John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Nudge, hosted by Phil Agnew, and it’s brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. You ever noticed how the smallest changes can make the biggest impact on Nudge you learned simple evidence, back tips to help you kick bat habits, get a raise, and grow your business. In a recent episode, Phil tested a thousand dollars on some marketing principles, some work, some don’t. Uh, guest Nancy Har Hut, who’s been a guest of the show as well. And Phil put these principles to test in a set of real life experiments. You’ll learn what works and what doesn’t. Listen to Nudge wherever you get your podcasts.

(00:52): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Diana Kander. She’s a keynote speaker on Curiosity and Innovation and a New York Times bestselling author. She’s a serial entrepreneur who has entered the United States as a refugee at the age of eight, and she has launched and sold millions of dollars of products and services. Today we’re gonna talk about a book she co-authored called Go Big or Go Home: Five Ways to Create a Customer Experience That Will Close the Deal. So, Diana, welcome back to the show. This is at least your second, maybe your third time.

Diana Kander (01:30): John, thank you so much. I hope this isn’t two forward, John, but I was so excited to be on this show. I created a jingle for you, . You’ve been in business for so long and I, I feel like it might be the only thing missing. So let’s, can I share it with you? You’re,

John Jantsch (01:47): You’re gonna way no matter what I say anyway, so , I’m ready.

Diana Kander (01:50): Alright, here we go.

John Jantsch (01:52): Okay.

Diana Kander (01:55): Duct tape.

Diana Kander (01:56): Woo.

Diana Kander (01:58): We’ll make your branch shine like new with duct tape. Woo. We’ll make your brat stick live glue with duct tape. Woo. Marketing is tried and true with duct tape. Woo.

Diana Kander (02:14): . Did that sound good on your end?

John Jantsch (02:16): That sounded amazing on my end. Yes. There’s

Diana Kander (02:18): A little muffled in my headphones,

John Jantsch (02:20): But it’s to, I wanna know how, I wanna know how you did it.

Diana Kander (02:22): It’s to the theme of Ducktails, of course.

John Jantsch (02:25): . Oh, well, I’m sorry. I’m too old for that. Oh, no, I think my kids are too old for that is what I really mean. So I wasn’t familiar with that. Okay. Sorry.

Diana Kander (02:35): Very popular cartoon. Sure. In the nineties when I was growing up, and I just thought, what a perfect match.

John Jantsch (02:42): Well, I certainly appreciate all of the effort that went into that. I bet you didn’t even have to use chat g p t to write that. Did you?

Diana Kander (02:51): Uh, chat g p t was kind of helpful, I’ll be honest. I’ll be honest.

John Jantsch (02:54): , yeah, I believe it. So that was, that was like, you’re going big, wasn’t it,

Diana Kander (03:01): At the very beginning. John, I wanna show you that this interview is gonna be different. People are gonna get a lot more than they’re used to out of it.

John Jantsch (03:09): So as I said, you’ve been on several times. This is kind of a, this is a, I don’t know, is this a different hack? Would you describe this book as being very different from your books on, say, curiosity? I mean, obviously you’re talking about pitching things and you know, you have some, I was gonna call ’em crazy ideas. Um, , that’s not what, that’s not what I really meant, but outrageous in a good way. Ideas. So I, I guess the first logical question is, you know, what kinda led you to this idea? Right now?

Diana Kander (03:40): I didn’t want to do this book. Actually, my co-author, Tucker Trotter called me. We had a mutual connection and he was like, Hey, I wanna write a book about my company Dimensional Innovations. They create experiences for like sports stadiums, universities. And I was like, good for you. You know, you enjoy that. I am so not interested. I, I did the call on my treadmill walking my dog, like, just could not have shown less interest, you know? And he said, Hey, will you come take a tour? Like, I get it, you don’t wanna do the book? And I said, fine. And so I went and took a tour of their 200,000 square foot facility, which is like, so impressive. And then during the tour, he tells me that they have this move to close big deals, this move where their usual close rates like 45% when they do the move, they close 90% of these huge hard to win deals. Right. And that got me really interested. And

John Jantsch (04:36): So I said, well, at least had to know what the move was. Right. .

Diana Kander (04:38): That’s right. . And so I, I talked to a couple more people and then I talked to some of their clients, and then I became obsessed with it. And I was like, well, other people must be doing this, and why does this work? What is the science behind it? So by the end of it, I was begging him to co-author this book. I just had to tell other people about how this works. Yeah. So I, I had to tell this story. It’s a slight departure from the innovation work, although I do think it’s a way to innovate how you sell your products and services. Yeah, for sure.

John Jantsch (05:05): Completely. And quite frankly, there’s a huge element of curiosity, I think, to the framework. So that’s how it works for me. Yeah.

Diana Kander (05:11): .

John Jantsch (05:12): So in the subtitle, five Ways to Create a Customer Experience that Will Close More Deals. You want to, you want to kind of dive into a couple of the elements. So people need to buy the book if they want them all, but Sure.

Diana Kander (05:22): Uh, for your TV viewers Yes. The five elements spell out the word magic, and we’re basically creating magic inside of our presentations. We don’t want them to be instantly forgotten as soon as we walk out the door, which is literally what happens. Right. And so there are five things you can do to help increase how memorable your presentation is and how actionable it is. Do you want me to tell you what they are?

John Jantsch (05:46): Yeah, I mean, let’s start with surprise.

Diana Kander (05:49): That’s the best one. .

John Jantsch (05:50): ,

Diana Kander (05:52): You gotta do things that they don’t expect. John. And did you see my mug?

John Jantsch (06:00): Yeah, of course I did.

Diana Kander (06:02): For the audio listeners, you gotta tell them what’s happening.

John Jantsch (06:05): So she just took a drink of, I’m guessing a tequila, but yeah, , who knows? But it was in a mug that had the duct tape marking logo on it that I did not supply to her.

Diana Kander (06:17): A brand new marketing Go Duct Tape Marketing logo. Congratulations on that. Thank you. I love it. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I think you need more schwag with the new stuff on it. We do with the new logo on it.

John Jantsch (06:26): We do. My wife won’t let me get anymore though. .

Diana Kander (06:32): So Surprise is all about doing something that is unexpected. Our brains love to be on autopilot, even when we’re being pitched and they’re basically saying like, do I know what’s happening next? And when somebody’s presenting, usually it’s, it follows a very similar pattern. So when you add an element of surprise, people are like, okay, I have to pay attention because Right, right. What’s, maybe there are other fun surprises happening.

John Jantsch (06:55): Yeah. Yeah. And it’s a bit of a dis I mean an interruption too, right? I mean, just like you said, a lot of times we lull people to sleep with what they, because they have an expectation. Okay, this comes, now this is gonna come down. And it’s like, whoa, I didn’t see that coming. And I think as you said, it kind of snaps somebody back into attention, doesn’t it?

Diana Kander (07:16): Yeah. I mean, if you think about what your body does in a surprising moment, yeah. You open your hands and open your eyes and open your ears. Like you’re just taking in as much information as possible. And when we’re pitching our idea, that’s what they’re taking in all the way as opposed to putting their guard up and Yeah. Kind of taking a, a, you know, step back approach.

John Jantsch (07:38): Do you want to give an example from the book

Diana Kander (07:40): Of

John Jantsch (07:41): Crazy of using Yeah. Of a surprise that worked?

Diana Kander (07:44): No, I wanna keep doing surprises on here. John, I know that you’re a woodworker. I, and so I created this Duct Tape Marketing apron that you can use in your shop. Do you love it? ? How great

John Jantsch (07:56): Does this look? I do love it. I do love it. Are

Diana Kander (07:58): You, I’m gonna be sending it to you after. I was gonna

John Jantsch (08:00): Say, you have no use for any of this. So ,

Diana Kander (08:04): I’m gonna load you up on Duct Tape swag. Okay. After this,

John Jantsch (08:07): I do wear an apron when I do my woodworking.

Diana Kander (08:10): Now you have an extra one. .

John Jantsch (08:11): Now I have an extra one. . So that leads me, actually, unless you want to go go more surprise on Surprise. But my you’re like,

Diana Kander (08:19): What else do you have back there?

John Jantsch (08:20): Yeah, exactly. Bring it . You gonna have just like one at a time? Let’s see the whole show. All right. So, so years ago in Duct Tape Marketing, and I used to do this in my practice, I wrote about something I call Lumpy Mail, where instead of sending somebody a letter, we’d send them a box of Cheerios or something with, you know, a message that was tied to what we were trying to pitch. And you talk a lot in this book about physical objects, and I’ve seen it work, but tell me about how it goes into your Go big framework.

Diana Kander (08:49): Well, there’s just a fascinating science to why physical objects work, but basically they are like a faster pathway to our memory banks. The same things that process visual information are in the same part of our brain that process emotions, which is how we make decisions. And so if we just hear something or read something, it doesn’t have as much of a memorable impact as if we see a physical 3D object. And th this has made such an impression on me, John, that I do not enter any meeting without a 3D object of some sort. Even if we’re on a Zoom call right now, like having a mug with their logo or something that shows that you have taken this invisible idea, which is a lot of our products and services are invisible ideas, and you’ve taken it into the tactile world. It just makes such a huge impact.

John Jantsch (09:44): Don’t you also find that it, it sends a little message is, Hey, this is an important thing to me. I took some time to actually do something that, you know, not everybody else does. I mean, in the world of just mass LinkedIn connections and mass emails, I mean, just showing that you took actually a little extra time. Doesn’t that, you know, doesn’t, that actually isn’t that part of the power of it?

Diana Kander (10:05): I think that’s at the heart of the Go Big or Go Home Method. It’s showing your soul to people. It’s showing who you are as a person and that you care about them. Can I tell you that for the last two days I’ve been walking around my house like singing duct tape, woo . Like I’ve been thinking about this, I’ve been thinking about you and how excited I am to share this thing with you. And I think it shows you how much I care and how much time I took for this. It’s not just another thing for me.

John Jantsch (10:32): That’s right. That’s right. So can I see your shelf of all the other, uh, mugs that you have?

Diana Kander (10:37): all the other mugs? .

John Jantsch (10:39): I might get jealous then though, huh? Right. .

Diana Kander (10:42): It’s in a different room. The theme song is brand new. I’ve never done that. And I have certainly never created a woodworking apron for anybody

John Jantsch (10:49): Else. . And now let’s hear a word from our sponsor. You know, companies are under pressure right now. I mean pressure to get more leads, close deals faster, get better insights to create the best experience for customers. A CRM can help, but not just any crm. One that’s easy to set up, intuitive to use and customizable to the way you do business. And that’s where HubSpot comes in. HubSpot CRM is easy for everyone to use on day one and it helps teams be more productive. Drag and drop your way to attention grabbing emails and landing pages. Set up marketing automation to give every contact white glove treatment. Plus AI powered tools like Content Assistant mean less time spent on tedious manual task and more time for what matters. Your customers. HubSpot CRM has all the tools you need to wow prospects lock in deals and improve customer service response times. Get started today for free @hubspot.com.

(11:55): 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 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. In some of the materials you sent me about the book, you were very adamant about something that people should stop doing when it comes to pitching. Yes. On trying to know what it is.

Diana Kander (12:51): So one of the five tools is to give the pitch in the right order. Mm-hmm. . And unfortunately the vast majority of us are doing it in in the wrong order. This is how a pitch usually goes. It’s like, Hey, let me tell you a little bit about myself. That’s number one. Yeah. Number two, let me tell you a little bit about my, about my company. And then number three, I’ll tell you why you should buy from us. And that makes sense, right? At a rational level, we want them to understand us so that they understand who they’re buying from. But the thing that we learned is that people don’t care about you at all until they know that you get them. Right. So that’s backwards. We have to start with, Hey, I get you. And then once I establish that foundation, then I’ll tell you about myself. Then people wanna know who they’re buying from or who they’re taking information from. But until I establish that level of I get you and you want to be here, it does, the rest of it doesn’t matter.

John Jantsch (13:51): You know, that’s really interesting because, uh, so many of these principles really apply to everything we’re doing in marketing. I mean, I for years have been talking about websites. You know, you go there and the first thing it says is, here’s who’s we, here’s who we are, here’s what we do. And you know, I tell people all the time, nobody wants, you know what we sell, they want the problem solved. So like, promise to solve my biggest problem, which does show that you got me , but it’s also gonna get my attention. It’s like, because I think a lot of times people don’t even know what their problem is. They just know something’s wrong. And it’s like you’ve put your finger on it for them and it’s like, yeah, now I wanna know the rest. But everybody does do that in reverse. So you’re talking about a probably a physical pitch, but I think it’s really that that runs true probably for almost every kind of contact or engagement we would have. Isn’t it

Diana Kander (14:37): Anything? I mean even these calls, you know, you would usually start with people like saying like, tell me a little bit about yourself. And people are like, well of course I would love to tell you about myself , but I start these interviews by saying, let me tell you something about yourself first. Yeah. And maybe your audience. And then once we establish that foundation, then I’ll share a little bit about me.

