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(00:52): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Laura Gassner Otting. She is the author of Limitless. You may recall she was on the show previously. She’s got a new book out coming out, I should say, Wonderhell, why Success doesn’t feel like it should and what to do about it. So Laura, welcome to the show.

Laura Gassner Otting (01:16): Hey, John, it’s so good to be back.

John Jantsch (01:19): So I know we’re gonna dig into this, but let’s just talk a little bit about pitching this idea and this title to a publisher. , it must have actually been a little hard for them to understand what you were trying to accomplish.

Laura Gassner Otting (01:33): Yeah, you know, as you know, I wrote Limitless with Idea Press, which is a hybrid publisher and did not have any expectation of anything happening with that. I just wanted to write it because when I was speaking on stages, I noticed people who were making real money had books. So I was like, I gotta get me one of them. Yeah. So I wrote Limitless with a hybrid publisher, and then I was like, well, that actually was a Washington Post bestseller, and I was in the Today Show, good Morning America and all these amazing things. I’m gonna go get one of those big five New York houses, I’m gonna do it. And then I called a bunch of the big five New York houses and a bunch of the agents who sell books to the big houses, and they were like, yeah, you’re nobody. I don’t get this idea.

(02:12): The title’s a little, I don’t know, edgy, I’m not so sure. Like I could sell it, but maybe not to one of the big houses. And then I had a conversation with Amy Cuddy, who you, who I’m sure you know also mm-hmm. . And she basically said, listen, people go with big houses because they need credibility, they want speaking events, and they wanna make a list. And she’s like, you’ve got that. So it’s a terrible business model for you. So as a serial entrepreneur, of course I heard those words, my ears perked up and I was like, you know what? I idea press was great. I had a terrific experience, I’m just gonna go back and do it myself again. And so, you know, Rohit at Idea Press, not only was he not questioning the book title when I first wrote the Facebook screen right after Limitless came out and I was like, oh my God, I didn’t expect it. But also in this moment I realized that I made for more, I’m not, I don’t know where I am, but I’m on this plane and I’m 1200 miles from where I’m going and 1200 miles from you know, where I need to be. And I, the space of minute right now is Wonderhell. And Rohit actually commented on that Facebook page, not for Nothing, but that would make a great title of your next book,

John Jantsch (03:22): . So

Laura Gassner Otting (03:22): It really always should have been at home with Id press in the first place, .

John Jantsch (03:27): So I should have you describe it because somebody’s gonna have to get into the book to understand. But I’d love to hear your thinking on the sort of the visual amusement park theme that you Yes. Kind of build the book around. So, so first you’re probably better describe it.

Laura Gassner Otting (03:41): Okay, so John, you know those moments where you’ve accomplished something, you could have sold your first business, or maybe you just sold your first contract, your first consulting crowd contract, your first two ballistic whatever. And in that moment you were like, that’s amazing, it’s exciting, it’s humbling, it’s wonderful. Yes. But also you see this vision of yourself like, maybe I could sell another one, or maybe I could build something even bigger, or maybe I could do even more. And I’m not sure. But wow, there’s a possibility out there. There’s a potential that I see in myself that I didn’t even know existed last week, last month, last year. And suddenly it’s not just wonderful, but it’s also anxiety-provoking, it’s stress-inducing, it’s identity questioning. It’s kind of hell. So it’s wonderful, but it’s also hell, it’s Wonderhell and Wonderhell, dear listeners, is where the burden of your potential walks in and goes, Hey man, what you got for me? What are you gonna do with this newfound potential? And that’s when we have to make that decision of who we are. And I mean, you know, anybody who’s ever been in business, been an entrepreneur, you know, done something for themselves, recognizes this moment when you’re like, yay. Oh hmm huh . And then it all settles on your shoulders.

John Jantsch (05:01): So how did you come to the visual though? That I was getting at the amusement park, the theme

Laura Gassner Otting (05:06): Park? Yes. Yes. So I was actually talking to RAAF Har Fu, who is a great friend of mine who she wrote Hustle and Float. And we were having this conversation and I’m like, you know, like we all think success is gonna be so much fun, it’s gonna be so amazing, it’s gonna be easy, it’s gonna be exciting. And then we get there and it’s actually harder than we thought. It actually kind of sucks because in that moment, if you have this bigger, this bigger hunger, this faster pace, and you wanna go, but should you, what does that mean? What is it gonna feel like? What are the sacrifices? What’s the opportunity? How do we figure it out? And she’s like, it’s kind of like an amusement park. Like you think it’s gonna be super fun and then you’re sitting in line, you know it’s three o’clock in the afternoon and it’s hot and your sunburned and that corn dog in your stomach is like threatening to go out one end or the other.

(05:50): When you get on that rollercoaster and you’re like, I thought this was gonna be fun, everyone told me it’s gonna be fun. Why isn’t it fun? She’s like, you do it and make it an amusement park because, and they have like a map like you are here and just like an amusement park, you can like pick which town you wanna go to in a different order. So in the book there’s Imposter Town, there’s Dotsville, there’s Burnout City, and in each one of the towns there are the five rides. So the 15 rides in total that represent the tsunami of emotions that are gonna come at you in all of these moments. And just like an amusement park, you can walk through the book in any order that you want in those rides, depending on where in the journey you are.

John Jantsch (06:30): So let’s visit Imposter Town. The first one, I struggle with this one because I never felt like an imposter. I see people posting these things on Facebook all the time of having imposter syndrome and I just don’t get it because I mean, all we’re really doing is learning as how I viewed as like, yeah, I haven’t done this before, but I’m not an imposter. I’m learning how to do it. Is how I always viewed that. So when people really talk about all the stress of imposter syndrome, I just, I help me understand that. I don’t get it.

Laura Gassner Otting (07:02): Well, you’re one of the rare people who don’t have imposter syndrome. I mean, when I, when the reason that I wrote this book is when Limitless came out and you know more than three people, my mother, my father, and my sister bought it, I suddenly was like, oh wow, that’s pretty cool. And I had this stress that I wanted to do more, be bigger, create something that was worthy of this potential that I saw out there. And, and so I talked to a lot of people who were further ahead of me in the path, right? Like I think everybody should have a mentor who’s further ahead of them on the actual path they wanna walk on, as opposed to all these like, I’m gonna run a mastermind type people , right? It’s like, I wanna have t-shirts printed out there like, before you tell me what to do, show me what you’ve done in the back.

(07:43): It’s like hashtag give me the p and l, right? Like I wanna know. And what was interesting is that I talked to Olympic medalists, startup unicorns, I talked to Glass ceiling shatters, I talked to people who ran big banks and then, you know, were running $2 billion companies and every one of them at every age and every stage had this moment where they were like, well I did that, but can I do the next thing? I don’t know. What if people find me out? What if I don’t belong? What if I’m not good enough in that moment? And so you’re one of the rare people, but I think it’s because, and I’ve known you long enough to know this, that you do see everything as this learning opportunity. And that’s a gift. You know, there is a voice inside of our head whenever we’re uncertain that goes, oh my God, you haven’t done this before.

(08:27): And the way to get rid of the imposter syndrome is to change how we think about, you know, that voice, right? How do we think about that voice and turn it into an, oh my gosh, you haven’t done this before. Which gives us the opportunity to say, we don’t need to be perfect, but instead we just need to be learning at every step of the way. Because of course you’re an imposter. I mean like what, what great news, right? Like think, just think about the term imposter syndrome. You’re an imposter. There’s something wrong with you y it’s a syndrome, you’re sick, , maybe you should sit down, right? Like it’s actually kind of an offensive term, but I wanna be in rooms where I’m an imposter because it means that I’ve never been in that room before. Because yeah, who wants to do the same puzzle over and over? Like we should all strive to be imposters. How lucky is that?

John Jantsch (09:16): Yeah. And I guess that’s May, it’s just maybe semantics, but I just, I have insatiable curiosity and so I want to go to see new things. And if I don’t know how they work, then the, I get very excited to find out how they work

Laura Gassner Otting (09:29): . Absolutely, absolutely. And you know, and here’s the thing, you have enough confidence in the successes you’ve had to date that you can say, I know I’ve had successes in these areas, which means that even though I don’t know stuff in those areas, I think I can probably figure it out, right? There’s a story I tell about Dory Clark, again, another mutual friend who decided she wanted to completely change her. She, her career, she wants to go into figuring out how to score Broadway musicals. It’s like her side passion. Cuz you know, Dori has enough brains for, you know, 15 different careers at once. And when she walked into this room, all the other people were like, well, I’ve scored 16 musicals and I’ve got, you know, when Emmy from you know, on Broadway and she’s like, I’ve written three songs, . But it didn’t stop her, even though she felt like an imposter. She’s still in that moment said, I have confidence from other things that I’ve done in, you know, my leadership and my, in my thinking and my entrepreneurship work that I know that I, even though I haven’t done this yet, I know that I have the skills to be able to get better at this thing.

John Jantsch (10:30): Yeah, yeah, you’re absolutely right about that. I mean, just even having experience and staying in the game long enough, you realize, oh, this is how this is gonna turn out. Just like endure ,

Laura Gassner Otting (10:40): Right? Yes. Well it’s funny, a lot of times like my, I’ve got two, you know, an 18 year old and a 20 year old, so their friends sometimes come to me for their advice and they’re like, how do you know so much? And I’m like, I’m just old , I’ve just been in the game a long time.

John Jantsch (10:56): So probably my favorite, if I can have a favorite ride in your book is the Ferris Wheel. Hmm. Unpack that one for me.

Laura Gassner Otting (11:04): So the Ferris wheel is also one of my favorites. In fact, I’m pitching that to Good Morning America for the, like, we’re gonna do one ride for the book launch. And here’s what I like about the Ferris wheel. Whenever we accomplish something, our view of ourselves changes, but we also find ourselves rising to new heights or to a different latitude. And in that, you know, new latitude, we, we have a different view of the world, we have a different view of the world and we have a different view of the people that are in it. And so there are a lot of people in our lives who are like, Hmm, I don’t know, do you think you should do that? And maybe you’re flying too close to the sun, and who do you think you are? And you know, we run into them in the coffee shop and they’re like, oh, I don’t know, that seems too scary. You shouldn’t do that. Well, what they really mean is, I’m too scared, I shouldn’t do that. But we had these people who have been in our lives because they’ve always been in our lives and they may not be the people who should continue in our lives going forward just like that. We had

John Jantsch (11:59): Wait, but they’re my family.

Laura Gassner Otting (12:00): Well, and it’s very funny because I talk about this a lot and I’m like, there are people who love you and they don’t want you get hurt. Right? Right. So like the last time I lived in the same house as my parents, I was 17 years old and I used to put the, I used to put the milk back in the refrigerator empty, but I would, and the car back in the garage empty, right? But the stereo turned up on full. And when I, throughout my career would tell them things like, I’m gonna drop out of law school to join this presidential campaign, or I’m gonna leave the White House to go like do executive search, or I’m gonna leave this big firm to start my own business, or I’m gonna sell that business and I don’t know, write a book. They were like, what are you doing?

(12:36): Are you sure you should do that? I’m not so sure, because the last time they knew me on a day-to-day basis, I didn’t have a frontal lobe , right? . So they wanna give me advice because they love me and that’s fine, they can stay in my life, they can be at the amusement park, but they don’t, they’re not gonna be in the car with me heading back up to the Ferris wheel. And so I think there are people in our lives who love us, there are people in our lives who are jealous of us, the ones who only see our rise through the lens of their own stagnation, smiles in the front and knives in the back. And then there are the people who are just afraid, or maybe they’re giving us bad advice because they’re giving us advice from where they’ve been, which isn’t where we’re going. And I’m not saying we have to like, you know, cut all ties and get rid of them. There is a part in the book where I do talk about the benefit of burning bridges when it is time to do that. But I think it’s a matter of deciding who gets to give you sort of close contact advice and who you just sort of like, that’s great, thanks. I’ll keep it in mind. See you later, , then you keep moving on.

John Jantsch (13:36): Speaking of bad advice, one that I have railed a against for some time now. Hustle porn.

Laura Gassner Otting (13:43): Oh yes, . Oh yes. You know, the thing that I loved most about your self-reliant entrepreneur book was that it just, it was this moment where you just sort of stop every day and you read the passage and you just kind of reflect and it, that book is like, it is the opposite of hustle porn to me in so many ways, and I just loved it. And when we think about hustle porn, it’s this like bigger, better, faster, more like great. Like, you know, you got the job, when are you gonna get the promotion? You got the promotion. When are you got the corner office? You got the corner office, when are you kicking off the boss at the window and taking his job? Right? So I think that, I mean, look, I will speak as a woman. I think that we can have it all.

(14:25): But I think that there are lots of opportunities, at least you know, for me and my life, and this may be with you, with kids, with grandkids, where there may be moments where you’re like, you know, I could hustle really hard for this work right now and make more money, but I’m making enough in this moment. So maybe I’ll throttle back the work part and I’ll throttle up the parent part. Right? Or maybe you wanna like travel around the world. You know, I, I could have put this book out a year ago, but my eldest was going off to college and I thought, you know, this book’s kind of evergreen, but he’s not, and maybe this is the moment where I wanna spend a little more time just kind of just being around and not being on my office clothes with my face and a computer the whole time. And so I think we have to think about, you know, do we wanna ride the rollercoaster or do we wanna just be on the merry-go-round right now because that’s okay, we’re just gonna keep coming back around.

John Jantsch (15:16): Yeah, I think the trap, you know, of the hustle porn as you’re calling it too, is that it assumes everybody should want the same thing,

Laura Gassner Otting (15:23): Right?

John Jantsch (15:24): , right? Right. And I think that’s, you know, where people really get off track. It’s like, I can’t have it all, but wait a minute, do I really even want it all

Laura Gassner Otting (15:31): Or how do I define All right? I mean, as you know and limitless, I talk a lot about this where, you know, I learned in 20 years of executive search that you know, there are eight motivating factors that will pretty much convince anybody at any time as a head hunter to talk to me. And there are things like, what’s the mission of the organization and will I be inspired by the leader and how big is the impact? How many, what kinds of skills am I gonna learn? How prestigious will it look on my resume? How much money am I gonna make, right? There’s all sorts of things like that. But every one of us will, will put that list in a different order. We prioritize that list differently. And so there are moments in my life where I put money at the top and there are moments in my life where I put money somewhere in the middle, right?

(16:10): It’s going to change. So like mm-hmm there, every one of us has two numbers. We have a like, what’s the want to make number and what’s the need to make numbers? Like the need to make numbers. Like what’s the, what are you, what’s the base number that you gotta make to pay your bills, right? Whatever those bills are. And then what’s the want to make numbers is like, okay, so you wanna take two vacations a year, do you wanna go camping or you wanna stay at the four Seasons, right? Like what does that look like? And in between those two numbers are the puts and takes of what else you wanna sacrifice in our life. So you know, your all is gonna be very different than my all, but also each of our all is also different at different ages and different stages. So I would argue that probably 10 years ago what you wanted was different than what you want now and 10 years from now it’ll be different. And so this idea of hustle porn that like you gotta drive the Ferrari and you know, wear the Hugo Boss suit and you gotta have the like model on your arm and you like, I don’t know, that’s not that interesting to me .

(17:05): But it might be very interesting for some of your listeners and that’s awesome, right? For some people success is the cherry red rot Maserati. For some people success is curing cancer, right? It’s some, for some people success is just having dinner with your family every night. Like every one of us is gonna define it differently. And the great thing about it is that we’re all right.

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(18:33): All from one powerful platform. It’s why more than 150,000 companies already use HubSpot’s CRM to run their businesses better. Plus, HubSpot’s user friendly interface sets you up for success from day one. So you can spend less time managing software and more time on what matters your customers. There’s no better time to get organized. Get started for free @hubspot.com today. So you mentioned my book, the Self-Reliant Entrepreneur. I actually wrote that book at a time when I just really wanted to do something different. And one of the entries in there, I started by saying that, you know, everyone wants to tell you how to get to the top of the mountain, but no one tells you how to get back down. And I read a very interesting statistic that more people die descending Everest than ascending. And I think that, I think this book speaks a little bit to the heart of that. You know, everybody’s like trying so hard to get to the top of this thing and then when they get there they’re like, no, I wanna be back there . And I really think that, you know, for what it’s worth, I’m not sure there’s a question in what I just stated there, , but I think that’s a lot of what your book is about. The idea that success doesn’t feel like it should because the destination doesn’t feel like it should.

Laura Gassner Otting (19:47): Well, and I think it’s also because the destination continues to change. So you know, when we say I’ll be happy when I have success, that defines success as a finite place, as an end point. But what I learned in writing this book is that in fact, success is just a way point. It’s a portal to what else we can do. So you know, when you are climbing a mountain, if you’re at the base of the mountain and you look at the top of the mountain and you’re like, I wanna go there, cool. But then you get halfway up the mountain and you look at one of those pretty vistas and maybe you’re stopping for your little picnic lunch and you look out and what do you see? You see the top of your mountain, but all the other mountains in the distance. So suddenly the view changes.

(20:25): So then you’re like, maybe I wanna go even further. How much food do I have? How much sunlight is left? How much water do I have? So suddenly you have to figure out, well what is my new definition? And so my book, I’m not trying to say like, you should always keep going and it should always be more and more that I’m saying. There may be moments where you say, actually I don’t wanna go there. I’ve now seen enough, I saw a pretty view, I’m gonna go down. Or maybe it changes. But uh, what, what I had always thought growing up that when I was successful, I’d be successful period. And everything would be easy and I’d be all done like easy money, everything’s great. But I was totally shocked to find out that at every moment, every stage where I had success, it never got easier.

(21:06): It actually got harder. And so when I sat down to talk to those hundred people, I talked about it earlier, I was like, one of them has to have an answer. One of ’em has to have a way for me to get through this. And what I learned was that on the other side of this Wonderhell is just the next one and the next one. And if we’re lucky, the next one after that. And it’s all about renegotiating our relationship with the emotions that we have towards it. So for example, it’s not I’m an imposter, but it’s wow, what an opportunity to learn.

John Jantsch (21:34): So there is a bit of a, even though it might be cyclical, there is a bit of a sort of path through this book. And so I won’t be the last one to ask you this question, where are you on the path

Laura Gassner Otting (21:45): ? You know?

John Jantsch (21:46): And the reason I asked you though is because you start the book out actually with some sort of raw sharing of your experiences in those like places. And so I wonder like how is, where are you in this and how you feel like you’re progressing?

Laura Gassner Otting (22:03): You know, I’ve wrote the book as this idea that you are in Imposter Town and then maybe you’re in Burn Dotsville and then maybe you end up in Burnout City and then as soon as you figure out how to get through that, you’re right back to Imposter Town again. But I gotta say, I think I might be a little bit in all of them right now, , and I’ll tell you why the book comes out in a couple of weeks. And the process of putting out a book as you know, is a lot of, there’s a lot of hurry, hurry. You’ve gotta like put everything together, put all the collateral together, start sending it out. You ask people to pre-order it and then you sit there and you wait and you’re like, did anybody buy it today? Does anyone like it? You get an email from somebody that says, I read your book and you’re like, should I open it?

(22:42): I’m not sure I’m scared. I you, you know, like, I don’t know. And then, you know, you’ll get these great reviews for the most part. Sometimes you get a like, yeah, it didn’t work for me, right? But I’m, I’ve been getting these amazing emails and at the same time as I’m getting amazing emails from some of my early readers from my newsletter list, I’m also pitching, you know, good Morning America and the D Today Show and all the big shows and I’m like, oh please like me. So, you know, I feel I’m full of doubt. I’m perennially exhausted, but I’m also excited about it. And I, no matter how many times I walk out on the set of a national TV show, I’m still like, oh my God, is this the time I’m gonna barf like ? So, but I’m also, even though there’s the hell in that, it’s also so incredibly exciting and wonderful. So, you know, I’m just in Wonderhell about Wonderhell.

John Jantsch (23:33): So as Omnis as the title sounds, I find that you come full circle towards the end and you basically, you basically explain Zen Buddhist philosophy. So yes, so there is a happy place in in coming full circle to adopting beginner’s mind, which is probably in some ways you should have saved us all kinds of time. And put that in the first chapter

Laura Gassner Otting (23:57): ,

John Jantsch (23:59): Because it’s the best piece of advice. ,

Laura Gassner Otting (24:02): Well, I don’t know, maybe I’m saving it for last. Maybe I should just written a pamphlet and not a book . I’m not sure I’m, I think that, I think that, I think that probably hit you because that’s where you are in your journey, right? Yeah. So I think that everybody reading the book, like, I mean I just, I had a reader who actually I had something on a newsletter list who sent me an email and she’s like, look, I love you, I love reading your newsletter. I’ve been on your list for four years. I read it every single week. And I loved Limitless, but I don’t think, I don’t think Wonderhell’s for me cause I’m not sure I’ve had that kind of success yet. And I sent her, I was like, you know what? I’m like, gimme your address, I’m gonna send you an early book.

(24:37): And I did. And she sent me an email last week and she’s like, okay, I have to admit I was wrong, , I was wrong. And it’s not just about people who’ve already had success, it’s people who know that they’re made for more. And she’s like, and everything in the first chapter about feeling like, I don’t belong and I’m an imposter. She’s like, I feel like you were sitting on my couch talking to me. So I think everybody reading the book well, a chapter that resonates with them more, right? Yeah. Than others. But you know, in terms of like the Zen Buddhist philosophy, yeah, I mean that’s the thing, each time we think we’ve gotten there, every ceiling is just tomorrow’s floor, which is kind of amazing to think about, right? Yeah. What an opportunity that gives us every single time. And you know, to further into the Buddhist philosophy, there’s a storytelling, the conclusion about running a marathon.

