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The Art of Customer Recovery: Transforming Negatives into Positives

The Art of Customer Recovery: Transforming Negatives into Positives written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

 

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with John Janstch

Photo of Jon Picoult

In this episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, we explore the art of customer recovery with Jon Picoult, a renowned customer experience expert, founder of Watermark Consulting and author of “From Impressed to Obsessed: 12 Principles for Turning Customers and Employees into Lifelong Fans.”  Jon has worked with some of the world’s foremost brands, personally advising CEOs and other members of the C-Suite. He helps organizations capitalize on the power of loyalty, both in the marketplace and in the workplace.

Key Takeaway:

In the world of customer experience, mishaps are inevitable. However, by approaching customer recovery with style, empathy, and exceptional ownership, businesses can turn these situations into opportunities to create raving fans. Remember, a well-handled recovery can often leave a more positive impression on customers than a problem-free experience.

Questions I ask Jon Picoult:

  • [01:01] How does somebody become a customer experience expert?
  • [02:48] How do you unify decision-makers in an organization around a customer experience vision?
  • [05:27] As the pandemic’s impact led to relaxed customer service, are we now entering an era where customers have heightened expectations?
  • [06:56] What role do you see speed playing in today’s market?
  • [09:06] Could you share a case where a company sought your assistance in transforming their customer experience?
  • [13:13] Have you encountered instances where customers were willing to pay more for exceptional service?
  • [15:10 What are the best strategies for fixing a poor customer experience?
  • [17:56] How can someone begin to identify and address gaps in their customer experience?
  • [19:52] What role will A.I. play in shaping the future of customer service and experience?
  • [21:19] Where can our listeners connect with you and explore your work further?

More About Jon Picoult:

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Connect with John Jantsch on LinkedIn

 

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by the DeskTeam360

Desk team 360 is the #1, flat-rate, digital marketing integration team, that helps small businesses and marketing agencies with graphic, web design, and on-page marketing services.

 

John Jantsch (00:08): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Jon Picoult. He helps companies impress their customers and inspire their employees creating raving fans that drive business growth. He’s the founder of Watermark Consulting and a noted authority on customer and employee experience. He’s a sought after business advisor and speaker working with some of the world’s foremost brands, personally, advising CEOs and other members of C-Suite. He’s also the author of a book called From Impressed to Obsessed 12 Principles for Turning Customers and Employees into Lifelong Fans. So we’re going to talk about customer experience today. So Jon, welcome to the show.

Jon Picoult (00:52): Hey, John, it’s good to be here with you.

John Jantsch (00:54): So I’m always curious on people’s origin stories for how they got into the particular line of work that they chose to focus on. So how does somebody become a customer experience expert?

Jon Picoult (01:05): Just lucky, I guess

John Jantsch (01:07): I should have said, how does somebody choose to as well now, not doubting it, I just mean I always love hearing what story backs somebody into what they’re doing now.

Jon Picoult (01:18): Yeah, so my first entree into business was selling radio ads back in college, door to door selling radio ads because the college station that I was trying to get a DJ job at, it was a commercial station. It didn’t get any funding from the university. And so they basically said, well, if you want anything other than the graveyard shift, you need to bring in some revenue for us. And so it was actually through that experience that I began to see how even very small details in your interactions with prospects or customers can have a really significant influence on their likelihood to purchase from you to repurchase from you. And so that was the first time I was kind of exposed to what I would now call customer experience, even though back then there really wasn’t the term for it. And then eventually when I went into the corporate arena, I had the opportunity to work leading various areas like sales, marketing, service ops, distribution even.

(02:13): And that really gave me a chance to see how the customer experience is delivered from the perspective of many different silos. And that’s a big challenge for many organizations is getting all of those functional leaders to really coalesce around one vision for the experience you’re trying to deliver. And so after that experience, I kind of thought to myself, well, this is a unique perspective to have having walked in the shoes of all those people, and I always wanted to set up my own consultancy. And that was the trigger for me was leveraging that expertise and those different perspectives to help other organizations improve the experiences they were delivering.

John Jantsch (02:48): So my next question was really going to be about challenges. You teed up a pretty big one that somebody can have an idea of, oh, we should be seen as this kind of company, but then at the end of the day, you’ve got this person executing, this person executing. So how do you help people work through that particular challenge?

Jon Picoult (03:08): Yeah, I think it comes to good leadership in the end. I mean, that might sound trite, but I have found that the common thread of any company that I’ve ever worked with that has been successful in its efforts to differentiate itself through customer experience, it really came down to the top executives, if not the CEO themselves, being passionate about that and making sure that it was something that was woven through every action that the company took. So how do you make sure that you are not trying to herd cats in terms of all of these functional silo leaders? And I think that it really comes, it’s the job of the chief executive to make sure that they are holding accountable, everyone in the organization for not just maximizing their own metrics and their own organizations success, if you will, but that they are cognizant of how they fit into the bigger picture and that they are standing up and raising their hand when they see that something that might be good for their organization is not good for some larger objective that the enterprise is seeking to achieve. And I think when you make heroes out of the people who step forward, raise their hand and say, Hey, I got an issue here, we need to recalibrate. I think that’s how you start to create a culture where people are not just strong silo leaders, but good corporate citizens.

John Jantsch (04:29): And I

Jon Picoult (04:30): Think that’s where you want to end up.

John Jantsch (04:31): Yeah, I mean, what I hear you saying is it’s really related to culture, isn’t it? Or permission to be that person to speak up, isn’t it?

Jon Picoult (04:41): Absolutely. Yeah. I think that the cultural norms that surround executives within an organization are going to shape their behaviors. And if you’ve got a culture that rewards people for hitting the metrics and the objectives for their particular silo, ignorant of how that may or may not actually hurt other parts of the business, that’s a problem. And conversely, when you create a culture where people are just by default thinking about the enterprise as a whole, I think that the sum ends up being greater than the parts.

John Jantsch (05:13): So we went through one of these days, I’m going to get through a show without blaming the pandemic on something that’s changed in business. But I think we went through a period in the pandemic where people were very forgiving. It’s like, I know you can’t get people, oh, supply chain, I get it. I mean, it was like customer experience kind of went by the wayside in a way out of necessity maybe. And then I think some companies relied on it a little too long, and I feel like we’ve almost got this backlash now where it’s like, no, that passes over. I actually, things have changed to the point where I actually expect more.

Jon Picoult (05:47): I think you’re absolutely right. I think there was this period of forgiveness among both B two B and B two C consumers. But I think we are long past that. And I think that if anything, that there is an aggravation among customer populations when they see a company that is trying to attribute its experiential weaknesses

John Jantsch (06:11): To

Jon Picoult (06:12): The pandemic at this point, what four years in. And I think there’s very little tolerance for that. And I think that you’re seeing the companies that are succeeding and thriving following the pandemic are the ones that didn’t cut to the bone during that downturn and were able to bounce back strongly and continued their focus on the quality of the experience they were delivering.

John Jantsch (06:34): Right. There’s been a lot of talk lately. In fact, I don’t know if you’re familiar with Jay Bearer was on this show recently talking about speed being maybe number one in terms of customer experience for a lot of industries. What role do you see that? I want it fast. I want the response to be quick. I want the solution to be quick or the resolution to be quick. What role do you see speed playing in today’s market?

Jon Picoult (07:01): I absolutely agree that for many businesses, speed is a key driver to customer success. And I don’t want to say customer satisfaction because satisfaction in my view is setting the bar too low. It is a way to delight people when you are super responsive. And the reason that I would say that’s the case is because number one, it’s rare that people see that these days. So when it happens, it creates what I refer to as a peak in the experience that people remember kind of snaps their head around and they’re like, Hmm, that’s unusual. I don’t normally see that. The other thing that quick responsiveness does is it actually reduces the amount of effort that your customers need to invest in order to accomplish something with your business. Because if you’re not super responsive, it really saddles me as the customer with more effort because what do I need to do? I need to reach out and follow up with you or follow up with a colleague or maybe another potential business or supplier that can help me more quickly. So I would say yes, speed is important. What I want to be clear though is it’s not always the key driver, and it really depends on the nature of your business and what you want to be famous for. So for example, there are some luxury,

John Jantsch (08:12): The fastest brain surgeon on the planet is probably not what you want.

Jon Picoult (08:16): Example. Yeah. Wasn’t the example I was thinking of, but yeah, that’s a good one too. But I’m thinking about some luxury products like Hermes for example. There are luxury high-end providers where the fact that you actually have to wait potentially many weeks for the product to come in and be delivered to you maybe to be handcrafted for you, that is actually a strengthening element of their brand experience. And so their speed is not a plus. So that’s the one caveat that I would say to your listeners is you got to really know what you want to be famous for as a company. And speed in that case might play into the value proposition, but in other cases it might detract from it.

John Jantsch (08:57): Yeah, absolutely. So let’s use an example. A lot of people use the term raving fans. You use it as part of your unique positioning for your organizations. Do you have an example that you can think of a company that brought you in and ask for, Hey, we need to transform our experience and maybe talk about some of the things that they did or you did or how they turned it around?

Jon Picoult (09:19): So one example that comes to mind, and the reason I like this example is because when many people approach customer experience improvement, they think about fixing pain points. They think about, let me look for stuff that’s broken and then figure out how I can remedy that. And that’s obviously an important component. But what I always like to tell people is that the customer experience game isn’t just about find and fix, it’s about discover and delight.

John Jantsch (09:48): And

Jon Picoult (09:48): What I mean by that is it’s about understanding things that your customers need or want that they never thought to ask you for because they never imagined that you could possibly help them. And so the example that I have actually is from a medical technology company that my firm worked with one of the largest companies in its industry. And essentially what they do is they provide automation products for laboratories. So for example, when you go to a local lab or a hospital and you have a blood drawn or something, it’s their systems that are automating the processing of those samples. And so here’s the thing, they have this great newfangled technology that completely automates the entire hospital laboratory. Well, that’s great, super exciting. But what they never realized was that one of the biggest challenges for their customers was actually the change management that was involved for the people working in the lab

John Jantsch (10:44): Because

Jon Picoult (10:45): The people working in the lab, these lab technicians, they had done it the same old way for decades, and then suddenly there’s this newfangled technology coming and they have to completely relearn how to do their jobs. And as you can imagine, there was a lot of friction and hesitation and concern there. And so in working with this, that was an opportunity. There was an opportunity for my client to actually provide their clients a turnkey program to help manage the change in their laboratories. And when they started to offer that, it was like they made the lab leaders at these hospitals heroes in the eyes of their employees because now it wasn’t just like, oh yeah, we got this new technology deal with it. There was a whole structured program for them to take their staff through and navigate them through that change. And that’s something that I would say was the kind of thing that creates raving fans within your employee ranks, which as you know from my book, I consider a type of customer and it comes down to delivering something that nobody really asked for.

John Jantsch (11:47): But

Jon Picoult (11:47): When you look and listen carefully, you see, you know what? There’s an opportunity there to do something different.

John Jantsch (11:52): And that’s a perfectly case of what can be seen as a customer experience touchpoint as actually being a core differentiator from a marketing standpoint. Yeah,

Jon Picoult (12:01): That’s right. And to this day, they actually do market that.

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Jon Picoult (13:22): Yeah, it’s absolutely true. It is not a myth. It bears out, as you say, in study after study. And the bottom line is that happy, loyal customers are less price sensitive because they don’t focus on the cost of a particular transaction, but rather they look at the value of the entire relationship that they have with you. And so when they’re less price sensitive, you can absolutely derive greater revenue from them, not only in terms of adjusting your price, but they’re also more likely to entertain ideas for other products and services from you. They’re more likely to refer others to you. So there’s a whole bunch of goodness there, but absolutely price. I’m not going to say they’ll pay any price no matter how good the experience, but you absolutely have more latitude. And the research that I’ve done that is described in the book actually looked at the shareholder returns of companies that excel in customer experience. And I mean, the contrast is quite stark. The companies that lead in customer experience outperform that those lag by an over three to one ratio. And one of the key reasons they’re able to do that is because they get a loyalty lift from their revenues and that just increases their profitability.

