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(00:48): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Ash Ali. And Hassan Kuba gonna have two guests today, their award-winning authors and entrepreneurs. And despite not going to University, Ash became a serial tech founder and the first marketing director of the Unicorn Startup Just Eat Hassan built a successful startup from his bedroom with nothing more than an online course and a yearning to escape the rat race. They’re now international best-selling authors, coaches and keynote speakers. And we’re gonna talk about their latest book, the Unfair Advantage, how You Already Have What It Takes to Succeed. So Ash and Hassan, welcome.

Hasan Kuba (01:32): Hello. Thank you. Thanks for having us.

John Jantsch (01:34): Hi. Awesome. So the book starts out with this premise, and we could probably do the whole show without me asking another question, but here it is. Life is fundamentally unfair. Who wants to take that dollop of hope?

Hasan Kuba (01:47): I’ll take it. I’ll take it going and so life is unfair. Yeah. That is the under underlying principle behind our book is that life is not fair. And sometimes when you get into self-development, like I did, and still I still enjoy a bit of self-development. Mo you know, you learned that you know, what you got in life is what you deserved. You know, you built the life that you’re living now. You designed it. Your decisions led to the moment you are in now and all these kinds of quotes and beliefs and mental models to make you take responsibility for your life, which is a very useful tool, but it’s limited because it’s not actually that accurate. So one of the ways to look at, well we talk about this in the book, is that it’s, it’s all about mental models. So there’s one extreme, which is to think that all success is based on hard work and, you know, merits.

(02:35): And the other extreme is to think it’s all luck and unearned. Mm-hmm. And the reality is squarely in the middle. Yeah. Right. There’s a lot of serendipity in life. There’s a lot of luck of births and genetic lotteries and there’s a lot of things that just happen because you were in the right place at the right time. Yeah. But at the same time, you can, you know, stack the deck in your favor. You can make the right decisions, you can be consistent in how you think, think and how you behave and the decisions you make to lead towards success. So it’s a mixture of both. Life is unfair and ultimately, you know, we’re so lucky and we should all be so grateful for everything that we have going for us. And at the same time, uh, we can also exert our own agency on the world. We can also take bear some responsibility. We can also take control of our lives to an extent.

John Jantsch (03:19): Yeah. Cuz it, it’s interesting. I mean, we all know people have had everything handed to them, all the funding, all the backing, all the mentors, all the, you know, whatever. And they’ve still found a way to piss it away, haven’t they? . So it really is kind of that combination.

Hasan Kuba (03:33): Exactly.

John Jantsch (03:34): So, so let’s maybe start out by defining, um, what an unfair maybe some examples of what you would call an unfair advantage that people tend to recognize.

Ash Ali (03:46): Yeah. So I mean, an unfair advantage is something that’s unique to you based on your circumstances and also based on your background and who you are as an individual. There’s so many books out there that talk about strengths, but what we do is talk about your strength, but also about yourself as an individual, as a unique person. So we talk about, you know, life is unfair and it’s not a level playing field, but sometimes when life is unfair and it’s not a level playing field, some people can grow up with a victim mindset and a victim type of thinking say, I didn’t have this, I didn’t have that. But actually what we say in the book is actually, how do you turn that around? How do you make that stuff that you, you felt was unfair growing up in poverty or growing up in an area that wasn’t great?

(04:26): How can you turn that around and make it part of your authentic story and use it to an advantage? So an example for me would be, I grew up with little money. And when I start companies now, and I know a lot of listeners are listening here who are run small businesses, when you don’t have a huge amount of money for marketing budgets, for example, I’m the perfect person to come in and work with you because I know how to be resourceful cause I had no money. Right? So my mindset is always based around being resourceful. That’s just an example of something that you could use, uh,

John Jantsch (04:53): Strip. But again, I, you know, to the flip side of that, I guess we all know people who had everything and should have made it. You know, there, we, we all probably know at least somebody, or at least you’ve read their story of somebody that sh never should have . You know, like you said, they didn’t have the education, they didn’t have the backing, they didn’t have the money. Yeah. They didn’t really have seemingly, you know, didn’t seem that smart, you know mm-hmm. , but, you know, they’ve, they’ve made themselves successful the way we defined that. So, you know, what are, you know, I guess to Hassan’s original point, it, it’s kind of somewhere in the middle, isn’t it?

Ash Ali (05:28): It is somewhere in the middle. It, it’s interesting because, you know, like I’ve got a daughter now who’s growing up in privilege and I look at her and I look at my life and think, okay, you know, does she have the fire in the belly? And what can we do to help her have the same mentality of working hard and trying to achieve things in life? And one of the things I found was that interestingly is that constraint does kind of foster creativity. And if you just live, give everything to your children, for example, straight away, then they’re not gonna, um, uh, feel grateful for it straight away. And unless they’ve worked for it. So con, sometimes having constraints, uh, does make you more resourceful and more creative. And that’s just an example of something we’re living in an abundant world now where everything is available quickly. You can audio your takeaway quickly, you can audio your cab quickly and you know, they’re growing up in a different environment compared to us where we had to wait for something, but we had to have some patience around something. So it’s understanding what constraint is and how to manage that, I suppose.

John Jantsch (06:24): Yeah. I I of course, it’s so cliche now, but you know, I like to tell even 30 year olds, you know, about uh, dial up, um, internet and, uh, . Yeah. Things of that nature. Can you, can you imagine that now, you know, it might take 10 minutes and we had to take turns, who could use it, right. Only one person could be on at a time and pretty crazy. So I think what would you classify or would you characterize this book as a business book or a self-help book?

Hasan Kuba (06:50): Yeah, good question. It really is in the middle because what we’ve done with our book is we’ve, so the origin of the book, let’s get into the origin. We did this book because we were getting pitched by loads of startup for funding and it was just like Shark Tank essentially. They’d come in and, and pitch us and we thought, what is the difference that makes a difference here? You know, when we confer between ourselves, we’re like, what is it with some people that we’re like, you know, even if we didn’t believe in them, they’re not gonna close out their funding ground. Nobody else is gonna believe in them and they’re gonna really struggle here. And what is that difference? And we start thinking about this and really diving into it and we decided to write this down, this idea of the unfair advantage. It’s essentially a sustainable competitive advantage for a big business.

(07:32): It’s kind of the type of thing Warren Buffet talks about in value investing. You want a business that has the economic modes, the defensibility that it’s gonna sustain. And it’s the same thing for individuals because at that early stage of a business, when you don’t yet have a product, even sometimes when you don’t yet have, um, customers, you don’t yet have traction in sales, how are you gonna judge it? Well, you’re gonna judge it by the team, by the co-founders. And when you’re judging it by the co-founders, that’s when you have to try and decide, okay, what have they got going for themselves? What do they have that’s gonna allow them to push through? Do they have a track record? Do they have something that gives you the idea that they’ll be able to get into this? Do they have the unfair advantages? Yeah. And essentially that was the idea behind the book. And that’s what made us think about like how we can help people to gain that kind of self-awareness. Yeah. To know what kind of business to go for, to know what kind of strategy to go for. Should you raise funding? Should you bootstrap? Who should you partner with? These are the kind of decisions we wanted to help people with at that early stage. So we’re just bringing it back to the individual. So that’s why it’s in between a business book and a self-development, cuz it’s about the early stages of a startup.

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(09:37): That’s DTM world slash workshops. So I think there are some unfair advantages that, that are pretty obvious that people could identify. But if I’m out there listening, you know, what are some of the, what are just some of the places that you go looking, I know you have a framework you call the Miles framework. So we can kind of go, you know, letter by letter for the acronym. Uh, but, but what are some of the places maybe that are less obvious that you’ve said, Hey, you know, these are unfair advantages that people don’t even realize they have?

Ash Ali (10:06): Yeah. So the Miles framework is, uh, it stands for money, intelligence, location, and luck education and expertise and status. And it sits on top of mindset. And we talked earlier about why it’s important for people to understand the unfair advantage in the context of business. Because business is all about people. And most investors invest in small startups and early stage startups because of the people, not because of the idea itself. It’s the founders themselves. And so if you can identify your unfair advantages and then amplify those in your pitch, in your message to hiring people to your cust or getting customers, it will help you get your early traction, which is what starts a business. So coming back to the Miles framework, it’s about understanding within each one of those miles frameworks in the each one of those acri, the letters, what you have that’s going for you.

(10:56): Right? And one of the big ones is insight. For example, when you’re starting a company, right? If you have insight into something that nobody else has and you are starting a business around, that’s a very powerful unfair advantage. And there’s so many case studies in our book around that, um, about specific insights around that. Another one is being in the right place at the right time, right the location. And look, you know, if can you find the right co-founder? Can you find the right, um, uh, customers who are close to you potentially who can, who can become customers straightaway? Status is another one. You know, your network. And here, you know, when you are starting a business, if you know how to raise money quickly and you have a network, that’s an unfair advantage. And if you need to go out to the market to raise money from ground zero and have nobody, no network, it’s much harder to do. Much harder to do. Right? And we know how that’s how investment generally works. So there’s lots of little examples in different places for different types of projects or businesses. It depends where you wanna apply the framework itself, whether it’s a project, whether it’s your career, whether it’s, uh, a business itself.

John Jantsch (11:54): Yeah. Let me, I wanna come back to insight in a minute and have you share some examples, uh, to, to help clarify that one. But let’s talk about luck. Some people, some, some people are purely lucky. I mean, they run into luck, right place, right time, like you said. But I would say a lot of entrepreneurs have come to the realization that they make their own luck. And that, that that’s almost something that’s earned as opposed to something that’s an unfair advantage. How would you respond to that notion?

Hasan Kuba (12:23): I I totally believe in making your own luck as well. So we talk about luck and we talk about the fact that it’s overlooked and luck exists. Hey, luck does exist, talent does exist. You know, that all these books has become trendy to say there’s no such thing as talent. Just work super hard and get the 10,000 hours in and, and that will be, that’s enough. These things exist. Tiger Woods was like, could swing a, could swing, a golf could swing a club before he could walk . Like, like these are the kinds of things that that is like pure talent. Oprah Winfrey was like giving speeches to whole congregations at church when she was three years old making. So these things exist, but making your luck also definitely exists. Yeah. We talk in the book about how you can actually increase your luck. There have been psychologists who’ve studied the phenomenon of people who think of themselves as lucky versus people who don’t.

(13:10): And how the fact that they think of themselves as lucky just makes them more proactive, makes them more observant to opportunities that come up. And it’s been literally proven in studies. So it’s quite interesting that you can make your own luck. We say put yourself out there more. Yeah. Increase your surface area to luck and maybe more lucky things will happen. So it’s essentially like rolling the dice, just keep rolling it. No one’s counting how many you’re throwing the dice, how many times you’re throwing the dice. If you keep rolling, you’re more likely to roll the double six.