(25:24): And in that marathon where I’m like, oh my God, I’m working as hard as I possibly can to finish this marathon in like five hours. Like it is hard. I’m exhausted, everything hurts. I’m chasing in all the wrong places, even though I don’t know if it’s only right places to Cha . And I get like, I get like halfway through the marathon and a friend of mine’s like basically tells me that the winner has just finished the race and it’s 92 degrees and I’m so hot, I don’t even know my own name. And all I can think of is I’m only halfway through . And later what I realized was, even though I was working as hard as I possibly could, like I could see myself finishing a marathon, first marathon ever. He cheated around my shoulder, meddle around my neck like I’m a superhero. I had to work as hard as I possibly could.

(26:05): I was at the very depth of my pain cave to get there. What I realized was, you know what the winner probably was too. And his pain cave and my pain cave probably felt exactly the same. His was just far deeper than mine. , he could just, his was much more impressive. But like going a hundred percent is still going a hundred percent and it probably still feels the same way. And so that, you know, that idea that, you know, pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional. Like you have that choice in it. And so you know, there, yes, it is scary and is difficult when things get harder when you find success, that’s the hell. But also what an opportunity to live into the wonder.

John Jantsch (26:45): Well I think many people are gonna read this book and just as you said, they’ll find a chapter that really resonates where they are at the moment. But I also think that one of the reassuring things about this book is you’re gonna have help. A whole lot of people say, oh, that’s why I’m feeling how I’m feeling right now. Yes. And that will be reassuring I think very much

Laura Gassner Otting (27:01): For, yeah, because you know, none of us can complain like, oh boohoo things are going well. Like, who wants to hear about that? Right? . So I’ve had so many people that are like, yes, I, there’s finally a word for this feeling that I’ve had. Thank you. I feel so seen .

John Jantsch (27:17): Well Laura, thanks so much for taking Moment to Stop by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. I know wonder how it’ll be available pretty much anywhere people buy books, you want to invite people anywhere else to connect with you?

Laura Gassner Otting (27:28): Yeah, so you can find me @lauragassnerotting.com and I’m on all the socials @heylgo, so people can find me there and wonderhell.com is where you can pre-order the book right now.

John Jantsch (27:39): Awesome. Again, thanks for taking the moment to stop by the show and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days soon out there on the road.

Laura Gassner Otting (27:46): Thanks so much.

John Jantsch (27:46): Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @marketingassessment.co not.com. Co check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing assessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

John Jantsch (00:01): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Creative Elements hosted by Jay Klaus. It’s brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination for business professionals creative elements goes behind the scenes with today’s top creators. Through narrative interviews, Jay Klaus explores how creators like Tim Urban, James Clear, Tori Dunlap and Cody Sanchez are building their audiences today. By learning how these creators make a living with their art and creativity, creative elements helps you gain the tools and confidence to do the same. In a recent episode, they talked with Kevin Perry about how he goes viral on every single platform. Listen to creative elements wherever you get your podcasts.

(00:53): Hello, welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and I’m going to do a solo show. It’s been a while since I’ve done one. So there’s a couple topics I want to get off my chest. So I might do a couple shows in a row. Who knows? This first topic I wanna talk about today is a trend, I guess definitely a trend that I’m seeing, and it applies to anybody in the marketing consulting agency world as well as frankly to anyone who owns a business in terms of how to get your marketing done, how to think about your marketing more strategically, and that’s the trend of what I will call the fractional CMO, Chief Marketing Officer. This idea of fractional whatever, titles, accountants, fractional management consultants, fractional hiring consultants. I think that this idea has really taken on a life of its own recently, probably like so many things here in the beginning of 2023, very influenced by the pandemic.

(02:01): But what I’ve seen is many, many business owners over the years really are looking for a marketing agency, a marketing consultant, somebody to get the tactical things done. They quite frankly, rarely hire unless they’re from a marketing background. They rarely hire strategic marketing folks internally because quite frankly, when you bring somebody in at a really high level to do marketing in your business as an employee, and you’re the owner of that business and don’t feel like you know that much about marketing or how to direct really a strategic marketing, dare I say, CMO type of role in your business, it can be a little intimidating. And I’ve experienced that over the years. A lot of times I’ve been hired, my firm’s been hired because, you know, there’s something easier about saying, Hey, this isn’t working out. You know, it’s not an employee, it’s, it’s a vendor almost.

(02:49): And so they can part ways, but I think what’s happened over the last few years is people have dramatically increased their understanding and and desire to really start with strategy. I mean, I’ve been my kind of my mantra for 20 years strategy before tactics. But I think a, I think people are finally getting it right, . And so this idea that they would hire a a a C-suite type of role where the implication is that that person’s going to be strategic, that person’s not gonna write copy necessarily or do social media posts. They’re going to really develop the grand plan for, you know, how you’re gonna go from where you’re today to where you want to be, certainly from a marketing standpoint, but they’re gonna get involved in the dollars and cents of it, the objectives overall for the organization, maybe a little deeper relationship then you would think of your traditional marketing agency.

(03:41): But we are finding that, uh, both business owners are, are really embracing this idea of hiring, you know, us or somebody as a fractional CMO. And certainly a lot of consultants, agencies, coach, implementers, you know, I’m finding are really drawn to this idea of maybe having a handful of clients that they are very deeply involved with and, you know, have a seat at the table , you know, for making or helping make big decisions. And obviously orchestrating the tactics to implementation. Maybe in some cases the team that’s already been assembled. So just the textbook definition, what is a fractional CMO? It’s a marketing strategist brought into an organization on a part-time basis to help set strategic direction and orchestrate marketing implementation using internal and external resources. So I spent the last 10 minutes just talking about what , what I just described there. But, but again, this role, this idea really has a lot of, I think a lot of appeal to business owners because it is a necessary piece that I think that, that you can acquire, or at least the idea you can acquire for much less.

(04:53): I mean, look at Google trends if you ever do that. The term fractional CMO is definitely on the rise. And I think a lot of it has to do with, I think people are tired of the tactic of the week of no real direction. Um, you know, everybody says they want customers, but, but a lot of the CEO’s, business owners that I talk to, what they really need is some clarity first, and the confidence that they’re making the right decisions and some control over their marketing. And I think that that’s a, that’s a big part of what you get by at least taking this strategy approach and, and by bringing in somebody that is very strategic to help you get those customers. And you know, the, the role of a typical CMO in an organization is strategic planning, brand management, you know, obviously the marketing campaigns, analyzing data, helping develop and use a budget and, and maybe even managing team players.

(05:43): And frankly, what most people do is they hire somebody just to do marketing campaigns and all those other things are left by the, the wayside. The reason I think this model works and why business owners should be really addressing it, looking at it, understanding it better, and certainly agency folks or consultants ought to be positioning themselves this way because typical, or I should say the average salary for a chief marketing officer, according to salary.com, this last year was between 208,000-375,000. And that really doesn’t include any kind of implementation or, you know, other people that you might hire to, to actually supplement that typical, average fractional CMO probably costs somebody 60 to $75,000 a year, plus a lot of the implementation now is done kind of on demand. It doesn’t, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you are going to hire those people as full-time people.

(06:38): You’re gonna, your CMO, fractional CMOs gonna bring them in as needed, you know, from a consultant or an agency standpoint, you know, if you do the math on, on what the average is, you know, you working with five or six clients that can be at the top, the absolute top of the CMO chain. So, you know, it really works for both parties as far as I’m concerned. 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 going to 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?

(07:33): 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. And now, word from our sponsor, are you ready to get out of spreadsheets? Look with HubSpot crm, get realtime data at your fingertips so your teams stay in sync across the customer journey, build better content, generate more conversions, and get the context you need to create amazing experiences for your teams and your customers at scale. All from one powerful platform. It’s why more than 150,000 companies already use HubSpot’s CRM to run their businesses better. Plus, HubSpot’s user-friendly interface sets you up for success from day one so you can spend less time managing software and more time on what matters your customers. There’s no better time to get organized. Get started for free @hubspot.com today.

(08:37): And so what the typical sort of agency project based path looks like. You know, you put out free content as a marketer, you get a sales meeting as a business owner, you, you then ask for a proposal project gets worked on, or maybe a handful of projects get worked on, and then, you know, everybody starts over again. And, you know, I think the fractional CMO approach is more that the very first thing you do for 30, 60 days is that you’re going to actually develop strategy first. And, and what that’s going to mean is you’re going to really drill into the ideal client. Who is the ideal client you should be attracting, you know, what is the core difference that your business makes out there in the market? And it’s not what you sell , it’s the problems that you solve for your ideal customers. You know, what is your customer journey look like? What should it look like?

(09:23): What could it look like? What’s a, what’s a content or editorial content approach going to look like? What are the near term priorities that you need to be looking at? I mean, those stopping and taking the time to develop that allows you to then month by month, look at, look, here’s what we’re doing this quarter, the next quarter, the next quarter. Because we’re, we’re going to evolve our marketing. It’s going to grow. We’re not going to simply just throw, you know, another tactic at everything and see if it works. Some of these concepts, the, the idea of developing strategy, in fact, we have a, we have a set, I’ve done th a strategy as I’ve described it here, probably in the neighborhood of a thousand times with businesses. I have taught hundreds of agencies and consultants how to do our product, if you will, called Strategy First.

(10:12): It’s really how we start every engagement. And as far as I’m concerned, if you are buying marketing services, you should actually be engaging somebody who is going to demand that you do strategy first. And as a consultant agency, that ought to be the way that in my mind, that you lead with every engagement strategy has become more important, quite frankly, than ever. It is the way that you not only differentiate your business, it is the way that you actually charge a premium for what you do, because you are able to understand how to guide the perfect customer journey. You’ve heard me talk about things like the marketing hourglass for, you know, years, our, our approach to the customer journey. That that has seven stages, no, like trust, try by repeat and refer. Just understanding what you need to move people through those stages that are essentially marketing, sales, and service or success is how you build long-term growth, focusing intentionally, focusing on those stages.

(11:14): This is a tool that I’ve seen it change dramatically change businesses in the way they view marketing. But then secondly, this approach to marketing, uh, hiring a fractional CMO who is going to become a senior. They, they’re not, you’re not gonna pay them as such. They’re not going to be there on-premise every day, but you can view them as a senior strategic hire in your organization. Even if you have people doing various marketing tasks, is an absolute game changer for most of the businesses that, that really can address or engage or embrace this idea. So that’s all I had for today. I wanted to introduce this idea of fractional CMO. Whether you are a business owner who doesn’t understand why marketing’s not working the way it should , or you are a coach or a consultant who doesn’t understand, you know, why you’re always getting beat up on price and getting tired of just doing, you know, the tactics that are demanded of you lead with strategy and that will change completely change the relationship you have with your clients.

(12:16): So if you’re either one of those a business owner or somebody who is in marketing consulting world, and you want to see how this fractional CMO model could change your business, just visit duct tape marketing.com. You’ll see at the very top there, you’ll pick your flavor. I’m a business owner, or I’m an agency that wants to license this fractional CMO approach. We’d love to talk with either one of you. Have an amazing day, week, month, quarter whenever you’re listening to this, and thanks for tuning in to the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast.

(12:51): Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @marketingassessment.co not.com. Co check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing assessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Outbound Squad, hosted by Jason Bay, and brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination for business professionals host Jason Bay, dives in with leading sales experts and top performing reps to share actionable tips and strategies to help you land more meetings with your ideal clients. In a recent episode called Quick Hacks to Personalize Your Outreach, he speaks with Ethan Parker about how to personalize your outreach in a more repeatable way. Something every single one of us has to do it. Listen to Outbound Squad, wherever you get your podcasts.

(00:49): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and I’m gonna do another solo show. If you listen to my last show, I started off by saying I wanna talk about a trend. I guess today I’m gonna talk about a really hot trend . It’s one that you’re hearing a ton about and so much so that I’ve been talking about it for a couple years, but the hype level on this trend has gotten so high that I wanna come in and do what hopefully you appreciate from me. Dear listener, , I wanna calm down some of the hype and talk about the real ways in which you can use this. You’ve probably guessed by now I’m talking about ai, artificial intelligence, this new set of tools, it’s been around for quite a while. In fact, I would suggest that whether you know it or not, you’re using AI every day.

(01:34): If you ever use Google Maps and it gets you to around traffic jams and gets you to where you’re going at the fastest route possible at that given time, that is a pretty common use of AI in our everyday life. Frankly, you know, the series and those kind of tools that are that, that have been around on iPhones are using ai, but a new generation of AI has jumped to the forefront. Something called GPT, which was essentially just a way to programmatically, systematically teach some AI tools, everything , all the content that’s out there, consuming it on certain topics, you know, up to a certain date. That’s the easy, simple way, probably to, and so what has happened is these tools have gotten smarter because they have, they’re basically just processing lots of language, lots of data. They can take that now and say, oh, okay, here’s how to write something based on that.

(02:27): Data tools have gotten better. Let’s face it. There’s no question. I think that while there are some tools like Jasper and Write, Sonic Market Muse that have been around for a while, I think the real game changer came when OpenAI ChatGPT, I’m sure you’ve, if you’re not using it, I’m sure you’ve heard people talk about it because it has really opened up the white hot topic of ai and it’s, you know, when that type of thing happens, you get so much chatter out there that it’s really hard to kind of cut through. I remember, this is going way back, so hang on cuz I’m gonna do a grandpa thing, almost internet grandpa. Anyway, you know when Twitter came around finally, I don’t know what year it was, 2008, 2009, it is. It’s like, if you’re not on Twitter, you know, you’re just like not cool.

(03:19): And I think that’s kind of where we are with AI to some degree, but let me just tell you, it is an amazing tool, not because it, well, if you’re a student out there, maybe it’s writing your essays, but as marketers, you’re not u going to use this tool today to create all of your content. You’re gonna use this today as a tool to get smarter about your customers, to get smarter about the industry, to get smarter about your competition, to create plans, content, no question. And to do a lot of mundane tasks, to get ideas, to get research. So that’s the way that, that, I’m not saying that we won’t get there one day where you just push a button and it’s writing, you know, your webpages for you. But what it’s doing right now, think of it right now as a a, a time saving efficiency tool that’s gonna save you some brain cells , quite frankly, because there are things that maybe if you sat around for a while, you’d brainstorm and you’d come up with a list of, you know, FAQs or something in your industry, but this is just gonna give you 20 of ’em.

(04:20): You’re gonna go, oh yeah, five of those are good. I didn’t have to use any brain power to get to those. So that’s how I tell people to really start thinking about it. Now, I wanna spend a little time talking about the process of using ai. So if you use a tool, the, you know, the, probably the reason ChatGPT has become so popular is because the interface is so easy to understand. If you use a tool, you know, essentially what you’re doing is you’re putting in what’s called a prompt. You’re telling it to create something based on something that you give it. Now you can give it a simple keyword phrase and it won’t really know what to do with that, but it’ll probably still spit something out. Or you can give, you can go as detail and deep as you want to tell exactly the tone that you want to write it in.

(05:07): First person to use statistics. I mean, those are all basically part of your prompts. So like many things, garbage in, garbage out. So if you put in a great prompt, if you keep refining your prompt to get to what you want, you’re probably going to get a lot better output. I’m gonna talk before we’re done today about what I would say is the top 10 ways you ought to be using these tools pretty much every single days, just from a use standpoint. Again, a lot of times I will start with kind of global ideas. You know, I wanna, I wanna start brainstorming a big idea. I’ll let it drill down to subcategories. You know, when I’m working with a client for, to create ideas, we definitely wanna plug in what are their strengths. You know, for example, I work with remodeling contractors. Well, you know, one, a very big remodeling contractor we work with is specializes in design build or design remodeler, because they have the designers and architect on staff.

(06:02): So we wanna play to their strengths. So that’s gonna, we’re gonna definitely use that as a way to create a differentiator inside of tools like ChatGPT. All right, let me just spend the rest of our time together today giving you a list. I said 10, I’m, I’ll probably go more than that. I’m just going to throw out a list of the types of output that you should be getting out of ChatGPT or whatever tool you use. Again, shout out to Jasper is another great tool. Shout out to write Sonic, like the word write Sonic is a great tool, but you know, whatever tool you use, these are the types of things that, that you can do. It’s not just writing content. For example, something that we have specialized in the last decade or so is, you know, with our clients, we create something that are called HubPages.

(06:51): Blogs are totally out. Stop calling it a blog, stop putting blog in your, in your, uh, main navigation. Nobody cares. Nobody wants to read a blog. We want got good content, but we want it structured in a way we could find it. And frankly, the way most people see blogs is it’s kind of chronological content. You, you put in a blog post to today and you put in another one tomorrow and when you wrote yesterday is gone. And so what we do is we take all that great content and we structure it around the outline of a big hub topic. So again, for example, I use the remodeling contractor. If they remodel construction or uh, kitchens, you know, we might create the ultimate guide to remodeling your kitchen in whatever city that you’re in. That would be the starting point. And then we would actually use, you could use a tool.

(07:37): In fact, you could type that exact prompt in to ChatGPT and it will give you a outline. Here are all the major chunks. It’s, you know, planning, it’s budgeting, it’s design, it’s construction, it’s, you know, it’s choosing appliances. I mean, basically all the kind of subcategories that go into a kitchen, major kitchen remodel, and it creates the outline for you. It even suggests steps all the way down to, yeah, that would actually be a good blog post. Why remodel Your kitchen probably would come up in that outline. , you know, the benefits of it would probably come up in that outline and, and that would make a great blog topic. So what it does is it kind of gives you like, hey, here’s, you know, in instead of just like, what should we write on Monday? It gives you kind of the whole outline for like, Hey, we ought to be doing something in each of these categories for the next six months and we’ll create this page that, that will really be a great resource.

(08:30): Instead of just telling somebody, go read our blog and maybe you’ll find something I can, I, in fact, I’ve probably done shows on that topic. But if not just Google HubPages Duct Tape Marketing, you’ll get a very thorough description of what I’m talking about there. Another kind of fun use for this tool is wouldn’t it be great to know what your ideal customer lays awake in bed at night worrying about when it comes to making a purchase of whatever it is you sell ? Well, you can actually tell these tools something along the lines of, you know, create a list of the top 20 concerns that a homeowner might have when it comes to remodeling their kitchen. Use first person and be very dramatic in your answers. Oh, and as a bonus, go ahead and write the responses that a marketing company for this remodeling contractor might write.

(09:24): So that sounds like a lot that can all go in one prompt. And then you are going to get a, a list of course of not just concerns, but actually sad in the way that a homeowner might say, you know, to deal with noise and budget and on time and you know all the things that you should be then addressing in your marketing. 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?

(10:23): 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. So you can use these tools not just to produce content, but to actually produce strategy. In fact, another strategic use. Take all of your Google reviews, you can just copy ’em, paste them in there, and tell the tool to actually go through the above reviews that you just pasted in and create a sentiment analysis, which is just another way of saying what are some of the key themes, , that keep coming up positive and negative? We can take core messages right out of those themes now. All right, let’s go to another step. Once it gives you that output and says, here are the three themes that keep coming up the most, here are the three problems people keep mentioning the most.

(11:20): You could take those in a continuation, put those in and say, okay, create a core marketing message addressing these themes that keep coming up. And so all of a sudden now it’s gonna get creative with you. So think in terms of research for strategy to do things much, much faster. Maybe to give some insights that you don’t have today. You could take three of your competitors and put them in there. And the same thing. What are people say about them that’s positive? What did they say about them that’s negative? You can create how-to, cause it certainly shines at that. Tell it to write a 1000 word article describing the five benefits of doing X, Y, and Z, and it will produce something that’s not bad. I, in fact, I kind of use the sole, the formula of, you know, 20 60, 20, like you give it 20% of the great ideas, let it spit out 60% of the content, and then you actually polish it the final 20%.

(12:18): And you might actually get some decent content written that way. You can take that content that it writes and say, okay, now give me a two minute YouTube video script based on this content. Franka. You can do that with actually any content you’ve written. Let’s see, you have some amazing content on your website already that was professionally handwritten, bespoke, just for you. You could take it to these tools and say, give me 25 uh, tweets based on this content. Give me a two minute video script based on this content. Repurpose this content for a LinkedIn article. And you are gonna get all those things that you could probably create all on your own. In fact, you could do a great job creating those on your own, but you’ve now saved yourself, I don’t know, five hours maybe to actually have it. And there are things that, that, that don’t require brain power.

(13:10): In fact, they just require somebody who understands how to do it. And these tools understand how I how to do it. Great example of that, writing metadata. So, you know, the titles and descriptions, you’ve probably heard every SEO person in the world talk about how important that is as an on page ranking factor. But it’s also, if you’ve got 10 blog posts, it’s also a bit mind numbing to create these tools. Not only create it, they create it in the way that Google wants to see it. They create it certainly SEO optimized. So even if you know how to do that, if you don’t really know how to do that, this is a great aid. But even if you know how to create something like that, this is a tool that will just save you an immense amount of time. I, I can tell you that, you know, companies that produce articles today, and this won’t be 100%, but a lot of companies that produce articles today, a lot of companies that do SEO work, a lot of people that do podcast transcripts, I mean those are all going to be produced by AI if they’re not mostly being produced by AI today.

(14:09): Google loves question and answers. FAQs have always been great content. There are certain types of people that they just want to go and find the one question they have and get it answered. So every single one of your service pages, if you offer different services or you offer different products or solutions, should, should have a list of FAQs, not just for the company in general. Yeah, maybe you have one of those that talks about how you work or about your process. But every one of your products and services should have cues. But you know, they take time, like everything they take brain power to, to produce. You can use these tools to get a head start on an, on what questions people are asking and the answers that obviously you’re gonna want to sprinkle your own magic on those, those answers, but it just allows you to do things much more efficiently. Do things that you’re probably not getting to today either because of cost or because of just time and you actually get it done quickly and rolled out. In fact, you know, just the very start of of keyword research, you know, just putting in a couple terms and letting a tool, an AI tool give you, I mean there are tools out there that do this, but the AI tool, since you’re using it can give you a list of, you know, the keyword word phrases that people are searching for companies or businesses like yours.

