place in here for your kids. Why do you have this random person here? And he said, he would always say the only way to create abundance in life is to help others without expecting anything in return. Today, of course, these kids are in the slum, they’re all well off. But then when I was eight or nine years old, the Gulf Warhead, I was born in Kuwait and security had lapsed, came together to rescue the country. Every building became a sub-community, right? What is community? Put your hands and say, I have a problem, or I have an aspiration.

(04:01): You find other people and they come together. And the way that effort was coordinated, because there were no cell phones, there was no internet at the time, you’d go down the building with concern faces and somebody would say, Hey, I’ll organize security. I’ll guard the building from this time to this time, all organized food and supplies and water, and that word of mouth spread from building to building and eventually evacuated us to safety. Then another time was when we were bootstrapping both. We had no money, we literally had no marketing team. Marketing was like me, and we bootstrapped this business to 10 million in revenue through building this traction community where we’re bringing our ICP, our audience together around their aspiration and their goals. This community of practice, in fact, our investors who bought half the company, the growth equity firm, they came to attraction community event.

(04:51): And through my entrepreneurial journey where it’s like something’s working, something’s not something’s great. One day it’s great, one day it’s like I’m failing, I’m falling. And so when things were going great after two failures and did an events company where the founder ran off with all the profits and then boast was a struggle, bootstrapping, and as soon as we started to make money at boast, we lost a twin. We were expecting twins. One passed the other was born four months or so early and spend that time in the incubator and we relied, my wife and I relied on this community called Fish’s mom’s group to bring us some sanity in terms of hope and how other people who were in that situation dealt with it. When we were looking at other babies pass away in the nicu, and then finally when we sold a majority of both stepped out of the day-to-day, I ended up depressed.

(05:41): I felt I lost my identity. I was the face of this company, became overweight, became insufferable, and the Peloton community is what saved me and brought my mental health to stability. And so when I sat here saying I could do anything with my time, I can be anywhere, what should I do? I said, I think I need to write about the impact of community to the world and pay homage to the community that’s given me so much. From the slums to truly the slum dog millionaire journey, which was fueled by the community. And I truly believe this, yesterday’s innovation always becomes today’s option and tomorrow’s commodity. If you look at the Gs, you couldn’t get ahold of it. Then it became an option in the car today, there’s CarPlay, you don’t even need it. It’s commodity. But if you build a community, you won’t become a commodity. A perfect example is Apple. They don’t have the best features, but they fall in love with their customers and sell that aspiration. They’re not nitpicking on, we have this many megapixels camera, they’re talking about the aspiration. So that was very important to me to share that journey.

John Jantsch (06:49): So we’ve always had community. If you think about the one you described in Kuwait, and then churches have always been communities, schools have always been communities, but I think they’ve really come to the forefront with the fact that we can have community now anywhere. We don’t have to be in a physical place. There are those that are suggesting that advertising and some of the traditional marketing ways are really become less effective and maybe even not work at all at some point. And that community is in some ways sort of the last frontier. Would you support to that idea, that notion that you think it’s going to really be the way that everybody has to market?

Lloyed Lobo (07:26): I truly believe that I embody it because if you think about it, marketing is taking up, look at 2023 because we went through this boom tech boom and then the interest rates went up and so-called recession. Marketing is taking a bloodbath in 2023. It costs twice as much to generate the same results from the same marketing tactics. TikTok, Facebook, all the CPMs are up. The spend is way off whack, and businesses are spending less and less of marketing because even with generative ai, what you’re seeing is you’re seeing sameness in content people now people are generating content through generative ai. Consumers are tired of this clickbait, this spam, these popups, these ads sharing personal data to access crappy white papers seeing the same thing over and over. But if you look at some of the best, most iconic brands, Harley Davidson being a perfect example, they almost went bankrupt in the eighties.

(08:21): They rebuilt the company on the ethos of community wasn’t a marketing strategy, it was a company strategy. Employees went out and started writer clubs, employees become writers, became employees. It had oversight from the president, and that community organized the Save Harley campaign. Today they organize breast cancer awareness campaigns. There’s a purpose behind it, and I think if you have a great purpose that goes beyond your product or service, you’ll build an everlasting sustainable community. And I like that you brought religion. My mom’s a very devout Catholic, and so as a part of my research, I was researching religions as well as brands. And when you look at every iconic brand or religion or cult has this path, they start with an audience and when they bring that audience together, it becomes a community. Now, when the community comes together to create impact, it becomes a movement.

(09:16): And when the movement has unwavering faith in its purpose, it becomes a religion or cult. Everything from Christianity to CrossFit follows that pattern. You see a lot of influencers today on LinkedIn, on TikTok and whatnot, they think they have communities don’t. The influencer is gone, the community is gone because it’s not a community, it’s an audience. It’s a one-way communication. So how do you bring them together to talk to each other without you being in the room is a community. And then when that community creates impact or products or whatever it is, it becomes a movement. And that’s what Harley did. They were coming together to create awareness. Mr. Beast, great community, it’s going to be everlasting because his community has come together to donate $20 million to evacuate the oceans of 30 million pounds of plastic. All of these things, those are purposes that go beyond the brand, and I think that is really important

John Jantsch (10:17): As a community. You look at some of the communities that are out there and they are counter to something, right? I mean, Harley Davidson really preaches the idea that free spirit writers we’re kind of counter to something else that’s out there in society. And I think most community, I mean you could even say Peloton is an example, that there is a so-called enemy, if you will. Would you say that’s a strong component of building a community, is that there has to be something to rally around or against?

Lloyed Lobo (10:47): It has to be an aspiration, a goal, or some challenge, right? And it’s funny, as I interviewed maybe a thousand or so community leaders, entrepreneurs, innovators, and one thing I found very common actually, I found a number of things that were common, but the one thing was very key driving force is they’re driven by some spite or anger to change the status quo, to prove the naysayers wrong, to do things a different way than it’s currently being done. And in many ways you say happy people don’t drive change, but people who have a spike towards something will drive that change.

John Jantsch (11:28): Yeah. So the book, as I read in the subtitle, has 13 rules. I’m curious if you want to share, visit a couple of rules, but before that, maybe a lot of times when people you researched a thousand or did a thousand interviews, how’d you get it down to 13 and why are those the most important? And then again, maybe share a few.

Lloyed Lobo (11:48): Definitely. So I asked the same set of questions is like, why did you get started? How did you bring people together? How did you seed it in the beginning? How did you continue to grow and scale it? How do you retain them? And then how do you make money? I think one of the most important things is there’s a lot of focus on metrics, and I think metrics is important, but we get caught up in these sort of acronyms and these buzzwords, but really it’s all about asking the right questions, right? It’s as simple as that, and that is what metrics are to me. It’s like if you’re looking for an answer, ask the right questions and make sure you ask the same questions because then you’ll get the answers you’re looking for. And you can find patterns if you ask some, it’s like AB testing and marketing, right?