John Jantsch (14:57): Yeah. Cuz the truth is I really only care about myself. , I’m asking you the question because you know I’m supposed to Right

Diana Kander (15:03): There, there’s a science to it. John , our brain actually releases dopamine every time we talk about ourselves in the same way that it does when we have sugar or sex. Like it’s a powerful drug. Yeah. And that’s why when you start talking about yourself, you can’t seem to stop because it just feels so good. So if you do an interview or a pitch and you feel real good afterwards, that’s the dopamine high. And that is a false sense of confidence that you have afterwards. You should feel like kind of okay. Because you let the other person do a lot of the talking.

John Jantsch (15:34): Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love that. And that’s such an easy thing, quite frankly. I mean, we’re wired as humans to maybe not think that way, but I think if you just like put a big sticky note there and just, you know, really start it that way, I think people would find that, uh, it would change everything about the conversations they’re having in general. Wouldn’t it? I mean, that could, that would go for, wouldn’t that go for networking? I mean frankly,

Diana Kander (15:55): Anything. And I, I’ll tell you, we have a tool in the book, which is kind of a map for you to think about your presentation. I do my podcast interviews on it too. And it’s basically what am I gonna do at the beginning to Right. Get their attention and make it about them? Then where am I gonna insert points of magic throughout the conversation? And then what is the big finish of how I’m gonna end?

John Jantsch (16:17): Yeah. I think you ought to finish with the Standup Comedy Act that you just did.

Diana Kander (16:22):

John Jantsch (16:23): Speaking of dopamine.

Diana Kander (16:25): Yes. That was, I just did a standup. I’ve been wanting to do it since I was 17 years old. I am much older than 17 now. I’ve been waiting 25 years for this. And a friend of mine created a safe space for it. It was a sold out room of 260 women. Yeah. And I finally felt like I could do my six minutes.

John Jantsch (16:45): Yeah. Yeah. Was there wine involved too? I mean, there

Diana Kander (16:48): Was a lot of wine. Yes. for the audience. I think that’s very key for the

John Jantsch (16:52): Comments. Yes. Yes. And poor Jason, that’s all I’m asking.

Diana Kander (16:55):

John Jantsch (16:56): What a sport. No, that’s like the easiest subject in the world for comedian, isn’t it?

Diana Kander (16:59): Spouses,

John Jantsch (17:00): Yeah. .

Diana Kander (17:02): I have a lot of spousal content that didn’t make that show. So yes, you’ll be happy to know there’s enough for like a whole second act.

John Jantsch (17:10): All right. So you outlined some memorable pitches as we call them in the book. And do you have a favorite memorable pitch child?

Diana Kander (17:21): It’s hard to pick. I’ll tell you my co-author’s favorite pitch. So in the story, which is Nap Hide, which is the company that makes work trucks. Yep. And they’ve created, they’ve turned their sales process into a just magical experience that almost feels like Disney World for people who are buying work trucks. . Yeah. And all throughout, there’s these moments where it helps their customers connect with them on a completely different human soul level. That’s really where we got that idea. Like it helps these moments, magic moments that we try to help you create, help people connect with you on this much, much deeper level than a typical transaction. And so, you know, they’ve engineered a process that really works. My favorite pitch in the, in the book is that of Sarah who used it to get a job. So I, we talked about how this works in a lot of different applications, but I do think it can help people get jobs. I’ve now helped five people. It’s like my side Hobby get jobs using the go bigger go home method.

John Jantsch (18:24): You’re a job maker. Yes. Like a matchmaker. Right?

Diana Kander (18:27): . But like a lot of people that I’ve talked to, you know, they’ll get to the final three and then they just don’t get any further and they don’t know why. Right. And unfortunately it’s because you didn’t create that moment of connection or memorable. And this can help you do it. And so Sarah’s story is, she had this job she hated, she was making $50,000 a year, she did a go big or go home pitch. And at the end of it she got an email that said is a hundred thousand enough? Which is like, what a great offer. You know, .

John Jantsch (18:58): That’s so funny. So, so is there a risk of going too big? I mean, to where you, I mean you just, people are like, that was weird. I mean there’s sort of this like, be memorable and this like be weird Right. Level isn’t there? Yes. . Yes.

Diana Kander (19:14): I mean, like if I had a brand new Mercedes pull up in your driveway this morning and I was like, Hey John, really looking forward to the podcast. Like yes, there are of course lines and

John Jantsch (19:26): I don’t get it. Where’s ? Where’s that over the top?

Diana Kander (19:30): And you have to, it has to be reflective of you. Like that’s the whole thing. It’s you’re showing your authentic personality. So if you start creating jingles like I do, it might not work as well because you’re not as excited about it as I am. So I, I just think it’s about every person finding their heart and being able to display it in a physical way to their audience.

John Jantsch (19:52): Yeah. S so how do you pinpoint, like publishers wanna know who’s this book for, right? Like yes. And they want it to be broad, but they also wanted to be obvious . And I think that that this book and as we’ve talked about it, I mean this is personal brand. I mean all this is down to like, I just wanna have more friends, you know, almost level, right? All the way up to c e o of major companies thinking we have to rethink our entire engagement process. So how do you work with the fact that, I mean, how do you help somebody know this book’s for you? That’s my real question.

Diana Kander (20:24): So our, our very simple initial premise is this book is for B2B companies that are selling and it can double their close rate. That’s what we’ve seen it do. Because they’re turning their sales process into a sales experience. Yeah. And yes, there are other people who can benefit from it. My side hobby of helping people get jobs with it. Yes, of course nonprofits have used it to raise money. Sure. But I think at the core it’s helping businesses that are in a market where they have to compete and they don’t wanna compete on price. Yeah. This is an exceptional way to compete on soul.

John Jantsch (21:00): And he, here’s the good news. You correct me if I’m wrong. Yeah. You, the title of this could go, could be just go a little bigger . I mean, because the bar’s pretty low, isn’t it? Yeah.

Diana Kander (21:14): Yeah. So it’s about thinking about every step of your customer interactions and thinking where can I add a little bit of magic to this? So you can even, the smallest step you could go is your signature line. Like why use a traditional signature line and not one that reflects a movie that you love or something about your personality that just really allows you to shine through. Do you see how silly it is to Yeah,

John Jantsch (21:36): Yeah. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off . So many, so many lines in that movie that reflect me. So I’m gonna start doing that now.

Diana Kander (21:44): Whi which of the, each of these moments, John, helps us connect. Sure. That’s the whole thing. It’s about like when we’re trying to pitch a business deal, people are like, you’re not human. I don’t care about your thing. And then as soon as we can break through and allow them to see us as a human being, then they can’t help by connect with us. Yeah. Yeah. And then we got ’em.

John Jantsch (22:03): So, so I have, I’ve, you know, spoken in events where the, you know, they wanna do a goofy thing like tell us your favorite movie. So we’ll announce that when we’re introducing you. And it is funny how people will come up afterwards and it’s like, I just stalked for 45 minutes. I told you some brilliant things. The only thing they remember is that I like Ferris Bueller’s Day off because I do think you’re right, we’re looking for our tribe and it’s like, oh, if you like that movie that says everything I need to know about you. That’s right. Thing. So that connection, you know, part is so big and it is, you know, you talk about memorable, being memorable and I think have most of the game is cutting through. You know, you talk about those people that maybe a thousand people do, you know, send in resumes for a job. Like how do you cut through that ? That’s right. You know, so. Absolutely. So Diana, it was as always, I got more than I expected in having you on the show. Tell people or invite people where you’d like ’em to connect with you. I know the book’s available, you know anywhere,

Diana Kander (22:54): John, I didn’t just bring presents for you, I brought presents for your listeners. They would be not fair for me to do that. So the book is available on Amazon, you can find it there, but if you want to get a digital copy, I’m happy to just send you one for free. All you have to do is send me an email, tell me why you want one. My email address is diana@dianakander.com and I wanna share this idea with the world. So if you don’t wanna buy it, I’m happy to send it to you.

John Jantsch (23:18): Okay. And we will also put that generous offer and link in the show notes. So go out and get it and be more memorable. How’s that Go big Go

Diana Kander (23:27): Home. Do you want me to send us off, John?

John Jantsch (23:29): Yeah, go . I dunno if I, I don’t know if I should stop the recording now or ,

Diana Kander (23:36): Just one last one.

(23:41): Duct tape. Ooh,

(23:43): It’s catchy.

John Jantsch (23:45): Get up and dance. Come on.

Diana Kander (23:47): Woo. Make your Brass stick Live glue with duct tape. Marketing is tried and true with duct tape. Woo.

John Jantsch (23:58): I’m gonna lose so many sponsors over this

Diana Kander (24:01): .

John Jantsch (24:04): Why? No, I’m, because I’ve given you trouble. It’s amazing. This is probably the best show I’ve ever done and you know, people are gonna enjoy the heck out of it and it’s always great to catch up with you and, uh, hopefully we’ll run into you again, one of these days in person out there on the road or in Kansas City or wherever we bump into each other.

Diana Kander (24:23): Thank you so much, John.

John Jantsch (24:26): 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 the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Nudge, hosted by Phil Agnew, and it’s brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. You ever noticed how the smallest changes can make the biggest impact on Nudge you learned simple evidence, back tips to help you kick bat habits, get a raise, and grow your business. In a recent episode, Phil tested a thousand dollars on some marketing principles, some work, some don’t. Uh, guest Nancy Har Hut, who’s been a guest of the show as well. And Phil put these principles to test in a set of real life experiments. You’ll learn what works and what doesn’t. Listen to Nudge wherever you get your podcasts.

(00:52): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Mark Mears. He’s a best-selling author, keynote speaker, and consultant. He serves as the Chief Growth officer of LEAF Growth Ventures, LLC; a consulting firm inspiring individuals, teams, and organizations to find purpose and fulfilling their true growth potential while making a positive lasting difference in the world. And we’re gonna talk about his fairly new book titled, the Purposeful Growth Revolution: 4 Ways To Grow From Leader to Legacy Builders. So Mark, welcome to the show.

Mark Mears (01:30): Thanks, John. It’s a pleasure to be here.

John Jantsch (01:32): Well, as listeners know, sometimes I, I like to start with the title and break some things down. And so I want to just, can I ask you, how do you define purposeful growth as opposed to, I don’t know, growth ?

Mark Mears (01:44): Well, I think the whole emphasis on purpose is on important. Is important, and it’s on purpose because purpose matters. And it’s not because I say it does, it’s because all the research suggests it. It is a very important part of what we’re all here to do. And while we all think maybe of purpose is some sort of noun or thing, like I gotta find my purpose, uh, I I I really look at purposeful as a better word cuz it’s an action word. Mm-hmm. . And I believe we’re always growing up into our purpose. And when we know what that is, we can grow more purposefully into that vision and that version of ourselves. If, if, if you just grow and you’re really not growing on purpose, you could be like a weed and you’re just kind of Yeah. All you know, like, you know, all over the place. Right? But when you really laser focus in on who you are, who you are, and what we’re all put on this earth to do based on the unique skillsets and gifts we’ve all been given, then you’re fulfilling a purpose over time. And that word fulfilling is also very important.

John Jantsch (02:55): So, so I know that in, in looking at your bio, you, you spent a deal of your career working with very large organizations and you know, many of them would say, well, yeah, this is a good idea, but we have shareholders that we have to care about. We have, you know, our growth has to be measured, you know, maybe in a much broader, deeper way. It can’t be somebody’s, you know, individual vision, you know, what would you say to somebody who says, well, that’s a good idea, but ?

Mark Mears (03:22): Well, you know, I’ve spent a lot of time doing research and I’m also a member of a global organization called Conscious Capitalism. And it was based on a book that was written by Whole Foods co-founder and Seed. Yeah. John Love John Mackey and Raj. Yeah. And so they really break down this whole idea that it’s not an an or proposition, it’s an and proposition. And some of the most profitable companies in the world are some of the most philanthropic and are the most purposeful. And so when I hear that as someone who spent over 20 years in the C-suite, and I was, I, I, you know, I was consciously, I guess, capitalistic before I ever heard the term because I just believe that you can do well by doing good. And if you think about what’s been going on specifically during this covid era with the great resignation, which I call the great repurposing, which we can talk about Yeah.

(04:23): For quiet, quitting, and according to Gallup, historically low levels of engagement among team members. And then you juxtapose it by saying, well, why did people leave the workforce? And you look at the study that the Sloan School of Management at M I t, uh, conducted over 34 million people who left the workforce during Covid and asked them a simple question why the number one answer, John, over 10 times more than the second most given answer was toxic work environment compensation didn’t come up until number 16 on the list. So when you think about pragmatically in a boardroom, you know, I believe you have four stakeholders, and I think it’s all about stakeholder balance. You’ve got your team members, not employees, you’ve got your guests or customers or clients. You’ve got your business partners, which could include shareholders if you’re pub publicly traded, like several companies I’ve been part of are.

(05:20): And then you have your communities. And, and if, if you think that purpose plays a huge role, if that’s a four circle Venn diagram, think of that as purposeful growth right in the middle, all revolving around it. And, and now breaking it down even further to some of the CFOs who say, well, I’m just all about metrics. Fine. You like profit, don’t you? Well, what’s the largest line item on most PNLs? It’s usually labor, right? Yeah. So think about the cost it takes to find, recruit, hire, train, recognize, reward, and retain a team member. And what happens if they leave? It creates a vicious cycle where you’ve gotta re yeah, repeat that process all over again. Not to mention the, uh, engagement loss of others who may be disgruntled or maybe the cost of replacing others and or, you know, the cost of, of loss of productivity because that person left, it takes time to, to fill it.