(15:25): You can tell the, you know, I already mentioned the idea of social posts. It’s great at writing four specific Instagram, Facebook, Twitter. I mean, one of the things that’s sort of banding about social media is has a way to differentiate themselves. Each platform now has their own way they wanna see content and what kind of content and what style of content works and what shape the images are. And so using a tool like this to actually write for specific platforms, just take some of the work out of that. You can actually, let’s say you, you wanna make sure that you’ve got a marketing assistant that’s writing content for email newsletter every month for social posts, every month for blog posts every month. You can tell these tools, you can give it the key themes and say create a monthly editorial calendar. If you’re an agency, you can certainly do that for a client and it, and you may not execute on the thing for 12 months.

(16:16): But if you’re an agency or a coach or a consultant and you’re able to show in a proposal to a client, here’s what 12 months would look like, a typical sort of proposed 12 months editorial would look like. It’s a great sales tool. You know, again, like do you execute on every single thing that’s on there, you know, nine months from now, maybe not, but it actually is a great differentiator and is very efficient to produce. Speaking of efficiency, one of the things I’ve learned about advertising or ads, digital ads is you can sit around in a room and guess all you want and some people are probably better at it than others. Which ad, which headline, which picture, which uh, description, which call to action is actually going to be the best. But experience tells me that the only real data that you can rely on is data that you test.

(17:06): So testing your headlines, testing hundreds of variations for ads is how you really get to the winners. Obviously you’ve gotta track and you’ve gotta analyze and you’ve gotta have, you know, your audience variables, right? I mean, there’s lots of variables, but I do know that when it comes to creating lots of variations that you can test, these tools are super fast at doing that. And sometimes you just have to have a lot of volume in order to start testing. So let me ask you this. If you’ve listened to this far, ping me, just send me a note, john@ducttapemarketing.com. Say, I would love it if you would actually demo kind of a working session on, you know, a ChatGPT type of tool. Be happy to do that. So just write that, send me a note, leave me a review. We always love those.

(17:53): Tell other people to subscribe. , what else can I ask you to do? All right, lots to learn. Lots more to come on this. This is actually going to evolve immensely. There will be so many ways that people find to use these tools, but there are very many practical ways that you should be using them today and hopefully this helped sort some of those out for you. All right, take care and hopefully we’ll run into you listener one of these days out there on the road.

(18:21): 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.

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Outbound Squad, hosted by Jason Bay, and brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination for business professionals host Jason Bay, dives in with leading sales experts and top performing reps to share actionable tips and strategies to help you land more meetings with your ideal clients. In a recent episode called Quick Hacks to Personalize Your Outreach, he speaks with Ethan Parker about how to personalize your outreach in a more repeatable way. Something every single one of us has to do it. Listen to Outbound Squad, wherever you get your podcasts.

(00:49): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Stu Heinecke. He’s a best-selling business author, marketer and Wall Street Journal cartoonist. His first book, how to Get a Meeting With Anyone, introduce Concept of Contact Marketing, was named one of the top 64 sales books of All Time. We’re gonna talk about his latest book, how to Grow Your Business Like a Weed, which lays out a model for explosive business growth based on the strategies, attributes, and tools weeds used to grow and expand, dominate, and defend their turfs. So Stu, welcome to the show.

Stu Heinecke (01:32): Thank you so much. What a, what a pleasure. And as I’m listening to it, I’m thinking, what the hell is he talking ? What must this guy be talking about

John Jantsch (01:42): ? Well, I’m certain that the first question that many people have given our sort of negative view, typically negative view of weeds is like, wait a minute. You know, that’s like how to smell like a skunk, isn’t it? I mean, why ? You know, why do I wanna use the analogy of weeds? So help helps first go there.

Stu Heinecke (02:02): Sure. Well, you know, by the way, I think the first thing they think of is, you mean this kind of weed, the ki kind of weed you smoke? No, it’s not that kind. That’s not what we’re talking about. But yeah, I mean, well, we all know what it means to grow like a weed. So the fact is that all of this whole logic is already built into our experience. We know what it looks like, we know what it means to grow like a weed. We also know what it looks like because you see it every spring and actually not just through through the spring, but you see what they do all the way through the summer and you see that they, you know, while a lot of the plants have maybe a single season of growth, dandelions, for example, just keep doing it, they keep running that process over and over again so that they are always running these unfair advantages, which is kind of a big part of the whole strategy. Oh, weed strategy.

John Jantsch (02:48): You know, it’s funny, I, I really, I’m, I love all plants, I love all animals, I love trees . So, you know, a lot of times I kinda laugh and say, what weeds are just flowers with bad PR firms? I mean, he is like, what? I know why we call some things weeds, their nature of taking over and for whatever reason they don’t look like what we want our yard to look like or something. But, you know, who gets to call something a weed? I mean, why is a weed different than a prizewinning flower?

Stu Heinecke (03:16): Well, you know, I guess the fact is that, well, if you look at let’s the, it’s full of contradictions because if you look at, let’s say the state flower of California, it is a weed, you know, it’s the California poppy. So they are beautiful. I don’t think it’s really a necessarily a function of beauty, but just are they, are they doing things that we don’t want them to do? Are they showing up where they’re not invited? And so dandelions are probably the great ex example. Everyone experiences them. And you, we, you know, if you have lawns, you see them show up in your lawn. And by the way, if you see one, then you see, you look up and you see hundreds of them. So they’re really, they’re tough to deal with. They’re formidable. And so I guess wheat is probably just, I don’t know, just a, a nasty name for a plant. It’s a plant that some gardeners say it was just a plant outta place. But that’s true only to a certain point because there are some weeds that seem like they’ve come from another planet. They’re just incredibly aggressive and noxious and we don’t really want them around.

John Jantsch (04:16): Yeah. And they’ll take out native species and things like that that, you know, because of their ability to grow and spread. Talk a little bit, of course the, you know, the big premise of the book or a big premise of using the weed metaphor is really to tap into what you’re calling a weed mindset. So yeah, maybe unpack that idea for us.

Stu Heinecke (04:35): Sure. Well, you know, you would, if you think about weed having a mindset, well, first of all, to have a mindset, I guess you probably should have a brain and weeds don’t have brains, so how could that even be possible? But if you watch weeds at all, if you see what they do, if you see how they operate, then you can certainly, you can certainly see that there is some presence there that looks like a mindset because they’re aggressive and resilient and adaptive. And when you, when they’re mowed down, they go right back to where building right back up again, they don’t stop. And, and so they have really admirable qualities that I guess in our experience are expressed as mindset. So that’s where the mindset, the weed mindset comes from.

John Jantsch (05:17): So one of the things I’ve talked about a long time is that having a real point of differentiation, one that matters to the client, can be a way to almost make your, make competition irrelevant. You call it an unfair advantage. So, you know, what are the unfair advantages that, that you think this mi weed mindset or adopting this weed mindset gives a business?

Stu Heinecke (05:37): Well, I would say that for, if we’re, well, so the really, the weeds model goes beyond just mindset, but it’s leveraging a fierce mindset. Mindset and unfair advantages against collective scale and running it against a process. But I would say really, if you’re using any element of wheat strategy, you’re already cre creating unfair advantages for yourself. And when we’re looking at, let’s say the, let’s say the situation of many small businesses, the ones that have no unfair advantages are not gonna survive. So you have to have, right, and I guess we could call them a lot of other things though, certainly one is a differentiator. So, and one of the Wall Street Journal cartoonists that helps me when my cartoons show up in the journal, they reach an audience of a little over 2 million readers. That’s real. You know, no one’s, how is anyone gonna compete with that as a way to cause people to become aware of you and maybe, you know, say, well, you know what, I know about stew’s use of weeds cuz I use weeds to help sales teams break through.

(06:31): It’s like my day job. So when I get to have my my my, you know, my my cartoons show up like that, then it’s just an advantage. That is really tough to, to me. But an an advantage could be a, a location, it could be, it could be a partner that you have. We’re gonna start up a, a new, a new award based on the book called the Total Weed Award. And my new partner in this is the NASDAQ Entrepreneurial Center. That’s an unfair advantage. So it’s all sorts of, all manners of, of unfair advantages from ways to get a lot more, uh, a lot more Boer to help with getting exposure. Kind of like this is a seed pod strategy that we’re executing right here. You’re my seed pod, essentially I’m reaching your audience and you’re multiplying the, the reach of my seeds of these impressions that I get to create from the book and from interviews and talking about the book. And it goes all the way down through, through Thorn strategy and segmentation strategy and rosette and vying and soil and root strategies. All of these are levels of strategies that help us gain unfair advantages.

John Jantsch (07:37): So I think you kind of were just doing it there, but I’m gonna ask you to kind of back up and say, and hopefully you can do justice in a couple minutes. You know, the weed model itself, I think you were ticking off elements of it there, but maybe kind of put it together for us.

Stu Heinecke (07:52): Yeah, well, so there are eight levels of strategy in that weeds in the Weeds model, which is an acronym for weed inspired Enterprise Expansion of Domination Strategies. So that’s , that’s what it is, it’s an acronym, but what it really is standing for are eight levels of strategy. So the, and it really corresponds with the pieces of the, or elements of the weed plants themselves. So there’s seed strategy, which is analogous to anything that causes people to become aware of you and, and form the intent to transact with you. Hearing me on your podcast might hap that might cause people to say, I want to go buy the book or maybe I don’t, what else? I dunno, I’d like to have stu consult with me or something else. I don’t know. But, and seed pod strategy, seed pods, we see those in, for example, dandy lines, those geo geodesic domes of seeds are held up in the air. Those seeds are so magnificently mobile, I mean they just, they fly all over the place. They probe every possible opportunity to take route. So holding them up in the air like that actually gives them a greater chance to travel and spread. So, and then,

John Jantsch (08:53): Yeah, and get a couple, like get a couple five year olds and pull a few of those out and blow ’em too. That really makes ’em

Stu Heinecke (08:59): Explosive. That’s true. , that’s true. They love to, they look, they’re kind of seat buds and, but then Thorn strategy is interesting because that’s using all legal protections, for example, to protect your ip and really your turf, you’re really protecting your turf. And the weeds do that. And we certainly need to do that in business as well. But not all of us do that or are oriented in that way. And then there’s segmentation strategy, which might, we could probably talk the rest of the, our time together on segmentation strategy because that’s, that is the, when you go out and you find a weed in your yard, you might have found some of these that you’ll pull on it and all you get is you get a handful of stuff, but you didn’t get the plant, you certainly didn’t pull it up by the roots. And so that’s actually a defensive strategy.

(09:40): It’s there to prevent or let’s say mitigate loss. Well, in business we have the same things happening. We have disruptions that occur all the time. One of those that co that occurs every, was this a regular cycle of years is recessions. And a lot of us are still caught un unguarded for recessions. We just sort of dread when they show up and we don’t really have much of, a, much of a much of a strategy for dealing it. But what if you’re dealing with those things, there are ways to mitigate them and that’s, we’re gonna be doing that probably soon if the press is correct because they’re sort of beating the drum about recession again. And anyway, there are strategies to deal with that. And then rosette’s strategies, really, I put that into the model because I wanted rots are those that, well, in the example of dandelions, that radial fan of leaves, that spreads out across the lawn.

(10:31): If you come over it with a, it seems like they evolved just to duck the mowers. It’s not really where it came from. But what they’re really doing is they’re covering the ground and they are denying the critical resources that plants around them need. The grass around them needs to grow and really just to live so sunlight and water. And so how can we create those kinds of, it’s really about cultivating unfair advantages, looking for those and finding new ones that we can add. A lot of times we can add those by the partnerships and associations that we create. And that’s mine strategies. So borrowing the infrastructure of others to, to gain dominant access to the sort of warm sunshine of sales and, and all the things that we’re looking for, just sales and exposure and so forth. And then finally there’s root strategy and the plant is the seed of all life force, but in business it’s all of the, it’s where all of the value of the business is sort of stored and curated and maximized.

(11:25): So there are strategies for doing that. And then finally, soil strategy. So seeds are rather, yeah, well the weeds, they don’t get to, they don’t get to change the soil quality that they’re in. They just sort of, they just, wherever they land, they make a go of it. But we have the ability to change the substrate in which we grow our businesses. So the cultures within our businesses and with outside of our businesses, our communities and movements are really interesting. If we can grab of or start movements, those are amazing things to help change the sort of soil strategy or the conditions for us to grow in. So that’s the model op, that’s the weeds model for creating unfair advantages.

John Jantsch (12:04): And now word from our sponsor. Look, if you’re anything like me or every other entrepreneur out there, you’re 2023 is probably off to a rock and start. And as a leader it could be challenging to align your teams on a shared mission and goals for the new year. But with HubSpot’s crm, you can keep your marketing, sales, operations and service teams in sync on one powerful platform that grows with your business and leaves your competition in the dust capture leads, boost sales and engage customers all from one powerful platform. Tools like a unified contact record, help desk, automation and customizable reporting make it easy to unite your team around a single source of truth, which means you can spend less time managing your software and more time connecting with your customers. Learn how HubSpot can make your business grow better@hubspot.com. Yeah, it’s funny, you’ll be driving down the road and there’ll be, you know, a, a weed growing up, you know, between cracks in in pavement and and things like that. I think it really kind of points to the tenacious nature of ’em. But when I hear you talk about the soil, I’m think I’m thinking very much in terms of like creating community and creating value for clients that they want to go out and and refer you as the idea of soil, isn’t it?

Stu Heinecke (13:26): Yeah, absolutely. Yes, it’s all those, cuz all of those create conditions that are much more favorable for our growth.

John Jantsch (13:34): So how then do we take that model and if somebody goes through their business today and says, oh, I’m, you know, I can add this or I could add this, or I could be better at this one. And so we get maybe our weed strategy put together, you know, what’s whatever, what many people want to do then is really scale, grow that business beyond them or grow that business certainly from beyond where it is to today. So how do you apply this then to, to taking that next step, going the next level with the business?

Stu Heinecke (14:01): Well, I think in fact, one of the first things that we can do to grow our businesses, I we gotta be looking at them and making sure they’re viable. If there’s something that’s not viable about it, fix it. But assuming everything is viable and you’ve got a great concept, then one of the first things we can do to grow our business is to root out one-to-one leverage and then jump to either multi-channel or collective scale is for the ultimate, is collective scale. I should explain what that is though. Yeah, we’re sure from just from early childhood, we’re all taught to become self-reliant and sort of self-sufficient. I guess that sort of happens when we, I the first time we played musical chairs and you got left without a chair, you say, well wait a minute, where’s my chair? You know, I’m not gonna let that happen again.

(14:41): And I think that maybe it’s, maybe that’s the first time we get it’s get it instilled in our heads that we’re in a competitive world and you need to be proactive and you need to get things done. You need to be able to rely on yourself to get things done. Then it continues when we’re told then to we go to school and get good grades, study hard, then you’ll get into a great college and from there you’ll get a great job, maybe a really well paying job. But here’s the problem, the all of that is wonderful. We need to be self-reliant. And I would say that the entrepreneurs around us are probably some of the most self-reliant people there are, but, but we can’t do it alone. And that’s the big realization. We, and, and I think probably the more self-reliant and the mortal talented, the more easily you learn things, the harder it is for you to learn to let go and say, well, some of this stuff I’ve just gotta let go of this and that somebody who’s either more better rated toward it or better at it than I am, just let them do it for me so that I can move on to other things.

(15:38): And I would say one of the big telltale signs is if your labor is directly involved in your deliverables, you are at one-to-one leverage. And or, and let’s say if you discover that it’s really hard to take a vacation because the bus, the business stops because you’re not there, that’s one-to-one leverage and you need to root that out really quickly. So you do that I think by jumping to multi-channel leverage. And that really means just forming partnerships with, with people who could bring you to, to other, to new clients, let’s say, or open up new sales channels. I was inviting you to, to, to join a group that I started a group of authors and I guess in a way that’s multi-channel leverage because we get together, we formulate ideas, we bring things together and, and, and you know, that you, that’s the way we’ve gotta, we’ve gotta find ways to collaborate with people as much as possible. I guess that’s really the one of the big messages of we just, that the more we collaborate, the stronger we become.

John Jantsch (16:33): So with an example of that, say a consultant or coach who is doing a lot of that one-to-one work would be building a course or bringing, building a community or doing group work or having, as you said, strategic partners who are going to, you know, send business his or her way. I mean, is that at, at a very simple example what we’re talking about?

Stu Heinecke (16:53): Yeah, yeah, I think so. I think productizing what you do as a consultant mm-hmm. and turning that into a course is a great way to do that because once you’ve built it, and of course you’re promoting it, but other people could promote it. You can go on vacation, you can make money while you sleep. All those wonderful things that happen when you’re not right. When you’re not the factory and you shouldn’t be the factory. Yeah,

John Jantsch (17:13): Yeah. All right, so here’s the burning question, and I’m certain people are listening right now and on the edge of their seats. How do you win a weed award?

Stu Heinecke (17:22): , you have to be, well actually a total weed award , you have to be a

John Jantsch (17:28): Total, total award.

Stu Heinecke (17:29): Yeah. You have to be absolutely audacious in, in the way that you, that you approach your market and create unfair advantages and create scale. And you obviously you need to be an example to the rest of us, but an example of weed like growth.

John Jantsch (17:45): Yeah. So I’ve been, uh, doing interviews, you know, for years and over the last few years, one of the things I’ve seen is title explosion in the C-suite. You know, you’ve got your chief people officer, you’ve got your Chief revenue officer, and now I think you are probably going to introduce a Chief weed officer.

Stu Heinecke (18:03): I am, I’m proposing one more . That’s right. the Chief Weed officer. I don’t know if you, do you know Dan Walch?

John Jantsch (18:09): I do, yeah, I do know Dan. Yeah, he’s on the show before

Stu Heinecke (18:11): He, yeah, Dan is, he’s an amazing guy. He’s, he has the blog Edgy Conversations, I think he has a book out by the same name. And, and he’s a turnaround specialist. Anyway, I interviewed him for the book and he, he gave a quote, by the way, the book has all these, I’m so proud of these quotes at the beginning of the book because they were, when I looked to research for the book, there were no positive quotes about weeds. So everybody I was interviewing, I was asking them, okay, could you share some sort of like, now that we’ve talked about weeds as a positive, what thoughts come to mind? Yeah. And so Dan said, if you don’t have a Chief Weed Officer, you lose . I was his quote

John Jantsch (18:46): .

Stu Heinecke (18:47): Um, and yeah, I think that there will be Chief weed officers, I don’t know if they’ll be called that, maybe they’ll be called Chief Strategy officers or weed strategy officers, but there will be people who will be responsible for growth of the company through the execution of weed strategy that we can watch all around us.

John Jantsch (19:05): Yeah. Awesome. Well, Stu, I appreciate you taking time to Stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. You wanna tell people where they can find out more about your work and obviously pick up a copy of the book?

Stu Heinecke (19:15): Sure. Well, you can buy the book anywhere, anywhere. Books are sold now it, it launches of course June 1st, but that actually, well, yeah. Can I start that over? Yeah, of course. Do it. Okay. Yeah, you can buy the book anywhere that books are sold, Amazon, of course, and Bo Barnes and Noble, bam and all that, perhaps at the airport soon. You can come and visit me at my author site, that’s stu hynek.com. And when you come there, then one of the things you might wanna do is join my weed, my my Weed bootcamp, sorry, my boot, my Weed Mindset bootcamp. And you can join that from, from my site as well. So yeah, and LinkedIn mention that, that you heard John and my and myself talking on the, on the Duct Tape Podcast. Duct Tape Marketing podcast. And I will be happy to connect with you there.

John Jantsch (20:02): Awesome. Well, we’ll have all those links in the show notes as well. And Stu, congrats on the new book and again, appreciate you taking the time out to, to share with our listeners and hopefully we’ll run into you again soon, one of these days out there on the road.

Stu Heinecke (20:15): I would love that, John. Thanks for having me on the show.

John Jantsch (20:18): Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it@marketingassessment.co not.com. Co check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing assessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Outbound Squad, hosted by Jason Bay and brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination for business professionals host Jason Bay, dives in with leading sales experts and top performing reps to share actionable tips and strategies to help you land more meetings with your ideal clients. In a recent episode called Quick Hacks to Personalize Your Outreach, he speaks with Ethan Parker about how to personalize your outreach in a more repeatable way. Something every single one of us has to do it. Listen to Outbound Squad, wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Jonah Berger. He is a Wharton school professor and internationally known, best-selling author of books like Contagious, invisible Influence, and The Catalyst. And we’re gonna talk about his latest book today, magic Words, what to Say To Get Your Way. So welcome back to the show Jonah.

Jonah Berger (01:13): Thanks so much for having me back.

John Jantsch (01:15): So before we get into your current book, w just looking at the, your titles there as I read them off, would you say there’s kind of a theme or a thread that’s run through your work

Jonah Berger (01:23): There? There is. I would certainly say it relates a lot to influence and think about how influence works, whether it’s seeing others through word of mouth, which is what Contagious was all about, influencing others through traditional social influence. We’re doing the same thing. We’re doing something different and how others motivate us or demotivate us using influence to drive change, which is very much behind the catalyst. But along the way I realized that a lot of what was behind influence was the language we’re using, right? When we’re sharing word of mouth, we’re not only trying to get people to talk about us, we’re trying to get them to say certain things. When we’re trying to change others, we’re not just trying to get them to change. Using broad strategies, certain particular words are quite impactful. And so for the last decade or so, a lot of the work I’ve been doing is involving natural language processing or insight from textual language data. And so it finally was to the point where I thought it was ready for a book on the topic.

John Jantsch (02:12): So, so would you go as far as saying that you are advising people to be, uh, let’s see, scientifically intentional about the words they choose when they’re influencing?