John Jantsch (13:37): Yeah, I actually, I started my blog in 2003 that I talk about being in the right place at the right time. That was luck to spot that technology. But also it, you know, it led to my first book four years later, but that point I had also written a thousand blog posts. So , you know, I always talk about really that was a lucky decision on my part to go that route. But then I, I do think, you know, you, you have to, you, you can also then turn that luck into something that is very fruitful.

Ash Ali (14:04): Yeah,

Hasan Kuba (14:04): Absolutely.

John Jantsch (14:06): So what’s your unfair advantages? Yeah, let, I’ll let you both answer that one. Go on. For example, as you mentioned, you didn’t go to college, so we’re,

Ash Ali (14:17): Okay,

John Jantsch (14:17): I’ll stop the college degree from Oxford off the table, right?

Ash Ali (14:21): . Yeah, that is, that can be an unfair advantage if you know how to use it. Some people don’t know how to use that as well. You know, we see people coming to us, Andre like, oh yeah, I went to caught Oxford in Cambridge or wherever. And it, it’s just, I’ll say it’s normal for them, but actually that could be an unfair advantage if you know how to use it properly. Uh, an unfair advantage, you know, there’s several different things with strength. There can be double-edged swords as we call them, right? So having something and not having something, and we talked about constraint earlier on, I’ll go through it from my perspective, which is kind of like the double-edged sword version of it. And it has someone go through it from his perspective. So from my perspective, I had no money growing up. So now when I’m building startups, I’m really shrewd and very lean and I can build things very quickly and I’m very resourceful.

(15:01): And, and actually what it does, has done to me is made me more creative. So one of my high skills is creativity, um, intelligence, um, and insight. I have lots of insights with businesses cause I’m doing things all the time. I’m always taking action. So I’m seeing opportunities and getting insights and different things and intelligence. There’s different types of intelligence. You know, a lot of people said to me, Ash, you’re really cool. Uh, you’re the glue amongst your friends. So I’m good at bringing people together and doing things together, which is cool. And I like to be, I don’t like to be the smartest person in the room, you know, I’d rather not be the most intelligent person in the room, but I can learn from other people quickly. So as well as that’s the, the eyesight location and luck. You know, I was born in Birmingham, which is like the second biggest city in the uk, an automotive retail industry kind of community.

(15:41): And the tech industry was booming in London. So I moved to London at the age of 19. If I didn’t move, I wouldn’t have had the same opportunities, wouldn’t have been able to join companies like just eat and do the I P O and look the IPO o you know, how many companies IPO O far and for few between it once again. And there’s a luck factor behind that and the right timing of that. And then seeing how that would work out. Education, I didn’t work university so I didn’t feel entitled, you know, so that, that’s what made, that’s why I kind of hit everything and anything. And I built my expertise up in Dear Tomar. So I was, and, and the time when everyone wanted to know how to do SEO and online marketing, I was there. And then status, you know, like, you know, and your Rolodex of contacts, you know, like I didn’t know many people, but now I know a lots of people. So if I need to do anything now, for example, I can open my black book of contacts, LinkedIn network connections and make things happen because of my status of having connections that are built up over time. Yeah. So that’s become an unfair advantage.

John Jantsch (16:31): What’s interesting, as you said, you know, the degree from a prestigious school used to really mean a lot. It feels like in the, particularly in the entrepreneurial space, it’s more about what were you doing for your summer job, , you know, than what degree you got or your side hustle or whatever seems to actually hold more weight than, than, you know, cost. And I think a lot of it’s because people realize college is great for making connections. What they teach in a lot of, like a marketing course in college will have very little application to what it’s like to market in the real world. And so that, you know, that education, the actual learning classroom education is probably not that valuable.

Ash Ali (17:09): Yeah, I, I mean if you want to learn, so,

John Jantsch (17:11): So Hassan, how

Ash Ali (17:13): Then the fastest way to learn is reading blogs like yours, John. And if you wanna learn about marketing, you can learn a lot more from reading blogs and marketing books can get old very quickly, right? What happened, you know, some time ago. Yeah, yeah. Timing wise might not work now. So it’s keeping fresh and uh, up to date with knowledge. I think that’s really important. And we talk about this in the book about this, there’s three aspects of university, but I’ll let Hassan talk about the Miles’s favorite from his side and what, what his advantages are.

Hasan Kuba (17:39): Yep. Yeah. So, so for me, look, so it is, it’s easier to simplify to what is your unfair advantage, but the reality is we’ll have a set of unfair advantages and a unique set of them. And that’s why Ash goes through so many, well, you know, for Ash, I would definitely say his creativity is, is just one of the top things about him. And the fact that he just gives things a go, he just goes for it. So for me, I would say that it’s my ability to learn really fast. So I think I have that kind of the intelligence where I pick things up fast and then I’m able to communicate them. So one thing that really helped me to get my initial clients and start to develop and get referrals is the ability to build rapport and build trust very quickly. So I think that’s partly just from my ability to absorb information and knowledge in the space that’s so new.

(18:25): And like something I was, one of the main things I was doing was seo. I was doing branding and websites stuff, but SEO and getting people to the top of Googles was huge. And so the fact that I was able to explain it to local businesses, build connections with them, build trust, I think that massively helped me. So that was huge for me. And then you can go further back and just say, listen, I was born in Baghdad, Iraq, and I came to the UK in London when I was three years old with my family to escape the war and all of that. So I’m, my unfair advantage is we moved to, to the UK when I was a baby and I grew up here in London. If you imagine if I’d come when I was 20 years old, I’d have the thickest accent and I’d have so much difficulty in terms of, it’s just how I come across the status side of it in terms of building rapport, building trust. So this is so lucky. So you can kind of go into the genetic lottery of it all. You can go into where you grew up and what kind of schools you went to. You can go into your ability to skill, skill stack and build your skills and expertise and learn things quickly. So I think that learning side is kind of the massive piece for me.

John Jantsch (19:27): So, so I suspect is you’ve both gone out there and maybe given talks on this or or web done webinars on this, that, that, you know, ultimately somebody comes to you and says, look, this is great, but I don’t have any unfair advantages, you know, what do you say to that person that that feels, especially since mindset really sits on top of this, what do you say to that person that, that has that mindset?

Hasan Kuba (19:52): So I would say that essentially this idea and ashes touched on it, this idea of double-edged swords, what you think is a disadvantage, you can turn into an advantage. And I’ll give you an easy one. So we have a few examples in the book of people who had a kind of a classic disadvantage. So a classic disadvantage is a woman entrepreneur, right? So a woman founder, the example of Sarah Blakely, founder of Spanx. Mm-hmm. . Now if you think about her, what was her unfair advantage? Okay, well it was tough. She had no idea about how to raise funding. Nobody would believe in her. She had no connections in that space, et cetera. But what did she have? She had an amazing insight into a problem based on her status as a woman, which is that this idea of like shape wear and, and spanks what turned out to be spanks, she would cut off the feet off tights.

(20:40): Like man wouldn’t have come up with that. wouldn’t have had that insight. The same with Tristan Walker, who’s another example in the book. He’s a, he grew up in the projects in, I think it was the Bronx maybe, or if I’m remembering correctly, Queens actually the queens in New York. And really poor, his dad was murdered when he was young. But hey, he was smart. He got scholarships, he got into good schools. He spent a long time thinking about what his big idea is. In the end, his insight was that black men need a different shaving system than other people do because they have more ingrown hairs. And so he developed this single blade shaving system. He used different rappers who also from his location, so the rapper Nas grew up also in Queens, and then he promoted his brand and then eventually he was acquired by Proctor and Gamble for 30 million.

(21:27): So it’s like what seems like a disadvantage you can use to your advantage if you grew up poor. Then you have an insight into how poor people live, what, what needs they have, what mass market products you might be able to create, let’s say. Or if you grew up as whatever, like you grew up from another country, or you’re learning languages or your, there’s all these different aspects to everything. So it’s all about your mindset. If you have a growth mindset, and we call, we talk about in the book the growth, uh, the reality growth mindset, because we wanna root it in some real reality, then you can grow and you can turn what seems like a disadvantage into an advantage. And listen, if you’re listening to this podcast, if you’re able to read this book, you probably have a lot to be grateful for. So you just need to kind of do a sort of an audit. And gratitude is one of the underlying themes of our book.

John Jantsch (22:13): Yeah. And it’s interesting too because as we grow up a lot of the things that drive our parents or teachers crazy, you know, ultimately come out as an advantage, you know, we were told they were a negative. For example, I, you know, I, my parents used to always joke about how curious I was and always getting into things because I had an teacher, same thing. You know, I was told for a long time that that was a problem that has served me extremely well in my professional life. And I think that’s, uh, sometimes we just have to overcome, you know, the, what, what society has told us is a negative, don’t we?

Ash Ali (22:43): Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. When people focus on your weaknesses more than your strengths, that’s when you start to misunderstand really what your unfair advantage is. Because we’ve all got strengths. And what we, the idea of the premise for the book is to double down on your strengths rather than focus too much on your weaknesses and then plug those gaps where you can appropriately and understand that we work in teams and people. It’s about businesses, about people. So it’s not just about you as an individual.

John Jantsch (23:09): Yeah. So, so Ash, uh, Hassan, where, tell people where they can find more of you, more of the work you’re doing, and obviously a grab a copy of the unfair advantage.

Hasan Kuba (23:19): Yeah. We’re all, all, all over social media. So I’m at Startup Hassan. Uh, Hassan is spelled with one s and Ash is, is it Ash Ali, uk Ash, for most of your socials you can find us and our website is the unfair academy.com.

John Jantsch (23:33): Awesome. And the book is, will be available in, I, I don’t believe there’s an audio version. Is there? There

Hasan Kuba (23:39): There

John Jantsch (23:39): Is, yeah, there is. Okay. So an audio and then, uh, in e ebook format as well as, uh, hard cover and available. Mm-hmm. depend upon when you’re listening to this available everywhere that you buy books.

Hasan Kuba (23:50): Yeah, it’s available now cuz it’s at the time of recording. It’ll be released tomorrow. So it’ll be available by time comes,

John Jantsch (23:56): And I should have mentioned this, but the book has been awarded. I don’t have it written here. Tell me the best business book in the UK in 2021 or something. You can do it better than I just did. Tell me, tell me what the award was.