(12:33): If you change three things, you don’t know what drove the results, but if you ask the same thing over and over again, you’ll get the answer, you’ll get a pattern, you’ll be able to see a pattern. So that was the key thing. So a couple of rules that I’d love to share, right? One is a framework which is a play on Daniel Pink’s Amp, which you may have heard of. And so when I looked at these communities, I found AMP was great, but to build a thriving sustainable culture community, there were six common traits that these companies, these cultures, these community had, and I called it camper, which sounds cheesy, but I say if you have proactively instituted camper in your company, your community, your culture, you’ll build capi campers. Camper stands for connection, autonomy, mastery, purpose, which is from Danielle Pink. And then energy and recognition with connection.

(13:23): What I found is that these communities, they foster genuine bonds and build bridges. When people feel connected, it empowers them to support one another and grow Peloton is a great example. Turns out sweating and working out together even virtually leads to a great sense of comradery. The other one is autonomy. Nobody wants to feel micromanaged. When people have the space to make their own decisions, they take ownership and drive innovation. A great example of that community was the Basecamp community. This company is a project management tool that invented Ruby on Rails. Ruby on Rails has spawned thousands upon thousands of startups as a framework, as an infrastructure to build products on. And that autonomy not only is a part of the community, but how they run the company, and it’s helped them achieve tens of millions in profit with only 80 employees working 40 hours a week, and no investors, their competitors have thousands of employees and hundreds of millions in funding.

(14:21): So that was the second piece. Mastery, of course, everyone wants to get better and better at what they do and become experts in their field. Purpose is a key one. I truly believe there’s no good or bad people. There’s shades of gray. Everyone is well intentioned. It’s just life happens. You want to give, you want to create impact, but taxes and mortgage and kids doesn’t give you the opportunity to do that. But when you attach with a great purpose, even if you contribute a small portion, you feel like you’re part of the whole thing. There was an urban legend with President Kennedy walking NASA at midnight, and he sees a janitor sweeping the floor and he asked, what are you doing at this hour? And the janitor says, sir, I’m putting a man on the moon. That is what great purposes. When it goes down to the person with the lowest position, they feel Patagonia is a fantastic example of purpose.

(15:17): They promote this environmental stewardship, but not only encouraging their employees to volunteer for these initiatives, they lead by example. They donate a big chunk of their profits to nature preservation. Then the fifth one is energy creating this atmosphere of enthusiasm, passion, and positive vibe. When your culture is full of lively energy, it sparks inspiration. I mean, you can ask yourself how many times have you been in an environment where they have connection, where there is autonomy, there’s mastery, and there’s a great sense of purpose, but the energy is a drag, it’s dry, and you’re like, I just want to get out of here. You watch presentations and we are with great people around the room, but you’re falling asleep because there’s so energy is really important because community is a marathon of the heart and mind, right? People are giving their time. Oftentimes they’re not paid like volunteers and whatnot.

(16:12): How do you keep them excited? Energy is really important to do that. And the last one is recognition. They proactively acknowledge and appreciate the efforts of others. When you celebrate efforts, no matter how big or small, and just say thank you to people or give them things to appreciate them, they keep coming back for more. And we’re in 2023 where job loss has been at an all time high, yet people have opportunities, right? I could go and drive an Uber and then part-time do DoorDash and then be on five or Upwork and make a hundred thousand dollars to support my lifestyle. Why do I join a company and do a nine to five? There has to be in addition to all of those things, if I’m not recognized, then I’m out of here, right? A lot of companies fail to proactively recognize their people. If you treat people with love and help them grow, they’ll treat your business, your community, your culture with love, and your company will grow.

(17:04): So those were six common traits I found. So the first thing was figure out how this fits because the last thing you want to do, and as I talked to more and more people in 2023, they asked me, oh, how do I start a community and when will I start making money? So if you don’t start with the thought of how do I give and how can I give without expecting anything in return? And if you’re looking to monetize on day one, then you may as well not do community. Invest in ads, invest in cold calling. There’s tons of direct response marketing you can do. Community is a long-term sustainable business strategy, and that’s why I say start with this ethos of community, which is camper connection, autonomy, mastery, purpose, energy recognition. If you don’t have that in your D n A, people will find it to be contrived and it’ll be short-lived, right?

(17:52): You won’t sustain it for the long Atlassian, the company work 40 billion. Their community organizes 5,000 events a year. I asked their chief revenue officer, how do you do attribution on this community? He’s like, I can’t, don’t care. It takes care of itself. The company’s growing, the product proliferating. I’m not going to nickel and dime on how it makes money. I know it takes care of itself. Or you ask Gainsight, the company was acquired for a billion. They created the customer success community a category. You ask Nick. Nick is like c e o and head of community, or even Brian Chesky at Airbnb. He’s c e o and head of community. You can’t do attribution with community. That’s the thing. It’s pretty hard because somebody comes to an event, they may pass on your details to somebody else on the team who goes and downloads a white paper.

(18:39): Those details go to an S D R who cold call, and then the deal gets done and get attributed to S D R, and then it says, oh, community did nothing, right? So that multi-touch is hard. So I think starting with that camper is really important. The second thing is figuring out the type of community you want to build. There are three kinds of communities, community of practice where you bring people together to educate them, to teach them something. I’m an engineer. My first job, I wanted to go into entrepreneurship. So I asked somebody, what’s the best skill I could learn? They said sales and marketing. So I started cold calling for a tech company and then transitioned my way into running G T M operations. But everything I learned about sales and marketing was from HubSpot’s inbound marketing content because nobody was talking about digital marketing.

(19:23): And guess what? Years later when I had the money and the position to buy a tool, I bought HubSpot. I was part of that community. So community of practice is that teaching people to become better versions of themselves about a craft community of product is turning your customers into evangelists. So teaching them about your product. And the last one is community of play. Bringing people together around fun. Right? Now, if your company doesn’t have a product market fit, you’re new, you barely have any customers, you don’t have high retention, there’s no point in building a community of product because nobody’s going to want to be sold to. You want to sell the aspiration, the goal that your product is driving. So why do people buy HubSpot? Because they want to generate more leads. They want to become better marketers. So teach them to become better marketers is what HubSpot gets.

(20:17): So that’s the second thing. The third thing is crucial is nail your niche. Figure out your ideal customer profile. What are their pains, their goals, their aspirations? Where do they eat, breed, drink, sleep, figure out their circle of influence. Who do they fund? Meaning what other services and tools they pay for? This will give you a list of potential partners. Who do they follow? Meaning who are the influencers they watch and listen to? So this will give you the list of people if you’re hosting events or podcasts or to invite, and then what do they frequent? Meaning events, magazines, blogs, they read, so you could distribute your content there. So that is the third thing. The fourth thing is start creating an audience. You can either curate content, like summarize content from experts in your niche or be the expert for your niche yourself or do a mix.