Jonah Berger (02:21): You know, I think about language a lot like math, right? You can break down interpersonal interactions into a series of things that are more and less likely to work and to drive action, right? And what’s so neat is, you know, the amazing amount of data now that we have out there on language, you know, you and I are having a conversation right now. It may end up being transcribed when we call customer service. It’s recorded when we post our opinions online, we leave them in our language, in digital form, we can mine all this data for insight and we can use a rich set of new computational tools to extract that insight. And so we’re really living in a time where we can learn a lot about what type of language increases

John Jantsch (02:58): Our impact. Yeah. You know, one thing, we do a lot of work with companies to help develop strategy and I find that a lot of comes out of what their customers are saying about them. Yes. Like here’s the value you really provide. So we’ve just been taking all their reviews, chucking it into ai and it’s saying, here’s the stuff that people really value about what you do. And I, I think that’s, you know, it’s pretty scary how fast we could process that amount of data now.

Jonah Berger (03:21): Yeah. But you can almost think about, we’re talking about a sort of social listening. You can almost think about people leaving breadcrumbs right behind about their opinions and attitudes. And sure, one person’s opinion or attitude may just be one person’s opinion, right? But if tan a hundred, a thousand, 10,000 people are saying the same things, you can learn a lot both about where your brand should be, what problems your customers are having, who your competitors are, and what strategies might be useful in, in the future. And so it’s amazing to see both how we can use language to influence others, but also how we can learn from the language people leave behind and be better marketers as a

John Jantsch (03:55): Result. So coming from your world of academia, I’m, I’d love if you share a little bit about the research that you actually did to compile. Think you, you have six types of words that can increase impact in every area of your life as you claim. So what, describe the research that went into Sure. Boiling that down.

Jonah Berger (04:14): Yeah, so let’s just take a step back. You talk about six key types of words and I often talk about them in a framework called the speak framework. And that’s S P E A with two C’s at the end rather than a K. I’m not clever enough to figure out how to make it have a K, but the S is for

John Jantsch (04:27): The language is the toughest letter in Scrabble. It really is

Jonah Berger (04:31): . That’s good to know. I will try to avoid it in future frameworks. But the S is for language that evokes similarity. The P is for the language that helps us pose questions. The E is for language of emotion. A is for language of agency and identity. The C’s are for concreteness and confidence. And lemme just give you one example. So often when we’re trying to get others to, to do something, we often use verbs. And what do I mean by that? Well, if we’re asking for help, we say, can you help me? Or if we were a nonprofit, for example, trying to get people to, to turn out and vote, we might say, can you go vote? Right? We use verbs to encourage people to take that desired action. But the study was done at Stanford University a number of years ago where they saw whether a small subtle shift in language and they actually two letters could increase the impact of a request.

(05:16): So rather than asking some students to help, for example, clean up a classroom, they asked some to help and they asked some to be a helper. Now helper is the word help with two letters on the end. Er, very small difference. Only two letters yet led to a 30% increase in the percentage of people who helped it. And you might say, well that’s students and a classroom. Does that really work in the real world? Well, some similar scientists wondering, could we use this to actually change the number of people that turn out to vote? So they sent out tens of thousands of mailers to voters. Some people they said, Hey, could you go vote? And others they say, well hey, would you be willing to be a voter and go vote. Now voter and vote are only one letter difference, but there it led to a 15% increase in turnout.

(05:59): The reason why is quite simple, right? People like actions, but they really wanna hold desirable identities. We all wanna see ourselves as smart and helpful and interesting in all those various things. But turning actions, verbs, helping voting into identities, being a helper is a way to encourage people to claim those desired identities. Right? Voting is fine, but if voting is a way to show I’m a voter, well now I’m more likely to do it. Similarly, losing is bad, but being a loser would be even worse, right? Cheating is bad, but being a cheater would be even worse. And so research shows that framing undesired actions as undesired identities is more likely to get people to avoid them. Cuz no one wants to be a loser. Right? And so a, a great way to encourage people to do something is not by using actions, but by turning those actions into a,

John Jantsch (06:45): It’s actually like you’re almost getting them to join the team.

Jonah Berger (06:48): Yeah. You’re a team. It’s a question of which team it is. Yes. But Right, right, right. It can be different teams. And the same thing is true even with talking about yourself or colleagues, right? You wanna make someone look good, don’t say they’re hardworking, say they’re a hard worker, . Now it seems more persistent, right? If you call someone a runner, it seems like they run more often than if you just said, well they run. And so calling someone a creator rather than they’re creative, calling someone an innovative rather than they’re innovative. All of these things make them seem more like persistent, true aspects of self and makes other people see them more favorable.

John Jantsch (07:21): I won’t be the first or the last person to go here on this, but you know, at what point does that become negative influence? Like somebody responds to being called a runner, but they don’t really like to run that much, but they just kind of like the association. So you can actually trick them , you know, by giving them the association.

Jonah Berger (07:41): Yeah. You know what’s challenging about influence and tools in general is the tools themselves are neither good nor bad. Yeah. Yeah. So take a hammer, right? A hammer’s not a good thing or a bad thing. It can be used for some great things. It can help us build buildings. It can also be used to hurt someone. A hammer itself is neutral. The way we use it is positive or negative. And so if you said, Hey, you know Jonah, can we use these tools to get people to turn out to vote and help them exercise more and encourage ’em to be better to the world around them? We’d say, this is fantastic, right? If you said, well it’s gonna encourage people to buy junk and hurt people and do bad things, we’d say, well let’s not use these tools. And so it’s not about the tools themselves, it’s really about how we use them.

John Jantsch (08:18): 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. It, it’s gonna allow you to make your competitors irrelevant, charge a premium for your services and scale perhaps without adding overhead. And here’s the best part. You could license this entire system for your agency by simply participating in an upcoming agency certification intensive. Look, why create the wheel? Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create and can have ’em today. Check it out at dtm.world/certification. That’s DTM world slash certification. This is a perfect segue to your name checking of Donald Trump in the book. But you use that example I think to illustrate that, you know, influence for good or bad depending upon, you know, where you stand on that. So, so talk a little bit about what you’ve noticed in what he has done that has actually influenced people, you know, regardless of how you feel about

Jonah Berger (09:25): It. Yeah. And so I don’t want to get into politics cuz some of your listeners may hate Donald Trump and some of them may love Donald Trump. Regardless of whether you like him or not. What you can agree with is he’s done an amazing job of motivating some set of people to action. Right? Even if you hate his policies and hate his ideas and hate him as a person, you can’t sit there and go, well he hasn’t had an effect. He’s clearly had an impact. And so even if you hate him, I think it would be a good idea to figure out why he has such an impact. And if you look at what he does, the same thing that startup founders and gurus and individuals we think are quite really good speakers often do, which is they exude confidence. They speak with a great deal of certainty, right?

(10:02): He doesn’t say something might happen, he doesn’t say this could work. He says, this will definitely happen, it will be amazing and everyone will love it. Right? He speaks with a great degree of certainty and compare that with most academics. And I’ll throw myself in the bucket here, right? We often say things like, well I, I think this is a good strategy, this might work. Or you know, as a consultant I often do this, right? I say, oh yeah, you know, I think this will be a good idea, this should work. Or you know, this is probably the best course of action. And what we’re doing there is two things. One, we’re sharing our opinions, but we’re also subtly undermining their impact. Because using hedges, the language I, you know, I think might, could possibly, all those are examples of hedges. Hedges undermine our impact cuz they make us seem less certain, right?

(10:45): They make observers think we’re less certain about what we’re saying and because of that they’re less likely to follow our advice. And so does that mean we should never hedge? No, they’re certainly cases where we should, but one don’t just hedge cuz it’s convenient and two, certain hedges are more impactful than others. So saying for example, it seems to me rather than it seems, suggests you’re willing to stand behind that opinion. Mm-hmm. . And it actually makes you seem relatively more confident rather than less and makes you relatively more persuasive compared to saying just it, it seems. And so I’m not saying pretend like everything is true all the time, but we need to be careful about the language you use and use it in a way that helps us rather

John Jantsch (11:23): Sense. Yeah. You know, one of the things to I think that comes from a book like this is that, you know, even if you don’t take all of this and run with it yourself, I think maybe it makes you a little more aware of how you’re being influenced. You know, if that makes sense. I know I had Robert Shield on the show author of, you know, one of the original books on Influence. Yeah. Called Influence. And he said he originally wrote that book because he saw a lot of really negative bad things happening to people because they were being influenced. He wanted them to understand yes. Why it was happening.

Jonah Berger (11:51): . Yeah. And I wanna be careful here, you know, I know the subtitle, this book is What to Say to Get Your Way. And so it may seem like an influence book. I don’t love the subtitle, I like that it rhymes. I like that it’s clear about one of the things you can do with language, an alternate title was, you know what to say to build social connection, persuade others, hold attention, be more creative, stick to your goals. And that was like this long and it just didn’t, it didn’t work. And so there’s certainly some things in the book about how to use language to, to increase your impact. There are also things about how to be more creative, right? Mm-hmm , rather than saying what, think about what you should do, think about what you could do. Switching one word makes you a better problem solver. There’s language of how to deepen social connection by asking the right types of questions. Follow ups rather than other types can make you have closer relationships with the people that you care about. And so this isn’t just an influence book, how do we get people to do what we want? It’s really how we can use language to increase our impact in all domains of life.

John Jantsch (12:46): You went over it very briefly. I wanna come back to that idea of asking questions because I find that one sort of intriguing when we think about magic words, we think about us telling people declaring things, right? Yeah. And this idea of being more impactful by asking the right questions I think is really interesting. I wonder if you’d go into that.

Jonah Berger (13:05): Yeah. You know, the more I’ve learned and studied questions, the more rich and and powerful they are. They do so many different things. We think about questions as ways to collect information, but they shape how others perceive us. They shape the type of information we collect, they shape a variety of outcomes. So take something as simple as asking for advice, right? Most of us think it’s a bad idea. Why? Well one, we don’t wanna bother someone, but two, we don’t wanna seem like we don’t know what we’re doing, right? Mm-hmm. , you know, if we ask a client for advice, we ask a boss for advice, they’ll think less of us because we assume that we should know the answer ourselves. That’s actually quite misguided intuition because what the research finds is people actually think you’re more competent, you’re smarter, you’re better when you ask for advice.

(13:48): And the reason why is very simple. People are egocentric. Everybody thinks they give great advice, right? They have useful things to say. And so they assume if people are asking them for their advice, well that person must be smart cuz they’re smart enough to ask me for what I think. And so advice giving makes us seem asking seems better rather than worse or something like follow up questions is also fascinating. Mm-hmm. too often we, we use questions at the beginning of a conversation or collect information, but we don’t always follow up. Someone says, oh, you know, I had a tough day, or That meeting was really difficult. We say something like, I’m sorry to hear that. But we could also say something like, oh, tell me more about why. Or you know, oh, what made it so difficult? Or that’s interesting, why did they react that way? Those type of questions not only show that we paid attention, but that we understood and we care enough to follow up and it makes people like us more as a result. And so questions don’t just allow us to collect information. They shape a variety of different aspects of our lives.

John Jantsch (14:44): And it’s funny, I have had numerous prospective clients over the years that I would just, they would say something and say, tell me more about that. Yeah, tell me more about that. Tell me more about that. In about 30 minutes of me doing that, they’re like, you’re brilliant .

Jonah Berger (14:58): I was like, yes. Oh yeah,

John Jantsch (14:59): , all I did was it’s

Jonah Berger (15:00): Also good. And what I love about that point though right? Is it’s easy to say just ask questions. And that’s actually, I don’t think what you were saying or what I’m saying. Yeah. It’s asking the right questions, right? Almost like a psychiatrist would. Right. Helping pull out. And that’s what great consultants and great leaders do. They pull out things by asking the right questions, by knowing when to ask questions, how to ask them the right one to ask. They really encourage people to, to figure out their own answers. It’s also powerful strategy with kids. Right? Too often I think when it reads kids’ book, we’re like, where you say here are the words in the books, rather than saying, what do you see? What do you think? Why does that cat character feel that way? Yeah. By asking them questions, we really help them be more involved in the journey and and learn more as

John Jantsch (15:41): Yeah. Plus you get some really interesting look into , a very creative mind .

Jonah Berger (15:49): Yes. Yeah. What do they see? They might see quite different things than

John Jantsch (15:52): You do. Quite different. Yes. I go guarantee you they haven’t been in that programmed yet. So, so this may seem counterintuitive to a book about word. What role does listening play in this universe?

Jonah Berger (16:03): That’s also a really interesting question. And uh, talk about that. Uh, based on an experience I had. So a few years ago I was, uh, coming back from a consulting assignment. I was on my way to the airport, I get a text that, you know, every traveler dreads saying my, my, my flight has been delayed and they’ve re-booked me. So I call customer service and you know, they very nicely re-booked me on a connecting flight the next day rather than a direct flight I’ve had. And obviously I’m quite frustrated just hoping to get home to the family and, you know, I get off this interaction with a barely better outcome, but quite frustrated the very nice Uber driver’s like, oh, you know, I heard you talking to customer service. I’m musing about how difficult it must be to have that job because people just are frustrated all day.

(16:42): He goes, oh, not really. You know, my daughter’s in customer service, she loves it and she’s so good at it that they now ask her to train other people. And so I’m sitting there going, what does she do that makes her so good at this and training others? And so we actually worked with a, a couple different companies, got hundreds of customer service calls and analyzed them to look at the language that makes ’em go better. Now obviously in a flight situation, we all want a, you know, a direct flight leaving right away. We all want them to find our bags. We, you know, we all want the good stuff, the problems to be solved, but could the language we use in those interactions matter? And what we found quite interestingly is that concrete language was really powerful. What do I mean by that? Rather than saying, oh, I can help you with that saying I can go find you a placement flight rather than saying, we’ll refund you soon, your money will be there tomorrow.

(17:26): Right. Using more specific concrete language increases customer satisfaction and it makes people more likely to buy from the brand in the future. Why? Because it makes people feel like that representative listened, right? Yeah. It’s so easy in these situations just to use kind of Swiss army language, right? I can help you with that. I can solve your problem cuz it works for any problem. Right? And as, as leaders, we often do the same thing. We say, oh, I I care about that, I’ll take care of that. But using concrete language shows that we listened, right? It shows that we paid attention, it shows that we heard them and as a result has a variety of positive downstream effects.

John Jantsch (18:00): Yeah. The one I hate is how is your Monday going? Yeah, right.

Jonah Berger (18:04): Well you sit on hold and they say, oh, they sit on hold and they’re like, your call is valuable to us. And you’re like, yeah, that’s why I’ve been on hold for 50 minutes because your call must, my call must be really valuable. And so, you know, the intentions are good. Yeah. They want a signal that they care, but actually doing the work requires understanding the language to, to get there. Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:21): Let’s wrap up today on, um, one of my favorite topics, the language of beer. So, so, so unpack that one for

Jonah Berger (18:27): Us. Yeah. So someone did a really interesting study looking at how language changes over time and they did the study in the language of beer groups online. So imagine you write a review of a beer and then you come back next week and you write another review of a beer and they look at what happens over time and they find that sort of the new members that come into this community end up adopting the language for the most part of other members of that community. But how well they do in an enculturating sort of join the community predicts whether they’re gonna stick around or leave. And I think this is neat in, in beer, I don’t know a lot about beer, but you see people adopting the language of beer. Yeah. But subsequent work is found the same thing is true in an organizational setting.

(19:07): Yeah. So I can predict, they can predict whether you’re going to get promoted, whether you’re going to get fired or whether you’re even gonna choose to leave the company based on the language you use in your email. Right. When you join a company, your language is different from your peers, but eventually it sort of comes to meet your peers, right? It becomes more similar to other folks in the organization. If it never does, you end up being fired more likely to be fired. It suggests he didn’t really enculturate to the firm. Mm-hmm. . But once you’ve kind of gotten there, you’ve shown that you can be part of the group. It’s interesting, some people stay part of the group and some people’s language diverges and that divergence predicts whether they’re gonna stick around, right? Some people can learn to fit in, but they end up deciding to leave for greener pastures elsewhere and their language reveals it even if they didn’t tell people. Right. The fact that they’re no longer trying as much to fit in with their colleagues linguistically is a good predictor of whether they’re gonna leave.

John Jantsch (19:58): It’s really interesting, I read a book, recent book called, and that was really one of the conclusions that probably the biggest conclusion of that, that language was one of the biggest tools that were used for good or for evil, or certainly made somebody feel like they were more a part of a community. There were certain words and phrases Yeah. That were unique to them. So pretty fascinating. It’s

Jonah Berger (20:19): A great marker of identity. Yeah,

John Jantsch (20:20): No question. Well, so John, I appreciate you stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. You wanna tell people where they can connect with you? I know they can find, uh, magic words pretty much anywhere you buy books. Yeah.

Jonah Berger (20:29): So first of all, thank you again for having me. Great to be back on. There’s a bunch of information about me, the book, but also a whole bunch of free resources. Uh, one pager with the framework, some guides to apply the ideas on my website, which is just jonah burger uh.com. And you can find me on social media at J one Burger on Twitter or on LinkedIn as

John Jantsch (20:46): Well. Awesome. Well, again, thanks for supp by and uh, hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road. Thanks so much for having me. 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.

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Outbound Squad, hosted by Jason Bay, and brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination for business professionals host Jason Bay, dives in with leading sales experts and top performing reps to share actionable tips and strategies to help you land more meetings with your ideal clients. In a recent episode called Quick Hacks to Personalize Your Outreach, he speaks with Ethan Parker about how to personalize your outreach in a more repeatable way. Something every single one of us has to do it. Listen to Outbound Squad, wherever you get your podcasts.

(00:49): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is David Barnett. He’s an author, speaker, educator, consultant, business buy, sell process coach who works with people to help them prepare and sell their businesses privately or buy a business privately or via business broker. So we’re gonna talk about selling your business. So if you’re one of those business owners out there that you think maybe someday you wanna do that, listen in today. So welcome David. Hey, thanks for having me, John. So let’s just start with that, you know, business owner who has the notion, gosh, I think I wanna sell my business. What are really some of the steps when somebody comes to you maybe and says that, what are some of the steps you have to say, well, hang on a second, we need to do X, Y, and Z to get your business ready.

(01:38): Yeah, sure. So basically it’s a giant exercise in empathy and understanding the position of the buyer . Yeah. Just like every business thinks about their customers and what their customer wants, when you wanna sell your business, you are basically entering the same kind of world, but instead of your product or service, it’s your business. Now that is the item of objective inventory, if you will, that you’re trying to, you know, promote and sell to the buyer. And so what that feature is that makes somebody wanna buy the business is the cash flow that the business produces. And so people are gonna look at that cash flow and they’re going to, they’re gonna use all kinds of different methods and there’s many different ways to do this, but they’re gonna figure out what that cash flow is worth to them. That’s the very first thing. So the business produces, you know, $200,000 of earnings for its owner every year.

(02:28): That’s the cash flow, and they’ll pay some multiple upon that. And it’s all based on the perception of risk in the industry. So the multiple paid for the septic pumping company is gonna be a much higher multiple than the multiple paid for a restaurant. Mm-hmm. , just because the two industries have a different risk profile, you know, but restaurants, you know, more a discretionary type of service, you know, fewer barriers to entry, lots of competition, you know, new entrance into the market, that septic pumping company, you know, you’ve gotta invest a lot in equipment to get into that trade. You have licensing issues, there’s very little competition. People call you infrequently, but whether they need you and no one can remember quite what they paid three years ago, the last time they called you. So if you, the price is 10% higher, they may not even know.

(03:17): Right. And so a lot of those different features make the cash flow from the septic pumping business worth more to a buyer than the one from the restaurant. And that’s just a quick example that I think people can appreciate easily. The value is one thing, the next thing that the buyer’s gonna think about is, will this cash flow continue under my stewardship? And that’s when you open the Pandora’s box of getting into process, procedure, methodology is the, you know, everything in the business running through that owner is the owner, got his hands on, you know, every deal, every sale. That’s when you get into all that other, you know, e-myth stuff, you know, system. Yeah. So we could go, we could spend the rest of our time talking about valuation. Right. , but, uh, couple things I’m, I’m sure that a lot of people wanna know.

(04:04): So if I’m that solo owner and I’ve been paying myself a nice salary and there’s maybe 10% profit at the end of it, I mean, is that what I’ve been paying myself? I mean, is that considered cash flow or is that considered an expense of the business? So, that’s a great question. So small businesses, and I use, I don’t like the term small business because different groups have different ways of defining it. The government, for example, often defines small business by the number of employees. Banks are gonna have different sets of definitions. So I like the term main Street. Mm-hmm. , because a main street business creates the connotation in our head of that small mom and pop kind of business, maybe with a few employees. And so these businesses tend to sell for a function of seller’s discretionary earnings, which is the profit of the business and the owner’s salary.

(04:51): And the reason why they sell for this type of function is because most of the time the buyers of these businesses are going to similarly be looking for both an investment and a job at the same time. Mm-hmm. , because they’ll come into the business and take over the owner’s position and role, and they’ll start to manage the business. So they’re asking themselves, if I invest my money to buy this business, how much do I get? And they’re kind of mixing the value of their labor and the return on investment in the business together. When you get up to bigger businesses, people are more, uh, you know, they look at it in sort of a more formalized kind of business format. They’re gonna separate out that leader’s role, the salary, and they’re gonna say, you know, that’s a separate kind of expense for the leadership position, and they’re gonna look at EBITDA cash flow.

(05:37): But for that small business that you described, we’re looking at discretionary earnings. And there will be some people that will criticize this and say, you know, why would somebody buy a job? But the reality is that there are a lot of people out there that would like to buy a job because the job they have, they don’t like, or they don’t have a job, or there’s some barrier to entering the labor market that makes them unable to get a job that they might like to have. And so willing to make an investment to, to secure that income. That’s interesting you say that because there are some, you know, let’s say some small business owner’s been paying themselves a quarter million dollars. Well, somebody might look at that and say, well, I can find somebody just as talented as you to do that for a hundred thousand dollars.