(06:26): So in black and white, the notion, John, of purpose and profit is much more aligned than it is purpose or profit or purposes, a rounding error. Maybe we’ll get to it. It’s a nice feel good. Yeah. We’ll throw a little something into the charity basket. That’s not the way business is being done today. Nor do I believe it’s the way that we will be able to recruit the best and brightest because many of them are asking their interview questions right now, am I gonna be able to fulfill my purpose here? Or what’s the purpose of this company over and above profit? They really want to know that, especially among the younger millennials and Gen Z.

John Jantsch (07:07): Yeah. Yeah. And I think that, I mean, I’m not debating that in any way, shape, or form, but I do think a lot of organizations, you know, it takes time to build that culture. It takes time to build the processes that are gonna drive purpose deep into the organization. And I think that people just get kind of shortsighted, don’t they? And think, oh no, we just need more sales.

Mark Mears (07:25): That, that’s why I call it the purposeful growth revolution, John. It’s because this really is a revolution. It’s taking place. And many companies are jumping on board and others are gonna follow because that’s the new way of work. And if you think about the idea of, I looked at, at brands as a, a branding expert, most people say, well, there’s one brand, it’s, uh, whatever. It’s Pepsi, it’s Coke, it’s McDonald’s, it’s whatever. I think, no. Then we heard, well, there’s two brands. The internal brand, the external brand, well, I believe there are four brands. There’s the personal brand that each and every one of our team members, including ourselves, has, whether we know it or not, it asks the question, who am I? And then the internal brand is the collective we of the organization, which then asks the question, what do we stand for?

(08:18): And then the third brand is the external brand that goes to the end user, the client, the customer, the guest, and the community, which should ask the question, what, what value is being exchanged here? And then finally, there is the employer brand that is really taking off because of the scarcity of finding and keeping good quality people. And that asks the question, do I belong here? And belonging is so important, John. We talk about d e i and we should diversity, equity, inclusion. But if you think about it, diversity just gets us in the door. Inclusion gets us a seat at the table, and equity gives us an equal voice and all that’s great. But if we don’t feel like we belong, we’re probably not gonna feel vulnerable enough to give of our very best, because we’re just happy to be in the room where it happened.

(09:10): Right? The quote Hamilton. And I think that’s really the importance today of making every team member feel like they’re a valued member of the team. I’ve come up with an acronym called Love Listen. Mm-hmm , observe value and empower. And if you think about those four very powerful components to building a lasting, loving relationship, well then you’re not gonna get the quiet quitting, then you’re not gonna get the resigning and moving on to somewhere else. Uh, you’re gonna get people that build that team mentality. And, you know, I’m blessed to live here in Kansas City and we have the Kansas City Chiefs, and we just won the Super Bowl. But after that game, you saw people making plays who didn’t make plays all year, but they played their role in their moment. And that allowed the whole team to persevere and ultimately win the game’s, grandest on the game’s grandest stage.

(10:13): And so making people feel like they’re a valuable member of the team and empowering them to be their best, whatever their superpower is, allow them to, uh, to really maximize that for the benefit of the team. You wouldn’t say to Patrick Mahomes, Hey, you’re a pretty good quarterback, pat, but you know, you can’t tackle for crap, so we’re gonna put you on the defensive line to round you out of bed. That would be a waste, right? But I’ve been in companies where they’ve done that and they’ve said, well, you’re really good at this, but we went, we went around you out. And they, they, they, they put me or other people in these, you know, uh, these areas that they had no interest in, no aptitude in. And they finally kind of said, look, I’m just, I’m gonna leave and go somewhere where my true talents are, you know, allowed to shine, and I could actually have help getting them to be even better.

John Jantsch (11:00): And now let’s hear a word from our sponsor. You know, companies are under pressure right now. How many pressure to get more leads, close deals faster, get better insights to create the best experience for customers. A CRM can help, but not just any CRM. One that’s easy to set up, intuitive to use, and customizable to the way you do business. And that’s where HubSpot comes in. HubSpot CRM is easy for everyone to use on day one, and it helps teams be more productive. Drag and drop your way to attention grabbing emails and landing pages. Set up marketing automation to give every contact white glove treatment. Plus AI powered tools like content Assistant mean less time spent on tedious manual task and more time for what matters. Your customers. HubSpot CRM has all the tools you need to wow prospects lock in deals and improve customer service response times. Get started today for free @hubspot.com.

(12:05): 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.

(12:51): Well, as a chiefs fan, I, I would say that it appears Andy Reid is actually very good at that, what you just mentioned, you know, getting everybody to step up and play their role. Mm-hmm. . Yep. Another point in concept of this book is the, the, the difference between leader and legacy builder, as you call it. Um, I wonder if you could spend some time kind of unpacking that concept.

Mark Mears (13:11): Absolutely. You know, John, everybody seems to want to learn how to be a better leader. That’s great. I mean, it’s a multi-billion dollar industry from Yes, yes. It’s, you know, what we’re doing here, podcast to conferences, to seminars, to webinars, to e-newsletters, you name it. And if you google the word leader or leadership, you’ll get 1.7 billion with a b hits. So we know people wanna learn how to be a better leader and that’s great, but not too many people are asking a question, how do I create a legacy and in fact, a living legacy? I don’t wanna wait till I’m dead and beque something. Not that definition of legacy, but yeah, every single day, how can I create a living legacy that ultimately creates a ripple effect to where I can support you on your growth journey, and then you’re gonna want to do likewise.

(14:08): So it comes back to my personal brand and I wrote a purpose statement and it says, I don’t want to just make money and retire. I wanna make a difference and inspire. And that means making a difference in the lives of others and inspiring them to wanna do likewise. So it creates this virtuous cycle reciprocity, or what I call paying it backward that helps elevate others and inspires them to wanna do likewise. And now you’re creating a living legacy and, and suggesting that leadership is important of course, but making a difference in the lives of people and aspiring them to wanna do likewise is really where that, uh, term comes from.

John Jantsch (14:51): So if somebody’s saying to themselves, they read the book, they’re listening to this podcast, and they’re saying to themselves, this makes a lot of sense. We need to do this at our organization. And yet, you know, the environment and the culture is what it is today, . And so walking in is saying it’s a new day sometimes is tough. So what are some of the maybe small steps, uh, that can show you wanna move this direction? Or what are some of the first places company might start going to try to make a change, uh, in the culture?

Mark Mears (15:18): Yeah, and you know, John, and throughout my career, I’ve, I’ve had the good fortune to be in some companies that lived into its purpose.

John Jantsch (15:28): Yeah.

Mark Mears (15:29): And now many people would call it a culture, but what I’m, what I love to do is look at words deeply. And I believe that a community is better than culture. A culture may just be something you’re part of. A community is something that you can belong in. And where there’s that sense of belonging and that sense of teamwork, you know, I liken it to a rowing team where all orbs are in the water rowing together. It’s called swing, I’m told. And it actually lifts the boat and, you know, propels it swiftly through the water. The Cheesecake Factory, when I was the chief marketing officer, there was one such company, but it starts at the top and the CEO has to be bought in, uh, because otherwise it can turn into some flavor of the month initiative. Or if it comes from hr, it’s like, well, it might get patted on the head and say that cube, but it has to come from the leader.

(16:25): And the leader needs to understand that this idea of being purposeful will in, in allow all shareholders that the rising tide that lifts all boats, it will help attract and retain and engage team members, right? So they’ll, they’ll be more productive. It will, uh, trickle to your customers or clients or guests depending on what your industry is, and they’ll notice the value that exchange and, and see that’s more profitable. We know that, um, companies who are more purposeful, there are people now that are, are, you know, going to those companies and spending more because they believe what I believe, right? And then your shareholders and your business partners, anybody in that business ecosystem is going to be lifted up because you’re gonna be more profitable. And then the communities in which you serve, and it could be your immediate community, it could be regionally, it could be nationally, or could be globally, are gonna benefit from your purposeful living and the way you take the profits that you make and distribute them. Or maybe it’s your business practices, maybe they’re more sustainable and in some way you’re helping the world be better because you are in it. Now, if I were a CEO and I have been and someone were to tell me that, I’d say I wanna listen. Yeah. I mean, let, let me read this book because that it is a playbook for how to grow a company from just being a company who makes widgets and earns a profit to a company that literally creates this community of which many people, all four stakeholders benefit.

John Jantsch (18:14): Yeah. I’ve had, there’ve been some recent books on this topic and I’ve had guests on this show that have talked about community from a marketing standpoint is actually being kind of the last frontier that, you know, that all the digital stuff and all the tactics that you know that people play in, you know, the most potent one is building a strong community.

Mark Mears (18:34): Yeah. And I think, you know, during Covid, we, we all, I think got a little some time out to really reflect deeply on not only what you bet who matters most in our lives. And I think while we were sequestered in homes and doing meetings via Zoom or other digital platforms, I think we all realized how much we need community. And when you think about this idea of, you know, who matters most, I go back to the Simon Sinek model and start with why. But I believe instead of just the why, how, and what he’s missing, something very important. The who, the who you serve when you think about it, four circle then diagram cuz they’re all intertwined like our four seasons, right? It could be spiritual, relational, personal, and professional. We’re whole people. And that’s why I put that emphasis on the personal brand that is just now starting to gain more traction instead of you’re hired and you should be glad you got hired and here’s your paycheck and you should be glad you’re getting a paycheck to, that’s, I wanna treat you as a whole person and I wanna treat you as a team member cuz I don’t want you resigning or quietly quitting or, or all those negative things.

(19:54): I really want this enterprise to succeed. And now based on this notion of who you serve that serves as a foundation for then how you plug in to that collective we of the internal brand that then leads to how you deliver the value to the external brand and then how you recruit, uh, engage and retain team members through your employer brand. So it’s all intertwined and revolving around purposeful growth.

John Jantsch (20:23): So I noticed on your website, like all good consultants, you have an assessment where somebody can actually kind of yes,

Mark Mears (20:30): Maybe

John Jantsch (20:30): Get a baseline on where they are and some of those, uh, things you want to invite people to where they might find that, find out more about you and connect and obviously I, I know the book’s available pretty much anywhere in the

Mark Mears (20:40): Books. Yeah, yeah. Thanks John. You can go to my website, which is markamears.com. And right there you’ll see a link that you can create or your own or take your own self-assessment. Takes about five, six minutes and it does go through the four kind of segments of the book. And it’s like providing a benchmark of where you are now as it relates to how you feel about purpose and, and also how aligned your organization is. And so that you can see if there are gaps, what needs to happen to fulfill them. And if you’re a company, I’ve also put together a brand assessment where I can take what you’re currently doing and see how aligned it is with what your team members are saying and then come in and help you close those gaps. So the assessment is really a great tool to begin the dialogue. Once you complete it, you can download a copy of your customized report and so you can buy the book, the Purposeful Growth Revolution: 4 Ways to Grow From Leader to Legacy Builder. It’s available on Amazon in paperback hard cover and ebook as well as Barnes and Noble and probably other places books are sold. And then if you would love to connect with me, you could do that on LinkedIn. I would love to get to know you and talk further and build a relationship with you.

John Jantsch (22:04): Awesome. Well Mark, thanks so much for taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast and uh, hopefully we’ll run into you, uh, one of these days. Next time I’m in Kansas City or on the road somewhere.

Mark Mears (22:14): Excellent. So is it true you’re gonna send me a role of duct tape as uh, kind of a

John Jantsch (22:19): No, we’re fresh outta duct tape. It’s funny though. Thank you. Over the years pe people have certainly sent me lots of different duct tape mementos. So again, thanks so much Mark and uh, appreciate you stopping by.

Mark Mears (22:30): My pleasure.

John Jantsch (22:31): 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): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Nudge, hosted by Phil Agnew, and it’s brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. You ever noticed how the smallest changes can make the biggest impact on Nudge you learned simple evidence back tips to help you kick bat habits, get a raise, and grow your business. In a recent episode, Phil tested a thousand dollars on some marketing principles, some work, some don’t. Uh, guest Nancy Har Hut, who’s been a guest of the show as well, and Phil put these principles to test in a set of real life experiments. You’ll learn what works and what doesn’t. Listen to Nudge wherever you get your podcasts.

(00:52): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and I’m going to do a solo show. That’s right, no guests. Today I’m just going to rant and rave about a topic near and dear to my heart. That is strategy marketing strategy. Now, don’t tune out if you think you’ve heard it all before from me. As you know, we have also been working using the AI tool ChatGPT to enhance our work. I do not, it is not a replacement tool. It is a research assistant. It is informed automation. It is an idea generator, so it really supplements the work that we would do by hand, but it just makes it faster. It makes us smarter, it helps us, uh, think of things that we perhaps, uh, forgot. So what I thought I would do is, I mean, you’re probably getting bombarded.