John Jantsch (14:31): Well, I think you said one of the key words value, I mean, convenience has value, for example. So I think obviously all those things go into the equation of analyzing whether a price is worth it or not. I had you share an example of creating raving fans in a positive environment of doing something proactively every now and then somebody screws up. And a customer experience is not what they meant it to be. Somebody has a bad experience. Do you have any advice for somebody to think of as a point of view or, I don’t think it’s a set tactic because it applies differently across the board, but how do you save or a bad experience? I mean, how should you approach saving a bad experience?

Jon Picoult (15:13): And so I love the question. This is very dear to my heart. It’s one of the key principles I talk about in the book, the notion of recovering with style. And the key thing for people to understand when they’re faced with a failure in the experience is that you should not resign yourself to creating a dissatisfied customer or even just a neutral customer. Because what great companies recognize, all the legends out there, the legendary brands, they sometimes screw up. But what makes them different is that they recognize that doesn’t have to, it doesn’t necessitate creating that dissatisfied customer and that if you overcorrect on the recovery, you can actually create a peak in the experience that’s going to eclipse the negativity of the failure

John Jantsch (15:56): Itself.

Jon Picoult (15:57): And this has been researched so much that there’s actually a term for it. It’s called the service paradox, and it refers to this idea that you could create a more loyal customer after the failure if you’re recovering in style as compared to before the failure even occurred. And so my suggestions for folks is first, that’s the number one rule, is you got to approach it. If there’s a failure, you say, this isn’t just about fixing, this is about fixing. And then figuring out how can I create that peak that people are now going to remember? And I think the way to accomplish that is, number one, it’s very easy to immediately focus on solving the problem, but the first thing many customers want is just to feel seen and heard. And so simply empathizing with them and acknowledging the issue and the impact that it had on them, that can go a long way. Once you do that, then the second key thing is to take exceptional ownership. What really aggravates people at a point of failure is when you have somebody that says, that’s not my department. I can’t really solve that. I’ve got to pass you off to this other area. When somebody just says, I can help you with that, just those words immediately, the tenor of the conversation changes. And if you back that ownership up with great execution, that’s going to serve you well in terms of recovering with style

John Jantsch (17:11): And going all the way back to one of our original points is, I mean, that’s a culture, right? I mean, that’s like I give you permission to own that and solve that. And even if it’s not in your job description, I give you permission to solve that rather. That’s

Jon Picoult (17:25): Right. Yeah. I call it Velcro ownership, and I encourage any company I work with to embrace Velcro ownership, where you imagine everybody comes to work, they’re dressed in a Velcro suit every day, every complaint, every need, every request is like a Velcro ball that’s thrown at ’em. And what happens when it hits your Velcro suit, it sticks, it hits your desk, it is yours. You might get other people involved to help resolve the issue, but you’re always keeping a on it, and the customer sees that it’s you advocating for them and owning the resolution of their issue.

John Jantsch (17:54): So if somebody’s listening to this and they’re thinking, yeah, I know we’ve got some holes. I don’t know where they are, but I just feel it. What’s the process? I mean, is it an audit you take a look at? I mean, how does somebody get started?

Jon Picoult (18:07): I think there are a number of ways to get started. I’ll suggest too to your listeners. The first is become a customer yourself. Whatever business that you’re in, sit down, take off your business hat, pretend that you don’t know anything, and try to sign up for that service. Try to go buy that product. Try to go learn about that offering that you’ve got, because inevitably, when you go through the experience yourself, you will come across things where you’ll be like, whoa, I didn’t know that it was like that. And it’s going to give you a whole host of ideas of how to improve it. So that would be my first suggestion. The second is, and this would be a compliment, is go out to your staff and simply ask them, say to them, what are the top three things that annoy or frustrate our customers?

(18:52): Tell me about those. And the neat thing about that, John, is the mere act of asking your staff and listing them in that process, as long as you act on their ideas, not only is it going to help improve the customer experience, it actually helps improve the employee experience. Because what your employees then see, they’re not just gears in the machine, cogs in the wheel. You are engaging them as a trusted partner to really help elevate the quality of the experience by capitalizing on the intelligence that they bring to bear. And so that serves to elevate the experience of both parties, the customer and the employee alike.

John Jantsch (19:27): And I wonder how many employees hate their job because they’re the brunt of bad customer experience processes, right?

Jon Picoult (19:34): Yeah. Well, and that’s why it’s a vicious cycle. A bad customer experience leads to a bad employee experience, which in turn leads to more bad customer experiences. But it works the other way too. If you can get that flywheel going in a positive way, you’re unstoppable.

John Jantsch (19:50): Alright. We’ve waited really till almost the last minute of the show for me to ask you, what’s the role of AI in customer service, customer experience, good, bad, ugly?

Jon Picoult (19:59): I’m not going to purport to know the answer to this because it’s obviously a rapidly evolving technology.

John Jantsch (20:05): But

Jon Picoult (20:05): Here’s what I would say is in the short term, I believe the greatest benefit of it, and that is giving your people a copilot that can guide them, coach them, help them navigate what, in many organizations can just be a mass of information that people have to sift through in order to find something that the customer’s looking for. How do I solve this problem? How do I answer this question? I think that ai, by being with the large language models, to be able to sift through that information very efficiently, it can provide a very effective copilot to your staff. So they could quickly zero in on the answer. And what that allows them to do is to focus not so much on the transaction of getting the information. It allows them to focus on the interaction with the customer because it becomes so easy for them to get the answer that they can then focus on the softer aspects of the interaction that make it feel warm and inviting to that customer.

John Jantsch (20:58): Yeah, I saw a demo of a product, some of these developing where it actually listens. And so it’s providing the answers before in real time. In real time. It’s like, this person’s asking about this, oh, here are a couple of scenarios. So yeah, obviously that makes it a lot easier to get people very effective in their jobs very quickly.

Jon Picoult (21:19): Absolutely.

John Jantsch (21:19): Well, John, I want to appreciate, or I do appreciate you some by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. You want to invite people to where they might connect with you and learn more about your work and anywhere you want to send them.

Jon Picoult (21:29): Yeah, sure. The best way to learn about my work is to go to my website, which is jonpicoult.com. That’s J-O-N-P-I-C-O-U-L-t.com. And from there you can learn about my book, my speaking services, and my consulting firm.

John Jantsch (21:43): Yeah. Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you taking a moment, and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road. Did you know that with HelloFresh, you get Farm Fresh, pre-portioned ingredients and seasonal recipes delivered right to your doorstep, skip trips to the grocery store and count on HelloFresh to make home cooking easy, fun, and affordable. That’s why it’s America’s number one meal kit. They have so many in season ingredients. I mean, you’ll taste the freshness of fall, all those fall vegetables that are really right on your doorstep straight from the farmer’s field to your table, I think it’s pretty easy to see that HelloFresh takes a hassle out of mealtime. But did you know it could also be less expensive than going to the grocery store and way less expensive than take out fast food junk? My wife and I really love the fact that we can order vegetarian meals. We’re vegetarians, and they have us covered with a wide array of options. So go to hellofresh.com/50duct, that’s five zero DUCT, and use that code 50duct for a 50% off, plus free shipping. That’s right. Go to hellofresh.com/50duct and you’re going to get 50% off your first order plus some free shipping. Check it out. I.

 

 

Why Agency Owners Should Invest In Other Businesses

Why Agency Owners Should Invest In Other Businesses written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Ben Young

Ben Young, a guest on the Duct Tape Marketing PodcastIn this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Ben Young. He is the founder of Nudge, an analytics company, that was a commercialized product from his agency. Nudge helps you measure the performance of your digital properties through the lens of what people are paying attention to. With the retirement of Google Analytics, many are re-evaluating what options are out there. 

Prior to Nudge, he co-founded an agency in New Zealand that was the 8th fastest-growing business at the time. Today, he will explain why agency owners should invest in other businesses.

Key Takeaway:

Agency owners should consider investing a portion of their own capital into other businesses as a way of personal development and to gain valuable insights from different industries. By investing in other companies, they can learn from other founders, gain exposure to new sectors, and understand emerging trends. While it’s essential to prioritize investment in their own agency, diversifying their investments can make them better founders and provide additional benefits beyond just financial returns.

Questions I ask Ben Young:

  • [02:26] What do you mean by investing in other businesses?
  • [03:00] Agency owners are sometimes really invested in their own businesses. Shouldn’t they invest in their own business?
  • [07:45] How do you analyze an investment if you don’t even know some of the terminology and what it really means?
  • [10:29] Tell me a little about when you first started because you were an agency owner. Were you naturally drawn to maybe tools that you had used or tools that marketers use, or do you think that you actually got completely out of your comfort zone?
  • [14:27] As an agency owner, one of the best investments I ever made was in a company that was a good fit and provided a core service that we can sell to our clients. Where have any of your investments fit into that category?
  • [15:31] When people invest in things, the hope is that they’re going to make money out of this investment. Should there be a measurement or criteria of time in which they can see some sort of return or you can’t really calculate all the benefits of return?
  • [18:02] Can you give an example of one investment that was a disappointment, but maybe you learned something from it?
  • [19:52] Now, can you give an example of an investment that was a success and what you learned from it?

More About Ben Young:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ben Young (06:25): You go,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network.

HubSpot Podcast Network is the audio destination for business professionals who seek the best education and inspiration on how to grow a business.

 

A Comprehensive Marketing Gap Analysis for Effective Strategies

A Comprehensive Marketing Gap Analysis for Effective Strategies written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

John Jantsch, host of the Duct Tape Marketing podcastIn this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I’m doing a solo show, and I’m gonna talk about a new tool that we’ve created, the marketing gap analysis. This guide will help you understand the complex world of marketing and create a roadmap for success by improving your marketing strategies.

Key Takeaway:

The marketing gap analysis is used to assess where a business is currently and where they want to be in the future. The focus of this tool is to identify gaps in various marketing areas that often relate to a lack of vision or strategy for marketing, and the overall goal is to help businesses by analyzing these key areas and working on closing those gaps to build momentum and eliminate chaos in your marketing efforts.

Topics I Cover:

  • [01:31] The idea behind a gap analysis.
  • [02:50] The areas of the gap analysis. Number 1: vision and objectives.
  • [03:41] Number 2: Revenue and profit.
  • [04:07] Number 3: Ideal client.
  • [04:48] Number 4: Core message.
  • [06:41] Number 5: Understand the extent of the customer journey.
  • [07:25] Number 6: Understand what your competitors are.
  • [08:19] Number 7: Content marketing.
  • [08:52] Number 8: Sales funnel.
  • [09:32] Number 9: Key performance indicators.

More information:

More About The Agency Certification Intensive Training:

Take The Marketing Assessment:

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

This Duct Tape Marketing Podcast episode is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network.

HubSpot Podcast Network is the audio destination for business professionals seeking the best education and inspiration to grow a business.

 

Building An Event Strategy That Connects With Your Community

Building An Event Strategy That Connects With Your Community written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Isaac Watson

Isaac Watson, a guest on the Duct Tape Marketing PodcastIn this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Isaac Watson. He is an event strategist and entrepreneur who founded Kickass Conferences in 2016. He has produced over 50 conferences and gatherings worldwide, specializing in event strategy and design for communities. Isaac is also the co-host of the Make It Kickass podcast.

Key Takeaway:

Events can serve as a powerful strategy for building a community around a business or brand. A comprehensive approach to event planning starts with developing a strategy that aligns with your business goals and creating impactful experiences for your community. Furthermore, a successful event strategy involves three components: strong community engagement, careful consideration of available resources, and a clear event vision. There should be a focus on fostering relationships between the community of your business and creating a space for attendees to support each other.