(06:15): And so it’s like, I’m gonna actually discount, you know, that, you know, piece of it or you know, as part of the, the cashflow puzzle. So I’m sure you deal with a lot of bi, I’m certain of this because I own a business and I know I’m emotionally attached. You know, a lot of business owners certainly wanna sell their business. But also, would you say that it is very common for them to overvalue what, you know, the market is going to, you know, probably come to the table with when I find deals in the wild, and I describe in the wild being someone who’s not working with a business broker or anyone with a lot of experience of business valuations, it’s typical to find businesses overpriced by two to 300%. Yeah. So that’s two to three times what they’re really worth. And there’s all kinds of ways that people rationalize how they get to the number.

(07:02): They’ll hear things or they’ll read articles and they’ll misapply what they read. They might read that a small business might sell for 2.2 times discretionary earnings, and they’ll do that and then they’ll add on the value of their equipment and inventory and all this other kind of stuff. And, but that’s not how that methodology works, right? Yeah. And so again, it gets back to empathy because if you think about the buyer, you know, if you look at your business, look at the cash flow, look at the money you want, and then say, well, who is the buyer likely to be? Is it likely to be an individual person? And what kind of money would they have available? So maybe they would have some home equity they could pull out or some savings. They’re probably gonna put, you know, some kind of down payment, maybe let’s say 20%.

(07:47): Well, where are they gonna get the rest of the money and what’s that gonna cost them? What’s the debt service gonna be like? You can very quickly find out if there’s enough cash flow in your business to be able to satisfy that scenario. And you can’t put, you can’t have the buyer putting the last nickel of cash flow into debt service because we all know that there’s ups and downs to cash flow. And the only reason that the buyer wants to pay you for the business, what, why they’ll be willing to pay you an amount of money greater than the value of the business’s assets. Now, that’s what goodwill is. The reason people pay for goodwill is to avoid the danger and risk of a startup. Mm-hmm. that that initial period where you don’t make money. And so for somebody to get into business in the first place, there needs to be some kind of return for them.

(08:34): There needs to be a benefit, which means you’ve gotta leave some meat on the bone. There has to be some detectable amount of profit that this person is gonna enjoy beyond the value of the time they put in after they’ve made all the payments to the bank. They need to have some extra bit of profit there that’s going to make this whole endeavor worthwhile to them. Let’s talk about some of the deal structures you’ve seen. So, you know, it’s really common for somebody to, you know, you talked about will this business, can I operate this business without that owner? Well, it’s very common, isn’t it, for there to be a transition period or an earnout even of parts of, so talk about a little bit about some of the common ways that you’ve seen people structure deals that, you know, maybe get the B, maybe get the seller a little more money, but they have to, you know, put a little more effort in.

(09:23): Sure. So we’re gonna assume we’re talking about a good, successful, profitable business here because right, the rules change when you, when those conditions aren’t there. So in general, buyers are terrified that there’s something wrong with the books or the business or something’s not being disclosed to them, et cetera, et cetera. Right? So if you pay cash for a small business, and there are limits to the ability that a buyer has to do due diligence because certain information just isn’t available in a lot of small businesses. So they’re fearful. And if they’re fearful, what they will do is they will discount every possible negative outcome into their offer. So the way that a seller gets a reasonable price for their business is by putting a warranty on it. Mm-hmm. . And the way that you do this is by being willing to accept part of your money over time.

(10:12): So we, this is called a seller note or a vendor takeback, there’s different terms for it. If we want to take an example, you know, you’re gonna buy, sell your business for a hundred thousand dollars and you’re willing to accept, you know, a third of it or 25% of it over time and that seller note. So on closing day, you might get 75,000 in cash. And then there’s a note, just like a car note when you borrow to buy a car and it says you’re gonna pay this amount per month over this many years. But that note often has an offset clause. It’ll say something like this note subject to offset in the case of a material misrepresentation or an undiscovered or undeclared lien or liability. And so what that means is that if something should arise in the business after the handover that costs the buyer money because you didn’t fully disclose, or your books were incorrect, or you know, yeah, I’ve seen all kinds of things.

(11:05): Like a big customer told you they were gonna move their business someplace else, but you didn’t tell the buyer that would be a material misrepresentation. Right? Because most of these buyers are gonna use a disclosure document that’s gonna have a big open question saying, is there anything important you haven’t yet told me about this business . Right? So, so that would be something you would need to put in there. I know that customer X, Y, Z is going to leave, right? Mm-hmm. , it’s gonna materially affect the business. So what would then happen is the buyer can then offset their loss against that note and the seller won’t get the full amount. And so what it does though is it gives the buyer confidence that what the seller is showing them is accurate. And here’s the other big thing, John, is it aligns the interest of the buyer and the seller because now in order for the seller to collect all the money for the business, they need the buyer to be successful.

(11:52): Mm-hmm. , which means they need to choose a buyer who’s got the right capacity, capability, aptitude, et cetera, to be successful. So they’re going to be more choosy about who they do this with. And so they’re gonna pick someone who’s better and they’re gonna be more willing to advise coach and help that buyer to make sure they get off to a good start. Because that’s how they’re going to get paid, is through the buyer’s success. 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 going to 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?

(12:49): 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. How about, and I’ve seen deals that, that are structured this way where they said, here’s, you know, here’s the totaled package. You know, here’s how much you get at closing. You have to agree to stay here for two, three years, whatever it is. Mm-hmm. and that, and by the way, if we hit this target and this target you get, you know, even you get a hundred percent of the deal or you get, you know, less if we don’t hit targets. Yeah. So, so what you’re describing is you’re describing a scenario where maybe the business is very dependent on the owner. Yeah. So the buyer, they can’t buy the business without, you know, sort of inden the seller to be part of the whole thing.

(13:39): Right. That, that you have to sign a term of service kind of mm-hmm. , you know, and, and so we see that a lot in businesses that are very driven by an individual professional service firms, you know, accounting practice. Yeah. Uh, architecture firm, marketing agency. When, when I sold my business brokerage, that was the kind of deal that we had where basically I was getting a percentage of all the files I had opened while I was the owner of the business from the buyer. And so they were buying this catalog of inventory of businesses I had for sale, but they knew j all of the different things that could happen to cause a business not to close. Right. And so my payment was contingent upon the deals actually closing. So, alright. Let’s say that, let’s say we’ve got that, you know, we’ve got the deal done, you know, we’ve signed all the things.

(14:34): I mean, are there some dos and don’ts when it comes to transition, you know, to make it very smooth? Or is it just kind of every deal’s different based on the relationship of the buyer seller? Yeah, I, it depends on the experience of the buyer, because if they are someone who comes from the industry, they’re gonna have a pretty good idea of what is going on in the business already. I always suggest that the seller is the one that should be creating the transition plan because they know the things that need to be transferred as far as knowledge from the buyer’s point of view. I always point out that, you know, that transition period is a great time to be bringing in some process and procedure and documentation into the business if it’s not there the way you like to see it. I’ve had examples before where buyers have, and this is easy now, the day of cell day and age of cell phones, making videos of the seller doing different things, explaining different things.

(15:28): And those videos can be referred to help the buyer, but then they also become part of the training catalog available for when the buyer wants to then hand that thing off to an employee to delegate. Right. You know, you’ve got that person who knows it really well, who sort of gave the training script and now it’s been recorded. Right. Stand on transition, you know, so we’ve got 10, 15 employees, they love David, David’s like, been a dad to that new person comes in and they’re like, I’m outta here. You know, that kind of materially changes the deal possibly. Do people write clauses in for that or is that just a Hey, you know, if it happens? Well it, it’s interesting you should say that because the call just before this one, I was talking about that with one of my clients who’s a buyer and he’s worried about that.

(16:13): And so there’s a few different ways to do to handle this. I mean, obviously we don’t own people, right? I mean, anyone can get sick, you know, fall in love with someone in the next city over or decide to quit. In my experience, most employees need their job. And so even though they may not be happy to hear the news that there’s been a changeover, most employees can’t afford to just up and quit. And so they’re going to give the new person a chance. They’re going to, they’re gonna see how it goes. Right? One of the, you know, the client that I was talking with earlier, he’s buying a business that is a very technically oriented business and there’s estimators and foreman and people that run a shop floor and things like this. And he identified four key people and he is like, if one of these four leaves, this is gonna be really bad.

(16:57): So here are some of the suggestions is that in the transition agreement with the seller, if one of those four people quits within the first year, the buyer has the ability to get the seller to come back and help hire and train someone new. So that’s something the seller can agree to and the seller is qualified to do the, and if sellers don’t want to do that, the only other thing you can come up with is, well then if one of these four people quits in the first year, I want some kind of offset against the note. Yeah. Because I could face some kind of financial hardship trying to replace them or trying to run the shop without them while I fiddle around trying to figure out how to do their job. And that’s gonna cost me money. So, you know, if I get to, if I knock 50 grand off what I owe you, then I should be just about square.

(17:47): And of course sellers don’t want that. Want to collect all their money. Sure. And so it’s, you know, that’s one of the best ways that, that I’ve come up with of how to do that. The understanding, the depth and the breadth of the labor market can be important. There was, uh, this time I was, had a business for sale. They were in the forestry products industry. They had a very high end computerized molding router. They could run miles of wood through that and make all these different kind of, you know, quarter round and window trims and all this kind of thing. And so the buyer asked the question, you know, who’s qualified to run this thing? And the owner said, you know what, this is the most sophisticated piece of machinery around here. There’s a community college that has a class every year of people that are in the millwright trade, and they come here on a co-op stint for a couple weeks to play with our machine.

(18:37): And so any of those people potentially could become a new operator. And of course the manufacturer has a whole training thing set up for that. And so that buyer then became satisfied that if the person left, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. There would be some way to, to keep operations going. So let’s talk about, we’re doing this out of order maybe a little bit, but you know, we’ve got their business ready and you think, yeah, we’ve got the price nailed and we think we know, you know, who we’re going after. You know, what’s marketing look like for, you know, a business to get? I mean, cuz theoretically you want the most buyers potentially, or most people that have a, maybe even a strategic reason to buy the business. So you’ve gotta get that word out. Is it, is it really any different than a traditional marketing campaign?

(19:20): Oh, it’s very different because you have to keep it secret. Ah. So the last thing you want is for people to find out the businesses for sale. Because if people find out your business is for sale, the business can be destroyed. Ah. And there’s all different stakeholders that are gonna worry and freak out potentially from employees to suppliers to customers, you know, the whole gamut. Your banker, you know, I’ve seen lots of bad things happen when word got out that a business was for sale. So we want to keep it secret. So this is why if you go onto one of the big marketplace websites where they advertise businesses for sale, you’re gonna find things like family friendly restaurant franchise in southwest Wisconsin. You know, it’s gonna be very broad, but what you should see is you should see the annual revenue number and the cash flow.

(20:06): Remember that the valuations based on the cash flow. So anyone who’s looking for a restaurant in Wisconsin is gonna see that ad and they’ll say, Hey, that might suit me. They reach out to the broker or the seller and then they’re probably gonna be asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Right. And it’s critical for buyers to understand that this sellers want to keep this confidential and so should you. Yeah. Right. Here’s why you’re gonna be valuable thing you’re trying to buy. Right, . Yeah. If you really hate your job or if you’re trying to grow your business by buying other businesses, this business could be the solution to your problem. The last thing you want to do is upset it in any way. Yeah. Because it won’t serve your needs ultimately. So. So David, as we wrap up, I appreciate you coming by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast.

(20:52): Tell, I’d invite you to tell people where they can learn more about what you’re up to and connect with you. Yeah, sure. So the easiest place to find me is at my blog site, David c barnett.com. And there’s links there to all the stuff I do about a YouTube channel and podcast. And I’ve written books and I have some online courses and stuff, all kinds of information on there. There’s over 500 videos that I’ve done. So if you wanna learn about buying or selling small and medium sized businesses, there’s all kinds of content there for you to learn. And I’d love for everyone to come and be my guest. Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you taking a little time out of your day and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road. Thanks John.

(21:29): 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 c reating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @ marketingassessment.co Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing assessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Outbound Squad, hosted by Jason Bay, and brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination for business professionals host Jason Bay, dives in with leading sales experts and top performing reps to share actionable tips and strategies to help you land more meetings with your ideal clients. In a recent episode called Quick Hacks to Personalize Your Outreach, he speaks with Ethan Parker about how to personalize your outreach in a more repeatable way. Something every single one of us has to do it. Listen to Outbound Squad wherever you get your podcast.

(00:48): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Russ Perry. He’s the founder and c e o of Design Pickle. He’s a seasoned creative leader, entrepreneur, author, and I already said leader. So he’s also a thought leader and a creative leader. It’s amazing. Used to own an agency. He intimately understands the challenges associated with all aspects of creative work and has transformed the creative process through Design Pickle. So actually I get to say welcome back, Ross.

Russ Perry (01:20): Thank you. Is this my second or third time? I feel like I’ve, this is a good, I love being back

John Jantsch (01:25): . It might actually be a third time. So in, in your intro we kind of outlined it, but in, in past shows, if we’ll link to those past shows, so you can go see how Russ’s voice has changed. I don’t think we were doing videos, but No. Like Beard,

Russ Perry (01:38): Gray, more gray hair for sure. .

John Jantsch (01:41): But, uh, you know, essentially Design Pickle is a, you know, design platform that you can buy on a subscription basis. You could probably do a better job of explaining it than I just did, but we’ll get into the components of that. But today I specifically wanna focus on a very trendy topic, and design circles. And that’s ai. I mean, obviously AI’s been around for a while, but it seems like now that people have found this chat, G p T thing, you know, everything is ai, right? And everybody’s talking about ai, but of course, like all things in the creative space, you guys tend to refer to it not as like AI design, but generative design or generative creation. Mm-hmm. . So let’s start there, you know, how does that, how do you define that term if somebody comes to you and starts saying, are you guys using ai? How do you da? How do you dive into this idea of generative design?

Russ Perry (02:29): Yeah, well let me take it super high level cuz I assume there’s probably a few people who have no idea what we’re talking about. And I wanna make sure that, you know, even if you haven’t heard the trend, you can still catch up with us.

John Jantsch (02:40): Yeah. There’s a good chance that I have no idea what we’re talking about .

Russ Perry (02:43): So, so you’re right. You nailed it. This has actually been around a while. And basically what it is, computer algorithms that are trained on data sets that then learn how to create visuals. Words actually space, not a lot of people have been talking about, but it’s been, it’s, it’s been part of this space for a long time is 3D printing and actually like 3D modeling type work. There’s a lot of generative design, but effectively you create a, create an algorithm through a bunch of data, a bunch of rules, and then you give it a prompt and based off of this data and rules and outputs and visual words, whatever, then you train the model, you say, yes, this is what I was looking for, or No, this is way off. And it’s, it’s through neural networks and the way the technology is built, it gets smarter and it gets more accurate for receiving inputs and output and giving you an output that’s practical.

(03:33): So this is just really hit the mainstream, you know, the, the most, the biggest player right now that’s leading the way publicly. There’s a, like all the big tech companies are working on it, but the ones that you and I can access today is from open ai. And they have a visual tool called Dolly, and they have a copy content tool called Chat G p T. Right. And, and it’s mind blown. I mean really, like, there’s really nothing you can, no lighter way to describe it with you use these tools where you can go in, I mean, we could say, Hey, let’s have a, a photo of us writing a dragon through Niagara Falls and then all of a sudden we have a photo realistic photo of you and I writing a dragon through Niagara Falls. So it’s been super buzzy. Everyone’s really excited about it.

(04:12): But I think a lot of people aren’t having the conversation on like, well how does this actually, how do you use it? Right? How do you use it practically? What is the use case for it? And, and, and this was actually something that I’ve been thinking a lot about because there’s been so many evolutions in the creative process and the creation process over the last 30, 40 years from just the digitization of it, which was, um, ear, like a little before my career started. But it was, you know, when people were like, Hey, we can actually use computers to u to design. And then obviously tooling side has evolved with cloud tooling and how we distribute content and how we access content and be inspired and just the,

John Jantsch (04:53): The bandwidth and the size of storage , you know, that’s got so I mean all

Russ Perry (04:57): That. Yeah, exactly. And then, I mean, you can even be as basic as say like video, you know, like video wasn’t a thing 20 years ago. It, it wasn’t where it was at. So what we’re really witnessing right now is just another evolution in the creative process. And I wanna touch on this term generative design because it’s actually a term that is how design already works without computers . So if I design something for you, or Design Pickle creates something for you, John, you’re like, nah, I’m not, I’m not, so I’m not so hot, like I want something else. And what do you do? You provide feedback and then you get a better output and you go through this generative process. All that these tools are doing is doing that almost instantaneously and you can iterate almost instantaneously. So rather than having to wait for a designer to come back to you with the revisions, you can go through in this pretty quick.

(05:51): Um, so it’s kind of fun. And there’s all sorts. I mean, we can go in tons of directions, legality. Yeah. Tech, how it’s built, how it’s used. But I think a lot of people are actually hyping it up a little too much. It’s kind of just like, well hey, I used to draw with a pencil and now I have a computer that can automatically do what I need to do. And that’s kind of the same way I’m looking at this is like used to take me three or four days to get ideas and concepts. Now I can do it instantaneously. Think about how much of an advantage you have. Yeah, yeah. And time saved inside of these tools. And for me, any creative who’s not thinking about how to start using them into their workflows is similar to the creative who is like computers, nah. Like yeah. Don’t think this is gonna be a thing.

John Jantsch (06:37): . Well, yeah, I mean you could say cars, you know, aren’t gonna be a thing. Right? The internet, you know, that’s the stupid thing for, you know, these people, right? So we’ve seen this before , you know? Exactly. Yeah. And I’m 100% with you that, that I think a lot of people are looking futuristic beyond what the actual capabilities of AI are and maybe ever be. And they’re ringing their hands about that. Where is it today? Like if somebody came to you and said, you know, we want to use AI in the design process, you know, of doing X, Y, z. You know, how would you say, okay, it’s here to this point. You already mentioned a little bit the efficiencies and the speed, but what about like in commercial use? Corporate use, you know,

Russ Perry (07:18): Right.

John Jantsch (07:18): Where is it? Where does it sit?

Russ Perry (07:21): So like everything can change overnight, right? Like, so these tools, they have more advanced versions of them that we don’t have access to. So, you know, today, and this again tomorrow, I could be wrong, but today the commercial use is pretty minimal. And here’s a great analogy that I use. Like, I love cooking, I love food, I love cooking shows, I love reading cookbooks and stuff. There’s actually, you know, random, I just saw this super dark documentary on HR mockumentary, I mean on H B O called the menu, which is really funny and dark, kind of making fun of food culture. Anyway, random. But a chef has all the pieces in a kitchen and all the people that they need to make the meals. And right now that’s how I look at design, right? And creativity in general, whether it’s verbal, visual, video, you have the visual elements, the copy elements, you have the business case, like what is this?

(08:12): What is this intention? What do I need this to do? What’s the call to action? Is it a click? Is it an ad? You have the audience that you need to consider. And if you think about cooking, it’s similar, right? You have the food elements, you have the spices, you have the genre of the restaurant, why people are coming to you. You have the specific customers that all want different things. And, and right now what we’re seeing is we’re seeing the cost of the elements go to almost zero. So this would be like in a kitchen, all of a sudden my vegetables and my spices are immediate and instantaneous and cost me nothing. You still have to make the meal. And so that’s really what I see these tools doing. They’re creating the pieces and really raw like photos, images, graphics, content, copy. But that alone isn’t gonna accomplish a business’s goals at this stage.

(09:02): Most of the visual tools can’t lay out copy and content into their designs. It looks like some mutated, you know, there that you can’t say I wanna fly or that says this, which to a regular designer is very easy to do. But these tools can’t, cannot do that yet. And I’m, and I know they’ll get there. And so when you think about today, it’s like, wow, my elements of design are becoming more immediate. Yeah. And they’re becoming cheaper or free, which this just in turn speeds up your creative process. And what I’m bullish on, and this is goes for all AI and technology is humans will always exist to close the gap. So wherever the tool effectiveness stops, that’s where humans come in to then assemble the meal plate, the spices, you know, do the fancy things and get it out the door to the table.

(09:53): And so that’s the same with design. Design will require people to take these elements to understand the context which the technology can do to create the content in a way and guide it and use it in a way that’s like achieving the goal and speaking to the audience that we’re speaking to. And I think that’s exciting. Like I think for creatives it’s like, wow, I don’t have to spend half a day coming up with concepts. I can use these tools and learn how to use these tools well. And then now I can send immediate concepts to my clients and then they can pick and then I take the one they like and I fine tune it and do my special sauce. And I just like, for me, that seems awesome, right? Instead of growing your tomatoes over three months, you could just go get the tomatoes for free.

John Jantsch (10:41): 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. It’s going to 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. Well, so in listening to that thread, does that mean that the price or what it will cost somebody to acquire design should go down dramatically?

Russ Perry (11:37): Yeah, and I, I think it, I think there’s two parts of design. I mean, food is an easier analogy to answer that question cuz you have hard costs of foods and things. But I even, I’ll continue that thread, A fine dining restaurant, what you’re really paying for is the experience you’re not paying for. Yeah. They might have some gold flakes on something and that added up some, you know, caviar on your, you know, oyster or whatever. But I think what will still maintain prices is the ability for people to go deeper, to do more, to provide a better quality product because they are able to spend more time on the parts that matter. And this could be research, this could be more in depth, you know, like details of how they execute these items. But the raw elements are gonna go down. Like if you’re a stock photography site right now, you’re just like freaking out. Yeah. And because cuz now people can generate pretty much anything they want on demand. Now are photographers going on gonna go out of business? I don’t think so. I think there’s gonna always be a premium for the skillsets that people have to create very hyper-specific things. Cuz these tools, one of their drawbacks is they’re not very repeatable. Right? Right. So if I want the same output over and over, they cannot do that. I can put the same prompt and it’s gonna gimme something different every time.