(01:46): It in fact is probably the 10th time today you’ve heard somebody talk about ai. I tend to take a much more practical view of these things. And so I am gonna talk today very specifically about the ways in which we are using, uh, AI tools to help us create, uh, more potent marketing strategies for clients in, in some cases more developed, more richly enhanced with research. But again, it’s just a tool to help us do that. So I thought I would go through what I did is, and I’m gonna give away for free at the end of this, I’ll share a link. There will be a link also on the show notes for this. That gives you a group of about 50 prompts. You know, prompts for those of you that aren’t using AI are, is really kind of how you get output. You tell it to do something that’s called a prompt.

(02:39): It then outputs what it thinks you want based on that prompt. So one of the keys to really getting good output in AI is good prompts. And so we spend a lot of time testing and retesting prompts. And so I’ve created what I think is a, you know, very potent page of prompts that I’m going to share with you and give away that, that really kind of break down the whole process of how we develop strategy. So by following these prompts, by seeing how we’ve broken up the prompts into certain pillars, brand industry leads, CX customer experience, it, it really gives you a, a very good feel for how we view strategy in general. So if you’re somebody who is working on strategy, if you for your own business, if you are someone who does strategy for clients, as you know, we have the Duct Tape Marketing Consultant Network.

(03:40): We’d love to certify you, uh, in our fractional CMO process. And this will give you a real taste of how we view strategy, how we’ve, how we develop strategy. Obviously, this isn’t the entire instruction manual , but I think that it’ll give you an idea of how comprehensive we think about it. So the very first section of prompts that you’ll reach, we typically do, we do study the online presence of a client that we are working with. Some of these tools make it actually very easy to get an assessment of a website keyword research for an industry. So it gives us a, a head start at looking at content and reputation and social media and just even SEO under the hood. And so that’s something that we do in every strategy. We want to get a sense, you know, our online presence today is businesses is a, it’s a very significant aspect of how we are seen by the market.

(04:34): And so we certainly wanna start there. The next thing we do in strategy is help people narrow the focus of who their ideal client is. Uh, let’s face this, as cliche as it sounds, you know, the 80 20 principle is alive in business. Typically, what we find is that some 20% of of a customer’s clients produce close to 80% of their business. Repeat business referrals, profit in many cases. And so, and yet, you know, we’re all nervous about narrowing focus because we’re thinking, oh, we’re gonna exclude these other people. But you know, my contention all along is if we focus more attention on that top 20%, we focus on finding more of them, really everything is going to be better off. So we have a couple prompts that really get into, you know, empathy mapping process around buyer personas, but also concerns, you know, that we can write a prompt in a way that will give us, say, a list of the top 20 things that make people who are our ideal clients, you know, lie awake at night, , and we could ask the, the tool to actually give it in first person and make it emotional.

(05:45): I mean, it’s the kind of stuff that, it’s the voice of customer. It’s the stuff that people are saying out there. So that’s certainly one area competition. You can actually use these tools to do a pretty good job of assessing what to be strengths and weaknesses of a handful of competitors. So, makes it very easy to do this kind of research. This is probably a good place for me to note. It could all be wrong, it could all be inaccurate in these AI tools because that’s just where we are right now. So use this as a tool, but test read. Don’t just don’t copy and paste anything here because there’s certainly a long way to go, but it’s a great assistant. It’d be like, if you gave some of this work to a, you know, a, a low paid virtual assistant that you found online, you certainly wouldn’t just take it as gospel.

(06:32): You would hopefully give the assignment and you would get work back and you’d hope it was good, but you’d certainly test and you’d, you’d learn what it does. Big part of what we do is develop what we call core messages. A core message is not a tagline, something pretty to put on a business card. Maybe it goes there , but essentially it is your strategic promise. It’s your brand promise. It’s, here’s the problem we promise to solve for you ideal client, here’s a problem that matters to you that we’re going to solve. So what we want to do with that now is start testing it. So one of the great things that we have today, I mean, we do still do, uh, one-on-one interviews. That’s a great way to certainly get across this idea of, you know, understanding the problem that you solved for an actual client.

(07:18): But today, Google Business profile reviews is also a great resource because people turn there and they typically talk about what a great experience they had or the problem they had or what they’re not getting, you know, from other people. So we can actually ask the tool to scan all through the reviews and give us some sentiment, like, what are some themes that are coming up? Uh, what are some things that that, you know, seem to really be addressing problems that we solve? So, pretty easy to get a headstart there. We can then play around with the creativity in the tool and ask it for some core marketing messages. Maybe even parrot down to seven to 10 word kind of tagline, maybe some marketing headlines for promotional materials. Again, based on going all the way through the reviews, we’re simply saying in the voice of the customer, you know, what are some ways we should be saying some things?

(08:05): It’s not gospel , it’s not cut and past, uh, but it’s certainly, uh, very helpful.

(08:11): And now let’s hear a word from our sponsor. You know, companies are under pressure right now. I mean, pressure to get more leads, close deals faster, get better insights to create the best experience for customers. A CRM can help, but not just any crm. One that’s easy to set up, intuitive to use and customizable to the way you do business. And that’s where HubSpot comes in. HubSpot CRM is easy for everyone to use on day one, and it helps teams be more productive. Drag and drop your way to attention grabbing emails and landing pages. Set up marketing automation to give every contact white glove treatment. Plus AI powered tools like content Assistant mean less time spent on tedious manual tasks and more time for what matters. Your customers. HubSpot CRM has all the tools you need to wow prospects lock in deals and improve customer service response times. Get started today for free @hubspot.com.

(09:12): 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 slash certification.

(10:02): Another couple little kind of throw in, uh, opportunities is you may not, especially if you’re a consultant, you may not know that much about a particular industry of a client that you’re working with, but you can certainly use it to ask it to give you industry trends, threats, opportunities, you know, for businesses in that industry.

(10:20): It could be really eye-opening to, if nothing else, to hear it in the language of your client. That’s another thing that I think it really does a good job of is picking up the vernacular of a particular industry so that you’re saying things, you know, even in your, uh, presentations, you, you are, you’re putting ’em in the words that make sense to the industry or to the client. We have a very, as many of you longtime listeners would know, we have a very specific approach to developing a customer journey. It’s something that trademarked IP that I call the marketing hourglass. The marketing hourglass relies on essentially guiding seven behaviors, seven stages, no, like trust, try by repeat and refer. And a lot of what we try to do in that hourglass is try to understand, you know, what would, what are tactics or processes or campaigns that we need to be intentionally, you know, putting at each stage, regardless of what industry we’re in, obviously the industry may dictate many of the tactics of, you know, how somebody comes to know about you.

(11:21): You know, what they would, what would mean trust to them in order to buy. We can use the tool to just brainstorm, uh, a list of those, uh, stages in the customer journey. One of the things that AI does or has the ability to do, because it is essentially been taught, um, the, the, the everything that’s put into it is, um, if there are processes out there, if there are frameworks out there, like the marketing hourglass that people have written a lot about, um, it, it will actually be able to access that, uh, content. It will know what the marketing hourglass is, for example. So you can pick any framework that you’re familiar with out there, and there are many consultants who’ve produced frameworks. You can actually put it, you can actually identify companies or identify, uh, brands or identify individual, uh, say experts on topics.

(12:13): Um, and you can actually ask it to access, you know, their bank of knowledge and put it into a certain way that you wanna see it. Content is essentially a tactic, but it shows up in our strategy approach because we quite often are asking people to rethink the way they viewed content, to really look at it as a strategic element to look at it as something that is going to be a useful resource rather than just another challenge. Marketing challenge. We produce something called content hubs. And these content hubs are a completely different way to view, um, producing content. We still use blog or content management system technology, but we don’t use it in the, in the sort of fa linear, chronological fashion that people come to think about blogs on. So I have written, um, probably talked, um, in a previous show about that idea.

(13:06): Uh, we’re able to quickly put together outlines. I will say that, uh, ChatGPT wallet is not great at writing actual content. Meaning like, give me a thousand word blog post. It is very good at outlining things. If you give it a topic, a kind of big broad topic and say, you know, create an outline for the ultimate guide to X, it’s actually very good at that. It will also take, and this is pretty clunky, but you know, you can tell it to give you a 90 day editorial plan and say, include social posts, include newsletter topics, include blog posts. And again, it will give you a bit of a plan. Then you can start diving into, uh, very specific, uh, platforms like video. And you can take maybe post content you’ve already written and say, give me topics, that would make great videos.

(13:53): You can follow that up and say, okay, I like this topic. Write a two minute script on this topic. And if you’ve already got the topic written, it’s saying a blog post or an a webpage or something, it’ll draw from that and turn it into a video script. It’s pretty cool. We certainly, you know, for a lot of industries or folks that come to us, you know, webinars and LinkedIn and Facebook groups are important, uh, places for them to access. So we often will use it in the same way to outline, certainly to create webinar topics, but then to outline those webinar topics as well. I would never cut and post these, but you can actually tell it to give you some detailed LinkedIn posts, for example, for your industry. You certainly can give it continued guidance. So you don’t want these to be promotional, so you tell it, make them primarily educational.

(14:39): Highlight the firm’s expertise. Those quite often can be, you know, a lot of times when we’re working with somebody, they don’t know what to write on their LinkedIn profile, so we can give them 10 idea starters. For example, sometimes Facebook groups are a great place, uh, to hang out, for example. Well, sometimes it’s a lot of work to go find those groups , but, uh, the AI tools can actually, you could tell it, give me 30 Facebook groups in this industry with contact details and you’re gonna get 30 Facebook groups. Now it’s still up to you to go check ’em out. Does it seem like a, a group I wanna be a part of or a group that I wanna participate in to share my expertise, but it’s a headstart. Same with podcasts. If you are a business that needs to be on podcasts, and frankly, I can make a case for many people to be podcast guests, we put it in most of our marketing strategies.

(15:26): Again, the research to find the top 30 podcasts related to your industry with contact details can be some work. Put your, your informed automation assistant, ChatGPT to work for you. We go into, in this, uh, sheet that I’m sharing the prompts, I’m sharing lead generation and lead conversion. These will be basic tactics. But again, it’s a great place to start. If somebody’s thinking, well, I, I’m, I’m doing these two things, what else could I do? Uh, great, you know, channel recommendations, specific tactics for each customer experience, again, for a particular type of firm, you put in the, the name of the industry of the firm, and then you, or I’m sorry, the name of the industry that the firm you’re working with or your firm. And then, you know, you tell it to act as a marketing consultant. Create, you know, onboarding, retention plans, employee recruiting plans, you know, all again, won’t be rocket science, but it’ll be a headstart.

(16:19): And then finally we end up this particular group of prompts that, uh, overarching strategic initiatives. Like if we want to, you know, act as a marketing consultant, create a list of more than, or no more than five key strategic initiatives that would give blank industry firm wishing to grow a competitive advantage. You know, questions like that or prompts like that will get you started on some ideas, on some projects, on maybe some campaigns. Maybe it’ll tap into some trends that they see as opportunities. You never really know sometimes till you play with it. But I invite you to get our AI prompts for developing marketing strategy. There are a lot of people out there that are producing all these, you’ve seen them 2000 prompts to do blah, blah, blah, and they, you know, the prompt says, write a blog post , or, it’s just random stuff.

(17:04): What I’ve tried to do with this gift, if you will, is to make it very focused on you’re trying to accomplish a set result really with these prompts. And they’re not just kind of random one off things that you might use. Some of you might not use others. So hopefully this approach, uh, you know, is very, if nothing else, is very eye-opening to, you know, some of the ways that you might use prompt. But I think, uh, prompts. But I think additionally, I think that this is a tool that could be very useful in developing marketing strategy or could give you some insight into how we develop marketing strategy. We’d love to work with you if that’s something you need for your business. And I’d also invite you to of course, check out the fact that we license our methodology for building really what is a fractional CMO practice using, uh, this kind of tool, our strategy first approach.

(17:53): So that’s it for now. Thanks so much.

(18:18): 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 the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast was brought to you by the MarTech Podcast, hosted by my friend Ben Shapiro, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with episodes you can listen to in under 30 minutes. The MarTech Podcast share stories from world-class marketers who use technology to generate growth and achieve business and career success. And you can listen to it all on your lunch break. Recent, an episode featured Max Novak, the founder of Nova Cast, where he talked all about how podcast booking campaigns create value for listeners and for brands. You know, I’m a huge fan of being guests on podcasts, so listen, check out the MarTech podcast wherever you get your podcast.

(00:57): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsh, and my guest today is Steve McKee. He is the co-founder of McKee Walworth, a nationally recognized marketing advisory firm that has made the Inc 500 list of the fastest growing private companies in America and its first year of eligibility and has twice won the prestigious Effy Award for marketing effectiveness for the American Marketing Association. We’re gonna talk today about his new book called Turns, where Business is Won and Lost. So Steve, welcome to the show.

Steve McKee (01:30): Great to be here. Thanks, John.

John Jantsch (01:32): So I guess we need to define what you mean by turns. I mean, what is a turn in business?

Steve McKee (01:38): The, it’s, that’s a really great place to start it. The original concept for the book started as a book about turnarounds, corporate turnarounds. Mm-hmm. , because that’s what my company does for a living.