Questions I ask Isaac Watson:

  • [02:15] Why should people think about events as part of the marketing mix?
  • [03:09] What are some of the most successful kinds of event marketing strategies that you’ve seen implemented and that you’ve probably implemented on behalf of some of your clients?
  • [04:19] How did COVID change the landscape of the event business permanently?
  • [06:38] Are there technologies, specific tools, or software that you recommend to businesses these days?
  • [07:34] What is your process for getting to the heart of an effective strategy for an event?
  • [08:27] You’ve mentioned the word community several times, a community can be your customers or the people that you want to turn into customers right?
  • [09:46] How do you measure success? Do you have a set process for that or is part of the to-go with KPIs?
  • [11:02] How important are all the things that are not necessarily the core topics of an event like food, breaks, or entertainment?
  • [13:10] The first thing one should do is define what type of event is, what are the goals; and based on that, define the strategy correct?
  • [16:13] How do you get people to think in terms of the event integrating with everything else they’ve been doing particularly when it comes to marketing?
  • [16:58] How comprehensive do you take an approach or does it come down to what the client wants and what their budget is?

More About Isaac Watson:

More About The Agency Certification Intensive Training:

Take The Marketing Assessment:

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Isaac Watson (02:14): I I

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

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

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

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

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

Isaac Watson (04:29): Yes,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(12:22): Hey, marketing agency owners, you know, I can teach you the key to doubling your business in just 90 days or your money back. Sound interesting. All you have to do is license our three-step process that’s gonna allow you to make your competitors irrelevant, charge a premium for your services and scale perhaps without adding overhead. And here’s the best part. You can license this in entire system for your agency by simply participating in an upcoming agency certification intensive look, why create the wheel? Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create. And you can have ’em today, check it out at dtm.world/certification. That’s dtm.world/certification.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network.

HubSpot Podcast Network is the audio destination for business professionals who seek the best education and inspiration on how to grow a business.

 

Rethinking The Words You Should Lose For Those to Use

Rethinking The Words You Should Lose For Those to Use written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Sam Horn

Sam Horn, a guest on the Duct Tape Marketing PodcastIn this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Sam Horn. She is the Founder and CEO of the Intrigue Agency. She’s been a speaker for 3 TEDx talks and the author of 10 books, including Tongue Fu, POP!, SOMEDAY is Not a Day in the Week. 

Her new book Talking on Eggshells: Soft Skills for Hard Conversations, shows you how to speak up instead of shut down, face challenges head-on instead of running the other way, and keep your cool even when others don’t.

Key Takeaway:

We need to start applying constructive communication strategies to handle everyday character-building situations, conflicts, and difficult people. Sam emphasizes the importance of shifting from reactive and negative responses to proactive and compassionate ones. With the use of specific words and approaches, individuals can interrupt patterns of negativity and encourage cooperation and understanding in various settings, such as in the workplace, family conflicts, etc.

This framework empowers people to take a different path and turn challenging situations into opportunities for growth and improved relationships. Furthermore, by keeping these strategies in mind and setting a good example, individuals can influence others to create a positive ripple effect in their personal and professional lives.

Questions I ask Sam Horn:

  • [02:05] Does it seem like we’re offered more character-building situations today than ever?
  • [05:16] You shared what is probably the main tool from the book and that’s this concept of words to lose, words to use. Could you explain it?
  • [06:25] Let’s say you’re in an argument with somebody, you have two different opinions. How would you frame lose and use?
  • [09:30] Let’s talk about a very common workplace situation, a mistake is made on something that is a big deal and there’s a finger-pointing going on. How do we diffuse the blame game using these tools?
  • [13:09] Is there a constructive way to handle a bully?
  • [14:37] How can we practice the ideas you share in your book and keep it top of mind?
  • [17:18] Can give us a concrete example through a story of the common places where people use the ideas you’re mentioning?
  • [18:59] How could you make this a bit of a movement where people would start teaching this in schools and people would start having not just workshops, but coaching inside the workplace?

More About Sam Horn:

More About The Agency Certification Intensive Training:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Jantsch (11:35): And now let’s hear from a sponsor. This episode is brought to you by Business Made Simple, hosted by Donald Miller and brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals hosted by Donald Miller Business Made Simple Takes the Mystery out of Growing your business. In a recent episode, they talked with my old pal, Seth Godin, where he explained the virtues and values in his book called The Song of Significance, A new manifesto for teams. Listen to business Made Simple. Wherever you get your podcast.

(12:07): Hey, marketing agency owners, you know, I can teach you the keys to doubling your business in just 90 days or your money back. Sound interesting. All you have to do is license our three-step process that’s gonna allow you to make your competitors irrelevant, charge a premium for your services and scale perhaps without adding overhead. And here’s the best part. You can license this entire system for your agency by simply participating in an upcoming agency certification intensive. Look, why create the wheel? Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create. And you can have ’em today. Check it out at DTM world slash certification. That’s DTM.world/certification.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sam Horn (18:19): .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network.

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How Virtual Assistants Are Reshaping The Business Landscape

How Virtual Assistants Are Reshaping The Business Landscape written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Joe Rare

Joe Rare, a guest on the Duct Tape Marketing PodcastIn this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Joe Rare. He is an “underground” serial entrepreneur, investor, and outsourcing expert. Joe focuses on helping small- to medium-sized businesses and currently owns and manages a number of digital companies that are fully run by virtual assistants, including: Level 9 Virtual, Wedding Booking System, Engaged.app and Campground Digital.

Key Takeaway:

Joe shares his story as an underground entrepreneur with his unique perspective on building businesses in silence, without seeking the spotlight or constantly promoting themselves. He emphasizes the importance of focusing on business growth, making an impact, and connecting with customers rather than getting caught up in content creation and personal branding. Joe is involved in the virtual assistants and shares the benefits of outsourcing tasks to VAs and how it can help businesses grow and be more profitable. It’s important to have a mindset shift to fully embrace this approach.

Questions I ask Joe Rare:

  • [01:51] What’s an underground entrepreneur?
  • [04:34] How did you get started building businesses?
  • [06:12] What attracted you to the virtual assistant world?
  • [08:37] Now you’re building some apps and some marketplaces. What what got you there? And what have you learned that it’s going to allow you to repeat that process?
  • [15:43] Should every business be looking at virtual assistans as a way to supplement, grow, be more profitable?
  • [18:50] What’s the best way to go about finding virtual assistants?
  • [20:35] Do you find that people graduate towards higher levels of responsibility for those virtual person where maybe they’re even client facing in some cases?
  • [21:58] Talk to me a little bit about the mistakes or the best practices when you’ve seen the relationship with virtual assistans really work. What’s been the keys to success?

More About Joe Rare:

More About The Agency Certification Intensive Training:

Take The Marketing Assessment:

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joe Rare (11:36): Absolutely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network.

HubSpot Podcast Network is the audio destination for business professionals who seek the best education and inspiration on how to grow a business.

 

The 7 Deadly Marketing Mistakes

The 7 Deadly Marketing Mistakes written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

John Jantsch, host of the Duct Tape Marketing podcastIn this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I’m doing a solo show, and I’m gonna talk about 7 martketing mistakes that business owner usually make and I give you some tips on how to avoid them.

Key Takeaway:

Businesses often make seven deadly marketing mistakes: lacking a clear vision, trying to please everyone, being just like their competition, wasting marketing resources, competing solely on price, succumbing to the idea of the week, and lacking measurable success criteria. Overcoming these mistakes requires a focused marketing strategy aligned with business objectives for creating a roadmap for growth.

Topics I Cover:

  • [01:25] Introduction to the 7 deadly marketing mistakes.
  • [02:32] Number 1: No vision of where your business is headed.
  • [03:47] Number 2: Trying to be all things to all people.
  • [05:54] Number 3: Being just like the competition.
  • [08:49] Number 4: Wasting precious marketing resources.
  • [09:37] Number 5: Competing on price.
  • [11:11] Number 6: Getting overwhelmed with the idea of the week.
  • [13:16] Number 7: Having no way to measure your success.

More information:

More About The Agency Certification Intensive Training:

Take The Marketing Assessment:

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

This Duct Tape Marketing Podcast episode is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network.

HubSpot Podcast Network is the audio destination for business professionals seeking the best education and inspiration to grow a business.

 

The 4 Commitments To Grow Your Reach Online

The 4 Commitments To Grow Your Reach Online written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Becky Robinson

Becky Robinson, a guest on the Duct Tape Marketing PodcastIn this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Becky Robinson. She is the Founder and CEO of Weaving Influence. This full-service marketing agency specializes in digital and integrated marketing services and public relations for book authors, including business leaders, coaches, trainers, speakers, and thought leaders.

In April 2022, Becky published her first book, Reach: Create the Biggest Possible Audience for Your Message, Book, or Cause. This book provides a structured approach to creating a successful online presence that will generate a big impact on any message. Becky shares a framework to cultivate followers based on four commitments: value, consistency, endurance, and generosity. 

Key Takeaway:

Building a successful online brand and thought leadership requires 4 commitments. The first one is delivering value and establishing meaningful connections to attract and retain followers. The second one is being consistent in the content shared and messaging to build trust and a strong presence.

While it may be tempting to chase quick success, longevity is the third commitment, and being able to create a long-term commitment that generates sustainable growth. It’s important to set realistic expectations and understand that building something meaningful takes time. Finally, being generous: with ideas, time, and support to attract interest and engagement. Becky emphasizes that sharing ideas freely and supporting others can contribute to your personal thought leadership growth.

Questions I ask Becky Robinson:

  • [01:54] Based on the title of your book, creating reach starts way before selling or marketing a new book right?
  • [02:35] Would you put the things you mention in your book as a must?
  • [05:48] Can you explain a little bit about self-publishing as a more accessible and streamlined option when someone writes a book?
  • [09:20] Talk a little bit about your journey of creating Reach that led to a publishing deal for you.
  • [13:16] In your book you mention four commitments: value, consistency, longevity, and generosity. Can you explain each one of them?
  • [17:53] Talking about longevity, how do you balance that when everybody wants quick results?
  • [21:52] What’s your relationship with goal setting?

More About Becky Robinson:

More About The Agency Certification Intensive Training:

Take The Marketing Assessment:

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

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

(01:14): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Becky Robinson. She’s the founder and CEO of weaving influence, a full service marketing agency that specializes in digital and integrated marketing services and public relations for book offerers, including business leaders, coaches, trainers, speakers, and thought leaders. In April of 2022, she finished her first book with Barrett Kohler publishers titled Reach: Create the Biggest Possible Audience for Your Message, Book, or Cause. So Becky, welcome to the show.

Becky Robinson (01:51): Thank you, John. It’s so great to be with you today.

John Jantsch (01:54): So I have, because I’ve written a few books myself, I get a lot of people that reach out to me and say, okay, I’ve written my book, how do I market it now? Uh, how do I sell books? ? I sell more books. I’m gonna suggest based on the title of your book that it starts way before that, doesn’t it?

Becky Robinson (02:12): Oh, it sure does, John. And you know, I think it starts, hopefully it starts before you even have an idea for a book. If you’re talking about a prescriptive nonfiction book, if you desire to write a prescriptive nonfiction book, you likely should be building an audience and community around your work for years before,

John Jantsch (02:31): Yeah,

Becky Robinson (02:32): Maybe a decade before

John Jantsch (02:34): . So, I mean, are you, I know a lot of people have ideas that they want to write a book and a few of ’em actually get around to doing it. Would you say that this is, I you would put this out there as a must? I mean, you must do the things in your book if you’re going to even consider having somebody look at your book.

Becky Robinson (02:53): Well, certainly if you want to attract a traditional publisher, right? You need to build an audience before you go to a traditional publisher because they’re making a business decision. They want to know that if they take a chance on your book and publish you, that you’re gonna be able to drive interest in sales. So, you know, if you dream of traditional publishing, yes, you must attend to growing an online presence to be able to support your book marketing. Now, if you’re interested in, you know, some people come to me and they wanna write a book just because it’s a bucket list item or Yeah, yeah. You know, maybe they wanna use it as a glorified business card in their business and give to potential customers. Now, in that case, you might have a choice about whether or not to build an online presence, but in the book, one of the things I talk about, John, is what I call the influence gap.

(03:36): And for anyone who has great real world expertise that they could bring to a nonfiction business book, but they haven’t adequately represented that thought leadership online, then they’re experiencing what I call the influence gap. And that happens when there’s a disconnect between who we are in real life and who we are online. If we want to set ourselves up for success, to have the biggest possible reach for our work, we have to choose to invest in both that kind of offline real world, you know, knowing something about our topics, experience with real life people and work. And we have to translate that and share that journey online as well.