Hasan Kuba (24:08): . So, so we were surprised and happy to learn that we’d won our category of the startup category of the business book awards. Yeah. And then it was like 12 different categories and then it turned out we’d won the whole thing as well over all the categories. So we’d won the business book of the year 2021. It was actually, it’s based in the uk but it’s an international award as well. The only country that the book hasn’t come out yet until now is in the US and Canada in North America. So yeah, it’s done really well. It’s really popular on Good Reads, it’s on YouTube, it a lot viral videos on YouTube’s took, summarizing it. So if you want to check it out a bit further, you can see some summaries on YouTube, you can read all the reviews. It’s, it’s doing, it’s thankfully spreading by word of mouth cause people are loving it.

John Jantsch (24:53): Yeah. Awesome. Well thanks so much for stopping by the the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast and hopefully we’ll run into you both, somewhere out there on the road.

Hasan Kuba (25:00): Thank you John. Thank you John. And big fans of Duct Tape Marketing, by the way, .

John Jantsch (25:03): Appreciate that. Thanks so much. 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. Co check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Nudge, hosted by Phil Agnew. It’s brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. You can learn the science behind great marketing with bite size 20 minute episodes, packed with practical advice from world-class marketers and behavioral scientists. And it’s not always about marketing. Great episode. Recently you learned the surprising truths about and tips for beating, stress and anxiety. Sounds like a great program, doesn’t it? Listen to Nudge wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is James Ellis. He’s a principal of Employer Brand Labs in Chicago, is a born employer branding nerd whose mission is to create a million employer brand thinkers. He’s an author of keynote speaker, practitioner, and podcaster with a wealth of experience across multiple industries for almost a decade. We’re gonna talk about, you guessed it, employee branding, employer branding. James, welcome to the show.

James Ellis (01:18): Thanks so much for having me, John. I’m thrilled to be here. So

John Jantsch (01:21): This is one of those topics that we probably shouldn’t have to, but we better start with what is in fact employer branding, and then we can go into why it matters.

James Ellis (01:29): No, I honestly, the employer brand has been long run long enough, but it’s still vaguely understood that I watched lots of people try and sell it. And I’m like, until you define it, that’s why I feel like you’re just grabbing me by the ankles and trying to shake the change outta my pocket. Classic if such a thing could be said, the classic definition employer brand is it is the individual perception, meaning it’s in your head. It’s in my head. But they’re different of what is it like to work at Company X based on touchpoints and experiences, some of which happened before the recruiting and job search process. Some of happens during and some happens after. So it is that individual perceptions. So what I think it’s like to work at Nike and what you think it’s like to work at Nike are, can be different, but they can both be. Right. And so influencing those perceptions is the job of employer brand

John Jantsch (02:15): In, let’s just go right into marketing, cuz that’s all I know. the, you know, when you think about it, uh, people wrestle to differentiate themselves with a marketing message, right? And quite often it’s about our thing does this, or, you know, here are the benefits. But would you go as far as saying that as a primary marketing message, talking about what a great team you have, what great people , how great people like to work. There is really not a bad attraction message for customers either, is it?

James Ellis (02:44): I don’t know. So if I go to a, if I pick a flight, they’re all Boeing through air buses. They’re all working the same routes. They’re all working. I mean, they’re all flying outta O’Hare. So what’s the difference? Well, gosh, the only difference is the people working there. So the difference between a delta and a, a frontier and a united is the almost exclusively a function of the people working there. So if you choose a certain kind of person they embody, they are owning that sense of what it’s like to work here. And that creates the experience of what it’s like to be a customer on that side. Now, airlines are an obvious example, but it’s true. The, any company you work at or any company you’re a consumer at, it’s good to know who works there. It’s good to know that they’re friendly faces, that they’re happy, that they’re, you think they do better work, you think they’re delivering a better product, right?

(03:29): Right. There is an inter intersection for the longest time employer brand has lived over in this, what I will lovingly refer to as the recruiting and talent acquisition ghetto. It’s the way of saying, Hey, let’s write a better job posting, or, Hey, let’s make some Glassdoor scores better. What employer brand is, when you really get down to it, it’s the human face of the marketing side. Marketing’s gonna talk about products, it’s gonna talk about features, it’s gonna talk about position, you know, your classic five Ps, four Ps, however you learned it, right? But nobody talks about the people. That’s the sixth p. And if employer brand can kind of own and drive that message and say, look, yes, it’s a great product. Yes, it’s gonna solve your problems and aren’t these wonderful people who make it, it just further reinforces why someone should

John Jantsch (04:09): Buy it. I tell people it’s, it’s how people actually, it’s how customers and prospects are experiencing your brand or company. Yeah. Because that’s, it’s, you know, the person answers the phone, greets ’em at the door, you know, sells ’em something. I mean, that’s their perception of the company.

James Ellis (04:24): Yeah. Target thinks that what it sells is products at a low price. What it really sells is a decent experience of that where I don’t feel bad about myself because those people seem like they’re happy wearing those red shirts and they’re doing their thing. Like, okay, great. I feel better about it than I would and say another company where it just feels like everybody’s, oh, this is the drudgery job.

John Jantsch (04:42): Yeah. All right. So now we’ve brought complete clarity to what it is. So let’s talk about how somebody, like what are the components of, what are the mechanics? Like, how does somebody need to start thinking about creating, but then also communicating in a positive employer brand?

James Ellis (04:58): Yeah. Employer brand has two sides of the same coin. It is that definition, that distillation of what is this brand? What is the message we’re going to market with? But it’s also the ongoing seemingly perpetual means of activating and localizing that brand. So to build a brand, my model is there are four kind of legs of the stool. There is what is the stand or the actual experience of a employee working there, right? Mm-hmm. not what I want to be true, but what do they say, right? Yeah. Two is what is the leadership saying and where is the company going? You know? Right. They have a sense that leadership’s job is something future facing. So where is the company going? Three, what is an employee want in a job? Right? Some people want stability, some people want status. Some people want big old sacks of cash.

(05:42): Everybody’s motivated by different things. So what does your audience actually care about? And then what is the relative competitive set, right? Yeah. If you’re talking, if you’re trying to hire a product manager and a product manager can work almost anywhere, well, gosh, they have a different kind of, you know, set of competitors than say, a nurse who’s only gonna work in a hospital, a clinic, or a doctor’s office. So understanding those four things brings your employer brand into pretty clear clarity, right? There’s a little creative work that happens to kind of distill it and kind of put a bow on it to make it like, oh wait, that’s really tight. But those are the four ideas that you have to wrestle with.

John Jantsch (06:16): Well, you make a great point too about the competitiveness of the industry too. I mean, a lot of times people will think, oh, our industry is so competitive, we gotta have that extra edge, right? But where I like to go is, okay, the remodeling industry or the tree service industry, right? This is a huge edge , right? Mm-hmm. To stand out, because anybody who comes into always like to pick on home services, anybody who’s coming into my home, the exper, I kind of figured they got wrenches, they got trucks, they can do the work, but the experience is the huge factor for

James Ellis (06:48): Me. Yeah, yeah. The plumber you hire, they all have the same wrenches, they all have the same hammers. It’s what you do and how you do it that really makes that experience real.

John Jantsch (06:57): Yeah. And I, you know, I’m probably hypersensitive, you know, like I’m going with companies because I like their follow up process, you know? I mean, it’s like, yeah, they get it if they’re doing that thing, right, , you know, they’re probably gonna do the other stuff, right, too, maybe. Why? Exactly.

James Ellis (07:08): But there, there’s a swing in like, you know, if you’ve talked to B2B marketers, it’s always about, it’s not b2b, it’s p2p, it’s person to person. Yeah. Consumer marketing has not quite got that message that it’s a person buying and it’s a person selling, and they need to adopt some of those lessons as

John Jantsch (07:22): Well. Yeah. Just go read the reviews on every plumber. It’s Russ, rusty fixed my boiler. He was amazing. They don’t even mention the company, right? It’s the person that came in.

James Ellis (07:30): Yeah, we just did our kitchen and this guy lived in my house for three weeks. I mean, it’s like this. They lived here. So yeah, I, it’s the experience of the human.

John Jantsch (07:37): Yeah. So let’s use the culture word then, because you know, all of the employer branding initiatives in the world are not really going to move the needle if people don’t think it’s a great place to work, right? I mean, so yeah, how do you, I mean, they’re really one and the same in a lot of ways. One is maybe just the communication of in an outward way, right?

James Ellis (07:59): Yeah. I always kind of get weirded out when this conversation starts because everybody kinda goes, oh, well I know what brand is, I know what culture is, and therefore I’m equating the two. It’s like, yeah, in a shorthand that works. Yeah. But the truth is, I’m a big believer that there’s a lid for every pot that the company that I wanna work with and I would adore working with, is not the company you wanna work with. And that’s not, I’m good, you’re a bad, or vice versa. It’s simply what we want is different than as humans. That’s completely natural. We look at, you know, use the stories that come out. Goldman Sachs, they’re working their junior analysts to a hundred hours a week, and oh my God, the calamity. And even inside my industry was like, oh, this is gonna really impact their employer brand, and it won’t.

(08:37): Because the truth is every single person hired for that job knew the workload that they were taking on, but they also knew the reward of taking that workload on. They made a conscious and very informed choice to do that thing, right? You’re gonna take my twenties, I’m never gonna see my parents for 12 years. That’s fine, because I’m never gonna see the inside of a coach cabin on an airplane ever again. Right? That’s the trade off you’re making now for someone working at state government, that sounds hellacious, but their motivations are completely different. They love the idea that at five o’clock they close their laptop, and I’m done for the day. I can go do this other thing and have this life. They’re motivated by different things. Is one job better than another? No, and that’s the problem. Everybody is really focused on this very linear sense of good versus bad, right?

(09:22): Glassdoor has said, this is your score, and therefore that is your employee brand. We’ve heard things like, this is your culture, therefore that’s your employee brand. It focuses too linearly In the end, you might want status, you might want opportunity, you might want op autonomy, you might want, there’s like nine core human motivations that move us to pick a job. The problem is, candidates don’t realize that they are o motivated by that. But two companies need to understand that this is, they care about who they bring in and the motivations they have. If you are a company of sharks where com competition and backstabbing and win at any cost is the norm, they should be crystal clear about that so that the accidental sheep doesn’t wander in and get murdered in the, you know, feel the sharks. And I know I’m cross-referencing land and and sea animals here, but

John Jantsch (10:07): There’s a lot of mixed metaphors

James Ellis (10:08): Going on yet. That’s right. That sounds like what I do. . But the opposite is true, right? If you’re a company where collaboration and best idea wins and supporting one another, how you want to do business, hiring a shark is just a horrible idea. So there is a lid, furry pot. The job is to communicate what does that mean in a way that’s meaningful and credible.