(01:46): And I just got very intrigued with that whole metaphor of the turn. And so it certainly includes big turns, like a corporate sweeping corporate turnaround, but little turns as well. The decisions that we make every day in business, either intentionally or that are foisted upon us that change the destiny of our companies and careers forever, which is a pretty big topic.

John Jantsch (02:09): So I, I think it’s like a lot of those things that, that you don’t know they’re happening while they’re happening all day long. Right. So, I mean, what’s a typical day of turns, you know, look like for an entrepreneur?

Steve McKee (02:19): It’s really remarkable. I start in the book with, I, I kind of get pretty, pretty narrow about it. Just the simple fact that the route you take to work in the morning could affect your whole day, could affect your whole life. The what you decide to have for breakfast, I mean, there are little decisions we make, little turns, if you will, that can have a big impact. In the day of an entrepreneur. Really any decision you make is a turn, because by definition a turn is when you’re heading one direction and you’re no longer heading that direction, you’re heading a different direction. So it could be a sweeping turn, like a new product launch or, you know, refocusing your company, or it could be a minor turn like, uh, or a less sweeping turn like who you hire or who you fire or how you price your products. Really, literally, every day we’re making decisions that are turning our organizations, and as I said, our careers, whether we realize it or not.

John Jantsch (03:11): So I can almost start to think of if people start realizing, you know, it’s like breathing. We don’t realize we’re breathing all day. Right. And then somebody tells us, you should pay attention to your breath. And you’re like, wow, I do this thing. You know, we can only do it for about two minutes. Right. But I can imagine people starting to say, oh, well, if I start to look at every decision I make and like start to analyze it, I mean, I’m gonna be exhausted by like 9:00 AM Right? I mean, so, so how, I mean, how do we take this like, okay, recognition, this is happening, there’s these decisions making, I mean, how do we decide Yeah. , which we should decide about .

Steve McKee (03:47): Yeah. I, the best analogy I’ve come up with this, it’s like driver’s ed, I don’t know if you remember back when you were taking driver’s ed, however you took that, when you’re trying to keep the car between the yellow lines as a new driver and you’re swerving back, it’s, and your hands hurt and your arms hurt and you’re panicked and the whole thing. Yeah. Once you learn the principles of driving, you can almost forget about it and it’s muscle memory. Yeah. This book, there are eight principles of turns and it’s meant to be a reflection on those things so that you can think about the turns in the past and the turns in the present, of course the turns in the future and how they work and the ramifications. But then yes, you have to sort of let whatever sinks in, sync in and then go about your day.

John Jantsch (04:27): What role does hindsight play in this? You know, I know I, I get, I’m on a lot of shows podcast myself and you know, a very common question is like, you know, what’s one thing you would do different? You know, that kind of thing. And it’s like, well, yeah, I can tell you now , you know, but certainly at the time I maybe made it, maybe it was an unconscious decision that paid off or didn’t. But you know, how much is hindsight, you know, a role in kind of, of analyzing turns how they worked, worked out? Yeah.

Steve McKee (04:54): It’s how we learn honestly. Right? Yeah. One of the, of course I go into the example of auto racing in the book, and if you’re on an oval racing in IndyCar or a nascar, how you took the last turn is gonna affect how you take the next turn because of the conditions of the track and the wind and the, and so forth. And the same is true in business, the physics of it, right? , every track is different. Every day is different depending on what tires you have on the vehicle are different when de pit is different, all those sorts of things. Same thing is true in business. Hindsight is where we learn, we took a turn and we either took it well or we took it poorly or something was thrown at us that we didn’t expect. And if we reflect upon it, we can learn not only about the forces that are affecting us, but the timing of the turn and the decisions we make and our emotions as they were involved in the turn. These are all factors that matter.

John Jantsch (05:39): All right. So I’ve got my three year plan and it’s mapped out exactly what’s gonna happen, you know, 36 months from now where our revenue’s gonna be and this is a plan and we’re sticking to it. I mean, how much does that sort of mentality in business get in the way of intuition turns and opportunity that arises or the opposite of that have just lost a focus? Because I’m willing to take anything that looks like a new direction.

Steve McKee (06:03): Yeah, it’s that delicate balance in life. One of the things I’ve said about this book is we tend to think of life as a series of straightaways interrupted by occasional turns.

John Jantsch (06:09): Mm-hmm. .

Steve McKee (06:10): And I actually believe that life is a series of turns interrupted by occasional smooth stretches of road. So we have our five year plans. Just as when I left the house this morning, I had the route I was gonna take to work in mind, but when I came across a closed road, which literally happened this morning, I had to adjust. And I think there’s a balance there. What is it? Eisenhower said, plans are nothing but planning is everything. Yeah. We have to have the plans, but we also have to recognize that they’re not gonna happen e exactly as we laid them out. And how we navigate those turns can make all the difference. That’s why the subhead is where business is won and lost. You don’t win or lose typically on the straightaways. You learn when things are dynamic and changing. You have to outmaneuver your competitors, you have to make sure you don’t run off the road, all those sorts of analogies.

John Jantsch (06:56): Do you find that, that if somebody embraces kind of this idea that they will actually find themselves avoiding turns or maybe looking for turns as opportunities in a heightened way?

Steve McKee (07:07): I think probably the latter, honestly, because the exciting thing about the more we learn about turns is the more confident we are in taking them and making them, I don’t see a desire to avoid turns because really the lesson of the book is too bad, , you can’t avoid them. They’re just gonna happen. One of the, one of the big lessons of the book though is if you recognize that turns are where businesses won and lost, would you wanna look for that turn where you can get the advantage over your competition or over the past or what have you? So I think it’ll make me people more, maybe, maybe to continue the auto driving analogy, the better you are at navigating turns and driving a car, the more likely you are to want to race it.

John Jantsch (07:45): . Yeah. You know what’s interesting? I mean, I’ve been doing this for a really long time and I can, I can physically remember times when I would say to myself, things are going too smooth. You know, things are almost getting boring. I feel like I’m doing mediocre work. And, and I would almost be excited with a challenge at that point. I mean, how does that fit into your principles?

Steve McKee (08:08): I spoke to the roadway engineer who literally wrote the book on roadway turns and he educated me. It was, it’s, it is really remarkable what goes into that. And he says that what engineers reali recognize that it’s better to have a number of shorter turns in a row for a driver than to have straightaway and then interrupted by a big turn. Because we get conditioned if thing, if the road is turning regularly, we get conditioned to it turning in. So we’re more ready and able to do it. Yeah. Yeah. So that too, if you are on a long straightaway, well that’s when you put on the cruise control, that’s when you fall asleep and up comes a turn and you can run right off the road. Whereas if things are continually turning, you’re alert to it. We talk in our business a lot about turns in business and that, you know, like the tech industry turns so fast, uh, I wouldn’t wanna be in it, give me an answer, but at least tech are aware of that. Yeah. Whereas in, in other industries that turn more slowly, what we see in our consulting practice is that there are companies that are being run off the road and they don’t even realize it until it’s too late. Yeah. Because they think that everything’s just gonna continue the way that it has in the past.

John Jantsch (09:10): Yeah. And to some degree, even if they see the writing on the wall, they kinda stick their head in the sand sometimes because it’s, you know, the change that they see coming is gonna be them killing the golden goose, you know? And that’s a hard one for somebody to swallow, isn’t it?

Steve McKee (09:24): It is a hard one for somebody to swallow. And that’s again, one of the messages in the book is the turn is coming. It doesn’t matter whether you want to take it or don’t want to take it, it’s happening. Yeah. So learn how to do it. Yeah, yeah. And embrace it.

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(11:35): So how about the, the, maybe it’s a metaphor, maybe it’s not actually a metaphor, but the fork in the road, you know, for a lot of businesses. Yeah. Because when you think of a turn, you think of, oh, I need to go this way, but what about that? Like, which way ? Yeah. Do I go and this is like life or this is death, or I don’t, you know, I don’t know. I mean, how does that play as a out, as a turn?

Steve McKee (11:57): That’s probably the most common kind of turn. We tend to think of turns as like 180 degrees. Very rarely our turns 180 degrees. Most of the time it is that fork in the road that there’s a decision to be made that, let me put it this way, that what’s happening today is not gonna continue indefinitely. We’re aware of that so therefore we can go this way or that way. Or maybe sometimes there’s a third or fourth way that is a turn. Any, even a one degree change technically is a turn cuz you’re headed in a different direction. That’s really the probably the most common thing that we face in business. And I believe we face it literally every day. Yeah. It’s in big and small, dark,

John Jantsch (12:33): I don’t fly airplanes, but I’ve heard pilots talk about this idea, you know, when you talk about a one degree change, you know, you take off from Denver and if you’re one degree off the entire way, you’re gonna end up in Tulsa instead of, you know, Kansas City three big change.

Steve McKee (12:47): That’s right. . And the same is true in business. I mean, I think that’s a metaphor everybody can understand.

John Jantsch (12:51): Yeah. Yeah. Well I don’t want you to read the entire book because we don’t have time for that. Give us a flavor of, you know, you, you mentioned the eight principles and I know that, you know, change and contest and cause and moment. I wonder if you could just kind of pick out a couple and and give us a flavor for what they are, but then more, probably more importantly, you know, how do we apply?

Steve McKee (13:11): Yeah, I’d be happy to do that. One of, one of the surprises that I’ve gotten from my readers is the, one of the early chapters is called the Principle of the Object. And I thought it was more of a setup chapter, but it turns out it’s really affecting people. And the idea behind that is distinguishing the turn from that witch is turning is important. So the example I give is we call a turn in a roadway, A turn, but it’s really not, it’s just a non-linear distribution of asphalt. It only becomes a turn when something turns on it. And access is only an axis when there’s something turning on it.

John Jantsch (13:41): So it’s a philosophical book.

Steve McKee (13:43): Well it is, but the lesson there is if you, we need to separate ourselves. Yeah. Or our companies from the turn or else we risk getting our emotions all tied up in our decision making. Yeah. And as it turns out, no pun intended, I’ve had several people say to me that realization alone was worth the, you know, the price of the book. I think my favorite chapter is the principle of the contest and the whole idea is there, I went into the world of physics and looked at all of the forces involved in a turn from inertia to lean to torque, to friction, to gravity. Every one of those has a parallel in the business world. Yeah, yeah. And it’s just, it was just really fun to uh, basically provide a toolbox of a lexicon, if you will, that people can use to describe and characterize the turn that their business might be going through. And I actually suggest in the chapter that you get out, if you’re dealing with a turn, go to a whiteboard, write all those physical principles down and say, okay, what’s friction in this situation? What’s gravity, what’s torque? And it can be a very much a learning experience.

John Jantsch (14:43): You know, it’s interesting I’ve commented over the years, another thing people talk about is like what book has influenced you the most? And really for my work in creating marketing system and the IP that I’ve created, it’s a book on architecture and it’s kind of the same idea about building community and you know, about things being in a place and having a systematic approach to, and I think other subjects other than what, you know, we think we’re writing about or reading about or trying to teach, you know, can really inform, you know, like just as you said a whole nother language.

Steve McKee (15:15): Yeah. I was just meeting with someone this morning who’s in the middle of the book and the book is called Turns where Businesses Won and Lost and he said, this isn’t a business book . I said, you’re right. It is a business book but it’s also not a business book. Yeah. It’s about larger principles of life. Yeah, yeah. Of which business is a big part.

John Jantsch (15:32): So I mentioned that, you know, I’ve had my business for 30 years and I’ve often used the term seasons, you know, I have, you know, I’ve remade my business, you know, as we all have had to, especially in the marketing world. I mean I started, we didn’t have the internet, you know, as one of our channels so to speak. And so, you know, I’ve married, made my business at least five times probably, you know, substantially. And I’ve always referred to those as seasons, you know, that certain things would happen and then another thing would happen and that meant I was supposed to do this. And I don’t think I certainly, I wasn’t applying the idea of tur of turns, you hadn’t written the book yet, but you know, I feel like that’s another metaphor that would apply to to, to turns. I mean there’s a season, a turn for every season, so to speak.

Steve McKee (16:14): That’s right. And I actually talked about seasons in the book because Yeah. I had a realization one day as I was watching the Golden Leaves fall was during the fall off the trees. My realization was if this was the first time that ever happened, I’d be freaking out. Right now, , the world’s coming to an . The fact that we can enjoy Autumn as a season is because we know it’s part of a cycle or a turn. Yeah, yeah. Where the season’s metaphor breaks down in business, and I use it too, is that, you know, there are four seasons in the year and they tend to repeat and in business it never repeats .

(16:43): It’s just different phases. Yeah. Different seasons, different turns. And when you look back, when you look back over your life, and I can do this with my business and I’m sure you can with yours, yes there are turns that happen every day, but there are some notable market that day or that moment or that season was when we made this decision or this happened to us and that changed everything. I think everybody can reflect on that. ,

John Jantsch (17:07): I wasn’t gonna ask you this question, but just as you mentioned that I had Dan Pink on recently talk about his, one of his most recent books about regret or you know, no regret. And I wonder how, you know, when people start thinking about turns, you know, they start thinking about defining moments and sometimes there’s a defining moment that you can go, ah, I blew that one. You know, look back 10 years later and you’re like, eh, you know, that was a defining moment. You know, how much, how much I’m really trying to ask what a role, what role regret has, you know? Yes. In understanding, you know, these terms.