John Jantsch (04:14): Yeah. If I can be completely cynical, I would suggest that the traditional publisher is, that’s the first thing they care about. What’s the size of your audience? What’s the size of your reach? Oh, you got a nice topic. Great, we’ll get to that later. It’s more like, can you guarantee us that you can sell 25,000 copies? I mean, I think that’s almost the, the calculus today, isn’t it?

Becky Robinson (04:31): It is. And that’s why people who are already famous get book deals. Right. You know, I have, I took a screenshot the day that Barack Obama’s book came out. He sold 887,000 books on the day his book was released . So of course, you know, people who have that kind of existing fame and fortune already are the ones who are gonna get the book deals. You know, that’s why, you know, you see kind of a, a viral sensation happen and someone has a big following. Then quite often what follows after that is a book deal. And that’s an easy decision when the outcome of the success of the publisher’s work is that they sell books. The reality is they may publish a lot of books that don’t sell to that level, and they’re using those huge sale selling books to offset the ones who aren’t. But for people who are not known, you have to be able to prove that you can drive sales. Yeah.

John Jantsch (05:24): And it’s probably 90 to 95% of their books, you know, are not, maybe they’re break even or, you know, maybe they make a little money, but you’re absolutely right. They bank on, you know, that top 10. And then of course, years of back list. I mean, but Duct Tape Marketing came out in 2007, and I’m still getting, you know, royalty checks, you know, for that, because that back list of 600 or 6,000, I don’t have many books, you know, is where they actually make their money. Let’s talk a little bit about self-publishing then. You talked about the glorified business card as it sort of called, but it, there’s no question it can be, uh, an effective marketing tactic and that whole world has gotten a lot easier and you know, much more streamlined. Talk a little bit about that as an option.

Becky Robinson (06:03): Sure, I’d be glad to. So there are lots of folks who, you know, have a point of view to share, but they don’t necessarily aspire to getting a lot of sales. Uh, in that case, obviously self-publishing can be a viable option and, uh, like even at my company, we support authors who want to self-publish their books, uh, with what I call a book production service. We are not a publisher. Uh, what I would say is that quality still matters. Yeah. So you wanna write a book worth reading because if you’re using a book in that way, those who read it will be using that book to decide if you’re credible and if you’re worth hiring. And so you don’t wanna skimp on a professional cover, you don’t wanna skimp on a professional edit, you don’t wanna skip skimp on a professional interior design. You want to create the best product possible, because obviously that will tell people things about your brand and expertise.

(06:54): Yeah. And so in that world, you know, if you’re going to bother to write a book worth reading, then what I would say is then why not invest in expanding awareness of that book even beyond the people who could hire you? There’s so much time and energy and money that goes into that. So, you know, on in some ways, you know, I said that’s a choice that people can make, but at the same time, if you are going to invest to the level that you would need to have a product that can be a good business card for your business, then why not share that value more widely? You know, I wanna pick up on something you said, John, you are still getting royalty checks on a book that you wrote in 2007. So for those who might be listening who are considering a book, you wanna see that book as being a long-term, viable marketing tool for your work and a value add to others. And you know what? An amazing thing to have a book that’s been out there that many years is still relevant, is still reaching readers. And I think that’s the kind of book that we should all aspire to write. Yeah. One that’s going to be timeless, one that’s going to add value, one that can continue to fuel whatever work we wanna be about in the world.

John Jantsch (08:00): Yeah. And I, and I think also a lot of times people think of the book as one thing. You know, for me it quadrupled my speaking. It, you know, led to other people wanting, we started a whole licensing program of our methodology be based on the fact that people were able to find that book. So I didn’t write it as a business card, but it certainly has for many years acted as a drawing card for many other things that we’ve been able to build around it. And I, and I think that’s a lot of times people just think the physical book is it, but the physical book might actually be the entry.

Becky Robinson (08:33): Yeah, I agree with you because once you have that physical book, the ideas in the book can be repurposed and reused in all sorts of different ways to be able to reach new audiences in new ways. And you know, I imagine, John, you have continued to learn or adapt the ideas in the book. And so as you continue to bring those to new audiences, the power of that original content asset will grow. So chapter seven in my book, for those of you who are interested and have an existing book, wanna figure out how to repurpose and reuse it in different ways, that’s a really powerful way to, to view a book. It’s, it’s an ongoing asset that you can use to add value to the world.

John Jantsch (09:10): So because, and this isn’t always the case with nonfiction offers, but because you have actually done what you’re telling people to do, you have your own book now that is out there. Talk a little bit about your journey of creating reach that led to, uh, a publishing deal for you. And we can just use you as a bit of a case study.

Becky Robinson (09:28): Sure, I would love to. So John, I started working with authors back in about 2010. And immediately I think as we, we all who love books are drawn to, you know, I saw what my authors were experiencing, and I, I immediately said, well, I want to do this also. And I remember early on, I traveled out to San Francisco. I had an author who was published by Barett Kohler Publishers, who later did acquire my book. And I remember thinking, well, look at how easy this is. Like, I know a publisher. So I, I made an appointment with an editor, I sat down, I shared my first book idea, and guess what happened? He said no. And then a few years later, I thought I had refined my idea a little bit. I contacted the same acquiring editor, and guess what John? He said, no. And then some more years went by.

(10:17): And I think in those intervening years, a few things happened. One is that I continued to build my own online presence. I was building my email list. I was establishing thought leadership and credibility. You know, in those years I had a podcast, I had a newsletter. I grew my social media accounts. So there were at least two things that happened during those intervening years between when I started my business and then 10 years after when I finally did get a book deal. One is that I built confidence in the way that I could articulate my ideas, which I think led to me writing a better book proposal in terms of how I framed the idea. So that’s one thing. And the second thing is also just the growth of my thought leadership brand. So in 2012, when I first talked to the editor, I was an unknown.

(10:59): I didn’t have, you know, any experience or credibility. You know, fast forward 10 years, I could say, Hey, I’ve launched 150 business books, you know, I’ve done X, Y, Z. So I think that, you know, for those who might be listening, who might be beginners like I was, and have a book dream, be patient, but use your time in the best way possible. Yeah. No, I think it’s possible. I could have gotten a book deal earlier. I had a lot of reasons along the way for why I waited. Finally, the thing that kind of got me over my resistance was figuring out that if I did a book proposal in, I think it was like the fall of 2020 or the leading up to December, 2020, that I could probably release the book for the 10 year anniversary of my company. Mm-hmm. . So that was really the thing that kind of pushed me over the edge, John, to say, okay, I’m going to do it this time. I’m going to write a book proposal and submit it. And so I, I got a book deal in February of 2021. Then my book came out in April of 22.

John Jantsch (11:56): And now let’s hear from a sponsor. This episode is brought to you by Business Made Simple, hosted by Donald Miller, and brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals hosted by Donald Miller Business Made Simple Takes the Mystery out of Growing Your Business. In a recent episode, they talked with my old pal, Seth Godin, where he explained the virtues and values in his book called The Song of Significance, A new manifesto for teams, listen to Business Made Simple. Wherever you get your podcast.

(12:28): Hey, marketing agency owners, you know, I can teach you the keys to doubling your business in just 90 days or your money back. Sound interesting. All you have to do is license our three-step process that’s gonna allow you to make your competitors irrelevant, charge a premium for your services and scale perhaps without adding overhead. And here’s the best part. You could license this entire system for your agency by simply participating in an upcoming agency certification intensive look, why create the wheel? Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create. And you can have ’em today, check it out at dtm.world/certification. That’s dtm.world/certification.

(13:16): So let’s talk a little bit about the, I think you call ’em commitments, pillars, whatever we wanna talk about. So there are four that you, uh, talk about in the book, value, consistency, endurance, and generosity. Obviously listeners, you’re going to get the book to get the whole story, but let’s talk a little bit about that idea of giving value. I think there’s a lot of, there’s a challenge for some people because they have a business values what they sell, , you know, but, but giving value sometimes, I mean, we all know it generally comes back, but sometimes if you don’t, if you don’t have enough money to eat , you’re giving value. Feels hard, doesn’t it?

Becky Robinson (13:52): Well, yes, and I do want to acknowledge, and I do talk about in my book, the difficulty for some of these ideas, if you happen to come from a marginalized identity. And I do know that my own ability to navigate the world did come from a, a place of privilege as many of us do. So I do wanna acknowledge that first. But in terms of growing an online brand or online thought leadership, it always has to start with value. And that value is, you know, what do you have to add? You know, what’s the topic or expertise that you’re bringing to online spaces? And so showing up with value is the starting point, because why would someone wanna follow you if there’s not some value that you’re delivering to them? I do wanna say, John, that value is not only about the content that we create, but it’s also about the connections that we make.

(14:36): And so people might derive value from following us, not only because we have a point of view to share, but also because of who we are as people. And so thinking about value, it’s, there’s value in the content, but there’s also value in the relationships or how we show up in the world. And that’s really the starting line for this. Like, if you don’t have any value to offer, you are not going to attract people to follow you or build community or build an audience. So yeah, that’s really the, the most basic commitment. The second commitment is consistency. And you know, in order for people to count on you or trust you, they have to know not only that you will show up in a consistent way that you’re gonna continue to be there. John, before we started recording, you told me that you’ve done 1500 podcast episodes.

(15:22): Now that is consistency, if I’ve ever seen it before. People know John, that they can count on you to show up with something. List interesting to listen to that you’re gonna ask good questions, that you’re gonna share content that matches what they need. So when we show up with value, consistency, people know that they can count on us. And the other thing is, I think people need to see a consistency of message. So sometimes where we fail at building reach, it’s because we, we failed to, uh, we failed to commit to a topic area. And so for example, like today I might wanna write about social media next week I might wanna write about leadership. People can’t figure out what I’m about. So we do need to have consistency in our messaging.

John Jantsch (16:03): Yeah, it’s interesting about that topic though. I think some, if I can add a point to that, consistency sometimes can just be a consistent point of view. You know, there are new topics that come up in our, you know, our world of marketing, for example. My consistent point of view has always been that marketing’s a system that starts with strategy before tactics. But Lord knows over the last 20 years we’ve seen a lot of new platforms that fit into that point of view. And I, so, so I think sometimes people do jump around, but I think you can jump around with a consistent point of view. And I, I maybe that’s a subtle point, but I think it’s one worth making.

Becky Robinson (16:38): No, I think that’s a really good point, John. And you know, I think that part of it involves ensuring that we’re listing our community and keeping them up to date on our story. Right? Right,

John Jantsch (16:49): Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Becky Robinson (16:50): So to all of those, you wanna add the third commitment, which is, you said endurance, it’s longevity. Oh. And so we need to commit to showing up with value consistency over a long period of time. John, I’m sure you’ve probably interviewed Dory Clark. Yeah, good friend. Dory Clark says it can take a year of showing up online to get any results at all. And it can take five years to be recognized as an expert. So I think what often happens is people think that they’re gonna come online and start to share something, and it’s gonna be magic, and they’re going to be an overnight success. And that is just not true for many of us. Yeah. I’ve been online since 2009. Yeah. So, and I’m really not all that well known. Right. So it, it’s not likely apart from some kind of magic or as I already mentioned, you know, that you’re already famous, that you’re gonna be able to do something quickly. So we have to show up with value consistently over time for a long time. And then the last one is this added,

John Jantsch (17:47): Let, let me before we, that last one I just went, we just lost half our listeners, because they want, everybody wants a quick fix. Everybody wants an overnight, you know, success story. And I think that I totally 100% agree with you, but isn’t, doesn’t that become a harder sell? I mean, you have so many people out there selling the get rich quick scheme of the day. I mean, even Dory’s book the long game, you know, it’s like, that’s just not a very sexy title . So, so how do you balance that?