John Jantsch (10:26): You know, that’s a really great point because I think some people, rather than owning who they are, actually try to say, no, here’s who we should be. And that’s, you know, regardless of what you’re doing, , that’s a recipe for disaster, isn’t

James Ellis (10:37): It? Yeah. You see these lists of these are the best places to work, and you’re like, oh, we’re just like that. Like, no, you’re not. Otherwise you’d be on that list, wouldn’t you? But okay, that’s neither here

John Jantsch (10:45): Nor there. Are you an agency owner, consultant or coach that works with business owners? Then I want to talk to you about adding a new revenue stream to your business that will completely change how you work with clients. For the first time ever, you can license and use the Duct Tape marketing system and methodology in your business through an upcoming three day virtual workshop. Give us three days and you’ll walk away with a complete system that changes how you think about your agency’s growth. The Duct Tape Marketing System is a turnkey set of processes for installing a marketing system that starts with strategy and moves to long-term retainer implementation engagements. We’ve developed a system by successfully working with thousands of businesses. Now you can bring it to your agency and benefit from all the tools, templates, systems, and processes we’ve developed to find out when our next workshop is being held, visit dtm.world/workshop. That’s DTM world slash workshop. All right, so now I’m the boss, and James has come to sell me on this idea of employer branding. And so I’m going, going to say, how do I measure this? What’s C R o? Roi, right?

James Ellis (11:57): That is,

John Jantsch (11:58): I’m the first person that’s ever asked you

James Ellis (12:00): That. Yeah, that’s true. True. You, congratulations, you’ve invented that question. The problem is, it’s the wrong question. You don’t really ask classic branders that what you say is, can you focus our message so that it resonates and connects with the right audience? If you’re selling planes, you’re not like, does my mom know? Does my mom wanna buy our planes? That’s probably not a likely audience for you. However, our CEOs wanting to buy your planes. Okay, that’s really interesting. Will they buy your planes? Well, that’s a salesperson’s job. So branding it as a measurement function is really hard to do. What I would say is that when you’re thinking about employer brand, what you’re really trying to do is make the right people want to work for you. It’s not about more applications, it’s not about volume. And here is where I get into trouble talking to an actual marketer, marketing, and I say this non pejoratively, very positively.

(12:47): Marketing worships at the temple of more, they want more eyeballs and more shelf space and more wallet space and more impressions. And more and more, everything is a function of more employer brand is probably the only aspect of marketing where quality is better than quantity. And I say that and every marketer goes, I like quality too. You’re like, in the end, I have the one job and I can only give it to one person. So my job isn’t to give it to a hundred people. My job is to give it to the best person. That is how I measure. And so really good employer brands should be measured on quality. Are you attracting better quality talent? Are you attracting more people who are potential award winners, or the people who are gonna be the rock stars of your industry? If you are employer branding is doing that job, getting a million people to apply for your job is how you get fired, right? You sell a million, anything you’re gonna get employee of the month, you get a million applicants, you’re getting fired

John Jantsch (13:38): . So how does somebody, you know, we talked off air a little bit, like should this be in the marketing department? Is it in hr? You know, there’s no question that recruiting anybody, you know, showcasing how your company is different. I mean, those are marketing functions, but so, so how are companies wrestling with this aspect, which maybe is, well not maybe has always been there, but now has kind of got a bright light on it and marrying those into like, well, here’s what our overall brand is as well.

James Ellis (14:09): Yeah. Most companies start employer brand as kind of a pilot project. And it’s usually sitting in the recruiting side, Hey, we gotta, why don’t we have an Instagram channel? Hey, why don’t we put some content on LinkedIn? Hey, let’s make a video. Right? They have that pilot, right? Right. They start it, they kind of go, oh, this worked. What if we got serious about it? And they have a pretty clear maturity model of how this works, right? They specify and they get specialists who write caught it and build videos and all that stuff. And we build advocacy who integrate it throughout the entire company. The ideal of all this, the goal of the platonic ideal of what employer brand should be is that the company has one brand. And that, yeah, it’s a lens through which consumers look through or consumer marketing looks through through it to talk to consumers.

(14:52): Investor relations looks through it to talk to their investors. And employer brand looks to see what the candidates want. And so it’s the same brand. And when you see it as a single brand, one, the conversation of where should it live kind of gets a little, it doesn’t really matter. You know, we all have a, you know, if we’re all looking at the same thing, it really makes things easier. But once you’re all looking at that same lens, the work employer brand does, makes consumer marketing better. The work consumer marketing does, makes employer brand better, and therefore they should be integrated. They should talk to each other. Do they need to live side by side? Ah, equivalent on that.

John Jantsch (15:27): So when you talked about attracting talent, there are plenty of surveys, at least that I’ve read, that talk about people. People will, you know, take far less money to work in a place that they’re happy to, you know, work in a place that probably does focus on creating a great employer brand. So would you ever use that type of argument to get the roi, to get these sort of practical nature of this?

James Ellis (15:50): There’s plenty of evidence and research that shows a bad brand. You have to pay a premium to bring in talent that matters. Yeah. That is just, you know, no one wants to work at Bob’s filling house of whatever. You gotta pay 20, 30, 50% more to get that person to even consider you because it’s added risk to them, right? That logo is now on their resume forever. And so that’s a burden, huh? At the same time, I know incredibly smart and talented people who teach, I know incredibly smart and talented people who work at nonprofits who’ve made a very clear decision to say, look, I’ll lose 20, 30% of my income because I’m doing a thing that matters to me. Yeah. So when we think about the phrase evp, everybody forgets the wor middle word, which is value. So what do people value? Okay, yeah.

(16:29): Everybody likes money. Let’s be fair. It’s America. It’s wherever you are. Capitalism works. It’s o not the only conversation, right? If you have to, if you’re, are you choosing Goldman Sachs or you’re working a hundred to 110 hours a week where you’re making all this money, that’s a value transaction. People choose to say, I’m gonna have work 40, 50 hours a week to get this kind of work-life balance. Some people will burn themselves out working for a mission that matters to them, right? Yeah. You look at everybody who works at SpaceX, they’re not there because the management style is so great. They’re there cuz they’re trying to go to Mars and what other companies go into Mars. If that’s what you care about, that’s where you go. It’s the end of that list. So getting a better sense of what is my value offering is really where the conversation happens.

(17:11): The problem is, in most recruiting and candidate experiences, when you think about being a candidate, you hear, oh, we’re a great company, we’re very innovative, we do this, we have this, we do. You get all these claims, and I love talking to marketers cause I can use the word claims with, and you get what I’m saying. Recruiters go, Hey, wait a second, I meant that. But you get all these claims and you’re like, that’s great, but none of them are provable. They’re all completely subjective saying, you are very innovative, it’s easy to do, right? I just did it, but when I show up and you give me a four year old Dell laptop and say, this is your computer from now on, I’m like, whoa, time out. What happened? Innovative. Well I meant this. And suddenly you understand how, how subjective, it’s, so if you look at the entire experience of getting a job, you realize there’s only a handful of non-subjective points being made.

(17:56): And the most important one is salary. Because if you say you’re gonna make a hundred thousand dollars and that you hire that person and you pay them 90,000, that’s called fraud. In fact, it’s technical felony fraud, and people go to jail for that stuff. And you don’t wanna do that. Saying you’re innovative is just some BS you just get to spit out. So in recruiting, the job is to say, if you focus on a non-objective value, if you focus on the subjective value, we have status work, left balance, innovation, autonomy, whatever it is, my rule of thumb is you have to prove it 10 times harder than an objective value. Right? The objective value being, Hey, what’s my title? Hey, what’s my start date? What’s the bonus structure? When do I get a review? That’s pretty hard and fast saying, this is a great place for families to work. Anybody can say that you gotta work real hard for me to go, oh, you, I, that’s true. That must be true. And that’s where the value conversation needs to happen.

John Jantsch (18:50): Yeah. That that’s where, you know, repeated stories demonstrate . That value has really kind of come to play. You know, one point that you made that, you know, as marketers, I’m constantly telling people, you got a narrow focus on who’s an ideal client, and that means you have to tell some people they’re not. Yes. An ideal client. And I think I, I think the same probably holds true here to a degree that you know, if you are X, Y, Z, or if you are looking for X, Y, and Z we’re probably not the place for you. Would you suggest people could go that far?

James Ellis (19:16): Ab No, actually there’s that. That’s a complete tenant of what employer brand is. Your job is not attractive to everybody. In fact, if you really looked at it, you only need to hire, let’s pretend you’re a good concise company. You only need to hire about a thousand people at most. You need to get a hundred thousand people to be really interested enough to work for you that they apply. Okay, a hundred thousand people relative to 8 billion people on the planet. That’s a really low percentage, which means you really only need to be engaging and interesting to 0.001% of all the audience you could be talking to. And once you realize that, you start to go, okay, so I don’t need to make these grand claims that we’re a world beating company, that we’re the greatest company, that we offer the best in class, blah, blah, blah.

(19:57): But I realize who I’m trying to reach. And that means I can start to understand what they care about and suddenly I can put messages out that only they care about, right? If I’m trying to hire working mothers. And that’s a really broad spectrum, but at the same time, I don’t know any companies who say we’re trying to hire working mothers because they are really good at kind of balancing work life. They’re really good at getting things done, they’re really good at managing expectations. They’re really good at talking to customers. There’s a whole narrative about this particular audience would be great for us. So in order to attract, then you have to talk about the things they care about in the way they care about them. So you talk about mother’s rooms, you talk about leave, you talk about balance, you talk about education spending, you talk about all this stuff that a non-working mother might not care about, but you don’t care. You’re trying to focus on this audience. The more you specify and the more you segment, the more specific you can get can get about what they care about. And suddenly you’re not just any company talking, which is every company, but you’re a very interesting company because you’re speaking their particular language.

John Jantsch (20:56): Yeah. So key there is understand what that language is. Well absolutely. I’m getting tired of asking this question, but you know, especially anytime that it comes to people conversations, what has virtual remote work from home done to this dynamic?

James Ellis (21:10): Well, first off, it’s, it just, it changes the math, right? It used to be, well, I’m a hospital or I’m a small startup and I’m in Chicago. You draw a circle on the map, those are the people I can hire. It’s real simple. But suddenly that circle got, went, got erased where it has holes in it. Certainly even companies who I’ve engaged with, where they’re very focused on, you have to come in the last three years, they’ve really said, okay, there’s talent out there that we normally wouldn’t say yes to, but let’s have a conversation. And having to deal with that kind of model and realizing that good talent can bring in good quality work, even if they’re a thousand miles away, has changed the conversation internally in leadership. I know there’s a push to say, let’s bring ’em in, let’s bring ’em in, let’s bring ’em in.