John Jantsch (13:01): Yeah. You’re not gonna get your family of illustrations, you know, that you’re gonna use in the exact same

Russ Perry (13:06): Style. Exactly. That’s on brand that matches your stuff. But that’s where the designers and the creatives come in, is they take the thing that you want and then they build it out on spec. On demand.

John Jantsch (13:16): Yeah. I personally, you know, I, I just play with it, but I personally have not been able to get very good images. I get great content , I’ve got that down. I cannot get images worth a darn, you know, they, they’ve like my, the face is always melting or something.

Russ Perry (13:30): . Yeah, yeah. Well and it is, and it’s similar to, you know, imagine for whatever reason I was watching the original 1984 Steve Jobs keynote where he launched the Mac and you look at the visual tools that were groundbreaking. Well, every artist in the crowd was like, this looks like crap. It’s so pixelated, it doesn’t actually work. I could do so much better and we’re gonna just see that again. You know? Yeah. And I think things will evolve. Yeah. Um, I do believe creatives will need to learn a new skillset. I think there’s going to be an AI prompt manager, you know, someone who understands the algorithms, understands how to put in the inputs, understands how to get into outputs. And you know, that might be its own design career. I don’t actually use tools of traditional design. I’m able to design using all of these algorithms and I’m an expert in that.

John Jantsch (14:19): That’s a really interesting point. I mean, because theoretically if you have a library of conventions of prompts, right? Mm-hmm. , you could produce a family of output.

Russ Perry (14:30): Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. And how, you know that and how you know, to manipulate and how you understand the algorithms. A great example in our spaces would be like SEO optimization experts. You know, they, they don’t have the exact, you know, the formula down that Google and other algorithms are using, but they know if I do this, it gets this result. If I do this, it gets this result. These are the best practices. Yeah. So I think there’ll be a whole new career opening up around how these are managed and used.

John Jantsch (14:56): How is it, how are you incorporating it at Design Pickle, if you are at all?

Russ Perry (15:01): Yeah. So my product team will kill me if I make too many promises. But here’s what I know is true , what we’re really looking at first, and this is the fir, you know, we actually have AI and a lot of things in inside our technology that, that optimizes the system every day that clients don’t see.

John Jantsch (15:17): Yeah. But I tell people all the time, you know, Google Maps is basically ai, you knows like exactly, that’s ai. Okay, it’s

Russ Perry (15:24): There. But where we’re looking at first is how do we shorten the creative cycle, which really comes down to less revisions, right? Mm-hmm. . Mm-hmm . Like if I’m able to understand what you’re wanting and deliver that straightaway and that’s pretty close, then you might have some fine tuning or a round of revision, but then you get your end product faster, that’s great for us because we can work on the next project That’s great for you. Cuz then you can get your items outside market, whatever you’re doing. So what we really believe is the first stop for these tools is gonna be for creatives and clients to better communicate visually and do it instantaneously. So if a client is creating a design brief, they can say, Hey, these are the, you know, use these tools to create example images, mockups, layouts. Mm-hmm. , you know, and they may be really off brand, they may not be exactly what they want. There may be some melted faces on there or whatever. But like the point is the creative can receive that and they’re now, instead of like 20% clear of what the designer wants, they’re like 70% clear. And from then they can start their design process. And vice versa, if a client’s unwilling or just not really wanting to spend time on their brief and send things in the creative can use these tools to quickly spin up ideas and send those to the client and get to that like

John Jantsch (16:41): Eliminate a bunch of ideas. Yeah, exactly. What’s the old joke in the design industry? It’s like keep, you know, keep sending me revisions, I’ll know it when I see it, right? I mean, it’s like now Yeah, I’ll know it when I see it. It’s like, well pick from these hundred and like tell me .

Russ Perry (16:55): Yeah. Yeah. And there is a bit of psychology in the design process. You know, I’m gonna let, I’m gonna let all of you out there listening who work with creatives. Sometimes creatives just are trying to maximize for what you, they think you’ll like, not necessarily what might be the best design in their opinion. And so, because it really is about, the creative process is very emotional, it’s about often you’re reflecting a brand someone cares a lot about. So if we’re able to guide the, the preference, you know, path faster as a creative, we can land on something that’s gonna be, that you’re gonna be happier with quicker, which means everyone wins. We get done faster. Now, is that good or bad? I don’t know. But I do know creatives do it every day. And I think for me it’s like, I think it’s not just about the design, it’s about the copy, it’s about the audience. It’s about the call to action. So there’s just so much more that goes into it that makes an effective design. And sometimes people just get so wrapped up in the visuals that if we can shorten that, then that’s helpful. Yeah.

John Jantsch (17:57): Well, so I was gonna go there. Where will this tool set? Because it can crunch data, you know, differently as part of the design process. Do you see it actually saying, look, this is your best choice , you know? Yeah. In other words saying, you know this for the goals and the objectives of what this is supposed to do. This is your best option.

Russ Perry (18:17): So we’re seeing those tools. So those tools have existed actually as well. And I’m a little, I’m a little torn on these tools because think about this from a real logical example. If I have a data set of, let’s just say Instagram ads, right? And I’m evaluating all the highest click through rates on Instagram ads, and then I give that tool to the masses and I said, Hey, use this tool and it’s gonna tell you what designs are best. It’s gonna obviously start optimizing and recommending certain types of designs to everybody. Well, now what happens if everybody’s using these design recommendations and floods the market with the same thing, all of the sudden now what was innovative and driving action is now commonplace and it’s not catching eyeballs anymore. So I think these tools are, I don’t know, I haven’t seen any that are st we’ve tested them in the past.

(19:09): Um, but I do think these models kind of somewhat of an answer to your question, will start to be able to learn your style and start to be able to design for what your needs are. And intuitively that should be based off of what’s the best for your client, for your audiences and things like that. Yeah. Um, so I think it will, I think there will be optimization in the sense that it’s gonna be able, these algorithms and the tools will advance in a sense that they can start understanding more than just these broad data sets. They can start understanding audiences and intent products, you know, industries and create accordingly. So personalizing outside of that. Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:50): Personalizing. Personalizing. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I wanna finish up with one totally not related design question to, since we talked last. How has your job changed ?

Russ Perry (19:59): Yeah, . So my job has gotten so much cooler and harder since we’ve last chatted because I think the early days of Design Pickle we’re just like, Hey, let’s help people work with flat rate creatives. And that’s the core. A thousand bucks a month, you get designer working fear one or two hours a day every business day of the week. It’s unbeatable and it’s super solid. But we saw so many other problems in the creative process beyond finding the designer. How do you manage files? How do you collaborate, how do you integrate these AI tools and use them properly? Because it is, you know, good John, if you’re just sitting in the, in your office downloading assets to your desktop. So what, you still have to do things with them, you know? And so that’s where we’re starting to think, and I love this type of problem solving, but man, it boggles my mind sometimes because really like we’re trying to do what, there are single companies that are huge companies that are just doing file management. Mm-hmm. , there are big companies that are just doing revisions and collaboration. There’re single companies that are integrating AI tools into their and building them. And we’re trying to do it all. And we’re trying to create the most streamlined, efficient, scalable, creative process for our clients. So I definitely have a lot of sleepless nights, that’s for sure.

John Jantsch (21:10): . Well the, you know, the one element of course that would add a lot to anybody’s plate is just the size of team that your team has grown to.

Russ Perry (21:18): Yeah. Yeah. We’ll break a hundred people this year, full-time employees and, you know, six, 700 creatives and support teams around the world. So it’s a big group.

John Jantsch (21:27): Yeah. Just the comings and goings of that amount of people, you know, adds a whole nother level of complexity. Yeah. Do you feel there’s gonna be a point where the role will outgrow you? The company will outgrow you, your ability to keep up? Because you’re obviously, you know, making stuff up on the fly right now,

Russ Perry (21:42): ,

John Jantsch (21:43): I very positive and just actual practical way. I mean, that’s just a

Russ Perry (21:47): Real, so it already has like, like here’s the deal, John. It already has. But here’s what I’ve learned as we’ve grown, I just start to get narrow, more narrowly focused into my areas of expertise. And I hire really smart people who are much better around me. And so I love to be a leader. I love to be a visionary, and I think that will never outgrow me. I, my ideas are still too big for this company. Sometimes some of the things that I come up with, but of course I’m not running our p and l anymore. Yeah, of course. I’m not doing our forecasting. I’m not running our product roadmap meeting. So we have incredible team members there. But, you know, at the end of the day there is a, a strategy for Design Pickle to, to grow big and have a huge transaction and, you know, support the team members that we have who have a piece of the pie and everyone else who’s supported of us. So depends on, you know, if Adobe buys us, maybe I’ll keep on going with them. If it’s boring, outsourced company from, you know, some no name part of the world, then I may not wanna go forward with them anymore. .

John Jantsch (22:48): Well, Russ, I certainly appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by and update us here on the Duct Tech Marketing podcast. Do you wanna I do. Where do you want to invite people to check some stuff out?

Russ Perry (22:57): Yeah, so I, I want, I’ll answer that, but I have one more little quick words of wisdom for everybody. Check me out on LinkedIn just in slash Russ Perry. That’s where you can find me. This technology is gonna be, at some point, it’s gonna be like email, web protocol. Mm-hmm. , it’s gonna be very standardized and very universal or almost free. The technology, the way that people will use this technology is how do they customize it for their use cases? How do they customize it with their own data and how do they really use it in a specific way? So it’s the early days, but if anyone’s listening about this, you, no one’s gonna out chat, g p t chat, g p t so far ahead with tens of billions of dollars. But they’re opening that up in innovative ways for you to use it and customize it and build on it. So that’s what I would leave everyone with is this is gonna be so commonplace in 3, 4, 5 years. What will you then create on top of it and how will you leverage it? That’s what gets me excited.

John Jantsch (23:56): I, I would throw in, I think the next obvious sort of opportunity is to niche this down to industries. Yeah. Um, and make it, you know, for them, personalized for them. Because you can now very easily. And then I would say, you know, beyond that, it’s really the mass personalization is now possible.

Russ Perry (24:13): Absolutely.

John Jantsch (24:14): Everybody gets a different email, everybody gets a different webpage when they visit. I mean, that’s possible.

Russ Perry (24:19): Yeah. Yeah. Cool, John, well thanks for having me back. Let’s get it, let’s get it together again. Once everything changes, once again,

John Jantsch (24:26): . That’s right. We’ll have to explore it. So talking with Russ Perry, founder of Design Pickle. It’s just design pickle.com as I recall to check ’em out.

Russ Perry (24:34): All right. Take care.

John Jantsch (24:35): Yeah, take care. And hopefully we’ll run into you again soon. One of these days out there on the road

Russ Perry (24:40): Or in virtual AI environments, . Exactly.

John Jantsch (24:43): 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 marketingassessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Outbound Squad, hosted by Jason Bay, and brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination for business professionals host Jason Bay, dives in with leading sales experts and top performing reps to share actionable tips and strategies to help you land more meetings with your ideal clients. In a recent episode called Quick Hacks to Personalize Your Outreach, he speaks with Ethan Parker about how to personalize your outreach in a more repeatable way. Something every single one of us has to do it. Listen to Outbound Squad, wherever you get your podcasts.

(00:49): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Dan Martell. He’s an entrepreneur, angel investor and became a highly sought after coach in the SaaS industry. Founded SaaS Academy after exiting three technology companies with a 10 year, within a 10 year period. He’s also an Ironman athlete, philanthropist, husband, and father of two incredible boys. I’ve never met them, so I’m gonna have to take word for that one. But, uh, he’s also the author of a new book out to buy Back Your Time, get Unstuck, reclaim your Freedom, and Build your Empire. So Dan, welcome to the show,

Dan Martell (01:26): John. It’s an honor and, and it is because you were one of the first marketing podcasts I ever listened to back when I was starting online stuff. So it’s cool to be a

John Jantsch (01:35): Guest. I’m just hanging around. I you’ve been on before though, weren’t you, weren’t

Dan Martell (01:39): You on before? I think I was

John Jantsch (01:40): Clarity or something. Yeah.

Dan Martell (01:42): But even before that I was, I was a listener. So it’s, it’s always cool to, to see and get reconnected.

John Jantsch (01:48): S so buy back your time. I had a little trouble with, not trouble with, but you know, kind of processing the title name and, you know, everybody talking about time is money and, and yeah, some people can say, you’re suggesting money is time. Am I getting them

Dan Martell (02:03): Wrong? I’m, yeah, I’m saying, I actually, in the book, I, there’s three levels of trading. I call, I call it being a, a great trader. When we start off, we trade time for money. That’s for the most people. That’s employees, right? Like you. Yep. Yeah. Create value then, then as an entrepreneur. So there’s employee then entrepreneurs, level two. Level two is trade money for time, right? It’s, it doesn’t matter if you’re, you know, you buy a Roomba to clean your house, well, you go to the office and pack stuff up. That’s, that’s trading money for time or employees or even contractors or your accountant or whatever. And then the third level trader is money for money. And that’s, that’s the empire builder, right? And I think if people understood that that’s the trajectory in life to create one of unlimited, and that’s why I say buy the, build your empire. In my world, building your empire is a life of unlimited creation that you never have to retire from. And I just think everybody should strive and maybe consider doing that.

John Jantsch (02:58): I’m not gonna argue you on that one, but I did want , I did wanna throw in here, there’s a lot of books. There’s probably a section in back when we had bookstores, remember those? There’s probably a whole section on time management books, some of which I suggest you probably drew from. I mean, just because people have been writing about this for a hundred years, right? So why did you decide to tackle time?

Dan Martell (03:17): Because, cause it’s the core of everything I’ve ever done. You know, people see my life and their like, you know, how do you run two eight figure companies as a c e O train for Ironman, you know, be a relatively good husband. I think I’m a great father. I’m still working with a husband’s stuff, but my wife gives me good scores and stuff. But you know, I, I live a pretty integrated life. You know, I just got back from a hell trip we were just talking about, and you know, last year we took about two and a half months off traveled Europe and stuff. Like, people always ask me, how do you do this? And it’s based on this core premise called the buyback principle, right? And this is what’s unique about my book then, you know, all the greats, right? And, and I’ve read them all, you know, you mentioned like, you know, getting things done and you know, eat the frog and like there’s all these like epic productivity books.

(04:03): But the buyback principle states is we don’t hire people to grow our business. We hire people to buy back our time. Cuz you can get the first if you do the second, but you can definitely not get the second if you get the first. Cuz I’ve just been friends with so many creatives, business owners, et cetera, that essentially build a business that they grow to hate. And the biggest risk to business is not the market, it’s not the economy, it’s not, you know, your team. It’s literally you deciding, I don’t want to do this anymore and just stop doing it. Right? And I addressed that in the book with this framework called the Pain line and the buyback loop. And you know, so in my, in my world of productivity, we always start with the calendar and we always figure out what our buyback rate is.

(04:45): And if we understand what are things that light us up that make us money, and what are things that take our energy that, that drain us, that that could cost very little pay somebody else. And, and, and you have some structure around how you sequencing, hiring and buying your time back. It’s honestly math. It’s a mathematical equation. You can’t mess it up. Like you won’t be able to grow your business where you make less money without adding. Like, you literally will buy back time and live a higher quality life cuz you know, you can’t build a million dollar company off $10 tasks. But yet people every day, it doesn’t matter if they’re, I have clients that are running a hundred million dollar companies and still do the most ridiculous things with their time and, you know, nobody’s ever challenged ’em on it.

John Jantsch (05:25): Yeah, I think it’s amazing. You know, it’s, it’s pretty simple math, right? If I want to have a million dollar company, I have to do x a month , which means I have to do x a day, you know? Right. Every

Dan Martell (05:34): Hour has to

John Jantsch (05:35): Produce X. Yeah. Yeah. So, so how much, and maybe you don’t even bother trying to argue with people that are in this mindset, but how much mine trash, you know, is built up with people of saying, oh, but you know, my dad said I was supposed to mow my own grass. You know, I mean, how much do, do people have to overcome that kind of mentality, even if it applies to the workplace before they can even start, you know, taking on some of these principles?

Dan Martell (05:59): Th that’s, I mean that’s everything. It’s why I wrote chapter three is called the Time Assassins because there’s these mental scripts that people run. You know, like when I started off I was, you know, I’m supposed to be the chief office cleaner and sandwich maker and you hear these things, right? But like, I remember one time I was reaching out to when a company invested in this, this kid Ethan, and I was like, Hey, we should go to the office and work on like, kind of strategy. And he’s like, I’m doing my laundry . Alright, you just raised 1.5 million from us and you’re telling me you can’t pay for wash and fold and you just said no to an investor. Like you see where there’s, there’s some logic that’s, that’s broken, right? So it’s everything though. It’s, you know, I address this in the book as much as I can.

(06:43): It’s around self-worth, right? I don’t feel worthy of this. There’s an element of that. Yeah, there’s, I’m fearful of what other people, including my team would think, right? If I hired somebody to do this for me, what would my neighbor think? I mean I’ve, I’ve coached clients on every level where, you know, one woman’s like, I don’t want my neighbor to think that I’m so busy in my business that I can’t clean my own house and have a cleaning lady parked in my driveway. Right? Or I don’t want my mother-in-law to find out that I have somebody making, you know, lunches for my kids or meal prepper or dinners or whatever it is. Like it’s just fascinating. There’s, I can’t afford it, right? It’s not true. But they say that to themselves. I don’t trust myself. This is a big one. What, what if I buy back my time and I don’t do anything good with it and I just wasted that hour, right? That’s another one I’ve, I’ve heard them all. So it is, it is actually all of that. So that’s why like I try to break it down into a first principle like real math where you just can’t deny it. Look, this is, this is the reality. If you understand your buyback rate and you do anything that you could have paid somebody else that amount or less, then you’re working against yourself of trying to create a life that is actually better for you and your family.

John Jantsch (07:55): Yeah. So let’s, I had it down to, to ask you about, but let’s go ahead. This is a great place to throw in, you know, explain buyback rate.

Dan Martell (08:01): Yeah, it’s math so I understand John, right off the bat I’m gonna lose people so please everybody just stay with me, I’ll make it fun. So essentially you need to understand what you can afford to pay somebody else to do based on your current income level, right? And income for me is your salary profit and then also discretionary expenses. Cuz a lot of people don’t make any money on paper cause they don’t like paying taxes. Fine, but throw that in. So let’s say I make a hundred thousand a year in income, that might be 70,000 in salary. I pay myself from the business. It could be 20,000 in profit and 10,000 a year in discretionary expenses that aren’t really business but you know, who cares? So that’s a hundred grand, I divide that number, whatever it is for anybody by 2000, you know, in this case that works out to about $50 an hour, 2000 is because that’s the amount of hours an average person that takes vacation and weekends off will work, right?

(08:49): And then because you wanna get a four times ROI on your investment of buying that time, take that number and divide it by four, right? So that works out to about $12 and 50 cents. So if you look at your calendar and you’re doing anything with your time that you could have paid anybody $12 and 50 cents or less to do, then you’re actually not being a very good time trader and you’re working against yourself to free up the space for you to go and reinvest that in higher value, higher leverage things, even if it’s stuff that is equally valuable but you just don’t like to do. Get that stuff off your plate because just stacking things that are green will have the most, the biggest impact out of everything because you’re bringing a sense of energy to the next thing, the next thing that you just can’t even quantify a dollar roi, but it’s an emotional roi.

John Jantsch (09:37): Yeah. It’s funny you mentioned that like 1250, right? I remember when I first started I did payroll and I did payroll reports and I filed all the reports. First off, there’s a mind numbing amount of reports , but I also hated every second of it. And so I put it off, I was late, I hated, I got rid of that. I don’t even know what I paid for, but it was worth a fortune, , whatever. I didn’t pay that much. That’s the scary thing, you know, to get rid of it. But I, you know, you talk about the emotional costs, I think that’s one that people, especially when you’re doing stuff that you hate, it’s, it’s the opportunity lost in actually writing that book, you know, that you could’ve been doing right?

Dan Martell (10:15): The only you can do, and that’s why I wrote the book cuz I, I actually sh demonstrate that your business, your customers, you will just be happier and way more productive producing when you, you kind of follow those two, you know, lights you up and makes you a lot of money. Try to just do as much of that in your calendar when you decide to work and when you’re not working, go spend it with people that you love and yeah, that’s a good equation.

John Jantsch (10:38): Yeah. Imagine how much time people waste and if they just like work three hours a day on like the stuff, that’s all they’d have to do.

Dan Martell (10:45): the one thing, I mean this is, this is what’s interesting is a lot of people I think use the busy work. You know, your inbox is nothing more than a public to-do list for everybody else’s goals on your time. And these are strangers for the most part. Yeah, yeah. So it’s like, there’s just a lot of things that people do that from a dopamine point of view, it, it keeps ’em busy and it feels productive because they don’t want to think, right? It’s like, oh, if I just start now for two hours and work on my email, be productive. It’s like, not really. No. The productive thing would actually be to sit back and look at what your goals are for the quarter of the year and say, does this activity actually get me closer to that or not? And I’ll tell you, just processing an inbox is not gonna help you double your business in the next 12 months. They’re just, they’re not correlated.