(21:07): But you start by, once you understand your I C P, you can write down a hundred, 200 burning questions and that’ll give you content ideas. You can even think about, if I had to write the ultimate guide to X, Y, Z, what would be the chapters and sub chapters and topics? And then from there, start creating content. Even something like this, we do an interview like this. You can turn it into an interactive interview. You can turn it into a YouTube video. You can post the audio to podcast. You can turn it into short form, clips the text into LinkedIn posts. You can turn in an ebook, you can turn the summary into a weekly newsletter. So it gives you content, multiple distribution channels, and you start building this audience. And once you start building this audience, then bring them together. One thing I found in this research is the value of senses.

(21:55): It was told to be my Jonathan Yaffe, the founder of any road, is that anytime you incorporate more than two senses, you start to build stronger connections. We’re sound in sight. If we were in person, we’d be taste, touch, and smell. And this is what Red Bull does. And these high energy brand, they bring people together in person. Surprisingly even Yelp scaled a lot of their community through in-person events. And you look at a lot of these online products that you think, but a lot of their early activities were bringing people together in person because it builds bonds, comradery when you’re engaging multiple senses. If you were in person now, probably this would extend for hours on end. We probably know each other personally. So that is really important to start bringing people together in person. And then the last one, there’s a lot more tips, but these were some of the crucial ones is do it with consistency.

(22:45): Anything worth doing is a long slog. We started traction by doing meetups and pizza nights. 10 people showed up the first time, then 20, then word spread, but we never stopped. And one day 200 people showed up to this co-working space and the GM of the co-working space is like, guys, this is not a meetup. This is a full blown conference. Now that evolved into the Traction Conference, and today we’ve had C-Suite from Uber to HubSpot to Shopify show up. But you got to do small. And then one day it hits. And even our subscriber base was small and we kept doing it. The pandemic hit, we freaked out. We had to cancel a conference. We had 50 some odd speakers. So I reached out to all the speakers and said, Hey, instead of doing a virtual conference, which I don’t have the fortitude to do it, I can’t sit through a two day virtual summit.

(23:36): What if I interviewed you every week for an hour and made it a live virtual one hour live summit and we’ll turn the recording into YouTube, the audio into podcast. They’re like, love it. It eventually ended up being twice a week and subscriber base went from thousands in two years, 120,000, just that cadence. And it’s funny, we were, when we sold half the company to growth equity firm, they’re like, what is this inflection point here? Your revenues just went up like this in those two years to like 10 million and you have no marketing team or spend. And I showed another thing about the number of webinars and events we were doing, because the word spreads, hundreds of people start joining. First it’s tens, then the word eventually spreads and you get the social proof of the speakers. Of course the brander of the speakers and the audience, the other people who are coming. And more and more and more people show up and you build that cadence. But most people just stop. They stop after the 10th thing. Magic doesn’t happen at number 10. Magic maybe happens at a hundred. And there are stats like from YouTube, even some of the best content creators have seen, I’m not talking about shorts, but I’m talking about long form videos that they had to create a hundred videos before they saw meaningful traction. That just does, consistency is the magic ingredient that leads to overnight success.

John Jantsch (25:04): It’s almost its own algorithm. So Lloyed, I appreciate you stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. You want to share where people can connect with you and maybe find out a little more about from Grassroots to Greatness?

Lloyed Lobo (25:16): Definitely. So I’m active on LinkedIn. Follow me, I post one to three times a week and generally content around entrepreneurship, bootstrapping, community mental health. So do follow me there. My mom made it weird for me growing up by putting an E in my name, it’s Lloyed, but she put an E in there and I was bullied as a kid a lot. And one day I asked her, why did you put this E in there? Why did you have to make me different? And she’s like, I always dreamed of you becoming an entrepreneur. When I was living in the slum in India, I wanted my child to be an entrepreneur. And I said, if he ever became an entrepreneur, he would want to trademark his name. And if I put an E in there, that would allow him to do that. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but in terms of that philosophy there, but that was the story. So Lloyed Lobo on LinkedIn.

John Jantsch (26:04): Yeah, it’s a great story. And I must admit, when I was looking at my show notes, I was like, Hey, is that right? So it worked. It worked. And the U R L was probably available, of course.

Lloyed Lobo (26:15): Definitely. The funny thing is Lloyed Lobo without the E is not available with the E, some software developer has. So I’m on LinkedIn with that. lloyedlobo.com, fromgrassrootstogreatness.com. And then if you want to tune into my podcast, it’s Traction on YouTube, traction by Lloyed Lobo on YouTube or traction on Spotify. Thank you so much. This has been fantastic, John, big fan.

John Jantsch (26:41): Thanks. Now again, I appreciate you taking the time and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Lloyed Lobo (26:46): Definitely. Where are you today, by the way?

John Jantsch (26:48): I am in the mountains west of Denver.

Lloyed Lobo (26:52): Oh, cool. I was just in Denver last week for a boast board meeting, and now I’m in Dubai. I spent half my time in Dubai and half in San Francisco. A

John Jantsch (27:00): Lot of air miles.

Lloyed Lobo (27:02): A lot of air miles. Awesome. Have a good one.

John Jantsch (00:00): 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 could 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 could have ’em today. Check it out at dtm.world/certification. That’s dtm.world/certification.

(00:55): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Jennifer Wallace. She’s a freelance print and television journalist who began her career at 60 Minutes, and she’s a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. We’re gonna talk about we new book Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic and What We Can Do About It. So Jennifer, welcome to the show.

Jennifer Wallace (01:22): Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch (01:24): So I always like to, this is a big topic. It’s an important topic. I always like to start with like, why’d you want to tackle this topic? ?

Jennifer Wallace (01:33): Yes. So, yeah, it, it, I have three teenagers of my own. I’ve been a journalist for 20, 30 years, but I know what it takes to write a book. And so I’ve been very reluctant to invest in a book until 2019 when the varsity blue scandal hit. I don’t know if you remember that, but Sure, sure. Parents from the East coast and the West Coast went to jail for conspiracy to bribe their way in their kids away into a, a highly selective college. And so I thought to myself, how did we get to a place where parents were now willing to go to jail to get their kid into a school? And I wasn’t buying the narrative that parents just wanted status and they just wanted the bumper sticker. I knew there was something deeper, and I also had my own three kids who were nearing high school age. So I wanted to know, what, where should I be focusing my parental energies? What’s the best way to secure a a, a fulfilling successful midlife for my kids? What can I do now to kind of put those roots in that could come to fruition throughout their lives?

John Jantsch (02:44): So as a trained journalist, you actually did research. Not every author does . Talk a little bit about it because obviously psychiatry, psychologists, I mean, there’s a whole range of research subjects involved in this. Curious how you tackled that.

Jennifer Wallace (03:01): Yeah, so I wanted to make sure, so I’m raising my kids in Manhattan, and I wanted to make sure that the anxieties I was feeling, uh, in my own, you know, children’s childhood and that I was seeing in my community among the parents, that it wasn’t just an east coast thing or a west coast thing. Mm-hmm. I wanted to know if these anxieties were being felt around the country. And the anxieties that I’m talking about are the feeling that as parents, we are responsible for launching our kids into a, a successful future. And so I teamed up with a researcher at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and, uh, we surveyed 6,500 parents throughout the country, which was an extraordinary sample size. We were hoping to get a sample size of a thousand, but within a few days, uh, 6,500 parents had filled it out.