(21:52): That’s a reaction. That is a mm-hmm jean jerk reaction to say, I liked it the way it used to be. I understood that world. Let’s go back there. But I’m pretty sure that’s not how change usually works. It usually just keeps going forward. So this is a, just from a math point of view, it matters at the same time just saying we are a fully in-house work environment. We are a fully hybrid work environment. We are a zero. We are a fully remote work environment that plants massive flags to people saying this is, it shapes their perception of what it’s like to work there. You look at an automatic where there’re completely remote work, there is no office make, make your own office that says volumes about what it’s like to work there relative to a bank that says, no, no, a hundred percent everybody shows up.

(22:38): You wear a suit, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That says a lot. Does it say all of it? Absolutely not. But it does frame the conversation. And what goes back to that sense of competition. If you’re trying to hire a developer and you’re a bank, you have to know that developer is also looking at automatic going, I could work at a fully remote wear, wear my pajamas every single day, do amazing work at midnight kind of thing. Or I have to go to this bank and dress up in a suit and what’s a tie? What that, I sounds like a word, but I don’t know what that word is. Like that you have to explain why that’s good for them. And that kind of focus really changes the math on who you talk to, what you talk about and what they care about.

John Jantsch (23:16): Speaking with James Ellis about employer branding, James, do you want to invite people to connect with you somewhere or find out more about your work?

James Ellis (23:23): Absolutely. You can find me employer brand labs.com, but really I run a, oh, a newsletter. It’s free, it’s really designed, you know, you mentioned my mission of getting a million employer brand thinkers, right? This is how I’m trying to get recruiters, marketers, HR VPs to say, oh, there’s a heart of employer brand that I can use and I can leverage. And that’s where I would invite them to go. So you go to employer brand headlines.dot com or just Google employer brand Headlights. It’s a free newsletter. I, it’s a lot of great content every single week.

John Jantsch (23:49): Awesome. Well, again, thanks for taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast and uh, hopefully we will run into you soon, one of these days out there on the road.

James Ellis (23:56): Thanks so much, John. This has been great.

John Jantsch (23:58): Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @ marketingassessment.co. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Nudge, hosted by Phil Agnew. It’s brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. You can learn the science behind great marketing with bite size 20 minute episodes packed with practical advice from world-class marketers and behavioral scientists. And it’s not always about marketing. Great episode. Recently you learned the surprising truths about and tips for beating, stress and anxiety. Sounds like a great program, doesn’t it? Listen to Nudge wherever you get your podcasts.

(00:47): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Robert Glazer. He is the founder and chairman of the Board of Acceleration Partners, a global partner marketing agency, and the recipient of numerous industry and company culture awards, including Glassdoor’s Employees Choice Awards two years in a row. He’s the author of the Inspirational Newsletter Friday Forward and the number one Wall Street Journal, USA Today and international bestselling author, five books I think you’ve been on for Elevate for Friday forward. We’re gonna talk about his latest book, elevate Your Team, empower Your Team to reach their full potential and build a business that builds leaders. So Robert, welcome back to the show.

Robert Glazer (01:33): Thanks John. I see you again and

John Jantsch (01:35): The dog barked on cue. Yeah,

Robert Glazer (01:37): That’s perfect. Right, right, right, right on cue. Yeah,

John Jantsch (01:39): , the dog is happy to the, you’re back on as

Robert Glazer (01:42): Well, . And he didn’t even hear you say it whole lot . You saw the mailman.

John Jantsch (01:47): Absolutely. So, so would you characterize this as sort of the new generation of leadership, you know, books or new, you know, leadership training? I mean that it’s kind of out with the old sort of hierarchical leadership?

Robert Glazer (02:00): Yeah, yeah. I think I talked a little bit about a new leadership playbook. I think this transition has been happening for some time. I think it’s been masked the last couple years with sort of high growth, low interest rate, you know, super stimulus kind of company unicorn, but command and control died in the military, uh, a long time ago. And now with a societal level of burnout that we’re seeing. I just don’t see how the old playbook is going to work for building an organization that that requires constantly swapping people out, going forward.

John Jantsch (02:35): Well, and I mean a couple dynamics of course that make the news every day, people are struggling to find people, period. People are leaving jobs that are not fulfilling because the last couple years haven’t been very fulfilling in some cases. And so, I mean, do changes like that in the workplace that are happening right now? I mean, is that something that you see as a trend going forward or is that really this little bubble that we’re in for a few years?

Robert Glazer (03:01): We’ve had a lot of ups and downs, you know, power dynamic between employer and plan. And it depends on what industry you’re in, right? If you’re in hospitality or travel or whatever, you have all the power in the world. If you’re in digital marketing and e-commerce right now, it’s not pretty. Yeah. So you probably don’t want to quiet quit, but I just think we’re missing, I think we’re missing the opportunity to use businesses as a way to grow human beings, grow them as leaders and you know, talk about this concept of capacity building, but you know, work on things that help poop improve people both in the business outside the business. And I, you know, I’m very sort of, I, there, there’s camps, right? There’s the oh results and then people like I, I’m in the middle. Like I, I think you should really try to take care of and grow your people, but also you need results.

(03:45): You need performance and you can’t look, you know, the other way at those things. And a lot of those cases, that’s someone who’s just doing something that they shouldn’t be doing or is doing the wrong thing and you’re not helping them either. So I think that with work from home and all these changes, I just don’t, I don’t, I’ve always said like, I don’t think you, like imagine the person who wakes up at home and is super groggy and tired and bad with money and sucks at per prioritization and they just kind of show up as a different person at work five minutes later. I don’t think that’s the case. So I think it’s like you’re gonna, if you wanna work on , if you wanna have people be better at prioritization and time management and their health and kind of have energy and doing a lot of these things, like, that actually kind of needs to be a holistic approach

John Jantsch (04:29): When you start talking about a holistic, I was gonna ask you about remote, because obviously that’s changed, you know, everybody’s leadership, you know, it’s like I don’t ever see my team now, right? Yeah. You know, how do I lead them? But how, how central is the idea of building trust? First? I’m gonna envision somebody reading your book and going, this is what we’re gonna do. But we’ve never been that , you know, before. I mean, so how essential if I’m gonna actually like go to Robert and say, I’m gonna help you achieve all of your dreams both in work and out outside of work and you know, it’s like what Yeah. You know, how essential is it to build trust first?

Robert Glazer (05:04): I like it. I talk about this a lot. I see way too many leaders managed to the exception . Yeah. They, you know, if something’s gonna happen 99 out of a hundred times, like harping on the one that it went in one direction, it’s actually a terrible thing to do. Like Right. Don’t make something goes a certain way 90% of the time. Like make that decision all the time and don’t worry about the 10%. So I’m a big believer in you give trust first, but like one, once trust is broken, it cannot be repaired. Mm-hmm. . So, so I think a lot of people point out to the one person who abused something or otherwise, but if that’s your default approach is not to trust all of your people because of one person that acted in a way, like it kind of is a really bad assumption. But I, so, so I think it’s better to set a threshold, particularly in a remote or otherwise that like, look, we trust you and we expect you act like an adult, but you know, when we find out you were working two jobs or you find out you abused that trust, it’s hard to, to get that back.

John Jantsch (05:57): Yeah. I know the answer to this, but I want to hear how you answer this , you know, how key, cuz one of the underpinnings of this is that we’re gonna help others succeed. Like we’re gonna lift them up. Whereas a lot of people are like, these people are here to help me succeed. So, you know, how important is it to check that ego is to gain a level of self-awareness that you’re doing that, you know, before you can even start down this path?

Robert Glazer (06:26): Yeah, I think peop people look at these things incongruously and they’re not, for example, like the 80 20 rule has never been overcome, you know, that I’ve ever seen. Yeah. And you got a lot of leaders getting a lot of people spinning wheels and working on stuff on crazy hours that just doesn’t matter and isn’t getting results. So it, I’m not sure that’s good for the company, it’s good for the leader, it’s good for the employee versus if you could, you know, I have a whole chapter on getting more outcome oriented, you know, with the business and the results. What are we trying to get to? What does good look like? Like we’re not gonna focus on a million things. We’re gonna focus on those things and there’s the accountability and their performance piece. And that also maybe makes it so that people don’t need to work a hundred hours a week or aren’t getting emails at, you know, 11:00 PM at night. So a lot of these things really, truly are, I wish there was a better word, but they are vicarious or win-win in that what’s good for the business is good for the employee. I, I mean, the 80 20 rule would tell you that, you know, most organizations today tw 80% of what they’re doing is only getting 20% of the right outcomes.

John Jantsch (07:35): W would you say that the things you talk about this approach, this mentality, this mindset is something that you find in, inherent in you that it came natural to you as a way to build this business? Or was this sort of hard one, you know, because you went out and said, well here’s how everybody else builds a business and I guess that’s how you do it.

Robert Glazer (07:53): Yeah. You know, it’s interesting. I looked at a lot of the things that were going on out there and they didn’t make sense. And I wanted to build a type of business that I was excited to, to work in. And I’ve done my core values, I’ve done the y work, like I my is very much around finding a better way and share it. So it’s like, how do we make people better? How do we make the business better? How do we grow that? So, so and, and then we just really saw that worked. Now again, we are high accountability, high performance of growning, 30% a year for almost a decade. Right? It’s not, I think sometimes when people talk about businesses that help people and care about people and all, you know, that there’s this kumbaya family thing. Yeah. And you haven’t grown revenue in a decade.

(08:30): I mean, we’ve been, we’ve grown 4000% in, in, in 10 years. So I, I just didn’t wanna build a growth business that required constantly changing the people. So the question was how do we grow the people and have that be the impetus for growing the business, not artificially grow the business and then drag people along. And most of our leaders have, and look, I, this was a decision five years ago, I said, if, if you were trying to do this now, if you were trying to just grow by telling people to grind it out in 89 hours a week, they’re so burned out that I just don’t think you’ll have any employees. And in this whole world, you’re either gonna have the freelance mercenary for rent people or you’re gonna have one of people that want to be at your company. And there’s something about being at your company that, and particularly if they’re working from home, that it ties together and it helps them, you know, get what they’re looking for in some ways. But none of these things are, you know, helping people like meet their personal goals should directly correlate to helping the organization reach its goals. Yeah. Some of them should be exclusive of each other.

