John Jantsch (00:00): This episode or the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by the nudge podcast, hosted by Phil Agnew and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network. You can learn the science behind great marketing with bite size 20 minute episodes packed with practical advice from admired marketers and behavioral scientist. Nudge is a fast pace, but still insightful with real world examples that you can apply her recent issue. Talked about the, the idea of getting your customers or prospects in the habit of buying from you or listening to you or following you habit based marketing, download, nudge, wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Sam Garg. He is the founder and CEO at Wright Sonic and AI writer that helps you write longform blog posts and articles in 15 seconds. Quite a promise. We’re gonna dig into that. So Sam, welcome to the show.

Sam Garg (01:08): Thank you very much, John. Very glad to be here. I

John Jantsch (01:10): Always like to, you know, we talk, we’re gonna talk about your current product service company, but I always like to get a little bit of backstory on what, what is your entrepreneurial journey looked like that led you to, to want to start this company?

Sam Garg (01:22): For sure. Yeah. So I’m sort of like a software engineer by background. I’m graduated in 2019. And since I was like 12 years of age been building multiple different websites and apps. So I started building, you know, like simple websites, like personal websites and lots of other things possibly I’ve built like 10, 15 different micro startups as I like to call them or the last five, six years. And then what kind of started right? Sonic was like, whenever you’re promoting any digital product on, you need a landing page, right? Like if you’re not launching a product and, or hack a news, wherever you’re launching, you’d need a landing page. So that was the point pain point that I was having personally. So I wondered like, you know, how about I train an AI model that, you know, kind of learns from the copy of the top brands like apple and Stripe and CocaCola and all that. And then kind of writes the copy for me, cause I didn’t have any marketing or copywriting experience at that point. So that was the starting point. So I built it for myself. People started liking it and then yeah, we, we sort of grew and you know, we have a good amount of team members now and we’ve got some funding by Y Combinator and stuff.

John Jantsch (02:25): Yeah. It’s amazing how I bet you it’s 50% of the companies are started out there as somebody saying, well, I needed this thing for me and I couldn’t find it so I thought, wow, they might, I better just make it

Sam Garg (02:36): Exactly,

John Jantsch (02:37): You know, everything. Like I, I get, you know, these marketing emails from people all the time now, somehow they’re working AI into everything. Like, you know, it’s whether it actually uses AI or not. It’s kind of cool to say that it does. So it’s becoming a crowded space really. How do you hope to differentiate right. Sonic particularly in the AI writing space.

Sam Garg (02:58): Yeah, no, I mean, I get asked that question a lot, you know, there’s lots of companies in this space, you know how email marketing is right there. There was MailChimp and then there’s like hundreds of different companies now. So what I like to kind of say there is, you know, we were, I would say the second company who got started in this space and we are in the top three right now. Yeah. Our core strength is the AI background that I bring. And then the team members that we have there. So we are constantly experimenting with, you know, state of the art, AI models and our core strength is the product and the features that we build. So we have a very fast shipping speed every week. We are pumping new features out. Yeah. Lots of cool stuff there. Yeah.

John Jantsch (03:34): Yeah. I’m actually a user and I’m amazed by that. It’s like every time I go, there, there’s something new. In fact, I think you just added an image editor, didn’t you?

Sam Garg (03:43): Yeah. So we just launched photo signing. So that’s like, you know, generates digital art and images using AI. So that is one thing we are exploring very excited about that space. Yeah.

John Jantsch (03:51): That sure. That’s in its infancy, I think, but it’s certainly getting a lot of that, that idea, you know, especially with Dolly with open AI is really getting a lot of, uh, buzz these days. So we’ve only got a couple minutes for you to answer a question that probably would take hours to answer sure. So I’ll let you decide which direction you wanna go with this when you’re talking to a complete novice and they say, how does AI work? What’s kind of your simple explanation if there is one.

Sam Garg (04:20): Yeah. So I mean, the way I like to think of it is, so AI is sort of like human brain, you know, it’s just like how a child learns when it sees, you know, when you were a kid, you would see images of things, you know, you would learn from there. Couple of times you repeat it, let’s say you’re kind of learning ABCD the alphabet. So you start with, you know, a, for apple and stuff. So you kind of, you reiterating it in your brain. Like you’re just remembering, and then slowly the brain picks up like the neural pathways become and you kind of pick up the patterns. So that is how sort of AI works. It’s sort of like this, you know, think of like this computer that sees something again and again and again, and then sort of picks up that pattern and it kind of gets edged and it’s kind of neural pathways on in its sort of like system. And then it is able to replicate that for any new scenarios or any new things that you throw it through at it. So, yeah.

John Jantsch (05:13): So I, and obviously I think that’s a good analogy, but you forgot the part where it does it a lot faster than human right.

Sam Garg (05:20): Much faster. Yeah, for sure. For sure.

John Jantsch (05:22): Yeah. So, so I like to tell people that I, it’s basically a computer that’s read everything and then is able to access everything and decide what, you know, what to bring back from that, you know, obviously at the speed of light. So you talked about right. Sonic being in the top, you know, top tier of particularly AI writers. What have you done from, uh, marketing standpoint to gain traction with users?

Sam Garg (05:43): Yeah, so, I mean, we have been trying a bunch of different things. So for example, EO has worked very well for us. You know, we an on the first page of Google for a lot of terms works very well and being a content focused company, we need to be good at content marketing and ATSU. Cause if we don’t do it, then the customers won’t trust us and they won’t kind of, you know, believe what we are building. So that’s one thing. We are also working a lot on social media. So Twitter, if you see there’s so many people making tweets and stuff about us now, influencers some PR and stuff as well. So lots of different factors that we tried.

John Jantsch (06:17): So that was really gonna be my next question. But I think you halfway answered it. Do you use right Sonic in all of your own marketing?

Sam Garg (06:23): We do. Yeah. So, I mean, if you check our landing pages, those are written by right. Sonic yeah. You check our blog. Most of them are written by right. Sonic with some, you know, improvements from humans. Like, you know, some fine tuning and some polishing, but yeah, we use it for everything.

John Jantsch (06:38): So you just mentioned blog posts and landing pages. What are some other ways that you see? I mean, you, I’m sure people are creating ads and social media tweets and you know, all that. What are some innovative ways you see people using it? And again, maybe you don’t, maybe you don’t really have access to the ways people, but maybe you’ve heard.

Sam Garg (06:56): Yeah. So I mean, apart from the 80 different use cases that we support, so people also tend to kind of mix and match different use cases. For example, we don’t have a book writing use case right now where you can, you know, just write a book, but people kind of combine different tools and people have written like eBooks and stuff. People have written songs and compose like, you know, proper lyrics and stuff and written that, or they have written like quite big like stories for children or stories in general. So lots of different use cases people are trying out for sure. And we are amazed to see things people are doing there. Yeah.

John Jantsch (07:28): Yeah. I bet writing an entire book. Now that that’s gonna be, that’s gonna be an interesting use case someday. Isn’t it. So on the flip side of that, what mistakes do you see people making when it comes to thinking about using, you know, AI technology?

Sam Garg (07:43): Yeah. So, I mean, there are some like set of people who think that, you know, AI can just do all of their jobs. So without them kind of doing any editing or kind of any thinking, it just would do everything for them. You know, it’s like a miracle, it just works and you don’t do anything. But whereas what we are kind of doing here is we are targeting ourselves as an sort of like a tool that helps writers that increases their productivity, right? So we come up with the first draft, that’s 80% there and then remaining 10 or 20% is where you add your own unique writing style or your unique sort of insights, and then improve that before you publish it out. Essentially.

John Jantsch (08:18): Now let’s hear from a sponsor, you know, today everybody’s online, but are they finding your website, grab the online spotlight and your customer’s attention with Semrush from content and SEO to ads and social media Semrush is your one stop shop for online marketing build, manage and measure campaigns across all channels faster and easier. Are you ready to take your business to the next level, get seen, get Semush, visit Semush that’s Semrush.com/go to try it free for seven days. Yeah. And that’s actually the way I tell people as well that, you know, don’t think of it as done. Just think of it as, as you know, you now don’t have to do the research. And so some of the grunt work, right? So, so the flip side of that, then, you know, what are some tips to get the best end product,

Sam Garg (09:08): The best ones, the best results that you get out of any AI model, whether that’s for image or text is when you give it good inputs, right? So the better the inputs, the better your outputs would be. So with these generative AI models, whether that is for text or image, the quality of the input sort of is directly proportional to your output. So the more in depth and like detail and very specific prompts or descriptions that you give to the AI, the better the text of the output would generate,

John Jantsch (09:36): Especially, yeah. I have found as a user that each step, if I iterate a little more, so if it gives me an introduction, you know, from a headline, I’ll actually edit that introduction a little bit. And then let’s say, I want five steps to do blah, blah, blah. I will actually probably edit each of those five steps. And I find that way I really get the best. So it really is kind of a four or five step process to get a blog post written. Isn’t it?

Sam Garg (10:01): Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it’s like you work together with the AI sort of like as an assistant. Right. And that’s where the magic happens.

John Jantsch (10:09): Yeah. Yeah. So, so talk a little bit about the images and the image product. How are you seeing, you know, right now I feel like it’s almost just a playground for a lot of people that, you know, they’re just going in and seeing, wow, it’s amazing. It did that, but what are, what are some of the end use cases really gonna be? I mean, do you see people actually creating images that they want for, or illustrations that they want for their websites that could go with their brand? I mean, how far do you think that the image creation can go?

Sam Garg (10:39): So yeah. I mean, it has come like a long way. Just lasted. If you were to kind of look at da or clip models, right. They were like, not there that the images were very bad, but just in the last two months, since da came and now stable diff fusion and mid journey, all these different models came up. Yeah. So the quality has improved by a lot where we are seeing the most amount of use cases, right. And of course the models are still developing, you know, every day the improvements are happening, but what, where we are seeing, uh, people using it is for stock images. So earlier where you would get it from Unsplash or these sites, same image, you can find on like a hundred different sites. Right. So there’s no personalization, there’s no kind of unique thing there. So now people can basically, we are even building this thing, right?