(03:48): And what I found was that the anxieties and, and fears I was feeling were also being felt in Alaska, in Maine, in Washington state, in Jackson, Wyoming, in Cleveland, Ohio, in Florida, in Texas. It was everywhere. So this was, you know, uh, if you want, I could read you a couple of questions. I asked these parents because I found it so fascinating. I asked them on a scale from one to four how much they agreed or disagreed with this statement. I feel responsible for my children’s achievement and success. 75% of parents felt responsible. And then I’ll read you one last one. I wish today’s childhood was less stressful for my kids. 87% of parents agreed with that statement. So I wanted, uh, to get, I wanted to kind of dig in and get to the roots of these, um, fears and anxieties and this intense pressure that’s on parents today.

John Jantsch (04:45): Okay. So there, there’s a lot of things that have changed generationally, but do you buy the idea that every generation has felt that to some extent? I mean, I’d like to hope my parents thought that a little bit . I certainly, you know, felt it about my kids. And obviously now my kids have kids. Isn’t that just something every parent feels?

Jennifer Wallace (05:05): I think it is something every parent feels, but I think when I was growing up, for example, just in the seventies and early eighties, life was generally more affordable. Housing was more affordable. Sure. Healthcare was more affordable, higher education was more affordable. Parents could be reasonably assured that their kids can make some wrong turns and still wind up. Okay. And over the generations we’ve seen that, that kids for the most part have been able to replicate their childhoods, if not do better. We are now looking at the first generation that is not doing as well as their parents. And parents are feeling these macroeconomic pressures that are in our environment, the steep inequality, the crush of the middle class. And they’re nervous. And I think they have reason to be

John Jantsch (05:49): So, so it’s not just that the parents are crazy, um, are crazier. Now what you’re saying is that the, the children of today, uh, millennials, you know, even now are not affording houses. And, uh, even though they’re making far more than, you know, baby boomers did when they came, uh, outta college. They’re, it’s a whole new set of circumstances.

Jennifer Wallace (06:10): Exactly.

John Jantsch (06:12): So how much you, besides say, you know, you talk to a lot of folks in interviews and you talk about, you know, things like, and these are maybe symptoms, right? Of the circumstances. Loneliness is an all time high. And how much of a crazy sort of reset did Covid cause?

Jennifer Wallace (06:32): Well, covid, I, so two things I think happened in Covid. I think it, if we’re talking about youth today, yeah. It, particularly the population that I studied for this book, I, I looked at the top 25% of household income. So this is, you know, parents who could generally choose where they live and what was happening in these communities, in these upper middle class communities. Things slowed down. Parents weren’t traveling for work anymore, kids weren’t doing those extracurricular activities. They were sitting together at the table as a family. And I think for a minute, kids, well, the researchers not just, I think this, but the researchers who studied this population at the start of covid the first month or so, despite the fears and the anxieties, kids were doing fairly well in be because they were feeling the support system. Mm-hmm. of their families. Um, and then as time wore on, the anxiety started to increase.

(07:30): Oh my gosh. What happens to the internships? What happens when, um, you know, when uh, acts and SATs become optional? What does that do? How do I now make my kids stand out? And so where I thought, I’m in the early days of Covid, I thought maybe I won’t have to write this book. Actually, I think the need is even greater. And what I’m finding coming out of Covid is that the anxiety and the depression and the loneliness that kids were feeling became exacerbated. Mm-hmm. . And so while I thought in 2019 when I sold this book, it might be a hard sell to tell parents to widen their definition of success. I think parents are seeing what’s working and what’s not working, and they’re scared. Mental health concerns top the list of parent anxieties today. And I think parents and including me, we’re looking for answers.

John Jantsch (08:22): You spent a great deal of this book talking about something you call mattering. So I think we probably ought to go into what you mean by that and what the implications are of not mattering. Yeah. Is that the way to say the opposite of that ?

Jennifer Wallace (08:37): Yeah. So I went for the book. I went in search of healthy strivers. I wanted to know what, if anything, these healthy achievers had in common. And

John Jantsch (08:46): I, so maybe you ought to define that. What a help. I mean, what is that

Jennifer Wallace (08:49): Achiever? So the way that I defined it, and I worked with a researcher at Baylor who helped me with this, was kids who were doing well. Despite the pressures by doing well, I meant that their parents, their peers, teachers at their school identified them as doing well as kids who were able to bounce back from disappointment, who had a good support system and often had a sense of purpose to what they were doing. What these healthy achievers had in common was a high level of mattering. And mattering is this idea of feeling valued for who we are at our core, by our families, by our friends, by our community. And also being dependent on to add meaningful value back to parents, to friends, to the community. So the kids who were doing a high level of mattering had this, um, kids who had this high level of mattering.

(09:45): It was like a protective shield. They still experienced step backs and failures, but they were able to bounce back from them because it wasn’t an indictment of who they were. They already felt valued. And the kids who were doing the worst felt like their mattering, their value was contingent on their performance. That I only matter when mattering has been around since the 1980s. It was originally conceptualized by Mars Rosenberg who brought us self-esteem. And what he found was that kids who had a high, a healthy level of self-esteem enjoyed a high level of mattering. They felt important and significant to their families. And mattering matters, not just in adolescents, but really throughout our lives. Mattering at midlife, mattering in retirement.

John Jantsch (10:28): 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/certification.

(11:14): Alright, so I wanted to find this question. How has writing this book changed your parenting?

Jennifer Wallace (11:22): Oh my gosh. In so many ways. In so many ways. I feel so lucky that I had access to the greatest researchers on achievement and, you know, living a life of wellbeing and meaning. And so what I do now, I no longer solve. I have three teenagers. I do not solve for their happiness at home, which I used to do. I now solve for their mattering. So when they’re not acting like themselves, when they’re feeling down or anxious or off, I think, are they not feeling valued by the family? Are they not feeling valued by their peers? Are they not being dependent on to add value? Because a lot of kids in these high performing schools spend a lot of time building their resumes and hearing from their parents perhaps that they matter, but they lack social proof. And I think as parents, when we don’t give our kids the social proof that they matter, we make them more vulnerable to life’s ups and downs.

(12:20): But if a child, for example, oh, how’s a way to give a child social proof that they matter chores, meaningful chores at home? What are ways that your child, and I’ve thought about this in my own home, what are meaningful ways that my kids can give back to our family to improve our family wellbeing? Well, uh, two have become tech experts for me. They kind of go on off and on depending on who’s in the house. Um, my daughter, you know, uh, my older son was, uh, tasked with bringing my younger son to school, even on days that he might have off or a free period, he still had to go in early to take his brother. He was dependent on, we relied on him to keep the family functioning. Before I would go on reporting trips for this book, my daughter would, I have a bad reputation with tech at home.