John Jantsch (09:32): Are you an agency owner, consultant or coach that works with business owners? Then I want to talk to you about adding a new revenue stream to your business that will completely change how you work with clients. For the first time ever, you can license and use the Duct Tape Marketing system and methodology in your business through an upcoming three day virtual workshop. Give us three days and you’ll walk away with a complete system that changes how you think about your agency’s growth. The Duct Tape Marketing System is a turnkey set of processes for installing a marketing system that starts with strategy and moves to long-term retainer implementation engagements. We’ve developed a system by successfully working with thousands of businesses. Now you can bring it to your agency and benefit from all the tools, templates, systems and processes we’ve developed to find out when our next workshop is being held. Visit dtm.world/workshop. That’s dtm.world/workshop. You have for many years now written a newsletter you call Friday Forward. It came out on Fridays. You sent it across, typically it was a, almost an internal comms piece, and then eventually grew to following, grew to a book. How much of what you, how you think about elevating your team came from

Robert Glazer (10:54): What

John Jantsch (10:55): You learned writing that

Robert Glazer (10:58): A a lot of it, I’m like a framework person. And so I realized, and when I originally wrote the book, I went to write a compilation book and agent was like, no one likes a compilation book. Like what is it? What have you done? What are the stories? I went back and looked at all the pattern analysis and the categories and that’s where I came up with this whole capacity building construct. That was the premise of both Elevate and elevate your team. And I was like, huh, this is the theme. This is what we’ve, this is what I’ve been doing personally. This is what we’ve been doing around training. We’ve been helping people with spiritual capacity, intellectual, physical, and emotional. Yeah. Like it just sort of, the pattern started to reveal itself. And when I was able to kind of lay out the framework, then I could more say, Hey look, this is, you know, if I went through the the checklist, it’s like that’s how we were training and developing people. Yeah.

John Jantsch (11:43): It’s, it was really encouraging to hear you talk about, you went back and discovered, you know, that you had this framework because I, the reason I asked the question, the way I asked is because I think a lot, lot of people underestimate how much having a regular writing practice, how much you learn from ha about yourself, about, you know Yeah. The world. Because you have to pay attention to put that out there. And I think just doing that is actually, and, and again, people should subscribe to Friday forward because you’re gonna see it’s a different kind of newsletter. But I think that it, you know, that’s one of the essential elements, right? Is, I mean, because consistently writing about those things, you know, at some point people had to say, I guess he means it.

Robert Glazer (12:25): Yeah. And look, the, I think there’s a, you probably feel this way. I know a lot. I think there’s probably a misperception that when I write something, like I had it all figured out, it’s actually the topic. It’s like, huh, I’ve been thinking about this topic for a while and now I’m gonna have to spend two hours and like Right. Come up with an opinion on it. So sometimes it really provides that clarification. Like I said, I like frameworks, so yeah. My writing is sort of about how do you put a concept or idea and a framework that then you can do something with it. You know, when you, like we read a book, you know, and you’re like, oh, I’ve known about this for a while, but just the way that John put it together, like, now I get it and it clicks and I know how to do something with it.

John Jantsch (13:01): Well I, I often, you know, somebody on my team will say, you know, I’d like to learn more about Google ads. And I said, oh great, two weeks from today you’re gonna teach a class on it.

Robert Glazer (13:08): Yeah. .

John Jantsch (13:09): And you know, they immediately learn a whole lot more than it had. I like shared, you know, what I knew about it. So I, I just think there’s a lot to that. Does everybody, does everybody need in an organization, do you view everybody as now you have a professional organization, you have very high level, you have leadership folks naturally. Yeah. You know, titled leadership folks. Do you think everybody in an org organization needs to be looked at as a leader?

Robert Glazer (13:34): No. In fact, you know, there is a whole section on this. I think one of the, you know, the premise first is look, give everyone the best chance to be successful in their organization. Yeah. But then you also need to be objective about what the organization needs and what people skillsets are and what they’re good at. And a lot of people, you know, with this word, a lot of people frankly want to be good individual contributors. Right. I think the biggest mistake historically an organization makes, right? They promote the sales person into a sales manager when they just wanna sell and the commission or the engineer into an engineering manager. Generally, I, some people aren’t really interested in managing and leading. They wanna produce and they wanna deliver and you shouldn’t cap their upside. But they are, you know, they get their good feelings from, you know, whatever they did.

(14:19): Personally, a leader, when you come a leader, you need to switch your reward center from what it is that you did. But first what that your team did. And some people just aren’t interested in that and Yeah. Because we want ’em to move up the arch chart and pay more money. Like, like we, you know, put them in charge of teams and frankly, if you’ve got a man or a woman that can sell 10 million a year, like don’t crack their commission. Like let them keep selling. Don’t make ’em managed salespeople. If that’s not what they want to do. They, if they wanna be a rainmaker, let ’em be a rainmaker. Yeah.

John Jantsch (14:52): And, and I think the real key you’re saying is work as hard as you can to get people in the right spot. Right spot for them. Right. Doing the right things because they’ll thrive.

Robert Glazer (15:02): Yeah. But look, help them build their capacity, help them learn all this stuff. Yeah. One of the things they may learn is that they don’t do some pre leadership stuff that I don’t like leadership. I like selling, delivering. You know, I like getting all the credit myself. Like I think if people then can be honest with themselves, if you can have that dialogue and the organization can be honest with them, you know, we had someone years ago who just, you know, was in a leadership role and we reversed them out of that leadership role and put ’em in a contributor role. Cause we’re like, look, you don’t like your leading your team. They don’t like having you as a leader. You like to just do stuff and get credit for it. Like we, here’s a contributor role that you could be good at. Yeah.

John Jantsch (15:42): Well and the key there too is that, you know, every organization needs somebody who geeks out on Google Analytics, right. Or whatever it is. I mean you need those tools. It wants

Robert Glazer (15:51): To be the best analytics person, the best engineer, the best salesperson, right? The there there’s not a manager of Google Analytics. I think that’s fine. So I think for that reason too, I think you need to, you, you might have training, you might, you know, for young up and coming leaders, but you also need to give ’em an escape, you know, route too. If they start down that process and realize it’s not the right thing,

John Jantsch (16:13): It’s become very trendy to talk about leaders needing to be coaches and coaching their teams. You know, where do you fall on that idea?

Robert Glazer (16:21): Yeah, look, I, a leader’s job is to make I think the sum of the parts greater than the whole, right? And so they should be talking to their team increasingly not telling what to do, but finding out where their blockers are, what they need, discussing problems with them, not solving the problems, but discussing the problems, talking about resources. So yeah, I think the coach mentor, you know, is the, I mean that to me that’s the difference between a leader and a manager. A manager just takes the sum of the parts and tells people what to do and moves the chips on the board. Like, you know, a leader is trying to get something that is more than the sum of the parts. And so I think that is the modern analogy of, you know, people talk about my friend Jamon McCormick, you know, wrote a book like Modern Leadership, but the modern leaders on the bottom of the org chart, like, Hey, I work for my team and how do I make you better get outta your way? Remove obstacles. Again, that true leader who sees their success as how well their team does, not how well they do. And by the way, this is a huge thing that most organizations miss. I would say 80 to 90% of organizations do not rate their managers as managers. , they rate them based on their contribution. So they’re totally rewarding the wrong thing. If you have a leader, someone who manages two, three, or four, five people, the number one thing that you need to be rating them on is how good of a leader they are. .

(17:42): If you rate them on their production, then you’re then, you know, if their teams, if it’s a sales leader and the team is all meeting their goals, but they, they all hate ’em or heard and they’re, you know, they’re all looking for a job and one person’s way ahead of their quota and isn’t getting promoted and one’s under their quota is not getting fired. But they’re all like, again, the results mask. That person is not doing their job as a leader. Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:04): So we started talking about this before I hit record and I want to loop back to it, you know, part of the subtitle Empower your Team to reach their full potential if you have one on your team reaching or at least feeling like they’re moving towards their full potential. What kind of marketing or brand impact do you suppose that has for an organization?

Robert Glazer (18:21): Yeah, look, I think they’re fundamentally three types of organizations. I talk about this in the book. The first is a star sniffling and I worked at one of these outside of school, like this is where like me, you know, te you know, mediocrity just tried to stay in place and like good talent left as fast as they could. It was like, you know, there was a whole group of people who just were protecting their job and knew the politics and otherwise. So like while that organization is bankrupt, like everyone I worked with is doing an amazing thing. Like it was one of my first jobs out of college. So the second is catch and release, right? I think these are the organizations that develop people and when they don’t have an opportunity or there’s two people going for one job, they’re actually happy to help that person.

(19:00): And you know, like seeing them go somewhere else and be successful. Patty McCord used to say, we love to see people go be from Netflix. And I think that’s really powerful, the brand and pretty awesome. The hardest one and the one that I think you can’t be all the time is sort of a true meritocracy. An organization that is willing to put the best person on the field, you know, at any time. And you know, my historical example from this in the book is that in 2001, right, the, the Patriots had just signed Drew Bledso for $103 million. I think Bill Belichick is the best example historically of this. It doesn’t matter what you’re paid, where you’re drafted, otherwise whoever is performing best will get the role. And Bledso got hurt. And when he, you know, the sixth round quarterback skinny kid that, you know, no one knew Belichick left him in there.

(19:46): And when the quarterback came back he said, he’s playing really well. I’m not gonna take him out. I mean you’re talking about he doesn’t make that decision and Tom Brady’s not the best player of all time. Very few managers I think are willing to make that decision or take someone and say, look, this person is objectively higher achieving and better than other, we are going to push them forward. So I think we’re all organizations actually are all flavors of those at time to time. But if you want to build a great brand as an organization, one where people can move up on their own merit or the organization supports them to go take better roles elsewhere, like I think that those are places that people wanna work.

John Jantsch (20:24): Speaking with Robert Glazer, he is the author of Elevate Your Team. So Robert, you want to invite people where they might connect with you, learn more about your work, but obviously also pick up a copy of the book.

Robert Glazer (20:35): Yeah, it’s all@robertglazer.com. You can find my podcast there. Book and Friday Ford and would love to, to have everyone join. Awesome.

John Jantsch (20:44): Well thanks again for stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast and hopefully we’ll run into you again soon. One of these days out there on the road. Thanks John. 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. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Nudge, hosted by Phil Agnew. It’s brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. You can learn the science behind great marketing with bite size 20 minute episodes packed with practical advice from world-class marketers and behavioral scientists. And it’s not always about marketing. Great episode. Recently you learned the surprising truths about and tips for beating, stress and anxiety. Sounds like a great program, doesn’t it? Listen to Nudge wherever you get your s. Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Matt Higgins. He’s a self-made entrepreneur who went from poverty to the top of five industries and now serves as a guest shark on ABC’s Hit series Shark Tank. He’ll soon star in a new spinoff, business Hunters, also executive produced by Mark Burnett. He’s the author of a new book called Burn the Boats, toss Plan B Overboard and Unleash Your Full Potential. So Matt, welcome to the show.