(11:20): So shutter stock and all these sites, they charge you like hundreds of thousands of dollars for one image. So what you can do is basically take the same description on that link. You put it in photo and it’ll give you a same image, like similar image for that same context, but it would be like hundred times cheaper than that. Yeah. So these are some of the use cases and then beauty, not beauty, like fashion and stuff like, you know, you have different clothes, so you can kind of try it out through the AI, you know, different combinations or furniture you can, you know, let’s say on Airbnb or something, you have a flat, like an empty apartment, but you want to show it fully furnished. So basically you tell the AI, you know, put a couch there, add some lighting and these kinds of things and to make it look very cool. And then that, that you can put on zoom plow all these platforms. So, so,

John Jantsch (12:06): So who’s driving or what technology is driving all of the, this image creation. So in other words, people talk about G P T three, you know, for the, you know, for the article writing. But so what’s driving the images.

Sam Garg (12:18): So images basically, there’s this technology called kind of latent diffusion where, you know, all these models, daily, stable diffusion, all of them are based on that.

John Jantsch (12:29): And Google also is very deep into, to, you know, their own image recognition. Aren’t they isn’t that a lot. What drives us?

Sam Garg (12:37): So not image recognition. I would say image recognition is sort of like a different space. Okay. But yeah, Google recently released this model called image gen that is sort of like similar to dally and it’s kind of doing a similar sort of thing. And

John Jantsch (12:50): Part of that, part of their rationale for that is, is for SEO purposes or for search purposes. Right. To be able to recognize what’s in a photo.

Sam Garg (12:59): Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Everything is related to that for

John Jantsch (13:02): Google. Yeah, exactly. Some more ads somehow. Yeah. so absolutely

Sam Garg (13:07): What’s

John Jantsch (13:07): Coming in AI in your view. I mean, a lot of people, you know, three, four years ago, it was still talked about almost like science fiction. Now people are seeing it every day or not even realizing that they’re experiencing it every day, but what’s so what’s out there three to five years from now.

Sam Garg (13:24): Yeah. So the, where the way we look at it is almost everything will have some sort of AI element in it. So right. Like last year kind of this whole AI writing industry blew up now it’s time for images and then next year it would be videos and then music and, you know, so sort of like all of these fields would sort of democratize by AI. Yeah. And yeah. So that’s what we see video probably in a couple of months or maybe an ear down the line, we’ll see videos also being made using AI, like movies and all sorts of stuff happening through AI, PowerPoint, presentations and everything. Basically we can see creative fields essentially coming up to,

John Jantsch (14:02): So what do you tell a creative, what do you tell a, a copywriter or an illustrator? Are they gonna be outta work in three years or is there some way in which they need to participate strategically in using AI?

Sam Garg (14:15): So yeah, that’s one thing that, that many people ask us. Sure. So the, a AI where it is at right now, it is not here to replace jobs is basically here to augment the, you know, the way that people work. So instead of, for example, for writers, instead of the AI, replacing them, it’s more like augmenting them. Yeah. And basically, for example, you know, freelancers, Lance writers, what they used to do in like one month with help from AI. Now they can do it in like one week. Yeah. Or even lesser like couple of days so they can get kind of more projects. They can make more money, they can kind of make more clients. So it’s a win-win for them as well if they kind of use it productively and in a good way. So that’s what we say.

John Jantsch (14:55): You know, I’m really advising, I coach a lot of marketing agencies and we’re, you know, we’re just telling everybody that will listen. You have to be using AI to become much more efficient with clients in the marketing space. I mean, it’s just a given what’s what’s coming for right. Sonic in the, in your roadmap.

Sam Garg (15:14): Yeah. So I mean, of course there’s the writing space. So right now we are focusing solely on blog and long form writing. Right. We do have 80 other use cases as, as well, but 80% of our users are using our blogging tools. Sosu and this is all that will be focusing on how can we produce very EO, optimized articles and blog posts that can be ran on Google easily. So that’s one thing. And then apart from that, as I mentioned, you know, we, we are right on, we are kind of experimenting with images and then next it’s coming for videos and then photo Sonic. So then video Sonic, and then we have kind of lyric Sonic or something and then slide Sonic for PowerPoints and stuff. So we are going to kind of explore all these different things where we can kind of the whole marketing pipeline or the whole pipeline we can sort of, you know, optimize using AI essentially.

John Jantsch (16:01): Awesome, exciting stuff. Well, Sam, thanks for joining the duct tape marketing podcast. You wanna tell people where, where they can find out more about right. Sonic and maybe connect with you even.

Sam Garg (16:11): Yeah, for sure. First of all, really glad to be here. Lovely chatting with you, John. Yeah. And, uh, yeah, so right, son, if you can find at right. so.com that’s w R I D E S O N I T. Right. so.com or you can just Google it and yeah.

John Jantsch (16:25): Awesome. Well, great. Hopefully we’ll, I’ll keep reaching out to you, Sam, just as I experiment with AI and with right. Sonic and hopefully we stay connected.

Sam Garg (16:35): Yeah. Awesome. Thank you very much, John. Really appreciate it.

John Jantsch (16:39): Take care. 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 heck 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 or the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by the nudge podcast, hosted by Phil Agnew and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network. You can learn the science behind great marketing with bite size 20 minute episodes packed with practical advice from admired marketers and behavioral scientist. Nudge is a fast pace, but still insightful with real world examples that you can apply. Her recent issue. Talked about the, the idea of getting your customers or prospects in the habit of buying from you or listening to you or following you habit based marketing, download, nudge, wherever you get your podcasts.

(00:48): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jan and my guest today is Todd Henry. Todd teaches leaders and organizations, how to establish practices that lead to everyday brilliance. He’s the author of five books, including the accidental, creative and die empty and hurting tigers. I’m just trying to think I’ve probably had you on here for most of them today. We’re gonna talk about a new book called the daily creative. So Todd, welcome back.

Todd Henry (01:15): Thank you. It’s great to be here and I am a huge admirer of your work. As you know, we’ve had many conversations about that. So it’s always a joy to talk with you. I know you’re a huge admirer. You’re also a huge copycat cuz I invented the daily book. So you did it. Wasn’t you know, Thomas Merton it wasn’t he had a cracky.

(01:34): Yeah, exactly. Yeah, no, it was definitely John Jantsch with the ator of the format. And I appreciate I, I am following in your footsteps, so thank you.

John Jantsch (01:42): No, I, I absolutely love it. The format is proven. It is a very different kind of book. So let me, well, well first let’s do this. I’ll ask you to just describe the book in your own words.

Todd Henry (01:52): Sure. So daily creative is a daily reader for creative pros to help you be prolific, brilliant and healthy. The idea is that every day you’ll open up basically a surprise package and it will challenge you or provoke you in some way about how you approach your life and your work that day. And there’s very intentional. I mean, and there’s not really a rhyme or reason to it. It’s not like, oh, this week we’re gonna talk about focus and next week we’re gonna talk about, you know, relationships.

(02:15): Instead. I want it every day to feel like a surprise because that’s often what life feels like. You know, you, you don’t, I mean, work is not predictable. And so every time and my hope is people go through this multiple times, right? It’s not something you read it. And then you’re like, okay, I’m done with it. It’s something that hopefully you can go through multiple times every time you read it, it’ll be like stepping into a new stream.

John Jantsch (02:33): Yeah. I used to say that too, because the thing about a daily book it’s dated, you know, there are three, did you do 360 6 or 360? 66? Yep. Yep. Nice. Gotta get those leap here. People um, the next year on September 7th, that’s when you and I are recording this I’ll be a different person. Yeah. And so it will hit me differently. You won’t, it, it will.

Todd Henry (02:54): Absolutely. And you know, this is what’s interesting is yeah, I know we’re sort of joking about, you know, kind of being the originator of the format, but there are a number of daily readers that I’ve been going through for years and years. And I still go through them right. Every year I have, one of my favorites is by CS Lewis or it’s not by him, but it’s a collection of his writings from just all of his different works. And every morning I pick it up and I read something from it and it provokes me in a different way every time. And so, you know, in the middle of the pandemic, you know, I think a lot of us kind of felt a little bit like we were drowning a bit, you know, with all of the uncertainty and the last thing you wanna do when somebody’s drowning is drop them a 300 page manual about how to swim.

(03:32): And I felt like, as I was thinking about what my next book was gonna be, I thought, you know, there are a lot of people right now who just need to build some daily practices to help them stay engaged. And so I thought instead of dropping another 300 page manual about how to, you know, create on demand, maybe what I’ll do is just take some of the best stuff that I’ve written over the years and kind of divided up into daily actionable nuggets since that’s really, that was kind of the Genesis of it. I wrote the book that I needed, honestly. Yeah. And I’m, and what’s interesting is I’ve never written a book, John, you know that when you write a book, you have to be ready to read that book about 20 times before it comes out, because it’s basically what it entails when you’re editing and all that.

(04:08): Um, I’ve never written a book that I immediately started reading the moment it was published. And this book I’ve been incorporating into my daily practice because I wrote the book that I need to read. I need to remind myself of all of these things as well.