Steve McKee (17:39): I think that’s actually a helpful part of the book. What the technique I use is I go back and look at terms in history and science and religion, business as well. Sports, it’s a sweeping overview of turns and one of the things that, I dunno if I can say this is universal, but I think it certainly could be is rarely has there ever been a turn that starts positive and is only positive. Yeah. Or starts negative and is only negative. And like a very recent example was how awful Covid and the lockdowns were for all of us. But so much innovation has come from that, for example. Yeah. So it’s rare that you can find a turn that is entirely bad or entirely good and I think that softens the regret. It also causes you to be a little bit humble on the upside. Yeah. That, you know, not everything we do is brilliant.

John Jantsch (18:24): Yeah. That’s interesting though. I mean you can make a case for saying in some cases you need to be pushed into a corner. Yep. You know, to make the turn right .

Steve McKee (18:34): Yep. Something come to that dead end and there’s that arrow there . Yeah. It’s your turning.

John Jantsch (18:38): Yeah. But I mean, I guess what I was getting at is that that, you know, a lot of times people can just float on, buy everything fine and then they like get pushed into the corner, they’re bar ready to go bankrupt and then they can make the right decision because they have no choice in some ways.

(18:51): Or feels like if it’s, if it’s not, if it’s not too late, which yeah. Yeah.

Steve McKee (18:54): Master the turns before you’re forced to turn to avoid going off a cliff

John Jantsch (18:57): Before the steering wheel comes loose. So Steve tell people we’re where you might invite them to connect with you, but then certainly also to, I know you can pick up copies of turns anywhere you buy books, but where would you like to invite people to connect with you?

Steve McKee (19:12): Yeah. Turns: Where Businesses Won and Lost. You can get on Amazon, Barnes and Noble anywhere, my company is mckeewallwork.com. But just as easily you can go to steve mckee.com, it takes you to the same place I’m on LinkedIn if anybody wants to link up. And I’d really love to hear from people who’ve picked up the book and have some thoughts about it because everybody seems to be getting something a little bit different out of it.

(19:31): And I love that.

John Jantsch (19:33): Okay. I said I was done, but I’m not . Here’s the question that I hope everybody who interviews a asks best turn you ever made

Steve McKee (19:44): I , can I give you two?

John Jantsch (19:47): That’s gonna be a hard question.

Steve McKee (19:48): Well, I mean, the obvious answer was marrying the woman of my dreams 37 years ago. I mean, that’s not only the correct answer, it’s also true. I would say that I was forced into a turn to start my own company. Yeah. When a succession plan fell through at a previous, it was not a turn of my choosing. It has ended up being remarkable.

John Jantsch (20:06): Yeah. Yeah. I suspect answering that, anybody answering that question is tough because again, I, you know, I think most of it’s made in the hindsight, right, . Yep. So tough one to hear.

Steve McKee (20:16): It’s and it’s genuinely hard to say.

John Jantsch (20:18): Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And who knows how many we missed, right. That we have no idea that we missed it,

Steve McKee (20:23): No idea that we missed it. And yeah. Who knows how many we’re gonna miss today.

John Jantsch (20:27): Exactly. Well Steve, it was great catch up with you again, as we pointed out when we were talking, it’s been 20 plus years . Yeah. Since, since we last talked. So I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast and hopefully we will run into you one of these days soon out there on the road. Super.

Steve McKee (20:45): Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch (20:46): 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. 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 was brought to you by the MarTech Podcast, hosted by my friend Ben Shapiro, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with episodes you can listen to in under 30 minutes. The MarTech Podcast share stories from world-class marketers who use technology to generate growth and achieve business and career success. And you can listen to it all on your lunch break. Recent episode featured Max Novak, the founder of Nova Cast, where he talked all about how podcast booking campaigns create value for listeners and for brands. You know, I’m a huge fan of being guests on podcasts, so listen, check out the MarTech podcast wherever you get your podcast.

(00:57): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Laura Belgray. She’s the founder of Talking Shrimp, a co-creator of The Copy Cure and is a copywriting expert who helps entrepreneurs find their perfect words to express and sell what they do in a way that gets them paid to be themselves through her work with hundreds of clients, including online biggies like Marie Forlio and Amy Porterfield. She’s seen firsthand that putting you into your copy and all through your business is pure magic for getting people to love you up and share your ideas and happily click your buy button. It’s like a copywriter wrote this thing, I don’t know,

John Jantsch (01:38): Her book. We’re gonna, her book we’re gonna talk about today is not necessarily about copywriting. It’s called Tough Titties: On Living Your Best Life When You’re F-ing, when You Are The F-ing Worst. So, Laura, welcome back to the show we were just talking about, it’s been a few years,

Laura Belgray (01:56): It has been a few years. Thank you so much for having me back, especially to talk about this not necessarily copywriting book, Tough Titties.

John Jantsch (02:05): You, you know, in fact, I don’t know if it was you or publicist, but some, somebody kinda said, gosh, does John really want me back on this show? Because this isn’t a business book necessarily, but frankly what you talk about in this book, every entrepreneur goes through , you know, at some point. So it’s, I think it is an awesome entrepreneur book. It’s obviously a people book in general, but I think it’s an awesome entrepreneur book. Viewers can’t, listeners can’t see this, but, well, you can if you visit the show notes, but the cover, it’s got like a seventies wallpaper vibe. What were you trying to do there?

Laura Belgray (02:36): ? It’s actually more what I was aiming for is a t-shirt vibe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Seventies, eighties. So it’s really a coming of age, not strictly in eighties, nineties, New York. It also gets into the two thousands and up to today. But there is for sure a retro vibe to it, especially to the early chapters. And I feel like I, I’m just really drawn viscerally to that, to nostalgia for, to the ephemera of that time of my growing up, of our, of my middle school years and my twenties. And I put together a Pinterest board for the cover, which I feel like they nailed the, it’s like a whole mood board of things like the Bubble Yum logo, right. And Pepsi Light and all the logos from that time. And I feel like they really nailed it with the Tough Titties logo just captured that like t-shirt iron on. Look,

John Jantsch (03:32): I was gonna say it kind of, it de it definitely reeks of pop culture that that’s how I kind of kind of see the, the cover. So again, I’m sorry Li listeners, , if you’re driving down the highway and you don’t know what we’re talking about, let me just, this is a stupid question, but I think it’s valid here. Why’d you write this book

Laura Belgray (03:50): ? It’s not a stupid question, it’s just a big one. I mean, I truly, I always wanted to write a book and I wanted to tell my stories. Like I, I do love telling stories in my emails and throughout all my copy and, but they never get to be the full story. I mean, you can’t write the whole thing. You can’t write a whole chapter in an email. And so there are many things, I always wanted to write a book and I probably announced many times over the course of the last 30 years or so that I was writing a book, I’m writing a novel, I’m writing a memoir, et cetera, and never followed through. And I was just thinking about this. I, it’s, I haven’t talked about it that much, but in around 2016 I met up with this online writer, a copywriter named Alex Franzen, and she came to a dance class with me.

(04:39): She was in the city and she, we were sitting on the floor stretching and she said to me, so, so tell me, do you have like a body of work? And I was like, well, I have my, I’ve got blog posts, , I don’t know, I’ve got my emails. I guess kind of that’s really hit me in that moment. Like I’ve gotta write my book. And I have always thought about it that way as my book, like the book that needs to be written. And so I finally really got writing on it in earnest in around 2019 after many stops and starts. And a as for like, why should it exist? I think it’s gonna, I, I feel like it has an audience with anyone who’s ever felt behind in their life or career or like they’re not very good with the supposed tos in life. The title Tough Titties is I see it as sort of the ultimate, sorry, not sorry for not doing life the way you all want me to. Like I’ve never, you know, learned to, I, I don’t drive a car. I never learned to roast a chicken and I never had kids and my career trajectory has been very windy as opposed to a straight hockey stick that it’s supposed to be.

John Jantsch (05:51): So it’s largely autobiographical. However, you know, you are trying to teach big life lessons too, aren’t you?

Laura Belgray (05:59): I am. I honestly, I thought I was gonna get to just slap together a bunch of stories that I like to tell, but I discovered through the process and from my editor who told me in not super careful delicate terms that it did, most of the stories didn’t have a point. The voice was all over the place and she basically said, what are you trying to say here? And I realized then that just like I tell everyone to do with their emails, like every story you tell has to have some sort of point, especially if it’s in a book it can’t end with like, and it was really funny, the end , you know, anyway, it was so embarrassing. Next chapter, it has to arc to some meaning. And my editor reminded me a few times cuz I was resistant to this. I was like, I’m not, this isn’t the how-to, it’s not a self-help book. I’m not doing takeaways, spoonfed takeaways. She’s like, but you know, people still want some wisdom there. They do want some life lessons. What did you learn from this? So it took some work to infuse it with those, but I’m satisfied with, she did come out a way better book because of that. I mean, people do wanna know, why are you telling me this story and what should I learn from it?

John Jantsch (07:14): Frankly, thank God you had that editor because there are a lot of editors that would’ve phone phoned that in and said, you know, send it on to line copy and you know, frankly that’s the editor’s job. You know, I had an editor on one of my first books that used to always say, you’re doing too much throat clearing here, . Which was basically his way of saying get to the point. Yeah. And I think that’s what a good editor actually can do. I mean, you know, you can find somebody to put the semicolons where they belong . So, so that’s awesome. You know what’s interesting is I listen, you talk about your struggle with that. You were defiantly I was gonna say self-reliant, but you know, you definitely are yourself. You wanna go your own path in some ways. Did that make you recoil against what you saw as the structure for a book?

Laura Belgray (07:59): Yes, it did. I mean, first of all, as I said, I set out, determined not to write the kind of book that I was supposed to write in the space, in the online space. Coming from a business background. I was supposed to write a copywriting book, a marketing book, a self-help book, something with bullet points at the end of each chapter or cyber or your next steps. And I was like, I am not doing that. I refuse. I want this to be, I was a little snobby about it. I was like, I want this to be a literary book. And yeah. So, and I kind of felt like the structure of a literary book is whatever I wanna make it, which is not true at all. So yes, but I was, I was defiant about structuring it the way you are supposed to. And I am glad that I had that, you know, this editor that I have who yeah told me you’re, you know, this needs to have str this needs to have wisdom to it, it needs to arc to some sort of meaning. And yeah,

John Jantsch (08:57): So, so one of the copywriters key tools is vulnerability. Mm-hmm. , some of the stories in this book would make me blush, were I to write them. So was that part hard?

Laura Belgray (09:09): No, that part was actually pretty easy. And it, you know, it could be because my, my father died in 2018 and I have a feeling that timing had something to do with me finally moving ahead on this book. There’s a lot in there that I would not want him to read a lot that confirms his suspicions back when I was in my twenties and living at home and staying out till four or all night. Like what? I we’re

John Jantsch (09:37): Not going, we’re not going into that chapter by the way.

Laura Belgray (09:39): , no. Chapter nine. So when I warned my mom not to read and she did , but it, yeah, so, so there was a little block around that for a while. He was alive. And I do, I didn’t think about it consciously until recently. I was like, yeah, that might’ve freed me up. And I do tend to, uh, I, I am drawn to Tmmi. I like sharing too much information. I am not private about a lot. There are a few things that I’m private about and my current life and there are things I wouldn’t reveal about my current life or my private life with my husband or anything like that. But revealing things about my past, I feel a little in a sense disembodied from that me, so that it’s almost like I’m writing about somebody else. Cuz it was a different person. Yeah. Different time, different person.

John Jantsch (10:29): Yeah. You talked numerous times about being a late bloomer, you know, from a career standpoint, I think that anybody who would look at your current body of work would say that you’re quite accomplished. So, you know, where’s the late bloomer come from? Is that just because you were saying I didn’t do what people expected?

Laura Belgray (10:51): I think that is part of it. I mean if, you know, if you read the book you might say, oh, like Laura was handed opportunities from early on, like just a year outta college, got this job and then that job and then that job. But I always felt like I was on a delay. Everybody was moving faster than me. Sure. My first year out of college everybody was out getting jobs, getting internships, getting, you know, working as paralegals making money. And I just, I didn’t want any of it. And I was waiting around to find a job that I really liked. And that’s been most of my career is saying like, no, I don’t wanna do that. I can’t do that because I don’t want to. I’m not very good at doing things I don’t want to . So jobs that, I mean, I, I think part of it is my resistance to corporate culture. I’ve never been that person who gets promoted every time they walk into a room. And it lasted all of six months in my one, nine to five job. And so I’ve never been that person who moves up and up in my career. I it very windy, a very windy path and we’re sideways and, um, looking for things that I actually want to do. And it takes a while to find that.