Matt Higgins (01:19): All right, thank you for having me.

John Jantsch (01:21): Like many entrepreneurs, you have a long and winding journey. If somebody were to wade into, you know how you got here, I wonder if you have the five minute version of kinda like what’s been your entrepreneurial journey. You obviously are at a, you know, a lot of times people will look at somebody and go, oh, he is on Shark Tank. He’s, you know, made it, you know, but they a lot of times look back or don’t look back at like the stuff you had to crawl over to get there.

Matt Higgins (01:45): . No, I appreciate you saying that. Well, winding is one way to put it. Some would say incoherent, but , we can sort of explain the genesis of everything. But I don’t wanna begin with what you just said cuz I love it. A lot of the reasons why I wrote this book was I don’t wanna be perceived as the guy at the end of the journey on Shark Tank. That’s just the manifestation of it. I think more useful to look at my life where I came from, hopefully to model what overcoming those circumstances looks like. I spent my whole life engineering my way out of bad situations. Some, I was born into others, I put myself into like everybody else listening, but, but my journey starts with the one I was born into. I grew up in Queens, New York, the product of a single mom, and these words, abject poverty, take on almost like a cliche meaning.

(02:26): So just to make it sound, what does that really mean? Growing up with basically wondering where the next meal was coming from. Grow up on government cheese, little blocks of cheese from the U S D A and food pantries. So just a lot of instability, fragility in my upbringing. And my mother had a lot of disabilities that were compounding over time. She is a high, she was a high school dropout, but really fiercely intelligent. And these all my worlds were colliding as a kid where food was an issue. I was selling flowers on street corners and I was watching my mother deteriorate. And you go through so many disappointments in life where you hope the calorie’s gonna come. And I learned, fortunately, for better or worse at a very young age, that the cavalry never comes. And so I was getting increasingly desperate. And around 1314, I, I had an epiphany, wait a second, my mother got a G E D and she was able to go to college with the ged.

(03:13): I was like, I was looking at the PennySaver, a little local newspaper in Queens and there was a job offer for a kid to deliver flyers, but it said college students only. And I was like, what’s this special thing called college student? What if I could drop outta high school at 16 and get it at $9 an hour paying job instead of making 3 75 at McDonald’s, could I pull forward my escape from poverty? So my entire entrepreneurial journey begins with me architecting my way and why that origin story is so important because it really put me through everything an entrepreneur has to go through. One, my guidance counselor said, you’re absolutely crazy. The stigma of you being a high school dropout will follow you forever. This is before a little Mark Zuckerberg with his hoodie I made a

John Jantsch (03:53): Four was trendy. Right, okay.

Matt Higgins (03:54): Before it’s trendy things, right? So that was number one. So I have the conventional wisdom of the world and the question of, well you’re not gonna know enough to go to college. I was like, I don’t know. I don’t think that’s necessarily true. And the fact that no one had ever done not, no one people hadn’t done it deliberately, certainly actually dropped outta high school and poor as a fan, right. As a, yeah. You know? And then the last piece is really important is that I realized I had so much pressure for me to change paths. I used to sit at McDonald’s all day, get picked up by the truancy police, carted back . You know, there was all these forces saying like conform, but yet nobody had the full context of the fact that I was sleeping on a d on a dirty mattress on the floor.

(04:32): My mother was, would cry through the entire night in pain. I would wrap a towel around my head so I could hear through the fibers, but try to sleep. So, you know, I’m under constant duress as a kid pretending to be affluent with my jordash jeans that I bought, you know, with whatever money I had. So like I’m putting on a mask my gut, everyone giving me advice, can’t see the truth. So the advice is corrupted because it doesn’t have full information created by me, you know, hiding my shame. So I had to go through that crazy decision to drop outta high school 16. And in one chess move I went from high school dropout where everyone’s looking at me with pity to a year later going to my high school prom as a finishing my first year in college on the debate team, three five GPA and a well paying job compared to McDonald’s. And I remember the look on my guidance counselor, my teachers that had win from one of sadness and it’s probably a degree of disdain to one of admiration. And so everything about my entrepreneurial journey and a lot of the in incoherence of it, the way my look on paper, all these different industries can be explained from that one move.

John Jantsch (05:34): So, so remind le listeners, probably most people have heard one version or another of this story, but the metaphor burned the boats, the story behind that.

Matt Higgins (05:42): Yeah. So I, I’ve, you know, despite my quote unquote success, you know, I’ve always tackled with the lingering effects of the story I just told you, you know, it’s a degree of, yeah, PTSD and trauma. There’s obviously more to it and anxiety and whatnot and all those things create hesitation. And so I get so mad at myself when I know in order to succeed I need to fully commit and I need to slay the naysayers in my head or the external forces that are trying to stand on my way. I know that intellectually, but I don’t believe it. And I was like, what does it take to fully believe that in order to be successful and achieve plan A, you have to fully surrender to the goal? Why do we hesitate? And I noticed throughout my career this phrase would keep coming up, burn the boats, and then I would look back in history like, wow, you know, Caesar said it right?

(06:26): You know, it’s in the art of war, right? It goes back to the ancient Israeli lights. This idea of that in a military context, when you’re outnumbered a hundred to one, the way that you could sum an unnatural resolve from your troops is to destroy their way home. In the article where they say, you know, burn the boats and the, and destroy the cooking pots, and that obviously that makes people say, I have no choice but to win h how can I take that co that concept and appropriate it for peacetime activity? Yeah. And so the word boat is a little bit different than used in a military context. My boat are all the things in your life that force you to hesitate and hold back.

John Jantsch (07:01): Yeah. The cushy job that you got right now,

Matt Higgins (07:03): The cushy job you got. But more often, as the Italians say, the fish rots from the head, the cover of my boat is a paper boat and it’s meant to be a child’s boat floating in a bathtub and it’s on fire in Cindy Air. And the reason why I start with that metaphor is because a lot of the things that hold us back are legacy issues that we haven’t synthesized shame. And for a number of years, the story I just told you would be something I wouldn’t talk about because I wouldn’t wanna show vulnerability and I had cancer and a bunch of other issues I went through. So the first mandate of my book was model what it looks like to shed shame, show people that everybody who has transcended their circumstances had to go through that journey and then try basically articulate all the different kinds of boats that we have to burn before achieving greatness. And a lot, and it’s not rocket science. The rocket science comes in execution, not in our, not in identifying, but the b the themes in my book that’ll be familiar to your listeners are imposter gen drum, the corporate saboteurs, all these of these obstacles. But it’s basically a treat toe on hesitation and how to commit.

John Jantsch (08:01): Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s interesting. I work with a lot of startup owners and many of them jumping out of corporate jobs and in some cases, you know, it took ’em three years or they tried to do both at the same time and found that they weren’t, you know, they were struggling with both. Yeah. So I, you know, I do think that there is a fear that stops people because you, you know, a lot of, lot of take the leap or you know, how other metaphors that people use, I mean they really, starting a business is, you know, a leap of faith in, in some cases. I want to go to a line that I read, I think it was in another interview you gave but, or maybe it was, was just a build up on the book, but why research proves that the mere contemplation of plan B statistically reduces the probability plan A will ever materialize. I think that’s a pretty profound backing for this idea of burning the boats, isn’t it?

Matt Higgins (08:52): Yeah, it’s, that’s a great point. Well the, well, so I put a lot, lot of energy in the book to buttress this idea because it’s at the same time, it’s kind of simplistic and there’s a lot of people listening who will reflexively say, yeah, I heard that before, burn the boats, but risk. But I have kit Mals to feed, but I have rent to pay. Right? So number one, the idea of burn the boats doesn’t mean the boats with you in it. And by the way, burn the,

John Jantsch (09:13): That is a huge clarification. Okay. Yeah,

Matt Higgins (09:16): That’s what I’m saying. Little caveat, ask her why that’s important because I am the most paranoid risk taker you’re probably ever gonna have on your show. Like I process risk thoroughly and I work backwards from the worst case scenario so that I can ensure that if the worst thing I can imagine what happened, would I still be okay? And the answer’s always yes, but I argue and burn the boats is not a shoe all risk or ignore it, it synthesize it at the start of the journey. And by the way, here’s how you do it so that you can go ahead and you could fearlessly, you know, move forward. And a lot of people don’t do that. Now, the science that you’re talking about, there was a study at a warden, which I think is so fascinating, it was 2014, they decided to see if they could identify what, what is the underlying, you know, consequence of anyone not actually having a plan B, but simply comp contemplating a plan B.

(10:01): And I won’t get into how they recreated it in the study setting, but all the subjects had to do was just think about another way they could get that snack, you know, in the study, whatever the stimuli was, right? And it found out that just thinking about it both eliminated the probability that they would succeed with plan A, but also killed their intrinsic motivation. So my book is meant to also be a retort to any one of you out there listening who’s going? But no, we get into the butts , everybody who I profiled this book, 50 different CEOs, founders, scar athletes, artists, N F L coaches had their butts to the point is to process the butts and put them in their place and then move forward and to prove to you through science, history, psychology and otherwise that just thinking about that Plan B is truly killing your plan

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(11:38): Visit DTM world slash workshop. That’s DTM world slash workshop. Do you think sometimes people come to the conclusion that they burn the boats in hindsight? So in other words, like they really only saw there was like, this is what I think I need to do, or this is what I was told to do and next thing you turn around and it’s like, I succeeded and now I look back and go, oh, because I didn’t have a plan B. I mean was is it sometimes, I guess I’m talking about luck almost , you know, is it sometimes that is at play?

Matt Higgins (12:10): Yeah, I think that’s true. I do, I’m a big anti luck person if there is such a thing because I think a lot of times luck is sort of robs you of agency. Yeah. And I think sometimes luck is a dirty four wet alert that people use against you to say, well, you know, you didn’t manifest it. So I think that the universe is fundamentally benevolent and does give you multiple opportunities to save yourself. And so a lot of times you’re reconstructing, you’re right in hindsight like the, I think it’s more you’re reconstructing what was the turning point? What was the moment when I finally actually pulled it off? And usually the moment I find in dealing with so many CEOs, I’m sure you have a similar experience, the moment that actually led to the breakthrough was the moment they stopped giving an F about something that was recurring in their head, it was the moment of almost capitulation like, you know what, I have a great story in my book of founder, it’s one of my favorite stories in all business.