John Jantsch (04:19): Yeah. And, and plug for my own book, the self line entrepreneur. I, I did the exact I’ve said the exact same thing. Yeah. I was burned out frankly, as a writer. Um, and I needed something felt like I wanted to do something different and this kind of my, actually my agent is Ryan holiday’s agent Ryan holiday, the daily stoic, of course. So, and actually my agent, Steve Hanselman, curated and participated in the creation when he was an editor at Harper of the daily Drucker, which is a big inspirational book of mine, of Peter Drucker’s work. Right. And I think that, I mean, I think there’s so much to that idea of you, you get to the point where you can, you’re mature enough to write a book that you needed. Right. I mean, mature enough to understand that

Todd Henry (04:59): That’s exactly right. And also, I think often, you know, like in your case, you’re stepping into a deeper stream and you’re drawing from not ancient wisdom, but you’re drawing from aged wisdom right. In your case. And you know, in my case, it’s the same thing. You know, a lot of the stories or the essays in the book are drawn from anecdotes or stories or illustrations of things that I had heard or experienced over the years that had been helpful to me in some way. And I didn’t wanna, I didn’t wanna forget about those things. You know, I wanted to make sure I continued to apply them well.

John Jantsch (05:28): And I noticed some accidental, creative showing up some Ty showing up. I mean, so I think I don’t mean passages, but I mean certainly themes and ideas from it.

(05:36): And I was gonna ask you that, you know, how did you collect and organize? And you already kind of let that out a little bit, that it was, I wanted surprise, but you clearly had to have a spreadsheet somewhere that said, here’s what my 366 doubts are, didn’t you,

Todd Henry (05:49): you know, what’s interesting is I didn’t have a spreadsheet sheet actually. Right. But I did have a plan going in. I wrote this book in about three months. Wow. Well to about two and two and a half months, which, you know, you can appreciate how crazy that is. That was basically five entries a day, Monday through Friday for two and a half months is what it took me to be able to do this. It was a really crazy time, you know, trying to get this done. But what I would do is once a week I would sit down and have a planning session and I would look at what I had written.

(06:18): And I would think about what I had yet to write about or, you know, ideas or stories that I had yet to share. And I would map out the week on Sunday evening and say, okay, Monday, I’m gonna write these five Tuesday. I’m gonna write these five Wednesday. I’m gonna write these five. And I mean, there’s a lot of words. Normally when I write a book, I write about 500 words a day over the course of about a year. That’s about what it takes me to write the drafts typically. And in this case I was writing, you know, thousands of words a day to try to get these done. But, but it was a really interesting and stretching experience to do this. And I think in the end it ended up, I think, I think I captured everything I wanted to try to capture. There was a, an underlying organ organizational principle, which was focus relationships, energy stimuli, and hours, the five elements of what I call creative rhythm.

(07:03): So, you know, many of the entries tie back to focus. Many of them tie back to relationships, to energy, to stimuli or the things we put in our brain to help us spark ideas and how we use our time effectively, not just efficiently. So that was kind of the organizing structure, but it wasn’t like, oh, today I’m gonna write about focus and tomorrow it’s gonna be relationships. It was kind, kind of bounced around a little bit intentionally

John Jantsch (07:22): and total word counts probably more 30, 40,000 more words than a traditional business book. Right? Yeah.

Todd Henry (07:29): Yeah. I always tell people, I wrote a book that was a third longer than any book I’ve ever written in about a third of the time has ever taken to write a book. So, yeah.

John Jantsch (07:36): And that’s really interesting because I think I took longer to write my daily than any book I’ve written because I’ve found it grueling mm-hmm .

(07:45): And talk to me about this idea. I mean, every entry is, I don’t know, four or 500 words maybe tops in your book, right? Couple 300, probably 2, 2, 300. Yeah. Two, 300. Right. So talk to me about how much harder it is to write short .

Todd Henry (08:00): It is well, and that’s kind of the secret to it is the, I’ll say the final entry was about 300 words. The first draft of the entry, however, was probably six or 700 words. The hard part was getting down to that 300 words because it’s hard to express an idea in 300 words to really do an idea justice in just 300 words. So the hardest part was the editing. When we fi, when I finally got the draft done, and then I’m like, oh, this is gonna be a 1500 page book if I don’t do some editing to this.

(08:30): And so that was really the hardest part as you know, you very well it’s that, um, I forget the source of the quote, but it’s the old thing of, you know, if I have more time, I would’ve written a shorter letter. Yeah. And that’s kind of the way it felt with this book, you know? Yeah. But I think we got down to the essence. I think we got down to the core of it, but yeah, we wanted to include, you know, all kinds of other stuff that we just weren’t able to. I mean, maybe that’ll be version two, right? Yeah. Version two will be, you know, 366 more ideas or something.

John Jantsch (08:57): I, I find that it’s just going to, that. I would’ve read a short letter. It’s actually easier to write longer because you can be lazy when, when every sentence has to at least like two or three sentences and there have to deliver a gut punch, so to speak, you really have to pay attention to what you’re writing, don’t you

Todd Henry (09:15): oh. A hundred percent. And you have to really know what you’re trying to say. You have to really understand the kernel, the essence of the paragraph, and be able to deliver that almost poetically. It almost has to feel like poetry in a way, because if you don’t, it’s just gonna feel like you just rambled on for a couple of paragraphs and then, you know, okay, well, what was that? I have no idea what that was about. And so it is really hard to do that. I think that’s the hardest part of any job or any business, right? I mean, think about the people you work with and you’re trying to help them get down to the core of who they are in the value that they deliver their customers or, you know, how they position themselves in the marketplace. I mean, the hardest part is getting down to that core essence and being able to describe it very succinctly.

(09:59): You give somebody five minutes and they can tell you what they do, but can they do it in five words? That’s a lot harder to do.

John Jantsch (10:06): And now let’s hear from a sponsor, you know, today everybody’s online, but are they finding your website, grab the online spotlight and your customers attention with Semrush from content and SEO to ads and social media. Semrush is your one stop shop for online marketing build, manage, and measure campaigns across all channels, faster and easier. Are you ready to take your business to the next level? Get seen, get Semrush, visit Semrush that’s Semrush.com/go to try it free for seven days.

(10:40): Let me ask you this also because it really, the intention is somebody is going, you’re gonna be with them every day. I mean, that’s the goal, right? So, um, there might be a tendency to say, here’s what you should do.

(10:52): Did you feel like you had to kind of bring yourself out of the advice category and more like I’m gonna walk alongside with you?

Todd Henry (11:01): Yeah. It was really difficult to do that because you do wanna be prescriptive. Right. Right. And the reality is people don’t need, it’s not 366 commands, you know, like do these things. I’ll give you an example. Today’s entry with, I mean, again, which I read right along with everybody else who’s reading the book right now was about how you define greatness. And the entire injury was about, you know, how you define greatness, defines you. And if you haven’t really thought about how you define greatness, you’re gonna spend your life chasing vapor. You’re gonna spend your life chasing everybody. Else’s definition of greatness. And so the prompt or the question today was how do you define greatness for yourself and for your work?

(11:33): What does that look like? Don’t care what everybody else thinks, what this greatness look like to you today this week, you know, this year. And then chase after that, that doesn’t feel like advice or a command. It feels more like somebody saying, Hey, remember that thing that you once knew very well, but have forgotten because you’re so busy and you lose sight of it. Well, I’m here to remind you of that tap on the shoulder. Hey, remember, you know, you need to have a clear sense of what you’re aiming for. You’re probably not gonna hit it. You’re gonna hit somebody else’s target, not your own. So that was, that’s really kind of the tone I tried to strike in the book is more of like, it’s more of like 366 helpful reminders or provoking thoughts along with a corresponding challenge. Like my friend that is, you know, I’m sort of hugging you, but I’m also sort of kicking you in the butt at the same time.

(12:20): That’s kind of what I wanna do because I think that’s what we need sometimes. Well, and

John Jantsch (12:24): I think as I read that, which I did today, uh, one of the things that comes out in that is like, not like you have to have these great, you know, Harry audacious goals, you know, type of language. It’s like, no, you get to define it, but you better. Yeah, that’s right. I mean, it can create somebody else’s definition of mediocrity, but you get to decide

Todd Henry (12:43): that’s right. Or, you know, greatness to, you can mean, I am able to show up fully and freely for my family every single day. Right. That can be greatness for you. And you know what your job is a means to that end for you. And that’s fine. That’s great. Maybe your job’s the way you make money. You don’t have to go out and build an empire.

(13:01): You just have to make enough money that you can show up for your family every day. And that’s your definition of greatness. Congratulations. If you did it today, you pursue greatness in your life. Right. You know, for other people, they have different understandings of that. They have a different sense of calling and different arenas and that’s fine too, but you have to have some understanding of what you’re trying to do, or you’re gonna spend your entire life chasing everybody else’s definition of greatness.

John Jantsch (13:22): So one thing that I did with the self-reliant entrepreneur, and I wonder if you would, uh, allow me to ask you to do the same. Why don’t you read today? Do you have the well, I’d love to .

Todd Henry (13:31): I do. Let me turn around and grab one out of the shelf.

(13:37): I have one right here. Okay. And I will tell you, I’ll just, why don’t I start with January or I could read the entry.

John Jantsch (13:47): We just talked a little bit, let let’s read the one we talked about, cuz there’s some context and you and I are recording this on September 7th.

Todd Henry (13:53): We are, let me look the September 7th. And by the way, that was part of what, and I’m sure you had the exact same thought with your book and the format. Part of the coolness for me is I wanted to create a cadence of thousands of people or hopefully eventually tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people thinking about having the same conversations on the same day. You know, every single day, like September 7th is the day that we think about greatness and our definition of greatness and teams can talk about that. Or people can talk about that.

(14:20): I think there’s something cool. I think you create that cadence. That’s how culture begins to change inside of organizations and you know, just in the world in general. So, so September 7th, how you define greatness? What does the word greatness mean to you? Think of someone you consider great. What qualities do they exhibit? What really makes them great in your mind? Is it what they’ve accomplished? How others recognize them or what others say about them? The work they leave behind some inevitable quality of character or personality. I believe that how you define greatness will determine a lot about the direction of your life and career. In fact, how you define greatness ultimately defines you because it determines well, you will choose to spend your time, energy focus and finite resources. Have you ever considered what greatness really means? How will you know when you’ve achieved it? If you don’t take time to define greatness for yourself, you might spend your entire life chasing vapor or someone else’s idea of what it means, how you define greatness, defines you. And the question for the day is how do you define greatness for yourself and your work and how will you know, when you’ve achieved it?