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(13:46): Yeah, I think the adventure path is the way to go, which mm-hmm , you know, is not for everybody, but I think when you, many people looking back on their lives would say, yeah, that was the way to go. Let’s dive into a couple chapters to give people a flavor of what they’re going to find. As I already said, we’re gonna stay away from chapter nine, . I mean, you’ve already gotten me in trouble with the title of the book to begin with. So just cuz I’m such a goofy guy, how I met my husband.

Laura Belgray (14:13): How I met my husband. Well that’s a story of how I met my husband. But I

John Jantsch (14:19): Know now

Laura Belgray (14:19): I

John Jantsch (14:20): Wanna hear it. No, nothing gets named a chapter title without it being a significant story

Laura Belgray (14:26): . Exactly. Well I think I wrote about that because the way I met my husband defies all the common dating advice and wisdom of how you are supposed to meet the one. And I met him, like our relationship overlapped for both of us with terrible relationships that we shouldn’t have been in. And I think the common advice would be make room, you know, people talk about Marie coning your love life, getting rid of what doesn’t spark joy. Making room for the love to come in and getting rid of the clutter, which would be bad relationships with people who don’t serve you. Right. And yet I would say that it is Bec absolutely because I was in a terrible relationship that obsessed me. You know, a person who was married and cheating, cheating in all different ways and and a bit of a narcissist and a liar and all those things because I was so obsessed with him. I was not a clingy monster When I met this new person who I liked so much, I was actually able to be the aloof, not caring. Sure, write me back anytime. Sure you can cancel tonight. Uh, kind of person that I always wanted to be

John Jantsch (15:46): you also have a title chapter or chapter titled The Most Driven Person, you know, so that obviously speaks to your level of ambition somewhat

Laura Belgray (15:59): . Yes. It’s because I’m absolutely the most ambitious person, you know? No, it’s, it is the opposite of that. It is an intentional mislead. It is about two things. It is a, I am literally the most driven person, you know, because I don’t drive and so I’m the one who’s driven around and really driving is a metaphor for so many things. You know, be the, take the driver’s seat in your own life, take the wheel, be in charge, you do the steering. And I’ve always been content to lean back and nap in the passenger seat. And I’m a terrible driver and I’m also, I also just don’t come out in any of those personality tests as the driver. You know, there was a personality test that was going around at work and my boss took it and she’s like, I’m a double driver. I’m in the upper right of the upper right quadrant, which means that I’m a driver in every way. And I was like, I don’t know what, where I fall in that test, but I know it’s not double driver . I’m not a, I don’t consider myself a leader, I never wanted to manage a team of people. I don’t even like seating people at a dinner party telling anyone what to do. So that’s the essence of that chapter.

John Jantsch (17:15): You also talk about laziness the good, like the good kind and the bad kind. And I firmly agree with you. I think there are some awesome bad laziness. Yes, I do. Some people look at it as procrastination, you know, as a form of bad laz. And I actually think sometimes what you’re doing is letting things brew.

Laura Belgray (17:35): I agree. So yeah, I think that just like with cholesterol, there’s good cholesterol and bad cholesterol, good fat and bad fats like guacamole, you know, avocado is good fat. I think there’s good lazy and bad

John Jantsch (17:46): This week. This week they’ll,

Laura Belgray (17:48): It’ll be better. Yeah. This way. Yes, exactly. after I just consumed three bowls of it yesterday. . So I, I think that I would say that I have both an equal measure. I, I identify as an unapologetically lazy person and a lot of people say, oh you’re not lazy. Look at, you know, you accomplished things, you wrote a book and you did this, you did that. And I’d say that for one, the good kind of lazy is yeah, being able to relax. I don’t measure my self worth or locate my self worth in how hard I work. Yeah. In fact, for me it’s a little bit of a badge of shame maybe cuz I brand myself as lazy, but to be working too hard to be overworked, I am very comfortable lying around and doing nothing. And that’s my natural state. And also if my husband comes around with a vacuum, I’m like hard pressed to even lift my feet .

(18:39): And to me that’s good lazy because a lot of people, especially women, have a hard time not doing anything. They have a really hard time with blank space on our calendar, which is something I relish to the like, I love it when there’s nothing on my calendar. My favorite kind of day is blank. Yes. And so that’s the, that I think is the good lazy because people struggle with it. They struggle to like relax and be okay not doing something every moment. And then the bad lazy is I would say is what I call fear dressed in pajamas. It is resistance. Resistance to doing what you know you need to do. The fear of not doing a good enough job. That’s where the like the bad procrastinating comes from. Yeah. It’s like putting it off because you’re so afraid that you’re not gonna do it right or knock it out of the park and yeah, that stops, that has stopped me a lot in my life,

John Jantsch (19:33): You know, and that’s the kind that puts a lot of stress on you that you don’t realize. I think a lot of times, you know, there’s a line from the Scarlet letter when the protagonist, you know, is finally kind of released from all the guilt and shame that had been put on her and is she did not, she did not know the weight until she felt the freedom. And I think that’s the way a lot of that does that to us. It’s like we don’t realize how much this stuff is weighing us down until we’re like, oh yeah, you know, free of it and then you’re like, holy crap, that was, I’m much lighter. That was, you know, that was definitely weighing me down. Yes. So I wanna do one, one more chapter, how to be popular.

Laura Belgray (20:09): How to be popular. That was about the year that I switched schools. And this wasn’t the typical from, you know, public school to a posh private boarding school or something like that where it was that kind of obvious culture shock. It was from one private school to another private school. There was a culture shock. There were totally different places. And my, you know, old, my former private school that I was in for 11 years was like laid back progressive school where you could say, you know, where if you are handed back your test papers, you could just go around the room, say, what’d you get, what’d you get? You get, and then the new school was an all girls school and very traditional and a little up and competitive. Competitive. And you know, if you said, what’d you get? Person would like move their paper away from you and fold down the corner and cover it with their arm and be like, that’s none of your business.

(21:06): But it, so that chapter is mostly about me trying to fit in there and the contradictions of, you know, you’re supposed to look effortless and have the right shoes that are scuffed from years of, you know, salt air, corrosion on daddy’s yacht and be really chill. And it was a certain kind of preppy old money aesthetic there. And you know, that contradiction with, you know, you’ve gotta work hard and you’re not supposed to be seen working hard, which is just like in our current, you know, online business culture. You’re not, you’re supposed to be the picture of ease. And yet we still have people yelling at us to hustle. And there’s such a confusion between grinding and anti, anti cult, anti hussle culture and hustle culture and being in our, in my new school it was called Being a Grind. And you are not supposed to be a grind, but you were supposed to get good grades.

(22:06): But the, you know, the uh, punchline of that chapter is basically that I tried to, I really wanted to have shoes like everybody else. I knew I needed this right. Kind of beat up, broken in leather boat shoes. And I, my mom, I begged my mom to buy me a pair and she bought me a pair of Docksiders or Topsiders, I forget what brand. Yes. But they were yes berry and they were glaringly virginal fresh. So shiny leather , so shiny unblemished. And so I bought a wood file and scuffed them, hand scuffed them myself one afternoon after school. And then the result was that they looked insane. , in no way did I look like a preppy kid who, whose daddy had a boat

John Jantsch (22:56): . It looked like you’d just into the factory maybe.

Laura Belgray (22:59): Yes. I and, and then attacked by a Tiger

John Jantsch (23:03): . Well Laura, it was so great catching up with you again and having you stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. She wouldn’t tell people where they can connect with you and perhaps take, pick up a copy of Tough Titties.

Laura Belgray (23:15): Yes, please. Well you can connect with me @talkingshrimp.com. That’s my digital home and I’m mostly on Instagram as at Laura Belgray. So please do connect with me in either of those places. But you wanna get a copy of Tough Titties or several copies and then you will unlock more bonuses. I’m gonna actually have writing trainings and things like that to go with it, even though it’s not a copywriting book that is @toughtittiesbook.com and all the book sellers are represented there, all the ones that matter. So please come by and score a copy or several, they’re great as the set tough titties, you know, gotta get at least get two and fill in the form and you will get your bonuses.

John Jantsch (23:59): Awesome. Well, again, as I said, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the show and hopefully we’ll run into you again one of these days out there on the road.

Laura Belgray (24:07): I would love that. Thank you so much for having me on.

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John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast was brought to you by the MarTech Podcast, hosted by my friend Ben Shapiro, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with episodes you can listen to in under 30 minutes. The MarTech Podcast share stories from world-class marketers who use technology to generate growth and achieve business and career success. And you can listen to it all on your lunch break. Recent, an episode featured Max Novak, the founder of Nova Cast, where he talked all about how podcast booking campaigns create value for listeners and for brands. You know, I’m a huge fan of being guests on podcasts, so listen, check out the MarTech podcast wherever you get your podcast.

(00:57): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Charles Conn. He’s the author or co-author of the bestselling book, Bulletproof Problem Solving: The One Skill That Changes Everything. And he’s got a new book coming called The Imperfectionists: Strategic Mindsets for Uncertain Times. He’s also the co-founder of Monograph Capital, a life sciences venture firm in London in San Francisco, and was previously CEO of the Rhodes Trust in Oxford. He’s the board chair of Patagonia and sits on the Nature Conservancy European Council. He was founding CEO at Ticketmaster City Search and was a partner at McKinsey and Company. So Charles, welcome to the show.

Charles Conn (01:43): It’s really good to be here, John. Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch (01:45): You’ve been a busy man.

Charles Conn (01:47): I have been a busy man,

John Jantsch (01:49): . So I do wanna talk about your book, but I can’t pass over talking for a moment, if you will, about Patagonia. And I’d love to just talk a little bit about the, I know how un uh, maybe you have to remind people, but a lot of people certainly are familiar with the story, but how unprecedented and maybe how important for the environment, the current kind of shift in, what would we call it? Ownership has been,

Charles Conn (02:16): I’m, I lost you for a second there. I hope it’s not my internet here.

John Jantsch (02:22): So, so I had just teed up a question about the change in Patagonia, which I’m hopefully people have read. You might remind people of the scope of it, but just how unprecedented that changes and how important for the environment you think it’s been or will be.

Charles Conn (02:37): Yeah, look, I mean, it was a number of years in coming and I think it’s gonna have a huge impact. We already have many people, you know, calling us and sending emails about how they can do something like this too. And as you know, Yvonne and his family gave away the entire company to fight the environmental crisis. But I, I do think it’s really worth saying that you don’t have to, you know, in order to do good, you don’t have to do something as bold as that. I like to think of the example of, for example, MasterCard. 9% of MasterCard shares are held by the MasterCard Foundation, which gives away, you know, billion dollars a year. So there’s a lot of good that people can do without doing something as extreme as what Patagonia did. We think it’s a wonderful example in some ways. Yvonne teed it up in 2018 when he changed the mission of the company from making the best gear, doing unnecessary, no unnecessary harm, and using capitalism to fight the environmental crisis, to we’re in business to save the home planet. And what, you know, what he and the family did September 14th last year, I think was the kind of the culmination of setting us that kind of a challenge as the mission of the company.

John Jantsch (03:46): Yeah. Well the company has had a long history of, you know, of social as a men, you know, environmental steward is stewardship, but as you mentioned, that was sort of unprecedented . So in the subtitle of your book, you used the term uncertain times. So I’ll just tee this up. Are we in particularly uncertain times?

Charles Conn (04:07): It feels like it. I mean, you know, when you look at all of human history, of course things change very little. And then if you really look at the last, you know, 75 or a hundred years, really within the lifetime of our parents, everything has changed. And then if you just look at the last two decades and you look at programmable biology, artificial, the impact of artificial intelligence, automation, robotics, things are changing actually much faster still, even in the last decade. Things are changing faster than the previous decade. And I think what it means is all the frameworks that we were taught, the ways of thinking we were taught, you really need to set them aside and say, what are the right mindsets for approaching the world that we live in now?

John Jantsch (04:52): Yeah. And of course you could certainly make a case for the last three or four years, you know, acceleration happened even faster. And really, as somebody who’s written and writes about problem solving, I mean, wasn’t that basically like it or not an incredible environment to test problem solving? Yes,

Charles Conn (05:09): . Yeah. I mean, I, it’s funny. I think, you know, problem solving is now and you know, it’s been my life’s work. But in a world where, you know, the internet MO knows more than you could ever know, right? And there are more specialized people in every possible field and every type of influencer. What are the, what’s the one or two things that humans can actually do better than anything else? And I think the answer to that is problem solving in small groups. And I, you know, I don’t think there’s anything more, you know, essentially human than that.

John Jantsch (05:51): There’s a particular type of problem solving that I always find intriguing. There’s examples of it the last couple decades particularly, and that’s the, the business leader who is faced with solving a problem of their cash cow going away, right? The industry is changing in such a way that they are gonna have to like kill the, you know, let’s use another metaphor, the golden goose. And some choose to ignore it because hey, you know, I’ll be outta here in a while, , you know, and how do you address that? Put that problem that you don’t, in some ways you could say you don’t wanna solve.

Charles Conn (06:25): Yeah, well, you know, I mean, in many ways that’s what the book is about. You know, that you have sh Peter’s creative destruction, right? Which is the, which the Austrian economist said that’s what capitalism is about. And of course, you know, it’s the job of every company, including companies like Patagonia to either reinvent themselves or become part of the trash heap of, you know, past ideas that didn’t work right. And what the book, the new book, which is about problem solving under high uncertainty is about can you make that transition? Can your company or organization, cuz half of our examples are nonprofits, can you recreate yourself or not? That’s what it’s about.