Becky Robinson (18:19): Well, it isn’t, but it’s real. So I mean, on the one hand, like I think it balances the frustration like worth doing is going to be challenging, should be. So, you know, when we were exploring how to name the four commitments in the book we did kind of wrestle with is the idea about endurance, is the idea about perseverance was another word that I chose. You know, in the book I tell a story about 500 trees. So I live on a five acre property in Michigan, and it’s beautiful and peaceful and private because 20 plus years ago, a man and his sons chose to plant a lot of trees more than 500. And they chose to wait for them to grow. So if we want to build something beautiful in the world, we can’t expect that it’s going to be instantaneous. So it may not be sexy, but it’s real. Yeah. And I think that it might help set people up to have that realistic view so that they can decide whether or not it’s worth it to make the commitment.

John Jantsch (19:15): Yeah. That reminds me of, uh, a quote, quote I’ll probably get wrong if somebody asked, you know, when’s the best time to plant a tree? And the answer was 20 years ago or today. Meaning, you know, okay, so you did , you haven’t been doing this reach game for 20 years. Start today.

Becky Robinson (19:31): Yes. Yes, exactly.

John Jantsch (19:33): All right. So I cut you off the fourth one.

Becky Robinson (19:35): No problem. The fourth one is one that, you know, sometimes might seem counterintuitive, particularly, you know, if we’re wanting to build the reach of a business and we’re wanting to drive revenue, the idea of generosity as a commitment can seem counterintuitive. And lots of times along the journey, I’ve met people, John, and they say, well, you know, my book’s not out yet. I can’t talk about this. I have to save it back. You know, cherry, I think the more that we can give our ideas away freely to others, the more we will drive people to our work and our message. And people aren’t gonna have any reason to be interested in your work if you don’t make it easily accessible to them. You know, there’s an author, Lilly Zang, she’s a bear. Uh, they’re a Barrett Kohler author. And one of the things they have done is they have taken the content in their book in different ways and shared all of it on LinkedIn.

(20:22): Yeah. And what they’ve seen is, well, people wanna buy the book because they see that there’s value, it’s in pieces that they’ve received and they want the book so that it’s all in one place. Yeah. So, you know, I think like it’s a natural response to think like I shouldn’t give away my best ideas. But what I’ve seen is that when you set your ideas free in the world, they are more likely to grow. I share the story in the book of a guy named David and back in the early, I think it was 1980s, David founded an, founded an idea called Appreciative Inquiry. Appreciative Inquiry is an organizational development approach. And rather than copywriting the idea, he set the idea free for anyone to use. And so as a result, that idea of appreciative inquiry has been used by coaches, consultants, organizations, all around the world. And it might have not been known apart from that. So you really wanna think about if your idea has value and merit, if you set it free, it can make the difference that it was intended to make. And when you think about generosity, it’s not only about give away your ideas, it’s about give away your time, your encouragement, your energy, your support. You know, when we support others in their thought leadership, our thought leadership is more likely to grow as well. Yeah.

John Jantsch (21:36): One of the struggles, I think anybody who looks at your book, I don’t think anybody would disagree. I think where the rub sometimes comes is like, there’s more to do in a day than I can get done or feels like there’s more to do. Right? I mean, we haven’t even talked about actually physically writing the book. So how do you, what’s your relationship with goal setting and you know, reach, you know, having milestones and ways, you know, cuz that’s what I think it comes down to is we’re eventually just gonna chunk all this stuff out. Right?

Becky Robinson (22:02): One thing I say to authors is, as you look at building reach, there are gonna be three possible places you can put something. Either it’s something that you can joyfully sustain yourself, or it’s something that you may choose to outsource if you have funds to do so. Or you may say, this is not for me, not now. So I asked about goal setting. I think one of the most important goals is to be very clear about what you can do and what you can’t do. And to commit to those things that you can joyfully sustain over the long haul. Now sometimes that might change. So in the early part of my business, I was an avid blogger on the archives of weaving influence.com, you’re gonna find like a thousand or more blog posts. And I wrote most of them about four years ago we started a podcast. Now I don’t have as many episodes as you, but that has been our new content mechanism. Mm-hmm. . And so it might not be that you’re making a commitment today, that’s gonna be the one that’s forever. But whatever stage you’re at, just being clear about what, what you can do, rather than taking on way more, I would always also rather have more kind of minimal goals and then find that I can do more than to set really lofty goals and then, uh, you know, fall short of them.

John Jantsch (23:19): Just get overwhelmed. . Right. Yeah. So Becky, tell people where they can. Again, I appreciate you taking a few moments to talk about reach, but tell people where they can connect with you or find your work or find your books.

Becky Robinson (23:30): Sure. So Reach is available at all your favorite online retailers. And if you want me to be giving you a pep talk in your ear, I recorded the audio myself. So the Audible version is available as well. In terms of connecting two main websites, beckyrobinson.com and weavinginfluence.com. If you wanna find my business, go to Weaving influence. If you wanna find me personally, go to Becky Robinson. I have tons of free resources available on both sites. I’d love to have you download one or two. And I’m also on most of the social media channels. Instagram and LinkedIn are my two favorite places to show up. And I would always love to hear from people via email. I’m becky@weavinginfluence.com.

John Jantsch (24:08): Awesome. Well, again, thanks for taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast and hopefully we’ll see you out there on the road one of these days. I’m going to a wedding in Michigan in a few months, so who knows, maybe I’ll bump into you.

Becky Robinson (24:18): It would be amazing to connect. Thank you John.

John Jantsch (24:20): Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @marketingassessment.co, not.com, dot co. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing assessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network.

HubSpot Podcast Network is the audio destination for business professionals who seek the best education and inspiration on how to grow a business.

 

How To Write A Business Book That Matters

How To Write A Business Book That Matters written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Josh Bernoff

Josh Bernoff, a guest on the Duct Tape Marketing PodcastIn this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Josh Bernoff. He is the bestselling author or ghostwriter of eight business books and contributed to 50 book projects that have generated over $20 million for their authors. Josh was formerly Senior Vice President, Idea Development at Forrester, where he spent 20 years analyzing technology and business. 

​​His most recent book Build a Better Business Book: How to Plan, Write, and Promote a Book That Matters, is a guide for authors who want to create impact in their business books. Josh teaches them how to refine their idea, choose a publishing model, and research, write, publish, and promote their books.

Key Takeaway:

A good business book should have a unique idea that solves a specific problem for a targeted audience, incorporating real-life stories and a narrative structure that engages readers. It should follow a natural progression from presenting a problem to providing a solution and explaining the details of that solution, using case studies to support their ideas. It is vital for authors to understand the continuum between big-idea books and how-to books, as both can be problem-solving.

The promotion plan of the book is crucial, and authors must not assume people will find their books without proper promotion and by building a platform. Josh shares a five-step process called “PQRST” which involves: Positioning, answering the Question, Reaching the target audience, Spreading the book encouraging word-of-mouth, and Timing the book launch.

Questions I ask Josh Bernoff:

  • [01:59] What are the essential elements that a business book needs to be good?
  • [02:49] Can a business book have a similar narrative to a fiction book?
  • [04:03] Some business books are terrible. What are they doing wrong?
  • [04:59] There are two types of business books: the ones that stay in the big idea category and others that are perspective. Are there different approaches that need to be taken for those two different kinds of books?
  • [06:43] Can you explain the different kinds of authors?
  • [08:59] Do publishers care about ideas or do they care about the platform or do you have to have both?
  • [11:16] There are two book approaches, the ones that include research and case studies, and the ones that talk from the author’s daily knowledge and experiences. What do you think of that?
  • [15:09] You have been a ghostwriter on some projects. What are some reasons somebody who has a good idea might use a ghostwriter?
  • [16:01] Let’s talk about editors. In a business book, are they qualified to give much input and help you get your ideas down?
  • [17:16] What role does the design of the interior pages as well as the cover play in the success of a book?
  • [19:36] If you’re going to write a book today, how important is having audio done?
  • [20:54] Can you explain the promotion plan of the book?

More About Josh Bernoff:

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

(01:14): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Josh Bernoff. He’s the bestselling author or ghostwriter of eight business books. He’s contributed to 50 book projects that have generated over 20 million for their authors. He’s formerly Senior Vice President of Idea Development at Forrester, where he spent 20 years analyzing technology and business. We’re gonna talk about his most recent book, Build a Better Business Book: How to Plan, Write, and Promote a Book That Matters. So Josh, welcome to the show.

Josh Bernoff (01:49): It’s great to be on. Good to talk to you.

John Jantsch (01:52): So I’ll just throw out like one really big question to start us off. Okay. And then we’ll hone in on, uh, things, you know, what are the essential elements that a business book needs to be good. How is that for, how is that for a big question, ?

Josh Bernoff (02:06): No, that’s exactly the right big question . And I’d say there are two things, one that everybody understands and one that people don’t understand. The thing that everybody knows you need is an idea. Yeah. That is, you need something that will solve a problem for a specific group of people, and it has to be a differentiated idea that is an idea that hasn’t been heard before. So that’s what people know. What people don’t recognize is that business books are made out of stories about people, stories about business people, about ordinary consumers, about people who have a problem. And you get insight from the way they solve that problem. And unless you’ve collected those stories and shared them in an interesting way, your book’s gonna be boring and it’s not gonna sell.

John Jantsch (02:49): Can a business book, like, I mean, a fiction book, you know, has a narrative and a plot and characters and we get to the end hopefully and go, oh, that was amazing. Can a business book have narrative similar to that? Or is it there just to do some nuts and bolts work?

Josh Bernoff (03:04): It has to have a narrative similar to that. Now we understand this, if you’re reading a business book that’s say a description of Elon Musk’s life or Right. You know, how Netflix was created as a company. But when you’re talking about a business book that solves a problem, there’s a natural order to it in the first chapter. We have to scare the crap out of you by getting you to see that there’s either a problem that you’re gonna have if you don’t follow the book or some opportunity you’re gonna miss out on. That’s the fear and greed options. Yeah. And then after that we described the parts of the solution. We show you how to implement that. We might show you some more detail about how it applies in different situations. This is a natural progression from you have a problem to the solution, to the problem, to the details of the solution. And that’s just as much a narrative as if narrative as if you were reading a novel.

John Jantsch (04:00): All right, let’s some people learn better from the negative. Let’s talk about some business books that are terrible. What are the, without naming names, what, what do they get wrong typically?

Josh Bernoff (04:10): So I don’t know if your listeners have had this experience. I have many times of the business book where you read chapter two and you’re like, gee, that sounds just like chapter one. And then you read chapter four and you’re like, oh my gosh, it’s just the same thing over and over again. Yeah. So there’s a word for what that book ought to be, which is a blog post . So if what you have is a blog post, write a blog post and you’ll save us all. A lot of trouble ideas that are worth writing a book about have to be big. That is, they need to affect a lot of people and they need to have consequences. They need to have elements to them. They need to have some subtlety to it that you need to figure out. And unless you have the ability to do that, you really should just write a blog post.

John Jantsch (04:58): Uh, there are two types of book business books. I read lots and lots of business books as I know you have as well. There are two types of business books that I really like. Some kind of stay in the big idea category. Mm-hmm. , Seth Godin’s books, I think are a great example of always a great idea that you, that he clearly believes in and that you can believe in, but not a whole lot of how to in them. And then there are other prescriptive books which are probably closer to what I write, you know, which is literally a retelling of what I do , you know, in, in the book. Are there different approaches that need to be taken for those two different kinds of books? And feel free to throw in, oh no, there’s four or five other categories too. ,

Josh Bernoff (05:36): Well, in the problem-solving kind of book, which is both of those are the big idea books and the how-to books are basically problem-solving kind of books. I think it’s a mistake to think of them as two different kinds. Okay. They’re really two ends of a continuum. Yeah. Right. So for example, the book I just wrote, right? Build a better business book here. This is a how-to book. There’s 24 chapters. There’s a chapter on covers. There’s a chapter on how to do research. Right. These are all very specific things that you have to learn how to do. If you look at the first book I wrote with Charlene Lee groundswell of posters behind me on the Wall. Yeah. That was a big idea book. And the big idea was that social media wasn’t a toy anymore, and people really need to learn how to take advantage of it. But even there we had to say, okay, if you’re gonna use social media for research purposes, here are the steps involved in that. Or if you’re gonna use social media for marketing, here are the steps involved in that. And unless you have some kind of prescription, then all you’re doing is basically throwing grenades and blowing things up. And while that can be entertaining, it’s not that helpful to people.