John Jantsch (15:18): So I’m wondering if there are any listeners, am I asking this hypothetically that actually gave you a little scare because I think that, you know, again, our mutual friend, I think Steven Presfield wrote a blurb for your book. You know, that whole idea of, if you felt that feeling of a little bit of fear, that’s the thing you definitely better look at and chase and understand. And I think that’s the hard thing about that kind of entry or not the hard thing. I think that’s the job of that kind of entry, right. Is to spark some sort of reaction.

Todd Henry (15:49): Yeah. I, well, it, and it is meant to be not provocative, but evocative. Yes. And I always strive to do that with my work. I wanna evoke, I don’t wanna provoke provoking just means I’m gonna stick a finger in your chest and force a response.

(16:01): Right. But I want to call out of you something that is great in you call out of you, something that you deeply suspect to be true, but maybe have never been able to put language to. And I think that’s what, you know, what your work does for me. John, is you give me language for things that I know, but just don’t know how to talk about sometimes or I suspect. And you know, I just, but I just don’t know how to really articulate. And you do that for me. And I think that’s what good writers do is they give people language for things that they’ve always felt, but didn’t necessarily recognize. And so that’s, again, that’s kind of what I’m trying to do with this. And so if people feel that sense of weight, oh my goodness. You know, that sort of really evokes something in me.

(16:40): Good. That’s exactly what I’m trying to do. And that doesn’t mean you have to come up with the answer today. It doesn’t mean, you know, oh, if I don’t define greatness right now, my life is gonna be, you know, way off course. But hopefully it does inspire you in some way to at least consider what are you trying to do? What are you aiming for you? Who are you trying to become? Cause I think it’s a much more interesting question than what are you trying to do? Who you’re becoming is way more important than what you’re doing because ultimately that’s how you’re gonna step into and, and then really envelope the calling that is put in front of you. Yeah.

John Jantsch (17:10): And of course the first step to that is awareness. Who am I is right. Absolutely. Is the first question to who am I becoming? Right.

Todd Henry (17:16): That’s right. And we discover who we are by doing things right. Yeah. By going out, but not by sitting around thinking about it or wondering, or Naval gazing, but by going out and doing things and trying and failing and adding value and figuring out, oh, maybe I don’t, I’m not really all that good at that. Right. And that’s how we, that’s how we discover ourselves. And then we figure that out and we start trying to find ways of adding value and building a portfolio.

John Jantsch (17:39): So you, you mentioned at the very beginning of this, that you felt like you wrote the book you needed, but I assume at some point you were, you had a thought here’s who needs this book or here’s, you know, here’s the ideal person or, you know, here’s who I’m writing this book for. So how would you describe that person in a way that might help them realize this is a book they need?

Todd Henry (18:00): I wrote this book for people who are somewhat into their career. So they have responsibility that they carry on their shoulders, but they haven’t yet arrived at their ultimate career ambition. And they’re facing the weight every day of having to create under pressure, having to deliver value under pressure. And that weight never relents. They lay down one weight and somebody piles two more on their shoulders. And that’s what it often feels like when you’re working in an organizational role. And so that’s really who I wrote this book for it’s people who are creative professionals. There are two words as part of that name, creative meaning, Hey, we get to solve problems and make things. And that’s wonderful professionals means we have to show up every day and do the work, whether we feel like it or not. And so I really wanted to help creative professionals have some framework for how they approach their days, that would help them to be prolific brilliant. And most importantly, I think healthy because if you don’t get the healthy piece, right, you’re gonna lose the prolific and brilliant piece as well.

John Jantsch (19:03): I think that’s a great place for us to wrap up Tom, thanks so much for stuff. And by the duct tape marketing podcast, uh, we were talking about his book, the daily creative, where would you like people? Well, I will sort of ask you another question on our going out here. Where would you like people to connect with you? Obviously the book will be available anywhere, but also what are your plans for maybe trying to build a community around this?

Todd Henry (19:22): Yeah. So you can learn more about me@toddhenry.com. That’s my personal site, but we’re building@dailycreative.net. We’re actually building out an entire community. Then we have tremendous plans around what we’re gonna do with daily creative, including, you know, building out some tools for creative pros to use in their day to day life as well to implement a lot of this stuff. So I’m very excited about that, but right now there’s actually a community@dailycreative.net and go and join your fellow creative pros and even get daily, creative delivered every day, you know, audio and email and have some conversation around these topics with me and meet up and all those kinds of fun things.

(19:55): So we have big plans right now for daily creative@dailycreative.net.

John Jantsch (20:00): Awesome. Well, thanks again for taking the time and hopefully we’ll run into each other one of these days. Soon out there on the road

Todd Henry (20:06): would love that. Thanks John

John Jantsch (20:07): Hey, and one final thing before you go, you know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the marketing strategy assessment. You can find it @ marketingassessment.co 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 or the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by the nudge podcast, hosted by Phil Agnew and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network. You can learn the science behind great marketing with bite size 20 minute episodes packed with practical advice from admired marketers and behavioral scientists. Nudge is a fast pace, but still insightful with real world examples that you can apply her recent issue. Talked about the, the idea of getting your customers, your prospects in the habit of buying from you or listening to you or following you habit based marketing, download, nudge, wherever you get your podcasts.

(00:47): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Brad Feld. He’s been an early stage investor in entrepreneur since 1987. Co-founder of Foundry Mo’s venture capital and tech stars, but he’s also the author of a number of books, including one we’re gonna talk about today. Startup boards, a field guide to building and leading and effective board of directors. So Brad, welcome back to the show.

Brad Feld (01:14): It’s great to be 4,000 feet below you. Can’t always, I think I’d rather be 4,000 feet higher than I am right now. I’d

John Jantsch (01:21): Rather be a little toasty out there. So I have authors back that update books quite often, and sort of the logical sort of cliche question has to be, you know, why a second edition, if I own the first edition, what am I gonna get by getting the next one?

Brad Feld (01:36): A couple of things. First, the first edition of startup boards was good, but I was not proud of it. It was a unique book. There really weren’t any books written for entrepreneurs about boards, but I wrote it during a time period that I went through a six month depressive episode. I was very function, but it was a real grind. And I wasn’t really enjoying the, the work of the book. And my co-author at the time, me Hendra did a great job, including putting up with me, but in the end, you know, when I reflected on the book and read it, you know, I usually read a book I write a year later and just sort of think about it again. Good, but it wasn’t one where I’m like, wow, I’m really proud of it. So we took the opportunity to really improve it. We added a third coauthor coauthor, Matt Bloomberg, who I’m sure we’ll talk about.

(02:19): And Matt really was extremely helpful, but I was also very motivated to turn it into a great book this time around the other big thing was that we wrote the book in 2013 and the book didn’t age. Well, in terms of yeah, temporary boards and specifically, we had a bunch of sidebars from board members and CEOs and experienced entrepreneurs and almost all of them were from men. And we had a bunch of quotes and they were also almost all for men. And so when we started talking to people about a second edition of the book, a couple of the women that we reached out to, you know, made comments like one, one of ’em said that I don’t encounter a woman until page 82 in your book. And so it doesn’t really make me feel like the books for me. And of course, you know, there’s been a lot of discussion in the last three or four years about diversity, both gender and racial on boards. And that would be an example of the book, not aging. Well, yeah. Yeah. So we took advantage of writing a second addition to really change the voices, changed the language. I discovered a pronoun dynamic called the singular, they, which is totally fascinating. And sort of, I went down a multi-hour rapid hole on the evolution of the English language. And it turns out the singular, they is a much more accessible way to write than alternating. He and she, or trying to do he and she, or he slash she. Yeah.

John Jantsch (03:36): It gets a little clunky, doesn’t it?

Brad Feld (03:37): Yeah. And on top of all of it, right, you also have people who are, who don’t identify as either he or she at this point, just making the book accessible in a way where the idea of a board, uh, and being on a board is something that anyone should feel like in the context of entrepreneur ship, it talks to a handful of other things that we really improve. We make chapters a lot shorter. We refactored a lot of stuff in terms of how we organized the thinking. The first book had much too high, a wall to climb every book I’ve ever written. You know, you try to get the reader into the book in the first 50 to a hundred pages, right. Without making the wall too high. And then you can, after 50, 60, 70 pages start introducing some stuff that is a little bit harder, a little chewier, we had too much chewy stuff up front.

John Jantsch (04:21): Yeah. That’s interesting. My last book, my editor said, we need to take this stuff in the back and put it in the front. I mean, it was the first time I’ve really, and that was really the idea. It’s like, you really give the value of the book here, you know, say it in the first paragraph, you know, so people get in right away. You also did a lot of research between 2013 and 2022, wherever we are today on kind of the evolution of boards in general, haven’t you?

Brad Feld (04:47): Yeah. Although I would say most of my research has been living it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I’ve been on boards, you know, going back to 1994 was my first board shortly after I sold my first company. I guess I was on the board of my first company, but we didn’t really, we didn’t have a board. We had three founders and it was myself, my partner and my dad and we were the board, but I joined a private company board in 94. That was incredibly enlightening experience. And it was a lot of fun. There was some definite challenges and in the end, the company got acquired and it was a good outcome. And so I felt like I participated in contributed meaningfully, but then since then both private company boards and public company boards, I’ve been on a large number of them. And I don’t have any idea what the number is.