(12:59): And he was a founder, an amazing guy. I bought his company and I knew frankly he was gonna get eaten alive by the investors that we had brought in. He just wasn’t ready for primetime and he wasn’t dealing with some of the hard staff choices that he needed to upgrade the team. He was just a martyr who was taken all upon himself and ultimately the walls began to crash in on him. And he calls me one night crying saying, I failed you, I’m gonna resign at the end of the year. And I heard in the background an EKG or you know, the beeping machine. I said, what is that? He’s like, well I’m in the hospital. My, my little baby girl we’re testing her for seizures. We think she might be on the spectrum. I said, first of all, why are you calling me? Hang up the phone.

(13:36): Go. Second of all, I’m the one who makes this phone call. I, when I’m, when you’re done, I’ll call you. You don’t have to worry about that. I will let you know. I said, but actually I think you’re not done. I think you just got started. And he hangs up the phone. True story. We bring in an industrial psychologist, he surrenders to the work, he credits stat as the breakthrough moment when he started realizing, you know what, if this were to fall apart, whatever, Matt will be fine. I lost a few million for him, you know, my family will eat, I’ll be okay. I’m an Irish bartender, I came here, I built this country. Eight months later he sells that business for nine figures and it was a zero 18 months later and it was a zero at that moment. And he has enough money to feed his children for generations. And so I share that story and all these stories like it so people can pick a moment to identify it like, oh I have a disabled child. I felt like that. Or you know what I mean? Even with me being a high school dropout, I was like, oh, I grew up in poverty. Matt could do it. Maybe I could do it too.

John Jantsch (14:30): Would you say there’s an element, maybe talking about you personally, but maybe you’ve seen this also of building habit muscle around this. Like you do it once and you go, wow, that worked out, nobody died here and the next time it’s easier and the next time it’s clearer. I mean, would you say that has happened to you?

Matt Higgins (14:48): There’s a hundred percent I get frustrated that it’s not, not more habituated, you know what I mean? I get mad at myself like, come on, you know this already, right? Like yeah, you’d be shocked if you were in my head as you’re listening to this, you’d be shocked by the things that I revisit. But I’ve come to realize the awareness of it is a habit that I need to burn the boats and fully commit to extract maximum. Right? And I have the fact patterns, but the reason why it doesn’t always hold is because I’m always doing new hard things. And so the reason why I talk about imposter syndrome in the set of Shark Tank when I was arguably very successful is to show if you are putting yourself in truly new and uncomfortable situations, you are always feeling like an imposter because you are an imposter, you’re an interloper for sure another I word, but you’re also interloper and imposter feel kind of similar.

(15:32): And so the answer is it gets easier with muscle memory, but if it ever gets too easy, it means you’re not putting yourself in new really hard situations. Yeah. Like when I went to Harvard to Harvard Business School, I’d never taught a day in my life, one could argue, well your ego should have carried you or your sense of self-worth of self-esteem. It’s like bullshit. Like I’m teaching in Harvard, like this is hard and like, and so I had those emotions and then next time it got easier and then by the third time I have to find a new intrinsic motivation system cuz I’m no longer full of anxiety. Right. So it does get habituated, but at the same time it should never get too habituated.

John Jantsch (16:03): Yeah. I mean when I listen to you describe that, it’s, you’re really talking about growth, continued growth, aren’t you?

Matt Higgins (16:07): Right. Right. There’s, I always say there’s a reason growing pains hurt, right? Like they’re supposed to hurt. And sometimes people say about my book, they’re like, oh God, it sounds exhausting. Do you ever get to relax? And I said, the answer is no. And the reason why talk to anyone who’s been to the top of the mountain and they’ll tell you there’s not much to see there. I really believe that the joy of living is in the striving and it’s not in the winning, which is a little bit contradictory cuz then you’re like, well then what are we fighting for? I think we’re fighting for to touch the ceiling of our ambition, our potential. So that I think that brings us closer to God. I, when I see a person who’s struggling to break through and I can make a slight trajectory change in our life and I watch them get closer to touching the ceiling of their potential, even though it’s unknowable, I feel like I’m watching God and magic and the universe sort of play out. And I think we all have that feeling in ourselves. It’s when we run the marathon, there’s a reason we’re depressed when marathon’s over and we wish we were still training for it, right? Because we were pursuing the ceiling of our potential.

John Jantsch (17:04): It’s interesting, I use this metaphor all the time, you know, a lot of people talking about striving to the climb Everest, you know, to get to the top, I mean, how dangerous it is and how hard it is. About three times more people die coming down actually going up. True. And I think that’s such a great metaphor, you know, for kind of that idea of climbing and then like, you know, going back down

Matt Higgins (17:22): of course now no listens to this is gonna climb, but like damn I’m gonna die on the way back just when I thought I succeeded. Right, .

John Jantsch (17:28): Exactly. There’s a

Matt Higgins (17:29): Lot of, a lot of lessons in that simple fact by the way, in terms of we get to wifi, but

John Jantsch (17:33): Yeah. Yeah. So, so you did, as you mentioned, dozens, maybe more than dozens of interviews for this. Do you have, this is always a hard question when people do this, but do you have a couple favorites or a couple you like to highlight?

Matt Higgins (17:45): Oh, interviews I’ve done?

John Jantsch (17:47): No, that you did for the book in

Matt Higgins (17:49): Particular? Oh, you mean interviews around the book that I really like?

John Jantsch (17:52): Yeah, yeah. With different leaders.

Matt Higgins (17:53): Oh, in the book? Yes, for sure. I’m so sorry. Yeah, you know what, there’s a woman profiled in the book and she had created a marketing firm called Village. Right? And when I was working on the book, our interaction and sort of fade in the back of my memory and her name had kept coming up throughout my career. And then at one point I realized, wait, I know her actually I had interviewed her before she had created this business cuz I tried to recruit her to join my business a new PR eight years ago. And I reconnected with her and it was one of these sliding door moments where she had a choice to join my new firm, right? And instead she went off and created the, this firm called The Village. And the reason why she did it is because she decided she needed to burn the boats and give it a shot, or she never would.

(18:38): And she had a little baby daughter and she wanted to try to create a firm that would be designed to enable her to raise her daughter the way she wanted to. So instead of joining my firm, she created her own and she only hired women. It was an all woman firm. And at the exact moment, within three months that I sold the firm I built that she passed on, she sold her own and created massive generational wealth. And I tell the story of that, I tell the story in the book of a lot of female entrepreneurs because my whole life has been guided by strong women. So I just, you know, it happens to be a lot of incredible stories, but I’d say hers is one of my favorites.

John Jantsch (19:11): So tell us a little bit about the spinoff that I don’t think it’s out yet. Bus business hunters.

Matt Higgins (19:15): Yeah. Yeah, so, so for everyone listening, I’ve been on Shark Tank a couple seasons, I love Shark Tank and you know, shark Tank as a kid would always give me hope and like everybody else sitting watching that show. Yeah. But there’s one part that is missing from Shark Tank. We all love it. But if you actually take a step back, how many people can really relate to the idea that you have an invention that is good enough that’s gonna put you in front of Mark Cuban and the rest to try to get venture funding. It’s actually a very alien concept that most people will never, ever get close to. What we love about Shark Tank is the act of going for it. The sort of glory of, you know, getting that investment of winning. Like it just has, everything’s on display cuz every single person at some point or another has harbored either an idea or more like autonomy and freedom that comes to be a business owner.

(19:56): We have a crappy boss. Or like, I just wanna quit. I just would love to it. Right? So I realized Mark Burnett realized that there isn’t a show that speaks to that impulse. What if we created a show that was designed to take anyone in America who has a dream for like a restaurant or a drag cleaner or like a marina, you know, how do I buy that business? How do I get the financing for it? How do I value it? And so the show takes usually a tandem, a husband and wife, a couple or something. And we, we both break down the psychological issues that go into becoming a new business owner because has these like, oh, it’s gonna be a great, I’m gonna have a restaurant, I’m gonna take weekends off. Like, no, you’re not, because your cap door, your inventory’s gonna disappear. You’ll be working seven days away.

(20:37): So a lot of it are those disabusing people of misperceptions about what it means to be a business owner. But the second part of the journey is let me present you with three different ideas. So, and then let’s evaluate them together. And then we give an opportunity for the entrepreneurs to actually work in those businesses before they buy them. Oh, nice. And then we, that’s very cool. I try to teach the audience because I get excited about like everything from like an ice cream truck, you know, to a hundred million acquisition. Everything excites me that try to teach the audience about this area of the business sector that’s kind of unexplored. So, you know, the business could cost, we have one business, it’s $75,000. I mean, these are not, you know, of businesses.

John Jantsch (21:14): Yeah. Well I’m sure you’ve got it all wired, but I want to come be a, a guest host on the thing because I’ve done, I’ve been doing this for 35 years and I’ve worked with 10,000 small businesses. I mean people you’re talking about.

Matt Higgins (21:26): I would love that. It’s so fun. And then, you know what’s interesting about it? As somebody who’s worked on, you know, whatever billion dollar deals and everything’s the same , you know, like, you know, how do I value, you know, ebitda, what does EBITDA mean? Like what, right. How do I balance cash outlay versus feeding my family growth versus every, all they all the same issues. I always say once you have two people working for you, you got the same kinds of problems that anybody else does. You know, coach, but anyone would love to have you on. And we finished shooting the show and right now we’re in the process of finding a home for it. But I assume by the time this airs or sometime thereafter, the network will be announced.

John Jantsch (21:58): Awesome. So you have in selling burn the boats. You have like a lot of authors just kind of buy extra books, get bonuses, but your bonuses are really fun. You’ve got some, you know, go to a Dolphins game, you know, come, I mean just don’t up in front.

Matt Higgins (22:14): I definitely have nice toys.

John Jantsch (22:16): . Yeah. Yeah. So I will say though that I’m a Chiefs fan and you know, we’re looking to win the Super Bowl again. We gave you Tyrek to try to help you out a little bit, but we’re still going back to the Super Bowl.

Matt Higgins (22:28): Yes. No, I have a, I have a, it’s called Burn the Boats book.com is the website and, and I wanted to make it fun and come up with unique packages. I have a lot of interesting businesses in my portfolio, so Right. One of them is we’re doing a session with Gary Vaynerchuk, who’s my partner, and just if you check out the website, all sorts of cool and interesting things. Yeah.

John Jantsch (22:45): Very fun. Well, Matt, thanks so much for stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast and hopefully we will run into you one of these days soon out there on the road.

Matt Higgins (22:52): All right, thank you for having me. I appreciate

John Jantsch (22:54): It. Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before Tex? 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 Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.