(13:07): So my daughter would check my carry-on to make sure that I had all of my chargers, that my laptop was charged, that I had a battery, and the battery was charged for my recording device on my phone. So they, we in our home, we have figured out, we also have something that we leave on the refrigerator called family matters. And these are things that we’re trying to wrestle with as a family that we need solving. Like for example, one family matter was, you know, we have a closet really close to our front door, but for some reason the shoes never went in the closet. And instead they would just pile up in front of the front door. And I would trip every time my guests would trip coming in. And so a family matter was like, what could we do in our home to make the entry into our home a little smoother for ourselves and our guests? And so my son said, well, here’s why we don’t put our shoes in there because nobody organizes and they just throw their shoes in and then when you’re running late, you can’t grab your shoes. So he researched it and he found this shoe rack on Amazon that could easily put our shoes out and now the shoes go away because we solved it and he solved it. So,

John Jantsch (14:13): Alright. So how much of this idea of matter, because that, what you just described is obviously in the crush of parenting can be hard, but it’s just a good parenting skill, you know, to make people realize they matter for what they, you know, care about. But there’s a whole lot of parents driving children to believe that they will only matter if, and you know, I think some of the stress that a lot of kids feel is like, I don’t really wanna be a doctor , but that’s the only way I’m gonna matter. So how much of that mattering is mattering for your parents? And I’m gonna have a question in here somewhere, but do you see what I’m getting at

Jennifer Wallace (14:54): ? Well, I do. And I, so I did the 6,500 parent survey and I surveyed 500 young adults and I asked them about when they felt valued and appreciated by their parents, and 70% of them reported we had respon 500 respondents, ages 18 to 3570% of them said that they felt like they mattered more to their parents, that they were more valued and appreciated when they were doing well in school. Mm-hmm. , 50% of them thought they were more loved and 25% of them said they thought that a lot, the highest measure that our survey. So one in four kids thought their parents loved them more when they achieved. Yes. That was very hard to read as a parent. Yeah. Yeah. And I think we love, there’s no parent I met in doing this book that did not love their child unconditionally. Not one I’ve yet to meet one that says, oh no, they only matter when they get straight a’s .

(15:49): But what our kids are hearing in the messages, in the subtle messages we are sending them, is that they matter most when they’re doing well. And so what I would say to parents, if you think that, you know, if you’re wondering what are the messages that you’re sending in your house, Tina Payne Bryson, who’s a psychoanalyst, gave me four questions to ask to kind of take that temperature once she said, take a look at your child’s calendar. How are they spending their time outside of school? Take a look at how you spend money as it relates to your child. Number three, what? Take note of what you ask your child about every day. Mm-hmm. . And number four, notice what you argue with your child about. When you look at those four things, it will show you the message you are sending to your kids and how it can be interpreted as contingent mattering, contingent love.

John Jantsch (16:42): So a lot of things have changed, of course, in parenting technology is, you know, I hear from young parents now is, you know, is really the bane of their existence. Various forms. Social media can be thrown into that at, you know, what role do those, like seeing other people strive, you know, now because everybody wants to talk on Instagram about all their successes and things. How much competition, you know, striving creates some of this stress?

Jennifer Wallace (17:08): Oh, I think it has exacerbated it. So I don’t believe this, that the, I don’t believe social media and technology is the root, but I think it’s a magnifier and an accelerant. So I think the, the root of the anxiety and the loneliness and the depression, we are seeing this huge rise is this unmet need to matter for who we are at our core. And social media and technology just exacerbate that.

John Jantsch (17:34): How far can you take this? Trying to use the right words here. Where’s the healthy balance? Because some achievement is not all bad. . Oh my, this is totally, and so there would be a way to interpret this as just let ’em be kids. But where’s the balance? How do you find

Jennifer Wallace (17:50): Those? Not my message. Yeah. That’s definitely not my message. This is not an anti ambition, anti achievement book because I, I’m highly ambitious. I’m just ambitious for more than my work success. I’m in mm-hmm. , I’m ambitious as a wife. I wanna have a great marriage. I’m ambitious as a friend. I wanna have deep, meaningful friendships. I’m ambitious with my hobbies. I wanna be okay on the tennis court. So I want for our kids to, to be ambitious for more than just their work. But work is important if it, because it feeds us. And so I want kids to understand why their, you know, why they’re striving, what is it all for? It is not just to be better than other people, it’s to, as one school puts it that I interviewed, that I visited, not to be better than others, but to be better for others. Teaching kids how to connect achievement to making a greater impact on the world. Mm-hmm. . Yeah. I certainly don’t want a generation of anti ambitious kids that soci our society can’t take that. We need healthy ambition. And what I wanna give in our kids with this book is, uh, a way to motivate them with a healthy kind of fuel that will sustain them. Not a dirty fuel that will break them down. Yes.

John Jantsch (19:06): So, I know you don’t go into this in the book, a lot of my audience are business owners, entrepreneurs, they’re in toxic cultures inside of organizations. So really a lot of the work that you write about this could really apply to a workplace, couldn’t it?

Jennifer Wallace (19:19): Absolutely. I wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal in December about the power of mattering at work. The surgeon general names mattering as one of the key pillars to workplace wellbeing and mattering at work is, you know, a way to retain people. Yeah. It’s a way to encourage high performance. It’s, yeah, we need to humanize the workplace and mattering. What’s so great about the framework of mattering is that it’s intuitive and it’s actionable. Right? Mattering is about recognizing other people’s accomplishments, telling them why they matter to the organization. Get just slowing down enough to recognize them and treat them with dignity. That’s what mattering is.

John Jantsch (20:05): So now that we’re almost done, I’m gonna say, what do we do about this ? Yes. We spend a lot of time defining the problem. What’s the solution?

Jennifer Wallace (20:15): The solution is to bring back mattering. I mean, the way we are raising our kids today is so different than the way we raised them when you were growing up or when I was growing up. I mean, success was part of a child a, a childhood, but we weren’t defined by our successes or our failures, the way too many children are today. So I think the solution is at home to make your home a haven from the pressures and to lead with mattering and to lead with at every chance. Telling your kid, showing your kid that you value them for who they are at their core. Get a PhD in your child, find out what uniquely makes them tick. What are their strengths? One way to, one place to go. You could visit the mattering movement.com, which is, uh, nonprofit I co-founded that gives tools to parents and teachers and educators on how to foster cultures of mattering for young people.

John Jantsch (21:10): Awesome. Well, Jennifer, I appreciate you taking some time to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. You want to find out or you wanna share with people where they might connect with you and, uh, obviously find out more about Never Enough.

Jennifer Wallace (21:22): Oh, I’d love that. So you could head over to my website, jenniferbwallace.com, and I’m not sure when this is airing, but the book is coming out August 22nd, and lots of goodies and pre-orders. If this is running before then,

John Jantsch (21:35): Well th this’ll run probably around then, but also, you know, live out there on the podcast webs forever. So hopefully people will take some time to listen to this important topic and check out the book. And again, as I said, I appreciate you stopping by for a moment and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Jennifer Wallace (21:53): Excellent. Thank you so much.