(05:26): It’s, you know, the wide range would be greater than a hundred, less than a thousand. And I’ve been on some spectacular boards. I’ve been on some tragically, awful boards, the vast majority of boards I’ve been on have been somewhere in the middle, right. They’ve been, you know, adequate, and I’ve spent a lot of time as a board member individually, but also as a participant in a board, reflecting on what makes both a good board member, but also makes a good board. Yeah. Or the board as a team. And I’ve tried to weave a lot of that experience into this book. And this is another place where Matt, Matt Bloomberg was really helpful for two reasons. One is, um, he’s been a multi-time CEO. So he’s had several boards. I was on his board of his prior company return path, which he ran for 19 years or 20 years.

(06:16): I was on it for 19 years. Huh. So a very long experience with him. And that was his first company. His company that he runs now is a company called bolster, which is an executive marketplace for both full-time and fractional execs, including board members. And so he spent a lot of time thinking hard about not just what makes a good board member, but how somebody becomes board ready. And so all of that kind of experiential research was what came into the book versus a bunch of academic research. You know, that says, this is, you know, we did a statistical study in blah or qualitative assertions, not based off of lots of experience.

John Jantsch (06:52): So the book is mostly about what you should do, but I find that people, you can get leverage. If you actually talk about the problem with most boards, like the mistakes they’re making. So, so, you know, what are the problems that, that if somebody buys this idea, oh yeah, I need a board because people say, I should, what are the mistakes they make?

Brad Feld (07:13): Yeah. Well, we have a fair amount of that in the book too, because we’ve tried to balance it between positive and negative. And we also tried not to be in the language of you should, you know, in terms of it more giving people a framing of how to think about it. But to the specific question, there’s some very simple things that people make mistakes around. When they think about the board, including reasons why early stage entrepreneurs and startup entrepreneurs don’t create boards. One of the mistakes is this sort of desire need for control. And his view is that I want to control my company and therefore I wanna control my board and sort of the implications of that. Another example of a mistake is to not think of the board as a team, but to think of them as individuals and Jeff Lawson, who we quote in the book had a great quote for this, which is as I get to build two teams, my leadership team.

(08:01): Yeah. And my board and yeah, my board can fire me. So I need to just sort of deal with that reality, but that’s fine. You know, until they fire me, I have an opportunity to build a second team that can really help me and the company be successful. Another mistake people make is, and this is sort of a cliche, it’s become cliche. You say to an entrepreneur, well, who do you wanna add to your board? And they say, well, I wanna make sure that I get, you know, I want diversity on my board, but I want to get someone who’s been on a bunch of boards and has been a CEO multiple times. I’m like, all right. So, you know, you’re already starting with a pool. That’s smaller because you’re trying to get a of non-white men, for example. And you know, all the people that have those characteristics are already on too many boards, cuz there’s a lot of demand for them.

(08:42): And so you’re not really sort of thinking about it from the standpoint of what functional value do you want to get out of the board member versus the, you know, the sort of reputational value. And I could keep going the last ID end with though here, which I think is really interesting. It was interesting when it came up, Matt came up with an idea that he calls the rule of one and or the rules of one and fundamentally boards become very imbalanced. Uh, a lot of times founders try to control the boards at the beginning and then you start raising money from VCs and with each round and other VC ends up on the board. And all of a sudden you got founders on the boards and VC’s on the board and it’s just not a healthy board. You’re not building a team, that’s a board.

(09:21): And so Matt’s rule of one includes the idea that for every VC that you add to the board, you had an independent director and his idea of a balance board is the CEO who could also be the founder and then an independent director and a VC director. And for every VC director, you add an independent director. Now there are definitely, I don’t necessarily agree with him that there should only be the CEO on the board, especially the, CEO’s not the founder. A lot of times there’s a lot of value to have a second founder on the board or if the CEO is not a founder, but his framework was really helpful, like in clarifying this idea that even at the very beginning, you’re trying to build this team of highly effective participants rather than create a controlled dynamic or defend against a control dynamic.

John Jantsch (10:04): Yeah. And now let’s hear from a sponsor, you know, today everybody’s online, but are they finding your website, grab the online spotlight and your customer’s attention with some rush from content and SEO to ads and social media. Semrush is your one stop shop for online marketing build, manage and measure campaigns across all channels faster and easier. Are you ready to take your business to the next level? Get seen, get Semrush, visit Semrush that’s Semush.com/go to try it free for seven days. So at what point do you tell people they need one? I mean, should somebody have an idea for a business and start thinking a board’s gonna be an aspect of it?

Brad Feld (10:45): Well, from a purely legal perspective, once you create your company formally, whether it’s a, you know, incorporated or it’s an LLC or even an S Corp by definition, your company has a legal thing called a board that might have one person. Yeah. You, my general view is if your intention is to grow your business beyond just you having a board from the early stages is very helpful. Um, at the minimum, it gives you a group of people other than you and your founder or founders to engage with you. As your thinking through the business, it also creates some accountability for communication and some rigor around stepping back and thinking about what’s going on with your business. There are plenty of people who think that, you know, creating a board at the earliest stages is too early. I just don’t, I’ve never, I’ve seen the opposite happen so many more times, which is delaying creating a board results in the company going off the rails.

(11:40): Yeah. I very rarely there, I can think of a few cases where a board was not, you know, as harmful to a very young company for some reason, but very few, most of the time, if the board members know that their job is to help the founders be successful, their job is not to torture the founders. Their job is not a purely governance one, cuz there’s just not a lot of governance stuff that needs to happen at the very early stages. If you have the right mindset as a board member, which is you have some formal responsibilities, but really your job here is to help the entrepreneurs be successful. Early board can be very powerful.

John Jantsch (12:15): So a little bit of the flip side of that, are there things that need to be in place if you’re a startup company? I mean, rather than saying, yeah, let’s just go get a board. I mean, are there some things that you need to have worked out first?

Brad Feld (12:28): I mean it sure, but not in a, again, other than the legal creation of a formal company. Yeah, not really. I mean, most of the time when you create a board, even if it’s relatively early in your life, you’re gonna create some structure around that board. You’re gonna create indemnification agreement. So the directors liabilities are covered by the company. You’re probably gonna have some rules of engagement for how the board members and the company interact. Whether even if they’re informal, you know, you’re gonna wanna be in a position where you can grant equity, uh, to board members for service. Because generally speaking for private boards, you know, you should compensate your board members with, you know, a non-zero but modest amount of equity for their board service. So, but you know, it’s very variable. I mean, I think about situations where a lot of times at the very early stages, somebody says, well, I’m gonna just create a bunch of advisors or an advisory. Right. And that’s fine. And we talk about that in the book. Like that’s a useful sort of way to wander into creating a formal board with the nuance that if you create something like an advisory board, be serious about it. Yeah. Versus just having lists of advisors that you can put on your website, you know, to give you social, social benefit, but nothing else.

John Jantsch (13:45): So what should a board, I guess this could go either way, what should a board member expect to bring? So like if I’m asked to be on a board, what should be expected of me vice versa. If I’m a founder, you know, what am I expecting a board member to ultimately contribute?

Brad Feld (14:00): I think there’s two different, two different things to ponder. One is, uh, what your role and your own expectation and your philosophy of how you’re gonna show up as a board member. So I’ll just describe mine. I think everybody can define their own, but here’s how I define mine. When I’m on a board, I really only wanna make one decision. And that decision is whether or not I support the CEO. Huh? If I support her, my job is to work for her. If for some reason I stop supporting her because of whatever’s going on. My job is to try to get back to a place where I support her and that doesn’t always happen. I mean the one decision that I wanna make as a board member is do I support CEO? And if I ultimately, don’t the one tool I generally have as a board member, not unilaterally, but as a member of a group of people would be to replace a CEO. So I bring that mindset because every CEO I’ve ever worked with needs different things. And the idea that I’m showing up with the generic playbook of

John Jantsch (15:02): Right,

Brad Feld (15:08): Just not EEO should look at, look at their board from the frame of reference of, I want to get different things from different board members. And ultimately I want that board to be a functioning team. So for example, if you add people to your board and every single person on your board is a deal, chunky, loves to do transactions, loves to buy and sell. Companies loves to do deals. Guess what? Your board’s always gonna be pushing you to do deals. Yeah. And you’re always gonna be spending too much time talking about doing deals. If your board is full of people who are finance, financial oriented, either investor or CFO types, you’re gonna spend an awful lot of time on your financials. Yeah. Having a blend of people that have product experience, go to market experience, finance experience, deal, legal, whatever. And having that spread across the board so that the board really can bring different things is powerful. And I think this then comes to the other piece of this, which is a lot of people add board members because they want help with networking or they want help with financing or raising money. And most good board members can be helpful with that. But if that’s a primary reason, you want that person on the board and there’s nothing else that is causing you to want to add that person to the board, it’s worth rethinking whether that’s the best person for the board relative to the other things that somebody could be bringing.

John Jantsch (16:30): So you mentioned the idea of, of this being a team, a board, how important is it that they like each other, that they, you know, that they respect each other? Is that important?

Brad Feld (16:38): Really? I’m gonna separate respect and like you

John Jantsch (16:41): Sure.

Brad Feld (16:42): I think that’s the key nuance. I think respect is critical if you don’t respect each other as board members, who’ve got a fundamental problem. And I have definitely been on boards where there were people who didn’t respect each other and you know, that created a lot of dissonance. And in a lot of cases, just fundamental dysfunction when you ran into situations that were challenging and difficult, right? That’s in the context of respect, I’ve also been on boards where people, you know, people lied, people were disingenuous. People, you know, did things behind other people’s backs, whether it was the CEO or board members that were very destructive and very hurtful to the company, not just emotionally hurtful, but fundamentally problematic. Those things are, I mean, those things exist. Those are problems. And the tone of the board and the tone set by the, whether it’s the chair or the CEO or the lead director, whoever is responsible for driving the board behavior that, that has to be paid attention to.