John Jantsch (06:43): All right. So I’m, I’m gonna go down the same path. There are two kinds of authors, I think and, and I think a lot of times they fall into maybe business models or how they think about business models. There’s obviously the Malcolm Gladwell giant big idea that’s gonna lead to giant big stages, maybe. Yeah. I wrote my first book, don’t tell my publisher this, but I wrote my first book to really be a platform for selling product and for, you know, bringing, uh, a licensing program, uh, to the world using that methodology. And that was really, the book was a piece, you know, as opposed to, I, in fact, for many years I didn’t even call myself an author necessarily.

Josh Bernoff (07:17): Mm-hmm. . Well, if you wrote a book and you published it, you’re an author, so please call yourself an author. But what people need, first of all, you’re not Malcolm Gladwell. I’m not Malcolm Gladwell. Very few people are Malcolm Gladwell. In fact, I have a section in the first chapter of my book about why you’re not Malcolm Gladwell . That’s funny. So for the rest of us, the success does not come from book sales. Right. That might be a nice little source of income. You might even not suppose you reach a thousand people, is that a failure? Yeah. If those are the right thousand people, that could be an enormous success. So the question is, how will that benefit you? And of course it should start by benefiting the people who read it, but then they’re gonna say, Hey, I should hire this guy. Or, oh, this company is worth looking at. Or this is a different way to look at the world. What vendors can help with it? Oh, look, he’s got one of those vendors he’s associated with. So there are lots of ways that, that you can benefit. I, I guess the simplest way to put it is a book is the largest possible lump of content marketing. Yeah. And just like any other content marketing, it attracts attention by being useful and then it translates into some sort of business for the author.

John Jantsch (08:32): Yeah. Yeah. Well, I, you know, fortunately out of some sort of dumb luck, I actually sold a lot of copies of Duct Tape Marketing as well as it being my kinda launching for a platform. So I kinda lucked into the best of both worlds. I guess l let’s talk about book proposals for a minute. You know, which is a typical organ that a lot of people would use to, uh, get a publisher interested in a book. Boy, that has changed in the last , uh, 20 years. Yeah. Uh, or, or so, um, do publishers care about ideas or do they care about platform? Um, or do you have to have both?

Josh Bernoff (09:05): Well, you have to have both. But platform’s more important, and that’s a shocking thing to say, right. But in the last 20 or 30 years, what I have seen is that some publishers like Wiley explicitly say, you have to prove to us that you can sell 10 or 12 20,000 books on your own. And the other publishers don’t say it quite so starkly, but they believe the same thing. Yeah. And that means, and they’re not gonna help you very much with the selling. You have to provide that yourself. So you need to have a podcast or a blog or regular appearance on CNN or a Forbes, you know, column or whatever. You need to have some sort of a platform to roll the book out. Now a person with a large platform and no ideas isn’t really very interesting, the publishers, because someone has to get something out of the book, but the, they look at the platform first and the idea second. Sadly, it’s true. Yeah.

John Jantsch (09:59): Yeah, yeah. And I think it’s become more true, quite frankly. You know, you mentioned definitely Wiley, for example, I’ve even seen some authors talk about, you know, they had to guarantee that they were gonna sell that . Yes, that’s true. It’s X number. So Yeah, they,

Josh Bernoff (10:14): I can’t resist pointing out here that there are alternatives now.

John Jantsch (10:17): Sure. Well,

Josh Bernoff (10:18): There are hybrid publishers

John Jantsch (10:19): Usually change, right? Yeah,

Josh Bernoff (10:21): Yeah, yeah. You can pay a hybrid publisher to publisher book. I’m this most recent book I did with a hybrid publisher, and I’m not saying that’s the only model. My previous book was done with a traditional publisher. Yeah. And you can even self-publish books on your own through the Amazon platform. And of course that makes a much less of an impact, but if you really gotta get your book out, you don’t need to go through a traditional publisher anymore.

John Jantsch (10:44): Well, I have a few, you know, folks in that, that I know well that have made a whole lot more money on their book by doing self-publishing because it sold really well and they kept 80%

Josh Bernoff (10:54): Phil Jones

John Jantsch (10:55): , Phil Jones is one first one came. Ok. Now,

Josh Bernoff (10:57): Now it’s, but it is hard to make your book catch fire. Yeah, yeah. If you’re doing it, you’re publishing it independently like that. Yeah. The, the traditional publishers have a certain amount of clout and distribution, and the hybrid publishers are helpful within that vein as well.

John Jantsch (11:13): Yeah. So my books are not heavily researched in the, you know, the idea that we had 3000 participants in some sort of study. I mean, my books are really kind of more, here’s my daily knowledge. I mean, here’s what I’ve learned working with ex clients. Is there, again, I don’t think there’s a better approach, but they’re quite different, aren’t they?

Josh Bernoff (11:34): Uh, you know what, you need something that proves that your book is right. Yeah. And I was sitting down and I thought of these ideas and I wrote them down as not sufficient

John Jantsch (11:45): , it might work.

Josh Bernoff (11:47): Yeah. And, you know, everyone does secondary research. This is basically going on the internet and finding quotes and studies and stuff. But you need some sort of primary research. But what you said, the, the, you know, the survey kind of research or data Look, I worked at Forrester. I actually created the program that they used to collect consumer data. That was wonderful to have all of that data. Yeah. But you can write a book that’s based on anecdotes. And if you’re telling the stories of, you know, Sarah, that that changed her marketing program, or Alvin who figured out a better way to, to track attribution, those stories are quite sufficient as primary research. You don’t necessarily need a huge amount of data.

John Jantsch (12:32): Yeah. I guess case studies would fall into that too. I mean, I know people love to see, oh, I’m a business kind of like that. And they did that. Oh, okay. That will work for me.

Josh Bernoff (12:41): Case studies are essential. In fact, I would say when I work with authors and we’re like at the beginning of the book process, the lack of case studies is the biggest problem that they have. So you want to be thinking right at the beginning, where am I gonna get the stories I’m gonna tell, where am I gonna find these interviews? If a book is, let’s say 14 chapters long, it should have 14 case studies in it.

John Jantsch (13:06): So you might even organize the book around what you

Josh Bernoff (13:09): Got. Is I you saying that? Well, I, one way to organize the book is to start every chapter with a story. Yeah. Yeah. It’s actually pretty common to do that. It fact, they’re No, they’re known as Malcolm’s after Malcolm Gladwell . Right. Who’s like the master of this. And people love that because they read it and they’re like, oh yeah, I’m having the same kind of problem that she had. Or Right. Oh man, he’s, he found an interesting way to solve that. I’m gonna learn from that. And I’ll tell you something. Once you tell one of those stories at the beginning of a chapter, whatever you say in the next three sentences, after that, people will believe no matter what it is.

John Jantsch (13:46): And now let’s hear from a sponsor. This episode is brought to you by Business Made Simple, hosted by Donald Miller, and brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals hosted by Donald Miller. Business Made Simple Takes the Mystery out of Growing Your Business. In a recent episode, they talked with my old pal, Seth Godin, where he explained the virtues and values in his book called The Song of Significance, A new manifesto for teams. Listen to business Made Simple. Wherever you get your podcasts.

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(15:06): You have, as I noted in your intro, been a ghostwriter on some projects. Mm-hmm. . What are some reasons somebody who has a good idea might use a, a ghostwriter?

Josh Bernoff (15:15): Well, it’s always a question of time. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It’s also a question of talent. Some people just don’t feel like they’re good writers. Yeah. But mostly it’s people who could write, but just don’t have the time to do it. And in the cases where I have ghostwritten books and I’ve done three, now they’re all situations where they were senior executives. Right. Very busy people. They had really interesting ideas and sometimes a lot of detail behind it, but they just wanted to hire somebody who would assemble that into a useful book. And what you read there was written on spec based on what the author, the person whose name on the cover asked for. They’ve just outsourced the writing. Just like you might outsource the graphics. Yeah. Or, uh, you know, a, a survey that you did,

John Jantsch (16:01): Let’s talk about editors. The, I think the common belief was that an editor was gonna make your book better. You know, certainly help you devise or get your ideas down. Mm-hmm. , and I’m not talking about copy editing, but you know, kind of big picture editing, it feels like, and this is coming from my experience, that, you know, the editor’s role has been to acquire a book, and that’s about it. And that that input, you know, in a business book, they’re not qualified to really give much input. Mm-hmm. ,

Josh Bernoff (16:26): It’s a question of how busy the people at these publishing houses are. So I, there’s a quote in my book from Holla Heinbach, who’s a, a very well known editor to Hartford Business who says, look, we expect the manuscript to come in ready to publish. Yeah. Um, so they don’t really have the resources to edit your book. Yeah. But that doesn’t mean you don’t need an editor. Most people who work on a good book will hire a developmental editor, and that’s someone whose job is to, to do the work of helping with the ideas, the sequence, the structure, the language, how the chapters are assembled, everything just so that you have a high quality piece of work that’s publishable.

John Jantsch (17:08): Yeah. This is gonna be a hard question to have a definitive answer, but I’m certain you have an opinion on . Yeah. What, what role does the design of the interior pages as well as the cover, play in the success of a book?

Josh Bernoff (17:23): Yeah. Well, let me divide those two. Yeah. Okay. Unless your book has got some sort of unusual elements to it, like, you know, a lot of sidebars or something like that, the interior design usually just as utilitarian and it doesn’t make that much difference. People need to tell when things are heading or subheading, but, but most books are pretty much interchangeable from that perspective.

John Jantsch (17:51): I’ve seen some poor font, I’ve seen some poor font.

Josh Bernoff (17:53): Oh, you can definitely make a mistake there, . If your book, if the, the body text in your book is in San Sarah, you’re making a big mistake. That’s a serious readability problem. Uh, I can’t resist mentioning here too that, that, you know, how do you tell when a book is poorly self-published? It’s the margins. It’s always the margins that are screwed up. You look at the book and you’re like, this doesn’t look. Yes. So the margins are like the dead giveaway, but you mentioned the covers. The cover is important. It’s just as you know, you wouldn’t go out and get married and just like grab a t-shirt off of the, you know, the hanger. You, you’re putting your best face forward there and a striking cover design together with a title that connects with it can really make a book much more recognizable. Yeah. But things are sort of backwards. People don’t buy a book because it has a great cover. They remember a book because it has a great cover, and then that becomes an iconic representation of how great that book was. They read it and then they associate that with a cover that they’re looking at.

John Jantsch (19:03): I, I know for myself, I’m, you know, walking through a bookstore back when we used to do that, used to do that. Yeah. A facing out, you know, book that had a compelling cover. It, it was a stopper, you know, it would be like, oh, I want to at least take a deeper look at that.

Josh Bernoff (19:17): Well, nowadays people are looking at the book on the screen Yeah. And it’s an inch tall.

John Jantsch (19:23): Yeah,

Josh Bernoff (19:23): Yeah, yeah. So the subtle little details of the design don’t become obvious until the person has had it shipped to their house.

John Jantsch (19:30): . Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very true. Let’s talk about another thing that’s become, I think a must audio. Mm-hmm. , if you’re gonna write a book count on doing audio or having audio done, uh, today, I would guess, huh?

Josh Bernoff (19:41): Yes. Audio, you cannot have a book that’s has a full measure of success unless there’s an audiobook to go along with it. Yeah. And people love to consume business books on audio while they’re exercising or commuting, you know, or on an airplane or whatever. So you really have to have that available to them. And in my book, I actually recommend that if the author has got any inclination at all, it’s great if you, the author can record the audiobook. Yeah. Because then your voice and your willingness to communicate the things that are important to you will come across effectively. And even if you know you have a scratchy voice or a nasal voice or something, most people can do a good job with that. Yeah. It’s just, that’s likely to take you 10 or 15 hours and not everybody’s willing to put the time in to do that.

John Jantsch (20:32): Yeah. Well, and, and, and if your goal is to build a community, to build a business around a platform, a larger platform around, I know I find it all the time. People are like, oh, now that I met you, you know, I can hear you in my head already, you know, because I listen to your books. Yeah. So it, it really is, you know, I think it’s a must for if you wanna do other things with the book as well.