John Jantsch (21:56): 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.

John Jantsch (00:00): 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/certification.

(00:55): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Mike Volkin. He is a serial entrepreneur, speaker, marketing consultant, fractional chief marketing officer, army veteran, and author of seven books. In addition, he has built and sold six of his own companies. And as a marketing leader, he specializes in helping businesses scale, particularly ones that help people, animals, and or the environment. So lots to unpack there. Welcome to the show, Mike. Yeah,

Mike Volkin (01:26): Yeah, thanks very much. It sounds like I have a productive life, but it’s not that exciting sometimes. But yeah.

John Jantsch (01:32): So, so let’s talk a little bit about, I’m gonna ask you about the chief marketing officer role. ’cause the fractional CMO role is something I wanna focus on. But tell me a little bit about the experience of building and selling six companies. I’m sure there’s a whole lot of people that you consult with that would like to do that as well.

Mike Volkin (01:49): Yeah, I think that what’s makes me a more complete marketer is being able to do something like that. But I’m always, I’ve always been the kind of like guy that’s had ideas in my head and I’m never short of execution. So, you know, I give things a try. I see what they stick. Some of them don’t. I, I said I built and sold six companies. Doesn’t mean I’ve only started six companies. A lot of ’em, I get to the finish line. I spent one time, I spent over 60,000 bringing a, a company to the starting lines to where I was gonna launch it. And I didn’t like the looks of it and I never launched it. You know, sometimes that happens, but sometimes it works out and you get to build a value, which is really fun. And you get to find buyers and then sell ’em off for a good chunk of money. So,

John Jantsch (02:24): So, so tell me also a little bit about other then, it’s a nice way to kind of have a niche people, animals in the environment Yeah. You list as a specific focus.

Mike Volkin (02:35): Yeah. I’ve listed . I, I’ve worked with a lot of companies, put it that way over, I’d say at least 600 by now over my 20 plus year career. Either doing strategy work from a marketing perspective or, or doing marketing leadership work. But you know, I’ve, overall that experience, I’ve learned that the companies that I’m most passionate about working with are companies that help people, animals, the, or the environment. It’s not to say I don’t like working with other companies. I like a lot of different types of industries and business models, but the ones that I most enjoy working with are ones that actually help people, animals of the environment. So that’s kind of my niche that I’ve developed.

John Jantsch (03:08): Yeah, so, so I guess that’s another way of saying you won’t work with, uh, companies that hurt people, animals in the environment. Right? That’s

Mike Volkin (03:14): Right. You know, I, I was contacted the other day about a, you know, from a company that does beef jerk and I’m like, you know what, I’m a vegetarian. I don’t wanna help you sell beef Turkey, . So I kind of turned them down, but I told ’em the reason why. So,

John Jantsch (03:24): Yeah. Yeah. O over long time ago, I had a cigarette company actually contacted me. Oh, that was kinda the same way. . Yeah. But it, it was a big company too. It was tempting, but yeah.

Mike Volkin (03:35): Yeah. As a marketer you can put your foot down ’cause you’re gonna help these companies grow and develop the culture and you kind of gotta be passionate a little bit about the service or the product that they’re offering, you know?

John Jantsch (03:44): Yeah, absolutely. So I started, in your intro, I talked about the idea that, uh, you are a fractional chief marketing officer, A CMO. If somebody comes to you, you, like, they’ve read your buy on, they say, Mike, what is that fractional chief marketing officer thing? How do you kind of neatly define that?

Mike Volkin (04:00): Yeah, it’s a tough one. The way I usually say it is that I work with companies that can’t afford or don’t have the ability to obtain a full-time chief marketing officer, which is often sometimes 300,000 plus a year. So I’m able to segment my day into six parts, so to speak, and one company gets one of those parts and I can work with four to six companies at any given time.

John Jantsch (04:24): Yeah, and to your point too, I think there’s a lot of companies that just don’t need the a full-time. That’s true, right? I mean, they need strategic input. They need somebody that’s guiding them, but that person doesn’t have to sit at a desk all day.

Mike Volkin (04:35): I know. Yeah. I know. A lot of times I talk myself out of a job because a company will just need me when they go to market to create the strategy, get some marketing processes going, and then they fire me or have me train a, a mid-level marketer to do what I executed and set up. You know,

John Jantsch (04:49): You’ve been doing this for a while, as have I, have you seen a change in the marketplace for accepting that, that idea? Very, we have leaned into the positioning a lot harder the last few years, even though we’ve always been doing it because it seems like small, mid-size businesses not only get the need for strategy, but I think the whole fractional employee, if you will, is really caught on, hasn’t it? Yeah.

Mike Volkin (05:11): Yeah. It’s been steadily growing ever since I’ve been doing it for like the last 10 years. In fact, when I was first doing it, I was calling it a part-time CMO because the word fractional wasn’t even around. And then covid hit, and then everybody got used to doing rero remote work and freelance work started getting really popular, even though it was popular beforehand. And now kind of fractional. CMO is just kind of a name, names stake. Yeah. I mean it’s not just CMO work, it’s fractional executive work C levels of all types. So it’s just, yeah.

John Jantsch (05:40): Yeah. I, yeah, the fractional C F O I think is probably been around longer than any other role because, you know, a lot of organizations, they need somebody to do their taxes, do their bookkeeping, but you know, they also need a little strategic advice on that, but rarely need a C F O O. What I’ve seen a lot in the last couple years also is a lot of organizations, I think, you know, let’s keep blaming stuff on the pandemic. Why don’t we, you know, kind of got caught without a strategy. You know, the market was good. They rose with , you know, the market. And then they realized, you know, we don’t have any way to stand out, you know, in the market or way to differentiate ourselves with our customers. So it seems like there’s hunger for this thing that we call strategy. Now, would you, have you seen that as well?

Mike Volkin (06:22): Yeah, absolutely. In fact, the, you know, a lot of people, obviously companies went under or had struggled with the pandemic, but my business was great as a fractional. CMO companies came to me saying, Hey, either one, we never paid attention to marketing before. And now’s our chance to kind of retool and start to strategize. And the other part is, you know, you know, let’s get creative, you know, help. Let’s hire you to help me get creative and let’s do something outta the box here. So I had some fun projects during covid and worked with companies I probably never would’ve normally. So I actually, I don’t wanna say I enjoyed the pandemic ’cause that’s not good to say, but from a fractional CMO standpoint, it was pretty beneficial for me. Y

John Jantsch (06:57): Yeah. And, and I think that will continue. I, we also had a lot of CMOs jump out of companies and decide they didn’t wanna work for ’em anymore. And so I think there’s more people hanging the fractional shingle out there, if you will. Yeah. Would, would you say there’s a, I don’t know if it’s size or industry, but would you say that there are companies that get to a certain point that need this role, maybe more than others?