(17:38): I’ll separate that from like, I definitely have been on lots of boards of people who I would consider them business associates, but they’re not friends. Yeah. And they probably consider me a business associate, not a friend or they’re people who you get along with, but you know, you don’t wanna spend time with them. And then there’s the other end of the spectrum, which is people who you have just real genuine affection for. Yeah. And you know, you’re emotionally engaged with and, you know, in alike kind of way. So I, I think it’s critical that every board member respect every other board member, I don’t think it’s necessary that every board member, like every other board member, but it sure does help when in a team like any team. Right. If even if you don’t necessarily quote like the person, if you don’t at the same time, don’t hate the person right. It doesn’t have to be the opposite of it. You can, you know, all right, this person’s fine. And I, but I respect them and I respect what they’re bringing here that works. Yeah,

John Jantsch (18:36): Absolutely. So Brad tell people where they can find more about startup boards and really the work you’re doing. I think you’re doing work with bolster with Matt as, as well is

Brad Feld (18:45): Yeah. I’m an investor. I’m an investor in Matt’s company bolster. Yeah. The books available, you know, online at any online bookstore that you happen to, like it’s called startup boards. And if you just do startup boards Feld as the search, I’m sure it’ll show up. The Google will deliver you. Lots of choices. We, uh, we also@feld.com, which is my blog. I’ve got links to all the books I’ve written. So it’s got a link to startup boards there with a bunch of additional content. And then Matt’s company bolster, it’s, uh, bolster.com. He’s got various again, links there and he’s written two other books, one called startup CEO, and one called startup CXO. And they’re both really effective books if you’re a startup CEO or you’re an executive at a startup for helping sort of process through and think through different ways, uh, to approach your job and the role and responsibility that they have in these three books, startup, CEO, CXO, and startup boards are kind of a trilogy makes me think of token I wouldn’t put myself in that category, but it’s sort of a trilogy of things for any CEO or executive to really absorb.

(19:48): Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:49): Awesome. Well again, thanks for taking time to stop by the duct tape marketing podcast. And hopefully we’ll see you one of these days out in the mountains,

Brad Feld (19:56): John, it’s always a pleasure.

John Jantsch (19:59): 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 or the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by the nudge podcast, hosted by Phil Agnew and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network. You can learn the science behind great marketing with bite size 20 minute episodes packed with practical advice from admired marketers and behavioral scientist. Nudge is a fast pace, but still insightful with real world examples that you can apply. Her recent issue. Talked about the, the idea of getting your customers, your prospects in the habit of buying from you or listening to you or following you habit based marketing, download, 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 Jamie Jay he’s the founder and managing director of bottleneck distant assistance, a business he founded in 2016. It’s an outsourcing agency that helps businesses identify, hire, and cultivate their workforce through a carefully designed systematic approach to growth. He’s also the author of a book. We’re gonna talk about quit repeating yourself, how today’s leaders are using systems and processes to grow their business the right way. So Jamie, welcome to the show.

Jamie Jay (01:25): Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. John. Super, super excited to be here.

John Jantsch (01:29): So the first chapter is, um, a line. Many people were recognized. I certainly do. I’m a fan of Peter Druckers. In fact, I often cite him as my best biggest mentor, and that is culture. Each strategy. I think his was for lunch, but, uh, talk to me a little bit about, you know, your relationship to that idea.

Jamie Jay (01:49): Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. I’m a big fan of strategy. Strategy’s super important. You can’t run a business without strategy, right? In my opinion, however, culture, in my opinion, and just so happens. I’m a big fan of Peter direct too. Culture really needs to lead the charge because if you’re charging the mountain all by yourself, that’s challenging to say the least, cuz you’re trying to do everything and everything’s done through you. But if you can get 10, 20, 40, a hundred thousand people charging that mountain, the same intentions, the same goals, the same drive, the same vision mission. It makes things so much easier and having a good culture allows for you to be able to do that. And it’s, it’s pretty amazing when, when that starts working and you get out of your own way, so to speak and that culture kind of takes over and it has everything to do with respect and giving people their own voice. We may have the same vision, but people go about doing things a little bit differently. Embrace those differences in my opinion.

John Jantsch (02:51): Yeah. And I think Drucker probably would’ve concluded that, you know, give like, like you said, culture E strategy, meaning that you got a thousand, like really gungho mission driven people. The strategy might be a little shaky, but they’re gonna outperform, you know, that company that has got a brilliant strategy, but doesn’t really have a whole bunch of people that are committed to executing.

Jamie Jay (03:12): Absolutely.

John Jantsch (03:13): So you then of course follow up with the kind of vision mission values, which has frankly been, you know, the staple of the leadership book genre, frankly, for, I don’t know, as long as I’ve been reading books, but so, but in the subtitle you talk about today’s leaders. So how has that concept of, you know, mission, vision values have to have a value sta or a mission statement, value statement. I mean, how has that changed for today’s leaders?

Jamie Jay (03:39): Well, I think we’re in a growing world. The world is shrinking because of technology. Any chance you have to differentiate yourself, maybe create your own category as we did here with distant assistance instead of virtual assistance. But anything you can do to kind of challenge the status quo or take something and tweak it in such a way that it’s kind of, you kind of make it your own. I think now because of technology and the competitive nature of the various industries that you come across without good foundational vision, mission, provocative points of view, it’s really challenging to do that. And I think one bad habit that we’ve had was we’re better. And one of the things, and this is from my good friend, Christopher Lockhead one of the authors of play bigger and amazing book by the way about category design was it was either, I think it was Pepsi.

You know, if you look at their commercials, it was all about Coke. You see the little kid walk up to the Pepsi machine and he gets two Coke bottles and stands on the Coke bottle so he can get the Pepsi machine. But all you’re thinking about is Coke. So we try to get that whole thing of better out. And mission is not just words on a wall. It’s a true belief, a true style. And the closer we can be to that belief and the more authentic we can be, I think you it’ll be easier to develop a culture and unite a team that has a similar drive or a similar understanding of yes, I love that vision. I love what this stands for.

John Jantsch (05:17): You. You mentioned it already. I was going to bring up the idea of the provocative, the point of view. I think that’s a, I think that’s a great way to look at, you know, categorizing, you know, that differentiation, um, years ago, you know, when I was actually trying to figure out, you know, a new way of bringing marketing services to small businesses, which is really just became my life works. I, I just, I think offhand, when in some talk I was giving to a group of small business owners. I said, look, first thing you have to understand is marketing is a system and you could just see all the heads pop off. They’re like, that’s it that’s, what’s been wrong with marketing. Well, you know, and I just, I mean, it was like vivid to me that it was like, wow, that, you know, that resonated, that hit, you know, you could just see the eyes and it really is. I didn’t call it a provocative point of view, but that’s really what I’ve been doing for 20 years. So talk a little bit about, you know, how somebody, I feel like I accidentally stumbled onto it, but how does somebody adopt a, a provocative point of

Jamie Jay (06:12): View? Well, thank you. And thank you for sharing that with so many, cuz that’s a huge lesson. I’m a huge fan, big geek when it comes to systems, processes workflows. Oh my gosh. But when you’re talking about a provocative point of view, two things need to occur with that provocative point of view. Number one is what is the challenge? What is the problem that needs to be addressed? And what is the outcome? What is the desired outcome of being able to overcome that challenge? So in our case, our provocative point of view is we guide business leaders or agency owners who are FOC, who are doing the wrong things, spending their time on the wrong things. So they can focus on doing their best work. Yeah. So that outcome is right, right now, they’re challenged, they’re overwhelmed. They’re trying to do everything. They’re doing emails, they’re doing all this, everything in their business. And we want to try and elevate them to where they can get rid of all that chaos in their brain so they can open them back, open themselves, back up to being creative again, mm-hmm and then take have somebody else who’s really good at it, by the way, do the execution.

John Jantsch (07:24): So let’s, let’s go back to, to values again, for a moment the, you shared your values in the book, you know, we’ve, I’ve been a big fan of that as well. I don’t think anybody listening to this or owning a business would say would dispute the idea you know, that you should understand what those values are. So you don’t get knocked off course. You know, you don’t get, you know, customers to push you around because you stand by your values. But I think where people get tripped up is it’s hard. I mean, you know, 24 7, stuff’s coming at you that is trying to knock you off course that you know, is easier to do a certain way, even though that doesn’t necessarily represent your values. So what are some of the ways that you’ve found to, because you have to live ’em you have to reinforce ’em every single day, every single meeting, you know, they have to be there, which can be exhausting, but it also is never going to work unless you do. What are some of the ways that you’ve found to make them real practical? You know, in the trenches

Jamie Jay (08:19): First and foremost, I believe in him a hundred percent. Yep.

John Jantsch (08:22): Yep.

Jamie Jay (08:23): As a founder, I wanted to share my belief system and speak in a culture like we did earlier so that others can come in and understand what my original core belief system is. And they could either buy into it or that’s not really me. And that’s first and foremost, be steadfast, super strong. What is your core values? And then practice it. Every single meeting, we go over what our vision is, what our mission is, what our provocative points of view are. And then we go ahead and go into the meeting and we often have different people lead the meetings at different times to give them a chance to participate. Again, we hear their voice. What they say is important to us, but also it’s not, I don’t believe in a work life balance. I just believe in life balance, right by extension. These core values that we have associated with bottleneck, our company are the same core values I live by in my life case in point we, my wife and I were going to buy a new truck.

We went to the first dealer, three of the four core values where yes one was no, we left that dealership. We went to the next dealership. All four were checked off. We bought that truck. And so I practice what I preach every single day. And I’m a big fan of life balance. And if we can introduce what I feel into life, again, being real authentic, it’s so much easier to pass along those core values and have other people, if they didn’t think of something like that, perhaps adopt them or realize that yes, indeed. That’s part of their core values.

John Jantsch (10:00): Yeah. You started off by saying you believe them deeply. And I think that’s the challenge for some people is we’ve all been told. You gotta have these core values. So people sit around a room, think up core values, right? and it, it obviously has to be something that it, you know, that’s real or you certainly are never going to live it.