John Jantsch (07:05): So, so there’s been a lot of, I mean a lot of people would agree with this idea that trying to be a perfectionist, you know, is a kind of a dead end that people have, I think given up on that idea. But have you taken it to another extreme that might be interpreted by using the word imperfections might be interpreted as like good enough?

Charles Conn (07:25): No, I mean, and, and of course, you know, the double meaning in imperfection is intended. Uh, you know, the, there is no, if you think about like linear programming or even chess where all the rules are actually known. And you know, that’s one of the reasons why machines are so good at it. That isn’t the world that we live in today. You know, when you and I were going through university strategy was about understanding industry structure and who the players are and thinking about the conduct of those players within the structure. Well, when the structure is blurry, you know, we have super competitors like an Apple or a Google or a Microsoft, and where things are changing so quickly that the person who disrupts your business is just as likely to come up from outside as inside, probably more. So that way of thinking about strategy as if it were a programmable game is completely wrong.

(08:19): You need to think about strategy as more of a dance. And that’s where this idea of imperfection comes in. So what you need to do is be curious. You need to gather data, you need to see things from multiple perspectives, including the perspective of people outside your industry. You shouldn’t be thinking about what your classic rival’s gonna do. You should be thinking about some rival you’ve never even thought of. And so you should anchor outside your own way of thinking about yourself and even find sources or solutions in, for example, you know, com competitive games like Kaggle where you use that in order to provide a new way of thinking about your own business. Right? So that’s imperfection

John Jantsch (09:01): It, it’s interesting though because as I listen to you described that, you know, I think a lot of people would talk about strategy as a science, and you are talking about strategy as an art. Maybe , you know, check off who was both a scientist and an artist said, the only difference is artists embrace uncertainty, . And I think that’s really where you’re headed, isn’t it? The uncertainty.

Charles Conn (09:20): And I wish, I wish I put that in the book. I mean, checkoff is one of my favorite authors, and I think that’s right. What we’re saying is that strategy is more like rugby than linear programming and more like an art than a science. And it’s about an orientation you take toward the future rather than trying to discern each corner, you know, like in a Tron game, right? Yeah,

John Jantsch (09:42): Right. . So, so you, like all good authors have a framework, I guess the six mindsets we might call them. And some of them I think are pretty obvious. I won’t have you unpack them all. I mean, pretty obvious where you’re going with them. But the one I really do want to hear about is Dragonfly Eye, just because it’s so interesting.

Charles Conn (10:01): . Yeah, so, so call it a framework if you like, but in some ways I’d like to think of it as an anti framework. Ah, okay.

John Jantsch (10:08): So you get, you, you’re the author, you get to .

Charles Conn (10:12): Well we, you know, I mean, you know, I went to business school and went to work at McKinsey and we were taught, right? Right. You know, Michael Porter structure conduct performance in McKinsey. And what all I’m saying is here’s a group of six things, you know, arrows you can put in your quiver. Yeah. Pull ’em out as you need ’em. Dragonfly eye is one we like a lot, and we use the analogy of a dragonfly, which has thousands of separate cells in their eyes and they collect information that’s much richer than the human eye can capture. We don’t know exactly how their dragonfly eye brains process information, but we do know that they can see far more spectrums of light and far more angles than we can. And we use that analogy to say, when you’re thinking about strategy, don’t just think about it from the perspective of yourself and your company, which is of course the very natural thing to do.

(11:05): Sure. Right. And you know, at a place like Patagonia, we’ve been going for 50 years. Of course you’re rooted in your own history. What we’re saying is step outside that, anchor outside that and say, force yourself to think about what does it look like from the perspective of one of your upstream suppliers or one of your downstream customers, or one of your existing rivals. Or perhaps think about it from the perspective of a potential rival. If you see the kind of strategic problems that you’re facing from a variety of perspectives, you’re much less likely to just drop into that rut that we’re all used to thinking about. Like, maybe we need to cut price, maybe we need to add another product color. I mean, that’s bullshit. That’s, you know, that’s the kind of old way of thinking. Maybe we need to blow ourselves up and think entirely differently. And of course, that’s what businesses find so difficult to do.

John Jantsch (12:00): Well, and I mean, I’ll give them a little bit of support. I mean be, because un unfortunately, sometimes what that requires is, and we’re gonna go, we’re gonna like get hit by our shareholders pretty hard for a while. I mean, we’re gonna, you know, we’re gonna have, you know, some real trouble explaining people why, you know, we see the future that they don’t. So That’s right. I mean, that’s probably what holds people back, right.

Charles Conn (12:22): Is, and, you know, and of course my, my friend who was, you know, my, my colleague in business school, clay Christensen, you know, wrote books and books about this. Yeah, yeah. You know, you can either choose to be the disruptor of yourself or you can let other people have a go at disrupting you. And it is difficult. And you face pressures from your shareholders, from your employees, from your mother who says, what are, you know, what are you thinking? But if you don’t do the job to rethink yourself. And it’s funny, cuz I was with Yvonne Melinda online j just on Friday, and Melinda made this point. She said, you know, we’ve been doing this since 1970, right? And every few years we reinvent what it means to be Patagonia, not the core ethic of serving outdoor athletes and doing it in a way that doesn’t damage the environment. But we rethink what it means to do those two things every few years. And if you don’t have that flexibility to do that, you end up being toast. Right. And especially in retail, think how many retailers are still around, right? When you were a kid, there was Montgomery War and Sears, where are they today?

John Jantsch (13:34): Kmart. Kmart,

Charles Conn (13:35): .

John Jantsch (13:36): Yeah.

Charles Conn (13:37): Kmart two. Kmart two. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that, you know, this is the challenge for all of us as the world gets faster and as technologies make it easier for other people to attack our business even when they didn’t grow up in our business. Right? That’s the, that’s what’s different, different about today.

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(15:55): So in a lot of ways, I mean, I think people would think about this idea that you’re explaining in maybe 10 year windows. Like where are we gonna have to be? And I mean, you’re really talking about realtime, right?

Charles Conn (16:05): , I’m talking about realtime. I’m talking about, you know, your planning horizon should be less than a year. Yeah. You, and you should be scanning the horizon for both opportunities and threats all the time. Think about the folks in who work in banks right now. I mean, what’s a bank gonna be in 10 years? Yeah. Who are the most interesting players in banking right now are not banks. Right? And look at players like Amazon. So in 2007, they had no position in consumer finance. Today they have a 24% share. Their payment system has a 24% share of transactions that are occurring in retail in the United States. That’s just a few years. They didn’t do it by acquiring a big consumer finance company or a bank. They did it by making small steps, investing in this little enterprise, hiring a team from this failed FinTech, you know, very small moves that were they, which they used to build up their capabilities and understand more, more concretely what was beginning to play out in consumer finance. They stepped themselves into a very strong position just as they had done in cloud computing and just as they’re doing again now in consumer healthcare. Right?

John Jantsch (17:25): Yeah. And there probably were failed bets along the way that didn’t work out, you know? But I think that’s the point you’re making, right? Is we have to be doing lots of events.

Charles Conn (17:32): Right? Many, the book starts with Amazon’s stepping in to consumer finance. And the four examples I give that they did from 2007 to 2015 were all failures. Yeah. They all looked like failures, but they weren’t failures. Each one of those was a learning step for Amazon. Each one of them helped build their assets and capabilities, helped build their team and the team skills and helped build the team’s understanding of the game field that was slowly or quickly unfolding.

John Jantsch (18:04): So for this realtime strategic problem solving leader of the future, , are there attributes that they either need to develop, embrace, or have that you think are going to serve them?

Charles Conn (18:17): Yeah. And you know, I’m gonna give you the most obvious of all, and it’s, and you’ll say it’s boring, but the very most important thing, because all of us humans are subject to incredible cognitive biases, his curiosity, right? And when you read, you know, Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow, he tells us all the ways, you know, with our giant brains, we actually use that processing power just to convince ourselves that our initial thought about something is correct. Instead of using that awesome processing power to really think the starting point of real thinking is to be curious. Yeah. The second one we’ve discussed already, which is to see things from other perspectives before you jump in. The third thing you can do is conduct your own experiments rather than relying on other people’s data. Right? And that’s, you know, in the internet we’ve learned, let’s do AB testing or a B C D testing before we hone in on something and then let’s make small steps where we learn things, right?

John Jantsch (19:18): Yeah. I think validate, validating our existing point of view, sort of a survival mechanism, isn’t it, ? It

Charles Conn (19:23): Is. And you know, and of course when you were, when things would jump out of the bush and eat you Yeah. You know, that that kind of instinct to grab onto the first thought, flee, made sense. And in the world we live in today, it doesn’t make sense. It’s counter, counter counterintuitive and unhelpful.

John Jantsch (19:41): So I don’t think for, by the way, the, that your answer of curiosity was boring. I think it’s, I think it’s uh, I think it’s a superpower quite frankly for, you know, a lot of the, the most innovative people out there and it’s something that’s hard for some people. So what do you think about the idea of, I mean there are a lot of, I I can just hear some companies saying, well, we’re just a entrenched boring industry. We’re just cranking along, you know, what’s so, so curiosity has died, right? ? Yeah. So how do you go out and buy that? How do you acquire that? How do you, like, do you just bring people in that are not from your industry in any way, shape, or form to go? Why are you doing that?

Charles Conn (20:15): So first of all, I do think it’s a great idea to bring people in from outside, but I think you can reinvent yourself from inside too. And one, you know, so first of all, there’s internal processes you can do, you know, you can bring your team together more frequently. You can get rid of hierarchy in your company. You can push decisions down further into the organization. And when you do strategy sessions, you can make sure that the most senior people speak last, not first . Right? I love breaking teams into, I love breaking teams into two and having them contest each other. The other thing you can do is keep part of your external research budget to literally source ideas from outside. So let me give you an example. The Nature Conservancy, which is a nonprofit, wanted to build a system for detecting what kind of fish are caught at sea are protected and which ones are okay to keep.

(21:08): And it, they didn’t have that capability inside. So they used Kegel to actually create a contest for artificial intelligence engine that would recognize Phish using onboard cameras. Mm. They didn’t source that from internally, they sourced it from externally. And a group of boffins, they paid prizes $150,000 and that $150,000 created a whole new system for, for saving protected fish at sea so that those fish could be thrown back and tuna was the species they were looking at. So even a boring old organization can source some of its most leading ideas from outside and by using its, you know, frontline people much more effectively inside.

John Jantsch (21:52): Yeah, I th I I think there’s probably no question that’s where I think some of those crowdsourcing things have become Yeah. So useful is that there’s no question there’s people out there that have solved the problem. They didn’t know you had, you know, , I mean, they were just something, they were tinkering with ,

Charles Conn (22:06): Right. And they weren’t thinking about Phish when they were inventing this camera based shape recognition. Yeah. Right. And they loved it. They said, oh look, this is a fin . And so they u they used that, that computer vision in order to recognize the characteristics of different fish in a boat that was bouncing up and down and it worked.

John Jantsch (22:26): Yeah. So as you were answering that last question, I wrote down the word culture, because that’s really what you’re talking about in a lot of ways that’s what has to change, right?

Charles Conn (22:35): Yeah. And in the companies we think of as nimble Yeah. You know, they’re just as subject to the same human frailties that you and I are. Yeah. They build in a, they build in cultures that lead to constant questioning of what they’re doing. So he may not be everyone’s favorite person, but when Elon Rusk, Elon Musk is running things at SpaceX, he’s constantly asking impossible questions and it creates a culture of asking impossible questions. Right? He says, we need a flight computer. Everyone says, great. And he says, we need a flight computer for $10,000. And everyone says that’s impossible. And he says, make it happen.

John Jantsch (23:14): . Right?

Charles Conn (23:15): That kind of thinking that leads to, you know, what you have in that case, which is the cost per kilogram of launch is 93% less than it was at NASA before he started SpaceX. That’s nuts. , you only do that by throwing out the window, the playbook, right? Yeah. Of nasa. And so we’re gonna have a launch of this giant stainless steel rocket and what does he tell us? It’s gonna be entertaining because he does, cuz he doesn’t know if it’s gonna work. And a number of the previous launches have failed. And of course if we don’t put people or animals on those right, when you’re still experimenting, that’s experimentation and scale and that’s pretty cool.

John Jantsch (23:53): Yeah. Yeah. Well, Charles, it was great having you stop by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. You want to tell people where, invite people, where they might find out more about your work and your latest book, how to Become an Imperfection.

Charles Conn (24:06): Sure. I mean, you can find that@theimperfections.org or bulletproof problem solving.com. And look, it isn’t, it isn’t really about the book, it’s really about this set of ideas. You know, in a time of, uh, fast moving change. We all need to be more mentally nimble and, you know, these are mindsets that’ll help us be that

John Jantsch (24:27): Awesome. Well, again, thanks so much for taking a few moments to stop by the podcast and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Charles Conn (24:33): Don, it was a real pleasure. Thanks so much.

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