Josh Bernoff (20:51): Yeah.

John Jantsch (20:52): Okay. We have exactly 30 seconds left. Let’s talk about promotion of the book . You know, I think a lot of writers, you know, write the book and go, okay, now how do I sell it? Promotion probably starts before that, doesn’t it?

Josh Bernoff (21:03): Yes. You need to plan the promotion. And the biggest mistake that authors make is to write the book and assume that people will find it, even if they don’t promote it. And I got a five step process positioning, what’s the question you answer? How are you gonna get reach? How are you gonna get people like the book to spread it? And how are you gonna get the timing focused? And right around the book launch, that’s P Q R S T, those are the five steps that I recommend people do to prepare for promotion in 30 seconds.

John Jantsch (21:32): , you know, and I was somewhat being facetious because I mean, I think a lot of people do realize that they think the hard part’s writing the book , you know, but you know, what you just outlined in 30 seconds really is an effective way to think about a book plan. Like you would’ve a marketing plan for anything, obviously. But really the best time to start is maybe before you even start writing the book, you know, start building that platform.

Josh Bernoff (21:53): Yeah. Well, people don’t realize, but in most book processes, there’s a period of three to six months when the book is in some sort of production and printing process, and you as the author, don’t have too much to do. That’s exactly when you work on the promotion planning, because the temptation is to sort of relax and say, oh, I’m done. And then the time comes to write and you’re like, oh, crap, I didn’t put anything in place.

John Jantsch (22:19): I’d tell you during Covid, it was 12 to 18 months for forcing some people to get to Yes, it’s true. Get the books out. And it’s like, well, I don’t even remember what I wrote . You know, how am I gonna promote it? Yeah. Well, Josh, it was, uh, great having you stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. You wanna invite people to connect with you and obviously where they can pick up the book.

Josh Bernoff (22:37): Okay. So if people wanna reach me, you want to go to bernoff.com. That’s my website, B E R N O F F.com. I post a blog post there every single weekday, mostly about authors and their issues. And if people are interested in getting the new book, build a Better Business book, you can go to bernoff.com/books, or you can pick that up on Amazon or bookshop.org or wherever you’re used to shopping for books. And by the time this goes live, the audiobook will be available. It’s already available in print and as an ebook.

John Jantsch (23:11): Awesome. And you can tell how long somebody’s been online by the fact that they have their last name come as a website .

Josh Bernoff (23:17): I, I bought it from like a third cousin of mine in Chile , but that was in, that was a long time ago. Yeah.

John Jantsch (23:25): So I, I actually, when all my kids were born, I actually reserved the names, their names. You know, I, I don’t know if they’ve kept them or not, but yeah, you can tell how long somebody’s been online. All right, Josh, again, great having you stop by and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Josh Bernoff (23:41): All right. It’s been great to be here, and thanks for giving me the chance to speak with your

John Jantsch (23:44): Audience. Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @marketingassessment.co, not.com, dot co. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing assessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get. Got.

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network.

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Unveiling The Future Of AI

Unveiling The Future Of AI written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Kenneth Wenger

Kenneth Wenger, a guest on the Duct Tape Marketing PodcastIn this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Kenneth Wenger. He is an author, a research scholar at Toronto Metropolitan University, and CTO of Squint AI Inc. His research interests lie at the intersection of humans and machines, ensuring that we build a future based on the responsible use of technology.

His newest book, Is the Algorithm Plotting Against Us?: A Layperson’s Guide to the Concepts, Math, and Pitfalls of AI. Kenneth explains the complexity of AI, demonstrating its potential and exposing its shortfalls. He empowers readers to answer the question: What exactly is AI?

Key Takeaway:

While significant progress has been made in AI, we are still at the early stages of it’s development. However, the current AI models are primarily performing simple statistical tasks rather than exhibiting deep intelligence.The future of AI lies in developing models that can understand context and differentiate between right and wrong answers.

Kenneth also emphasizes on the pitfalls of relying on AI, particularly in the lack of understanding behind the model’s decision-making process and the potential for biased outcomes. The trustworthiness and accountability of these machines are crucial to develop, especially in safety-critical domains where human lives could be at stake like in medicine or laws. Overall, while AI has made substantial strides, there is still a long way to go in unlocking its true potential and addressing the associated challenges.

Questions I ask Kenneth Wenger:

  • [02:32] The title of your book is the algorithm plotting against this is a bit of a provocative question. So why ask this question?
  • [03:45] Where do you think we really are in the continuum of the evolution of AI?
  • [07:58] Do you see a day where AI machines will start asking questions back to people?
  • [07:20] Can you name a particular instance in your career where you felt like “This is going to work, this is like what I should be doing”?
  • [09:25] You have both layperson and math in the title of the book, could you give us sort of the layperson’s version of how it does that?
  • [15:30] What are the real and obvious pitfalls of relying on AI?
  • [19:49] As people start relying on these machines to make decisions that are supposed to be informed a lot of times, predictions could be wrong right?

More About Kenneth Wenger:

More About The Agency Certification Intensive Training:

Take The Marketing Assessment:

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

John Jantsch (00:00): Hey, did you know that HubSpot’s annual inbound conference is coming up? That’s right. It’ll be in Boston from September 5th through the eighth. Every year inbound brings together leaders across business, sales, marketing, customer success, operations, and more. You’ll be able to discover all the latest must know trends and tactics that you can actually put into place to scale your business in a sustainable way. You can learn from industry experts and be inspired by incredible spotlight talent. This year, the likes of Reese Witherspoon, Derek Jeter, Guy Raz, are all going to make appearances. Visit inbound.com and get your ticket today. You won’t be sorry. This programming is guaranteed to inspire and recharge. That’s right. Go to inbound.com to get your ticket today.

(01:03): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Kenneth Wenger. He’s an author, research scholar at Toronto Metropolitan University and CTO of Squint AI Inc. His research interests lie in the intersection of humans and machines, ensuring that we build a future based on the responsible use of technology. We’re gonna talk about his book today Is the Algorithm Plotting Against Us?: A Layperson’s Guide to the Concepts, Math, and Pitfalls of AI. So, Ken, welcome to the show.

Kenneth Wenger (01:40): Hi, John. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me.

John Jantsch (01:42): So, so we are gonna talk about the book, but I, I’m just curious, what, what does Squint AI do?

Kenneth Wenger (01:47): That’s a great question. So, squint ai, um, is a company that we created to, um, do some research and develop a platform that enables us to, um,

(02:00): Do, do AI in a more responsible, uh, way. Okay. Okay. So, uh, I’m sure we’re gonna get into this, but I touch upon it, uh, in the book in many cases as well, where we talk about, uh, ai, ethical use of ai, some of the downfalls of ai. And so what we’re doing with Squint is we’re trying to figure out, you know, how do we try to create a, an environment that enables us to use AI in a way that lets us understand when these algorithms are not performing at their best, when they’re making mistakes and so on. Yeah,

John Jantsch (02:30): Yeah. So, so the title of your book is The Algorithm Plotting Against, this is a bit of a provocative question. I mean, obviously I’m sure there are people out there that are saying no , and some are saying, well, absolutely. So, so why ask the question then?

Kenneth Wenger (02:49): Well, because I, I actually feel like that’s a question that’s being asked by many different people with actually with different meaning. Right? So it, it’s almost the same as the question of is AI posing an existential threat? I, I, it’s a question that means different things to different people. Right. So I wanted to get into that in the book and try to do two things. First, offer people the tools to be able to understand that question for themselves, right. And first figure out how, where they stand in that debate, and then second, um, you know, also provide my opinion along the way.

John Jantsch (03:21): Yeah, yeah. And I probably didn’t ask that question as elegantly as I’d like to. I actually think it’s great that you ask the question, because ultimately what we’re trying to do is let people come to their own decisions rather than saying, this is true of ai, or this is not true of AI . Right.

Kenneth Wenger (03:36): That’s right. That’s right. And, and, and again, especially because it’s a nuanced problem. Yeah. And it means different things to different people.

John Jantsch (03:44): So this is a really hard question, but I’m gonna ask you, you know, where are we really in the continuum of, of AI? I mean, people who have been on this topic for many years realize it’s been built into many things that we use every day and take for granted, obviously we ChatGPT brought on a whole nother spectrum of people that now, you know, at least have a talking vocabulary of what it is. But I remember, you know, I’ve been, I’ve been, I’ve had my own business 30 years. I mean, we didn’t have the web , we didn’t have websites, you know, we didn’t have mobile devices that certainly now play a part, but I remember as each of those came along, people were like, oh, we’re doomed. It’s over . Right. So, so currently there’s a lot of that type of language surrounding ai, but where do you think we really are in the continuum of the evolution?

Kenneth Wenger (04:32): You know, that’s a great question because I think we are actually very early on. Yeah. I think that, you know, we, we’ve made remarkable progress in a very short period of time, but I think it’s still, we’re at the very early stages. You know, if you think of ai where we are right now, we were a decade ago, we’ve made some progress. But I think the, fundamentally, at a scientific level, we’ve only started to scratch the surface. I’ll give you some examples. So initially, you know, the first models, they were great at really giving us some proof that this new way of posing questions, you know, the, uh, neural networks essentially. Yeah, yeah. Right. They’re very complex equations. Uh, if you use GPUs to, to run these complex equations, then we can actually solve pretty complex problems. That’s something we realized around 2012 and then after around 2017, so between 2012 and 2017, progress was very linear.

(05:28): You know, new models were created, the new ideas were proposed, but things scaled and progressed very linearly. But after 2017, with the introduction of the model that’s called the Transformer, which is the base architecture behind chat, g, pt, and all these large language models, we had another kind of realization. That’s when we realized that if you take those models and you scale them up and you scale them up in, in terms of the size of the model and the size of the data set that we used to train them, they get exponentially better. Okay. And that’s when we got to the point where we are today, where we realized that just by scaling them, again, we haven’t done anything fundamentally different since 2017. All we’ve done is increase the size of the model, increase the size of the dataset, and they’re getting exponentially better.

John Jantsch (06:14): So, so multiplication rather than addition?

Kenneth Wenger (06:18): Well, yes, exactly. Yeah. So, so it isn’t, the progress has been exponential, not only in linear trajectory. Yeah. But I think, but again, the fact that we haven’t changed much fundamentally in these models, that’s going to taper off very soon. It’s my expectation. And now where are we on the timeline? Which was your original question. I think if you think about what the models are doing today, they’re doing very element. They’re doing very simple statistics, essentially. Mm-hmm. , they’re not the idea of, of these models being called artificial intelligence. Right. I think it’s a bit of a misnomer sometimes. I agree. And it leads to some of the questions that, that people have. Um, because there, there isn’t much like deep intelligence going on, it’s just statistical modeling and very simple at that. And then where we are going from here and what I hope the future is, that’s when we start, I think the thing, things are gonna change dramatically when we start getting models that are able not just to, not just to do simple statistics, but are able to understand the context of what it is they’re trying to achieve. Yeah. And are able to understand, you know, the right answer as well as the wrong answer. So, for example, they, they, they, they’re able to know when they’re talking about things they know and when they’re kind of skirting around this gray area of things they don’t really know about. Does that make sense? Yeah,

John Jantsch (07:39): Absolutely. I mean, I totally agree with you on artificial intelligence. I’ve actually been calling it ia. I think it’s more of informed automation. is kind of how I look at it, at least in my work. Do you see a day where, you know, prompts asking questions are, you know, that’s kind of the, the street use, if you will, of AI for a lot of people. Do you see a day where it starts asking you questions back? Like, why would you wanna know that? Or what are you trying to achieve, uh, by asking this question?

Kenneth Wenger (08:06): Yeah. So the, the, the simple answer is yes. I, I definitely do. And I think that’s part of what, what achieving a higher level intelligence would be like. It’s when they’re not just doing your bidding, it’s not just a tool. Yeah, yeah. Uh, but they, they kind of have their own purpose that they’re trying to achieve. And so that’s when you would see things like questions essentially, uh, arise from the system, right? Is when they, they have a, a, a goal they wanna get at, which is, you know, and, and then they figure out a plan to get to that goal. That’s when you can see emergence of things like questions to you. I don’t think we’re there yet, but yeah, I think it’s certainly possible.