Jamie Jay (10:17): You know, I was in corporate America for about 12 years. Took me about 11 years to figuring out how to get out. I’m proud to say I’m unemployable anymore and no disregard or no disrespect to corporate America or corporations in general. If that’s what you like good for you. For me, I wasn’t a good fit. We had the big wigs coming from San Francisco to visit our little radio station in central valley, California at the time. And our manager gave us a piece of paper with a mission statement on it and also said, do not raise your hand. Don’t ask any questions.

John Jantsch (10:53):

Jamie Jay (10:54): And I was like, wow, that was just so crazy to me. And they’re coming to inspect as a leader. I would wanna know if there’s challenges in a certain branch or a certain area or a certain thing. Yeah. And it seems a lot of people get closed off on that. And if you have to get a piece of paper to read what the mission statement is, there’s a huge disconnect there.

John Jantsch (11:15): And now let’s hear from a sponsor, you know, today everybody’s online, but are they finding your website, grab the online spotlight and your customer’s attention with Semrush from content and SEO to ads and social media. Semrush is your one stop shop for online marketing build, manage and measure campaigns across all channels faster and easier. Are you ready to take your business to the next level? Get seen, get some rush, visit Semrush that’s Semrush.com/go to try it free for seven days.

Yeah. Let’s uh, let’s pivot a little bit and talk a, a little bit about the idea of distant assistance today. You know, so, so many business owners, I mean, the world has changed in such that, you know, the idea of having a remote team, of having people that you work with, that you maybe never meet in person having clients that you don’t go to their office. You know, I mean that, that is something that, you know, some people in certain industries have been doing for 20 years, but it’s really come to the forefront for pretty much everybody now. So, you know, what are some of the things that if I’m sitting here thinking, you know, everybody else is doing it, I need to get a digital assistant. You know, what should they be thinking about? Or where are they gonna go wrong? You know, where you see people that go, they get this brainstorm and, you know, idea, and then they blow it.

Jamie Jay (12:37): Oh boy. So there, there is quite a bit to unpack there, but I’ll try and be as precise and short as I can. As Christopher Lockett taught me. It’s not a long story, shorter, it’s a long story longer. But what I’ve found is there’s two things. I’m a firm believer in what I call is the 10% role. I am a hundred percent remote. I practice what I preach. I haven’t met anybody except for two people in my organization, in person, my wife and another gentleman that lives here in Springfield, Missouri, yeah. That we hired and everybody else is remote. And I’ve been doing this for 16 years. And so what I found is the first thing is we, as a business leader should understand what that 10% rule is because of COVID. If you look for the silver linings, we’ve found an identified four key roles that can not only reduce overhead, but increased productivity. Several studies have proven this. And so I really liken that because now again, with introduction of technology, boy, oh boy. Imagine where we were 16 years ago. Oh, it was nothing compared to what we are now. So now you have the capability of getting a lot of things done, meeting on zoom or doing all of these really cool things because of the interwebs and all that kind of stuff.

John Jantsch (13:56): Yeah. When I started, we met by phone and fax.

Jamie Jay (13:59): Yeah. we had a magazine and we would fax over the proofs.

John Jantsch (14:05): like,

Jamie Jay (14:05): Okay. You know, and we didn’t even have color at the time. It was crazy. But yeah. But yeah. So that’s one thing. The other thing that I think is really critical is you have to start planning, hiring from day one. A lot of people wait too long and then all of a sudden they it’s chaos. There’s overwhelm. And then you hear one of two things, oh, I’ll just do it myself. I can do it faster. Or I don’t have time to train somebody. Right.

that’s the worst mindset to have. Yeah. In my opinion. And I hate saying that to people, but I’d let them know because you really have to kind of shift that mindset. If you see the Epilog in the book, quit repeating yourself. It says, um, do something as if it’s the last time you’re ever going to do it. Mm. Uh, the good friend of mine, Scott Bebe said that. And I put that in there because you need to start documenting on day one. Yeah. What is it that you’re doing? Document it step by step, record a video, do whatever you can so that when it does come time for you to hire somebody, and here’s the beauty of it, doesn’t matter if it’s in ter in your office or remote, as long as you document it via video written, whatever it is. Yeah. It’s so much easier for somebody to come in and take over because they see exactly what you want. The expectations are set.

John Jantsch (15:22): And I think one of the things that people underestimate, because I, you know, we have a network of consultants. I train a lot of them are just getting started. And that’s one of the first things I tell ’em is look, you, your first job is to get a couple clients. Once you get three clients, your next job is to then create the fulfillment system. You’re gonna teach to somebody else, you know, be because what happens is they get five, six clients. And then they’re like, now I’m just running crazy. And I, you know, so they get, go get a VA and they fail, right. Because you know that

Jamie Jay (15:50): They just wanna hire the rock star. They know how

John Jantsch (15:52): To do everything. Like here, do all this stuff. Right. So it’s it. I love that. Do something as though is the last time you’re gonna do it. But I think one thing that, that I’m sure you agree with on this, but I wanna bring this point back is that when we got really good at outsourcing this stuff, especially me as my business started growing, there was a lot of stuff I didn’t do. Well, I didn’t like doing. And so consequently, it made me grumpy, which then consequently made me not a very good leader, you know, . And so when I got that stuff off my plate, I became a much better leader because I was doing the stuff I was meant to do. And so it really impacted the culture.

Jamie Jay (16:25): You know what, our provocative point of view, you just sum that up. Yeah. Stop doing the wrong things. Yeah. So you focus on doing your best work. The wrong things are spending 90 minutes, you know, two hours a day on email handling your own calendar, you know, booking your own travel, you know, making sure all of your projects are being coordinated with your vendors and your team. Like this is a lot of stuff that takes up a lot of that brain room. And if you can just kind of alleviate that. If you remember the, when you were really creative, when you first started out, you didn’t have any clients or anything like that. Right. You had all these ideas that’s

John Jantsch (17:02): Right.

Jamie Jay (17:03): Well, that’s because you didn’t have all this other stuff yeah. Going on in there. So if you can delegate that with confidence because you have systems and processes in place, because you’ve documented everything, it frees you up to be creative, let somebody else worry about the execution. You do what you do best

John Jantsch (17:21): All. I’m gonna ask you another like multi multier or type of question, but is there a kind of set of best practices for, you know, maybe vetting the right person, but also onboarding ’em the right way?

Jamie Jay (17:36): Absolutely. Absolutely. And I feel after 16 years hiring over a thousand people at this point that we’ve pretty much nailed that down. Yeah. We have to pay close attention to what’s happening because obviously when you create a system, things change and you have to, you know, add, you identify friction points. So there’s always that going on in the background. But yes, for as a general principal, it’s really do your background checks or outsource this to somebody else that can do the background checks and do the reference checks and take care of all of that stuff, because it’s really time sensitive. And it takes up a lot of time doing all of that calling. And then we, I just talked to someone three days ago, three days ago, two days ago, Monday. And he said I had 13 people scheduled to come in and interview one showed up. Oh

John Jantsch (18:25): Man.

Jamie Jay (18:26): Imagine all of the time that took. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So figure out what that is. Do you have the bandwidth to do that or does it make better sense to hire somebody who’s really good at doing that? And the second thing is when you’re getting ready to hire, make sure that you have the tasks written down that just totally drain you of energy. I call this the delegation roadmap. Yeah. And so what we do is we write down every single task we do in a given day. And then we assign two values. Number one, is it something you must do? Or can you delegate this? And number two, does it give you energy or drain you of energy? Anything that you can delegate and drain you of energy. Now start putting those tasks into a description. Now the next part of that is knowing whether or not that’s one job role, two job roles, three job roles. Because if you wanna protect the integrity of your brand that you work so hard for, and it’s your baby, you have to make sure that you put somebody in the right position. Yep. So you don’t wanna hire a personal assistant and say, oh, can you design all my graphics for my social media and post those? Well, no, because this person’s expertise is answering your phone, handling your email, maybe writing proposals for you, whatever that is. Yeah. So you have to be really co careful there, we call that the golden goose rule. Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:46): So talk briefly about your model then. Do, does somebody come to you and you find a person and then you place them as a full-time person or do they come and buy hours? How does your model work? Because I know a lot of people have different models.

Jamie Jay (19:57): Yeah. And, oh man, since COVID came these companies are popping up. So, so what’s good about that. There’s a lot of good companies out there. There’s also a lot of maybe companies that are a little more challenged. They don’t have the systems in the place. Yeah. Yeah. Because they’re so new. That being said, the way that we work here is we are a full 100% subscription based organization. We keep it really simple. We do full time. We do the re research. We write job descriptions for our clients based on 30 minute interview with them. So we take a lot of that work off. And then we invite three candidates that have gone through a vetting process. By the way, gone through an academy, they’ve been trained through nine weeks of training. They’ve graduated from that. And then we introduce three candidates to our client and they get to pick which one they like. And we move on from there. Then we do a 60 day onboarding the first 30 days, phase one, take an hour a day and train them. Yeah. Phase two, they maintain that the rest of the time they’re working by the way. Yeah. Right. The next 30 days, they keep that same hour and they do documentation. They take all of the tasks. That’s been delegated to them and document it two weeks prior to the end of 60 days, they deliver that to our design team. And we design a workflow manual branded for our clients with a table of contents, with every single task documented. And that gives our clients the confidence to delegate even more responsibility. Yeah.

John Jantsch (21:25): Yeah. No, that’s awesome. What are the typical kinds of roles that you find yourself filling for people?

Jamie Jay (21:29): There’s three main roles, personal assistant customer service representative and project coordinator. And we’re gonna be launching a bookkeeper in Q4 of this year as a time of this recording. It’s August 31st. Yeah. Of 22. So yeah. In about another two months, we’ll launch the book bookkeeper commission.