John Jantsch (11:29): I used to tell my kids when I was little and they’d say, what do you dad, what do you do for a living? I say, I delete email professional

Dan Martell (11:36): Email

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(12:26): One of the things that you, and you’re not the first to say this, but I like your approach to it is clone yourself. Everybody should have an assistant. Everybody should teach somebody else how to do the stuff that they think only they can do. I know pe other people that have given that advice, I think you’ve gone a little farther and had a, actually a better system for it. But I also know a lot of people that have tried that and they just, they like look at that person and go, I don’t know what to tell ’em what to do. So, so what, what’s your advice on somebody? First off you’re saying just get overdo it, but then one

Dan Martell (12:54): Thing, then I give it a system. Yeah, so I mean what what’s fun for me is nothing I wrote about I think is, you know, I think that’s just life. I’m, I’m, I’m built by my community. I’ve read over 1500 books. I’m, I’m a remix of everything I’ve ever read. What was missing for me, and this is why I wrote it, I have like very unique perspective. So for example, with the executive administrator admin type role, there’s two things that have to be true. One, you have to give them a hundred percent of your inbox, meaning that you do not touch the emails first they do and they triage. And two, you do not touch your, in your calendar. You give them a framework for your calendar, which I call the perfect week. Kind of like, uh hmm this is what my perfect week looks like.

(13:33): These are the areas you put certain types of things in there and, and you own that, not me. So I don’t even touch my calendar. If I want to add something like this podcast, I I, I will send a message to my executive assistant or she manages it and then she’s responsible for making sure everything’s there. Now where it falls apart, cuz you just mentioned it, like what do I even get them to do? My brother ran into the same thing. I have a brother Pierre, he’s like, you know, and he ran, he was running probably a, you know, multiple eight figure company when he, when he is like, Hey, I probably need an executive assistant. I’m like, yeah, but you know, he got really efficient and after he got through this like crazy pain line period of his life, he hired project managers, he runs a home building company and he, he got to a better place, but it just, it it started eating away of his mindshare and he’s got two little girls and he just noticed that he was not present.

(14:21): So he is like, I need somebody that monitors so that I don’t have to worry about it. Right? Because that’s really what an inbox is. It’s like, do I have a fire? No, I’m good. Do I have a fire? No, I’m good. Right? So I gave him, I gave him all my SOPs and stuff. It was about three, four years ago and you know, six weeks later we’re at a barbecue and I was like, Hey, how’s the new assistant? Like, tell me all about it. I was all excited and he’s like, I don’t see the big ideas. And I’m like, you didn’t give them a hundred percent of your inbox, did you? It’s like, what are you talking about? I said, I, I wrote it in all bold. And he goes, well no, I just CC them on stuff. That’s the challenge. If you are triaging, you didn’t buy any time back, right?

(15:02): Like just having somebody that you like schedule this, buy this, you know, you’re like giving them orders. No, your inbox is actually their, their their projects. So like for example, my executive assistant, I don’t have projects, she has projects. They technically happen to be mine, but I’m the talent on the project. So she owns getting them complete. I don’t own getting them complete and it’s just a little shift like that that I think is what could be missing. You know, how do I keep them busy? And then, and then, you know, then people are like, well how often do you talk to them? I put that in the book. I literally took all the questions I’ve been asked, I just don’t have enough time in my week to have these very detailed conversation with all my friends. I just put in the book, here’s the daily meeting.

(15:42): Actually have it right after this, the conversation, I have it with my exec assistant. It’s very structured. I give the agenda in the book. I, I tell the purpose, even the email system, the email GPS system, it’s in the book here. All the folders we use in the labels and why we use them and it, it, everybody my wife bought hired an executive assistant, John, okay? She lives with me. She sees this, it wasn’t until I wrote the book, she read the book. She goes, I get it now. And she got an executive assistant, changed the game for her. So yeah, I’m really excited because I think that those are the missing pieces that even was missing for me, you know, 15 years ago that has really allowed me truly a clone. I mean there’s two people in my life, my house manager Betty, and my executive assistant Anne. I would sell everything before they leave my life

John Jantsch (16:26): . Well, and that’s, you know, that, that’s where I think people struggle sometimes too, because it didn’t start that way, right? I mean that took a, that took time. that took time. I will, I will say that I sent you the request for this interview and I really, you know, what I appreciated is a lot of people have executive assistants and it actually comes off as like, now their job is to make more work for me, the other person. And your, your whole process is more like, I really thought you read my email, but she was doing you a favor by jumping in because you

Dan Martell (17:01): Were busy. I teach that in the book. Did you see the language used? Yes. I teach that in the book cuz I’m Canadian, John, I I don’t wanna be taken as like, you know, too good or what. Like I had a lot of fear in my mind in that language of saying, you know, this is Anne Dan’s assistant and I got to this before he did and I thought you’d appreciate a speedy reply man that unlocks everything. And, and look, I would’ve replied if I had the time, but I was pr like, this is the thing is I get to go on and have great conversations with yourself and I’m here and what if the next meeting there’s an email that canceled it? Well, because I have somebody supporting me. Yeah. That meeting gets filled with somebody else that was on the queue and pulls forward. So like think about just the amount of, of opportunity I pull forward into this calendar year because I get to spend, like you said, what if you only did those three hours of things you could do? Yep. And none of the other stuff. But those three are like really meaningful energy giving, green productive stuff. Man, your life just gets really cool, really fast.

John Jantsch (18:00): So I wanna, I wanna cover one more concept for we’re out of time here and that’s the replacement ladder.

Dan Martell (18:07): It’s one of my favorites because I always get asked like, so what’s the sequence, Dan? Like how, who do I hire first then second, third. And took me a while to kind of really like battle test this strategy. But essentially the idea is if I was starting at zero and I had to hire four or five people what order based on the buyback rate, based on the drip matrix, based on the calendar, if I had to sequence it, these are the, these are the five I would hire in order first one right out of the bat. Level one replacement ladder is an executive assistant and the clear outcome and I write about this book is inboxing calendar. They have to own it. That’s why I talk about ownership. They own those two things, not me. Then I get to move to level two if that’s true.

(18:52): Level two is delivery, what some people call fulfillment, right? Or onboarding. And the two things that that person owns is the post-sale experience and the customer experience. So they onboarding. So like as soon as somebody takes a credit card, they process it, they onboard, they, they, they get information from them, they get ’em scheduled, whatever it is in your business and any questions that person might have about their work, that person can answer, right? So that you can just do, if it’s coaching, logo design, podcasting or whatever, you do that nothing else. Level three is marketing because a lot of people run into this like feaster famine when it comes to marketing because when they’re busy they stop and when they’re not, they are hungry. So they do a lot of it and it just keeps going like a yo-yo. So even a part-time person focused every day waking up and just focusing on what I call the campaigns and the traffic, like thinking strategically, creatively about the campaigns you should run annually.

(19:49): There’s, there’s this natural rhythm in, in business. And then also like, did somebody change the color of a button that made it so that nobody sees it in the checkout page? Like what’s the traffic doing? Like I’ve seen this happen. Yeah. So it’s just part-time or full-time. Somebody dedicated to generating opportunities for your business and you, you can still be the talent, right? Like I run a big coaching business, I’m still the talent, I’m the face of the business, but I do not, you know, click buttons in Facebook ad manager or whatever the team does. Yeah. Then level four is sales, right? Hmm. And sales is all about the call, right? Which is super fun. You get an opportunity that comes in your inbox, your assistant can just forward it off to Mike, who’s your scale specialist, your product specialist, your strategy special, like whatever you want to call them.

(20:34): And then Mike can move that thing forward while you’ve been in meetings with your team or talking to another client or whatever it is. And they own the follow up because CEOs and entrepreneurs are horrible at follow up. So it’s like all these things are now gonna be done outta 10, outta 10. And, and, and at level four what happens, John, that I think is super exciting. This is where you actually have a business that can make money while you sleep. You know how everybody talks about that? And those infomercials and those internet marketers talk about this. You have somebody now that generates leads, somebody that enrolls that client into your world and somebody onboards and takes their payment and make sure they’re good to go. And you get to show up and do the work you love to do. Level five, which is the top level, this is leadership and this is when you start thinking about company building and not just, you know, just a solopreneur and stuff.

(21:18): And you could stay there honestly if you’re, if you’ve got those four other hires in place, I mean, you could be making a couple million bucks a year and working 25 hours a week and that’s a beautiful place to get to. Then you can learn how to trade your money for money. But yeah, the level five is a fun one and that’s usually where I start working with clients. But those are the five levels of the replacement ladder. And mathematically you can’t deny the cost that each level kind of goes up, but it unlocks another level of revenue at the appropriate time. And there’s a reason why you do sales before or after marketing, et cetera, et cetera.

John Jantsch (21:51): You know what’s funny is as I listen to you list those, I, I’m thinking about all the companies that do the, the exact opposite order. You know, it’s like I’m the leader of the company. I have to like be, you know, be that I need to be the CEO and then I’m gonna go hire salesperson so we can get more sales

Dan Martell (22:08): Or a coo. Let, let’s go, let’s go. Oh, I I don’t wanna do this anymore. I’m gonna hire a coo. Do you have an executive assistant? No, start there. That’s a way cheaper. I had a friend go, I need to hire a salesperson. I go, how many sales calls do you do four a week? You don’t need a salesperson, you need to generate more than four a week. Why? Why don’t have time to do the marketing? Oh, why don’t you have time to do the marketing? Because I I’m still involved in fulfillment. Oh, do you have an executive assistant? Yeah, kind of. Does she manage your inboxing calendar? Not really. So it’s, it’s really, you just can’t argue. It’s, I really wanted to distill the book in the first principles that were backed by some level of math to just show people like time does have an equation and the way you leverage that, good or bad is gonna dictate if you can move things forward.

John Jantsch (22:52): So Dan, we’re invite people. I know you have a, a website for the book itself. The book’s available everywhere. Selling really well, why don’t you invite

Dan Martell (22:59): People Wall Street Journal best bestseller. I don’t know if you saw that John number

John Jantsch (23:02): Two. I did, I did, I did.

Dan Martell (23:03): That was pretty cool.

John Jantsch (23:05): Yeah. That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Well, it’s, and it’s one of those books that we’ll probably pick up momentum because people will tell their friends, you know about it just because it’s got some real practical hands-on, you know, very dialed in stuff. So where, where would you like people to connect with you or find out more about, uh, the book itself?

Dan Martell (23:19): Yeah, so the website’s buy back your time.com and you can go to any retailer in person or online to get a copy. But I do have a free workbook that I, I added in the book or you can go get on the website and then I’m Dan Martel to Elza Martel on all social platforms, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, you mention it, I’m there. And my favorite though is Instagram story. So if people wanna actually see how I apply the buyback principle in my work and personal life, like how I interact with better house manager and, and people to support my wife and I, that’s where I do it. Cuz I think it’s really, really cool to just share the, the nuance of the systems. I’m a I’m a software guy, so like I, I can nerd out on a lot of the tools in the process.

John Jantsch (24:01): Awesome. Well Dan, thanks for taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast and hopefully we will run into you soon, one of these days out there on the road.

Dan Martell (24:09): Absolute honor, thanks Sean.

John Jantsch (24:10): Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it@ marketingassessment.co Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Outbound Squad, hosted by Jason Bay and brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination for business professionals host Jason Bay dives in with leading sales experts and top performing reps to share actionable tips and strategies to help you land more meetings with your ideal clients. In a recent episode called Quick Hacks to Personalize Your outreach, he speaks with Ethan Parker about how to personalize your outreach in a more repeatable way. Something every single one of us has to do it. Listen to Outbound Squad, wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Oscar Trimboli. He’s the author of How to Listen, discover the Hidden Key to Better Communication, the most comprehensive book about listening in the workplace. And he’s also got a new book out called Deep Listening Impact Beyond Words. So Oscar, welcome to the show.

Oscar Trimboli (01:12): Good day, John. Looking forward to listening to your questions.

John Jantsch (01:15): . Well, let’s see where we go. In fact, maybe the fir, I always like to start to get a kind of a baseline on some terminology sometimes. I mean, how would you describe the act of listening in the workplace?

Oscar Trimboli (01:30): Listening in the workplace, A lot of people have heard about active listening, which is listen to what people say, pay attention, focus, paraphrase and nod. And when we talk about deep listening, when you understand the neuroscience of listening, the most important thing to listen to is what people don’t say. There’s a huge differential between the speaking speed of the speaker and their thinking speed. They think at 900 words a minute, yet they can only speak at 125. So when you are listening in the workplace, the most important thing you should be listening to is what they haven’t said. ,

John Jantsch (02:05): I’m gonna choose my words carefully today. Of course. So maybe more so than with some guests, you have done some research, I don’t know, over 10,000 workplace listeners. Describe that a little bit and you know, how is a we a research project like that conducted and what are some of the things you’ve discovered?

Oscar Trimboli (02:22): Yeah, like, like the book, like the playing cards, like the queers, the research came about because my clients asked me to, and we are sitting about 24,000 workplace listeners now. The research was about what gets in the way of people’s listening at work. There’s a lot that’s being written about what a world class listeners do. What is it in terms of being aspirational to listeners? What we did with our researchers, we weren’t quite the opposite way. There are small things that get in the way of what people do. So we started off with 1,410 people that we surveyed. Half we knew they had interacted with the work we did, and half we didn’t know. We used a panel of participants who were in the workplace, normed against a database of the working population. And we asked them three simple questions, what do you struggle with when it comes to listening?

(03:17): What’s the one thing you’d love to improve when it comes to listening? And when you are the speaker, what’s the listener doing that really frustrates you when it comes to listening? So we got a mountain of information there, John, but then we did a second round of research, which was quantitative. We used numeric scaling and we came up with descriptors of the four primary things that get in people’s way when it comes to listening. These are the four villains of listening and these four villains of listening from the research and in fact named by the research participants, dramatic interrupting, lost and shrewd, a listening villa.

John Jantsch (03:59): I was having some, I’m having some construction done here at the house.

Oscar Trimboli (04:02): I, it’s not coming through on the episode. By the way, you mentioned that on your last interview, isn’t it? I

John Jantsch (04:10): Did So, uh, so forgive me there. So what I was starting to ask you is what are you finding that not listening in the way that you’re talking about at least is costing people

Oscar Trimboli (04:21): The cost of not listening and the way people described it in the research was lost. Customers were still you winner customer that becomes an unprofitable customer cuz you didn’t listen to what they actually said. Particularly if you were in any kind of professional services industry, whether you’re an accountant, whether you’re a lawyer, market researcher, you’re in software industry, winning the wrong customer can be probably the most costly thing you can do. The other costs of not listening are great employees who leave before they should because they don’t feel heard, valued, or seen in the workplace. You’re not getting the most out of your suppliers. You have issues with your regulator or the media because you’re not paying attention to what the external marketplace is saying. But for the vast majority of people who run their own businesses, it’s typically coming down to reduced profitability because of rework where people are having multiple meetings to get the same project, the same product, the same campaign done to the quality that was expected. So the cost of not listening is quite significant.

John Jantsch (05:34): So I guess flip that around. Let’s flip that around to the positive then, you know, what are some of the real highlights? Like if you were gonna sell somebody on on the benefits or the roi, you know of listening, you know, what would be some immediate trackable things that somebody could point to?

Oscar Trimboli (05:49): Yeah, this is a good question. We attracted 1,410 people from our research group and we’re giving ’em specific things to try. What they’ve said consistently is they get more time back in their schedule because they have fewer meetings and the meetings they have are shorter. How does this happen? When you start to listen, not just to what people say, but to what they think and what they mean, meetings don’t come back later on and go, oh, I thought you meant X. And as a result you have to do a whole rework. So the big thing that people are reporting back is the first one time on average people are saying they get 5% of their schedule back Now doesn’t sound a lot. That’s a week in a week. That’s one day in in a year. That adds up quite significantly. The other thing that people are saying is the upside of listening in their workplace profitability is increasing because rework is declining. So your costs and your sales effectiveness is increasing, not because you’re winning more, but the customers you have got. You are listening to bigger problems that are not symptoms, but more systemic problems for the customer. And either you can refer somebody to them or what normally happens in our client base, they say that discovering more problems for their clients that they can solve.

John Jantsch (07:23): So, so when we mentioned listening, you know, we immediately think ears, right? What role does the entire body or body language as people refer to it, play in listening?

Oscar Trimboli (07:36): So there’s five levels in listening and you are referring to level two, which is listening to content. It’s what you hear, what you see and what you sense. So when we think about the middle one, what you see in terms of body language, when we spoke to Susan Constantine, she’s known as the human lie detector. She’s advising lots of legal practitioners about how to select jury panels, for example. But whether we spoke to her or to Mark Bowden, one of the things that people consistently say is, as humans we overplay our sense of the role of body language and what we see. The most important thing you want to, whether it was Susan or with mock body language, is about the congruency between what people say and how their body is showing up As a human, you can do that in a microsecond. You are coded to do that really quickly. Unfortunately, if your face is in a laptop, looking at your connected watch, looking at your cell phone, the likelihood you can be present to notice body language is really low. So I’d encourage everybody listening is a contact sport and it’s three-dimensional. When you look at content, it’s what you see, it’s what you hear and it’s what you sense. So you also have to notice what people say and how they’re saying it.

John Jantsch (09:02): 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 processed it. It’s gonna allow you to make your competitors irrelevant, charge a premium for your services and scale perhaps without adding overhead. And here’s the best part. You could license this entire system for your agency by simply participating in an upcoming agency certification intensive look, why create the wheel? Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create. And you can have ’em today, check it out at dtm.world/certification. That’s dtm.world/certification. So you mentioned multitasking to some degree there. What role then playing on with that little bit, what role does the fact that we’re all on these zooms and the virtuals and we’re not in person in offices nearly like we used to be? You know, what role does that play in degrading people’s ability to listen?

Oscar Trimboli (10:07): So listening situational, relational and contextual. You’ll listen differently in a mediated environment like a Zoom, a team web, a Google meets. One of the things people say to us is in our research group that we keep tracking, they say to us, I oh Oscar, I don’t have that connection that I had in a face-to-face meeting. I say yes, and you have a completely different connection because in a lot of cases people are gonna be sharing their backgrounds with you, they may be sharing part of their home with you. And I remember talking to Dr. Bronwyn King, who runs an organization called Tobacco Free Portfolio. She had to travel the world for 300 days of the year to visit boardrooms in finance organizations all around the world. She was never, ever invited into somebody’s home in any of that time that she travel face to face.

(11:00): Yeah, with Zoom, she’s able to do that on a very regular basis. And the connection she has now as a result of that is completely different. So one of the things I’d encourage you to do, if you’re a leader or you run your own business, don’t blow her out your background. Just be who you are because it’s gonna help create a connection for you and the other person. It will give you something to discuss. Now, by the way, when you’re on Zoom, you can stare at someone’s eyes and they’ll never know. You can’t do that in real life. John .

John Jantsch (11:34): Yeah, it’s a good, that’s a great point. Yeah. It’s funny, when the pandemic first came around and everybody immediately shifted to zoom, I remember seeing a lot of spare bedrooms and , unmade beds and , things of that nature. People eventually kind of set something up that looked a little more like an office. But uh, yeah, there was a period there where we were seeing things we’d never seen before. So I suspect, I’m not gonna make an assumption, but I suspect gender plays a role in listening and who’s a better listener or who’s maybe more naturally in tune to that. What did your research find there?

Oscar Trimboli (12:07): Whether it’s my research or volumes of academic research, this is an old question. Do the genders listen differently in terms of listening effectiveness, there is no material difference in the way the genders listen. Yet the way people experience listening from different genders is quite radically different. The research summarized is women listen to feel. Men listen to fix. That means our listening orientation comes from a very different place. Now, this is a vast generalization, John. I’m sure there are women who listen to fix and men who listen to Phil. But when I say this and I talk to people and we look at the way our listening villains show up, there is a slight variation in the way genders show up and how they listen, but it doesn’t actually make a material difference to their listening effectiveness. So when it comes to your gender, the only thing I would say is no matter what you’re a woman or a man or another, you can always improve your listening in the very next conversation.

John Jantsch (13:25): So let’s carry on with that idea. What about culturally are Americans terrible listeners? For an example,

Oscar Trimboli (13:30): , we’ve researched the English speaking Western workplaces. Yet because of that we’ve touched on how do Eastern Europeans listen? How do South Americans listen? For example, if you’re in a really strong relationship with somebody in South America or Eastern Europe, it’s not uncommon to talk over the top of the other person. An interruption is actually a sign of a tight relationship. Yet in America, the United Kingdom, Singapore, Australia, the opposite is true. Talking over someone will be a sign of rudeness. The big cultural variance across Asia and high context cultures, Korea, Japan, China is the role of silence.

(14:14): So in the West we use this phrase, the awkward silence, the pregnant pause, the deafening silence. I struggle with silence. I want to fill the silence. Yet in the east and in high context cultures like the Polynesian cultures, the Innu cultures of North America, the aboriginal cultures of Australia and the Maori cultures of New Zealand. These high context cultures use silence as a tuning fork for the group. But it’s also a sign of wisdom, respect, and authority. So culturally, we do listen differently. Yet across all cultures we tend to struggle most with distraction. Turning up and being ready to listen is the most common thing that gets in the way of every human’s way of listening. Because we listen at 400 words per minute, yet they speak at 125. So you’re jumping ahead and you’re using heuristics and matching mindsets to go, oh, I know how to solve this. Oh, wish they’d hurry up. Oh I need to get some lunch. And all these other things that pop into our mind. One of the biggest fallacies about listening, John, focus on the speaker first. That’s interesting, but it’s really unproductive. You need to listen to yourself first. Most of us have multiple browser tabs open in our mind and our memory is so full that we can’t process what the person in front of us is about to say.

John Jantsch (15:45): That’s really interesting. I mean it’s almost like our mind gets bored listening to somebody and so we start processing other things. Do you have any kind of a ritual, so to speak, for like let’s say you were getting ready to get on this call or you’re getting ready to meet with somebody. I mean, do you have something to bring your focus into? Okay, let’s turn this stuff off. Let’s be here now and listen, I mean, is there a process you go through or recommend?