Mike Volkin (07:22): I would say every size company needs a fractional cmo, but they’re certainly companies that are pre-revenue, or probably the ones that most needed are the ones that didn’t think they needed a marketing senior marketing leader. They got the marketing like, wait, our sales aren’t really what is expected and our, there’s the product market fit really isn’t there. Let’s hire somebody senior to figure out what’s going on. Uh, because a lot of entrepreneurs, as you know, have big goals. They’ll come to meet time and time again saying, we got a billion dollar idea, and this is gonna be massive and take equity in the company and this and that. But it rarely works out like that. Right. and not everybody’s a unicorn, or they wouldn’t be called unicorns. But, you know, even larger companies, I’ve worked with larger companies, it’s not common, but they might say, you know, our marketing director needs a fresh look at things, or we need you to keep tabs on our managers or something. So from a larger company perspective, I’m more into the project management and consulting from a, from an advice standpoint, from a a smaller to mid-size company. I come in as a fractional CMO with a strategy perspective to develop something and some strategy and some processes in the company. So my roles are vary depending on the size of the company. Yeah.

John Jantsch (08:30): You, you, you know, another type of company that I’ve seen over the years quite often is that company that is very founder sales driven. They grew nicely, 10, 15, $20 million company, but they plateaued because they don’t have that senior team at all. Or se uh, senior marketing person. I think this fractional CMO is very attractive to them as well, because they may be ready for a CMO, but the typically the founder has no idea what to tell the CMO to do, or if they’re doing a good job. And I, so I think that hold, doesn’t that hold ’em back? Sometimes it’s like, I’m not gonna hire that senior marketing person because, well, I don’t know what they’re, I don’t get marketing.

Mike Volkin (09:10): That’s the typical way a company grows, right? So they go to market, they have a very tight budget, you know, they do the lean business model thing, and they hire the minimum that they need to get a lot done. People wear a lot of hats. They might even have a marketing department with nobody actually specifically dedicated to marketing with any specific marketing skills. And then they realize they need the strategy. That’s my sweet spot. When I have a company that has data coming in, they have customers, they have, you know, things that I can look at and grab onto to create a strategy. And then that’s when things really start to take off. When they have processes, they know who they need to hire or need to upskill, and they really need my services at that point. So generally, my sweet spot is somewhere around 250,000 in revenue to 3 million in revenue is when companies decide I wanna scale, but I don’t have the team to do it. Or the strategy.

John Jantsch (09:55): Yeah. Yeah. And even in that range that you mentioned, I mean, you have different problems at $2 million than you did at 250,000 probably as well. And so if you’ve never dealt with those problems, even having an outside perspective is, is pretty important, isn’t it?

Mike Volkin (10:09): It’s always important. You know, one of the key freelancers that I hire for a lot of my projects or my clients that I work with are the marketers. Because yeah, marketing is so fast. It’s not, you know, back in the sixties it was like, here’s the yellow pages and let’s get listed. And that was marketing. Now it’s like, and even lately, it’s like, you gotta be on top of these AI programs and what they’re doing and their capabilities. It’s all these different specialties and marketing should just, I mean, there’s hundreds of ’em. It’s, you can niche down to anything now,

John Jantsch (10:34): 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/certification

(11:20): So if somebody asks you to come in and, you know, it’s like a typical thing. We need marketing or we need marketing help, we’re not really sure. Like our website’s not working. I mean, it’s always like some little tactic thing, right? Yeah. And you know, you’ve been doing this for 10 minutes, you realize no, that , they have a whole strategic problem. Where do you focus or how do you get them to realize? ’cause nobody ever wakes up and says, I need strategy, better go buy some strategy. Right? So how do you get them to realize that all their problems link back to being a strategic problem?

Mike Volkin (11:51): Yeah, that’s a really good question. So the, probably the most popular thing that I do when I first come into a company is I, I give ’em an audit. I just go through not just marketing, but every piece of data I can get ahold of. You know, even if they gimme financial statements, P and ls, whatever, I’ll, I’ll look at everything I can to get an overall glimpse of how data’s coming into the company, how it comes outta the company, and then I’ll look at the resources and especially the staff. You know, I wrote a, I wrote a book called The Business Success Formula, and it’s literally a formula on how to create business success. And the heavily, the most heavily weighted elements of that formula is the staff. It’s 50% more valuable or heavily weighted than any other, uh, formula, part of the formula.

(12:29): But typically what happens is, I’ll, I’ll give an audit. And then the thing about clients is they come to you and they don’t know what they need. They don’t know what they don’t know. So they might come to you with a problem and say, Hey, we need strategy. And I’ll say, wait, you’re not ready to scale yet. You don’t need a strategy. You need to fix some stuff first. So I go in and I, I tell them, usually there’s a clear communication problem with the way they’re portraying their products or their service on their website. It’s not hitting, right? It’s not resonating. Conversion rates are low, bounce rates are high. All those key performance indicators that indicate that you’re just not ready yet to scale. You need to refine some things. So typically what I do is I start with their website and their marketing materials and I refine the messaging. And that usually alone gives ’em a good 15, 20% boost in revenue and conversions right off the bat. ’cause a lot of companies don’t really think too hard about that kind of stuff until they realize there’s a plateau.

John Jantsch (13:18): Yeah, yeah. Their message is, here’s what we do, here’s what we sell. Right. ,

Mike Volkin (13:23): And then also the testing is really big too. I mean, that’s how Uber and the, these companies that just exploded to a billion dollar valuation, they just tested every little minutia of their company. So AB testing is big too. I’ll ask ’em, you know, what have you tried for your calls to action? What have you tried for your different menu options on your pricing plans? And they just don’t, they just threw stuff up. They never really did any research on their pricing, and they just thought, you know, that’s this, the price, it’s gonna be a hundred dollars a month. But they never really did any research or surveys or anything. So there’s that element to it.

John Jantsch (13:49): Yeah. Or, or worse yet, we find a lot of people just like, well, this is what everybody charges in, you know, free in our market, so we’ll just be competitors charge. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, all right. You mentioned, you know, here’s when I talk to people that, that decide to be fractional CMOs, one of the real challenges to the business model is you’re really just selling your time. I mean, or that can be one of the challenges is, is, you know, you’ve mentioned that there’s six companies that get a six to me. I mean, you may be highly paid for your time, but how do you scale a business like that? Or is it in your mind not really possible

Mike Volkin (14:26): To a certain point? The way I scale it is I have a, I’m not an agency, but I have a close-knit group of freelancers, depending on the skillset that I keep near and dear to my heart that I know do good work and deliver good value. And I don’t need a quote unquote babysit them too much. Like I know, right? Right. If I give them a task with very little effort or instructions, they’re gonna complete it. So I have about 20 to 30 of those people in my pocket. So when I create a strategy, I tell the team, listen, if you don’t have anybody staff that can do this, I have people on staff now I have my fee, my hourly fee, but if you want me to manage them and work with them to deliver the product, like I will charge more for that.