John Jantsch (21:45): Awesome. Well tell people where they can find out to all the ins and outs of a bottleneck.

Jamie Jay (21:49): You can go to bottleneck.online.

John Jantsch (21:51): All right. bottleneck.online. And then the book itself quit repeating itself. I know is on Amazon, probably other folks, other places as

Jamie Jay (21:57): Well, pretty much anywhere you wanna get a book, you can go there, but yeah, Amazon’s usually the easiest, but yeah. Thank you. Quit repeating yourself. Dot com. You can learn more about it there. Yeah.

John Jantsch (22:07): Awesome. Well, Jamie, thanks for supp by the duct tape marketing podcast. And hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the

Jamie Jay (22:12): Road, John, thank you so much.

John Jantsch (22:16): 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 marketing ssessment.co I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

John Jantsch (00:00): Today’s episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by blissful prospecting, hosted by Jason bay and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network host Jason bay dives in with leading sales experts and top performing reps to share actionable tips and strategies to help you land more meetings with your ideal clients. Recently, they did a show on the four day work week. I’m a huge fan. I think everybody should be looking towards trying to create that, Hey, we get most of our work done in like two hours every day. Anyway, so let’s try out the four day work week. All right, listen to blissful, prospecting, wherever you get your podcasts.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, and I’m doing another solo show today. I wanna talk about communication and business and working with customers and all the other various forms of communication. that go on in our business? I’m gonna make myself sound really old here, but back in the day, when I first started my business, the only thing we had to worry about was we got mail in the mailbox and we got phone calls, and then we got really fancy and got a codone or a, whatever. We called those things. And we got voice messages recorded. That was it. We checked the mail, we checked the message box on the phone and that was it. Or we answered the phone and we talked to people today. We do still get the occasional phone calls. We get voicemails, we get text messages.

People are now chatting into us from our Google business pages. Obviously we get email by the droves. People write reviews and we get notified about those. Facebook messenger is a way that people can get ahold of us. Instagram, DMS, I don’t know WhatsApp chats. So the point is we now have opportunities coming at us from 55 different places. I won’t even mention the fact that we got all these social platforms we’re supposed to engage in. And so, you know, what is a person to do? Because I contend because of this and because people want to communicate the way they want to communicate with us, we’re missing tons of opportunities. Business owners are missing tons of opportunities. People expect today to get instant replies or to, as I said, communicate in the way that they want to communicate. So of late, the advice I’ve been giving folks is we need to start using some of the technology to automate our communication.

And don’t turn off the the recording yet. I’m not necessarily saying that we never talk to human beings, but I think what we need to do is we need to start automating even the flow of how we get these conversations, how we can be checking in on them, how we can respond. Imagine if you had like one place that you had to go to, or an app on your phone that you went to, and all of that stuff was sucked into that. That’s what I think that’s the holy grail of communication today. And the good news is the tools are there. The tools are getting there at least with a little bit of work and is my blatant pitch. That’s a tool that we’re working on. We’re actually building this unified communication. It’s not there. I can’t send you to a website, but if you’re listening to this and you think I want that, for my business.

It’s just John at duct tape, marketing.com. Send me a note and we’ll start talking about it. But one of the drivers of this, I think as well is SMS text messaging. Everybody’s got a phone, every single one of those phones is equipped with that functionality. And it’s becoming there’s surveys showing that 50, 60, 70 pan upon the generation, you were born in 60, 70% of folks prefer to communicate via text, especially early on. I mean, if you were trying to close a deal and finalize some things, but if we’re just trying to get information, we’re just trying to say, Hey, I have an interest in getting X or I wanna schedule appointment for X text. Is it? I mean like it or not, there’s still some people that don’t think it has a place in business, but like it or not, it is a huge driver today of communication.

And if you are not using that functionality, that technology as a part of your overall communication or overall customer journey, you are missing tons and tons of opportunity. In fact, I would suggest there’s some buyers out there that are, that are just gonna say, oh, you don’t have text. I’m not gonna do business with you. I can’t schedule automatically. I’m not gonna do business with you. That’s just where we are. So rather than fight it, , let’s start talking about ways that we can do it on your website. There should be a text to, there should be a chat functionality. And frankly, that’s been around for a while. I mean, 7, 8, 9, 10 years ago, people were putting those on, but they quickly found that if they weren’t sitting there and somebody said, Hey, I have a question. Not much good was going to happen from that.

In fact it might be negative. So then version two became the bots. Everybody loves those, right? you ask a question, it spits out, you know, some pre-programmed answer. You ask another question. You’re, you know, your 10 texts in and you still haven’t gotten to close to where you want. You’re just like, let me talk to somebody. And now let’s hear from a sponsor, running a small business means doing it all. You deserve an online marketing platform that does the same. Semrush is an all in one platform that will lighten the load, handle SEO, social media, and advertising all in one place, attract new customers, save time and money on marketing and get ahead of the competition. If you need online marketing, no problem. Some rush will get you started. If you’re ready to grow online, try some rush free @ Semrush.com slash. Now that’s Semrush.com/.

Now, today, what I think the, what we wanna be doing is if you think about this idea of text or SMS, being the huge driver of the hub of communication, what about having taken that chat bubble and driving people to a text conversation? So now first off you’re getting, you’re capturing that information. You’re starting a conversation and theoretically, anybody in your organization, walking around with the app that, that has that info coming to it can respond. I’m not saying that they necessarily have to sit there and respond, but you know, you imagine you have a technician out in the field that, that, you know, instead of being there, sitting in front of a desktop on a computer, wait, waiting for people on your website, they’re able to respond through that. I already mentioned Google business profile. Google is very well. I was gonna say very smart.

They’re not necessarily innovative , but they certainly read the writing on the wall. And so in their overarching effort to never have anybody actually leave Google, they are capturing or attempting to capture all the forms of communication. So if your Google business profile is showing up at the top of a search results, increasingly, and I’ve seen this time and time again, one of the functionalities that they’ve added recently is text messaging. So somebody who’s on their phone, they’ve done a search instead of calling you, instead of going to your website, instead of just getting directions to your business, they can send you a message where those are going. Quite frankly, many people don’t know or they’re having to put in of somebody’s mobile device. Well, again, capturing those in that unified communication platform is going to become increasingly important spec, particularly for local businesses.

Here’s a, another functionality that can be built into this idea. I wonder how many phone calls you miss because you’re on the phone or because it’s after hours or because whoever was supposed to be answering the phone, didn’t get to it. Now, maybe the phone’s equipped with a voicemail and so great. You captured it there, but now that person has to go and listen. And you know, maybe it’s a insurance pitch or better yet an SEO person that wants to sell you services. So you still got all that time invested. Imagine if you had the functionality and I’m not saying you never answer the phone, but imagine if you had the functionality that every time a call was missed and not picked up, that person got an immediate text back. Not everybody calls on a mobile device, but I don’t know, probably 90% do so they immediately get a text back and it says, Hey, I saw we missed your call.

What can we help you with now, if it’s that person selling SEO services? Well, they’re probably not gonna respond, but if it’s a customer, especially a customer who would actually prefer to, to use a text anyway, it’s like cool text away. And now you’ve got a conversation going calendars, you know, are a big part of what is going to make this work. Imagine if people could on their mobile device, have the ability to not only, um, schedule an appointment, but that you would then have the ability to text them. And you’ve probably all gotten this. Your dentist probably does it, right? Dentists are crazy about this, but you get the, Hey, your appointment’s scheduled. Hey, your appointment’s in a day. It’s in 10 minutes. I mean, it, I’m not saying you should do that to the, to that extent, but the ability to actually have that follow up automated as a part of it, and there are platforms out there that, you know, that kind of scheduling and things have been going on for a long time, your dentist does it, your hair salon, does it, you know, maybe your, uh, H V a C contractor or plumber does it.

But I think every small business should have that ability now reviews. So you go, you do the work you’re done. What if you just had to press one button in that app that we’re talking about? And all of a sudden the person gets a text that says, we love reviews. We’re so happy that we did business. You please review us here, automate the process of that. And then when that person did review right there in your unified communication platform, you’d have the ability to respond to that review a Facebook review or a Google review. So this technology is all there now, and I’m not selling G whiz technology. I’m selling the fact that I think you’re missing. Most people are missing massive amounts of opportunities because they haven’t automated this because it’s hard to go find all the places people are leaving clues. It’s, there’s no question that if somebody gets followed up with in five, 10 minutes in maybe one or two different ways, they’re far more likely to convert.

We’re all busy. Life is inconvenient. Sometimes, especially getting stuff done is inconvenient sometimes. And so that company that responds first, that company that responds in the way that I want to talk to them, or the way that I want to be communicated with. I mean, we’re going to give that company, our business. So today, increasingly I’m not talking about, you know, I’m not talking about messaging today. I’m not talking about your overarching strategy, but a huge part today of the customer journey has to be automated. And you have to get much more efficient at tapping into all those communication avenues that are coming at you and SMS and text is going to drive this for the foreseeable future. If you’re not, if you’re not participating in this, and I’m not talking about the spammy, sending out text, I’m talking about in ways to drive the customer journey, to serve your customers, to get reviews, to get repeat business.

If you’re not using that technology for that, you are missing the boat. As I said, this is such an important thing. We’re building it. We’re building this engine that will allow you to have that beautiful unified communication place will allow you to have the app that, that you or whoever all of your team can carry around. And the person who, who needs to reply can reply. But I think that’s a place where we’re at today. That software has to be installed in small businesses today. Every small business, I don’t care what industry you’re in. All right, that’s it for today. Please hit me up, John, at duct tape marketing. If you wanna hear more about this unified communication, beautiful way to run your business, take care out there, and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road. Hey, and one final thing before you go, you know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the marketing strategy assessment. You can find it@marketingassessment.co not.com.co check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing assessment.co I’d. Love to chat with you about the results that you get.