John Jantsch (08:40): But that’s the sci-fi version too, right? I mean, where people start saying, you know, the movies, it’s like, no, no, Ken, you don’t get to know that information yet. I’ll decide when you can know that .

Kenneth Wenger (08:52): Well, you’re right. I mean, the question, the way you asked the question was more like, is it, is it possible in principle? I think absolutely. Yes. Yeah. Do we want that? I mean, I, I don’t know. I guess that’s part of, yeah, it depends on what use case we’re thinking about. Uh, but from a first principle’s perspective Yeah, it is, it is certainly possible. Yeah. Not to get a model to

John Jantsch (09:13): Do that. So I, I do think there are scores and scores of people, they’re only understanding of AI is I go to this place where it has a box and I type in a question and it spits out an answer. Since you have both layperson and math in the title, could you give us sort of the layperson’s version of how it does that?

Kenneth Wenger (09:33): Yeah, absolutely. So, well, at least I’ll try, lemme put it that way, , when, a few moments ago when I mentioned that these models, essentially what they are, they’re very simple statistical models. That itself, that phrase itself, it’s a little bit of, it’s controversial because at the end of the day, we don’t know what kind of intelligence we have, right? So if you think about our intelligence, we don’t know whether at some level we are also a statistical model, right? However, what I mean by AI today in large language models like ChatGPT being simple statistical models, what I mean by that is that they’re performing a very simple task. So if you think of ChatGPT, what they’re doing is they are trying, essentially to predict the next best word in a sequence. That’s all they’re doing. And the word, the way they’re doing that is that they calculate what are called probability distribution.

(10:31): So basically for any word in a, in a, in a prompt or in a corpus of text, they calculate the probability that word belongs in that sequence. Right? And then they choose the, the next word with the highest probability of being correct there. Okay? Now, that is a very simple model in the following sense. If you think about how we communicate, right? You know, we’re having a conversation right now. I think when you ask me a question, I, I pause and I think about what I’m about to say, right? So I have a model of the world, and I have a purpose in that conversation. I come up with the idea of what I want to respond, and then I use my ability to produce words and to sound them out to communicate that with you. Right? It might be possible that I have a system in my brain that works very similar to a large language model, in the sense that as soon as I start saying words, the next word that I’m about to say is one that is most likely to be correct, given the words that I just said.

(11:32): It’s very possible. That’s true. However, what’s different is that at least I already have a plan of what I’m about to say in some latent space. I have already encoded in some form. What I want to get across, how I say it, that the ability to pro to produce those words might be very similar to a language model. But the difference is that a large language model is trying to figure out what it’s going to say as well as coming up with those words at the same time. Mm-hmm. , right? Does that make sense? So it’s a bit like they’re rambling, and sometimes if they talk for too long, they ramble in a nonsense territory. Yeah. Yeah. Because they don’t know what they’re going to say until they say it. . Yeah. So, so that’s a very fundamental difference. Yeah.

John Jantsch (12:20): I, I, I have certainly seen some output that is pretty interesting along those lines. But, you know, as I heard you talk about that, I mean, in a lot of of ways that’s what we’re doing is we’re querying a database of what we’ve been taught, are the, the words that we know in addition to the concepts that we’ve studied, uh, and are able to articulate. I mean, in some ways we’re querying that to me, prompting or me asking you a question as well, I mean, it works similar. Would you say

Kenneth Wenger (12:47): The aspect of prompting a question and then answering it, it’s similar, but what is different is the, the concept that you’re trying to describe. So, again, when you ask me a question, I think about it, and I come up with, so I, again, I have a world model that works so far for me to get me through life, right? And that world model lets me understand different concepts in different ways. And when I’m about to answer your question, I think about it, I formulate a response, and then I figure out a way to communicate that with you. Okay? That step is missing from what these language models are doing, right? They’re getting a prompt, but there is no step in which they are formulating a response with some goal, right? Right? Yes. Some purpose. They are essentially getting a text, and they’re trying to generate a sequence of words that are being figured out as they’re being produced, right? There’s no ultimate plan. So that, that’s a very fundamental difference.

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(15:18): I do wanna come to like what the future holds, but I want to dwell on a couple things that you dive into in the book. What are the, you know, other than sort of the fear that the media spreads , what are the real, you know, and obvious pitfalls of relying on AI?

Kenneth Wenger (15:38): I think the biggest issue, and one of the, I mean the, the, the real motivator for me when I started writing the book is that it is a powerful tool for two reasons. It’s very easy to use, seemingly, right? Yeah. You can spend a weekend learning python, you can write a few lines, and you can transform, you can analyze, you can parse data that you couldn’t before just by using a library. So you don’t really have to understand what you’re doing, and you can get some result that looks useful, okay? Mm-hmm. , but heating in that process, right? The fact that you can take data a lot, a large amounts of data, modify it in some way, and get a response, get some result without understanding what’s happening in the middle, has huge repercussions for misunderstanding the results that you’re getting, right? And then if you’re using the, these tools in a, the world, right?

(16:42): In a, in, in a way that can affect other people. For example, you know, let’s say you work in a financial institution and, and, and, and you come up with a model to figure out, uh, who you should, who you should give some credit, get, you know, approved for, for credit for a credit line, and who you shouldn’t. Now, right now, banks have their own models, but sure, if you take the AI out of it, traditionally those models are thought through by statisticians, and they may get things wrong once in a while, but at least they have a big picture of what it means to, you know, analyze data, biasing the data, right? What are the repercussions of bias in the data? How do you get rid of all these things are things that a good statistician should be trained to do. But now, if you remove the statisticians, because anybody can use a model to analyze data and get some prediction, then what happens is you end up denying and approving credit lines for people who, with you, you know, with repercussions that could be, you know, driven by very negative bias in the data, right?

(17:44): Like, it could affect a certain section of the population, uh, negatively. Maybe there’s some that can’t get a credit line anymore just because they live in a particular neighborhood mm-hmm. , or they, you know, there’s many reasons why this could be a problem,

John Jantsch (17:57): But wasn’t that a factor previously? I mean, certainly neighborhoods are considered , you know, as part of the, you know, even in the analog models, I think.

Kenneth Wenger (18:06): Yeah, absolutely. So like I said, we always had a problem with bias, right? In the data, right? But traditionally, you would hope, so two things would happen. First, you would hope that whoever comes up with a model, just because it’s a complex problem, they have to have some satis statistical training. Yeah. Right? And a, an ethical statistician would have to consider how to deal with the bias in the data, right? So that’s number one. Number two, the problem that we have right now is that, first of all, you don’t need to have that set decision. You can just use the model without understanding what’s happening, right? Right. And then what’s worse is that with these models, we can’t actually understand how the, or it’s very difficult traditionally to understand how the model arrived or prediction. So if you get denied either a credit line or as, as I talk about in the book bail, for example, in, in a court case, uh, it’s very difficult to, to argue, well, why me? Why, why was I denied this thing? And then if you go through the process of auditing it again with the traditional approach where you have a decision, you can always ask, so how did you model this? Uh, why was this person denied this particular case in a, in an audit? Mm-hmm. with a, a, a neural network, for example, that becomes a lot more complicated.

John Jantsch (19:21): So I, I mean, so so what you’re saying, one of the initial problems is that people are relying on the output, the data. I mean, even, you know, I use it in a very simple way. I run a marketing company and we use it a lot of times to give us copy ideas, give us head headline ideas, you know, for things. So I don’t really feel like there’s any real danger in there other than maybe sounding like everybody else in your copy. Uh, but, but you’re saying that, you know, as people start relying on these to make decisions that are supposed to be informed, a lot of times predictions are wrong.

Kenneth Wenger (19:57): Yes. And, and there’s very, so the answer is yes. Now, there’s two reasons for that. And by the way, let me just go back to say that there are use cases where, of course you have to think about this as, as a spectrum, right? Like yeah, yeah. There are cases where the repercussions of getting something wrong is worse than other cases, right? So as you say, if you’re trying to generate some copy and you know, if it’s nonsensical, then you just go ahead and change it. And at the end of the day, you’re probably gonna review it anyway. So, so that is a lower, probably a lower cost. The cost of a mistake there will be lower than in, in the case of, you know, using a model in a, in a judicial process, for example. Right? Right. Right. Now, with respect to the fact that these models sometimes get, make mistakes, the reason for that is that the way these models actually work is that they, and, and the part that can be deceiving is that they tend to work really well for areas in the data that that is, that they understand really well.

(20:56): So, so if you think of, of a dataset, right? So they’re trained using a dataset for most of the data in that dataset, they’re gonna be able to model it really well. And so that’s why you get models that perform, let’s say, 90% accurate on a particular data set. The problem is that for the 10% where they’re not able to model really well, the mistakes there are remarkable and in a way that a human would not be able to make those mistakes. Yeah. So what happens in those cases that, first of all, when we’re training these models that we get, we say, well, you know, we get 10% error rate in this particular dataset. The one issue is that when you take that into production, you don’t know that the incidences rate of those errors are gonna be the same in the real world, right?

(21:40): You may end up, uh, being in a situation where you get those data points that lead to errors at a much higher rate than you did in your data set. Just one problem. The second problem is that if, if you are in a, if your use case, if your production, you know, application, it’s such where a mistake could be costed, like let’s say in a medical use case or in self-driving, when you have to go back and explain why you got something wrong, why the model got something wrong, and it is just so bizarrely different from what a human would get wrong. That’s one of the fundamental reasons why we don’t have these systems being deployed across safety critical domains today. And by the way, that’s one of the fundamental reasons why we created splint, is to tackle specifically those problems, is to figure out how can we create a set of models or a system that’s able to understand specifically when models are getting things right and when they’re getting things wrong at runtime. Because I really think it’s, it’s one of the fundamental reasons why we haven’t advanced as much as we should have at this point. It’s cuz when models work really well, uh, when they’re able to model the data, well then they work great. But for the cases where they can’t model that section of the data, the mistakes are just unbelievable, right? It’s things that humans would never make those kinds of

John Jantsch (23:00): Mistake. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and obviously, you know, that’s certainly gonna, that has to be solved before anybody’s gonna trust sending, you know, a man spacecraft, you know, guided by AI or something, right? I mean, when you know human life is at risk, you know, you’ve gotta have trust. And so if you can’t trust that decision making, that’s certainly gonna keep people from employing the, the technology, I suppose.

Kenneth Wenger (23:24): Right? Or using them, for example, to help in, as I was saying, in medical domains, for example, cancer diagnosis, right? If you want a model to be able to detect certain types of cancer, given let’s say biopsy scans, you wanna be able to trust the model. Now anything, any model essentially, you know, it’s going to make mistakes. Nothing is ever perfect, but you want two things to happen. First, you wanna be able to minimize the types of mistakes that the model can make, and you need to have some indication that the quality of the prediction of the model isn’t great. You don’t wanna have that. Yeah. And second, once a mistake happens, you have to be able to defend that the reason the mistake happened is because the, the quality of the data was such that, you know, even a human couldn’t do better. Yeah. We can’t have models make mistakes that a human doctor would look at and say, well, this is clearly Yeah, incorrect.

John Jantsch (24:15): Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, Ken, I wanna take, uh, I wanna thank you for taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. You wanna tell people where they can find, connect with you if you’d like, and then obviously where they can pick up a copy of Is the Algorithm Plotting against Us?

Kenneth Wenger (24:29): Absolutely. Thank you very much, first of all for having me. It was a great conversation. So yeah, you can reach me on LinkedIn and for the cop for a copy of the book and get it both from, uh, Amazon as well as from our publisher website, the, it’s called the working fires.org.

John Jantsch (24:42): Awesome. Well, again, thanks for solving by great conversation. Hopefully, we’ll maybe we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Kenneth Wenger (24:49): Thank you.

John Jantsch (24:49): Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @marketingassessment.co, not.com, dot co. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing assessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

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