Oscar Trimboli (16:08): Number one, I have a completely different browser tab and setting for when I go onto video conferences. So all my notifications are completely off. I don’t even have to worry about it. That is set up and all of us can do that. That’s very simple. Whether you’re on a Mac, a pc, an iPhone or an Android, there’s one button to switch off all your notifications. That’s 83% of the distractions our research group tell us gets in the way. Ritual number two is play music as little as 30 seconds for me. There’s three different songs that I use depending on the energy I need to bring to the group, the audience and the outcome that I’m working with ranges from very soft, instrumental all the way through to heavy rap wrap ritual. Number four, drink a glass of water before I go into the conversation. And ritual number five is take three deep breaths before you press.

(17:06): Join the meeting or walk into the meeting as well. If you do get distracted in a meeting, some of the quickest tips I could recommend just have a glass of water consistently. The brain, 5% of body mass yet is consuming 26% of blood sugar. And the quickest way to help the brain process the listening, just pause, drink a half a glass of water. Now if you drink coffee, that’s great, but I encourage you also to drink water. Coffee is not a substitute for water, although it does have water in it. And John’s just showing us that he’s got a regular supply of water where he is right now, the most important thing about water and breathing, it sends a signal to the parasympathetic nervous system, the part of the body that sits around the lungs and it just says, relax John. Everything’s gonna be okay. And you can be present to what the other person’s saying.

John Jantsch (18:01): I want to talk a little bit about and thank you for sharing that. Those were all great tips cuz I do think that it, there has to be something intentional about saying, okay, like I’m shifting into this new thing. I wanna talk a little bit about the format. Again, I’m holding up for those of you that are on video, we’ll also have it on our show notes. But the format of your book is rather unique. It is. First off a boxed book. It is rather small in size relative to other books, about a quarter of the size, perhaps going a little shirt pocket. And then there’s also a deck of what I could only describe as playing cards, but I think you would probably call them practice cards for for listening. So tell me a little bit about your decisions from a format standpoint on the book, because I get the sense that you’re very intentional about everything you do.

Oscar Trimboli (18:45): Well again, think you give me much more credit than my community. My clients, my research group, both the book and the cards have all come about by listening to my clients. And one of the things the clients say is, wow, Oscar, this listening stuff, it’s much bigger than I thought. Could you package it up into something really small? And the format was very deliberate because it was the format the group had asked me for. I want something to be able to reference. I want something to be able to put into my handbag, my jacket pocket to be able to take on a flight. I’ve had photos of people who are by the sides of waterfalls in hotel rooms, all showing me the book. And yet the other thing is the applying cards, the practice cards. They’re designed around the five levels of listening. And each card has a concept and a question that you can practice.

(19:41): And what I recommend with the cards is once a week, use one card, maybe share it with somebody else, maybe someone you trust in the workplace, maybe a life partner and just say, Hey, I’m working on this week. Have a look at the card when I do it well hey, give me a cheer when I don’t, just remind me. The cards are about listening happens before, during, and after a conversation. And this is about the third part, how do you sustain your listening? Listening like any other thing is a practice, it’s a strategy. And you need to be building your listening muscles intentionally over time. When you do listening moves from heavy energy sapping to lite n easy because your orientation moves from I need to listen to what they say to how do I get them to say what they have and said, when you do listening’s, light listening’s easy people describe their listening batteries. When they come into workshops with me, as am my listening batteries yellow or orange red or maybe touching on black. Yet when they finish the workshop they go, wow, my listening batteries are recharge. I can see how I can stay on green all the time just by practicing with these cards.

John Jantsch (20:59): You know, it’s funny you mentioned the idea of silence and like getting people to say, you know what they aren’t saying. And I find that actually silence is really one of the best tools for that because a lot of other people have that sense that I need to fill up the space. And so many times your silence will actually in some ways force them to continue or to go deeper or to explore, you know what what you ask them at a deeper level. So I, I think there are many ways that that I have seen. I mean, I have so much work to do or as you as I guess you suggest most people do. But I have seen the power of this, certainly this idea firsthand of deep listening.

Oscar Trimboli (21:36): Yeah, just remember silent and listen, have the identical letters.

John Jantsch (21:41): Yeah. . That’s right. That’s great. Tell people where they can find deep listening. Find more about you and your worker. I invite you to share whatever you wanna share.

Oscar Trimboli (21:50): Look, uh, as much as I’d love you to connect with me, I’d love you to connect with your own listening and learn a little bit about your listening. So if you visit listening quiz.com, you can take the seven minute quiz, you can find out which one is your primary listening villain and your secondary, and you’ll be able to grab a report that gives you three tips to help you with your primary a listening villain. That way, like others, at a minimum, you can get 5% back in your schedule each week.

John Jantsch (22:20): Awesome. Well, Oscar, it was a pleasure having you stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. I appreciate you taking the time and hopefully we’ll uh, run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Oscar Trimboli (22:30): Thanks for listening. Hey,

John Jantsch (22:31): And one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @ marketingassessment.co. Co check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Outbound Squad, hosted by Jason Bay and brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination for business professionals host Jason Bay, dives in with leading sales experts and top performing reps to share actionable tips and strategies to help you land more meetings with your ideal clients. In a recent episode called Quick Hacks to Personalize Your Outreach, he speaks with Ethan Parker about how to personalize your outreach in a more repeatable way. Something every single one of us has to do it. Listen to Outbound Squad, wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Mark Schaefer, a globally recognized keynote speaker, college educator, marketing consultant, author of books such as The Marketing Rebellion and Cumulative Advantage. But we’re gonna talk about his latest book today, belonging to the Brand, why Community is the Last Great Marketing Strategy. So Mark, welcome back to the show.

Mark Schaefer (01:17): Thank you, John. I love writing new books cuz it’s an excuse to talk to you. .

John Jantsch (01:22): . Well, I think this is at least your third appearance, if not Martha,

Mark Schaefer (01:25): At least. At least. Yeah. Yeah. And thankfully we do get a chance to talk to each other, you know, once in a while in between, but it’s always nice seeing

John Jantsch (01:33): You. That’s right. I did run into you recently. Where in Boston? Marketing? Boston.

Mark Schaefer (01:39): Oh, Maine.

John Jantsch (01:40): Oh, well is it been that long?

Mark Schaefer (01:42): I think it might have been Maine, yeah.

John Jantsch (01:44): Oh, okay. I thought we ran into each other at a, at another, another event more recent than that. That seems like eons ago. That was like pre covid.

Mark Schaefer (01:51): Well, that was pre Covid.

John Jantsch (01:53): , yeah. That’s gonna, that’s gonna be the new like, like BC and AD now it’s gonna be pre Covid, post Covid. I don’t know. All right, let’s get into your book. Um, first off, I want to get a definition what’s, I mean, what’s the difference between community and like audience or even customers?

Mark Schaefer (02:09): Yeah. Well I think that’s an important janan one I hit right up front in, in the book. You know, I think there a lot of people might have a blog or a podcast and they say, this is my community, but it’s really not. It’s an audience and that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with that. I look, I owe a lot to my audience. I have a deep emotional connection with my audience, but it’s one way. Mm-hmm. . And if I go away, the audience goes away. It’s a sort of a cult of personality. The beauty of community is it brings the emotional connection to the brand to a new level. Because not only do people love you, they love each other in the group. I’m sure you experienced that with your own, you know, your duct tape community. So from, for, here’s something so interesting, John. I mean, I went down a lot of academic rabbit holes on psychology and sociology when I was writing this book. But it suggests that the bonds built in the community, that those friendships and that love spills over to the brand. It almost suggests it’s more important to build these relationships in a community than to build the relationship between the customer and the brand. And it builds this emotional switching cost. Because if people have friends in the community, well, I can’t leave this brand. These, this is my place, these are my people. So it’s really quite profound when you get into the marketing benefits of community.

John Jantsch (03:45): So a couple things I want to touch on that I heard you say, one of the key differences is, is instead of one to many, it’s a true network. Yeah. So to speak. And there’s not, well, there might be a leadership structure or guide, you know, it’s really the individual. Like you don’t have community if people aren’t talking to each other. Right.

Mark Schaefer (04:02): . Yeah. Yeah. And I, and it’s a great point that you make that when you talk about the leadership structure, and I think this is one of the most important values of the book, is it talks about really the new leadership mindset required this friend over in the UK who had a B2B marketing agency and he created this community and the community is now bigger than the company. He’s gone all in on this community. This is where he is getting his revenue. Yeah. And he said it’s so intimidating and disorienting to, you know, just all the stuff we learned at the university is turned upside down about leadership, about giving up control, about nurturing people. You’re not trying to build a staff. You’re trying to, you know, build leaders in your community. You know, in marketing that you and I do over the years, it’s ephemeral. You know, you have a campaign, right? When the money runs out, you start something else. A community, there’s like this implied social contract. Yeah. That’s new for marketing. , that’s new idea. But what I hope people get out of this book is that community isn’t added through the lens of brand marketing is. Yeah. You and I have been around a long time. When was the last time you and I, when was the last time you’ve been to a marketing conference where they’ve got a track on community and it’s this obvious opportunity staring as right in the face and it’s just almost completely overlooked by the world.

John Jantsch (05:44): Well it’s interesting because as you noted, well first off, you know, churches were communities, schools were communities, small towns, you know, talk about, you know, community. So as you said, we’ve always had that tribes and the initial native tribes were communities. But then when I think when we all went online, all of a sudden we had access to people outside of our community who believed the same thing we did. And so we have been talking even in marketing circles about community for, you know, at least 15. But I think there are very few people that have actually activated a community in the way that you’re talking about as a marketing strategy. ,

Mark Schaefer (06:23): Right? Yeah. I mean, if you remember when the internet began, the first thing a lot of people tried were communities, right? Coca-Cola I remember had a community, most of the big brands, even like one of the oil companies like Exxon had like a community thing, right? I mean you can see that why that wouldn’t work very well , but everybody tried it. But you know, in the early days they were built to try to sell stuff, right? They didn’t really have the right bandwidth. We didn’t have the right technology. You couldn’t do video and it just didn’t work. So most communities failed. The communities that survived. Almost all of them are transactional. It’s customer self-service. Oh, your problem with your software, go into our community. And I think the way the world, the reason the world went that way is because it’s easy to measure. You can see the ROI of that kind of community because it’s cost avoidance. And we completely overlook this idea of if we have like-minded people coming together, we can collaborate and co-create and it builds trust and it builds loyalty. And you’ve got customer advocacy and you have di a direct line to consumer information. And it, it’s just, I think I put together a very compelling case in the book to say, Hey, yeah, wake up and at least consider this idea.

John Jantsch (07:55): Well I know over the years, you know, I have sold for years, I’ve sold courses, I’ve sold training, I’ve done one-on-one. I will tell you some of the most beneficial programs that I’ve ever run have been small cohorts of people coming together Yeah. In a group. And I think that while I wouldn’t call that a community necessarily, even if we come together five or six times over, you know, so many months or something, people get very connected. And I think that that in some ways what I’m witnessing is just a real hunger that people have for this, right? I mean, it’s not just that people need to create this, it’s that there, there’s a real hunger. There’s a, you even start the book talking about, you know, a lot of this is driven out of loneliness, which has probably gotten far worse. , you know, for a lot of people that aren’t going into offices anymore.

Mark Schaefer (08:38): Yes. The first chapter of my book is probably the most depressing chapter in the history of different books, . Cause I start off talking about my own childhood loneliness and how I was lost. I I something happened to when I was a kid that just made me a shadow. It just, it made me someone just a ghost of a person. And then a miracle kind of happened in high school where I was embraced by a community and I was always haunted by this idea of what if that didn’t happen? I mean, I was going down this road of isolation and depression and this is why it’s significant. And this is one of the reasons I wrote the book. I saw this headline in the New York Times that said the loneliest generation talking about our children and our teenagers and the pandemic didn’t cause this. No. It was, it’s been creeping up actually for decades.

(09:38): But the pandemic really amplified things. And just like you said, that we’ve got generations like just living in their rooms. And one, one of my students said my, my my daughter graduated college the last year and a half of college was spent in her bedroom cuz it was remote. Then she got a job that was remote . She said the last this important two and a half years of her life, the big change in her life has been moving from one room to another. And she’s so lonely and she’s so desperate to see people. And so we are, we do long to belong. And I’m not being Pollyannish John, this is a business book. It’s based by data, it’s based by research. You know, that’s sort of a hallmark of my books. But there’s also this aspect that community heals. It not only works as a marketing idea, but it really heals.

(10:40): I mean we need this, as you say, psychologically, sociology, sociologically even there’s a little bit of research in the book that shows h helps us physically to be happy and belong. So I mean, it it, it is a business book, but I think it also sort of creates this sort of new meaning to marketing. We, it’s the only marketing I think our customers would actually embrace because they need it. And I think that’s a powerful idea. If you create not only marketing that works, but marketing that, that heals. That’s, that’s something that appeals to me. Hey,

John Jantsch (11:18): Marketing agency owners, you know, I can teach you the keys to doubling your business in just 90 days or your money back. Sound interesting. All you have to do is license our three step process that’s gonna allow you to make your competitors irrelevant, charge a premium for your services and scale perhaps without adding overhead. And here’s the best part. You can license this entire system for your agency by simply participating in an upcoming agency certification intensive look, why create the wheel? Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create. And you can have ’em today, check it out at dtm.world/certification. That’s DTM world slash certification. You actually introduced what for me was kind of a new, it’s probably not a new term, but it’s the genesis of a business being community based. That that actually being the way that it starts as opposed to a bolt on channel.

Mark Schaefer (12:18): Yeah. It was new for me and really inspirational. And I guess you’d have to say this was another sort of seed that was planted in the book. You know, I was writing, it was like 2018, I was writing Marketing Rebellion. So I was like on the lookout for new marketing models. Mm. And I was at the social media marketing world and was at this, uh, breakfast held by Andy Costadina, one of our mutual friends. Mm-hmm. and Dana Malstaff was there, first time I ever met her. She started telling me she had, she was an entrepreneur, she had been pregnant and didn’t feel like couldn’t find a lot of support for being a mom and being a business leader. So she created this Facebook group, cut Boss mom. Long story short, in the first nine months she was making a six figure income. She now has 70,000 members in this group.

(13:14): It’s nearly a million dollar business. She always corrected me. It’s not quite a million dollar. She said, mark, don’t call it a million dollar business. I’m almost there. But in a short period of time, her business has been doubling every year. No sales department, no marketing department, no marketing budget. Sort of a remarkable idea. She’s a, she’s created this million dollar business in a short period of time with no marketing budget. Because if you have this community of 70,000 people, she just, they just are eager to buy her courses, her videos, her events, her coaching, her workshops, because they believe in her. They love being in this place. They belong to her as a brand. And so she doesn’t have to sell. She was careful to say, I can sell . Right. Yeah. She knew it if she needs to, but she said I don’t need to.

John Jantsch (14:11): Yeah. I suspect a lot of people underestimate, you know, how much selling probably is, but not in the traditional negative way that we think about it. Yeah. Right, right. I mean you’re, you’re selling the vision, you know, of belonging and that’s, that’s still, you know, a sales job in some ways you call this, I mean it’s in the subtitle last great marketing strategy. So you, there’s nothing left. Like there’s no more. This is it.

Mark Schaefer (14:33): Well it’s gotta be my last book. Right? Well the reason, yeah, I know it’s a very, it’s a provocative subtitle, but this is the way I looked at it. First of all, it was the first marketing strategy. You know, when, you know, my, my grandparents lived in Pittsburgh and they shopped at these neighborhood stores and the people at those stores knew my grandparents, they knew their family, they knew their kids, they knew their birthdays. They would talk and it was a community. It was a community atmosphere. And I’m just one generation away from that and I’ve never experienced that and I just long to belong to something like that. So it was really the first way that the first marketing is you belong there. And I think we live in this community, in this world now where we have this streaming economy, you know, last night, you know, I was batching it last night, so I got on to Netflix and just binge some show and then, you know, tomorrow I’m going on a trip and I’m gonna listen to Spotify for hours and hours and I might listen to an audiobook and all these hours I’m consuming content.

(15:46): I am not going to hear one ad, I am not gonna hear one brand messaging. There’s gonna be no PR spin. And so we’ve gotta find something new. Yeah. And I think when all the interruptive advertising and the spam and the robocall finally go away, the last thing we’re gonna have is community. Because we’ve always had community, we’ve always needed community and we always will. And so I think this is the one thing in this fast, crazy world we can really count on. Our customers need this. And I think this could be a long lasting strategy if it’s done the right way.

John Jantsch (16:32): It’s one of the points that you make, I think in probably has its own whole chapter. If I recall, you know, I’m envisioning somebody listening to this going, we need to do community, we need to increase customer retention by 12%. So let’s start community. Yeah. And you suggest that actually if you don’t start with purpose first, yeah. You’re doomed to fail right outta the gate.

Mark Schaefer (16:53): Well, most communities fail. That’s the hard fact. And the main reason why they fail is because the communities are created to sell stuff. Right. And that’s great and we gotta do that, but it’s not a reason to gather. So you have to think about what is the intersection between what you do and what you believe in and this and the purpose of your customers. And one of the things I’m proud of in the book is I have dozens of brand new case studies, diverse b2b, b2c, big companies, you know, small companies. There’s even a stay-at-home mom with five kids that has a community of 50,000 people in this book. So it’s very inspirational. Yep. But I will rely on good old Harley Davidson. It’s a worn out example. But you know, here’s a, it’s a transportation company, but they don’t have these crazy ads. You know, we’re going crazy.

(17:56): Come down, it’s President’s Day sale. You’ll never hear that from Harley. You never will because they’ve got points of differentiation, right. About their look and the leather and all this stuff. But the purpose that unites them, and this is, this unifies that company and I have firsthand experience with this. I’ve worked with Harley Davidson. They are obsessed with everything they can do to make you a badass. That is what, that’s what if you wanna be a badass, they’re gonna help you do that. And that’s why they never need to have a sale. That’s why they’re never in your face with all these stupid ads. Because you know, you can really only be a badass if you have Arnold Davidson . Right. So it’s all based on this pur on this unifying purpose. You wanna be a badass, we wanna help you be a badass. And that’s the way it goes. So I spent a lot of time on this in the, in the book helping cus helping businesses think through what do you want to accomplish in the world? And you can do it better if you’ve got your customers with you. There’s lots of prompts I think to help businesses think that through. And, but it does, it, it it does start with a, not just a purpose, but really a unifying purpose.

John Jantsch (19:22): I hate to get too practical from go from purpose to tools , but you did kind of mention one of the challenges early on was we didn’t really have great tools for building community. You know, there’s a whole new breed of community platform cropping up through the, you know, I’m thinking of the circles, you know, of the world. Yeah. So talk to a little bit about both the technology but then also the practical standpoint. I think where a lot of communities fail is they think that you just put a bunch of people in there and they’re gonna like mingle. And so, you know, there has to be a community management aspect as well as the, you know, whatever the technology is, doesn’t there.

Mark Schaefer (19:57): Yeah. You know, in, in that part of the book, I stay pretty high level because,

John Jantsch (20:05): Because it’s all changed already. , it’s

Mark Schaefer (20:08): Changing

(20:09): And I can’t tell you what to do because Yeah, look some pe the only piece of advice I really give in the book is it’s probably going to help if you meet in a place that’s organic to your every, the everyday experience of your community. So if the people in your community, if they go to LinkedIn every day, maybe you should be on LinkedIn. If you go to Facebook or Twitter or Slack every day, maybe you should be there. Mm-hmm . Mm-hmm , my community is on Discord. I fought and kicked and screamed not to be on Discord , my community is about learning about the future of marketing and the community said, look, if we’re gonna learn about the future of marketing, we might as well learn about Discord. So I couldn’t argue with that. So there we are. The one thing I point out in the book that I think will be fascinating to any marketer is, are these new ideas about NFTs and Web three and the Metaverse?

(21:08): And I point out in this section of the book, talking about the future of the community, why many of the things we rely on in marketing today, like social listening platforms are gonna become obsolete in some ways They already are because Gen Z, they’re not on Facebook. Yeah. They’re not on LinkedIn. Even business majors. I gave a presentation to Esther’s degree students at Rutgers, almost none of them were even on LinkedIn. It’s like they resisted, where are they hanging out? Discord. Twitch arguably the biggest community in the world. I could even say Fortnite, right. Is a community. And guess what? They’re undetectable and like gens, when we talk about Gen Z, we’re not talking about babies. The first member of Gen Z just got elected. The Congress. Yeah. They’re here, they’re buying stuff, they’re gonna be our new leaders. You know, they punch way above their weight when it comes to culture and fashion and music and art. And I mean they’re having an incredible impact on our society and they’re invisible. And so, so, and I don’t have answers to that, but I think considering where these new communities are popping up, number one they, there’s an implication there for our own communities. Number two, there’s an implication there just to for finding these people cuz they are in communities. Yeah. But you and ie. You, you may never know it. Yeah.

John Jantsch (22:45): Speaking with Mark Schaffer on his wonderful new book, belonging to the Brand Mark, you want to tell people, I know the book’s available anywhere, but uh, you wanna invite people to connect with you in any fashion as well as check out the work you’re doing.

Mark Schaefer (22:55): Sure. Thanks so much John. You know, it’s just always a joy to speak to you. And so you can find me@businessesgrow.com. You’ll never remember how to spell Schaffer. You might not even remember how to spell Jan .

John Jantsch (23:10): I guarantee you we’ve both got the that S C H in common. But other

Mark Schaefer (23:14): Than that, yeah, you can remember Grow. And if you can remember that you can find my book, my blog, my podcast, my social media connections. And I’d love to hear from you. And John, thank you so much, as always.

John Jantsch (23:25): Well, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast and hopefully we’ll run into you soon. Mark one of these days out there on the road. Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it@ marketingassessment.co. 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.