(15:00): So that’s the way I scale it, is I’ll either upcharge the freelancers that I recommend just because of I’m working with them and I’m managing them. So other than the hourly fee, I also charge that. And I also make a, a good amount of money from referrals too. Like if I can’t, I don’t fit every client that wants me to work with them. So I’ll say, listen, I know someone I used to work with, he’s great. Give him a call, he’s gonna work with your company, and then I’ll take a 10% cut or whatever from that freelancer I refer to. So

John Jantsch (15:26): Yeah. One of the things that we’ve been teaching for years is a repeatable system. As you mentioned, a lot of times people, they’ve had no strategic direction, so they don’t really need A CMO. They need what A CMO would’ve developed for them. Mm-hmm. , and then obviously somebody to orchestrate the implementation as you do. One of the things that I’ve found is, and you know, a lot of people will shoot me for this comment, but , you know, eight mo 80% of the companies out there need about 80% of the same thing, . And so I believe that there is a way to actually build a repeatable system for strategy development and then teach it to like account manager, you know, level folks rather than somebody that’s got 25 years of experience. Do you, does that sound like heresy to you?

Mike Volkin (16:07): No, because you’re actually speaking my language. This week I’m actually launching a business where it’s gonna be the first ever AI generated marketing strategy. So I’ve been working on it for quite some time, but, uh, it’s literally gives a company, and it’s just for marketing agencies. I’m not rolling it out to everybody. So a marketing agency would come, they answer 16 or so questions about their clients, and it would spit out a three month marketing strategy for them based on the answers. So, you know, not to plug myself, but it’s called your marketing expert.ai and it’s gonna be launched this Friday. So I’ve been working on it for a long time. So yes, I do think that strategy is yeah, repeatable. However, the, even I’ll be at my AI marketing strategy, it’s not gonna get you 100% there. There’s little nuances about every company and culture and the, the experience, the staff and like you just AI can’t do, no matter how good AI is gonna get that, you need to be able to get in there that last 10% and customize it.

John Jantsch (16:57): Yeah. Yeah. I, you know, I’ve been, obviously all marketers are, you know, talking about AI today and Yeah. You know, I tell people, I think the best that you can expect from it right now is it’s just an informed assistant. Mm-hmm. , it can do a lot of the legwork for you. You can do a lot of research for you, you can give you ideas to expand your thinking, but it, in the end, like you said, the first 10% and the last 10% are all you.

Mike Volkin (17:21): Yeah. AI is certainly not replacing anything. Um, but it certainly does help and the potential there for something more, you know, more development. Obviously ChatGPT 4 is awesome, but, you know, I think a lot of clients that come to me thinking that AI could solve their problems, and it’s really just more of a, a helpful tool to save money. It does cut down some of my time. Like if I need to, sure. You know, copyright a script or something real quick, I’ll throw it in the chat G B T before I hire a writer and I’ll hire the writer, look at it and review it type of thing. So it has certainly built some important processes in some businesses, but it’s certainly not replacing anything at least just yet. But it certainly will in the near future.

John Jantsch (17:56): One of my favorite content uses is, you know, you write a really great, you know, piece of content and then just let AI turn it into 18 formats. That’s right. So, so the writing’s good. The writing is yours, it’s original, it’s on point, you know, but then it takes that and gives you all the uses cut up. Yeah. Talk a little bit about, you mentioned this early on that you end up, because of your background, you’re able to actually kind of put your spin on some areas that people would think, well, that’s outside of marketing. I, you know, I tell people all the time, I think everything a business does is marketing, you know, , how they send out their invoices, you know, they’re hiring, I mean, their people obviously are, you know, are going to, you know, be a part of marketing or a part of the brand, you know, like it or not. How, how aggressively do you just say, Hey, we have to look at all these areas, or is it really a, because it could be, you know, it could be a really big rabbit hole to go down too sometimes for folks, but how important for you is it to address kind of the whole, you know, ecosystem of the business and how it impacts marketing?

Mike Volkin (18:55): Yeah, that’s a good question. So typically, I mean, there’s no less than three dozen different types of inbound marketing tactics and outbound, right? So, right. You can’t do them all at once or you’re gonna be spread too thin. So you have to look from a CMO standpoint, you have to look at the budget and also the resources. Like you can have the, a huge budget, but have no staff really to be able to execute it. So you have to balance that in with the, the strategy work you’re doing. But typically what I like to do is I like to have two, maybe three different marketing channels that a company is gonna perfect where they can say, I put in $10,000 in this marketing strategy and I got $40,000 r o i once you could do that repeatedly, then we move on to a different channel.

(19:32): And depending on your skills of your staff, we, it depends what, what channel we select, you know? I mean, if, if nobody likes to speak in front of a camera, I’m not gonna be selecting a YouTube strategy for you. Right? So, you know, that’s the kind of artwork that I don’t think AI is ever gonna be able to pick up, but that I come in as a CMO and I have to look at from both sides to say, okay, do we have the staff and resources, and then what channel do we pick based on that? So that’s the way I usually approach that. And I don’t usually have them do more than three different types of inbound marketing at once.

John Jantsch (20:00): So, so, so what about some of the areas that fall outside of that? So, I mean, we’ve all seen this, you, you know, you’re generating leads, they’re converting leads, and then, you know, service drops the ball and they’re going out the back door, you know, it’s like, oh, it’s marketing’s fault. You know, we’re not growing , right? Yeah. I mean, so how do you know, how do you stay disconnected or do you, you know, from that area that maybe isn’t seen as marketing?

Mike Volkin (20:25): Well, marketing, that’s a good question. Marketing and sales is always almost presented as one and the same for a company. Sure. Especially if it’s a sales led company. But honestly, before I ever launch a marketing campaign, I used to not, but now I do. I always look at the sales process, I’ll look at the sales conversions and I’ll, this guy isn’t cutting it, or this team isn’t cutting it, or they’re, they’re doing the wrong thing on the, on the calls to the clients. But ultimately you have to be able to, your scope of work, when you outline what needs to be done with the client, it has to clearly outline what marketing is and what sales is like. I just had a client the other day who wants me to hop on some, um, sales calls, and I’m like, I’ve never done that in my entire life. That’s not what marketing is. You just have to explain to ’em this is what marketing is and this is what sales is. And it’s different with every company. Sales isn’t necessarily sales from one company to the next. So in my contract that I send out to my clients, I have a, a long bulleted list of things that I do. And then I also have a, a list of things I don’t do in regards to sales, like taking phone calls from clients and customers.

John Jantsch (21:22): Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Well, Mike, you wanna tell, again, I appreciate you taking a few moments to drop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. You wanna tell people where they might connect with you and find out more about your work? Yeah,

Mike Volkin (21:31): Thanks. Always available for speaking gigs. mikevolkin.com, m i k e v o l k i n.com. And if you’re a marketing agency, you want some marketing strategy, my new website, yourmarketingexpert.ai.

John Jantsch (21:43): Awesome. Again, appreciate you stopping by the show and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road, Mike.

Mike Volkin (21:48): Alright, thanks so much, John. Talk to you soon. Hey,

John Jantsch (21:50): 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 marketingassessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.